“They’ll go, if you order it, but do you think they will forget what you did? What you didn’t do?” Alchiq shrugged, taking another sip from his bowl. “You’ll have to kill all of them. Including the big one, and the young one, the one who knows how to hunt.”
?gedei held out his hand for the bowl, and after Alchiq handed it over, he drank from it, peering over its rim at the gray-haired hunter. “Would you kill them all for me?”
Alchiq lifted his shoulders and calmly let his gaze swing across the camp, almost as if he was marking how he would accomplish that task. “I am yours to command, my Khan.”
“Would you kill the Great Bear for me too?”
Alchiq brought his gaze back to ?gedei. “You won’t ask me to,” he said.
“But would you?”
“Would you help me kill all of these men?”
“What? That is a ludicrous question.”
“Is it?” Alchiq asked. He knelt by the river again, refilling his bowl, allowing ?gedei the luxury of not answering the question. He stood and took another drink from his bowl. “A man earns those things that he carries with him his entire life. Both his victories and his secrets. What he doesn’t earn haunts him, always.” He clapped ?gedei on the arm, a surprisingly familiar motion, and gave the Khagan a rare smile. “Kill the bear, my Khan,” he said. “Accept your destiny.”
?gedei did not know what to say, and after Alchiq left him, he stood for a long time at the edge of the stream, staring at the water.
Gansukh tugged at the hem of the shirt, wishing—once again—that Munokhoi had been slightly taller. Though, if he had been, events in the woods might have gone differently. He sighed and wriggled his shoulders one final time before relenting to the constant confinement of the ex–Torguud captain’s extra shirt.
He could have returned to the hunting party the previous day covered in blood, but when he calmed down after killing Munokhoi, he had realized that the less said about the fight in the woods, the better. Namkhai had noticed when he had caught up with the Khagan’s party, as had Alchiq and Chucai, but the different clothes and horse had gone unnoticed by the others.
He had caught ?gedei staring at his ravaged ear after the evening meal, but the Khagan had said nothing. Even though the cold water from the stream had given him a headache, he had dunked his head into the stream three times, scrubbing his hair, his face, and both ears between each immersion. He was surprised—and a little pleased—that he had slept at all, given how much his ear had been throbbing in the night.
This morning, though, most of the stinging was gone, reduced to a dull ache that would, he suspected, persist for several weeks while the wounds healed. He would be marked for the rest of his life, carrying the visible scar of the fight in the woods.
At least he was alive. Missing part of an ear was an acceptable sacrifice.
After the men had taken care of their horses the day before, the Darkhat had drawn the Khagan a map in the dirt. The valley forked, and the northern fork became a narrow rocky vale. Somewhere up there, hidden in the boulder-strewn hillside at the end of the valley, was the bear’s cave. The southern fork was rocky as well, though it was filled with a dense forest of evergreen trees. The bear hunted in those woods, but it always returned to its cave in the northern fork. In some ways, it didn’t matter in which fork the bear was, because once they entered the valley, there was no way out except past them.
When they reached the valley, the Torguud became the rearguard, and the hunters spread out to the side and in front of the Khagan as the hunting party rode toward the northern fork. The sky was clear of clouds, and the morning mist had already burned off the floor of the valley. Thin wisps of fog still clung to some of the rocky knobs on the surrounding hillsides.
Gansukh was surprised by the variety of trees. He recognized ash, alder, oak, and cedar, but there were several other evergreens that he did not know. The trees hugged the edges of the valley, growing thicker the farther they ventured into the valley. The trees were tall too, as if they had never known fire or ax. Gansukh heard numerous birds singing and calling to each other, and he saw signs of small animals—squirrels, rabbits, and other rodents and scavengers.
The bear never had to go far to find food, and for a little while, Gansukh wondered if the Darkhat had been wrong and the bear had been dead for many years. The proliferation of life in the valley was, instead, a testament to the lack of predators.