“My mind is uneasy,” he said, the proper formula when calling for advice on a problem that did not yet require a healing, and took from the purse at his waist a gold coin.
“Not gold, but a teapot,” she answered the coin with a dismissive wave of her hand and set about filling the teapot in question with crushed leaves and water hot off the firebox.
Bekter understood the old riddle well enough and answered with a smile. “What stands between friends.” Hospitality, that meant, and not a cash transaction. Then he saw the girl.
She sat on the layered carpets, weaving a little basket out of reeds. He recognized her instantly and should have been elated that he had a chance to observe her up close. Instead, he found himself frozen in disarray. He’d expected the shamaness to be alone and found himself torn suddenly between his own private errand and the need to learn more about the girl who had caught the prince’s eye and terrified Qutula, two good reasons to make the khan nervous.
Looking up from the cups she set out on a small chest—just two, Bekter noted—the shamaness followed the direction of his gaze. “This is my apprentice, Eluneke,” she introduced them with a question in the lift of her eyebrow. “Have you met before?”
The girl was watching him with wide, cautious eyes. She recognized him and wondered, he supposed, if he meant her harm as Qutula had threatened. He must have looked at her the same way. Qutula had seen her as a giant poisonous toad, after all. Too late to deny that they had met. Or something.
“Only from a distance,” he said, reining in his galloping imagination. “I’m a friend of the prince.”
“I see,” Toragana said, as if he had explained more than he might want her to know.
“You’re the other one’s brother, aren’t you?” Eluneke gathered a collection of little baskets scattered at her feet and tied them to the strings that hung from her shaman’s robes.
“Which other one?” Bekter asked the top of her head as she leaned over to scoop up the dried reeds she had used to weave the baskets. Remembering the rough treatment she had received at the hand of Qutula and his Durluken, he was suddenly reluctant to claim that connection.
“You know who I mean.” She gave him a sharp glance from under her downcast lashes, not flirtatious but attending to the reeds she picked up from the carpets.
“Qutula is my brother, yes. I’m not like him, though.”
“I know.” She nodded, coming to her feet. “The question is, whose side will you come down on when the prince’s life hangs between this world and the next?”
“What are you talking about? I’m no traitor!” Bekter drew himself up to his full, if unimposing, height. “And neither is my brother. But if you know something about a plot to harm the prince—”
“What if you’re wrong?” she insisted. It shouldn’t have answered his question, but it did.
“I am no traitor.” But if it came to believing ill of Qutula, how would he fall? He really didn’t know.
She searched his eyes for truth or falsehood and seemed content with what she saw for now. “All right, then,” she said, and then, to her teacher, “Will you be long here?”
“I’ll be where I need to be when it is time,” Toragana reached out and smoothed the girl’s hair in the loving gesture of a mother. “Until then, mind your own business, little flower, and trust me to mind mine.”
Which should have sounded like a reprimand, but rather came out as some playful code between them. Eluneke smiled mischievously up at the shamaness before she made a bow to Bekter and departed. He knew he ought to follow her, but he had come for other business and Toragana was watching to see what he would do.
Bolghai’s tent lay on the far side of the city. He wasn’t waiting for her at home, though; Eluneke turned toward the open land and started to run. The next step of her initiation was too dangerous to approach with magic, so she kept to her human form as she left the thinning lines of tents behind her. The soft grass crushed underfoot released sweet fragrances as it cushioned her step. She settled into a pace that ate up the li without stealing her breath. She needed that to call her totem animals to her. “King of toads, king of toads, I need you,” she chanted.
“By your oath at greatest need,
bring your troops to guide my way.
Heaven will reward you, king of toads.”
She had made of her headdress a comfortable seat for him, well guarded against a sudden fall by an elaborate casque of wicker. She owned few beads, but those she had—two coral ones small as seeds and a larger one of turquoise that had belonged to her mother—she had worked into the decoration of the headdress to honor the king who would make his seat there.
