Lords of Grass and Thunder (35 page)

“The vision doesn’t say.” She took his hand in hers, willing him to listen and believe. “Let me tell you a story.”

Bekter could walk away if he chose; she had already resolved to release him if he pulled his hand away. But he waited, patient eyes troubled. His presence gave her hope as she began the tale he already knew.

“When last you visited my tent, I was telling the children the story of Alaghai the Beautiful and the king of the Cloud Country. But some among the storytellers and shamanic orders know that the truth doesn’t end with a wedding and a happily-ever-after.”

“I know,” he said, and bowed his head as if he bore some terrible burden. A wisp of hair had escaped its braid and Toragana reached out with her free hand and brushed it from his forehead with the backs of her fingers.

“When a wound festers, the evil spirits often veil their poisoned breath behind the illusion of ruddy health,” she said. “If we wish true healing to occur, we have to cast out the evil spirits before they kill what they inhabit.”

“I know that, too,” he admitted. “But this tale cuts too close to my bones. I would not revisit it if I could help it.”

She would have spared him if she could, but Eluneke’s visions gave her little choice. “Sometimes the spirits of a sickness reside in the body,” she reminded him. “And sometimes they reside in the soul of a people. To hide from them only gives them a dark place to thrive.”

“Open the wound, then,” he said, and turned his hand in hers, offering the smooth pale underside of his arm as a symbol of the cutting she would do to his soul.

He still attracted her, but now was not the time to kiss the flesh that rose so sweetly from his wrist. Toragana entwined their fingers for her own comfort as much as for his. Then she took up the tale.

“Alaghai had two brothers who saw the king as an invader,” she began softly, “even if his weapons of choice were gifts and flowers. And so they hatched a plot between them. Luring their sister to a tent hidden far outside the city of the khan, they made her their prisoner and set guards around her from among their loyal followers. Then each set fist to the face of his brother and returned to the ger-tent palace with bruises to support the story they told, of an attack by bandits who seized the princess. They didn’t know that Alaghai had stolen away for a night of passion with her lover, the king, or that he had sneaked under the tent cloths to be with her under the khan’s own roof.

“When he heard the story of his sons set upon and his daughter abducted, the khan sent the gathered warriors of the ulus to search for the imaginary bandits. That first King Llesho likewise sent his most trusted aides to find the princess.

“The brothers had hidden their sister well. Weeks passed, and the king found no trace of his bride. But time made no secret of the babe rounding Princess Alaghai’s belly. Her brothers soon discovered what she had done with the king. If allowed to live, the child might one day rise up like the son of Nogai’s Bear to avenge their treachery and take the dais for himself. The brothers resolved to hold the princess in secret until she delivered the child and then kill it before its first cry. Only when they had secured their own positions with the murder of the babe would they lead the king to his death in battle for his bride.

“To kill the king, the two brothers concocted a plot out of magic and sorrow, a wonderfully carved spear they presented as a gift to show their love for the promised husband of their sister. But the spear was cursed.”

“And so for generations the khan’s family has been cursed with the blood debt of that terrible day,” Bekter said. He shuddered, waging an inner struggle against some horrific memory of his own. Toragana had seen the like in men lately returned from the battlefield. The words that followed came as no surprise.

“We just fought a war to pay that debt,” Bekter said, though she little needed the reminder. “I have seen the cursed spear in the hand of that king’s descendant. Our own Prince Tayyichiut nearly paid the curse with his life. But where does the tale lead us? Back to two brothers who commit treachery against all they should hold most dear? And for what? An inheritance I have never desired? I would never hurt the prince! Never!”

Toragana held his hand more tightly when he tried to pull away. “I know you love the prince, Bekter. I know you would do nothing to hurt him. But someone does wish him harm. The prince will die, soon, if we don’t figure out who, and how.”

“Of course,” he said, but his voice had grown wary and his eyes closed her out of his anguished thoughts. He gave up his efforts to untangle his fingers, however. She gave them a reassuring squeeze which he didn’t return, but to which he didn’t object. “But why this story? Why these brothers?”

“You tell me, poet.” She didn’t mention what they had both seen, Qutula with his hand around Eluneke’s throat.

Outside the rain had begun in earnest.

Beneath Eluneke’s feet the grass had flattened, grown slippery with the rain that beat against her shoulders and rattled the baskets where the tenacious toads clung. Growing accustomed to their weight, she gathered speed until she was running again, across the open plain where no trees waited for her at all.
Where is it?
she asked the darkening day.
How do you find the center of the world? Where is the tree that grows there?

From the shadows of the storm lightning flashed, scattering branches of red and purple light from cloud to cloud and turning the vast and empty plain white and colorless as Great Moon Lun. Eluneke stumbled, righted herself amid the croaking protests of her riders. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she muttered under her breath.

She flinched as the thunder rolled over her. Not all of the water running down her face had fallen from the sky. Her own tears felt hot and salty with her terror next to the cold of the rain. No sane person went out on the plains during a storm. Thunderbolts from heaven scattered death at random. The gods used lightning to snatch the unwary right out of the mortal world and left them dead when they were done. She didn’t want to end up like that, lying in a puddle somewhere with the sign of the tree burned into her breasts.

Oh. Of course. The riddle was simple, really.
A tree where no tree grows
. Lightning, its towering trunk reaching from earth to heaven, with great branches holding up a crown of clouds. She would climb the lightning. It was impossible, but being a shaman meant doing the impossible on a regular basis. The hair prickled on her arms and neck, rising in bumps of cold and foreboding, but she ran on.

