Lords of Grass and Thunder

by Curt Benjamin

  She thought it would be difficult, and it was, but not in the way she’d expected. Though the tree of lightning seemed no wider than her hand from a distance, it grew unnaturally thicker with each step she took toward it. When she could bring herself to touch it, the life force of heaven passed through her, bringing every nerve in her body to painful life. There were no hand or toeholds to the eye, but when she set foot to the purple light, her toes sank in slightly and held. It was more difficult to plunge her hands into the burning tower but she took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and pushed. The tree held her, though by no solid substance she could identify.

  She tried not to think about how high above the mortal world she must climb but focused on each arm as she reached over her head for the next handhold, each foot as she lifted it to the next unearthly toehold. And again, and again. Other girls of marrying age wore silk coats and beads of coral or jade in their ears, she thought, while she dangled toads for decorations. Other girls flirted with the wrestlers while their grandmothers made matches for them. She climbed the lightning to wrest the life of her intended from the gods—after which she must do the same on earth, with no grandmother to claim a prince for a shamaness and all the armies of the gur-khan to stand against her.

  Below, she heard voices. Bolghai, she recognized, querulous, to Prince Tayyichiut’s pleading. The prince wanted her to come down, but she wouldn’t. She was doing this for him, after all. The king of the toads made some comment, ironic by the sound of it. The higher she climbed, the closer she seemed to understanding his language. Not yet, though. Not quite, but she thought it might be advice, and didn’t look down.

  “Eluneke!” The shrine to his father’s memory exploded in a hail of dust and rocky fragments that peppered him with fine cuts and one bruise the size of his fist over his left eye. The lightning strikes didn’t snap and fade as they should, but remained untamed and writhing in a circle like the nine dancing maidens around a central strike that seemed to swallow up the world around it. His heart stuttered in his chest and the hairs on the backs of his arms rose in fine points of flesh. Overhead, limbs of the great lightning tree turned Eluneke into her own shadow, climbing higher and higher.

  Tayy knew he was in the presence of unearthly magic but he would not let her go into that danger alone. “Eluneke! Eluneke!” he cried. When she didn’t answer, he threw himself into the circle of dancing light.

  “No!” Strong arms wrapped across his chest and pulled him back. “It’s Eluneke’s path. Let her follow it!”

  Bolghai. Tayy fought him with all his might, but the shaman had pinned his arms to his sides. When he kicked, the shaman picked him up in a bear hug, and when he tried to throw his weight to the side to escape, Bolghai let them tumble together into the muddy grass. Above them, the wind howled cold as night. Ice hard as stones fell from the heavens, pummeling them and littering the grass, some small as millet, some larger than his fist. And one, not ice at all, but a toad frozen solid.

  “She’ll come back. I promise. She’ll come back.”

  Tayy shivered in the shaman’s arms, accepting no comfort as Bolghai held him and smoothed his braids—Tayy’s cap had rolled away when they had fallen.

  “To become a shaman, she must find the tree at the center of the world and climb it alone, child. How else is she to learn the arts of healing from the gods who reign in the heavens?”

  “You did this, too?” Tayy looked up at Eluneke, whose seething shadow had reached the first branching of the great tree she climbed. His fists clenched helplessly as the clouds dropped lower, it seemed, to swallow her up. But if Bolghai had survived it—

  “We each find the tree in our own way,” Bolghai answered, as cagey a way of saying “no” as the prince had ever heard. Tayy figured he could defend Eluneke in heaven even if he didn’t survive the return to earth. That would be enough for him, if it had to be.

  As if he knew what Tayy was going to say next, Bolghai added quickly, “This is Eluneke’s path, not yours. Do you think she will thank either of us if I let you kill yourself against the lightning trying to stop her?” He released Tayy with a little shake, “To knock some sense into you,” he said. “She will need us both down here when she returns. Up there, she doesn’t need either of us.”

  “But—” Tayy rolled to his feet, ready to follow but too late. One by one the bolts of lightning snapped out until only the tree at the center of the world remained. High over their heads Eluneke vanished into the cloudy crown of the great tree and that, too, imploded as if all the world had become thunder. Tayy clapped his hands to his ears and stared up where it had been.

  “Where did she go?”

  “She is with the gods in heaven now,” Bolghai answered.

  The thunder had deafened him. The prince didn’t hear, but knew the answer anyway.

  “What do we do now?” He didn’t need the answer to that either. We wait.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  THE LIGHTNING’S TRUNK grew more tenuous as Eluneke climbed. Great branching limbs spread out above her and she stretched, reaching for the sturdiest that blocked her upward path. From there she grabbed another, making her way into the great crown of clouds that billowed around her. The clouds were like ice, the lightning like fire. Trembling from the cold at her back and the brilliant energy crackling through her limbs as she climbed, she wondered which would cause her to fall back to earth first. Would she lose her grip because her hands had grown too numb to hold on? Or because the heavenly fire had burned through muscle and sinew to the bone?

  “So this is heaven,” the king of the toads croaked.

  “Huh,” she said, too focused on the task of surviving the climb to do more than acknowledge that suddenly she understood his speech. Nearby, one of the lesser bolts of lightning wavered and snapped out.

