The Tiger Queens (2 page)

The
Seer

1171 CE

YEAR OF THE IRON HARE

H
e came in the autumn of my tenth year, when the crisp air entices horses to race and the white cranes fly toward the southern hills.

A single man led a line of horses between the two great mountains that straddled our camp. Startled, I set down my milking pail and wiped my hands on my scratchy felt
deel
—the long caftan worn by men, women, and children alike—as my father joined me, grunting and shielding his eyes from the last rays of golden sunlight. Visitors and merchants often found their way to sit against the western wall of our domed
ger
,
silently filling their bellies with salted sheep fat until our fermented mare’s milk loosened their tongues. I loved to hear their tales of distant steppes and mountain forests, of clans with foreign names and fearsome khans. My father was the leader of our Unigirad clan, but life outside our camp seemed terribly exotic to a girl who had never traveled past the river border of our summer grazing lands.

I finished milking the goats and untied them from the line, watching the shadows grow, eager for the trader’s stories that would carry me to sleep that night.

“Borte Ujin.” My mother, the famed seer Chotan, called from the carved door of our
ger
, her gray hair tied back and a chipped wooden
cooking spoon in her hand. I hated that spoon—my backside had met it more times than I could count on my fingers and toes.

I was a twilight child, planted in my mother’s belly like an errant seed long after her monthly bloods had ceased. After being childless for so long, my parents welcomed even a mere girl-child, someone to help my mother churn butter and corral the herds with my father. And so I grew up their only daughter, indulged by my elderly father while my mother harangued me to sit straighter and pay more attention to the calls of geese and the other messages from all the spirits.

My mother was by far the shortest woman in our village, but the look she gave me now would have scattered a pack of starving wolves. “Pull your head from the clouds, Borte,” she said. “The marmot won’t roast itself.”

I lugged the skin bucket of milk inside, ducking into the heavy scents of animal hides, earth, and burning dung. The thick haze of smoke made my throat and eyes burn. The felt ceiling was stained black from years of soot, and the smoke hole was open to the Eternal Blue Sky, the traditional rope that represented the umbilical cord of the universe dangling from the cloud-filled circle. A dead marmot lay by the fire, the size of a small dog, with prickly fur like tiny porcupine quills. Our meat usually came from one of the Five Snouts—horses, goats, sheep, camels, and cattle—but my father’s eyes sparkled when he could indulge my mother’s taste for wild marmot. The oily meat was a pleasant change.

“There’s a visitor on the path.” I hacked off the marmot’s head with a dull blade and yanked out the purple entrails. My father’s mottled dog pushed at my hip with her muzzle, but I swatted her away, daring to toss her the gizzards only when my mother wasn’t looking.

Mother sighed and rubbed her temples, squinting as if staring through the felt walls at something far away. “I knew about the visitor before he stepped over the horizon,” she said, the beads that dangled from her sleeves chattering with her every movement. Each was a reminder of a successful prophecy breathed to life by her lips, bits of bone and clay gathered from the spine of the Earth Mother to adorn her blue seer’s robes.

I glanced at the fire. Two singed sheep scapulae lay on the hearth, cracked with visions of the future. My mother’s father had been a holy man
amongst our people, but he had passed to the sacred mountains the night I fell from her womb. There were whispers that my grandfather’s untethered powers might have found a new home in my soul, and his Spirit Banner still fluttered in the breeze outside our
ger
, strands of black hair from his favorite stallion tied to his old spear, so that his soul might continue to guide us.

My mother stuffed the marmot’s empty stomach cavity with steaming rocks. “These strangers will bring great fortune and great tragedy.” She spoke as if commenting about the quality of our mares’ dung, then pushed a strand of graying hair back from her face and glanced at my palms, slick with blood. “You’d best not greet your fate with foul hands.”

My skin prickled with dread. My mother was an
udgan
, a rare female shaman, and had cast my bones only once and then forbade me from speaking of the dark omens to anyone, including my father. Lighter prophecies than mine had driven other parents to fill their children’s pockets with stones and drown them. And so I had swallowed the words and promised never to speak of them.

