Lords of Grass and Thunder (24 page)

Urging his horse to a trot, he laughed at his companion’s suggestions for their wagers. “Races!” Altan cried out. He had the fastest horse.

“Music!” Bekter called after him to the noisy objections of his companions. Bekter would doubtless require original songs as part of the competition, which guaranteed him the win.

“Hunting,” Qutula’s voice whispered in his ear, though Tayy had already ridden a distance and could scarcely hear the shouted suggestions of the others. A chill wind raised the hackles on his neck; he wondered what his cousin planned to hunt.

But the sky was clear, the tents had fallen behind with his companions, and out ahead the dogs leaped in the grass that rolled in long waves rising to the south. Outcrops of flinty rock sparkled in the afternoon light, promising mountains that were just a smudge of smoky blue in the distance. Herds of horses ran ahead of him, scattering the sheep grazing on the wildflowers that raised their heads in bunches of blue and pink and yellow and white. Tayy could feel the joy of the day surging in the horse beneath him.

“Go, girl.” He gave her her head and she ran.

It wasn’t until they had tired each other out and he had turned back toward camp that he saw the circle of beaten ground. The fire had reduced Chimbai-Khan’s pyre to ash that had fallen in upon itself. Hooves of animals had driven the dust into the ground until nothing remained to show that a khan had gone to the ancestors but a smudge of gray, slowly losing its battle with the hardy grasses of the plains.

The beginning of a low stone shrine had formed at its center, however. Tayy slowed his horse to a walk and gave her the signal with his knees to turn toward the circle. He brought her to a halt a little distance away and dismounted, leaving her to lunch on the sweet grass. He saw no vipers, nor did any lady snake-demons dressed in green come across the grass to lure him to his death. Others had been there before him, leaving their own small gifts of food and drink and ornaments. A small bunch of wildflowers lay beside a dish of kumiss.

Stones, of course, to mark the place, rose in a small heap growing larger with each offering. Stuck into the crack between two sun-flecked rocks at the top, a ribbon with a prayer on it fluttered in the breeze. Tayy found a smooth, flat stone and placed it on the others, adding to the shrine.

“Bortu sent this pie,” he squatted in the ashes of his father’s pyre and unwrapped the offering, set it next to the kumiss. They would make a good meal together. Then he laid the red silk on the stones at the top of the shrine.

“The cloth is my gift, Father. The seamstresses in the underworld can make you a coat suited to your rank among the dead. Or perhaps you will want to give it as a gift to your first wife, my mother, to keep her spirit in good temper. She always loved the things you gave her.”

He stayed like that a little while, in the posture of a supplicant. The red cloth caught on the sharp edge of a stone and he watched it ripple like a banner in the breeze until invisible fingers—a doubter might have said the wind—plucked it up and carried it aloft. When it disappeared into the sun, he bowed his head. “Father, I miss you. The world has changed since you left it.”

As if in answer, his own black hound howled mournfully. The dogs had circled in, closing around him as they did when they sensed a disturbance. This time it didn’t mean earthly danger. The hair on Tayy’s neck stood up. Spirits, he thought, brushing his sleeve as they passed in the grass. When the red bitch batted his hand with the top of her head, he admitted to himself that he was glad for their company. He sat with his back against the stones, the dogs settling around him.

When he’d spoken about change, he’d meant politics. The Tinglut once again desired to negotiate marriages between their peoples in friendship. The conquered clans of the Uulgar no longer posed a threat to the Qubal or their neighbors far to the south. He didn’t consider himself a hero but hoped he had grown into the man his father would be proud to see as khan.

The black hound stared up at him with such warm understanding in his eyes that Tayy felt the weight on his heart ease. The words that came to him were of more private matters. “Jumal is gone,” he said. Rubbing the dog’s neck seemed to comfort him as much as it did the dog. “Someday, when I am khan, I’ll call him back. But what can an orphan offer him now to match the advancement he’ll earn bringing the Uulgar under Mergen’s sway?”

