The wind howled across the steppe. I should have been afraid, but I was not aware enough for fear; hunger and cold were my constant and only companions for so long that I had ceased to notice even their presence. I stood and gripped my makeshift spear, my fingers numb and my body shivering. I was accustomed to cold, but I was undernourished and insufficiently clothed.
It was not until the horse and rider came near to me that I could see them clearly through the blowing snow. The horse was a sturdy pony, its shaggy coat sandy brown in color where it was visible beneath many draped blankets. From its back leapt a small woman dressed in furs, a hood encircling her pale, round face. She called out to me in a tongue I could not understand.
When I did not answer, she led the pony closer, holding up gloved hands to show she was not a threat. There was a short sword attached to her saddle, along with a curved bow and a quiver of arrows, and a number of other bundles of supplies. The woman repeated her greeting, and said some other phrases equally incomprehensible to my ears, before she said something in words I could grasp.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?”
I had seen only a handful of souls in those prolonged months, and I had spoken not a word to any of them. I feared the power of language had left me, and I had become as the beasts of the wood, unable to communicate by words or signs. I could not respond to her question.
She looked me up and down and said, “A storm is coming. You’ll want to get out of the wind.”
She moved away and began removing packages from the saddle. I stood by uselessly as she raised a shelter of felt and canvas over a slender frame. From somewhere under the saddle she produced several cuts of meat, raw but tenderized from travel. This seemed very strange to me, but when she held out some of it in my direction, I was too hungry to refuse, and I crawled under the canvas door after her. The shelter impeded the wind, and even without a fire, the air within was almost warm. Feeling returned to my hands and feet, and the ever-present hollow gnawing of my empty stomach subsided.
We sat in silence as the wind grew more enraged, and what little daylight there was left faded to darkness. She watched me with a dubious expression; I can only imagine how I must have appeared, having grown thin and pale over the course of my journey. I would learn later that even when I was no longer sickly, the southern folk perceived me as strange: like many of my people, I was tall and broad, my arms, torso, and neck decorated with swirling blue tattoos. At the time, I was indeed very ill, and more than a bit mad—an odd sight in this desolate place.
After some time, the woman spoke to me again. “Where did you come from?”
It took great effort to form my thoughts into words, but I managed to say, “Far to the north, beyond the sea.” Emboldened by my success at speech, I added, “My name is Eske, son of Ivor, of the Clan of the Bear.”
“Beyond the sea?” she asked. “They say that no one can survive there, but seeing you, I’d believe the stories were wrong.”
“I tell you the truth,” I insisted.
She nodded, though not all her doubt left her face. “My name is Aysulu,” she said. “My father was Ruslan the stargazer. I came here seeking a lion and a wolf, not a bear, though it is fortunate that I found you.”
Fortunate it was. I did not look favorably on my chances to survive another winter alone, and here there was no shelter but that which travelers carried with them. I had seen no creatures other than Aysulu, her horse, and myself, and any attempts to hunt might well have been in vain.
“A lion and a wolf?” I said. “Do such beasts live in this place?”
“Not in the winter,” she explained. “The Tribe of the Lion and the Wolf is a clan of reavers. I’ve been tracking them across the steppe for forty days, but I fear this storm means I’ve finally lost them.” Her voice was high and reedy, and I guessed she was close to my age, nineteen or twenty winters. With her hood removed in the comparative warmth of the shelter, I could see her hair was black and fell below her chin, and she was solidly built under her heavy coat.
She gave me one of her furs, and I slept the instant my head reached the tent floor.
Morning came late, but unlike the winter at the edge of the world, it did come. Aysulu shook the dusting of snow from the shelter and packed everything back on her saddle, and I was somewhat more helpful than I had been the night before. She carried more with her than any of my companions or I had brought on our longship. I was amazed to see it take up so little space when she was done.
“I’ll have to return south,” Aysulu said, “and try again to find the reavers in the spring, when the raiding starts. I can take you as far as the next settlement.”
Where else would I have gone? “I will come with you,” I told her.