She had tied her baskets to the silver chains that hung from the slashed leather of her shaman’s robes. Some small enough to suit a toad no bigger than her thumb, some to house a guest larger than her fist, they flew in many ribbons about her as she ran, leaving bruises where they bounced against her legs and hips and on her breasts. She didn’t let the discomfort slow her pace, however. Bolghai was waiting, and heaven after that.
“ You can’t go where she is heading, good Bekter. You must, I fear, make do with the errand that brought you.”
“I’m no more a spy than a traitor!” he protested, but this time he couldn’t meet her eyes. She would know, and how could he expect her to believe him after such a lie, even for the gur-khan?
“Of course you are,” she answered, “But you’re far too gallant to mean her any harm and even the gur-khan himself, I think, wishes only to protect her.”
The thought that Mergen might care what happened to the girl had never crossed his mind. Hadn’t crossed ’Tula’s either, or he wouldn’t have threatened her. His brother was impetuous, but Bekter wouldn’t believe him a traitor. Now that Toragana had mentioned it, however, the notion planted itself and took root. How did the story reshape itself if Eluneke was more than an inconvenience to be rid of?
“Who is she?” he asked, and didn’t say, Why would Mergen care? The possibilities terrified him. His father favored his blanket-sons and had seen that they rose in the court. Caution sank deep roots in the gur-khan’s heart, however. He had never given any public sign of his affection, nor had he shown by any word that he recognized them as his heirs.
Though Sechule had been his favorite, they always knew their father had entertained other lovers. How much more cautiously would he protect a daughter from the schemes and attentions of the court? In Toragana’s eyes he saw the reflection of his own thoughts, and the moment when he came to the conclusion she had meant him to reach. Once the notion seized him, he thought he recognized the gur-khan in the girl’s dark eyes.
“Is she my sister?” he asked, in this unsettled moment telling her more about his own parentage than a lowly shaman from an obscure clan ought to know.
She didn’t look surprised at his revelation about himself. Carefully as Mergen himself might do, she answered with another question. “Does the gur-khan say so?”
He suppressed a dismissive movement of his hand. “No more than he has acknowledged his sons.”
It would make sense of the gur-khan’s interest in her, though. A word to her clan chieftain would have taken the girl well out of the prince’s reach, but Mergen hadn’t given that command. Suddenly he wanted her close by. Available to the prince? Bekter didn’t think so. But an emissary was due to arrive that night, in search of a wife for the Tinglut-Khan. He gave a little shudder in sympathy for the girl who might soon find herself wed to the old man who stood in uneasy alliance with her father. Was that why she pursued the robes of a shaman?
“You’ve heard the stories they are telling in the camp about her?” he asked instead. He doubted the foreign khan’s interest in a poisonous toad for a wife. The thought that he might be related to one clenched a tight fist around his belly. If he could have shed his bloodline like a snake its skin, he’d have done so that very moment.
Toragana shook her head, not denying anything he’d said, but
exasperated, he thought.
“Stories grow in the telling.” She pointed him to a cushion on the rugs, near the firebox and away from the low stool for clients. “Sit, before you fall,” she said, and filled a cup with tea.
He did as he was told but refused to be lulled with her answer. “We both know that tall tales grow from true seeds. Qutula saw her in the shape of her totem animal.”
Flowers floated in the tea, which needed neither butter nor honey to improve the flavor. Idly he wondered if she had drugged him or merely sweetened the drink. “Could she poison him with her skin?” he persisted in spite of the snort of laughter he startled out of her. The notion that so dangerous a creature might be kin made him queasy all over again. “Qutula says she poisoned him when he touched her.”
“And what was he doing touching her in the first place?” Settling the ruffled feathers of her robes, the shamaness re-phrased his request. “Two questions, you mean to ask: ‘can she poison with her skin?’ and ‘would she use such a taint to harm the prince?’ ”
Toragana curled her leg under her and sat among the carpets, separated from Bekter by a stray beam of dusty light that pierced the smoke hole in the roof. “Rest easy,” she assured him, “The truth, as it happens, is ‘no,’ to both. Eluneke is no danger to your brother or your prince. She is a girl who sometimes wears the form of a toad, but who is always, at heart, a girl.”