The black dog raised his head and uttered a high-pitched whine of sympathy, as if he shared Tayy’s pain. “I wish you’d explain it to me,” the prince muttered with his arm buried in the dark and bristly ruff. “He thinks I’m in danger, but Mergen sent him away before we could talk—”

The dog lifted his head so abruptly that Tayy’s arm slipped from his neck. The keenly suspicious squint in the doggy eye, so like the thoughtful glare of Tayy’s own father, made him wonder if the creature understood more than a beast’s mind rightly ought. He knew better, of course, but it helped to pretend even for a little while that his father could hear and respond through the hound. To play the game properly, he first corrected the misperception his words might have given.

“Not Mergen. He is faithful as Great Sun, and has lost none of his subtlety of thought while gaining your own powers of direct action.” He didn’t mention the deaths of the Uulgar chieftains, but the dog seemed to follow his meaning well enough.

“The danger remains unclear and Jumal, if he knew more, didn’t offer his intelligence to my uncle’s general before they set out for the south. So I am left with a warning, but with no clue what it means.”

The dog howled his anxious agreement while the red nuzzled them both like a worried mother. But no spirits spoke to him out of their mouths and Great Sun had risen almost to the zenith. His uncle would worry if he stayed too long at his mourning.

“I’ll figure it out,” he promised himself as he regained his feet. “In the meantime, I trust only the people who have proved their loyalty by their actions.” Mergen, surely, and Lady Bortu. Qutula and Bekter, for his uncle’s sake, though his cousin’s lapse during their wrestling match still troubled him. Altan as well, perhaps, but only Jumal and Yesugei had his complete confidence. He said none of this last aloud and the dog whined his objection.

“It’s the best I can do for now.” Whatever the dog or the spirits wanted, if indeed they did inhabit the hound, they hadn’t made it clear enough for him to act on. They’d just have to settle for what he could manage on his own.

The mare had strayed only a little way. As he gathered up her reins, the matter of Qutula’s woman came back to devil him. Or, not the woman herself, but women in general and his own hopes for a marriage to be arranged by his uncle.

Except that every time he thought of marrying, his mind supplied the face and form of the girl standing in the doorway of a tent far from the centers of power in the palace of the khan. He’d only seen her once, though he’d ridden with an eye to finding her almost every day since. Her family might have gone their own way as so many others had, taking their herds and flocks in search of fresh pasture. But he hoped not.

Just curiosity. Mergen would find him a first wife to bind the clans, and he would learn to love her as his father had loved the Lady Temulun, his mother. Perhaps some day, when he had the age and experience of a khan, he might take a second wife of his own choosing. But even then she must be of a proper family. He couldn’t debase his father’s blood by reaching too far beneath him, and he wouldn’t dishonor the girl by sneaking into her tent at night and pretending not to know her in the day.

“I won’t bring any shame to your name,” he promised his father. No matter what happened, he’d never dishonor the khanate. He thought he knew that much about himself. But he longed for his father’s arm around his shoulder and his gentle chiding as he explained how it must be for a young prince of royal blood.

He tried to let thoughts of the girl slide off his shoulders like rain off an oily woolen cloak, but it didn’t work. In his imagination Qutula writhed in a tangle of limbs with his mystery lady. His blood leaped as he imagined himself in the scene. Setting his cousin aside, he took his place under the seductive heaps of blankets, finding there his own lady of mystery, the girl with the wide dark eyes who had entranced him with no more than a glance.

He couldn’t face his guardsmen like this, so he headed away from the camp, to the place where the grasslands fell away to meet the river at the bottom of the dell.

The Lady Bortu, who had slit a throat or two in her day and knew the ways of a spy, had grown old on the path of politics. She had seen the love her sons bore each other ease the conflicts both necessary and inadvertent that often came between two headstrong men. Then she’d seen one die and the second take his place in honorable stewardship.

Chimbai had made mistakes. His mother thanked the gods and all the spirits that his own errors hadn’t killed him. That had taken treachery from outside the Qubal ulus. But they still had the aftermath of bad decisions to deal with. Mergen would recognize his sons, or not, as his conscience led him. A girl, however, was the responsibility of her grandmother. And one who set herself upon the shaman’s path required more than the usual tasks of matchmaking.

