Lords of Grass and Thunder

by Curt Benjamin

  He found a place protected in shadows cast by an outcrop of rock and filled with flowers that had lost their color in the moonlight. There he dismounted and laid his coat on the ground. This time, he knew she would come and threw himself down on his coat to wait with the smell of the flowers in his nose and the pleasure of a plan well begun coursing through his veins. He had stripped the prince of his protectors; soon Tayyichiut, son of Chimbai, would be dead. With his rivals out of the way, the khan would look to his son for an heir. The thought warmed him and, in spite of his intentions, he slept.

  It was no surprise that Toragana led him to her shaman’s tent. They’d left the girl, his sister it now seemed, at Altan’s funeral pyre. She couldn’t have arrived before them except in her totem form, but Toragana assured him she wouldn’t take that route. “It’s much too soon,” she said as they passed under the watchful eye of the stuffed raven over her door. “The risk is too great that she would lose her way.”

  By that, he thought she meant that the girl might turn into a toad and stay that way, permanently. There were other hazards to that calling as well, however. Only the initiate, and the occasional foreign god, might know the mystery of dream travel, the nether region between their world and the next by which the shaman moved through the mortal realm. He’d never heard of a shaman who entered the dreamscape and failed to return, but he supposed it could happen. As a poet, the tragic possibilities captured his imagination. As a brother, however, the same images made him shudder with dread. Sensibly, he figured Eluneke would walk home.

  “I didn’t know she was my sister the last time we met,” he reminded the shamaness. He’d thought her a threat to the prince’s standing, if not his life. Now he didn’t know what to think. “I’d like to talk to her again, now that I know we’re related.”

  “And you will.” She took the lute from his back and leaned it against her worktable, then drew him to her bed of feathers and furs, her mind and her nimble fingers focused on the ties of his coats. “But not tonight.”

  She was with Prince Tayyichiut, he guessed, and figured he ought to be more worried about that. Mergen needed them both for marriages of state and he’d charged Bekter with keeping an eye on her. But Altan was dead and Duwa a slave. Things seemed to be falling apart and he knew enough of legendry and the old songs to recognize the signs of disaster that followed when kings set their own will above the will of the gods. He would never accuse his father of hubris, but an excess of caution could prove just as costly.

  Toragana had taken off his coat and was working on his breeches. Politely he had begun to slide her shaman’s robes from her shoulders, but his heart wasn’t in it. Tonight he felt too sad for the pleasures of her flesh.

  She must have read his thoughts in the hesitation of his fingers, because she stilled him with her hands over his heart. “My spirit is heavy with many sorrows, too,” she told him, “but if you would do me the kindness, I would wish to be held a little before you go.”

  He hadn’t known until she asked, but it was exactly what he needed as well. He told her so with a kiss and lute-string roughened fingertips upon her skin. Lying face-to-face, with arms and legs entwined, her forehead resting lightly on his brow, he felt the tightness of his grief ease a little bit. When his fingers began to relearn the map of her skin, she didn’t complain, but stroked his own more coarsely drawn country with her lips. They didn’t laugh the way they had before; desire became a drowning thing, with sorrow left on the shore like old clothes for a little while. Not all magic, he realized, required a potion or a spell.

  “ ysonshavegone to the beds of strangers, my only daughter to the heir. All that I’ve worked for is coming undone, Sechule, and once again I find myself back here with you.”

  He had followed her blindly to the tent she shared with her children for no reasons of secrecy, but out of blind need where she led him. It was smaller than he remembered, two lattices crowded with bedding and the worktable where she mixed her herbs, but with few of the luxuries he should have provided for the mother of his sons. Chimbai had wanted no claims on his younger brother, but Chimbai was long dead now, back the other side of a war they had fought and won without him. And without him they must go on, though the world seemed to fall like the ash of Altan’s pyre around them. Perhaps his mother had been right all along.

  As if reading his mind, Sechule answered the melancholy litany of his thoughts, both spoken and not, with an old challenge lightly laid. “Perhaps you should take that as a sign from the gods and marry me.”

  She stroked his face, her eyes dark with invitation. Her lips fell lightly apart, drawing his attention to the rush of her heated breath and he thought, Yes, perhaps it’s right this time. He knew it was a weakness, to forget the fights and her ambition. But Mergen’s body clenched with the promise of solace in eyes that seemed to swallow him whole. He could have her beside him for all the nights of his life, desire quenched with no greater effort than to reach his arm across the blankets . . .

  “Yes,” he said, and met her light tone though it cost him, because the sorrow was still there like a blight on his heart. “Perhaps, when the prince has been made khan, and I have stepped down to live out my days as a well-loved adviser, we can marry and grow old together with our sons and our grandchildren around us.”

  It wasn’t what she wanted to hear, and he couldn’t figure out what he’d done now. She’d known, from the beginning . . . she couldn’t have thought . . . He would give her all he was and all he had to himself alone, but she must know that she would never be khaness, her sons would never follow him on the dais. He owed that duty to his brother.

  That she had not known, or had not accepted this simple fact, showed itself in the cooling of her ardor.

