Lords of Grass and Thunder

by Curt Benjamin

  “Blood!” he heard, curses and prayers and weeping. Sechule was weeping. “I can do nothing but make him comfortable now,” she said, “I am too late. The evil spirits have chewed his vitals to the spine. I do not see that he can live so!”

  “My lady,” he heard the sounds of comfort given to his murderess while he vomited more blood and the dark red pool spread across his bed.

  “My son, my son,” his mother had reclaimed her place at his head while the woman he would have made his wife lay weeping in the arms of the son who had put her deadly potion in his drink.

  “Is he in much pain?” Jochi asked, and Sechule answered, “None at all.”

  It was a lie, as all her words were lies. He thought he must have died of the pain, and that it had followed him into hell itself to chew through skin and bone. Blood gushed unchecked from his body. He was cold, very cold, and desperate to say something that would unmask his murderers. But the spirits of the dead, the lost, the voracious spirits began to hover and among them loomed one living face of comfort.

  “Mother,” he said, a whisper, barely a breath, for by then he had little breath left him. Then he had none.

  His mother rocked with his head cradled in her arms, but he didn’t feel it. Her wails of grief rose up to heaven, but he heard them only as a distant, passing breeze.

  “Well, brother,” Chimbai said, waiting for him in the pure white light of Great Moon Lun spilling through the smoke hole. “Between us, we are singularly bad at choosing women.”

  “It could’ve been different.” The pain was gone now, and the filth and the blood. He walked beside his brother through the thick grass scattered with wildflowers in the sunlight.

  “Maybe,” Chimbai made it known by his tone that he conceded not an inch. “But a woman who would hand a man his bleeding heart and grind his guts to ribbons in the bargain because he didn’t also give her an ulus for a wedding gift is no great loss.”

  Like his brother, Mergen refused to concede the point. “So, I suppose if you are here, I must be dead. Have you come to show me the way to our ancestors?”

  “Dead, yes, I’m afraid so.” In spite of this momentous pronouncement, Chimbai seemed preoccupied. “As for accompanying you to the ancestors, not yet, I’m afraid. I have work to do here first, to secure the ulus. Soon, though.”

  Mergen nodded, accepting that answer. It had been on his mind as well. “Can I help?” Even as he asked, a shiver passed through him, carrying a memory of unspeakable pain.

  Chimbai noticed. “Not yet,” he said. “Not this fight.”

  Another nod. In life Mergen had always followed his brother’s lead, and he did so now, when Chimbai-Khan released him to his death in peace. “Later, then.”

  They lingered, perched on an outcrop of glittering rock as morning turned into afternoon and the pyre was gathered and lit. Sechule wept. Qutula let a tear escape his eye as well, but Prince Tayy showed none of his grief or despair on his face. Mergen saw his nephew’s emotions like a garment that he wore, from the darkest to the brightest. He thought to ask if the boy would be all right, but already his attachment to the mortal world was fading. Coming toward him through the rising smoke, he recognized his father then, and Otchigin. His grandmother, and all the friends and ancestors who had come before him, beckoned.

  “Go on,” Chimbai said. “We’ll be along soon.” He laid his hand on the head of a red hound Mergen recognized as one of Tayy’s.

  “Oh,” he said, and smiled. “I see, now.”

  An unearthly hand reached out to him and he took it, following the smoke of his pyre to the spirits of his beloved dead.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  THOUGH HE had traveled far in his totem form looking for the girl, Bolghai felt the tremor in the ether that meant a death of some consequence in the mortal world. Sniffing the air, he found in that death the smell of a life familiar to him. The gur-khan, he realized, and in terrible pain. A proper shaman, he had made a bond of service with the souls of those he treated on a regular basis and so he winced in sympathetic pain as the gnawing agony resonated in his own gut. Poison.

  He should have been there. Guilt crushed his tiny stoat form, adding to the grief he felt at the loss. Mergen had the wisdom and passion to fight and win a war his brother had handed him, but even the Lady Chaiujin’s murders had not imbued him with the necessary suspicion to keep him alive in his own court. As when his own son died fighting the stone giants, Bolghai curled his little paws around his black button nose and wept.

