Lords of Grass and Thunder

by Curt Benjamin

  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 th
e 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.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  “MY PRINCE, we have to go!”Altan shouted. Startled, Tayy looked up from the shrine that had grown up around the place where his father’s pyre had burned. At Mergen-Gur-Khan’s insistence, he had brought Qutula and Altan with him as guards. The two didn’t get along—’Tula had wanted to bring Duwa instead—but Altan was Nirun, his own man. Duwa served the Durluken. They were just names for the games, but in the subtle push and shove for status in the court, the prince determined to hold the line for his own team in front of the khan. So it was Altan who first brought his prince out of his prayerful meditation with the reminder, “You will want to be off the grass before the Tinglut prince comes any closer.”

  The Tinglut-Khan’s messenger had announced the arrival at sundown of Prince Daritai, second son of Tinglut’s third wife, to discuss a marriage between their clans. Mergen had declared a great hunt for the morning to celebrate the visiting prince. But first they must receive him at sunset with all the splendor of the gur-khan’s court.

  “At least you get to wear silks,” Qutula added with a mock grumble. “We guardsmen will be in half-armor until the Tinglut are back on their own ground.”

  “Count your blessings that you will have a place by the dais, inside the ger-tent palace,” Altan challenged him. Fat raindrops started to fall on the stones of the shrine. “The rains are coming. I would not be on guard outside the doors tonight. We need to ride now if we don’t want to get caught in the storm ourselves.”

  “The gur-khan will have our heads if anything happens to you,” Qutula agreed, glaring sourly at Altan, as if he had usurped his better’s place in sounding that alarm. The dogs would have done it, and considerably sooner, if they’d come with him, but he’d left them behind out of deference to the battle they waged with his cousin. Both of his guardsmen were looking back over their shoulders to the clouds roiling the sky to the north, however. Tayy did the same. A line of heavy rain dropped a gray curtain over the horizon.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he agreed, and mounted his horse. Foreign prince or not, darkness was moving toward them from the south as if some terrible beast was swallowing the sun; already they could see forked lightning reaching for the heavens in the distance.

  He knew more about storms now, having watched the approach of the like in the belly of a galley slaver. This one was coming in off the Marmer Sea. He half expected it to sweep him up as it had his friend Llesho in that terrible storm at sea. The gods used storms to pull human beings out of the living world into the sky, only to return them dead again of the experience. King Llesho—not the old legend, but the new one—had survived the experience, but it turned out he was a god himself so that didn’t count. The prince tucked his head down against the neck of his horse and settled her with a murmur of reassuring words before letting her set her own pace. He didn’t have to urge her, just pointed her in the direction of the tent city, and she went like her feet were on fire.

  Qutula was ahead of him. Behind, Altan urged him to greater speed—“Hurry!”—but after that the rising wind snatched his voice away.

  They were galloping full out now, all three of them. Altan caught up, terror blanching the color from his face. In the wind, Tayy heard the shrieking voices of the nine maidens, daughters of the great sky god who rode the storms in search of earthly lovers to snatch up into the heavens. Puddles had already begun to form in the rain and he guided his horse around them, one more hazard of the storm. The spirits of the restless dead could reach out and snag a man by the ankles, dragging him down into the underworld through standing water.

  Cold and wet, he rode through a terrifying landscape where the underworld of the spirits and the heavens of the gods turned the mortal realm into wind and water and fire with no flame. He looked back, saw the branching stretch of lightning joining grass to dense black cloud. In the blinding white light that washed the air between black sky and blacker earth, he saw the silhouettes of two figures, running. He recognized the man as Bolghai by the skins flapping around his neck as he ran. The other figure, shorter than the man, seethed with no sharp outline to her figure, but instinctively the prince knew who it must be.

  “Eluneke!”

  Tayy hesitated. His guardsmen had ridden far ahead of his voice and didn’t turn or show by any sign that they had heard. Eluneke and the shaman were still too far away to hear, but he could tell they were heading in the direction of his father’s shrine. Toward the storm, which was bearing down on them as if it had a will to seize them for heaven.

  Maybe they were looking for him, but he was as clear against their horizon as they were against his. And if that was Eluneke, the shifting movement around her could only mean that she had called the kingdom of toads to attend her. He didn’t know what the shamaness in training was doing, but he wasn’t about to leave her to the storm. Wrenching the mare around to face the lightning he drove his knees into her flanks and cried out, “Eluneke!”

