Lords of Grass and Thunder

by Curt Benjamin

  It was a selective truth, but she accepted it with a little nod, as if his sudden appearance had posed a riddle and the answer was starting to make sense. “And the prince,” she added, as if he didn’t know, which confused him even more. “I saw you wrestle for the khan.”

  “That, too. Prince Tayyichiut, at your service.” He bowed, low enough to make a joke of it, but wondered. If she knew who he was, why did she ask? She was looking past his face again, like she had the first time he’d seen her, and he figured she must have understood from his answer more than: “I’m the khan’s nephew.”

  The toad thing urged him to caution, however. He decided that he wouldn’t love her, no matter the fantasies that had plagued him. At least, not yet. “What else should I be that you didn’t know, then?” He dug the toe of his boot into the dirt, unwilling to meet her dark and knowing eyes. But that had been the god-king’s habit and he stopped himself, refusing to follow too closely in the footsteps of his friend.

  “I don’t know yet, but I’ll figure it out.” She sounded determined to unravel all his secrets, but had turned her studious gaze away from him, to the river. Tayy was grateful. He felt a little less exposed that way.

  “I think there was a battle here.” Her head moved as if she tracked the fighting even now.

  “I was there,” he agreed. She would know that, of course, having recognized him for the prince, but she nodded gravely anyway, as if his words confirmed something she had only guessed.

  “The wild creatures still haven’t settled. That’s why I’m having so much trouble catching toads.”

  He knew nothing of toads or their habits, but figured he hadn’t yet settled himself. “I lost a good friend on this spot,” he offered, an exchange of intelligence. “The Uulgar forces drove our troops into the river, and he drowned.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you. But why are you trying to catch toads anyway?” He flung himself onto the carpet of soft earth and rotting leaves, prepared to listen to her story. His black dog settled beside him and Tayy flung a careless arm around the beast’s neck, a gesture grown familiar since he’d come home.

  The girl tapped her foot, but in spite of herself, he thought, a little smile sneaked onto the corners of her mouth. “If I told you, you would laugh at me, or recount your ills for me to diagnose, so perhaps I will not tell you after all.”

  “I could never laugh at you! I swear it!” It took all the discipline of a warrior not to wrap his arms around her where she stood, so he figured that was as safe a promise as he’d ever made. He was far too diplomatic to mention that if he was still talking to her, in spite of the difference in their rank, then he wasn’t likely to be chased away by any other secrets she might be harboring.

  “Are you daring me to reveal all my mysteries?” She was smiling openly now. In fact, he thought she might be laughing at him rather than the other way around, but that was all right as long as he got to look at her eyes and imagine his hands on her hair and her lips—Don’t think about her lips, he warned himself. Don’t fall in love; she’s dangerous. Duty demanded that he make his matches for peace and politics, outside the clans. But it was too late, and his face flamed red at the thought of touching his mouth to hers.

  “They’re not that kind of secrets!”

  What did she think of him? Whatever, she was wrong. “I didn’t imagine they were!”

  “Oh.” Mollified, she sat beside him. The red bitch whined and put her head in the girl’s lap. She didn’t look at him, studying the curled toes on her boots instead, while her fingers absently stroked the soft red fur.

  The death’s-head hadn’t obscured his face this time. When Eluneke turned to look at him, she saw that the prince was very handsome, with thick braids tightly bound and high cheekbones sharp enough to cut thread on. His clear deep eyes saw more than they said and probably were saying more than he meant to reveal about himself on such a short acquaintance. He hadn’t touched her in the way of a boy who wanted a tumble in the grass, but she could tell he was interested enough.

  That might change when he knew what she was, of course; it often did. But the spirits of the dead had given him to her, so she had no worry that they would eventually choose one another. Keeping him alive to enjoy his marriage bed, now that would be the challenge.

  “I’m Eluneke, apprentice to Toragana the shamaness and lately a student of Bolghai as well, it seems.”