The Eternal Blue Sky was bruised black when I stepped outside, and the scent of roasting horsemeat from a nearby
ger
made my stomach rumble. The water in the horses’ trough clung to the warmth of the day and I scrubbed until the flesh of my hands was raw. As on any other night, voices floated from the other far-flung tents. My cheeks grew warm at the grunts of lovemaking from the newly stitched
ger
of a couple freshly wed, the young man and woman who my mother claimed mounted each other like rabbits. The moans were muffled by a new mother crooning to her fussy infant and an old woman berating her grandsons for tracking mud into her tent.

And my father’s voice.

I started toward him but retreated into the shadows as a wiry stranger stepped into view. About the same age as my father, the man wore two black braids threaded with gray hanging down his back, topped with a wide-ruffed hat of rabbit fur. Five dun-colored horses grazed in the paddock, laden with packs, their dark manes cropped close. I strained to hear the conversation, but my father only complimented the man on the
quality of his animals. The stranger patted the flank of a pretty mare, releasing a puff of dancing dust into the air. Early moonlight gleamed on the curved sword at his hip, an unusual sight amongst my peace-loving clan, but then the light hit his face. I stumbled back, nearly landing on my backside.

His right eye glittered like a black star, but the left socket was empty, a dark slit nestled between folds of wrinkled skin and at the exact center of a long white scar, likely an old battle wound.

“And I thought they called you Dei the Wise.” The man grinned at my father, revealing two lines of crooked brown teeth. “You didn’t think I’d come without something to trade this time, did you, Dei?”

This time
. So my father knew this traveler.

I thought to stay and listen, but the stranger shifted on his feet and his gaze fell on me. I expected a one-eyed scowl, but instead the man’s bushy eyebrows lifted in surprise.

I shrank further into the shadows, pulling the darkness around my shoulders. My mother would have my skin if she knew I’d been eavesdropping. Learning more about this stranger would have to wait until he’d filled his belly with our marmot.

I scuttled back to our
ger
, feeding the fire with dried mare dung until it crackled and my cheeks flushed with heat. My mother bustled about, mumbling to herself as she set out five mismatched wooden cups.

“There’s only one visitor, Mother.”

She ignored me and poured fresh goat milk into two cups, then filled the other three with
airag
. I knew better than to argue what I’d seen with my own eyes.

My mother pulled the rocks from the marmot’s belly as the wooden door opened, ushering in a gust of cool air along with my father and his guest. Behind the man skulked a scrawny boy scarcely my height, dressed in the same ragged squirrel pelts as his father and fingering the necklace at his throat, a menacing wolf tooth hung from a leather thong. His black hair was cropped close to his head and his eyes gleamed the same gray as a wolf’s pelt. My father’s dog gave a happy bark and jumped up, paws on the boy’s shoulders as if embracing a lost friend. The boy’s hand went to the hilt of his
sword, a smaller version of his father’s, and for a moment I thought he might stab the dumb beast. I dragged her away by the scruff of her neck and forced her to sit at my feet, prompting a raised eyebrow from the boy.

I turned my nose up at him and looked to the one-eyed visitor as he bowed to my mother. At least the father had manners.

“Chotan,” he said to my mother, straightening. “I bear warm words from Hoelun, my first wife and mother of my eldest son.”

My mother grasped the wooden cooking spoon so hard I thought it might crack. It took me a moment to recall the story of my mother’s childhood friend Hoelun, married to a handsome Merkid warrior who loved her. The story of her shame and dishonor while en route to her new husband’s homeland was still whispered around hearth fires, that a desperate Borijin hunter had been tracking a rabbit when he came across a splash of fresh urine in the snow, left by a woman. The man ignored the rabbit and hunted the woman instead, stealing her from her husband and claiming her as his wife.

A one-eyed hunter.

This man wearing a sword curved like a smile was no exotic trader, but instead a kidnapper of women.

The fire suddenly burned too hot, yet a cold sweat broke out on the back of my neck. I stepped toward my mother, well away from the men’s side of the tent. “And this must be your daughter,” he said, opening his arms toward me. “Her face is filled with the first light of dawn, yet her eyes are full of fire like the sun.”

It wasn’t my eyes that filled with fire then, but my cheeks.

“Borte’s soul is full of fire,” my mother snapped. “As was Hoelun’s.”