  The mare leaped and curvetted a moment, ran a few paces and dug in her hooves, refusing to go any farther. Her eyes rolled in her head and froth steamed at the corners of her mouth. Too much a lady to throw him, she stood her ground trembling and would not go on.

  “You’ve got more sense than I do, girl,” he agreed, soothing her with long strokes of his hand on her neck while the wind kicked grit in his eyes and whipped his braids where they hung below the silver cap of his royal helm. His guardsmen, confident that he was with them, had pulled well ahead and reason told him to follow. The Qubal people needed him alive, not dead in the grass with the tree burned into his chest. But he wouldn’t leave Eluneke to whatever mad venture Bolghai had set her. Not in this storm.

  “I don’t know what you expect of me!” he shouted at the unseen gods advancing in a line of thunder and rain. With a frustrated sigh he slid from the terrified horse. “Go,” he told her. “Find safety, and come back for me when you can.” Foolish orders to give a dumb beast, but he slapped her flank with the irrational certainty that she had heard him and would obey. He didn’t stay to watch her go, but turned and ran back toward the shrine. He would intersect Eluneke there, he thought, and put on a burst of speed that carried him back into the storm.

  Rain pelted his shoulders and ran off his pointed silver cap. His boots kicked up gouts of mud in the beaten grass. Lightning passed from cloud to cloud, returning day to the grasslands in a flash that was quickly snuffed out by the rain. He was close enough now to see Eluneke, a hundred or more toads clinging to her shaman’s robes while their king rode in state atop her headdress. The sight filled him with an unearthly dread even though he had been there when the pact was made. Hesitating, he slipped in the grass and fell backward, knocking the air out of his chest. Overhead, the clouds pulsed with the signal fires of the gods, rumbled with the drums of heaven that mortals called thunder.

  The prince squeezed his eyes shut for a moment to clear them of the rain that filled them, then he dragged himself to his feet and started to run again. “Eluneke!”

  She didn’t hear him, or didn’t acknowledge him if she did. Bolghai, however, turned his head. Dismay had rounded his mouth into a wide “O.”

  “Go back!” he shouted. “Go back!” Tayy didn’t listen. Whatever fate the
old shaman had planned for Eluneke, he wouldn’t let her go through it alone.

  She was almost there. Already the storm was focusing on her, on the shrine where the sky gods would call her. Eluneke didn’t know by what sense she felt their presence, but Bolghai didn’t stop her. Riding in his throne atop her head, King Toad seemed content with the direction she was taking his people as well. The sound of a familiar voice reached her in strands of fog torn apart by the shrieking wind and the thunder rumbling overhead.

  “Stop!” Prince Tayyichiut cried, and she thought she heard him say, “Wait for me!”

  He couldn’t follow where she planned to go, however, so she ran faster, toward the shrine that rose higher each day on the plains. A toad shaken loose from its hold on the leather ribbons of her robes fell to the grass, and another, but most of their number hung on.

  Lightning struck as she neared the low pile of stone in its circle of ash. It didn’t flicker out, but held steady, linking earth to heaven. Another rose out of the ground beside it, another, until they circled the shrine, nine great trees of lightning with Eluneke inside the circle. This is it, she thought. The gods accept me as a shamaness, or I die with the mark of the tree on my breast. But which of the nine dancing trees of light was she supposed to climb? Which was the tree at the center of the world?

  “Ribit!”

  In human form she couldn’t understand the words of King Toad. His meaning, this time, was clear enough, however. “That one,” he must have meant.

  Over the topmost point at the very center of the shrine the sky seemed to open in furious white light, and from the heavens came a searing purple bolt. Above, great purple branches joined cloud to cloud in a towering crown while below the stone of the shrine shattered with the sound like a rocket from Shan going off. The air itself, fleeing the wrath of heaven, blew her off her feet in the broken stone. Eluneke’s hair stood on end. Her skin lifted from her flesh in the way it does when a ghost passes nearby. She wanted to run away, to bury herself beneath the shattered shrine and hide until the terrible storm had passed. But that wouldn’t win her the knowledge she needed to save the prince. Pulling herself to her feet, she glared at the tower of dancing light at the center of the destruction. “Now,” she said, and took the few steps that brought her to the base.