“Dead, of course, she can cause no trouble,” Sechule agreed. Then, cocking her head as if the thought had come after her agreement, she added, “Or we might use her as bait, to draw our prey?”
“Bait, indeed, dear friend.” Both women smiled as if they had come to one mind, though Sechule wondered why the demon—snake or woman—had stolen her best coats. As for the girl, she would need to speak with Qutula before she set her own plans in motion.
Perhaps, buried together in the furs of his bed, Mergen might confide in her and she would guide his thoughts about this girl. . . .
Tayy made his way down to the river with the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end, waiting for the arrow between the shoulder blades that never came. He missed Jumal, whom he trusted above all his companions, and wished he’d had time to talk about the oblique warning that had ended badly when Mergen sent him south with General Yesugei. For that matter, he wished for the general himself, who might have had advice about the danger that Jumal had seen where others hadn’t looked. He didn’t think Qutula would try to hurt him with foreigners in the camp, but he had lost faith in his cousin to thwart some other threat.
Fortunately, he didn’t expect any danger to himself this morning. But Eluneke’s absence worried him. Bolghai had expected her no sooner, of course. That didn’t comfort him any more than the Tinglut prince did, waiting to take her away to wed an enemy old in years as he was in past enmities. He thought that, if he had a way to do it, he might warn her to stay where she was, abiding among the gods who at least would present a fairer face than the husband politics intended for her.
Humans didn’t survive long away from the land and air of their own mortal world, however. She’d fare no better in the heavens, so he fought his way to the riverbank. The king of the toads had hidden behind this tree and there Tayy found the patch of moss where he and Eluneke had sat together, debating the life and death of the toads she needed to complete her shaman’s costume. Here he had watched her turn into her totem animal to negotiate her treaty with their king.
Bolghai would cover the other possibilities, but he thought she would come back here. She had taken the toads with her on her spirit journey to see the sky god, and she had come to know the prince here as well. If she lost her way, her heart would call her back to him in this place.
Dropping to the moss, he curled his legs to wait. Above him on the slope of the dell he heard a twig snap and knew Qutula was watching him. He’d have rather had the dogs for company, but they had gone with the pack for the hunt, where he should follow before the Tinglut took insult. Except for the sound of his guardsmen, who had not stayed where he left them but had fanned out in a circle with himself at their center, the wood remained unnaturally still. The toads were gone, and the frogs, silent. Even the river ran quietly. The whole world of gods and mortals held their breath, and superstitious fear crept over him, that Eluneke was waiting, too. She would not return, bringing with her the life of the forest, as long as his soldiers watched the place where she must enter the mortal realm.
“Go,” he called to Qutula, the heat of whose eyes seemed to burn a hole in the back of his head. “And take the rest of the guard. You can see there’s no one here but ourselves. Tell the gur-khan I’ll follow as soon as I can.”
“The gur-khan gave me different orders.” Qutula said in his ear, close enough for a knife, or a confidence.
“I know. Tell him that your disobedience is on my head.” Dropping his voice so that only his cousin could hear, Tayy added, “Mergen is at greater risk from our Tinglut guests than I may be among the trees. How could I forgive myself if something happened to my uncle while you sat in the branches watching the moss grow on my behalf?”
He could hear the hesitation in his cousin’s restless feet against the old fallen leaves. “She is shy at the best of times,” he added, though he didn’t think it was exactly true. Cautious, he guessed, and wary of a danger warned in a vision. But he wouldn’t share that with the cousin who had nearly strangled him in a competition of wrestling. “She’ll be disoriented after her long visit to the heavens. With so many people around, she may be afraid to return at all.”
“You’re probably right,” Qutula acceded agreeably enough. “I’ll send the rest away.” Mangkut had come out of the trees. His captain passed him an order with a hand signal to which he bowed in acknowledgment and turned to gather up the Durluken who had filtered down through the wood. “I’ll stay out of your way, but I won’t leave until you do. The gur-khan would have my head. So I’ll guard the path out of these woods—I can’t abandon you with only the river for your escape.”
