Lords of Grass and Thunder

by Curt Benjamin

  “The bitch poisoned me!” Qutula raised his voice in outrage. “I can’t feel my fingers!”

  “What did she do?” Bekter, as always, tried to sound conciliatory while the voracity of his hunger for a good story urged his brother to greater heights of expression.

  “What do you mean, ‘do’? Didn’t you see her? The very skin on her horrible body was poison to the touch!”

  “I arrived late, remember? But she didn’t look ugly to me.”

  “No wonder your bed is always empty. Where do you meet your lovers if you have such a taste for giant poison toads?”

  Her sons had burst through the door, still engaged in the thrust and parry of their conversation. Bekter, as she might have expected, blushed purple to the roots of his hair at his brother’s suggestion.

  “I have no such interest and I don’t know why you would say such a thing,” he huffed indignantly.

  “Because that’s what she was. A giant, poisonous toad!” Qutula held his hand out to his mother.

  Sechule noted that, as his argument with Bekter heated up, Qutula’s panic seemed to recede. “Symptoms?” she asked him. And, “How much contact did you have with her?”

  “Just my hand around her throat. It’s numb. I can’t feel it.”

  She had taught her sons that distinction early—between a heavy numbness and the absence of feeling. The poison from a toad should have had the other effect, however; he should have felt his hand, through a separation that clouded the brain with a fog of waking dreams. But his eyes remained clear of all but his rage. Only one way to find out. She turned his hand over and licked it. Salt from the girl’s throat still clung to his skin but she tasted no toxic bitterness on her tongue. Waiting, she felt no effect of residual contact—her mouth should feel puffy and separate from her body, dizziness should have shortened her breath. Colors should have sharpened. Nothing.

  “Who is this girl?” she asked.

  “No one,” he answered, “A shamaness in training that the prince has tangled his ankles over.”

  She was starting to make him suspicious. It wouldn’t do to show her eldest son for a fool in front of his brother. Rummaging through her simples for a salve she used for rashes, Sechule nodded as if this answered the question of his symptoms and not why his hand went around the girl’s throat in the first place.

  “Rub this on both your hands—you may have touched her in passing with the other as well. Don’t skimp on your fingers; any little cuts will give the toxin entry.”

  Mollified, Qutula took the jar from her with a grunt and threw himself down on the furs piled against the side of the tent. As he rubbed the salve carefully into the cracks around his fingernails, Sechule thought she saw a shadow gliding from the deep cuff of his summer coat and into the bedding. A vision brought on by the toxin Qutula claimed for the girl? Perhaps she should have paid more attention to his complaint. Her son was looking at his hand as though she had created a miracle, however, waggling his fingers with satisfaction.

  “Better,” he said. “I knew you would be more powerful than the little shamaness.”

  No normal toxin, then, but one with a short life. In answer to Qutula’s praise she offered only a mysterious smile. She knew when speech would lessen the impact of her power over her sons and she kept silent now.

  “Who is watching the prince in your absence?” she asked them, her brow arched to take the sting out of the reminder.

  “Nirun,” Qutula answered with a sour twist of his mouth. His frown pointed at his brother for so naming those who followed the prince as their captain in their warrior games.

  “Then you must set the Durluken in their place, my son.” She left it so that anyone who heard—including her fool of a son Bekter—might think she meant to protect the prince with their superior service. A glance assured that her more ambitious child understood her perfectly. His Durluken would truly stand at the side of their prince when Qutula had taken both the position and the title his father owed him by right of blood.

  “Take this—” She reached into the cabinet and opened a secret door, took from the shelf within a sealed vial no bigger than her thumb. “For the poison.”

  He knew the value of silence as well, and bowed over her hand with a smile between them before slipping the vial into his sleeve. Then he gathered his brother up before him and shepherded him to the door. “Come on, Bek. The gur-khan will wonder if we’ve lost our way.”

