Samarkar stood up in her stirrups, craning along the length of the road. “Surely they don’t use … wagons?”
“Carts,” Temur said. “The clans use this road as well as traders. And our women’s carts can go anywhere on the steppe. Some of the caravans use carts as well. Some use beasts of burden.”
Payma said, “The ruts are overgrown.”
Temur nodded. “No caravans without the peace of the Khagan.”
The princess reached down and scratched the ear of the mule nosing along her saddle. Temur, too, was growing fond of the mules—they were sturdy and steadfast and smarter than most horses. Besides Bansh, he corrected himself.
The mare snorted as if she could hear him thinking. He would not have been particularly surprised. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s ride.”
“Wait a minute,” Payma said, swinging her awkward belly over the saddle to dismount. “While we’re stopped, I have to pee.”
* * *
After the first storm, there were no others, calming Temur’s fears. As the nights warmed, they made cold camps except when there was meat to cook, and so they covered ground faster than he had dared hope despite the need to rest and graze the horses. Payma’s belly swelled like a puffball mushroom, and her ankles swelled like sausages. She had to be suffering, but she made no complaint over long days in the saddle, confirming Temur’s ever-more-favorable opinion of Rasan royal women.
She did let him and Samarkar take over more of the work of setting camp as days went by. Twice they were awakened in the night by the territorial cough of the great steppe lion. Twice Hrahima replied, then they heard nothing more. The grass faded to ashy gold as the summer’s true heat manifested. The little party refilled their water at stagnant shallow lakes gone jewel-green, straining it through folds of cloth to remove the algae and the threat of cholera. Sometimes they went so long between water sources that Samarkar had to pull it from the air. In providing for three people, the Cho-tse, and five equines, she exhausted herself, and Temur worried what they would do when they reached the desert.
They met no caravans bound for Qarash—a sign Temur welcomed, for it hinted that Qori Buqa was having trouble consolidating his rule. No sensible caravan master would lead his train into the teeth of war or banditry. Indeed, Temur and the others did find the charred remains of one cart train led by a rash or desperate master, thus proving the wisdom of the others.
Safe roads had been another gift of the Great Khagan’s peace. Temur found himself half satisfied that Qori Buqa had not yet made himself Khagan in fact as well as name, and half sorrowful to see his grandfather’s achievement crumble within the lifetime of his sons.
Perfect flatness gave way to rolling countryside, brown and treeless, and the westernmost horn of the Steles of the Sky edged up over the horizon.
“We turn south here,” Temur said, trying to hold a half-remembered map before his mind’s eye while imagining how it would look seen as a landscape. “Nilufer’s stronghold is somewhere among the roots of that range.”
“Good,” Samarkar said.
Payma only sighed. Relief, he thought, and Temur could in no way fault her for it.
15
When they noticed the first talus, they knew they could not be far from Nilufer’s Stone Steading. Payma and Samarkar had been scanning the steepening hillsides with focused attention, alert to the legendary living boulders—as well as their legendary bandit tribes, which were probably growing larger and more dangerous again with the death of Mongke Khagan and the civil war among his relatives.
But it was Hrahima who spotted one first.
It resembled nothing so much as a shaggy, lichen-coated slab, moving as slowly as the sun, so its progress was impossible to track unless you glanced at it repeatedly and noticed it shifting against the background. But there was a trail in the rock behind it, and if Samarkar listened very intently, she could hear the grinding noise as its mouth parts wore away the stone.
It was not as large as she had imagined. In her head, the talus were more like small hills than boulders. But this one was perhaps ten paces long and two men tall—gigantic for a living thing, but not too big as rocks went.
Temur swung down from the saddle when they drew abreast of it and led Bansh over. Samarkar would have imitated him, but Buldshak being what she was, she handed the reins to Payma before she followed. She might have felt bad about it, but Payma evinced no interest in going close to the beast. Which was probably more sensible than Samarkar’s combination of audacity and curiosity.
When she came up on him, Temur was walking speculatively around the great, placid living stone. Samarkar heard the grinding from within it. She had read that the talus were docile. Now she extended her hand to touch its flank, testing the theory.