“No!” Tayy wasn’t going to win this one. Even his Nirun, who had gathered with the Durluken, took Qutula’s side. But he wouldn’t give in without having his own way at least in part. “The khan needs you at his side.” They both knew the greater danger rode with Mergen now. Qutula wanted to be with the khan, Tayy could see indecision tearing at him in the restless searching of his eyes, stealing furtively to the grassland above.
“Leave Altan with the horses,” he urged his cousin. Tayy wanted someone he trusted completely to watch his back. Jumal had gone, so that left Altan, whom he trusted as much as anybody, though not with Eluneke’s secret. “Any threat would have to come from up above anyway.” Any but his cousin. If someone wanted to hurt him, they’d have to come down off the high plains and that meant passing his guardsman on the path above. And from there Altan wouldn’t hear or see anything that happened below.
Qutula brushed absently with his fingers at the jade on its thread around his throat. If his mother could give him a potion to effect the transformation, Qutula would have split himself in two, leaving his shade behind to watch for an opportunity against the prince while his physical presence lavished devotion on his father. Unfortunately, Sechule had no such power hiding in her cabinet. He couldn’t reject the prince’s plan without revealing his own secret plots, however, so he offered a compromise, “I’ll go if you let me leave Mangkut to stand guard.” Mangkut would watch with eyes pledged to Qutula and whisper in his ear what he saw of the prince and his forbidden princess.
Unsurprisingly, Altan objected, his hostile glance saying more about his distrust of the Durluken than his words, “I’ll stay, as my prince bids me.”
But Qutula disagreed, with an emphatic jerk of his chin in the direction of the waiting guardsmen. “You’re the prince’s lieutenant; who else can lead the Nirun in his absence?”
To object would have revealed too much. Tayy nodded, accepting the Durluken as his watchman on the path. It worried him that Qutula might not care if the prince knew his cousin had designs on his position. He went, which was the important thing for the here and now.
Like a weight lifting from his back, Tayy felt the eyes of the Durluken pull away, until he was alone with the river and his thoughts. They were grim as he sat there. When he had Eluneke back, he would figure out how to salvage his relationship with his uncle’s blanket-sons. First he had to get her back, which was proving more difficult than he’d hoped.
Once he would have confided in Bolghai, but the shaman answered only in riddles and seemed never to take him—or anything—seriously. Bortu was wise and she loved him, but he thought she loved the Qubal more. She didn’t know Eluneke anyway, and had never shown sympathy for putting emotions above political necessity. He couldn’t talk to her, and Mergen was the problem. Eluneke understood him, though, with all his hopes and fears. She wasn’t here, but he could talk to her, and maybe she would hear him in heaven and follow his voice home.
“I won’t let them take you away,” he said, the most important first. “We can run, or we can fight, but I won’t let them part us.”
“I won’t let them part us...”Out of her despair the voice rose from somewhere near Eluneke’s heart. A human voice, in danger somewhere, she remembered through the dim thoughts of her toad mind.
The sky god and his daughters had given her their secrets and then
abandoned her to find her own way home. She had searched and searched in human form and then in the shape of her totem animal, until she lost the notion even of what she was looking for. She thought that she had once been human, but what that meant had faded with the rainbows.
“Ribbit,” the king of the toads said from his throne in the basket that once had ridden on her head. She squatted low on her haunches and bobbed in submission to his rule. A fat and juicy fly hummed by and she caught him on her tongue, swallowing him down still beating his fragile wings against her gullet.
“You said we were fated to be together,” the voice continued. “You said I was your destiny, that we met because the spirits had sent you to save my life. I don’t care about that, Eluneke. If you’re lost, Qutula can strangle me or this Tinglut prince can pierce me with his arrow. What difference will it make?”
