barged in and yelled the results: “No, I’m stuck. Can’t have been here. It’s too tight for a gorged snake.” They crawled and yet found nowhere to go.
“I humbly thank you, grandfathers,” whispered Temujin to the wood.
He wandered where the passage led – an aisle, arched over his head, as if a secret cloister for the spirits to walk in the flesh. He hoped to meet one. Down at the ankles of the most enormous cedars he had seen, the day was a green shadow, where dead trees listed into the arms of others, where great tents of moss hung and webs tough as string, where beetles, beetles in neat battalions and gem armour, ran like ambulant carpets. Up in the forest roof birds warbled and whistled, cackled and cawed. Funnily, he saw no trace of animals.
He sensed he had gone in a circle, when the green dusk changed to a green dawn ahead and a man spoke almost in his ear. “My whittle says we’ve lost him.”
Temujin stopped. Here he was at his door again, and had been about to wander right out.
“I don’t want your whittle.”
“What do you want?”
“Shagreen pouch?”
“My shagreen pouch says we’ve lost him.”
“Scored. You’re in a throwaway mood, Dar. He isn’t lost, he’s in the wood and we have the wood surrounded. Since when do we call off a chase? Captain won’t front His Royal Scarlet Arse without him.”
“I’ve got a hunch.”
“Last hunch you had turned out to be a humpback ape on a warlock’s leash and ripped your arm off.”
“We’ll see.”
“What’s up with you? Ain’t your inclination in?”
“I don’t know. His Scarlet Arse was a trifle strident. Yesugei’s kid, see. We might wait til he’s a size.”
“Dar.”
“What, you going to report me?”
“No, just don’t give me a headache.”
The Tayichiut had staked out the wood. That meant a patience test. He had known Uriangqot to poise a spear over a hole in the ice the whole day, as still as a tree with only the wind to rustle their hair, until a carp swam by. He had known a doe to outwait a wolf, hidden from his eye and ungettable-at in a thicket, until the wolf disbelieved his olfactory senses and went away, and that took time.
So Temujin made himself at home, perfectly safe and not fool enough to walk out to them: they’d get bored before he did, because he didn’t want his head cut off. He sat on boughs or the beetles ran straight over him. Not to freeze he slept in a leaf drift with its insects. The horse had never spent a night alone, without several of his kind in his ears and nostrils. He was about Temujin’s equivalent in age, cut from a colt three months ago and still in school. None of their mounts by Toghrul’s stallion had a name, because horses have description-names and they were so alike, whipped up of milk and cream with meltingly dark eyes. Temujin began to call his Pinky, for a spot on the lip. Most of the next day he took care of him. They found a sort of creeper he had a mind to eat, and he slurped the odorous damp from a log. Which Temujin lapped too, but what was he to eat? It wasn’t the time of year for cedar cones or berries, and any stalk or root he thought of, the beetles had eaten. Eat the beetles? He wasn’t that hungry, though tribes of the deep forest did. There were seriously no animals whatsoever: strictly birds and insects in the temple. As an animal Temujin saw how gracious they had been to take him in. A thorough search of his clothes came up with a forgotten cheese nugget and a little curl of dried meat, too old and dark to identify. These he counted as two meals.
On the third day he thought the squad might have given up. He had no way to tell, though he tried to keep an ear out through the noise of birds. Didn’t Tarqutai’s Guard have bigger fish to fry? He wasn’t much to fuss over. He’d been meant to wait for his family to call, only he’d never hear them over the birds.
I can’t stay here forever, can I?
He buckled up Pinky’s gear and led him on the path to the one way out he had found, the way they came in.
Behind him, very close behind, a slither and a big flop-thump. Temujin jumped and Pinky skittered. The horse gear lay on the ground, and daintily Pinky stepped his hind hooves out of the loop of the girth. How did that happen? He must have passed under a tree arm and the seat had been swept off. With the girth, that Temujin mightn’t have tightened. With the chest-strap still done up. That wasn’t even possible.
From head to foot he shivered, and yet felt suffused with warmth as if he had stepped into a sunbeam. Glued against Pinky he gazed at the trunks, bark split and peeled with age, the splayed tufts at the end of the branches like fingers, he smelt a mist of their fragrance and said directly to the cedars – since he didn’t know who had helped him – “Grandfathers, your care for me is far past my power of return. God keep you strong and green, and undisturbed here in your holy wood. Bless ye, bless Tergune’s birds, peace to their nests and increase to their beetle herds.”