  “Don’t think about it now.” She gave a little rueful laugh, as though she had come out the butt of some cruel joke, but her fingers paused only a moment as they stripped him of his sword and dagger, and his clothes. “Who knows what the future will bring.”

  The way she said it, he thought perhaps the rumors about witchcraft had more truth in them than he had ever believed. What do you know? “Can you read my fortune in the bottom of a cup, then, and promise me a wife with skin as soft as butter, with hair like the mane of a fine black mare?”

  “And fine strong sons to give offerings to the spirits for your soul.”

  With Altan lately dead he thought the promise of sons to see him on his own way to the ancestors less than tactful. But she drew him down into her soft bed and welcomed him into her arms with an indulgent smile. “Think later,” she admonished him. “You can be gur-khan in the morning. Tonight, you are my intended husband and entitled to an accounting of what I bring to this match.”

  She meant her body, and he took possession like a husband while he planned the campaign to capture her soul, which remained remote and out of his reach. As he fell asleep between her breasts, he thought perhaps when they had married, she would open that door to him as well.

  By Great Moon Lun, Eluneke could see the Qubal heading back to the tent city of the khan. Bathed in that stark white light, the pyre of the prince’s follower, Altan, showed stark and black. The descent into the little dell where the Onga River ran, however, became a descent into moist and earthy darkness.

  Taking his hand, Eluneke led the prince carefully down into the pitchy night that wrapped the trees. “Not magic,” she assured him as all the details of leaf and tree disappeared into the darkness.

  He knew that, of course. “I wish it were,” he answered, and she heard the pain of his loss and the knowledge of more to come tighten the words in his throat. “We could hide down here in the dark until it was all over up there.”

  She understood the sentiment, but there was no hiding from fate. Before her mystical eye, his face was losing its flesh, the beautiful young warrior she loved fading to flensed bone as each step took them deeper into the darkness. Above, a dry leaf rustled with a purposeful tread. They had picked up a guard, possibly an a
ssassin, but she didn’t think so yet. Qutula was occupied elsewhere. Tears welled in her eyes, but she didn’t stop. Didn’t need to warn the prince either. Though he divided most of his attention between the treacherous climb and her face, he stole a glance back at the moving shadows where the sound had come from.

  “I don’t think Qutula can afford to lose another man yet,” he said, which summed up her own thoughts on their unwanted companion.

  Between them, they knew the lay of the land along the river better than any of Qutula’s Durluken, or the Nirun. The spy, or guardsman, came no further as Eluneke and her prince made their way by touch among the dark and looming trees. Finally, she knew by the soft press of moss underfoot that they had come to their own special place. Tayy folded his legs and sat with his back against the tree sacred to King Toad. Eluneke followed him, pensively resting her chin on the arms crossed over her knee.

  “So are you a real shaman now?” he asked, “I saw a lot in my travels, but never someone climbing lightning before.” He’d seen wonders, however, and this one, she recognized, had frightened him only for her sake.

  “Not yet,” she answered glumly. Eluneke still had one more task to complete. She had to travel to the underworld and return with the knowledge to lead the dying to their ancestors. This was the last, most terrifying step: to travel with the dead and learn their secrets, and return unscathed. And she would have to cajole the soul of the prince back to the living with her.

  “I am committed to saving you,” she said, knowing the trap his mind was caught in.

  “I don’t know how,” he answered glumly. “My uncle won’t see the danger, or if he does, refuses to believe his eyes.”

  Eluneke winced at the mention of the gur-khan who was, it seemed, also her father.

  “I’m sorry.” He hurried to apologize for hurting her with the reminder, but she didn’t shy away from the thought.

  “It doesn’t matter what he wants, you know, or who he would see us marry to secure the peace. You’re my husband by the gods’ light.” Her visions had made that clear enough, so she hadn’t given much thought to his feelings in the matter. Hadn’t given much thought to her own feelings come to that. She’d accepted it as she accepted that her hair was thick and her hands square and more useful than pretty.

  He was a prince, which was nice, but he was about to die, which wasn’t. She had felt herself drawn to him at first sight, but hadn’t expected the way her body went still and watchful whenever he came into view or the unthinking way she moved to meet him with all her nerves tingling when he looked back at her. From that first vision in the doorway of Toragana’s tent, however, she had known the urge to rage and weep at the sightless skull that came between his face and her eyes. If she couldn’t save him, how could he be her husband? If she couldn’t save him, how could she live without him?

  Her husband. He’d accepted her from the first and had joined in her loving conspiracy to save him without understanding why she was worth fighting his uncle for. They still had to work around the whole dead thing, though.

  “Then we have to convince my uncle, your father, very quickly, before the gods have made you a widow.”

  “Don’t joke about it.” She hadn’t meant to sound so angry, but she wouldn’t hear him give up. If she had to follow him onto his pyre and drag him away from the gods by the force of her arms and her will, she wouldn’t let him go.

  “Sorry.” He ducked his head to hide his confusion and misery, but she sensed it rolling off his skin in waves. “Altan is already dead. I should be glad my uncle sent Jumal away, or he’d be dead now, too, I think. So I have to ask myself which is best: do I fight my cousin, and my uncle, too, if necessary to stay alive, knowing that it will cost the lives closest to me and that I will die anyway? Or do I give Qutula the opportunity he’s waiting for and end it quickly, without the loss of all the innocent life that stands between us.”