What difference? The fate of the ulus, that’s all, to say nothing of her own heart, which had begun to swell and burn as the words found the love she had hidden there. She had to get back—out flicked her tongue to catch a mosquito and pop, down her throat it went, still buzzing indignantly.
“You have to come back,” the voice continued, and this time it had a name, Prince Tayyichiut of the Qubal ulus, heir to the khanate. A face drifted across her toad mind, half-flesh, half-bone. “I’ve lost too much already to let you go as well.”
He sounded bitter, and she remembered the grimace of pain that had dragged his lips back off his teeth, the ache of old wounds he carried on a body too young to know such terrors. His parents had died of treachery, and he would follow them if she didn’t save him. The death’s-head vision left no doubt of that and suddenly her breakfast of insects sat uneasy on her toad belly. She had to go home, right now.
That had been her problem before, she realized. To go home, you had to have a home to go to. And she hadn’t, not in Toragana’s little tent among the clans that had fostered her with growing irritation. Her mysterious father’s wealth and power never materialized to provide her with a dowry or themselves with the price for keeping her. Like Prince Tayy she was an orphan, homeless except for the prince, who was home and life and destiny in one.
“This way!” she called to the king of the toads, who gathered his people in turn, all the hundreds who had climbed with Eluneke up the tree of lightning to the gods. And like a tangled vine she crawled back down the lilting sorrow of the prince’s voice.
Chapter Twenty-seven
“ CAN I COME with you?” Daritai closed his eyes against the importunate twelve-year-old voice at his back. The sounds of the camp preparing to ride faded into the background like the wind tangling the braids below his princely silver cap. He’d left the boy sleeping in his tent, had almost made a clean escape across the field where the horses and riders were gathering for the hunt, because he didn’t want to answer that question. No, he wanted to say. It’s too dangerous.
But Tumbinai, his eldest son, had hunted with the warriors for over a year now. To leave him behind would signal to his own men too many of his secret thoughts. There was more going on in the Qubal camp than Mergen-Khan let on. More, probably, than the gur-khan knew himself. How he might use to his advantage the unrest—the veiled hostilities—he had sensed in the tent city Daritai hadn’t quite figured, but he knew the boy was his own weakness. Mergen might mean the Tinglut clans no harm, but factions in the Qubal court might see in his youthful heir a weapon to use against him as a hostage, or worse. And yet, what better show of peace than his unblooded son at his side in the enemy camp?
He’d feel better about the whole mission if he could figure out why his father had insisted he bring the boy in the first place. Hulegu already held Daritai’s seat on the dais. He didn’t think Tinglut-Khan meant to wipe out his line to ensure the new heir’s position, but he couldn’t entirely dismiss the thought. If that were the case, then perhaps his father didn’t expect him to return at all, let alone with a treaty-bride.
The endless possibilities for betrayal on this mission almost paralyzed him in front of his own son, in the face of the simplest question—“Can I come with you?”—that he should have answered differently a hundred and more li back, in his own tents. He couldn’t answer as his heart wished now, however: Take half a hundred of my most trusted guardsmen and go home, as fast as horse may carry you, into the arms of your mother and stay there until I come for you, be it through storm and blood and murder. Whatever the game, he had to play it out to the end.
“Of course, you must attend me and make your courtesies to the foreign khan,” he agreed.
“Thank you, Father! I’ll get my horse . . .”
“Yes, go. Don’t let manners keep you!” He drew his lips back in a wooden smile at the familiar joke that Tumbinai, clever boy, might have seen through on another day. But on this morning, with the clear blue light of Great Sun filling his heart with anticipation, he turned his back on the bleeding anxiety in his father’s eyes, running to ready his mount with innocent joy.
“Stay with him,” he instructed a guard who followed at his elbow. “Make sure that no harm comes to him.”
“With my life, my prince.” The man asked no questions, not even with a furrowing of his brows. He bowed deeply to bind the vow and went after the young princeling.