  He took her explanation a lot more casually than she expected. “You don’t smell like Bolghai. Which is a good thing, by the way.”

  He startled a laugh out of her with that. “Neither does Toragana,” she assured him. “I wonder sometimes if it is because he is a man, or because he is a stoat in his spirit form, or just because he is Bolghai.”

  “Until now, I hadn’t thought about other shaman at all,” he admitted. “I suppose I assumed they were all like Bolghai.”

  “Nope. We’re all different.”

  Bolghai was shaman to the khan’s court. Eluneke hadn’t met him herself until her vision about this very soldier-prince had compelled Toragana to seek assistance in her training. She had never been very interested in clothes or ornaments, but now that she thought about it, she felt herself lacking in all of the graces a matchmaker looked for in a royal wife. She owned neither elegant silks nor embroidery, for one thing, nor had she beads for her hair. She perched ungainly as her totem animal in the mud of the riverbank with, she feared, a smudge on her cheek like a truant child.

  Worst of all for a royal bride, Eluneke knew, she had no name, no powerful clan to bring to a prince in marriage. She had a father somewhere in the clans, but her mother had never revealed his family. Now her mother was dead. She thought her relatives must know, but they had refused to say anything about him. From their glares and muttered curses she had guessed that he must be of high rank, and that their expectations of gifts and rewards for her care had been disappointed. She could look for no help there to make her an acceptable match. Her calling set her apart from any position she might have claimed through her father anyway.

  If the prince had been the simple soldier he had claimed at first, their union might have met with approval from both their families. Approval from hers, at least. His might not have liked the idea of a shaman added to even a humble bloodline, but there would have been nothing to stop a marriage between them. Well, except for the little matter of his death, of course. But if he had a dangerous fate in store, he could ask for no better wife than a shaman, who could negotiate with the ancestors for his spirit.

  A prince of the royal blood, however, was so far above her reach that it didn’t bear thinking of. He must look at girls like her for entertainment until his uncle the khan made the matches that would bind clan to clan, ulus to ulus—something she could never do. If not for the visions she would have fled, refusing to allow this confusion he stirred in her to continue.

  But he was hers, a gift of the spirits no matter that their ranks might say otherwise. Convincing him of that, however, required skills of persuasion well beyond her talents. Even the most general of conversation failed her; it seemed easier suddenly to study the upturned toes of her shoes than to make small talk. Silence fell between them comfortable as an old coat and painful as a knife to the heart. Even the dogs had fallen quiet, content with the slow stroking of their fur. Finally, when she thought she might scream just to remind herself that she was really there, with him, the prince spoke.

  “You’re a healer, though, right? You aren’t interested in poisons or spells or anything like that, are you?”

  The idea of it offended her. But he knew only one other shaman from whom he might have drawn such a conclusion.

  “No. Never. Of course not,” she insisted, while a cold weight settled in her stomach. She’d thought Bolghai a bit strange but a good man who honored the spirits of his calling. Toragana wouldn’t have taken her to see him if she knew he practiced the darker side of a shaman’s trade. Would she? Would the khan they all fo
llowed require assassinations from his shaman? The very thought made her ill. So did her second thought, a reminder that a shaman with a knowledge of poisons might be the very one she needed to keep her prince alive.

  “One must, of course, learn a bit about such things in order to treat them in a client. I hope to acquire that knowledge along with other healing arts from my teachers.”

  “That’s good,” he said, which relieved her mind a little. If Bolghai did commit murders for the khan, her future husband seemed not to approve. They had that much common ground. His next words, however, chilled her like the winter wind off the mountains:

  “My stepmother was a poisoner. At first we thought my mother had died of a sudden illness. By the time our suspicions had turned to the Lady Chaiujin, she had murdered my father as well. She kept a toad in a cage in her tent. I think she used the poisons from its skin in her potions. Perhaps, if we had known in time, we could have saved my mother.”

