Yesugei-Khan sat astride a mare the faded gold of autumn grass, watching from a low-rising swell in the rolling plain. All seemed peaceful in the afternoon light of Great and Little Suns, but looking down on the shadows that crossed the ger-tent palace he had served all his life, he knew that for a lie. Chahar had delivered the message from his dream and departed at speed while Yesugei had prepared his army and swept down on the tent city a day behind the scout.
Mergen was dead, according to the shaman Bolghai, who had appeared to Chahar in his dream: murdered by his blanket-son Qutula with the aid of Sechule, who had agreed to be his wife. Yesugei was surprised the news hadn’t shocked him more. Grief, yes, he felt a terrible pain at the loss of his khan. But when he thought of Sechule without the presence of her beauty to blind him, he realized that her treachery came as no surprise at all.
Jumal had predicted Qutula’s betrayal and the reports of his scouts had only confirmed the worst. But Yesugei-Khan hadn’t expected to find the Tinglut installed in the palace while the Qubal fought each other for a dais they no longer owned. His scouts had counted a shifting number of Tinglut warriors, no more than eight thousands in the tent city at any time and half of them sleeping or moving to and from the battlefield.
It was clear that the Tinglut were present as an occupying force, however, and not merely as an ally. Tinglut guarded the wagons that formed a protective barricade around the tent city, and Tinglut scouts moved back and forth from the ger-tent palace to the front. His spies sent to report on the conflict had not returned, so he was left to guess what part the Tinglut played in the Qubal civil war.
But time, he had determined, was running out. His captains were ready, and he raised his arm, ready to alert the drummers and the trumpeters to sound the attack. His vastly larger army, combined of his Qubal forces and former Uulgar prisoners, would fall on the Tinglut as Prince Daritai had likely done to the Qubal. When Yesugei had driven out that threat from the rear, he would . . .
“A message!” Otchigin, who had once been a princeling among the Uulgar, but who had given his devotion and the loyalty of his horde to the gur-khan, galloped toward him. “Delivered from the Qubal city under a white banner.” At his side came a rider whose beaten leather armor bore Tinglut decorations.
“I’m only interested in one message,” Yesugei informed the messenger. “If Prince Daritai wishes to see Great Sun rise tomorrow, he’ll return all that he has stolen from the Qubal. Including the dais of the khan.”
“The Lady Bortu sends me, not my lord Prince Daritai,” the messenger met Yesugei-Khan’s baleful glare with wilting courage. “I bring the words of the khaness to her general, the esteemed Yesugei, named khan over the Qubal-Uulgar by her own son Mergen, who has returned to his ancestors, may they grant him rebirth fitting his station.”
As greetings went, it was a mouthul, but it contained the necessary elements to confirm the sender. “Go on, then,” Yesugei instructed him. Mergen, after all, had failed to listen to Jumal, and now the gur-khan was dead.
“The Lady Bortu sends this message: ‘I would have my beloved general beside me. At my behest, Prince Daritai grants safe passage to Yesugei-Khan and his captains and a guard suited to his position. The prince would have me give you also his reminder, that he holds the Princess Orda in his hands and, I would hesitate to add, my own worthless life as well.’ ”
Insolent colt! Safe passage indeed, when Yesugei had twice as many warriors as the Tinglut. The Qubal were furthermore fighting for their home. But Prince Daritai had the princess and the old khaness, as he pointed out. He would doubtless cut their throats if Yesugei-Khan defied him.
If he were a different kind of man, Yesugei-Khan would feint an attack and let the Tinglut remove the last obstacles between himself and the dais. His own army would easily defeat the Tinglut. Too late, of course, for the prisoners, but it would add gur-khan to his title and put the grasslands in his hands, from the Shan Empire to the Cloud Country.
He was not that man, however, and dismissed the unworthy thought without even a twinge of desire. Mergen was dead, and the Tinglut prince would soon meet his own ancestors. Yesugei had no wish to follow in their ambitions or their fates. He would do as the khaness bid him, and spy out for himself how best to take back Mergen’s city for the Qubal.
