He would sleep on the matter tonight. Tomorrow he and the Circle could begin exploratory work on it.
THIRTEEN
For more than three weeks, Nils, Hans, Baver, and Achikh continued with only two mounts and a packhorse. Thus on the trail, at least two of them were on foot at any given time. Achikh never walked except to rest his horse, which meant that the other three shared one, only one of them riding at a time. And because it too needed rest, every fourth turn the horses were led; then all of them walked. Baver wore a wristwatch, and when he explained it to the others, and volunteered to time the shifts, they accepted. He gave each shift twenty minutes, and was scrupulous about not shorting his own turns at walking.
Nils and Hans trotted when it was their turn to be afoot together, and for the first week after the storm, Baver trotted the shifts when he was afoot with Nils. He was in far the best condition of his life, and pleased at it. But his boots were showing serious wear, and fearful of being barefoot for thousands of kilometers, he ceased to trot, to reduce the stress on them.
Hans had been barefoot the whole trip without ill effects. Nils had begun with the moccasin-like boots the
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Northmen sometimes wore, a well-worn pair, and when they’d come apart, he too had gone barefoot with no ill effects. But Baver was convinced that if he went barefoot, he’d end up crippled.
Achikh occasionally felt some discomfort at riding while his trail companions walked or ran, but he couldn t bring himself to give up his own mount. He was a Buriat, and this meant always to ride. Except in dire need, to walk demeaned him in his own eyes; he was unhappy simply to have no remount, which necessitated walking every fourth shift to rest his horse. On the other hand, the others were not truly horsemen. They were foot-goers who rode when chance provided.
Thus he explained it to himself, and thus Nils explained it in Scandinavian to the resentful Baver.
Meanwhile their lessons in Mongol suffered, for when two ran or walked and the other two rode, instruction was difficult. They worked at it mainly between the evening meal and lying down to sleep, an interval that was sometimes brief Though when Nils rode, it was almost invariably beside Achikh, practicing.
Almost daily, Achikh suggested or even urged that they steal horses, enough for a mount and remount for each of them, partly because of his discomfort at riding while they walked, and partly because their progress was slower now than he liked. Each time, Nils refused: they didn’t need a band of angry herdsmen tracking them, their quivers full of arrows.
Actually, when Nils and Hans were afoot together, they kept up nicely with the trotting horses, which impressed the burly Buriat greatly. But Baver’s walking pace, though typically close to six kilometers per hour, slowed them somewhat. And beyond that, the horses were finally showing signs of wear.
This too worried Baver. In fact he had two main fears. One, he feared that Achikh would get frustrated and leave them, leave them with the one horse that wasn’t his. And two, he feared that all three of the others would abandon him, simply cease to accommodate his own slow
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pace, leaving him to keep up or be left behind. Thus after a week without trotting, he tried it again for a few turns, but the condition of his boots alarmed him too much to keep it up.
The road stayed north of the more arid southern steppes, but it was late summer now, and creeks and waterholes were commonly hours apart. Not infrequently they kept going till dusk or even night brought them to water. Or to a dry camp, where they made do overnight with what remained in their waterbags. On one such day, with the setting sun throwing their shadows far ahead of them, they passed at a distance a camp of some four dozen large round tents, and a greater number of small tents equivalent to sheds. According to Achikh, the people around there were Kazakhs, or some people whose Turkic dialect was like Kazakh. Not much farther on, they came to a creek upstream of the Kazakh camp, and stopped to make camp themselves.