High above her little tent, thunder rumbled across the sky. Toragana thought of her pupil and the task she must complete. She should be out there with the girl, guiding her as her own teacher had done. But Eluneke had Bolghai, and Bekter, too, had a journey to make. She would have made it easier for him, but knew they needed to drive all the evil spirits into the open before they could be banished.

“I know how the story ends.” Bekter stared at their clasped hands as if he couldn’t quite figure out how they had got that way. Or as if he were looking into a different time and place entirely. Toragana wondered if poets, like shaman, could travel in waking dreams. She held on more tightly, unwilling to let him go there alone. His face gave no sign that he noticed, but some of the tension went out of his shoulders as he picked up the telling for her.

“A servant, fearing for the life of the princess at the hands of her brothers, told the king of the Cloud Country where to find the tent where they had hidden her. With his armies out of the Golden City he came to her rescue just in time to see the two princes strangle his newborn child.

“When he raised the spear in battle, the cursed gift pierced him through with poison, murdering him. The brothers died in the war that followed. Their sister, it is said, wandered in madness for the rest of her life. A new khan was set upon the dais, and that is the line from which our own Mergen Gur-Khan is sprung. Thus, the debt of blood we owed the Cloud Country in the name of the Qubal people. A debt we owe no more, having won the Golden City in battle against the Uulgar, under the banner of the god-king Llesho himself. I know the story. But that is history, a debt we paid in the blood of our own Prince Tayyichiut. What can it have to do with Eluneke’s visions?”

He heaved a very great sigh, and Toragana wanted to fold him into her arms and keep him safe there, but he wouldn’t understand it if she did and—

His head dropped to her shoulder. Perhaps he would understand it after all.

“She cannot mean that I would hurt the prince. I would never—”

This time, it was her turn to say, “I know, I know.

“The old tales teach us hard truths, that sons will have their day and more than warriors suffer when princes go to war. But we are meant to learn from the old stories, not borrow their guilt. Bolghai and I are shaman, like the one who cursed the spear, but we would sooner die fighting such a curse than seal a man’s doom with one. You are a brother, like the brothers in the tale, but you are a good and loyal man who would no more betray your prince than you would betray yourself. Eluneke is a princess, and she loves the prince. But she is more powerful by far than that long-ago Alaghai and is forewarned by her visions. If any hand can stop it, ours can, brought together out of a story, perhaps, but destined to change its ending.”

“You’re right.” Bekter straightened his spine, rubbing his eyes as he moved away from the shamaness. The skin felt stretched over his cheekbones, as if he were waking from a dream. Outside, he heard the thunder roll across the sky. It would be a muddy hunt in the morning. He couldn’t avoid the obvious conclusions anymore.

“If Eluneke is the gur-khan’s daughter, a lot of things make more sense. He wants the girl stopped. It’s not just a romantic ballad; politically it’s a mess. There are khans and emperors and apadishas from Pontus to the capital city of the Shan Empire watching to see what match the gur-khan will make for his nephew.

“Eventually, he will have to make more children or acknowledge some among those he’s scattered in the camps of the ulus to soothe the nervous posturing of the losers in that contest for the heir’s bed.” With a bitter laugh he gestured at his own person. “A fat musician will be hard to shift. A pretty girl a lot easier, but not if she’s a shaman.”

“Not so difficult as that.” She smiled in spite of the seriousness of their conversation. “If the fat musician has eyes as deep as the night sky and a smile soft as a spring day.” She untangled their hands, trailing her nails across the pads of his fingertips. “And a touch that wrings music from a woman’s soul.”

His music was adequate at best, though he’d never tried a tune upon a woman. In Toragana, though, he was beginning to find harmonies he didn’t know existed between men and women. But he still had the problem of Eluneke and the prince, and the tragedy of a tale caught up in a vision.

“Even a khan must sometimes choose between the thing he wishes and the thing he must have,” the shamaness reminded him, reading the questions in his eyes. “If he wishes a daughter to trade for peace, he will lose an heir and that peace as well. That’s the lesson for us in the story.”

“You think Qutula will kill the prince.”

“Unless we stop him,
someone
is going to kill Prince Tayyichiut. But if we turn the stampeding horses at the wagons we don’t have to repair the tents. At the least Qutula has threatened Eluneke, who may be the only chance we have to save the prince.”

That was an easy enough riddle to solve. If they could find the assassin before he struck, they could fight him on their own terms with a much greater hope of success. He couldn’t believe Qutula would plot murder—his brother loved the prince as much as he did—but it gave them a place to start.

He had forgotten something he had planned to tell her. But the rain beat on the tent cloths and the angry bellow of the thunder roared overhead, while inside the little tent he was warm and dry. Toragana looked at him with such heat in her eyes that she could only mean one thing by it. And, he discovered, he rather liked the thought of an older woman under his blankets after all.

“Stay until the storm passes.” She reached for his hand, a gesture that had grown as familiar as his matching one, to twine his fingers with hers. She crossed the step between them, so close now that he could smell the herbs in her hair and the leather of her shaman’s robes, and the warm and musky woman smell.

The raven watched him disapprovingly from atop her shaman’s headdress, but not for long. Releasing his hand she lifted the nest from her head and set it away from the firebox. Her robes followed, carefully hung on a peg. Then she stood in nothing but her shift, a smile lighting her eyes. “It’s cold outside, in the rain,” she said. “Come, warm my bed a while.”

The furs looked inviting, and by the heated glow of the firebox, Toragana’s skin seemed flushed with youthful vitality. Not at all like—oh. The woman who had come to him in his dreams. He’d meant to tell her, but this didn’t seem the time. “I’d like that very much,” he said, and let her untie the strings of his clothes.