  She smiled until the sound of their voices faded in the distance. When she felt certain they would not quickly return, she sank down in front of her herb chest with a frustrated moan. A toad-girl with no poison Sechule knew? Had she bewitched the prince? What else would he be doing with her? Who was she, and where had she come from? Did Mergen want to protect his nephew from a politically disastrous marriage, or did he want the girl for himself? She was, it seemed, very young, but men were prone to such fancies in their middle years.

  Sechule had accepted that after so many years in which marriage had been forbidden him, Mergen would want to wed. She had expected him to make a political marriage for the clans and had considered potions that her sons might slip into his food that would draw him back to her. Second wife to a khan would do. A first wife untimely dead would raise too many suspicions—Lady Chaiujin had already used that trick on Chimbai’s khaness—but it would be easy enough to ensure that Mergen’s political union bore no fruit. Her plans had all assumed a horse-faced foreigner of high birth; the thought that Mergen might have cast her aside only to take a lowborn slip of a girl as a lover rankled.

  Fortunately, the girl had her eyes on the heir. It seemed unlikely that anyone at court would ask her preferences, though how an apprentice shaman managed to catch the prince in her spells remained a mystery. If Mergen had any sense, he’d ride around that one like she were quicksand. Wasn’t anybody paying attention? That might work in their favor.

  Eluneke landed lightly on the smoke hole cover of Bolghai’s tent-burrow. In her form as a small toad, she crawled to the center of the roof where the flap had been turned back and carefully let herself down onto one of the arched spokes that made up the tent’s ceiling. From there she made her way to one of the many brooms hanging from the spokes. She thought the crawl to the floor might be arduous, but Bolghai himself was standing there with his hand out, just a short hop from where she sat on a broom made of sticks.

  “Who comes calling over the sill of the door?” He gently set her down on the floor and stood back so that she could turn into a girl again.

  “The wind,” she answered him and pressed down her skirts, which had gotten badly mussed by the river.

  “Just so. Sometimes,” he agreed. “What does the wind blow in today?”

  “Trouble.” Almost a shaman, she had given him almost a riddle, which seemed to please him.

  “Would you like some tea?”

  She couldn’t figure out the riddle in that, but it came clear enough when he wiped a dirty finger around the inside of a cup and offered it to her. “No, thank you.” Events were moving, she had no time for tea.

  A raven flew through the smoke hole and landed on his shoulder, but Bolghai waited patiently, the cup in his outstretched hand until she figured it out for herself. “Yes, please. And your help, if you will. And Toragana’s help too, of course.” She deferred to her teacher, who watched her with dark, expressionless raven eyes while the shaman swept the skulls of his totem animal, the stoat, from a chest and pulled out a cloth sack half full of rolled tea leaves.

  “Now tell me what has happened.” Bolghai looked up from the firebox where he had set about steeping the tea. “How can I help?”

  That was the riddle, sure enough. Toragana flapped her wings and disappeared out the smoke hole, as if she had joined them only to put her pupil in safe hands before heading off on some errand of her own. Eluneke let Bolghai fill her cup and accepted a pat of butter in her tea. As quickly as she could, she told him what she knew, about Qutula’s threats and the shadow-i
mage of the serpent that seemed to envelop him when she looked at him.

  “What serpent is it?” he asked, focusing his disconcertingly bright gaze on her.

  “I’m not sure.” Eluneke remembered hearing that the previous khan had died of snakebite. She wondered what the connection was.

  “Not one local to the grasslands, though it’s hard to tell, in the presence of magic, what is real and what is not. Surely the true serpent couldn’t be so large—it’s taller than the warrior who carries it and almost as transparent as air. It seems to have some connection to the jade talisman he wears. If the Great Mother hadn’t shown it to me that first time, I wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

  “Great Mother?” Bolghai sipped his tea, his eyes wide and shining as the brother moons Han and Chen. “Talismans and serpents and Great Mothers. Surely we have the making of a fine riddle here.”