The young Otchigin had remained at his side and Yesugei gave him instructions. “Gather five hundred warriors under my banner, divided equally between Uulgar and Qubal. Captain Jumal has command in my absence. We pay a visit.”
The tent city of the gur-khan had sadly diminished in the few weeks since he had left it. Even the most detailed reports couldn’t prepare him for the sight of Tinglut warriors sleeping in a tangle of weapons and leather half-armor in the tents of the Qubal army. They could not have prevented the chill that gripped his gut as he rode down the wide avenue to the ger-tent palace behind a thousand Tinglut warriors. Columns of Tinglut brandished their swords as he passed between them and fell in at the rear, cutting off any escape.
A light rain had begun to fall, but servants had set up a dais in front of the ger-tent palace. On it, he saw forty or more of the most aged of the nobles who had stayed to guide the gur-khan in his tent city. They sat with their fine clothes beaded with raindrops, their heads raised watch-fully to the Tinglut prince. At their center Daritai awaited him, a child in his arms.
A cut roughly stitched above his eye began to leak fresh red blood when he drew his brows together, leaving a lurid streak down one cheek. The prince looked hollowed out and weary as men do who have spent too long in a battle they have no hope of winning. Which was strange, Yesugei thought, because his supremacy over the Qubal city could not be doubted. He wondered what it was they fought out there where his scouts went but didn’t return. The Lady Bortu stood at the prince’s side but gave away no answers by glance or expression.
“Welcome, my lord General Yesugei,” Prince Daritai said, reducing him to his military title. “I understand from these men and women who know you that you are an honorable man.”
“I hope that I am,” Yesugei answered. He hadn’t expected the interview to take this direction. “Certainly I value loyalty to clan and ulus. As do my captains.” Let the Tinglut invader take that as a warning. If he survived, Yesugei would fight. If he didn’t, Jumal held his army and would avenge their deaths.
The child in Daritai’s arms lifted her head and he saw that she was indeed the Princess Orda, though she clung to the Tinglut prince’s shoulder as if she found all her comfort and safety in her captor.
Lady Bortu put out her arms, but the princess refused to go to her. “Bad man!” she insisted.
Yesugei was on the point of agreeing with the child when her grandmother chuckled.
“You have it backward, little lamb. Yesugei-Khan would rescue you from Prince Daritai.”
The little girl seemed to think that was very funny, but she still wouldn’t let go of the Tinglut’s coat. Even slaves sometimes grew to love a harsh master, he knew, for the times when the beatings did not come. How much more might a child love her captor for ending the chaos begun by his own conquering army?
Prince Daritai sighed and rolled his eyes. Then without ceremony he dropped a little kiss on the top of the child’s silky dark head. The princess snuggled in more comfortably, not in the least surprised by the kiss. “Is he going to rescue Tumbi?” she asked.
Yesugei didn’t know who Tumbi was, but Daritai’s eyes darkened with a pain he would have wished to keep private, it seemed.
“I hope so,” Daritai answered the princess. “But first, we have to rescue General Jochi and his army.”
It seemed unlikely that Jochi would bend his knee to the Tinglut. With the khan dead and Qutula in league with demons, however, Yesugei conceded he might not have had a choice until now. He had much to think about.
But the light rain had grown more persistent and the mother of two khans was getting wet. “Explanations can wait until we have allowed the old among us to get
in out of the rain,” Lady Bortu reminded the Tinglut prince tartly.
“As you wish, my lady khaness.” Even conquerors bowed to the will of old Bortu. “If you will join us, General?”
Daritai turned and entered the ger-tent palace. One by one the elder nobles entered behind him until only the Lady Bortu remained to watch Yesugei dismount with his five hundred behind him. No Tinglut warrior moved to stop her when she came to him and put her hand on his arm. “You had your differences with my son, but I know you loved him and the ulus he led.”
Yesugei nodded, accepting her words. “I won’t leave his mother in the hands of an enemy,” he promised, but she patted his sleeve as though he were a child and she wanted him to pay attention.
“The ancestors in their wisdom sometimes make plans for us that we wouldn’t have chosen,” she said. “We create nothing but grief for ourselves even to our children’s children when we set our will against Fate.”
