* * *
For many days they traveled without trouble, and Samarkar felt the terror of that night ride through the mountains start to ebb. If she had ever been about to forget that they were running before a devil, though, Temur’s weariness, worry, and the way he checked the sky each moonrise would have kept it present in her mind.
He only spoke of it once, though, at dawn on their fourth day, when he came to her with bloody, seared meat—Hrahima’s kill—and hunkered beside her while she tore at it with knife and teeth. Payma had finished loading the mules, and only eating remained before they set out once more.
“Before my uncle Mongke died,” he said softly, “A rider could go from the Song border to Asitaneh in six weeks, with remounts and rest at the Khagan’s outposts along the way. But the roads are unmaintained, and the outposts emptied by the war.”
Hot juice ran down Samarkar’s throat as she chewed. She licked blood from the back of her hand. There was nothing she could say to address the loss in his voice, so she touched his hand and changed the subject. “We’ll reach the Celadon Highway in another quarter-moon or so.” She glanced at the skies, at the thirteen unchanging moons. “I mean, in a little more than a hand of days.”
If her failing manners made her less the once-princess in his eyes, it never showed in his courtesy. “Until we leave it for Nilufer’s Stone Steading. It might be better to move cross-country, where there is less chance of being overtaken by Songtsan’s men.”
“Or headed by al-Sepehr’s,” Hrahima said, from where she lay among long grasses, her broad hands propped on the meat-distended mound of her belly. The Cho-tse did not dine every night, but when she did, she dined in quantity. They would move more slowly today, in deference to Hrahima’s sluggishness, but they would make it up on the morrow.
The four of them were developing a sort of language of their own, a pidgin of Temur’s milk tongue and that of Samarkar and Payma, with Cho-tse words thrown in as Hrahima acquainted them with a few. But as the days wore on, Temur began insisting that they all practice Qersnyk, which was the language of Nilufer Khatun’s principality. Samarkar knew this was for Payma’s benefit, because Hrahima seemed to pick up human languages—“monkey-tongues,” as she called them—with ridiculous ease, and Samarkar already knew enough Qersnyk to get by.
But when Payma was elsewhere, Temur rode close to Samarkar and made her help him practice the Uthman tongue, dialects of which were spoken from Asmaracanda as far west as Ctesifon.
For the first hand of days, the mist-wreathed mountains still loomed so huge behind them it seemed Samarkar could just walk over there in an afternoon. Bit by bit, the haze of distance began to cut them off from their feet. Then they seemed to float over the earth, and Samarkar had to force herself to train her eyes on the blank and endless waves of grass crawling under the wind before her. Looking back was like pulling the stitches from an unhealed wound, too much like the view from her tower window in Prince Ryi’s palace.
On the tenth day they came to and crossed one river that had dropped from flood but was yet too deep to ford, though the horses could just about tiptoe across. Payma and Samarkar stripped and plunged into the water, which still ran cold from the snowpack that spawned it, though days of sun crossing the steppe had taken the worst of the edge off. Hrahima swam too, with apparent unconcern for how it plastered her fur to her body and twisted her ruff to dripping spikes. Temur, however, stood on Bansh’s saddle, keeping the water out of his boots, and held the women’s clothes above the flood.
The current was still fast enough to push them a li downstream in the time it took to cross, but fortunately there were gravel beaches along both sides of the ford. Samarkar stood up out of the water, dripping, gasping with cold, slapping her arms and thighs to feel anything in them. Payma was red all over her body, cradling her belly with one arm and wiping water from her face with the other, fingertips and toetips dusky with chill.
That was as far as they got that day, because having crossed, they camped on the far bank to build fires, spread their bodies and belongings in the afternoon sun, and fill their bottles against the next long dry stretch of steppe.
The river flowed northwest, and Samarkar wondered aloud if they could follow it to the inland sea whose trade fed the great port cities of Asmaracanda—once Uthman, now Qersnyk—and Asitaneh—which was Uthman still.
“Probably,” Temur said. He’d just finished rubbing the horses and mules dry with rough cloth and was giving them sweets mixed with mutton fat, for warmth and energy. “It’s the Red Stone River, unless I miss my guess.” He waved at the round rocks and jumbled boulders that filled its bed; they were indeed mostly of a dark pinkish granite. Then, as if what he’d said disturbed him, he turned away with some excuse about finding more driftwood for a fire.