Which presupposed she was the offspring of the khan and that she had the skills to take her to the underworld and back again in the rites of initiation. Many years ago Bortu herself had traveled far on that path. She had danced with the broom and in the shape of her totem had journeyed in dreams. When faced with the tree at the center of the world, however, she had turned back, choosing khan-maker over healer as her fate. She had not sought her totem form again.

How many times had she regretted that decision? When her husband died? Her daughter-in-law? Her son? The children dead in her womb before she ever bore them?

Wind in the grass, the past. Impossible to catch it or change its flight. But she would have some say in the fate of this girl. First, however, to test the truth. Did she have the shaman’s gift? Was she Mergen’s daughter?

Lady Bortu had to know, to have her persuasions ready before Mergen turned his eye on her. So she had outfitted both herself and her horse as drably as she might, and left at home the better part of the decorations that usually hung from the silver horns of her headdress—the fine wires laden with a curtain of beads that dangled from her lobes at court—to pass unnoticed as any old grandmother through the camp.

She asked no questions of the ranks that surrounded the ger-tent palace, who would look to Bolghai for their healing and scorn the gifts of a minor seeress of no rank at all. As she expected, however, many of the lesser folk who made their camps out of sight of the silver palace knew the tent of this shamaness, Toragana. With a weary sigh and a suggestion of the true pain in her joints she had no trouble drawing out the direction.

Leaving her mount behind the little tent, she made her way to the door at the front. Above the door the gleaming eyes of a raven greeted her, sharp and wise even in death. She knocked once, to announce herself, and entered. The tent surprised her. For one thing, it smelled of herbs and fresh things. The shamaness preserved her totem animals more carefully than Bolghai did, it seemed, using sweet herbs and scented smoke as well as other things. For another she maintained a level of tidiness that Bolghai had never imagined. The tent reminded her of her own girlhood studies and a shaman dead in battle before her grandchildren were born. There was no sign of Eluneke, however.

“You’re the shamaness Toragana, then?” Lady Bortu inquired as a new patient might, cranky with her age. It disturbed her that the part came so easily to her.

“Yes, that’s me. Come in.” The shamaness looked up from the scrubbed workbench where she was crushing fragrant spices with a mortar and pestle. “Here, sit down.” The woman gestured to a low stool by the door for the khaness to sit and reached into a small chest, painted with elaborate designs and polished until it gleamed. The corners of her gray eyes lifted in her open, friendly face, ready to sympathize with her patient. She didn’t smile, which would have been improper when addressing one who needed her services, but the lines around her mouth gave her away.

The Lady Bortu declined the stool. Stealing a glance around the little tent, however, she noted that Toragana kept her rugs tidy, her brooms neatly tucked away on strings of sinew hung from pegs on the lattices. The furs of the beds were neatly stacked on the far side of the firebox, well away from the stool that marked the space by the door where the shamaness saw her clients.

“May I give you something for that toe? I have an ointment that often helps in such cases.” The woman held out a small stone pot. “Apply it with a clean soft cloth on rising and before you go to sleep. The pain will come back if you stop using the ointment, but I’ve had no complaints of those who are faithful in its use.”

Bortu turned up her nose, though it took an effort of will. “I didn’t come about feet.” The second joint of her right big toe certainly ached, but she thought she kept the pain reasonably hidden from the interest of strangers. Certainly she wanted to show no weakness in front of one who might prove to be a potential enemy.

“I understand.” The woman’s expression subtly sharpened and she put off her apron with birdlike movements. Hanging the discarded garment on a peg beside a mirror on the wall, she moved to her robes, soft deerskin covered with the feathers of ravens.

“My apprentice isn’t here at the moment. I can’t leave until she returns, but we can have a cup of tea while we wait. Or you can give me directions to the patient and I will follow when I can. If it’s someone I’ve treated before, a name should suffice. We don’t often see strangers here.” The shamaness combined both interest and concern in her request for directions, something Bolghai had never succeeded in suggesting even under the most dire circumstances.

The Lady Bortu stopped her with a raised hand, however, as if she would physically restrain the shamaness with the gesture. For the first time since she had entered the tent, this Toragana looked uncomfortable, which was just the way Bortu wanted her. Now that she had the upper hand, she allowed herself to sit on the little stool. “I didn’t come about a patient. I am here about my granddaughter.”