  Not for long, however.

  “What is it? What is it?” A raven popped out of the dreamscape and hopped nervously on the grass for a moment before it shook out its feathers and turned into Toragana, the shamaness.

  “I felt something, like a wave of darkness passing through the dreamscape,” she said, preening her shaman’s robes. “What happened?”

  Bolghai dried his little stoat eyes and shook himself all over, setting the skins on his collar flying in a shivering dance. Human again, he told her what he knew. “The gur-khan has died,” he said, “Murdered, I believe, by his own kin. We have to get back.”

  “Of course,” she said. “The prince will be alone now, and in danger.”

  He hadn’t mentioned which relation had murdered the khan, but Toragana, he realized, had not for a moment suspected Prince Tayy, who would have profited most from the death of his uncle.

  “Does he have anyone near him he can trust?” she asked, her mind traveling the same path that his own had taken. Tayy had much to gain with Mergen gone, but the gur-khan had planned to step down in favor of his heir anyway. The prince had only to wait. But others who might covet the dais had only eliminated one obstacle to be faced with another in the prince himself. Which made him the next target.

  “Jochi.” He hesitated, certain of his loyalty, but said, “The general still suffers the loss of his son, and harbors in his own house the murderer, a slave with ties to Qutula.”

  “You think Qutula murdered his own father, then.” She seemed unsurprised and added, “I’m sure he has taken Eluneke; he’s seen her for a threat since the first time he laid eyes on her.”

  “I think it most likely, and that he had the help of his mother, the Lady Sechule.” The searing pain he had sensed most surely had come from a poison, and he knew the lady for an expert in the use of herbs both wholesome and less so. “I wish Mergen hadn’t sent Chahar on his errand to Yesugei-Khan,” he mused. Chahar had his father’s talents, if not his father’s inclination to the shaman trade. But with the understanding that comes of looking backward on the path that has led to crisis, Bolghai knew that not even his own skills had given him the foresight to protect the gur-khan. Chahar hadn’t seen the threat any more than Jochi or Bolghai himself. If not all, then no one of them could be blamed for not preventing it.

  “I have to go,” he said, shaking off his own regrets.

  “Do you need me?” Toragana asked, but Bolghai shook his head. “Not now, alas. Find the girl if you can. The prince will need her.”

  “And for her own sake.”

  “For her own sake.” He bowed his head, humbled by the reminder that the girl’s life, too, hung in the balance. Then, with a twitch and a twist, he took his stoat form and followed the scent of grief.

  Softly, Eluneke moaned to herself. Caught between her human form and her totem, she shunned the light. She had no need to avoid Qutula’s guardsmen, however. The most forward of them, and Qutula himself, had been absent all morning. Those who remained kept a superstitious distance, though she heard them muttering to themselves about smothering the monster with stones. Caught as she was by the demon in the talisman, she had only the shadows to protect her.

  Smoke drifted on the air, and in it the smell of burning flesh. Another pyre, which would explain the absence of Qutula and Mangkut and the others closest to her half brother. She wondered who had died now and prayed to the gods of the sky and her ancestors below that Prince Tayy still lived. She knew Qutula wa
nted him dead but thought she would know if the prince had passed from this world to the next. Her heart must wither like old fruit if he died.

  The guardsmen who remained had fallen silent as the smoke thickened. Their unease penetrated even the mind-numbing horror of her state. Rescue became a dim hope. If Tayy still lived, Qutula would use her against him. If Qutula had succeeded in murdering him and had taken his place on the dais, then what? How could he return her to the gur-khan knowing what she did about his part in her abduction? He must realize that if she lived, she would devote her life to exposing him for a traitor.

  Escape seemed her only option, but she had no success in engaging the demon of the talisman again. Even her efforts to touch the jade fragment with its strange coiled ruen had failed. Until she was free of its evil influence, she didn’t dare leave the protection of the little tent. In her present form, she could expect only murder at the hands of any who saw her.