Time to go. Daritai found his own mount readily enough and greeted his closest guardsmen who had accompanied him to victory and defeat through all the years of his youth and adulthood. Too soon to have saddled the horse after their conversation, Tumbinai joined them, nudging seasoned warriors out of his way to take his place at his father’s side. He was trying, Daritai noted, to retain a serious and regal mien, but in his excitement a grin kept escaping the boy’s control.
Let him survive, he begged the spirits as they rode to meet the Qubal gur-khan. The appointed place of that meeting, the shrine of the murdered Chimbai-Khan, now lay fractured by storms, an ill omen if ever he’d seen one. He doesn’t have to be a prince, he thought, just let him live to be a man.
Mergen waited until his scouts told him that Prince Daritai’s party had arrived at Chimbai’s shattered shrine before he led out his own hunters. Scouts had also reported sighting Jochi’s returning party in the distance. Their large central tent flew a banner in Chimbai’s colors to show that a member of the royal family resided within. He’d had success in finding the Princess Orda, then, for all the good it would do them now. Daritai didn’t want the girl and he wondered what success Prince Tayy had had in finding their next offering to the Tinglut-Khan for peace between them. If Tinglut had any sense he’d have taken the little girl to raise her in a tent friendly to his interests. But the old ram had other plans for his dotage.
The party he’d sent to bring back the hope of that compromise was approaching with the speed of a summer squall. Let the Tinglut prince wait, he thought, while he gathered his own younger generation about him: his heir and the young warriors who would form their own phalanx in defense of their prince. And the princess, his daughter, summoned from whatever shamanic ritual Bolghai had set her. He knew he ought to be hoping that Eluneke did nothing to dissuade the emissary. He found himself wishing instead that she might confound this Daritai with some shaman’s trick that sent the Tinglut prince home with his jaws agape and his face pale from terror. So much for peace.
But Qutula greeted him at the head of that party, with news he could have done without. “We saw no sign of the princess, though Prince Tayy seemed certain that she would come to him if he waited. He refused our company, however, afraid our presence would frighten the girl away, and said the steep slope of the dell and the Onga River itself provided all the protection he needed against any attack.”
Qutula must have seen the anger gathering in Mergen’s eyes, because he added in his own defense, “I convinced him to keep Mangkut on guard with the horses. And I confess I disobeyed his direct order, though I hoped to win your pardon for my crime. I left another guardsman from among my own cadre hidden within the trees.”
“Not yet.”
In her serpent form, the false Lady Chaiujin slithered through the grass. She didn’t think she needed Sechule’s help persuading Qutula to murder the girl. He’d already shown himself willing. That was before he knew her as his sister, of course, but family feeling hadn’t extended to his cousin, the prince. She didn’t think the girl would stir any greater love. It seemed he used his heart to course blood through his veins but for little else. In this he reminded her of a serpent. She felt the egg taking shape in her belly, and tingled in anticipation of the moment when her child would quicken in his shell. But not yet. Not quite. There were murders to perform, and a lover to cajole.
She thought of his breast and formed the desire to rest there, to sink her inky teeth into his flesh and hold fast to him with his desire matched to hers. In her demon thoughts she made her desire real.
Qutula sidled his horse in between the khan and his age-mates who guarded him. Restlessly his hand went to his breast, returned to his side under his control again. The lady of his mysterious nights burned her impatient message over his heart again and he welcomed the pain as a reminder of the deeds he had promised her. Soon, soon.
Chahar, Bolghai’s son and the warrior who rode closest to the khan in Jochi’s absence, made room for him, but the guardsman’s expression was troubled. He had grown up in a shaman’s tent and had a subtlety that bore careful watching. Killing, if necessary, though a murder so close to the khan would heighten the vigilance of his guards. Letting no part of his thoughts show, Qutula shrugged a shoulder to disavow his next words. “The prince thinks she’ll come to his call if there aren’t a lot of people around to frighten her.”
Lords of Grass and Thunder Page 32