“Still is,” the stranger said with a laugh. “Fiery women make the best wives.” He elbowed the black-haired boy, still standing sullenly at the edge of the
ger
. “They’re certainly the best in bed.”

At least I wasn’t the only one with burning cheeks. The boy looked as if he wished the Earth Mother would open her maw and swallow him.

My father cleared his throat and handed the largest cup of
airag
to his guest. “You must be thirsty after so long a journey, Yesugei. Rest a while and then you can tell us why you’ve come.”

The men stuffed their bellies with so much marmot that my stomach still rumbled when I lay on my pile of furs later, listening to Yesugei’s wild tales. His son hadn’t yet spoken, only sat on the visitors’ west side of the tent as if forgotten by his father and crammed his mouth with marmot as if he might never eat again. His gray eyes darted about, no doubt taking in everything. I burned to know why this one-eyed man dared return to the village of the woman he’d kidnapped, but the heat of the fire pulled me into sleep. The furious whispers of my mother and father entered my dreams, but the rosy fingers of day pushed their way through the cracks of the
ger
when I next opened my eyes.

I wished I hadn’t woken when I heard what the men were discussing.

“Temujin would make Borte a good husband,” Yesugei said.

Temujin. So that was the boy’s name. It meant
to rush headlong
, like a horse racing where it wished, no matter what its rider wanted. He sat cross-legged by the door, sharpening a stick with a wicked-looking knife as his foot twitched. I had a feeling he was ready to bolt at any moment, to saddle a horse and tear across the steppes.

I might beat him to it.

“They’re too young.” My mother’s voice stung like a wasp. I peered through slitted eyes to see my father lay a gentle hand on her arm, the platter of dried horsemeat to break our fasts untouched between them. “I’ll not give the only treasure of my womb to a Tayichigud raider,” she muttered.

I wondered then if she wished she had told my father our secret instead of keeping it hidden all these years. Now it was too late.

“Since the days of the blue-gray wolf and the fallow deer, the beauty of our daughters has sheltered us from battles and wars. Our daughters are our shields.” My father’s words were an oft-repeated maxim amongst our Unigirad clan, yet Yesugei’s people were well-known as the lowest and meanest of the steppe’s families, as sharp clawed and sneaky as battle-scarred weasels. No single man ruled the grasslands, meaning that the belligerent Merkid, wealthy Tatars, fierce Naiman, and even the Christian Kereyids all fought continuous wars for supremacy.

“Borte,” my father said in a stern voice, but I kept my eyes closed. “Stop feigning sleep and come here.”

I sat up and my mother handed me a cup of goat’s milk to wash the bitter taste of sleep from my mouth, but I found it hard to swallow.

“I’d keep my little goat with us as long as possible, forever if I could.” My father twirled a strip of dried meat between gnarled fingers, then sighed. “But as much as I might wish it, it is not my daughter’s fate to grow old by the door of the tent she was born in.”

“My husband,” my mother said. “It is not wise—”

My father didn’t allow her to finish, only raised his hand for silence.

“I don’t wish to be married,” I said, praying the Earth Mother would send up roots from the ground to bind me forever to this
ger
. I had no desire to be saddled to the half-wild son of a barbarian raider. Surely my father would not match me to a boy so far below us, and thereby banish me to the farthest and most barren expanse of the steppes.

“One day I’ll give you my daughter, to keep the peace between our clans,” my father spoke over my head to Yesugei, his hand on my shoulder. I had no doubt that Yesugei might steal what he wanted, as he’d done before with Hoelun, thereby disgracing me forever. I waited for my father to nudge me forward, yet he didn’t move. “But that day is not yet born.”

I stared up at him, only then noticing the tick of blood fast in the vein on his neck. “Instead,” he said, “I invite you to leave Temujin with us for a while, to hunt and herd for me so we can get to know our new son.”

Yesugei gave a bark of laughter and clapped the boy on his back, grinning as if he’d just returned victorious from a raid on a neighboring village. “Do you hear that, boy?” he asked. “I just gained you a wife!”

In that moment I wondered if all girls’ hearts curled up in their chests and their knees threatened to give way upon hearing the news of their betrothals.