Lords of Grass and Thunder (44 page)

Once he would have confided in Bolghai, but the shaman answered only in riddles and seemed never to take him—or anything—seriously. Bortu was wise and she loved him, but he thought she loved the Qubal more. She didn’t know Eluneke anyway, and had never shown sympathy for putting emotions above political necessity. He couldn’t talk to her, and Mergen was the problem. Eluneke understood him, though, with all his hopes and fears. She wasn’t here, but he could talk to her, and maybe she would hear him in heaven and follow his voice home.

“I won’t let them take you away,” he said, the most important first. “We can run, or we can fight, but I won’t let them part us.”

“I won’t let them part us...”Out of her despair the voice rose from somewhere near Eluneke’s heart. A human voice, in danger somewhere, she remembered through the dim thoughts of her toad mind.

The sky god and his daughters had given her their secrets and then abandoned her to find her own way home. She had searched and searched in human form and then in the shape of her totem animal, until she lost the notion even of what she was looking for. She thought that she had once been human, but what that meant had faded with the rainbows.

“Ribbit,” the king of the toads said from his throne in the basket that once had ridden on her head. She squatted low on her haunches and bobbed in submission to his rule. A fat and juicy fly hummed by and she caught him on her tongue, swallowing him down still beating his fragile wings against her gullet.

“You said we were fated to be together,” the voice continued. “You said I was your destiny, that we met because the spirits had sent you to save my life. I don’t care about that, Eluneke. If you’re lost, Qutula can strangle me or this Tinglut prince can pierce me with his arrow. What difference will it make?”

What difference? The fate of the ulus, that’s all, to say nothing of her own heart, which had begun to swell and burn as the words found the love she had hidden there. She had to get back—out flicked her tongue to catch a mosquito and pop, down her throat it went, still buzzing indignantly.

“You have to come back,” the voice continued, and this time it had a name, Prince Tayyichiut of the Qubal ulus, heir to the khanate. A face drifted across her toad mind, half-flesh, half-bone. “I’ve lost too much already to let you go as well.”

He sounded bitter, and she remembered the grimace of pain that had dragged his lips back off his teeth, the ache of old wounds he carried on a body too young to know such terrors. His parents had died of treachery, and he would follow them if she didn’t save him. The death’s-head vision left no doubt of that and suddenly her breakfast of insects sat uneasy on her toad belly. She had to go home, right now.

That had been her problem before, she realized. To go home, you had to have a home to go to. And she hadn’t, not in Toragana’s little tent among the clans that had fostered her with growing irritation. Her mysterious father’s wealth and power never materialized to provide her with a dowry or themselves with the price for keeping her. Like Prince Tayy she was an orphan, homeless except for the prince, who was home and life and destiny in one.

“This way!” she called to the king of the toads, who gathered his people in turn, all the hundreds who had climbed with Eluneke up the tree of lightning to the gods. And like a tangled vine she crawled back down the lilting sorrow of the prince’s voice.

Chapter Twenty-seven

“
C
AN I COME with you?” Daritai closed his eyes against the importunate twelve-year-old voice at his back. The sounds of the camp preparing to ride faded into the background like the wind tangling the braids below his princely silver cap. He’d left the boy sleeping in his tent, had almost made a clean escape across the field where the horses and riders were gathering for the hunt, because he didn’t want to answer that question.
No,
he wanted to say.
It’s too dangerous.

But Tumbinai, his eldest son, had hunted with the warriors for over a year now. To leave him behind would signal to his own men too many of his secret thoughts. There was more going on in the Qubal camp than Mergen-Khan let on. More, probably, than the gur-khan knew himself. How he might use to his advantage the unrest—the veiled hostilities—he had sensed in the tent city Daritai hadn’t quite figured, but he knew the boy was his own weakness. Mergen might mean the Tinglut clans no harm, but factions in the Qubal court might see in his youthful heir a weapon to use against him as a hostage, or worse. And yet, what better show of peace than his unblooded son at his side in the enemy camp?

