Lords of Grass and Thunder

by Curt Benjamin

  There she was! It had been a good guess that the earth, shaking, had been coughing up her apprentice, but Toragana hadn’t been sure until she actually saw Eluneke next to her prince, riding through the drizzling rain across the muddy battlefield. So the visions so long ago now proved true. Dead, and living again, though it remained to be seen what Eluneke had actually brought back with her from the underworld. Death changed people. But Toragana had no doubt that the prince and the shaman-princess would soon become khan and khaness, as the visions had predicted. First, of course, they had to end the Lady Chaiujin’s war.

  Toragana had practiced her healing arts far from the court of khans, so she bore no weapons. She had a horse, however, and rode to the battle with her magic about her, and the broom she had danced with long ago. She swept the ground with it, driving the serpents before her. Where the broom struck a demon, smoke rose and the creature smoldered with soggy flames. Soon they were keeping their distance. The toads recognized her and let her through, so she made good time drawing up to Bolghai and his royal party.

  “Glad you could join us,” he said with a cheerful smile.

  Toragana turned up her nose at him. She would have sniffed her displeasure with his levity, but the miasma of death and decay that rose from the battlefield assaulted her nostrils in spite of the wintergreen salve with which she had treated her upper lip. She would take no more of this foul air inside herself than she had to, and certainly none just to make a point.

  “Keep your eyes on your charge,” she cautioned him. Up close, the prince was looking a little . . . mad. And the rain fell harder.

  Furious, Daritai rode out with four thousands of his Tinglut warriors, the better for a few hours’ rest, to relieve the thousands he’d left under General Jochi’s command. He’d had an understanding with the general. But with Yesugei-Khan’s return at the head of an army of Uulgar and his own Qubal horde, he figured it was time to renegotiate. If any of them survived to sit a dais again. Sourly, he considered the golden eagle riding to war on his saddle pommel.

  “I hope you know what you are doing, old woman.”

  She turned her predator’s dark eyes on him and gave one long, slow blink, the meaning of which eluded him. Then she lifted on strong wings and circled, circled lofting higher with each turn, until he had lost sight of her in the sparkles that Great Sun scattered across his eyes. Snakes, he remembered. The great golden birds ate snakes. Maybe the old woman would be worth something in the fight after all.

  He hadn’t counted on the whole family having shamanic powers when he’d considering marrying his son to the little Qubal princess. The old khan wouldn’t like it. No Tinglut royal had ever shown such tendencies. Mostly they kept their heads down and hoped Tinglut-Khan didn’t notice them. He was bound to notice a neighbor returned from the dead, however. The thought might dampen his ardor for conquest.

  Things were looking up. Or would be, if any of them survived the serpent war. Shamans’ war, the old woman had called it. General Jochi was nowhere to be seen and Yesugei-Khan was surrounded. Daritai drew his sword and called his men to the aid of the under-Khan of the short-lived Qubal empire. But someone arrived before him, driving the serpent-demons like smoke before him. The boy prince, Tayyichiut, surrounded by shamans and with his own sword raised, slashed into the fleeing demons.

  So the old woman had been right about the returned from the dead thing. Or, more likely, not dead at all but merely stunned until his shaman roused him from his stupor. It was a good trick, and the boy knew how to make an entrance. Daritai would need more evidence before he would believe the boy had returned from the dead, but the demons were afraid of him. That certainly meant something.

  And so did the toads bigger than horses who had invaded the field. Back the other side of a war with demon vipers, Daritai might have turned and fled at the sight. Now, he wearily asked himself the only question that mattered: whose side are they on?

  Damn it. Damn it! He’d killed his demon-cursed cousin, put a sword in his back, and then covered him with dirt. So what was Tayy doing back again, riding across the battlefield like he owned it? He didn’t look like a ghost. Qutula’s own half sister was riding next to him. She seemed solid enough and she’d brought their own army of monsters. Where was his Lady Chaiujin when her precious serpents were shriveling up and running away from the spear the girl wielded like a warrior queen of Pontus?

  Qutula figured that between his Nirun, the Tinglut, and Yesugei-Khan’s horde, Prince Tayy had almost thirty thousands to call upon, not counting his toads, against Qutula’s paltry handful of thousands under captains he couldn’t count on or trust. He needed the Lady Chaiujin to turn back her minions and force them to fight. Where in all the demon hells of the underworld had she disappeared to?

