Conqueror: The Complete 5-Book Collection. Conn Iggulden
trees.
Temujin reached out clumsily to try to give his mother some comfort. He took her shoulder and, to his pleasure, she tilted her head so that her face briefly touched his hand.
‘Make me a killing bow, Temujin. Find Bekter and help him,’ she said, raising her eyes to his.
He swallowed painfully against his hunger and left her there with the baby, the wailing cry echoing amongst the wet trees.
Temujin found Bekter by the sound of his blade hacking into a birch sapling. He whistled softly to let his older brother know he was approaching and received a surly glare for his trouble. Without a word, Temujin held the slender trunk steady for his brother’s blade. The knife was a solid piece of edged iron and it bit deeply. Bekter seemed to be taking his anger out on the wood and it took courage for Temujin to hold his hands still as blow after blow thumped near his fingers.
It did not take long before Temujin was able to press the sapling down and expose the whitish fibres of the young wood. The bow would be near to useless, he thought glumly. It was hard not to think of the beautiful weapons in every ger of the Wolves. Birch cores were glued to boiled strips of sheep horn and ground sinew and then left for an entire year in dry darkness before the pieces were fitted together. Each one was a marvel of ingenuity, capable of killing over a distance of more than two hundred alds.
The bow he and his brother sweated to make would be little more than a child’s toy in comparison, and this was the one on which their lives would depend. Temujin snorted in bitter amusement as Bekter closed one eye and finally held up the length of birch, still ragged with its paper bark. He saw Bekter’s jaw clench in response and watched in surprise as his brother brought the length of wood back sharply and broke it over another trunk, throwing the splintered birch to the leaves.
‘This is a waste of time,’ Bekter said furiously.
Temujin eyed the knife he was holding, suddenly aware of how alone they were.
‘How far can they travel in a day?’ Bekter demanded. ‘You can track. We know the guards as well as our brothers. I could get past them.’
‘To do what?’ Temujin asked. ‘Kill Eeluk?’ He saw Bekter’s eyes glaze for a moment as he tasted the idea, then shook his head.
‘No. We’d never get to him, but we could steal a bow! Just a single bow and a few arrows and we could eat. Aren’t you hungry?’
Temujin tried not to think about the ache in his stomach. He had known hunger before, but always there was the thought of a hot meal waiting at the end. Here, it seemed worse and his gut felt sore and painful to the touch. He hoped it was not the first sign of the loose bowels that came from disease or poor meat. In such a place, any weakness would kill him. He knew as well as his mother that they walked a thin edge between survival and a pile of bones come the winter.
‘I am starving,’ he said, ‘but we’d never get into a ger without the alarm being raised. Even if we did, they’d track us back here and Eeluk would not let us go a second time. That broken stick is all we have.’
Both boys looked at the ruined sapling and Bekter grabbed it in a show of mindless anger, wrenching at the unyielding wood and then throwing it into the undergrowth.
‘All right, let’s start again,’ he said grimly. ‘Though we don’t have a string, we don’t have arrows, and we have no glue. We have as much chance of catching an animal by throwing stones at it!’
Temujin said nothing, shaken by the outburst. Like all of his father’s sons, he was used to someone knowing what to do. Perhaps they had become too used to that certainty. Ever since he had felt his father’s hand go limp in his own, he had been lost. There were times when he felt the strength he needed begin to kindle in his chest, but he kept expecting it all to end and his old life to come back.
‘We’ll braid strips of cloth for a string. It will hold long enough to take two shots, I should think. We only have two arrowheads, after all.’
Bekter grunted in reply and reached out to another birch sapling, supple and as thick as his thumb.
‘Hold this steady, then, brother,’ he said, raising the heavy blade. ‘I’ll make a bow good enough for two chances at the kill. After that fails, we’ll eat grass.’
Kachiun caught up with Khasar high into the cleft between the hills. The figure of his older brother was so still that he almost missed him as he climbed over rocks, but his gaze was drawn to where the stream had widened into a pool and he saw his brother on the edge. Khasar had made himself a simple rod with a long birch twig. Kachiun whistled to let him know he was there and approached as silently as he could, staring down into the clear water.
‘I can see them. Nothing larger than a finger so far,’ Khasar whispered. ‘They don’t seem to want the worms, though.’
They both stared at the limp scrap of flesh that hung in the water an arm’s length from the bank. Kachiun frowned to himself, thinking.
‘We’re going to need more than one or two if we’re all to eat tonight,’ he said.
Khasar grunted in response. ‘If you have an idea, then say it. I can’t make them take the hook.’
Kachiun was silent for a long time, and both boys would have enjoyed the peace if it had not been for the ache in their bellies. At last, Kachiun stood and began to unwind the orange waist cloth from his deel. It was three alds long, stretching as far as three men lying head to toe. He might not have thought to use it if Temujin had not added his own to Hoelun’s pile. Khasar glanced up at him, a smile touching his mouth.
‘Going for a swim?’ he said.
Kachiun shook his head. ‘A net would be better than a hook. We could get them all then. I thought I might try to dam the stream with the cloth.’
Khasar pulled his bedraggled worm out of the water, laying the precious hook down.
‘It might work,’ he said. ‘I’ll go further upstream and beat the water with a stick as I come back down. If you can close off the stream with the cloth, you might be able to scoop a few onto the bank.’
Both boys looked reluctantly at the freezing water. Kachiun sighed to himself, winding the cloth around his arms.
‘All right; it’s better than waiting,’ he said, shuddering as he stepped into the pool.
The cold made them gasp and wince, but both boys worked quickly to tie the length of cloth across the path of the stream. A tree root made a perfect anchor point on one side and Kachiun heaved a rock onto the other as he doubled the cloth and brought it back on itself. There was more than enough, and he forgot his chill for a time when he saw small fish touch the orange barrier and dart backwards. He saw Khasar cut a strip from the cloth and bind a knife to a stick to make a short stabbing spear.
‘Pray to the sky father for some big ones,’ Khasar said. ‘We need to get this right.’
Kachiun remained in the water, struggling not to shiver too violently as his brother walked away and was lost to sight. He did not need to be told.
Temujin tried to take the bow from his brother’s hands and Bekter rapped his knuckles with the handle of his knife.
‘I have it,’ Bekter said, irritably.
Temujin watched as the older boy bent the birch to fit the loop of braided string over the other end. He winced in anticipation of the crack that would be the ruin of their third attempt. From the beginning, he had resented Bekter’s bad-tempered approach to making the weapon, as if the wood and the string were enemies to be crushed into obedience. Whenever Temujin tried to help he was roughly rebuffed, and only when Bekter failed again and again did he suffer his brother to hold the wood still as they bent it. The second bow had snapped and their first two strings had lasted just long enough to come under tension before they too gave way. The sun had moved over their heads and their tempers frayed as failure piled upon failure.
The new string was braided from three thin