We walked south from the coast, across a frozen grassland like an unmoving sea. I was outfitted, after a fashion, in the manner of the steppe people, in what furs and leathers Aysulu had to spare. I no longer feared the bite of the cold, and as I ate mostly meat, my strength returned as well. I told her tales of the mythical seafarers of my people, and of the lind-worm, though I kept my own confrontation with it to myself. She passed the time by singing traveling songs, which I could not understand but she told me were mainly about beautiful and faraway women, fast horses, and the sky above the steppe. I tried to learn one, but the sounds of her language were difficult for me to imitate; she only laughed a little at my attempts. She offered to teach me to ride as well, but I refused: we had no such animals in the lands of my birth, that ran quick as lightning and bit when approached by someone untrusted. I far preferred the swaying of a boat to that of a horse.
The sky was by turns a steely gray and a piercing blue, and very little snow fell. We walked for many days, the grass crunching under our feet and the pony’s hooves, until a village of tents appeared on the distant horizon. We arrived at the large octagonal shelter where the village headman lived, and he spoke to Aysulu for some time, gesturing expansively with his fur-clad arms. She bowed deeply when he was finished, and returned to where I waited with the pony.
“He says you may stay here, if you want,” she explained. “They are always in need of another hunter, and you can learn their tongue quickly if you have a mind to.”
I believe she was right, and perhaps I could have made a life for myself there, but the thought of staying on the grasslands and never seeing the ocean again made me hesitate. Adventure called to me, and though during the long winter I yearned for food and shelter, I never once desired to return to the safety and the confinement of my home.
“Where will you go?” I asked.
She considered the question, looking out over the featureless plain. “Farther south. There is a city where many of my people pass through to trade, and I might find word there of the Lion and the Wolf. Then I will search for them again in the spring.”
“Why do you pursue them?” It was a question she had not yet answered in the time of our acquaintance, though I admit I had not asked it directly until this moment.
“It is my sacred duty,” Aysulu said. “I am the last survivor of the tribe of Hyrkan Khan. The Lion and the Wolf destroyed my clan when I was but a babe in arms. My father escaped with me and fled to the west, where he served as the royal astronomer in the court of Lord Vanagan. Though I grew up in a castle far from here, my father made certain that I could ride, and shoot, and speak our mother tongue, and that I knew one day I would return to the steppe and seek out those who had slain our people and chased us from our home.”
Perhaps it was shame that pushed me to my decision, and the memory of my duties to my own father, from whose hall I had run so many months ago. But when I answered her, it was the call of adventure that was strongest in my mind. “I am a fighter of no small ability. Let me help you.”
“Are you certain? The road is long, and the responsibility is mine.”
I was. We replenished our supplies, and purchased a thick coat and a new pair of boots for me, and left the next morning toward Qoeli, the great city of the grasslands. The days grew longer as we traveled, though spring was a distant thought. I carried Aysulu’s sword, in addition to the makeshift spear I had crafted in the hills, and she hunted with the bow to maintain our stores of food, expertly steering the pony with her knees as she loosed arrows from its back.
One morning, with the sun searingly bright but bringing little warmth to the winter landscape, we saw a group of men on the western horizon. Two of them rode, but the other three were on foot. Even at that wide distance, I could tell they carried weapons. There was no possibility that they could not also see us.
Aysulu dismounted, and put her foot in the curve of her bow to bend it and string it before swinging back into her saddle. “Watch them,” she said. “Maybe they’ll move on.”
As the day went on, the vagrants meandered closer and closer. At first, they were in no hurry to catch up, but as the sun reached its zenith and they were within a league of us, the riders kicked their horses into a gallop and the men on foot ran. The horses circled us, keeping us in place until the others could reach us. Aysulu pulled an arrow from her quiver and readied it, and I drew the sword.
The tallest of the men carried a battle-axe in both his hands, while the ones flanking him each held a short spear. The riders came to a stop, and they had bows similar to Aysulu’s. Like us, they were dressed in furs, but their clothing had a ragged, cobbled-together look about them, with pieces of lamellar or plate armor here and there.
