Temüjin spent the morning with the sheep, which was what a boy in his position was for.
Bride-service[1] was not slavery and it was not hospitality. It sat in a category the steppe had built for itself and never bothered to name: a boy was promised to a girl, and the boy went to live with her people and worked for them until he was old enough to take her away. It made a stranger into something the household had fed. By the time he came back for her, they would have watched him for years, and if he had turned out badly, they would know before the herds were split.
It was, Temüjin thought, a better system for testing a son-in-law than anything his own century had come up with. It also meant that his days belonged to Dei Sechen, and today Dei Sechen wanted sheep counted.
He was good at it. The body was good at it. It could walk all day, and it could tell one sheep from another, which he could not. To him they were all the same animal. But there was a ewe in the flock that drifted, always to the left, always toward the low ground—and the body knew which one she was, and his feet had already turned to cut her off before he understood that he had been watching her at all.
What the body could not do was stop him thinking, and he thought about the grass.
It was high summer and the grass was the best it would be all year, and in four months it would be under snow, and the animals would spend the winter walking through drifts scraping down to whatever was left underneath. Most years, most of them managed. Some years the snow came wet and froze into a lid over the whole steppe, and then nothing could be scraped down to, and a family could lose nine animals in ten in a single season and simply cease to exist as a family.
He knew what that was called, in a language nobody here spoke, in a paper he had read once and could still see.
The grass was standing right there. Nobody was cutting it.
Dei Sechen sent for him after the midday heat had broken.
The ger was the largest in the ring and Temüjin went through the door carefully, as he did every door, and sat where a boy of his standing sat, which was near enough to the west wall to be out of the way. Two of Dei Sechen's men were already there. A woman poured airag[2] into a wooden bowl and it went first to Dei Sechen, and from Dei Sechen to the eldest of the two men, and around, and to Temüjin last, and he took it in both hands, the way the men did, because a bowl taken one-handed said something about the person holding it, and he could not afford to say anything.
It was sour and slightly fizzing and he had loathed it for the first month. He had stopped loathing it somewhere around the time he stopped noticing he was drinking it.
"You've got sun on you," Dei Sechen said. "Good. A boy who stays out of the sun grows up soft in the head."
"Then I'll be very clever by autumn."
Dei Sechen laughed—a real one, loud, delighted out of all proportion. He laughed like that at most things Temüjin said, and that was the problem.
The man had dreamed about him. He had told Yesügei so on the road, when the two of them met by accident and stood talking about their children the way men do, and what Dei Sechen had said was that he had dreamed of a white falcon coming down out of the sky with the sun in one foot and the moon in the other, and settling on his hand. Then he had looked at a nine-year-old boy standing beside a horse and decided the dream was about him.
Nobody watches you as closely as a man who is waiting for you to prove him right.
Hostility Temüjin could have worked with. Hostility looks for faults, and faults could be arranged, could be given somewhere harmless to land. Dei Sechen looked for signs. Every odd turn of phrase, every silence that ran a beat too long, every time the boy knew a thing he had no business knowing—Dei Sechen took each of them, turned them over, and filed them under *falcon*.
It was the safest possible misreading, and Temüjin was going to be living inside it for as long as he stayed here, and he did not trust it an inch.
"Your father," Dei Sechen said, "will be long home by now."
"He rides fast."
"He rides *badly*," Dei Sechen said, "and quickly, which he thinks is the same thing." He drank. "He was a good man to meet on a road. I have not decided yet whether he is a good man to be related to."
There was an opening in that, and Temüjin took it, because the alternative was letting the conversation find its own way to Yesügei's health.
"He was better with the horses than with people," he said.
The words were out and gone before he heard them.
*Was.*
The airag was suddenly very present in his hands. He did not look up, because looking up would be worse, and he counted—one, two—and nothing happened. Dei Sechen was nodding at something one of his men had said. The men had not noticed. Nobody in the world had noticed.
Except that when he did let himself glance across the fire, Börte was sitting in the women's half with a bowl in her lap, not eating, looking straight at him.
She did not say anything.
She never said anything. She just put it down somewhere, the way she had put down the business of the doorway, and went back to her food.
He tried, anyway. He had promised himself he would try once before the rider came.
"You could cut it," he said.
Dei Sechen turned. "Cut what?"
"The grass. Now, while it's high. Cut it and stack it and cover it, and when the ice comes you'd have something to put in front of them." He kept his voice light, because the alternative was sounding like an adult, and there was nothing he could afford less. "You'd lose fewer animals in a bad winter."
The older of the two men snorted into his bowl.
Dei Sechen did not laugh, which was somehow worse. He looked at Temüjin with enormous fondness, the way you look at a child who has said something about the moon.
"And who cuts it?"
"Everyone. It's a few weeks—"
"Everyone is milking. Everyone is felting[3]. Everyone is moving the camp twice more before the cold." He counted it off without heat, a man explaining water to a fish. "And when we go north, does the grass come with us? Do I carry a winter's grass on a cart, or do I leave it here for the Merkits[4] to sit on?"
"You'd move less."
"Ah." Dei Sechen's eyebrows went up. "We'd move less."
And that was it. That was the whole conversation, and Temüjin heard how it sounded from the outside as it was still leaving his mouth: *stay in one place through the good grazing season, do a month of labour nobody has ever done, so that in a winter that may not come you might keep some animals you would probably have kept anyway.*
Every part of the objection was correct. That was the thing he had not been ready for. It was not superstition and it was not stupidity. It was a man who had run herds for thirty years, doing arithmetic Temüjin could not beat with anything except a certainty he had no way to explain.
He knew the answer. He did not have the road to it. He was nine, he owned nothing, he could not cut a field by himself, and he could not say *I have read about the winters that are coming* to anyone alive.
"It was a thought," he said.
"It was a *boy's* thought," Dei Sechen said, kindly, and refilled his bowl, and the talk went to the horses, and the thing died there on the floor of the ger with no one to mourn it but the person who had brought it in.
Börte found him after, sitting out past the carts where the light was going.
"They're going to lose stock this winter," she said.
"Probably."
"You said it like you already knew." She sat down next to him, not close. "Not like a guess. My father makes guesses all day. They don't sound like that."
Temüjin looked at the grass, which went on to the edge of the world in every direction and would go on doing so for four more months, and then stop.
"Lucky guess," he said.
"Mm," said Börte.
She did not believe him. She was not going to argue about it either, and he understood, sitting there in the last of the light, that this was going to be the shape of things between them: he would hand her something that did not fit, and she would take it, and put it away, and one day she was going to bring all of it out at once and lay it in front of him in a row.
Somewhere east of here his father was riding home with poison working in him, and would arrive, and would give orders about his sons, and a man would be sent.
Soon. Within the week.
The grass moved in the wind and nobody cut it.
[1] the custom by which a betrothed boy goes to live among his bride's people and works for them until he is old enough to take her away. It makes a stranger into someone the household has fed, and lets them judge him for years before any herds change hands.
[2] fermented mare's milk, the everyday drink of the steppe: sour, faintly fizzing, mildly alcoholic. Poured and passed in order of standing, and received in both hands.
[3] beating and rolling wool into felt, the material a ger is covered with. One of the heavy communal jobs of the warm months, and one reason there is no spare labour in summer.
[4] a people of the northern forests and rivers, near enough to the Onggirat that anything left behind on the move is assumed to end up theirs.