  “Whoa!” her passenger observed, a bit breathlessly. “Not exactly my idea of perfect bliss.”

  He shifted in his seat atop her head and she snapped, “Keep still, unless you want to end up a smear on the muddy ground!” The words came out in foreign croaks that strained her throat, but King Toad stopped moving. She wasn’t sure if he was following her orders or frozen in terror—or from the cold.

  One by one the lightning bolts that had danced around their central tree collapsed until only the great tree at the center of the world remained, wobbling uncertainly under her weight.

  “Are we there yet?”

  “No,” she gritted between clenched teeth, and wept silent, frozen tears as one toad and then another lost its grasp on her shaman’s robes and fell.

  But: “Yes,” a woman’s voice answered from above. Hands reached down and took hold of Eluneke’s arms and shoulders, drawing her into the warmth of the summer sun just as the tree she climbed disappeared in an ear-shattering crash of thunder.

  “Thank you.” Unable to bow—the king of the toads still squatted precariously in a basket on her head—Eluneke curtsied politely to the beautiful young woman who stood watching her with a grim and forbidding countenance.

  The woman was tall, so that the top of the basket on Eluneke’s headdress came only to her shoulder. Her coats were of gold embroidered all over in silver dragons and in her hand she carried a spear. At her side stood another young woman of an equal height and dressed just as lavishly with all the animals of the grasslands embroidered in silver on her coats. In her hand she held a drum. Next to her another woman, with all manner of healing flowers embroidered on the silk of her coats and a laurel bough in her hand, studied Eluneke as if she were some new specimen that had not yet proved its usefulness. Nine in all, the women circled her as the lightning had on the stormy plains. Eluneke thought they must be the daughters of the great sky god of the heavens, but she was too polite to ask.

  “Thank you,” said the king of the toads, inflating his throat in a pompous balloon. Although he had spoken in the language of the toads and Eluneke in the language of the Qubal, they understood each other.

  The women seemed t
o understand them both. “You’re welcome,” the first said with a smile but no bow. Eluneke and her totem were supplicants here, not equals.

  “Here” did indeed seem to be heaven as the stories had described it. No sign of the terrible storm below disturbed the fragrant grass, where only soft breezes lifted the hair of the nine maidens in gentle waves. It should have been later in the afternoon, but Great and Little Suns both shed their light from the very top of the sky above them. An open door flap showed Great Sun to be a ger-tent palace of gold, larger even than that of the khan. The abode of the sky god, Eluneke figured, though she saw neither warriors to defend him nor the sky god himself. Great Moon Lun shared the vaulted heavens with both suns and her brother moons, an impossible sky in the mortal world, but here all things were possible, if one had the knowledge.

  “May we ask why you left your own world for ours?” the woman of the drum asked. “The path is difficult for a reason. Humans aren’t welcome here.”

  “Nor,” her companion with the laurel bough added quickly, “do we welcome their toad companions.”

  “I wish to serve my people and my prince as a shamaness.” Eluneke gestured at her distinctive robes as evidence of her calling. In her own small circle the toads who had accompanied her were leaving their baskets and crawling down her silver chains for the sweet grass of heaven.

  “Following the teaching of my masters, I climbed the tree at the center of the world to beg the secrets of healing and long life from the sky god and his daughters.” Eluneke curtsied again to show that she recognized the women to whom she spoke.

  “A shamaness, perhaps,” the first conceded, settling the butt of her spear on the ground. With the familiarity of a warrior, her hand wrapped the shaft below the leaf-shaped blade. “but I sense an urgency in your voice that few among your number have expressed on coming here. Fewer yet have the courage to climb the tree when it manifests as the lightning.”

  “A vision sent me.”

  The god’s warrior daughter accepted this answer with a tip of her head and another question, phrased like a riddle: “A vision more powerful than the storms of heaven.”

  “The death of a prince,” Eluneke answered, still cautious. But if the daughters were asking questions that Bolghai might, they weren’t likely to throw her back to earth quite yet. She would have kept the rest to herself, but if the sky god sent her visions, then they already knew. “My husband.”

  “A hard path,” the daughter with the drum muttered.

  “It has its rewards.” A little smile escaped Eluneke’s lips. He was handsome, after all, and he took her communion with the king of the toads in his stride. If they survived the coming threat, she thought they might make a comfortable pair. As for the prince part, and the differences in their ranks, she just wouldn’t think about that.

  It seemed that the warrior maid had passed the questioning to her sister, for once again the woman with the drum spoke up. “I have greeted the totem spirits of many shamans before, but only in their empty skins.” The animals embroidered on her coats shimmered in the sunlight as she peered curiously at the king of the toads. “It is a strange shaman indeed who lets her living totem speak for himself.”

  “We have an arrangement,” Eluneke explained, which seemed to amuse the nine maidens.

  “And what do you get out of this arrangement, toad?” The warrior daughter didn’t seem perplexed. Rather, it felt like a test, which it probably was.

  “My skin,” the king of the toads answered, “safely where it belongs, wrapped over my bones and not shriveled and dangling from a string on a shaman’s coat. The same for my people, of course.”