He turned around and led his horse back into the wood.
By the sixth day both his horse and he were famished, and droopy, and slightly crazed with the blast of bird-talk. He felt he had been here a fair fraction of his life. He had stomached a few soft grubs. No squad was going to sit on their heels for six days for the sake of an underaged trial-dodger. Temujin took the path out again, his cream horse a ghostly green in a dawn more smelt than sighted.
Light struck into the eaves and smattered his unused eyes with fireflies. While these confused him he felt a quake, he heard a groany wheeze and glimpsed the crash of a missile through the trees. Did Tayichiut have catapults? Was he under siege? Instinct dropped him to the ground. A white hulk, the shape of a travel-tent, squatted in the path, a drift of spangled dust above. The triple crags of Tergune had thrown down a chunk of rock and plugged the gap.
In the quiet that ensued a Tayichiut swore, “Holy Mother of God.”
Temujin, from flat on his face, got onto his knees.
On the ninth day he lolled in musty leaves, sluggish, dull, listless and indifferent. Hours went by between the times he bothered to turn his head. There wasn’t much to look at, whereas his inner eye laid out for him a phantasmagoria of food. His intellect engaged deeply with kitchen questions. For instance, the great schism: boiling or roasting? The flock-owner, whose watchword is husbandry, twitches to see fat spitting into the air, juices hissing off in the flames. Boiling keeps the very last fatty globule in the pot. But in the forest, where wild animals belong to no-one but themselves, where Agha Rich gives freely of his pelf and pelts, parsimony is the only sin. And truth to tell, if Temujin had a choice, a crispy haunch of roast deer or boiled mutton...
A caw, bleak, pregnant with woe, as caws are, interrupted this fantasy. Temujin shook out of his glassy stare and focused on a huge crow, cock-headed on a tree’s foot level with his face. Its beady eye inspected him. It might be here to pluck my eyes out, Temujin thought, and on the other hand might be my guardian in fleshly vehicle. He went with the latter theory, to be safe. “Grandfather, you have given me asylum from my enemies, me, a snake’s sloughed skin, in your sanctuary where I trespass. But grandfather, Pinky and I are only animals and we have nought to eat.”
The crow opened its beak and uttered its poignant caw. It flew off.
He ate an insect he retched at and decided insects weren’t for him. A few were toxic, but unlike mushrooms he hadn’t been taught which ones. On his ninth day almost without sustenance – and he hadn’t had great store of fat to tide him over – he felt, with revulsion, the effects creep over him, cripple his ability to act... his ability to want to. There were two extreme options: birds and horse’s blood. Birds weren’t to be thought of and he drove the thought from his mind. And although he had fond memory of blood sausage, straight from the vein was another matter: an emergency food for soldiers, mostly, the portion the spirits eat at sacrifices, liquid blood, that disgusts a mortal stomach – Mongols don’t even like raw milk, which has to be churned at least. Temujin didn’t know where to bleed Pinky or how to patch him up. You can’t
bungle these things. Spillages in butchery are very bad. Besides he thought he might be sick again.
It was meant to be thoroughly horrible to bleed to death, which is to watch your soul glug and gurgle out of you. The gash-weapons – battleaxe, blade – are for the strongest stomachs. Head-cutting, the criminals’ death, splashily lets blood, but quickly. He’d rather have his head cut off than this, this bleed, though not of blood, this extinguishment, physical and mental, slow. One by one his lights guttered and went out. He’d cease to care. He hated this. People want to go intact, but he wasn’t intact. Blood was piffle, obviously. The most miserable way to go? Chinese have a death by vivisection: on the first day they cut off your little fingers, five days to go through the digits of the hands, on the sixth day the wrists, the seventh we’re up to the elbows. Week two is little toes to knees. Their doctors suture the veins, their doctors treat each amputation and it’s shock that kills. Not in his mother’s lessons, that, but kids find out these things. He didn’t hurt, but he didn’t like this sensation, of what he was reduced, deducted from, of being less and less himself, more and more miserable a creature. Like the vivisected captive he just wanted to get out. If that cost him his head, fine. So this is starvation?
Kids told about Mogusi, sentenced to be hacked apart at the