  “Not so much of one,” Eluneke admitted. “I saw her once before, at the festival to celebrate the army’s return from the Cloud Country. She sat a great broad horse at the khan’s side so she must be Great Mother the khaness.”

  “Doubtless you are correct, but what has this to do with me?”

  He meant it as a question, she saw; not a dismissal but a challenge to find her own answers in him. She thought past the obvious, that she was a student and he a teacher. Her eyes looked on far distances and she almost missed the change in Bolghai’s regard. Toragana had trained her well in the basics, however; she kept one toe in the here-and-now even as her mind wandered in the might-bes and the happens-nexts.

  “Powers are moving in the grass,” she gave him riddle for riddle: not just the serpent or the two young men who faced each other in love and envy. The answer to this one lay out beyond the ulus.

  Forces were moving. The thunder of horses set up a fine vibration in her bones and she heard the flight of arrows in the wind.

  “Then I suppose it is time you became one of those powers,” Bolghai agreed and she knew he felt the coming storm in his marrow as well. “I expect the gods will have something to say on the matter. It’s time you climbed the tree at the center of the world.”

  To become a shaman the apprentice, in the shape of the totem animal, traveled first in the dreamscape to learn about the living, second to the heavens to learn about healing from the gods, and third to the underworld to learn about death and the spirit world from the ancestors. Eluneke had already visited a young man’s terrifying dreams. Now she must climb the great tree at the center of the world and bring back from the sky god’s daughters the secret knowledge of healing.

  No shaman learned the same mysteries, Toragana had explained to her. No shaman could speak in human language the secrets they brought back from the heavens. An apprentice had many teachers, but becoming a shaman was a solitary climb to the top of the tree. Eluneke had fully expected to make this great trek. Just, not so soon after treating with the king of the toads.

  Bolghai made a chittering sound in response to her look of dismay. “You should be fasting,” Bolghai chided her and took away her teacup. “We have little time for the niceties.”

  He paused, took in her ragged appearance and the mud on her nose. “But time for a nap, I think, and to wait for Toragana to bring your robes.”

  He took her cup and passed a hand over her eyes. Suddenly she was falling into the furs that covered the floor of his little burrow-tent. “Sleep,” she heard him say as she drifted on soft clouds of fur. “It will keep until tomorrow.”

  Sechule was neither a witch nor a healer in the usual way, but she had learned as all mothers must the ways to keep her children alive. When they were small, fatherless, and alone, that had meant tree bark to cool a fever and the mosses to stop the bleeding of a wound, the teas that soothed an angry belly and those which calmed a moody temperament. As her sons took their places in the court of their father the khan, the love of a mother demanded more.

  She thought she knew who had slithered from her son’s cuff into her blankets. But how had the bamboo snake-demon found her way up Qutula’s sleeve? And what did the serpent want with him? Yesugei, her only regular visitor these days, had departed on the khan’s business with the defeated Uulgar captives. Her tent was empty and she expected it to remain so until her sons wandered home from the palace late in the night to find their dinner and their beds. Perhaps it was time for Sechule to confront the lady on her own ground. Carefully she turned the mirrors, lest the lady’s demon reflection scare her away. The precaution of mirrors hadn’t saved Chimbai-Khan or his insipid first wife, the Lady Temulun, but one wanted to appear hospitable when treating with demons.

  She had shared with the Lady Chaiujin an interest in herbs, so while she waited for the serpent to reveal herself, she sat before a painted chest and opened first one door and then another. Picking up in turn each of the thick stoneware jars lined up on their shelves, she made note of which herbs she had in full supply and which rattled for lornly at the bottom of their jar.

  Quickly finished with the beneficial medicines, she turned once again to the secret door which she opened with a manipulation of the design on the front of the chest. Here she kept a small supply of various doses that might produce the very ills the others cured. Though she knew the uses for each, until tonight she’d had few calls for most. The jars offered ample options, though one larger than the rest, that held the death’s-head mushroom, was almost empty. In great enough amounts the mushroom could drive one mad, or even kill. But Sechule did a tidy trade in small doses which jealous lovers used to summon dreams of the misdeeds of their beloved. She made a note to replenish her stock from the nearby wood.

