She stayed to a walk, picking her way among the stinking bodies, ears moving unhappily as her head swung from one side to another. It was just as well, Temur thought; he wasn’t sure he could sit a trot without falling, and if he fell he was sure to reopen his wound. While many a Qersnyk warrior died in a tumble from horseback—the Great Khagan himself had been killed so, leading an army at the age of eighty-two—Temur couldn’t bear the irony of doing it now.
So he let the mare have her head, guiding her only in that he kept them pointed toward the south, where the Range of Ghosts was not yet even a smoky purple smudge on the horizon.
* * *
Another night passed before they left the dead behind, and by then they had begun to overtake the living. Temur had not been alone in his determination to reach the mountains. A straggling, numb, war-shocked column of refugees struggled south, moving like migrating birds—each individual but all of one goal, so the whole assembly gave the illusion of unity. In numbers, at least, there was some semblance of safety from the predators that stalked their margins—wolves and the massive steppe lion—waiting for twilight when the archers of the defenders would have to seek their targets half blind.
At first he feared he might be recognized—by warriors or by the women and children hauling their salvaged goods in carts. But either they did not know him or they were too focused on the business of survival to care, or perhaps some were of the faction that would have preferred his brother Qulan to Qori Buqa. So he and Bansh moved among them untroubled.
The vultures stayed with them. Most of the refugees were wounded or exhausted, and when they fell, the sacred birds would dine on their flesh and carry their spirits into the Eternal Sky.
Temur mourned his brother and lost track of the days. He should have fought on in Qulan’s stead. He should have rallied the men.…
Except that was foolish. He might have spent half his life in army camps, but he was barely a man, and Qulan had been older and experienced. Qulan, Temur thought, would have known what to do. Temur could just get more people killed.
Temur had no sense of time passing, except in watching the slow attrition of the moons, the heavier darkness each night as the Eternal Sky noted the passing of another of his uncles or cousins. The days passed in hands with little variation, except that food became scarcer and scantier. Short rations impeded his healing, but eventually his wound scabbed and granulated, though he could tell from touching it that it would remain terrible to the sight for as long as he lived. The scar stiffened, making it difficult to turn his head to the right.
Each day he and Bansh moved until they could move no longer, and each evening he slept while she grazed, until moonrise brightened the night and they could move again. They rested again between moonset and morning. In summer, they would have conserved water by sleeping away the high heat of the day, but in winter the refugees kept moving—which meant less sleep and less rest for everyone.
The steppe stretched away on every side, trackless and unfeatured, spotted with the shapes of walking or riding men, of women with oxen pulling their carts, of boys and girls with no more than four summers riding scout.
His people. The Khaganate might have fallen, or Qori Buqa might be gathering his scattered allies and consolidating power. News was fragmentary and not easy to come by. But the Qersnyk people endured, as they always had. As they would whether there was to be a succession or whether the empire would crumble back into the scattered tribes and clans it had been before the Great Khagan conquered the world in every direction as far as a horse could run.
Whatever became of them, Temur thought, they were his people. His brothers and sisters. And he owed to them any hope of survival he could find.
The army of refugees swelled around him. After a few nights, there were songs by the dry-dung fires—and ceremonies to commend the inevitable dead to the Eternal Sky. After a hand of days or so, Temur took up his new bow to bring food back to those fires—marmots, mostly, and the odd zeren gazelle, because he could not range widely enough or draw the bow strongly enough to bring down larger game. But whatever he brought was accepted gratefully, and in return the others shared with him what they had—dumplings, clarified mutton fat, salted butter, airag—fermented mare’s milk—from the bags that hung over the flanks of the cattle when the herds were on the move.
Those sheep and horses, the goats and oxen among the refugees were too precious to slaughter for food. They would be the foundation of the herds that meant next winter’s survival.
Temur was welcomed there, and he was relieved that when he failed to provide his clan name, no one inquired as to his family. That kind of reticence would have been a rare thing among his people before the fall of Qarash, for the steppe folk navigated their world through a complex and comforting system of clan and family allegiances.