  In despair, she dropped her misshapen head into her webbed fingers and wept.

  “Ribbit!” A little toad slipped under the tent felt and cocked his curious head at her.

  “Ribbit!” Another, red and poisonous, joined him, and another, larger and green, and another . . . One, missing a toe lost in a fight with a weasel, she recognized from her visit to the sky god and his daughters. She was a member of King Toad’s court and a leader in his harem.

  “Ribbit!” King Toad’s wife said.

  The demon made it difficult for Eluneke to practice her arts, but caught as she was half in toad form, she understood the Queen Toad:

  “This is unseemly, girl! Last night your mind-cries tumbled into chaos a court concert to the moon. And now, sent by my husband to demand an explanation, I find you neither toad not girl, nor any part of your spirit animating the realm of mortal creatures. What do you mean by it?”

  “I am held prisoner by this talisman.” Eluneke sat up and dried her eyes. She gestured at the jade fragment tied around her neck by the gold thread. “It holds me in this tent and, I think, must hide my presence from my teachers. Otherwise they would have rescued me by now.”

  “So take it off,” Queen Toad instructed her with some asperity. She had accompanied Eluneke on her trip to the sky god’s kingdom, however, and possessing great courage herself, she had recognized the same in the young shamaness. She waited now for an explanation free of any shame to the girl.

  “I tried.” Eluneke strove to keep the doleful whine out of her voice, but Queen Toad wrinkled her upper lip in distaste anyway. Eluneke took a deep breath to settle her fears and began again, offering as unemotionally as she could her attempt to escape first in human and then in toad form. The consequences of her efforts were clear in her round, bulging eyes and the green of her wide-stretched lips.

  “I see,” said Queen Toad, bobbing her head to show that she both understood and sympathized with Eluneke’s plight. “I would bite through the thread that holds you prisoner to this thing, but as you can see, I have no teeth.”

  “Until I am free of this demon, neither have I,” Eluneke mourned. “And while I sit here, neither human nor toad but some monstrous thing between them both, Qutula plots against the prince. He will murder him. He may already have done so.”

  Queen Toad had demanded courage of her, and she willingly gave it. She feared little for herself, but she couldn’t stop the tears that leaked from her toady eyes when she thought of the danger to Prince Tayyichiut. A disgusted sigh let her know that this display of emotion had not gone unnoticed, but Queen Toad refrained from a more pointed rebuke.

  “Can’t you take it off over your head?”

  Eluneke showed how her hands slipped past the talisman and its thread, leaving crusting marks on her own green skin.

  “Lean over,” Queen Toad demanded. But Mangkut had tied the cord too tightly around her throat. Human fingers might have worked it off, but the toads had neither the strength nor the dexterity to free the princess.

  “It would seem we are at an impasse,” Queen Toad observed, “since those creatures with the teeth to chew through the golden thread seldom stop to converse with the toads. They are more likely to eat us first and wonder not at all if there might have been a question worth asking.”

  That was true. Mostly. A shaman would have the power to understand the toads, though. “If the king of the toads would send an emissary to my teacher’s tent, she would listen,” Eluneke suggested. The toads had given her hope for the first time in a very long time.

  “The Lady Toragana is a good shamaness,” the Queen Toad agreed, “But in the realm of animals she flies the skies as a raven. Like the toads, she has no teeth to bite the thread.”

  “And like the toads,” Eluneke added glumly, “she would quickly become the prey of any creature with teeth sharp enough to be of help.”

  “I’m sorry,” Queen Toad sympathized.

  Eluneke bobbed her head in acknowledgment. A fat black fly flew near and her long tongue flicked out, snatched it out of the air and flung it still buzzing down her too human throat. “Ugh,” she said, and clapped both hands to her mouth. “I can’t believe I did that!” she mumbled between her webbed fingers.

  “Well, if you didn’t want it, you could have left it for your betters,” Queen Toad croaked and slapped one webbed foot indignantly. “But it is clear that something must be done quickly.”

  “I told you that.”

  Queen Toad glared at her but otherwise kept her thoughts to herself.