  “Nothing more?” the maiden asked again.

  Toads don’t have shoulders formed for shrugging, but he bobbed his head in his species’ version of the gesture, admitting to an ulterior motive. “Even a toad can have a sense of adventure. How else would one of my kind climb the tree and see heaven, or greet the nine daughters of the sky god in person?”

  In fact, his people had scattered widely, exploring by smell and touch and taste the rich loamy ground and the sweet green grass of heaven. With their raspy croaks they reported their findings back to their king: fat insects, soft earth, and—far off—trees bordering a river that flowed like the Onga through heaven.

  “Then enjoy your visit, for it may be a long one,” she said with a warning glance at Eluneke. “Climbing up the tree at the center of the world is difficult enough. Climbing down is more so.”

  “And learning the skills to banish evil spirits that cause sickness and death?” Eluneke asked. She knew better than to invite trouble before its time. If she were clever enough at her lessons, she felt sure that the maidens would teach her what she needed to solve the riddle of the way home.

  “For that you must ask permission of our father, who rules the sky,” the first of the daughters answered. Great Sun had begun his journey toward evening and the daughters turned to track his shadow across the flowing grass. Eluneke had expected the king of the toads to leave her as his countrymen had, but he remained on his throne atop her shaman’s headdress and together they followed the nine magical women home.

  Mergen’s court buzzed with excitement, but the gur-khan paid little heed to the preparations going on around him. Prince Tayy had returned to the palace in the middle of the storm with marvels glittering in his eyes and would not say where he had gone or why he had abandoned his guardsmen. Bolghai hadn’t returned at all, nor had Bekter, whom he’d sent to spy on the girl Eluneke. And scouts had come in reporting the appearance of the Tinglut prince Daritai and his party approaching from the north, come to seal the peace with a bride for the old khan.

  It would matter little what carpet he sat on, or who waited to greet him, if he found no potential brides to choose from among the Qubal. Mergen had already sent General Jochi to find Princess Orda. Though she’d only seen seven summers, as the direct descendant of Chimbai-Khan and the sister of the khan-to-be she made the best choice for a long-term peace. And the old khan might be dead before they had to present her, at fourteen, to his tents. But the princess had spent all her short seasons fostered to a remote member of his brother’s clans. The general could not return with her before the Great Hunt in the morning.

  “What are you going to do if the old khan decides not to wait until the child has grown to a marrying age?” Lady Bortu paused in directing the servants to ask the question he’d been avoiding. If not the princess, they found themselves with few appropriate female relations to trade.

  “Perhaps he’d like a wife of his own age,” he taunted her. After the death of her husband, the Lady Bortu had freely taken lovers, but never again an ambitious husband. Now her opportunities were few and expensive.

  “They never do, old fools.” She scratched thoughtfully at a stray whisker that sprouted from her chin. “Yesugei’s daughter has gone out of reach—”

  He had thought Yesugei’s daughter might do. She was pretty enough, but her father had taken her far to the south. He knew what the khaness thought of that. “Send the woman away, not the general who serves you,” she’d complained. For Yesugei’s service in the war and before it to Chimbai, however, Mergen owed his old friend this opportunity to advance his status. The daughter might yet prove useful as a match to one of his own sons, to bind the new khan more closely to his old ulus. Now, however, he had to count her out of his calculations.

  “Eluneke,” he said.

  His mother pursed her lips, as much a denial of his wishes as she might make to a royal edict of the gur-khan. He wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t blind, however. It looked to him like his own mother had joined in a conspiracy with the Qubal shamans to make the girl one of their own. He feared they had bewitched the prince, whose shivering ague had wakened him again in the middle of the night. Though he declared himself well in the morning, Prince Tayyichiut’s complexion had lost its healthy color, and he spent too much time moping about his father’s shrine. The Lady Bortu wouldn’t allo
w her allies to murder her own grandson. Short of lethal, however, he would lay no wager on how far she would go to achieve her mystical ends.

  It only remained to discover whether his own son Bekter had joined in their conspiracy or had himself become their prisoner.

  “Qutula!” he called to his loyal son, who caught his eye with a hawklike darting gaze over his own preparations as Prince Tayyichiut put aside his muddy clothes for the stiffly embroidered silks of his court dress. He, too, must have heard the prince’s teeth-chattering moans in the night.

  Qutula left the prince and stood before him in the blue coat of a guardsman. He wore his sword at his side and carried a spear in a sheath slung over his back. Mergen hesitated to separate him from the heir, but who else could he trust to find Bekter without spreading his actions throughout the tent city?

  “My gur-khan,” he acknowledged the summons, bowing so low that the top of his pointed hat brushed the carpets.

  No one else, Mergen decided, and said, “I would have your brother’s songs to entertain our visitors, but I see him nowhere among our musicians and poets.”

  He smiled, but his son read his displeasure in the wrinkles of his brow and the creases between his eyes. Bekter had disappeared on a mission to find out more about Eluneke and her shaman teacher. Mergen wanted his delinquent spy brought in front of him to give an accounting both of his mission and of his absence.