  She always came back to him. He had her mark . . . but the serpent tattoo was gone, had disappeared from his breast weeks ago. Though she’d ridden at his side, and sat with his captains at his councils and lain with him in the dark, he hadn’t felt her presence beneath his skin for too long. I’m losing her. The thought filled him with rage. He’d lost everything, and his lady serpent-demon as well.

  He’d once dreamed of punishing her, when he was khan. Perhaps that part of the dream was beyond him, but his cousin was here, now, and he’d stay dead this time, if it took a hundred arrows to put him in the ground. Qutula turned his horse and called his human fighters for one last rush. He would take down the prince, finally and forever. Qutula’s serpent allies would rally. Yesugei would fall. Daritai would crumble. And Qutula would hold all the grasslands within his clenched fist.

  Demons didn’t bleed, but the ichor they were made of burned Tayy’s hands where it splashed over the crosspiece. It was eating his blade, but there were fewer of them now. Eluneke had accounted for a goodly number, and old Bolghai. The shamaness Toragana had made good account of herself with her broom. Even the toads fought, driving the serpent-demons back with their venom, which flew from the sacs above their eyes like arrows.

  If he wanted to fool himself, he could believe they were winning. But for every serpent-demon accounted for by his shaman army, there were a hundred warriors rotting in the light of Great Sun and his little brother.

  Jochi was down, the toads were abandoning the field, their venom depleted, and Yesugei was struggling, with his captains close in to protect each other’s flank. Tayy would lose the last of his standing generals if he didn’t reach him in time.

  “Just one more, just one more, just one more.” The chant took his mind off the ache in his arm, it gave him a rhythm to each jab and slash of his ghostly sword long after sense told him to just give up. “Just one more . . .”

  Yesugei wasn’t clear yet, but the supernatural assault had lessened and his lake attack was drawing tighter, pressing the Durluken into the center. And Qutula . . .

  The sound of horses drew his attention and he almost missed his mark, but the demon under his sword was slithering away, abandoning the field like his fellows. And Qutula had taken its place, sword upraised, while at his side Mangkut rode high on his stirrups, aiming an arrow over his horse’s head. Tayy turned into the fight, ruining the Durluken’s shot. With a screech of steel against steel, his sword met Qutula’s, their blades screaming against each other.

  Lady Bortu executed an awkward turn before the natural sense of flight returned to her, then she glided in a wide looping circle, rising, rising. The ground fell away beneath her and she soared. She’d forgotten over the years the pleasure in stretching her wings, in catching the wind and rising, rising, until she had disappeared against the clouds. The rain beat against her wings, but she brought her predator’s mind back to her task. Nothing must distract her: not the pleasure of flight or her regrets. Her children were dead, the ulus in chaos at the hand of her own grandchild. It had been for nothing that she had given all of this up so long ago.

  Below, the ground was rutted and churned. Rivulets of blood-pinked rainwater splashed off the dead and formed gulli
es in their lee. Down there, the reek of death would be overpowering. Up here, she could pretend the dead below didn’t signal the end of the Qubal people.

  Another circle, tighter this time, a little lower. The rot from the battlefield floated up to her on the air, but she didn’t let it drive the raptor’s brain. Around again. She would leave Qutula to her grandson, Tayyichiut-Khan, whose life would make the stories that his grandchildren would tell their children, if he lived. The khaness had one goal in this fight: the serpent at her family’s breast. And there she was. The Lady Chaiujin.

  Sweat mixed with rain and stung his eyes. To spare even the moment to blink or wipe them would have meant death, however, so Tayy ignored it, as he ignored Mangkut who awaited the outcome with drawn arrow. It was harder to set aside the jarring ache that rang up his arm with each slash averted, each pointed lunge parried, so he embraced each shock as proof that he was alive. Eluneke rode beside him, her spear accounting for as many as his sword, but she was engaged at his flank and couldn’t help him. He moved in for a strike.

  He’d been fighting too long while Qutula had watched and commanded, but had raised no sword in warrior’s work that day. His cousin was fresher. His cousin was stronger. His cousin hadn’t been dead a few hours before.

  The muscle in Tayy’s arm bled their own fire in protest, but he commanded it to rise and fall anyway. If he died, the serpent-demons would return; the putrifying dead of Qubal and Tinglut and Uulgar would litter all the grasslands, until only the serpents remained.