  “Don’t say it! Don’t give up, don’t ever give up!” She took his face between her hands, as if she could impress on him the absolute necessity that he fight even a losing battle against his cousin. “The gods gave you to me, and you will fight until I give you permission to stop, which will be never. If the task were truly impossible, they would not have promised happiness at the end of it.” Fate had promised her a husband. The happiness part she came up with on her own, but she was determined to make that happen as well.

  “It doesn’t have to be impossible,” her prince corrected her, his own hands trailing fingers through her maiden’s loose tresses. “It need only be unacceptable.” He kissed her with tears and fierce longing and she knew she would be his downfall and wept.

  “Not for me,” she berated him. Her knees tucked under her chin, she rocked inconsolably. “Do not trade your life for mine, I forbid it!”

  “You have taken to the role of princess with remarkable speed, but I am still the heir.” He joked gently, brushing her hair back and wiping the damp from her cheeks. “I give the orders here, and I command that you stop crying this instant. I’m not dead yet, and until it happens, we won’t know how we are meant to stop it.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to be a biddable wife.” She wrinkled her nose at him to show her displeasure at his lordly manners but brought the argument back to the urgent promise she required of him. “But I’ll make this bargain with you. If you don’t make any stupid deals with your cousin, I’ll try to be an obedient wife.”

  He tilted his head so that it rested against the tree at his back and looked up into the graying sky. “No you won’t,” he said with a little smile on his face.

  “Probably not,” she agreed. “But I’ll do anything I can for you if you just ask.”

  “I know.” He took her hand in his, kissed her knuckles with the breath of a sigh. “Sit with me,” he asked, “until I have to go.”

  “Always,” she said, meaning: “I will always be here for you, no matter what.”

  He seemed to understand all that and more that she hadn’t even put into thoughts yet. He didn’t exactly relax, but he let her carry some of his burden. Between them, they found some peace in that. That peace seemed short-lived. Nearer at hand than any assassin should have been able to approach unheard, the leaves shifted lightly.

  “Ribbit.”

  With the keen insight of the shaman, Eluneke saw that King Totad, with his crown of leaves, had crept down his tree and settled nearby, contemplating them with kingly measure. It was too dark for the prince’s eyes to make out the shape, but he had heard—Eluneke saw the shifting of shadows as he turned his head toward the voice in the dark.

  “What did he say?” Tayy asked, “Is it King Toad?”

  “Ribbit,” King Toad repeated.

  “Yes, it is.” Her time with the sky god and his daughters had taught her many things, and among them the languages of the animals, so she understood that he was offering his own cautious support.

  “His majesty says he’s had enough of adventures but will defend this place, his own realm, with all the power of the toads.”

  “Ribbit!” King Toad swelled his throat, which flushed with a florid warning of the poison exudations of his skin.

  “We are welcome here, to share in the peace of the mossy trees under his protection.” Eluneke translated, and again, when the prince asked, “Thank him for me, please,” with the formality of one royal to another.

  “Croak!”

  With a bob of his head to acknowledge the courtesy, the king of the toads withdrew, leaving them with the illusion of privacy, though Eluneke knew more than one set of toady eyes were watching them. They were her totem, however, closer to her in some ways than her own skin. In her totem form, they were her own skin. So she rested under the prince’s arm, her head leaning on his shoulder, and said nothing of Great Moon Lun chasing her brothers from the sky.

  Qutula woke with the smell of moist earth in his nose. By the drugged heaviness of his limbs he guessed that he had slept for some time. The stars that had glitte
red in a clear sky above the rocks where he’d lain his coats had vanished, but the dark remained, more complete than any night he had ever known. His coats were gone, and so were his clothes and his weapons, but beneath him the softness of silk cradled his naked back. No breeze stirred. He lay alone, surrounded by stone, with only the fragment of jade from the battlefield sprawled by its golden thread across his heart to cover him.

  “What?” He tried to rise; the question had escaped his sleep fogged senses. With a moment to orient himself, he knew the truth. Only his lady of mystery could have found him in the shadows cast by the tumbled stones, and only she would have troubled to remove his hunting clothes. But where had she brought him? And where had she gone?

  A cool, firm hand, lightly cupped over the jade talisman, pressed him back, then lifted, leaving him bereft even of her shadow. He didn’t try to rise again; didn’t think he could, so there wasn’t much point in trying except to make a fool of himself.

  “Where are my clothes?”

  “Safe.” He’d never disrobed in her presence before. It felt dangerous to do so now and his body tightened with the anticipation.

  He heard a sound like the snapping of fingers, smelled sulfur, and a lamp leaped to life, its flame quickly hidden behind its shutters. By the smothered light he saw that she had set it on an outcrop of stone that roughened the otherwise smooth curve of a low-roofed cavern. Underground. How had she brought him there? Beneath him lay his mother’s best coat—he recognized it in the half-light—and about him other items of silk or gold set with precious stones, that he recognized from the camp. Then his lady crossed into the light.