  She wasn’t a witch, but her grandmother had taught her much before the clan had stoned her to death after the fatal illness of a rival. Among her lessons, Sechule had learned not to show surprise to her disadvantage. So when a woman’s voice said, “Good afternoon, O mother of khans,” she first stilled the sudden speeding of her heart. This was, after all, the reason she was sitting here making an inventory of her poisons. When she was better able to control her reactions, she set the jar down with careful deliberation and rose to her feet. Pretending to a shock she no longer felt, she turned on her visitor with an imperious scowl as if she did not expect the intruder. “What are you doing in my tent?”

  “Visiting an old friend, of course.” The woman smiled conspiratorially, sharing the sort of secrets that had gotten Sechule’s grandmother murdered.

  “I don’t know you.” Sechule made a warding sign behind her skirts. This creature spoke as if she were the Lady Chaiujin, but she wore a different face.

  “Come now. We were friends once.” The air around the woman swirled in a thickening mist, in which her face ran like water, changing.

  “Lady khaness!” Sechule bowed deeply, as subject to ruler, burning to know what the demon wanted of her, and her son. She had met the Lady Chaiujin from time to time when gathering herbs of the kind neither wanted known about them. But Chimbai’s second wife had never declared herself a friend to anyone.

  The lady held out her hands to be kissed. Sechule hesitated only a moment before she brushed her lips upon the backs of the lady’s fingers. In the form of an emerald green bamboo snake the lady had sunk her venomous fangs into her husband’s breast, murdering Chimbai-khan in their bed. Her fingers seemed perfectly normal, but beneath her sleeves the skin shone a pale green, with a faint tracing of what might be the reflection of the pattern of her green dress, or might be scales sheathing her arms above her wrists. Sechule wished briefly that she hadn’t turned the mirrors, but the khan’s palace had many such and they hadn’t stopped the lady’s magic. But today, perhaps, she meant no harm.

  “Do you mind?” With a graceful gesture in the air, the mist returned. When it had lifted again, the lady wore a stranger’s face, spoke with a stranger’s voice.

  Sechule wiped her hands nervously on the apron she wore. She had never liked it. Mergen had given it to her when she still had hopes of him. When she p
romised to put it safely in her marriage chest, he had chastised her, saying that could never happen between them. After so many years, stains splashed the embroidered birds nesting on vines curling sensually at her breast and she wished she had put on something more fitting a visit from a khaness, even if she were a murderess.

  “Be at peace,” the lady encouraged her, “We share the same hope for your son, Qutula.”

  “My son? I don’t understand . . .”

  “Of course you do. You saw me leave his sleeve and invited my presence with your turned back. We both want the best for your son. Mergen’s son. The rightful heir.”

  The lady smiled, as if this must be the most obvious thing in the world, that she should take an interest in Sechule’s blanket-sons. “I cannot say I know him well. But . . . intimately . . . He knows of my interest in him. The spirits will approve, once it is done; his father sits on the dais as khan, after all. What could be more natural than that a son follow his father’s path?”

  Sechule blinked, but otherwise showed little of the feelings that bubbled inside her like the stewpot on the firebox. Qutula, khan. She had dreamed it, but to know that others felt the same, that her son had attracted the support of supernatural forces to his claim—

  “His father has not acknowledged him.” The most bitter reminder of Mergen’s treachery burned in her heart. Until his father claimed him, Qutula—and Bekter, for that matter—would be heir to nothing.

  “An obstacle, I know, but one I trust him to overcome.”

  Not all the years of his young life had taught his father how to love him enough to name him son. That left little, in Sechule’s estimation, but murder. Not the khan, of course, since that would put Chimbai’s heir on the dais. But if some accident were to befall Prince Tayyichiut, to whom else would Mergen turn?