Lords of Grass and Thunder

by Curt Benjamin

  Since his election to the khanate, Mergen had ceased to visit her tent. With inducements of many presents, however, her resolve against the general, Yesugei, had softened. She had allowed him to crawl under her blankets. The general lacked skill as a lover, but he did have the ear of the khan.

  She didn’t put her hopes in any romance. Men who craved her blankets had proved inconstant once they had warmed themselves to their satisfaction. Her sons, however, shared the blood of the khan. Bekter seemed content to bask in the reflected glory of the palace, but in Qutula the burning of her own heart for justice found a second home. He would find a way to take his rightful place on the dais and she would be khaness, the mother who ruled a khan. . . .

  Through the night Bolghai played his fiddle, taking turns with Toragana on her drum, one playing while the other rested in the grass. Now the tune mimicked the hopping of a jerboa, now the quick, elusive movements of the stoat, now the sinuous slither of the snake. Eluneke danced to them all. The determined rhythm of a mountain ewe didn’t call her spirit. Not roedeer nor wolf, not rabbit nor any creature that Bolghai or Toragana could imagine between them brought her totem spirit forth. . . .

  By a sharp upthrust of rock Qutula spread his coat and lay in wait for the lady who came to him in the dark. As yet she had given him no name, nor had she let him see her face. This time was no different. Great Moon set, the darkest pit of night descended. In the distance, farther from the camp than he had come himself, he heard the shifting rhythms of music played on the drum and the fiddle. The sound came no closer, however, and he easily put it out of his mind. Slowly his eyes began to droop.

  “Aieee!” A slithering pain in his chest brought him suddenly awake. Qutula clutched at the place where the tattoo burned deep into his flesh, but the angry ache suddenly lifted as if it had not existed at all. Breath came easily to him as it had not since the morning he had awakened to find the mark of the coiled serpent on his body. He blinked, staring up into the darkness that blotted out the stars.

  “Thank you.” He knew she had something to do with the sudden absence of pain, he just didn’t know what.

  “You’re welcome.”

  Though he still couldn’t see her face, he followed the shadow of her movements as they darkened the night sky behind her. The lady of no name slipped her arms out of her coat and spread it to cover him. Then her waistcoat fell. He heard the slide of silk as she stepped out of her caftan, then she was naked between the coats with him, her skin night-cold where it touched him.

  Assertive fingers sought out his buckles and the laces on his clothes. As before she did not permit him to undress, but nuzzled him through the openings she made in his shirts and trousers, rubbing her soft face everywhere on his body, as if his scent were the air she breathed.

  “I’m starting to think you don’t want to know my name,” she whispered, and her words crossed his skin like scales, tormenting him with the pleasure of her soft breath.

  “I do.” He moaned, reaching for her breast with his mouth gaping wide, gasping for the sustenance of her flesh.

  “Then prove it.” She moved over him, taking him in, between her thighs, and pressing him down into the loamy earth with her round, soft hips. His lips found her breast and he latched on, drinking the sweat that bloomed with their exertions. The perfume of her skin made him dizzy.

  “Anything,” he said when she pulled away from his mouth. In the small part of his mind left for thinking such thoughts, he mused that her mountains and valleys had conquered him and not the other way around as the riddle suggested.

  “The prince.” She took his mouth, her lips cool with a liquor that numbed where she licked them and left him light-headed and short of breath. “Not too much.” She freed herself from his kiss. “Not yet. You promised me the life of the prince.”

  “He’s too closely watched.” He didn’t want to tell her that his plan to murder the prince while hunting had fallen to the baser imperative of saving his own life from the maddened bear.

  She stopped moving, tilted her head as if trying to comprehend a riddle in a foreign tongue.

  “You promised.”

  Qutula was finding it difficult to breathe. He thought that perhaps he ought to worry. But her fingers toyed with the braids of his hair and he knew that whatever she wanted of him she could have, if she would just move her hips, or let him—he reached up and took her shoulders, began to roll her over, but she slipped away—“Tsk, tsk”—leaving him bereft.