  “But not your father?” If Bolghai knew the antidote for ingesting the poison from a toad, perhaps he could teach her enough to save the prince. But she wondered what had happened to his father that even the royal shaman could not help him.

  Prince Tayyichiut shook his head, his eyes focused on that distant memory. “Even Bolghai has no cure for the venom of a bamboo snake-demon.”

  “Demons are difficult in the best of circumstances,” she mused while her heart sank.

  “Worse than you can imagine,” he agreed, almost in a whisper.

  The prince had already faced demons and knew their terrors. He could teach her a lot as well. “If the demon chooses to kill with the fangs of a viper, the victim’s body is ruined almost immediately. No honorable shaman would attempt to hold the unlucky spirit in such putrid flesh.”

  Eluneke’s thoughts were torn between the technical problems of the case and her own terror that a fate like his father’s might await the prince. How would she keep him safe from such a creature? She almost missed the shiver he gave at her cool analysis, but the red bitch leaned into her side and whined a high-pitched note of distress. Looking about her for the cause of the animal’s discomfort, she saw the prince, his hand buried up to the clenched white knuckles in the black dog’s fur. His features, set in lines of bleak desperation, took her breath away.

  “I beg your pardon, my lord. Toragana has cautioned me about speaking my unguarded thoughts in public. I’m not so unfeeling as I seem: it’s the way shaman are trained to think, that’s all. We hold our own terrors at bay with the knowledge of our calling.”

  “I know about terrors,” he agreed, making it sound casual, though his eyes reflected a spirit struggling against crushing memories. For politeness, he tried to shake them off. “So, I can understand if you were afraid I’d burden you with my sad tale of painful old war wounds, but why did you think I would laugh at you? You never did tell me why you were chasing that tree toad.”

  “Are you in pain?” He’d tried to pass off the suggestion as an exaggeration, but Eluneke caught a quaver in his voice when he mentioned old wounds. Instantly her professional concerns set aside more personal considerations. He was a patient in pain, and she could help him. All he had to do was, “Describe it for me.”

  “It’s nothing. I meant only to ask what kind of shaman you were, not to do the very thing you accused me of.”

  His head reared back like a horse with a twitch in its nose. She thought the pain must be very bad, then. Or the memory of how he received the wound must still prey on his mind. But he didn’t want to share it with her now and he wouldn’t be diverted from his questions by his own concerns. “I could use a good tale to take my mind off myself. Perhaps you’d better tell me the worst and get it over with.”

  It seemed that the spirits were determined to humiliate her. As her future husband, however, he would have to find out sometime. Now was as good as any. Eluneke huffed a sigh and relented. “To become a shaman you first have to find your totem animal.”

  “I know about that,” the young man said. “I have a friend who used to turn into a roebuck and fly away whenever the mood took him.” Picking up a pebble from the littered ground he tossed it into the river and watched the rings it made as they moved outward toward the shore. He seemed in that moment to have forgotten her.

  “What happened to him?”

  “Nothing bad for a change.” The prince shrugged. It amazed her that so expressive a gesture could leave her wondering what he meant by it. “He missed his wife, so he went home to her. Master Den says he’ll come back, but he needs to rest a while.”

  “And you miss him,” she said of his friend.

  Though he didn’t look at her, his eyes sharpened as if he hadn’t thought of that most obvious of facts before. “Yes, I guess I do.”

  Complicated things passed behind his eyes. Not an easy relationship, then, but important to him. She didn’t know who Master Den was, but the prince seemed torn between belief and caution. So he worried that all was not as he had been told.

  “But this was supposed to be about you, not about me.” He did look at her then, and smiled.

  Eluneke’s heart turned over in her breast. “What?” she asked, too caught up in his eyes to remember the question.

  “You were explaining how Bolghai helped you find your totem animal, I think.”

  “Um, yes. Well, um, I had to dance with this awful broom—” She wondered for a moment about the story Bolghai had told, of a young man who discovered his totem and became a god. It seemed far-fetched, however, and she tried to put the idea out of her head, while wondering if a prince so elegantly dressed as the one in front of her could be in any way inferior to a god.

