Lords of Grass and Thunder (9 page)

M
ergen picked at the blood itching under his fingernails. The hunt had gone well. For a few hours he had forgotten all about the decisions waiting for him in the ger-tent palace where he served as an uneasy place keeper for his brother’s son. The khan understood the value of war, had fought it well enough as a strategist and with the force of his own arm. Stretching out over the neck of his horse, following the baying of the dogs in pursuit of a fleet-footed stag or a wild ram, however, he felt his connections to the earth and the sky and the people of the Qubal clans more keenly than he ever had on the battlefield.

The moment reminded him of what he was beneath his coats, at heart and soul. A man of the grasslands. Harnish, the Tashek mystics named them, for the wind that passed over the grass, never resting. The wind. That’s what he was. The wind.

Even an afternoon in summer must end, however. Returning to the tent city with their prey securely tied on the back of a horse, Mergen joined his companions in their jokes and boasting.

“You have cut short that ram’s lazy reign over his harem of ewes,” Mergen praised the skill of his friend Yesugei. “You must insist that the cooks honor the virility of beast and hunter with their best recipes.”

“Perhaps he can help me with my own harem,” Yesugei agreed. None but the khan knew how deeply from the heart the general’s answering joke had come. Yesugei pined to add Sechule to his household. She rebuffed him, setting her aim above him, on the khanate Mergen could not, in conscience, give her. Like all the rest, however, he passed it off as rueful boasting to enflame the scandalous jesting insults of their companions.

“Better the one end than the other,” someone joked from the back, and another, “Better the horns of a ram than the egg of a cuckoo!” This was an old riddle, which could lead to a murderous fight if a man’s sons strayed too far from the look of his own face. But this time they all laughed, knowing it for a harmless joke. If the general had no harem, at least Yesugei’s wife was faithful as Great Moon herself. All his sons and his one daughter took after their father.

With no cause for insult in his own tent, at least, Yesugei shifted the boasting attention onto his khan. “If there is a point to this conversation,” he asserted with mock indignation, “then it is dangling off the head of that fine stag you have yourself caught.”

Their party joined in laughing agreement, slapping the sides of their horses in goodwill.

“A lover for every branch,” they agreed. The many points to the antlers of the stag must surely indicate something about the pointed manliness of the hunter who bagged him, after all. “But a bit hesitant to commit his shot.”

Mergen had, in fact, hesitated to let his arrow go. He shuddered a little at the memory of wonders he had seen in the war. Even a khan had to consider, as he set the arrow, if he aimed at fair game or a neighbor visiting in his totem form. But the joke referred more to his lack of a wife. As his brother the khan had wished of him, he did, indeed, enjoy the welcome of many lovers among the clans without bestowing his tents on any one, or two of them.

Beside him, Yesugei said something. He didn’t catch it all, but recognized the tag line of another ribald riddle with, perhaps, a knife edge glittering in the folds of its meaning—if he wished to hear it so. With the others of his own generation of guardsmen and counselors around him, however, he chose not to see the nettles among the clover and laughed his raucous appreciation of the jest.

The day, he decided, was perfect. Warm, though, and the hunt was warm work. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and without thinking he wiped at it with the back of his hand. An uneasy silence fell suddenly over his companions. He didn’t need to ask what troubled them; he felt the bloody mark smeared across his forehead.

“It’s nothing. Wipe your face.” Yesugei handed him a scarf and reached to take it back when he had wiped the red streak from his brow.

My tether line
, Mergen-Khan thought of his general, who accepted the wonders he had seen without letting them trouble his world. Since Otchigin had died, and then Chimbai-Khan, Mergen had had no friend as sure, no counselor as honest as the chieftain Yesugei. Blood was just blood. Men got it on themselves when hunting. It meant nothing, certainly pointed to no guilt on his part. He’d loved his brother and had no desire for his position.

They all knew that Chimbai-Khan had died of a snake’s venomous bite. Fewer knew the snake for Chimbai’s second wife, the emerald green bamboo snake demon, but no part of the tale laid any blame on Mergen. Still, he would not return the soiled scarf but tucked it into his own clothes rather than deflect the omen onto his general.

