Lords of Grass and Thunder (74 page)
Read Lords of Grass and Thunder Online
Authors: Curt Benjamin
Tags: #Kings and Rulers, #Princes, #Nomads, #Fantasy Fiction, #Shamans, #General, #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Epic, #Demonology
The golden eagle swooped out of the blinding light of Great Sun, careful not to cast a shadow that would alert her prey. She had sighted the emerald green bamboo snake swimming across a basin of rainwater carved by the frantic beating of a dying man’s boots against the muddy ground. And there, passing on, the demon left the slithering trace of her serpent body in the bloody slime.
Silent and deadly in flight, Lady Bortu snatched out with her sharp-clawed eagle’s feet and grasped the serpent tight under the jaws. The demon writhed and twisted, but her fangs couldn’t reach the eagle’s horny legs. A loop of the sinuous green body coiled and tightened around the golden eagle and they tumbled in the air, plunging toward the battlefield while Lady Bortu struggled to free her wings. She didn’t dare let go her hold on the serpent’s jaws—the Lady Chaiujin’s venomous bite would kill her instantly—but squeezed more tightly in her clawed feet as she flexed her powerful shoulders in abortive flight.
“You’ll die with me,” she spoke to the mind of the serpent as she had spoken once to her granddaughter, showing the demon her own vision of the ground coming up at them. Serpents have weak eyes, but the clear and deadly images Bortu fed her dismayed the creature. She loosened her coils and the eagle lifted, but not soon enough. They tumbled to the ground together.
Lady Bortu righted herself, but the Lady Chaiujin had vanished. Failing to murder her captor and fearing the death of her serpent body, the demon turned into a thick green mist. Bortu had seen the like before, however; she used her wings to beat the vapor into the ground, where it must take on a shape or melt into the mud.
She expected the creature to rise up in her human form, but instead the serpent writhed on the ground, her curved and hungry fangs reaching for the eagle. Bortu struck first.
“Awk!” Rising on powerful wings, she lunged at the serpent. Her powerful beak clamped over the scaly neck and gave a shake.
Snap! The false Lady Chaiujin lay dead between the jaws of the Lady Bortu’s totem form. The golden eagle shook her head a second time just to be certain, then with her clawed feet carefully shredded the carcass. And if Bortu was careful to avoid the poison glands in the creature’s pitted jaws, the meat was quite tasty, really. Quite tasty indeed.
Tayy had forgotten the marksman with his arrow but when he looked up, the man had fled. Which was fortunate, since he didn’t think he could lift a hand in his own defense. He hadn’t heard Mankgut go, and when he looked around, he was surprised to discover that the fighting still went on. A cocoon of silence had descended around him with the lightning. Steel clashed against steel, men cried out to exhort their comrades, or screamed in pain as they died, but none of it reached him.
He thought he ought to be helping to route the serpent-demons, but the silence was such a relief that the tension had fled his weary bones. He found himself sitting in the mud beside his dead cousin and didn’t know how he’d gotten there. Nothing seemed to hurt in the way an injury ought, though, so he sat, surprised that the wind seemed to have gone out of him so completely. He still hadn’t wiped the sweat and the rain from his brow. His arms were covered in demon gore to the elbows, however, and the stuff burned when it touched his skin. It could wait until he had a clean corner of cloth to mop himself with.
It wasn’t as bad as the burn on his hand. When he finally managed to raise it enough to check the damage, he saw the sign of the tree had burned into the palm. The trunk started at his wrist and branched out across his fingers. He wondered, with a remote part of his brain, what it meant, but couldn’t get past the one thought that drove out all others. Rest. He could . . .
“They’re gone.”
He couldn’t hear her, but she touched his shoulder and he read the words on her lips when she repeated them. Eluneke looked filthy and tired and as covered in the ichor of the demon-serpents as he, but blessedly, blessedly unhurt. It took a moment for the meaning of her words to sink in. Then he looked around. The demon-serpents were gone. Even the mortal snakes called to battle in aid of their demon brethren had slithered from the field.
From somewhere on the battleground Toragana had appeared, and Bolghai. Yesugei followed. Each looking as weary and filty as he, but Tayy saw no injuries except, he thought, to the soul.
Bolghai touched his ear. “She’s dead,” he said, grinning. Tayy realized he could hear again and figured out the answer to that riddle easily enough. The false Lady Chaiujin, who had caused them all so much pain. Toragana had tears in her eyes and left them quickly to minister to the dead and the wounded.
He closed his eyes and let Bolghai bring him to his feet and steady him.
“My lord gur-khan,” General Yesugei said.
Gur-khan. Tayy opened his eyes again, but of course Mergen wasn’t there. Slowly, he realized that Yesugei meant him.
Prince Daritai was there as well, eyeing the general warily. “Tayyichiut Gur-Khan,” he said, and bowed as one of slightly lesser status to one of greater rank.