  “Of course! Bolghai! He’s the most powerful shaman I know.” Why hadn’t Eluneke thought of him before? “In his totem form he travels as a stoat, so his teeth will be sharp and strong. If you can’t find him, you can ask Toragana to look in the dream realm.”

  Queen Toad quickly instructed minions to look for Bolghai, and others to find Toragana.

  “But warn them not to tell Prince Tayy,” Eluneke begged, “Qutula stole me to use as bait to draw the prince into his trap and murder him.”

  Adding this to her instructions, Queen Toad sent the toads out onto the grasslands to search for the shamans and deliver her messages. Then, with another haughty croak she slipped away under the tent cloths and Eluneke was alone again.

  The fires of the funeral pyre had fallen to angry embers the color of the cloud-choked sky. In the distance, a light rain had begun to fall, a drape of silver beads that shone in the low red light of Great Sun on the horizon. Great Sun would rise again in the morning, of course, just as Mergen’s spirit might return some day in another form. But the gur-khan, ruler of the Qubal and the Uulgar people, was gone forever.

  “Call the chieftains together.” Tayy might have phrased his request to his uncle’s general more diplomatically, but he wasn’t feeling diplomatic at the moment. His cousin had vanished, taking with him his Durluken and a greater number of Mergen’s troops than he’d expected.

  “They won’t come,” the general advised him. “Mergen sent for Yesugei before he died and the chieftains won’t move until he returns.” Jochi hesitated, and Tayy cast a piercing glance at the unhappy man walking at his side, silently urging him to continue.

  “You know I have no love for the gur-khan’s blanket-son or his Durluken.” A Durluken had murdered his own son, Altan. “But we have no proof against him.”

  “And the army?”

  “Yours. They would follow the Warrior Prince to the underworld itself and fight demons in your name if you asked them to.”

  “With any luck we can limit the fighting to the mortal realm, though I wouldn’t be surprised to find an old enemy of my family mixed up in it somewhere.”

  “The Lady Chaiujin?”

  Tayy shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe I’m just trying to justify my own failure. He has Eluneke, I know it. I just can’t figure out how he’s hidden her from all our searches.”

  “If Bolghai can’t find her, you may be right.”

  Hearing it didn’t make Tayy feel any better. Saner, maybe, but Mergen was still dead, Eluneke still missing, and
he still didn’t have a clue. “I was a fool to think it was a game,” he admitted. “But I know better now. I should have died last night. Mergen drank my cup.”

  “I wondered.” Jochi didn’t look the least surprised. “I think at the end the gur-khan hoped by marrying Sechule to bring his sons to feed more tamely from his hand. Bekter, of course, has always been content with his place at court, but his brother yearned for his father’s recognition. Or so Mergen believed.”

  “It seems he preferred his father’s place on the dais, however much he shortened Mergen’s life to get it.” His uncle’s announcement that he would marry Sechule had come as a shock, but Tayy would have given his place to his cousin gladly before letting this happen.

  “The gur-khan never intended to name Qutula his heir,” Jochi said. “He would have married Sechule only after the chieftains had named you gur-khan.”

  The general stared into the setting sun and Tayy gave him the time he needed to put his thoughts together. “In the end, I think you may be right that Qutula meant for you to die and not his father. Mergen’s death brings him no nearer his goal. Sechule, however—”

  “Could have saved him, but didn’t because he wouldn’t name her khaness?” Tayy nodded, finishing the general’s thought. “I think you’re right. I want her found—who knows what mischief she has in mind.” He didn’t say he wanted her dead, but Jochi would know it. As for Qutula, “Tell all our men he must be taken alive, along with his closest minions. Until we find Eluneke.”

  “We won’t fail you.” Jochi paused, as if pondering the wisdom of what he would say next. “Like those who rode away with him, some of the chieftains will side with Qutula against you.” He cast a nervous glance to see what Tayy would do.

  “Not everyone liked my father,” Tayy agreed. “Some will think the succession should have gone to Mergen’s line when he became the khan.”