“Travelers,” the man with the axe said. “Hand over the horse and your weapons, and we might let you live.”
It was a death sentence in either case; without the horse and its supplies, and without anything with which to hunt, we would surely die of hunger and cold. I brandished the sword at him. If it was my fate to die here, it was better for it to be in battle.
Aysulu kicked her pony’s flanks and shot off through the line of men. With only a second’s delay, the two riders tore after her. I thought for one horrified and indignant moment that she had left me behind, when an arrowhead sprouted from the eye of the man with the axe. I saw an opening in the shock of his companions and struck down the man on the right before he could bring his spear to bear.
The riders chased Aysulu in widening circles. She stood in the stirrups and turned her body around, and another arrow flew into the chest of her first pursuer. He slid from the saddle to the frost-covered ground. The second rider evaded her arrow, swinging out of his seat and hanging from the side of the horse, placing it between him and Aysulu.
There was no cover between him and me, however, and I threw my spear. It flew in a short, unsteady arc and caught the rider in the side, and he dropped to the ground.
The remaining spearman charged, and I parried two of his blows, seeking an opportunity to close the distance between us. On the third parry, my blade embedded in the shaft of the spear and stuck fast. I pulled and twisted, and my opponent pulled back, and both weapons wrenched out of our hands and clattered to the earth. He reached out to regain the spear and I dove for him, ramming my shoulder into his abdomen and driving him to the ground. He gasped as the wind was knocked from him, and managed to strike me in the jaw with one powerful fist before I could pin both his arms.
I held him there, my entire face and neck aching, trying to get an elbow around his neck or shoulder and force him to yield, but the bandit proved too evasive. We struggled for several long minutes, until I heard the tramp of horses’ hooves against the hard ground. I looked up to see Aysulu, still mounted and leading the other two horses.
“Let him up,” she said. “His companions are dead.”
I obeyed, and the bandit stood, his eyes wild and glancing rapidly between Aysulu and me.
“I’ll give you a horse,” Aysulu told him. “It’s more than what you would have given us. If we see you again, you’ll meet the same fate as the others.”
He took the offered bridle and pulled himself into the saddle, and he galloped away toward the west, whence he had come.
I stood, brushing dead grass and frozen earth from my clothing, and surveyed the now-quiet scene. The first bandit wore a single large shoulder plate, held in place by a leather strap across the chest. What was more interesting to me was his axe: a sharp crescent blade on a stout shaft, with a spike opposite it. I had owned one somewhat like it, before, though it now lay at the bottom of the frozen ocean.
I took both the armor and the axe. With that weapon in my hands, I felt more myself than I had for more than a year. Having it was a stroke of good fortune, as well, as the spear I had made had finally fallen apart in taking down the rider.
Aysulu offered me the second horse, and again to teach me to ride it, but I stubbornly declined. We sold it when we reached Qoeli for enough food to last the rest of the winter. The city was one of the only permanent settlements on the steppe, and it was larger than my own village, but not by much; perhaps two thousand people lived there year-round, in wooden shelters and tents not unlike those of the nomadic folk. These were clustered around a central stone edifice, a temple to gods as vast as the grasslands and the empty sky above it. Beyond the boundaries of the settlement, fields were tilled in rows, though nothing grew this late in the year.
There, Aysulu learned of a rumor: the Tribe of the Lion and Wolf had last been seen moving south, past the steppe and into the desert that lay beyond. It was the opinion of the hunter who relayed this information that the reavers were ultimately headed toward the citadel of Phyreios in the mountains, to compete in a tournament held every seven years. The prize, he said, was a mighty weapon, in addition to the customary large purse. Warriors and other skilled competitors traveled from the reaches of the world to participate, and this year was no exception, the promised reward drawing people from even farther abroad than usual.
So Aysulu’s road turned ever southward, and mine along with it. The siren call of adventure still sang to me, and more than that, I feared to leave the company of the woman who was then my only friend, and to face the wide world alone.
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