This winter the frost stood more terrible than ever before, ringing. There had not been such a one in a long time. At moments it felt as though the elements were squeezing and would not let go, trying to rob you of your very air. A small cluster of steppe-folk from the Moyyr tribe, who had been walking toward the winter camp of the Kartal aul for two days already, had gotten stuck right in front of the Bozbolyk river, beyond which lay the place of their customary wintering. Only some twenty people, several massive horses of the Stenavarr breed, about a dozen two-humped tuyek camels hung with the heavy baggage of the steppe-folk, three dozen fat-bellied hoy sheep and a few domesticated steppe dogs, the dahgalls — the bellowing, the barking and the noise of all that livestock carried through the frosty air as a low, gut-deep rumble, and it seemed that the earth itself was complaining, unable to bear the weight of people and beasts. The steam rising around the steppe-folk froze almost instantly on their eyelashes, turning into hoarfrost that sparkled like silver, and because of that the people tried to squint and blink more often, so that their eyelids would not freeze shut.
The fault lay with the steppe dzhut — a sheet of ice that in a single night seals the steppe grass beneath a crust so strong that no livestock can break through it with a hoof. The dzhut came to the Kartal aul suddenly, in the middle of winter, and three days were enough for the flocks to start dropping one after another. The Eldest decided not to wait: he divided the people and the remaining livestock into several detachments and sent them to the far winter camp by different routes — some straight over the pass, others the long way round, along the bed of the Bozbolyk — if only to get away before the dzhut took what was left. The detachment of twenty Moyyrs took the shortest road, across the mountain ridge, but the old path that cut half the journey away turned out to be destroyed.
Ahead of the Moyyrs, instead of the road leading to the winter camp, there was the dark gap of a precipice. So now they would have to try to reach the winter camp by crossing the Bozbolyk a little below the place where the elements had wrecked the road. The trouble was that the river ran through a black canyon pinched between two rocky banks, and the ice on it was desperately treacherous; young and old among the steppe-folk knew this well: in one place it was thick and reliable as stone, but in another — quite close by — it could be thin and ready to crack at any false step. Above the heads of the Moyyrs, where the cold air of the canyon met the invisible, softer breath of the water beneath the ice, a mist lay spread — milk-white, low, reaching to the knee of a grown man. The old people called it the Breath of Ulgen — as though the upper god himself were breathing it out through a crack between the worlds.
"Stop, we go no further," came a voice from behind, level and without a single note of doubt, which had astonishingly managed to override all the noise with which the Moyyr settlement moved as it wandered toward the winter camp.
Dark-haired and grey-eyed, a little above average height, the Elder named Erasyl, who was now leading this exhausted detachment to the winter camp, angrily clenched the reins of his tuyek and turned toward that voice. Throughout these two days on the road he had never once managed to sleep properly, not even on the comfortable hump of the tuyek: the journey was very hard, and without his word practically nothing was ever decided.
"Ospan-ata, we have no time for your forebodings and old men's grumbling," he said, trying to make his young, still ringing voice sound as firm as he could. "The people in the detachment are freezing. We must get across the water faster, or we may lose more of the livestock."
The old man Erasyl was addressing went on sitting in the snow, not stirring, not reacting in any way to the Elder's words. He was calm, as though it were not bitter frost around him but the spring sun's warmth that was heating his whole body. The blind wanderer and storyteller Ospan Kariy, who had lived in the Kartal aul for three winters now, with his narrow, dried-up body in a thin sheepskin coat eaten by moths, seemed so frail that it was strange even to imagine that he had walked that whole road on foot. Slowly he turned his head toward Erasyl, who stood over him with a gloomy face. Ospan's white sightless eyes seemed to be looking at the Elder and yet past him at the same time — it was as though he were listening to the air and to the winter elements themselves in their fury.
"As usual you want to go straight through, you are too hot-headed and reckless, Erasyl," Ospan smirked, his sightless eyes hiding among the wrinkles of his face, narrowing into dark slits. "Have you forgotten how your father, Darbol, climbed straight across the Syrkalu ridges in the year of the Snow zhombors? Truly they say that human memory is short. Do you really not remember how it all ended, young man?"
Erasyl said nothing. He did not remember his father himself — neither his face, nor the palms that had sometimes tousled the top of his head, nor his voice; he had been far too small then. But he had heard this story from his mother and other kin more than once. So often that it had literally eaten its way into his head.
Still smiling, Ospan slowly rose onto all fours, pulled the mitten off his right hand, and with bare old fingers, their skin darkened by age and the steppe winds, touched the untouched crust of snow in front of him, and then, bending down, pressed his right ear to it — the way healers and folk-wise men lay an ear to the chest of a dying man, checking whether he is still breathing or the body has already released his soul into the waters of the sacred Unutma.
All the Moyyrs standing nearby were silent, and Erasyl too. Even the tuyeks and horses near the old man, as if sensing the importance of the moment, had noticeably fallen quiet.
"I hear the river singing," the old man said at last, but his voice sounded anxious. "Do you hear it? No, you do not hear it. Under the ice there is shuga. Fine porous ice endlessly grinding against thick ice floes; down there is a whole host of icy crumbs. The river is restless and uneven: in one place the ice is firm as stone, and right beside it, at the very next step, thin as a shrivelled autumn leaf."
"Then we will find a safe path and cross the Bozbolyk," Erasyl, still unable to calm down, threw back curtly.
"We will find it, son, of course. But not at all the way you want to."
Ospan rose — unhurriedly, leaning on his asatayak staff, which had lain beside him in the snow all this time — and at last turned his face to the people who had fallen silent. The asatayak in his hand, long — three heads taller than Ospan himself — with bronze pendants shaped like konyr-au bells at its upper end, gave a soft clink as it moved. The konyr-au produced a sound pure and dry, unlike anything else: not the ringing of metal on metal, but as though someone were clicking their tongue somewhere deep in the throat.
"Listen to me, good Moyyrs," Kariy said, and his voice, despite his age, suddenly filled the whole space between the people, though he was not shouting at all. "We will go across the ice that has bound the surface of the river, strung out in a chain. Hold to the common lasso, not letting go of it for a single moment. You will walk to the step of the konyr-au's ringing — I will strike my staff against the ice in front of me, and every step of yours must fall exactly under that ring. Not faster, but not slower either."
He raised a hand above himself with three fingers stretched taut.
"And remember three things, as you remember the names of your children or the words of a prayer to the patron gods. First: a step only under the ring of my staff, no one else's. Second: if someone calls you by name out of the mist, do not answer, whoever it may be, even if the voice is dearer than your mother's. Third: if you hear your own voice calling you from off to the side, close your eyes and do not breathe for three heartbeats. Three. Not two, not four, but exactly three."
In the silence, one of the women sobbed quietly.
"This place is soaked in the breath of Ulgen," the old man said more quietly. "It does not take our bodies. It takes the souls of those who answer the call."
Erasyl looked long and intently at the old man. Then he pulled off his mitten and, sighing so that steam burst out in a cloud, held out his hand to the old man — to help him be the first to climb down the precipice.
"Very well, ata," Erasyl drawled, as if reluctantly. "I, and all of us, will follow the ringing of the bells, but if you should be mistaken…"
"I will not be mistaken, young man, do not fear," Ospan cut him off, narrowing his eyes slyly. "I went blind some thirty years ago, when I was still young and strong, almost like you, and over these passing years my ear has grown used to hearing what the eyes of many sighted people have long since forgotten."