He wasn’t sure what Daritai was doing here, but figured he ought to be grateful for the help. “You may tell your father that the Qubal gift him with the death of the creature who caused the loss of his daughter, the beloved Lady Chaiujin of the Tinglut.” He gave a little bow of his own, as one who has received a service of an ally and has repaid it with one of equal or greater value. “The false Lady Chaiujin is now dead.”
“Was she . . . ?” Prince Daritai lifted his hand in a small gesture at the battlefield, all he could do, it seemed, now that the need to wield a sword had ended.
“We can talk as we ride,” Tayy offered. He didn’t think he could stand any longer. Someone had put his own mare out of her misery, but there were riderless horses enough on the field and Bolghai gathered one up for him and saw him into the saddle.
“She murdered Chimbai-Khan and his first wife as well,” he said as they rode, with Daritai on his left and Eluneke, who had never left him, on his right. “By the serpent-demon’s influence, my uncle the gur-khan died as well. Be grateful you never met her.”
Daritai nodded, partly to acknowledge the answer, but just as much, Tayy thought, because he was stunned by exhaustion. They would have to deal with the whole conquest and invasion thing soon enough, but Tayy had a feeling they’d work that out in time.
“Come back with me,” he said. “Take your rest while our living sort their dead.”
Daritai nodded again, but the intelligence was returning to his eyes. “We have much to discuss,” he said.
“In time.” Tayy nudged the mare under him to a walk and let her go home at her own pace. Daritai followed. “After we’ve cleaned the dead off our hands, we can have a thought for politics.”
With their dead by thousands on the ground they traveled, he couldn’t find it in his heart to think about politics at all. But politics had put the dead there. Politics would end it now or see them falling on one another in another war, if he had not yet learned the lessons Mergen had died for. Yesugei seemed pleased with him so he figured he must be doing all right.
“Huh. There she is.” Daritai grunted. He was looking up into the sun and Tayy shaded his eyes to follow his gaze.
A speck. A bird. The golden eagle landed shakily on the pommel of Daritai’s horse and then slid off into his lap. The Tinglut prince winced, and then the eagle turned into Tayy’s grandmother.
“My Lady Bortu.” Tayy refused to show his surprise. So did she.
“You’re looking well, grandson. Death seems to have been good for you. But I think your lady wife would like it if you didn’t try it again.”
“I live only to please my lady wife,” Tayy agreed. He’d meant it as a joke when he said it, but the words unfolded like a flower in his heart. Eluneke’s smile felt like a kiss.
Chapter Forty-six
W
HEN THEY HAD honored their dead, Tayy ordered the camp moved, and further declared that the Qubal would bend their course in future so that they might never camp by the little dell on the river again. So it was with some sorrow that he made his last visit before he took horse. Eluneke, who would become his wife at their next camp, accompanied him, her face as wistful as his own.
“Prince Daritai is waiting to say good-bye,” she reminded him.
“He can wait a little longer.” The Tinglut prince, accompanied by his own survivors of the recent shaman’s war and a handful of Qubal thousands, carried with him a betrothal contract between his own son Tumbinai and the Princess Orda. Tayy would have preferred to wait until after the election for gur-khan, but Daritai needed the leverage of the proposed marriage to free the groom, held hostage by his grandfather. The princess was determined that no harm come to her beloved Tumbi.
But first, Tayy had his own good-bye to make. “This is where we first spoke to each other,” he said, and took Eluneke’s hand in his. He’d lost his best friend to this river in his first battle and found a new one in the god-king Llesho. Here he’d lost his father and started on the adventures that led him through slavery and near-murder to the Cloud Country. He’d come to know his wife here.
In this little dell, the tent city and all its tribulations seemed far away and he could forget, for a moment, the many dead they’d lost here. He could remember, for a moment, the happy times. But too much sorrow brought bad luck to a place. He was glad to be leaving it behind.
“Ribbit!” King Toad showed himself with his crown of leaves. “So you’re going at last.”
“Yes, we’re going.” Eluneke took up the conversation with her totem.
King Toad bobbed his head, not to show submission, since he would never admit the superiority of a human khan, but to acknowledge the wisdom of this decision. “I can’t say we’ll miss you—humans make it hard for the toads,” he said in the language of the toads. “But you’ve given us plenty of stories to tell. For that we’ll be grateful.”
“I’m glad.” Eluneke bowed to show her respect, but he was gone before she straightened again.
“I guess it’s really time,” she said.
He nodded and took her hand, and together they climbed out of the dell for the last time, back to the ulus where they served as khan and, soon, khaness. Before they left the shelter of the trees, however, Tayy leaned over and kissed her. She kissed him back, and the pine needles were soft and smelled like summer.
The egg had grown thin and stretched as the offspring grew within it. Arms, pink and green, moved. Legs kicked. An egg tooth sharp as a knife cut into the leathery case. Pink fingers with pale green scales along their backs clutched at the shell and pulled as the egg tooth did its work and then dropped off in the splinters of the casing. The ground was soft and warm. The grass tickled his nose. The child looked up into a blue-and-golden sky and gurgled happily. Then he rolled over, dug his toes into the dirt, and crawled away.
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