He’d feel better about the whole mission if he could figure out why his father had insisted he bring the boy in the first place. Hulegu already held Daritai’s seat on the dais. He didn’t think Tinglut-Khan meant to wipe out his line to ensure the new heir’s position, but he couldn’t entirely dismiss the thought. If that were the case, then perhaps his father didn’t expect him to return at all, let alone with a treaty-bride.

The endless possibilities for betrayal on this mission almost paralyzed him in front of his own son, in the face of the simplest question—“Can I come with you?”—that he should have answered differently a hundred and more li back, in his own tents. He couldn’t answer as his heart wished now, however:
Take half a hundred of my most trusted guardsmen and go home, as fast as horse may carry you, into the arms of your mother and stay there until I come for you, be it through storm and blood and murder.
Whatever the game, he had to play it out to the end.

“Of course, you must attend me and make your courtesies to the foreign khan,” he agreed.

“Thank you, Father! I’ll get my horse . . .”

“Yes, go. Don’t let manners keep you!” He drew his lips back in a wooden smile at the familiar joke that Tumbinai, clever boy, might have seen through on another day. But on this morning, with the clear blue light of Great Sun filling his heart with anticipation, he turned his back on the bleeding anxiety in his father’s eyes, running to ready his mount with innocent joy.

“Stay with him,” he instructed a guard who followed at his elbow. “Make sure that no harm comes to him.”

“With my life, my prince.” The man asked no questions, not even with a furrowing of his brows. He bowed deeply to bind the vow and went after the young princeling.

Time to go. Daritai found his own mount readily enough and greeted his closest guardsmen who had accompanied him to victory and defeat through all the years of his youth and adulthood. Too soon to have saddled the horse after their conversation, Tumbinai joined them, nudging seasoned warriors out of his way to take his place at his father’s side. He was trying, Daritai noted, to retain a serious and regal mien, but in his excitement a grin kept escaping the boy’s control.

Let him survive,
he begged the spirits as they rode to meet the Qubal gur-khan. The appointed place of that meeting, the shrine of the murdered Chimbai-Khan, now lay fractured by storms, an ill omen if ever he’d seen one.
He doesn’t have to be a prince,
he thought,
just let him live to be a man.

Mergen waited until his scouts told him that Prince Daritai’s party had arrived at Chimbai’s shattered shrine before he led out his own hunters. Scouts had also reported sighting Jochi’s returning party in the distance. Their large central tent flew a banner in Chimbai’s colors to show that a member of the royal family resided within. He’d had success in finding the Princess Orda, then, for all the good it would do them now. Daritai didn’t want the girl and he wondered what success Prince Tayy had had in finding their next offering to the Tinglut-Khan for peace between them. If Tinglut had any sense he’d have taken the little girl to raise her in a tent friendly to his interests. But the old ram had other plans for his dotage.

The party he’d sent to bring back the hope of that compromise was approaching with the speed of a summer squall. Let the Tinglut prince wait, he thought, while he gathered his own younger generation about him: his heir and the young warriors who would form their own phalanx in defense of their prince. And the princess, his daughter, summoned from whatever shamanic ritual Bolghai had set her. He knew he ought to be hoping that Eluneke did nothing to dissuade the emissary. He found himself wishing instead that she might confound this Daritai with some shaman’s trick that sent the Tinglut prince home with his jaws agape and his face pale from terror. So much for peace.

But Qutula greeted him at the head of that party, with news he could have done without. “We saw no sign of the princess, though Prince Tayy seemed certain that she would come to him if he waited. He refused our company, however, afraid our presence would frighten the girl away, and said the steep slope of the dell and the Onga River itself provided all the protection he needed against any attack.”

