Oraq Sayle

Oraq Sayle is the Khagan of the Khaddan horse-clans of the Ember Steppe, chosen at the Gathering of Nine Fires in 308 AS and still, at the time of writing, young enough that the marcher lords of [[Varrow]] call him the boy with the sabre — though not within his hearing. He commands a people who trade horses and salt with the Tidebound League in good years and ride over Varrow's border marches in bad ones, and since the Long Winter there have been more bad years than good. What he wants, by the account of those who have sat in his tent, is larger than raiding: he would make the clans one power that the south must treat with, rather than a season's nuisance to be bought off with grain.

Early life

The archive's account of his early years rests largely on League factors' letters and should be read with that caution. He was born about 286 AS into clan Sayle, a lesser clan of the eastern steppe, the second son of a horse-master. His mother died when he was small; the clans bury their dead in stone barrows without burning, a custom the south finds unsettling, and Sayle is said to have ridden out alone to her barrow on the ninth day, as their rite asks. He learned the ledger-hand of [[Saverra]] from a factor wintering among the clans — a rare accomplishment for a steppe man, and one he has used since to read every contract set before him twice.

Accounts differ on how he came to the gathering as a candidate at all. The version the Sayle tell has him winning the clan's banner in a winter horse-race run over frozen ground. The version the Belgra tell has him buying it with salt owed to another man.

The Gathering of Nine Fires

The old Khagan died in the winter of 308 AS — of fever, the Sayle say; of a knife, the Belgra say; the archive has no record that settles it. At the gathering that followed, the clans chose between Oraq Sayle and Temmet Belgra, an older man with more tents behind him. Sayle took the title on the third night, after the riding and the speaking, and swore his oath by the White Road — the Khaddan name for the pale scar in the sky — that the clans would kneel to no southern power, neither to [[Caldmere]] nor to the charter-houses nor to the Pale Choir.

The election left a wound of its own. Temmet Belgra rode from the gathering without striking his tent, and the blood-price of two cousins killed in the quarrels that followed has never been settled. It is the cost Sayle carries for his title, and the Belgra remind him of it at every moot.

Deeds as Khagan

The Long Winter of 309–311 AS fell hard on the steppe. The marcher lords of Varrow lay the raids of those years at Sayle's command: grain trains taken on the imperial roads, two watchtowers burned, cattle driven off by the thousand. He has not denied it. A Khagan who cannot feed his clans does not keep his fires, and the elders still tell of Maera Tor at Hollowfield — what one Hollowed woman cost a Khaddan army in 236 AS — as a reason to take grain from farms rather than risk it against Varrow's ashcraft. Sayle is reported to answer that Hollowfield was seventy years ago and the Empire that won it is dead.

In the same years he kept the Salt Road to the League open, taxed its caravans honestly by the charter-houses' own grudging admission, and hanged two of his own riders for robbing a Saverran convoy. When a Pale Choir mission came among the clans in 310 AS to sing of the Wound, he let them winter, heard them out, and sent them home with their psalter intact and their horses kept as payment for the pasture. The Choir has not returned.

He is twenty-six and reads a contract like a moneylender and sits a horse like the wind. Do not lend him money. Do not lend him anything you want back.

Reputation

Among the clans he is respected and not yet loved. His flaw is a quick accounting of slights: he forgets nothing done against him, and the Belgra feud festers because he will not pay a price he judges unjust. In Varrow's marches his name is used to quiet children. In the League's counting houses he is considered sharp, dangerous and — so long as the steppe starves — for sale, a judgement the archive records without endorsing; men who have been counted bought before have a way of being mispriced.

Unanswered questions

Khaddan elders hold that the old barrow-graves of the steppe stand empty, and some say the barrows were found opened from within, with tracks in the frost leading west until the wind took them. Accounts differ; no archivist has seen it, and the clans do not speak of it before strangers. What Sayle himself believes, he keeps behind his teeth. The larger question the archive cannot answer is where his ambition points: west against Varrow's failing marches, south against the League's fat towns, or nowhere at all — a young man holding nine quarrelling clans together with an oath and a sabre, and nothing more certain than winter.