“I will not believe that fate has meant the Qubal to bow to old Tinglut-Khan!” he muttered.
“Fate thinks long, my dear Yesugei. Fate thinks very long, and Tinglut-Khan is old already. Be patient. Listen. More than mortal men are moving the stones on this board. Our world may hang in the balance.”
The Lady Chaiujin. Yesugei bowed his head, accepting that the greater fight would come against the khan’s own blanket-son. Qutula rode with a horde of demons at his call. In the meantime, Daritai held the princess. He could do little to oppose the invader now, but he could wait, and watch, and move when the opportunity came. “I trust the Lady Bortu in all things,” he assured her. She would know when he should move against the Tinglut prince.
The khaness sighed, however, and patted his arm. “We’ll see,” she said, and led him to the feet of the conqueror.
Guided by the spirits of his parents, Eluneke had come for him. Prince Tayy took her hand and allowed her presence to push back his terror. He had awakened surrounded by hungry spirits, unable to defend himself from their horrible mouths. Then she was with him, driving off his tormentors with her horse-head stick. Suddenly he discovered hope in the midst of his despair, and a terrible sorrow.
“Has Qutula murdered you, too?” he asked Eluneke. How else had she come to him in the underworld where his cousin had trapped him?
“Not yet,” she promised, “but I don’t know how long I can stay here.” The toads on her costume added their opinions in urgent croaks and dainty bellows.
“Then go. Don’t risk yourself for me. I’m already dead.” He could move his head and his arms now and reached out to embrace the spirit of his mother. He hadn’t figured out how to stand yet, but he managed to sit up. Eleuneke was upside down, hanging in the night air above him. Closing his eyes helped a little with the disorientation, but he couldn’t keep them closed forever.
“I won’t leave without you.” Eluneke took his hand and gave it a tug. “But I’m not going to wait around for the hungry spirits to come back either.
Suddenly Tayy was moving, though he didn’t know how, or how to stop the soul-stuff that he leaked from a dozen tooth-shaped rents in his flesh.
“Gather it up in your hands and put it in your shirt,” Eluneke suggested.
At first his fingers ran through it as water through mist, but gradually he got the hang of it, letting his spirit tangle itself around his fingers and wiping them off on the inside of his shirt. His success gave him more confidence.
It seemed to have the same effect on Eluneke. “You’re looking a bit more substantial,” she said. “That’s a good first step, I think.”
The toads seemed to agree, but they were still lost.
“This way,” Chimbai said, and turned his mount around. Tayy, however, had no horse and couldn’t follow.
“Come with me.” Eluneke still had his hand, but she sat astride a pale horse. He climbed up behind her and they were off, across a landscape that would have turned his stomach, if he still had one, with its upside-down confusion. It wasn’t only the underworld that was making him feel strange, however.
“Something is happening to me. Someone is digging up my body!”
“I should hope so,” Eluneke replied tartly. “Bolghai was supposed to have started as soon as he was sure I had crossed into the underworld.”
That was good news, or he knew he ought to think so. Tayy hadn’t expected to be aware of his body after death, though. The implications made him queasy.
“Will it hurt much?” he asked. When she turned in her saddle with a question in her frown, he added, “The pyre, I mean when they burn me. I can take it—anything is better than being stuck here, turning into a hungry spirit myself—but I’d rather know . . .”
A little shiver passed through her, trembling against him. “I’d rather not find out.”
Prince Tayy dreaded the pain that awareness would bring when the clans burned his body, but he thought he might prefer it to this. Eluneke was going to abandon him to face the fire alone. He figured he should be grateful she hadn’t left him for the hungry spirits, but it hurt more than dying had.
She was still talking, though. It took a moment for him to catch up with what she was saying. “The visions are very clear that you’re going to be my husband. Since I don’t plan to marry a dead man, I have to get you back to your body.”
“Husband?”
“Ribbit,” a small toad answered from the basket on her head. “Of course,” Queen Toad said, with the toad version of a superior sniff. Tayy was surprised to discover that as a spirit he understood her.