  “Next time,” she suggested. “Maybe. Bring me a token. A finger bone, perhaps, or a rib of the prince. Then we can take up where we left off—”

  “You can’t!”

  “I have.” She had already left him when her final words came back to him. Something slithered across his belly. He went to throw off the coat that had covered them and realized it was gone, as was the mysterious woman who wanted him to be khan. Whatever serpent had crossed his flesh after she left him had disappeared into the grass. In its path it left the smell of moist earth and poisoned meat.

  Qutula’s heart was beating more steadily, but he struggled for each breath. He couldn’t feel his lips. He knew he ought to be afraid of her. He had thought her a woman of the clans wishing to tie a khan to her skirts, but a witch seemed more likely. The tattoo burned more fiercely on his breast since she left him, a reminder of his promise.

  It didn’t matter. He would do as she asked because it was in his best interest. He would have her then, when he was khan. If she tried to leave him unsatisfied again, he would have his followers hold her down until he had his fill, then he’d kill her. No one would blame him. She was a witch and he would be khan.

  Pulling his clothes together, he made his way back to his mother’s tent, unwilling to listen to the jokes of his followers at his return. Sechule could have been a problem as well—politically, she wanted much the same from him as his night visitor did. But she was herself occupied under the blankets and didn’t notice his return. He crawled into his bed of furs and turned his back on the sounds from the other side of the firebox. Soon enough he fell asleep.

  FALSE dawn came, and the light of Great Sun. And still Eluneke danced, leaving bloody footprints in the grass. Her thoughts wandered from the broom in her hand to the tent of her childhood, which had no father in it. As she danced, she wondered about the man who had fathered her. She remembered only the stealthy movements and rumbling voice of the lover who came to call in the middle of the night and disappeared again before dawn. Her mother had loved her, but after one midnight call from the stranger, Eluneke had been sent away for fostering to a minor clan.

  Fostering was common among the clans. She had expected to go to the family of one of her mother’s brothers. With plenty of time for visiting back and forth, her aunts would have chosen a suitable husband for her. None of that had happened, however.

  Eluneke hadn’t understood why a distant branch of her mother’s family had come to take her far from all she knew, though she thought it must have something to do with the man in the night. She had cried to be torn from her mother. Once she’d settled into her relatives’ tent, she’d had few visits home. Her foster family had been kind to her, but she had learned from the experience to hold herself a little aloof. She had promised herself never to give her heart so fully again.

  When she heard that her mother had died of a wound in her breast that would not heal, Eluneke made the proper offerings and sacrifices. But she felt that all her ties to the mortal world had been cut. Toragana had come for her shortly after and she left her foster family behind with little regret. She had determined to maintain the same distance with Toragana. Now she wondered. By withholding her heart, even from her broom, did she stand in the way of finding her totem spirit?

  She didn’t think the question that rose out of her inner self made any difference in what happened next. But she gripped her broom a little more warmly when, in desperation, Toragana began to beat out a hopping jig on her drum. Eluneke hopped, and hopp
ed again. And suddenly the grass was taller than she was.

  “Bolghai! What leaps higher than it is tall, yet cannot see over the grass!” Toragana called to her old teacher.

  “She’s halfway there,” Bolghai laughed. He dropped to his belly with his chin to the ground so that he was eye to eye with the toad hopping madly where Eluneke had stood. “Now all she has to do is cross the river.”

  With that, he turned into a stoat and ran away.

  Toragana clicked appreciatively and patted Eluneke’s little toad head. Then she turned into a raven and flew over the Onga.

  This, Eluneke figured, was the hard part. The thought amazed her because just moments ago she would have said that finding her totem spirit was the hardest thing she’d ever tried to do. She had rather hoped to be something more stately, like Toragana’s raven. Birds knew how to fly already; that must surely give her a head start on crossing the river. She knew her shaman teachers meant more than that, however. She took a hop, another hop, and found herself leaping high over Bolghai’s little camp. When she came down again, she was on the other side of the Onga, with no idea how to turn back into a girl.