  “Anyway, the broom. I danced and danced, and when I thought I couldn’t stand the pain of the blisters another moment, I turned into a tree toad. Now I have to catch enough tree toads to decorate my shaman’s robes before I can take the last steps on the road to becoming a shaman.”

  “Your dream travels.”

  He struggled to keep a smile from his face, but Eluneke could see his imagination at work as he looked her over. “You don’t look like a tree toad.”

  “I thought it unlikely myself, but there you are. A tree toad. For my next lesson in dream travel I must have at least the beginning of a shaman’s costume, which requires that I catch some toads.” The stages of a shaman’s dream travel remained a secret of the calling, so she didn’t explain where she must travel next in her dreams. Prince Tayyichiut—she’d known the name as well as her own, of course, though she’d been surprised to discover that the face of her own hero went with it—seemed to enjoy her tale of woe, however, reaching out to her for strength of spirit. She felt a warm glow of satisfaction at performing a healing service for him, even if only with her sorry history.

  “I see the problem,” the prince agreed. “But perhaps I can help.”

  “How?” She didn’t trust that grin one bit, but it tangled her in delicious tendrils of feeling and she shivered in spite of the flush that burned her cheeks. Toragana would know for sure, but she didn’t think this particular effect he had on her had any basis in her shamanic training.

  “You must, in your toad form, be as beautiful to the toads as in your present form you are to . . . humans,” he began.

  Eluneke accepted the compliment with a gracious bow. She caught the hesitation, however, and wondered what he started to say before he changed his mind. She didn’t think it far-fetched that he might return her interest. At least, until he saw her as her totem animal. But she didn’t see how it helped her catch toads for her robes, and she told him so.

  “This helps me how?”

  “It’s simple. Sit here beside me as you do now, but in your totem form. When they see how beautiful you are, the lovesick toads will come a wooing. While you pretend to have a hard time making up your mind which of them you will choose for your mate, I’ll drop the net over you all. Then I’ll pluck you out and you can return to your human shape again.”

  �
�I think I’ll stay on the outside of the net, if you don’t mind. Besides,” she added ruefully, “I don’t think I can kill them even if I do catch them.”

  He’d managed to keep the smile down to an occasional smirk until then, but now he laughed out loud, wrapping both arms around his belly as if it hurt him and fell laughing onto his back in the leaves. Eluneke bristled, ready to take him to task for offending her with his ridicule. But it didn’t sound like he was making fun of her. She wasn’t sure why he was laughing, except that he seemed happy to have discovered her weakness when it came to killing toads.

  “There must be another way,” he suggested when he had calmed himself and wiped the tears of laughter from his eyes. “Bolghai will know.”

  “Bolghai has a burrow full of stoat pelts. I doubt his sympathy in the matter.”

  When they began to talk about the toads, Eluneke noticed a rustling in the leaves above their heads. Sunlight flashed off the secretive eye of a tree toad as big as her own head. He sat well under cover of the branches of a willow. The leaves, where they fell about his head, gave the illusion of a crown and she half expected him to climb down and address the prince as one ruler to another. The king of toads seemed to read the fanciful thoughts in her eyes, but withheld his counsel, withdrawing more deeply under his cover of leaves and limbs. When the prince turned to see what she was looking at so intently, there was not even a twitch of a leaf to give old King Toad away.

  But something about the day or the moment had carried their minds along on the same breeze. “If you don’t want to kill the toads you need for your costume, and you can’t catch them anyway, perhaps you can make a treaty with them.”

  “A treaty?” Eluneke glanced up and indeed, the king of the toads had crept out on his branch again, listening keenly, she thought.

  The prince must have known something was going on behind his back, but this time he refrained from following the direction of her gaze. “Lady Chaiujin kept a toad captive in a cage in her tent—”