“Isn’t that the young Prince Tayyichiut?” One of his guardsmen pointed toward a minor tent as they came onto the wide avenue leading to the ger-tent palace gleaming in the distance.

“The heir has turned to hunting rabbit,” Mergen’s guardsman pointed out in jest.

With his attention drawn to the modest tent decorated in the raven totem, the khan saw where his heir’s hunt had taken him. Prince Tayyichiut had slowed his horse, his eyes fixed on a girl. She had high cheekbones and a mouth a bit too wide, but her solemn dark eyes seemed lit with complex inner life. Long, straight hair fell thick as a horse’s tail from her maiden’s combs. As he passed with his companions around him, the young prince couldn’t take his eyes off her. For her part, she seemed equally fascinated by the sudden appearance of a prince at her door.

“Not rabbit, I think, but larger game,” Yesugei amended. He might have meant the doeskin packet strapped to the packhorse. But Mergen, like his hunting party, understood him to mean the girl, and that perhaps the arrow went both ways. The prince seemed spellbound.

Mergen recognized the look. He’d had the same for Sechule in his time, and Yesugei himself often sported it in her presence now. Unfortunately, he also recognized the girl. But what was she doing here, in a shaman’s tent so close to the grand avenue leading to the palace? Had her fosterers lost their senses? And why, of all the girls in the camp, did Tayy have that look on his face for this one?

“No lady,” a guardsman sniffed with a nudge of his chin at her bare feet. “But she’ll do for practice.”

A vein throbbed at Mergen’s temples as he turned his wrath on the man. He’d spent years hiding the very existence of the girl, but in his temper his hand went to the sword at his side. He would separate the man’s head from his body with one stroke and worry about explanations later.

“Not if he has any sense.” Another of his guardsmen spoke up. Chahar, one of Bolghai’s many sons. Some had followed their father’s path and others had chosen the army. One brother had died with Otchigin, fighting stone monsters in the war for the Cloud Country. But they had all grown up wandering in and out of their father’s bur rowlike tent. Chahar wasn’t looking at Mergen or the sword half drawn from its sheath, but at the broom in the girl’s hand.

“That broom has seen little enough of sweeping, and she’s holding it wrong way up for earthly chores. She’s a shaman, or practicing to be one, with the raven-lady, Toragana, I would guess. If the boy has any sense, he’ll wait at least until she can control her spells before approaching her with any suggestion he may want to make.”

“I’d have thought the young prince had seen enough wonders in his short life,” Yesugei mused. “I’m sure he has no more than a passing curiosity about her, but I’ll put a word in Qutula’s ear if you wish, my khan. Sometimes young men will listen to each other before they will take the advice of their elders.”

Alone of Mergen’s companions, Yesugei knew the identity of the girl and the khan’s plans for her. Mergen wondered, however, if he only pretended to surprise at the shaman business.

“I’ll talk to Qutula.” It was time, Mergen thought, to start demonstrating to the court his faith in his sons. Bekter was a poet and the favorite of all, so his place in the palace was already secured. The khan’s appreciation of Qutula’s more subtle mind must be carefully introduced, however. He wanted to raise no fear among the clans that he planned to establish his own dynasty on Sechule’s blanket-sons.

“And I’ll make my feelings clear to the prince myself. He may find his way under whatever blanket he wishes as long as he makes his connections for the clans.” Mergen had no intention of letting Prince Tayy develop any sort of acquaintance with that particular girl, but he would reveal nothing on that score yet. Soon, though. First, he had to put an end to this shaman nonsense.

The prince led his followers racing the night toward home in a cloud of dust kicked up by their horses’ flying hooves. Mergen slowed his own party to a walk so they didn’t have to make their greetings in front of all the clans. Mergen let his companions think the fading of the light had put him in a pensive mood. His courtiers knew his temper well enough to cease their joking. Content to raise themselves a little higher in their saddles, they urged their horses to a swaggering gait past rows of round white tents. Yesugei, however, watched him with a sharp eye that didn’t escape Mergen’s notice.