Her eyes were clear and gray as the Onga River on a winter afternoon. He would have said they hid nothing, but he knew better than that. A shaman was made of secrets, and she gave him a glimpse of them when she added over her tea, “Bolghai believes she may be the prince’s salvation.”
He’d never really thought the girl a physical threat. Tayy was a hero, after all. He’d made allies of dragons. And Eluneke seemed to care for him even if she was an unearthly creature with or without a poisonous skin. The prince could hold his own against a lovesick cousin, even one with shamanistic skills. But what was Bolghai afraid of?
“Salvation from what?”
Bolghai waited for her by an outcrop of rock that on a day with more sunshine glittered with mica. Today clouds had closed over Great Sun, turning the day almost to night. The rocks didn’t glitter, but they did move, seething with a strange life of their own. When she drew closer, she realized the stones remained still and sleeping. Over and around them, however, crawled an army of toads.
“The king of the toads has kept his promise,” Bolghai informed her, though she could tell that for herself now.
As if waiting for the introduction, the giant toad crawled out of the mass of his court and croaked a greeting at her.
“I don’t understand.” Eluneke cast a helpless glance at her guide. She had to find the tree at the center of the world and climb to heaven in human form, but she could only communicate with the toads when in the shape of her totem animal.
“That’s all right,” Bolghai assured her with a little pat on her shoulder. “He understands you.”
That would do. “Welcome, Your Majesty,” she said, and bowed low to King Toad.
“Croak!” he said in answer, and climbed into his seat atop her headdress.
Once he had taken his place on the throne she had prepared for him, the toad court swarmed to find their own places on her dress. She had made baskets for ten, but none seemed willing to stay behind. They climbed into the baskets in pairs and fours, and when there was no room in the baskets even with legs and arms sticking through the wicker, they climbed onto the silver chains that held the baskets, and the hide ribbons that made up her costume itself. Each toad weighed little by itself, but with hundreds of them clinging everywhere to her clothing, she found it difficult to lift a foot. Running was impossible.
“I can’t do it!” she cried, “They are too many!”
The toads just clung more tenaciously, croaking their messages of encouragement or deep in their own noisy cross-conversations. The king of the toads said something, but not, apparently an order for any of the toads to disembark.
“In this journey, you will need all the help you can get,” Bolghai encouraged her, though whether he somehow knew the language of toads and translated for their king or just added his own thoughts to the noise she didn’t know. But the toads weren’t leaving.
“All right,” she said, and with great effort took her first encumbered step. Right, then left, then right, against the rain that had started as the gentle tears of heaven but had now become the blinding downpour of a raging storm. She tried not to think about where she was going, or how she was to find the tree at the center of the world. Bolghai had led her away from the narrow band of forest that lined the Onga. On the flat plain of the grasslands, no natural tree grew for li after li of waving grass and tearful wildflowers.
The shaman seemed to read her mind, or perhaps the perplexity that pursed her lips and drew her brows together. “The great tree will find you,” he said. “All you have to do is run.”
Toragana gave an apologetic tilt of her shoulder. It was hard, now that she had the ear of the gur-khan’s own poet, to admit how little she really knew about the danger to the prince or the role Eluneke would play in saving him from the death that loomed ahead.
“In a vision Eluneke has seen a death’s head riding the prince’s horse. Now we’re racing against fate and time to save him from what she has seen.”
The breath went out of him in a whoosh. Toragana took the teacup from his hand and set it down, dabbing absently at the spill soaking into the carpets. She’d had time to get used to the notion, but her visitor sat with his eyes wide and his cheeks pale as he asked the question that burdened her own heart. “How?”
“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!”
Lords of Grass and Thunder Page 25