  “ Eluneke! Eluneke!” Bolghai shook the water off his sleek fur and turned back into a man, the stoat pelts flying around the neck of his shaman’s clothes. Then he realized she wouldn’t have understood when he called to her in the language of the stoat, so he tried again. “Eluneke! Let me help you! Show me where you are!”

  A hesitant croak brought him to a rock by the side of the water, where a small tree toad sat looking back at him with wide, sad eyes.

  “I know,” he said as Toragana came to rest on a nearby branch. She didn’t return to her human shape right away; the piercing fixed gaze she set on her pupil made him nervous for a moment. Then she shook out her feathers and landed neatly on her feet.

  “There we are,” she said, settling the folds of her many-feathered dress around her. “Eluneke, you must come back to us. You were looking very snackish even to me, and I knew who you were. Try to remember there are real hawks and ravens about. Snakes, too—”

  “Yes, child. It’s time to come back to us.”

  The toad blinked solemnly at him.

  “Come on, girl!” Toragana remained a woman standing on her two long legs with her fists resting on her hips, but her head shifted, became a raven’s head with a raven’s beak. “Snack!” she clacked, and snapped a hair’s breadth from gobbling Eluneke right up.

  “Think of something close to you,” Bolghai added, more helpfully, he thought. It surprised him when her broom took shape beside her—she’d given every indication of hating her partner.

  Unfortunately, the rock she had chosen to sit on as a toad was far smaller than her returning human form. She tumbled into the brush and crumbling leaves, dazed for a moment, then hastily brought herself back to order, her first words for her costume.

  “How will I catch enough toads to make my ceremonial clothes!” she wailed. “It will take me the rest of my life just to get started!”

  “Exactly as it should be,” Bolghai grinned and patted her on the back. “Do you think that Toragana or I came to our present level of magnificence overnight? Not at all! Time and travels have brought feathers to one, the skins of stoats to another. To a third, time will bring the hides of toads. But all of that can wait. Breakfast is calling and you have yet to make your first dream journey.”

  Great Sun rose, lighting the slender trees that huddled close to the riverbank. Its golden glow drifted like a cloak over Eluneke, who gazed wistfully at the sparkling ripples the current stirred in the water. They made a pretty picture, girl and river, but it wasn’t getting him any closer to his breakfast. Bolghai waggled his eyebrows encouragingly.

  “Breakfast!” he reminded her.

  Eluneke sighed. Toragana took up her drum and Bolghai set his fiddle to his chin. Picking up the rhythm of the jig, the girl hopped, hopped, in a fast tight circle. Suddenly, she disappeared.

  “I think we’ve done it,” Bolghai complimented his fellow shaman. It seemed unlikely that she would return here to the woods when his little ger-tent, or Toragana’s tidier one, must call to her out of the dream lands. With that thought in mind, he turned into a stoat and dove into the river, heading home. He could track her through the dreamscape just as easily after a cup of tea.

  Chapter Nine

  “ MYHUSBAND,” Eluneke thought to herself as she Mentered the world of dreams. “Find my husband.” She worried that he had already met his fate and hoped his dreams would give her some clue about who he was or how she was supposed to save him. But . . .

  “This can’t be him!” Eluneke moaned to herself as she dropped sickeningly into a trough of seawater. Her soon to be dead—but not yet wed—husband rode among Qubal warriors as one of them. He wore a Qubal face over his death’s-head skull and dressed in the clothes of a highborn Qubal lord or clan chieftain. No Harnishman—Qubal, Tinglut, or Uulgar madman—would ever go to sea. He would rather fight tigers or demons than cross the Onga River. Even a hero might quake in his boots if he met up with too great a puddle after a rainstorm.

  It wasn’t that the Harn feared water, exactly. They drank it, after all. But man, woman and child, they preferred it in quantities no greater than a teacupful. The stuff of the universe was at its weakest in bodies of water, even small ones. A man could fall forever into the river, never touching land until his feet brought him to the underworld. In rainstorms lightning might snatch a man’s spirit for the sky heaven, leaving his dead body behind with the sign of the tree at the center of the world burned into his chest.