He was pretty sure that plain dumb luck had brought the prince and the girl together. But the shaman business had to stop. She’d be no use to him at all with a rattle and a drum in her hand.

Chapter Six

“
E
LUNEKE! COME AWAY FROM the door!” Toragana’s high, sharp voice called from inside the tent.

“Coming!” Eluneke answered. Her teacher expected prompt obedience, but still she lingered on the doorsill, watching the bold young lords as they galloped up the wide avenue.

“What is it, girl?” They had no customers that afternoon, so Toragana had come to the door in her everyday coats with a wide apron covering everything from shoulders to ankles. She set a motherly hand on Eluneke’s shoulder and craned her neck to discover what her protégée found so interesting. “What did you see?”

Eluneke wanted to answer truthfully, but the truths that vied for release on her tongue confused her. “A dead man,” she said, though the same voice said to her heart: “My husband.”

“Did you recognize him?” Toragana asked. “Only the sky knows what uneasy spirits have followed the armies down from the mountains. Does Chimbai-Khan himself wander among his tents? Bolghai did what he could, but I have never been satisfied that the khan’s soul rested easy. He had unfinished business with the lady who murdered him.”

The questions didn’t surprise Eluneke. Shaman, who stood guard at the gate to the underworld, regularly talked with the dead. When Eluneke’s fosterers had apprenticed her to Toragana, she had already begun to receive such visitations. Her answer was more problematic, however.

“I never saw him before.”

Toragana narrowed her eyes and peered down the avenue. “Was it a hunting accident?”

The boy, she meant. Eluneke shook her head. “I think it will be murder.”

“Will be. And murder, no less. Oh, my. I wonder who it could be?” The shaman tugged at her sleeve, drawing Eluneke into the tent they shared as student and teacher.

“I’ve been able to see the spirits of the dead since I was little,” Eluneke objected. She didn’t understand Toragana’s urgency over this boy—she hadn’t even told her the husband part yet.

“I know, I know.” Toragana patted her hand and began to pace. “The spirits pay a great deal less attention to the niceties of past and future than the living do,” she explained, thinking it through for herself at the same time. “Still, it’s very unusual for an apprentice who hasn’t found her totem yet to have such sensitivity to the dead, let alone the not-dead-yet. Let me think.”

She circled the firebox at the center of the little tent as she spoke. Past the little stool by the door for customers and patients she went, between the workbench filled with her herbs and elixirs and the chest where she stored the ingredients for the mixable potions. She paced quickly by the furs for their beds stacked at the far end of the tent, around the firebox to the door on the far side. Her robes swung on their pegs as she swept by them, around another set of chests where she kept the things they used for tea and their stores of flour and honey and sheep fat for special occasions.

Eluneke thought her teacher was going to trip over the thick pillows scattered for sitting on the carpeted floor, but she somehow managed to avoid them—and the brooms hanging from the lattices on strings of sinew—without looking up from her frowning concentration. As her thoughts grew more troubled, however, Toragana circled more quickly. The little mirrors hanging from the spokes of the round ceiling to keep away evil spirits swung wildly in her wake, and Eluneke thought she could see the old carpets growing thinner with each pass.

Just as she thought her teacher would turn into her totem animal and fly away through the smoke hole, Toragana stopped. “Stay here,” she said. “Don’t go anywhere. If anyone comes for a prayer or a talisman, tell them I’ll be back later. Dispense medicines if you feel confident to do so. The others can come back tomorrow.”

While she gave her usual instructions, Toragana flitted about the neat little tent no more slowly than she had a moment before, but with a great deal more purpose. Hanging her apron on a peg, she put on her shaman’s robe of doeskin with many cuts in it, sewn everywhere with the feathers of her totem animal, the raven. She put on her shamanic cap of feathers crowned by a stuffed raven whose keen dead eyes pierced the gloom between the worlds.