It was a brief ride, brief enough so Temur understood that Edene had only ridden for the confidence of speaking from horseback. When she showed him where to dismount and picket Bansh, he held his tongue. There was no good in pointing out to someone that you had noticed their insecurities. Instead, he gave his mare an extra rub across the poll and followed Edene toward the fire.
Most of the refugees had lost their clans and families, though a surprising number reunited on the road, and this seemed to be one of them. The clan hadn’t set up a white-house, but there were two or three skin tents in evidence and more than one cart. A fire licked across coals in the center of the little grouping, and the same light breeze blew skeins of a late snow through tramped grass. A woman sat bundled in skins before the fire, surrounded by younger women and a few boys. Edene led Temur directly toward her.
Tsareg Altantsetseg was diminutive with age, her face like an apple doll’s. The horsehides and sheepskins that wrapped her made her seem even more doll-like, while the crabbed hands that stirred the fire or ladled broth from the cauldron over it could have been dry black sticks.
Sticks were never so deft, though. As Temur and Edene approached, she first dished out bowls of milky tea and airag, the lightly fermented mare’s milk that would not make your bowels sick, as fresh mare’s milk was wont. By the time they had made an obeisance—deeper in Edene’s case than Temur’s—the tea was joined by bowls of broth.
Temur took up the tea in both hands and bowed once more over it to the matriarch of the Tsareg clan. “I am grateful.”
“It’s nothing,” she demurred, in a voice stronger than her cracked appearance would have hinted. She pushed a platter of boiled, fatty lamb across the cleared ground toward them. It had been picked over, Temur could see, but there was quite a bit of meat and fat left.
The tea was salty. He sipped it, then drank down the broth and the airag. With chopsticks from his belt, he worried loose morsels of lamb, dipped them in the tea, and ate. Sparingly, despite his hunger, for there were not that many more lambs where this one had come from—perhaps it had been stillborn, so early in the year?—and the Tsareg had a lot of women and boys to feed.
Beside him, Edene ate with similar reserve. The Tsareg watched them closely, all polite attention, and Temur found it difficult to chew and swallow under the regard of so many friendly eyes. After a few bites, though, Altantsetseg humphed her satisfaction and turned back to partitioning out food among her horde of descendants and collateral relatives. As the edge came off his hunger, Temur enjoyed the leisure to watch others. Two of the youngest who were old enough to feed themselves—a boy and girl who might have been twins—argued over the remains of a plate of hard-baked dumplings that must have been wrapped in leather and buried in the ashes the night before.
Temur sipped his tea, eyes half closed, and allowed himself the luxury of imagining himself in his mother’s white-house, watching younger siblings or nieces and nephews quarrel. True, there was no white-house here—the Eternal Sky stretched overhead, and there was little point in setting up a white-house every night only to pull it down again, when simple hide tents would do—but that seemed like a quibble. This was more comfort than he’d known since Mongke Khagan died the previous summer—so much more comfort than the rough fire circles of a military campaign, if there was less food to be had.
The comfort and the companionship settled some deep craving in him. Something he hadn’t even been truly aware of until now, except as a sort of disembodied longing.
He set the airag down and picked up the broth, which had been replenished. There was no sense in letting it make him maudlin. What was gone was gone, and the future that unrolled before him was a mystery road whose destination only the Eternal Sky knew.
He glanced over at Edene and caught her looking at him over the top of her tea bowl. She ducked her head again, spilling tea, and whatever he had been about to say was sanded from his mind by sudden squealing, as the girl twin piled onto her teasing brother, yanking his long, ink-black ponytail.
Temur sighed and shook his head. Altantsetseg was grinning at him toothlessly. He raised his eyebrows in a question he wasn’t sure how to put into words.
She shrugged and tossed a lamb bone to one of the massive, lion-maned mastiffs that lay comfortably far from the fire. The Bankhar dogs were still in their winter coats, their black sides and enormous red-gold feet almost invisible under puffs of undercoat plate-matted like that of musk oxen. Bankhar were called the “four-eyed dogs” for the gold spots marking their eyebrows, said to be able to keep evil spirits at bay, and now the eyes and eyespots of every dog around the fire were trained on Altantsetseg.