Married. To Eluneke. Even death hadn’t changed that, it seemed. He ignored the toad’s condescension. Great Sun didn’t shine in the underworld, but suddenly it felt like sunrise on the plains above.
He thought the light that blossomed like the bright hibiscus of Pontus was only in his mind, but the khan and khaness had drawn up their horses with wary glances around them. Eluneke brought her pale horse to a halt as well. “What is it?” she asked. The red glow on the horizon snapped like a banner of fire, growing closer as they watched.
“The court of the demon-king, on the hunt,” Chimbai said. Spirits flew before the growing flame, screaming terror and despair in the windless darkness of the underworld.
Run. Tayy felt the message from the fleeing spirits and would have joined them in their race with the doom riding down on them, but Eluneke kneed her horse forward at a stately pace. His parents hesitated, fighting their own dread. Chimbai had lost none of his bravery in battle, however, and his khaness refused to leave her child. They brought their mounts around and followed the shaman-princess.
This was it, the third test that would complete her initiation. As she waited for the demon-king with his hunting party to reach them, Eluneke thought ruefully that she’d have preferred not to have the fate of worlds depend on this meeting. A minor demon she might have browbeat into revealing the secrets of the dead, and how to protect them from the hungry mouths of trapped spirits and the demons themselves, who hunted them for sport. She would have risked no lives but her own. Instead, she had to face down the king of the demons himself, with her own dead around her.
“Could be worse,” the queen of the toads muttered from her perch on Eluneke’s brow. “We are all of a similar rank, at least. Kings and princes all. No need to knock one’s head on the ground. I would not debase myself before these malevolent creatures.”
The khaness had heard and she added her own advice. “We must hold onto our dignity, but afford the king of the demons the respect due a monarch in his own realm.”
“I thought the king of the demons was dead.” Tayy’s voice rumbled in Eluneke’s ear, doing unaccountable things to her concentration. “I was there when King Llesho killed him.”
“For which the new king should show his gratitude, since he owes his present status to your war,” the queen of the toads agreed.
“He won’t, of course,” Chimbai warned them. “Any human who can kill a demon-king must be a threat to his successor.”
“But I didn’t do it,” Tayy objected in that rumble that turned all Eluneke’s insides to trembling flowers. “The god of Justice did, and he needed the help of a dragon.”
“Don’t tell the king that.” The queen of the toads did the little bobbing thing she reserved for repeating the obvious. “It’s always better to be a powerful enemy than to be the prey in a soul-hunt.”
Eluneke couldn’t disagree with that. She thought that was the last of it, but Tayy leaned forward to whisper in her ear, “Leave me if you must. Don’t lose yourself on my account.”
“Never.” Her own happiness mattered little in her answer, though she refused to imagine a life without him. All of her training had taught her that she could show no weakness when she faced the demon-king. He would feed on her fear if she let him. And he would know the value of the prince to the survival of the ulus, maybe of all the grasslands.
The prince fell quiet then, which was a good thing. They had crested a rise made of the insubstantial cloud-stuff beneath them, and saw ahead the hunting party of the king of the demons drawn up against them. The demons rode in a blazing nimbus of flame, orange and yellow at its edges and a deep blood red at its center. Mountainous figures like shadows rose over steeds whose legs stretched out thick as uprooted tree trunks. Each mount had many long necks spilling from its shoulders like a writhing nest of snakes. From each neck rose a head with beady red eyes peering over a snout full of long sharp teeth curled out in all directions to tear its prey with a shake of its head.
Demons, Eluneke knew, could take any shape they wanted, or no shape at all, so she was not surprised that among the court facing her not one bore the characteristics of any other. Serpents rode coiled in saddles, and monsters rode against them that made Nogai’s Bear look like a child’s toy. Some took on no substance at all, their malignant consciousness glowering out of eyes of flame. She had not prepared herself for the shape the king of the demons took, however, and had to bite down on her lip to keep from crying out when he rode forward to meet her on a tall black mare breathing fire from her blowing nostrils.
Lords of Grass and Thunder Page 50
