Temur, amused, watched as she prised loose another bone for the pack. Dogs were not livestock; they were honored as near-brothers. No clan or tribe could long survive without its dogs—mastiffs to guard and shepherds to tend—and both breeds served as loyal hunting companions.
A good dog was sky-buried with as much honor as a good horse.
She gave the bone to Temur, and Temur—aware that this, too, was a test—offered it to the nearest mastiff, a great-headed dog whose yellowed teeth showed alongside a lolling tongue. Even a third of an ayl from the fire, he was too hot in his winter coat.
Gravely, the big dog stood and came to Temur, softly placing feet as big as a lion’s paws. Gravely, he accepted the bone.
Despite the heat of the fire, he lay down beside Temur to dispatch with it.
Over the splintering bone, Temur heard Altantsetseg say, “You have a good eye for a dog. That is Sube, the ‘Needle’s-Eye.’ He’s the best get of my old ruddy bitch.”
Temur looked up and smiled. “He was closest,” he said.
“He’s Edene’s dog, you know.” She picked shreds of meat from the bones with her fingertips and tucked them between teeth still strong if worn. “Maybe the way to her heart is through wooing him.”
“Grandmother,” Edene said. But she covered her mouth with her hand and looked down as if her face were burning.
Temur looked from one to the other. “I know better than to war with women.”
Edene looked at him directly, her eyebrows lifting. “As if you have a choice,” she said archly, “when women would war over you.”
* * *
The open air burned cold and wide, blue-white with winter, around the wings of Shahruz’s mount. The wind of her passage cut through the heavy weave of his trousers, plastering the cloth to his legs. It seared his knuckles in his gloves and struck tears from his eyes, until he remembered the wood-framed, wool-padded goggles that hung on their braided cord around his neck. Even with those, and several wraps of his veil protecting his face, his cheeks and lips chapped and peeled.
The rukh’s body rose and fell between her wings as wide as sails, her crested head on its long neck stretched out before her. Shahruz straddled that neck just before her shoulders, legs bound to the saddle with an assortment of straps, and pretended the reins were anything but a suggestion. The wind served al-Sepehr because it feared his retribution, not because she was in any way tame or trained.
Lesser rukhs—the young of the mother bird, some no greater than falcons—flocked around them, sometimes landing to rest on their parent’s back and shoulders. The rukh herself was tireless, sky spanning. She never hesitated nor varied the clockwork of her wings.
And so they beat east, into the setting sun of the Uthman Caliphate, until they crossed the broad but bounded waters of the White Sea, and the sun was abruptly behind them, setting in the west. As they flew over the sprawl of Asmaracanda at the mouth of the Mother River, they entered Qersnyk-held lands, and the sky reflected it.
The rukh brought Shahruz so close to the sky he thought he could almost touch it, raise a hand to rip through its folds and catch a glimpse of whatever wonders lay beyond. But of course that was illusion: Not even a rukh—perhaps not even a dragon—could fly so high as to touch the tent of the heavens where it draped the Shattered Pillars and the Steles of the Sky.
From here, though, Shahruz could see both mountain ranges before they widened away to the north and southeast and were lost to blue distance. In the throat of the funnel they formed, the Mother River ran down to Asmaracanda, and beyond Asmaracanda the level steppe stretched to where haze concealed its reaches.
The rukh flew on through nightfall, and Shahruz dozed on her back. He never quite slept—far behind, in Ala-Din, his sister Saadet slept for him. He could feel her there, the warmth of her dreams as she gave him her rest and took his tiredness into herself. She asked no questions, though she must have felt the wind tangling his veils and the cold cutting his bones. She just warmed him and ate for him and gave him her womanly strength without stint.
There were too many moons, scattered across the sky like empty plates. When the sun rose, it shone into Shahruz’s eyes.
Not too long after, he spotted the distant smudge of a caravanserai. Perhaps a half day’s walk; not bad at all, and from the way the rukh’s head turned toward it with interest, he knew it was not deserted. Her keen eyesight told her there were animals within—animals big enough to be worth eating.
Perhaps there would be men there worth hiring, as well. At least worth hiring for as long as they lasted.
It was a sad truth, Shahruz reflected, that the nature of war was such that not everyone could survive it.