  This man whose dream she had invaded feared the water as much as Eluneke did, but it was hard to tell if he had the Qubal belief about standing water or if he feared a simpler death from the storm tossing his little ship like a leaf on the angry foam. Her watery husband wanted to vomit, but his stomach was empty. That could have been either of them, too. Bolghai hadn’t allowed her to stop for dinner and now she was missing breakfast as well. But his hunger felt more urgent. She had an image in her head—his head—of hard biscuit and beans, knew she couldn’t eat it even as her stomach growled in anticipation. Overhead, birds flew before the storm while in the rocking ship her muscles strained to the breaking while a voice called, “Pull!”

  Her bottom felt bruised and she discovered why—with a huge pull on a great tree trunk of an oar, she fell backward onto a wooden bench hard as a paddle with a thin layer of padding on it. “Step, step, pull!” the voice called again, and she moved dizzily to the command once, twice, three times before she broke free. When she became aware of her surroundings again, she lay on the ground by Toragana’s feet, exhausted and wet through.

  “It seems she’s been somewhere.” Bolghai spilled a little of his tea on Eluneke as he bent to study her on the ground. She didn’t mind; the tea was warmer than the seawater that had lately crashed over her. “Where have you been, girl? And how did you get all wet?”

  “I’ve been on a ship, in a storm,” Eluneke answered. She tried to stand up but found she was still too weak from her buffeting at sea. “I didn’t see his face, but bitter despair wrapped clinging fingers around his heart. I might have died of it if I hadn’t escaped when I did.”

  “And is he now dead of this despair, as you describe it?” Bolghai asked, though it seemed to Eluneke that he had already guessed the answer.

  She was not so certain. “No. Nooo. Maybe. I tried to find the boy who wore a death’s-head beneath his flesh, but I must have lost my way. Who ever heard of a Qubal warrior rowing a ship?”

  “Who, indeed!” Bolghai exclaimed, with interest quick as flame in his eyes. “Do you know when in time you traveled—to the past of your young warrior? Or to his future?”

  “Past, I think.” Eluneke considered the feelings she had experienced in her travels and had to give up with a shrug. “But whether he dreamed a memory or a prophecy I couldn’t tell.” She would have made excuses, that she had never traveled int
o someone else’s dreams. She had nothing by which to measure the experience.

  But Bolghai’s thoughts were clearly elsewhere. “I see,” he said, and snapped his teeth shut, refusing to say anything but: “Come in and have some tea. My son Chahar has come to visit while you were traveling. The khan has declared a series of games today, to celebrate his recent success in battle and the taking of a bear by his heir in the forest. You won’t want to miss it.”

  Toragana raised her brows, a familiar gesture that marked her surprise that the old shaman had released her pupil for a morning of pleasure at such a critical point in her training. Bolghai didn’t seem to notice, however, and more than that she kept to herself.

  “Tea,” Eluneke agreed. She would have hopped like a toad down the whole length of the Onga for a cup. As it was, she needed only to follow Bolghai and her teacher into the little round tent.

  Though loud enough to rouse the spirits of the dead, Bekter’s familiar snoring hadn’t awakened Qutula; the angry whispers coming from his mother’s bed had. Sechule was tossing her lover out by the false dawn of Little Sun again, before the camp had fully cast off sleep around them. Her lover objected, but gathered his things while he made his protests, which mostly had to do with marriage and her own tent in his clans.

  That’s never going to win her, General Yesugei, Qutula mused cynically to himself. She’s already got a tent of her own. She doesn’t have to answer to any first wife to keep it, even if she wanted to forget her schemes to claim a place on the dais of the khan, which she never will. He opened his eyes a crack, enough to see that his mother hadn’t given her lover time to put on his clothes.

  “I don’t want Qutula or Bekter to see you here,” she whispered, and shoved him naked out the door.

  “Too late.”

  When the door closed behind the general, Qutula sat up, scattering the furs that covered his bed. He still wore his clothes of the night before and his nose filled with the musty scent of his lady’s strange perfume. The urge to reach out and touch her, even in her absence, was so overpowering that he closed his eyes for a moment, cooling the heat that the memory brought to his blood.