Qutula must have seen the anger gathering in Mergen’s eyes, because he added in his own defense, “I convinced him to keep Mangkut on guard with the horses. And I confess I disobeyed his direct order, though I hoped to win your pardon for my crime. I left another guardsman from among my own cadre hidden within the trees.”

“You have my pardon, and gladly,” Mergen assured his son, letting go a little of the tension that had built between his shoulders when he saw neither prince nor princess returning with the others. He gave the signal to move out and asked, “You haven’t found the girl, then?”

“Not yet.”

In her serpent form, the false Lady Chaiujin slithered through the grass. She didn’t think she needed Sechule’s help persuading Qutula to murder the girl. He’d already shown himself willing. That was before he knew her as his sister, of course, but family feeling hadn’t extended to his cousin, the prince. She didn’t think the girl would stir any greater love. It seemed he used his heart to course blood through his veins but for little else. In this he reminded her of a serpent. She felt the egg taking shape in her belly, and tingled in anticipation of the moment when her child would quicken in his shell. But not yet. Not quite. There were murders to perform, and a lover to cajole.

She thought of his breast and formed the desire to rest there, to sink her inky teeth into his flesh and hold fast to him with his desire matched to hers. In her demon thoughts she made her desire real.

Qutula sidled his horse in between the khan and his age-mates who guarded him. Restlessly his hand went to his breast, returned to his side under his control again. The lady of his mysterious nights burned her impatient message over his heart again and he welcomed the pain as a reminder of the deeds he had promised her. Soon, soon.

Chahar, Bolghai’s son and the warrior who rode closest to the khan in Jochi’s absence, made room for him, but the guardsman’s expression was troubled. He had grown up in a shaman’s tent and had a subtlety that bore careful watching. Killing, if necessary, though a murder so close to the khan would heighten the vigilance of his guards. Letting no part of his thoughts show, Qutula shrugged a shoulder to disavow his next words. “The prince thinks she’ll come to his call if there aren’t a lot of people around to frighten her.”

“Let’s hope so,” Mergen agreed, riding comfortably, it seemed, with his own son at his side. Qutula kept a triumphant smile from his lips with difficulty. Soon, Mergen would be forced to acknowledge him as he had the girl Eluneke. He would ride at the side of the gur-khan as his right. Then a terrible accident, and the gur-khan would follow Chimbai and his heir. He might, with cunning, avoid a war altogether. Qutula would take Mergen’s place at the head of the clans.

Perhaps he would bring the Tinglut under the Qubal sway as Mergen himself had swept up the Uulgar. He would rule the grasslands from the valleys of the Shan Empire to the mountains of the Cloud Country. He said nothing of this, however, as the gur-khan’s hunting party stopped to greet the Tinglut prince—auspiciously for his plans, he thought—across the ashes of the murdered khan.

“ ’I ve lost too much already to let you go as well.” Tayy buried his face in his hands. However lost she became in her initiation rites, he didn’t think Eluneke would forget him, but he was afraid to look and find that it was so.

“Ribit.” A little toad with a high, rusty voice like a badly hung gate plopped on his boot. “Ribit!”

“Eluneke?” Tayy leaned far over so that he stared eye to eye with the toad that perched on his upturned toe.

“Ribit!” she answered, sounding more desperate than she had a moment before. She bobbed her head in a little dance but didn’t turn back into the girl he knew.

Suddenly, plop, plop, plop, toads were tumbling all around him. A great rain of toads spilled out of a sky as clear and blue as the silk of his best court robes. As they fell, the wood filled with the sounds—high and deep, croaking and bellowing—of their voices. With their return the crickets and cicadas came to life, mosquitoes bit, and flies lit on his arms. The little toad on his boot looked hungrily at a fat insect that flew too close, but she refrained from eating it. Tayy was glad of that, since it was hard enough to harbor romantic feelings for a toad. He might have to resort to keeping her fed on such fare if she didn’t find her own true form soon, but for now he’d rather not think about such things.