  As his cousin’s horse danced out of range, Qutula shifted his attack, cutting at the legs of Tayy’s mare. She screamed and fell, the tendons severed. Tayy leaped from his saddle and rolled free, but came up empty-handed. He’d lost his father’s ghostly sword in the fall.

  “Fool.” Qutula smiled, but it wasn’t a friendly sight. He settled his sword more comfortably in his hand and prepared for his swing.

  Weaponless, Tayy wondered if this was the end Fate had in store for him. Qutula had already murdered him once. Had that been his intended destiny all along? But no, he didn’t think the gods and ancestors would have sent him back just to die again. And he didn’t think he’d come back entirely the same. He had shown the same powers that his shamans possessed, to kill the demons.

  The rain fell in rivulets down his face, but that didn’t matter. He had a plan. It would probably kill him, but he’d pay that price, to save the Qubal. . . .

  “My lord!” Eluneke, freed of her battle, reached a hand to him and he took it, leaping up behind her on the pale horse.

  “I love you,” he whispered into her ear, and then Tayy reached out with his hand and heart. But he was too tired, or perhaps had never had the power that had seemed to follow him from the underworld.

  “Let me help.” Eluneke closed her hand in his. Between them, she had clasped the dragon spear of the sky god’s daughter.

  Tayy felt the power then, flowing not only from Eluneke, but rising in himself, gathering between them. He needed only to be reminded of how it was done. Together, they called the lightning.

  Tayy felt the spark grow between their hands. He pointed the spear at his cousin.

  “My lord,” Eluneke whispered, a signal that she was ready. Then Tayy released the god’s fire.

  The spear shattered. Thunder cracked like heaven itself was falling on their heads. Qutula’s eyes were wide with terror as he was lifted out of his saddle. The sword in his hand melted and ran sizzling in liquid drops to the ground, where it pooled in strange shapes with the blood of the fallen locked in its heart. Qutula’s horse was dead, blasted and charred. And Qutula lay with his eyes open to the rain, the sign of the tree burned across his unbeating heart. Dead.

  Lightning forked in the air, reaching for some target on the ground, but Lady Bortu ignored it. The snake was her target. Bortu had never feared the contest itself. But she had feared unmanning her son in front of the ulus by fighting his battles for him. She had feared a war if she confronted Qutula over his lady. She had feared, most selfishly and with the greatest dread that, once she discovered them again, she would lack the strength to let her shaman powers go. And one by one, she had lost the fight for each of the things she had hoped to save through her inaction. It hardly mattered if she lived, as long as the false Lady Chaiujin died. But if she did survive, she would never give up flying, or her totem form, again.

  The golden eagle swooped out of the blinding light of Great Sun, careful not to cast a shadow that would alert her prey. She had sighted the emerald green bamboo snake swimming across a basin of rainwater carved by the frantic beating of a dying man’s boots against the muddy ground. And there, passing on, the demon left the slithering trace of her serpent body in the bloody slime.

  Silent and deadly in flight, Lady Bortu snatched out with her sharp-clawed eagle’s feet and grasped the serpent tight under the jaws. The demon writhed and twisted, but her fangs couldn’t reach the eagle’s horny legs. A loop of the sinuous green body coiled and tightened around the golden eagle and they tumbled in the air, plunging toward the battlefield while Lady Bortu struggled to free her wings. She didn’t dare let go her hold on the serpent’s jaws—the Lady Chaiujin’s venomous bite would kill her instantly—but squeezed more tightly in her clawed feet as she flexed her powerful shoulders in abortive flight.

  “You’ll die with me,” she spoke to the mind of the serpent as she had spoken once to her granddaughter, showing the demon her own vision of the ground coming up at them. Serpents have weak eyes, but the clear and deadly images Bortu fed her dismayed the creature. She loosened her coils and the eagle lifted, but not soon enough. They tumbled to the ground together.

  Lady Bortu righted herself, but the Lady Chaiujin had vanished. Failing to murder her captor and fearing the death of her serpent body, the demon turned into a thick green mist. Bortu had seen the like before, however; she used her wings to beat the vapor into the ground, where it must take on a shape or melt into the mud.

  She expected the creature to rise up in her human form, but instead the serpent writhed on the ground, her curved and hungry fangs reaching for the eagle. Bortu struck first.

  “Awk!” Rising on powerful wings, she lunged at the serpent. Her powerful beak clamped over the scaly neck and gave a shake.

  Snap! The false Lady Chaiujin lay dead between the jaws of the Lady Bortu’s totem form. The golden eagle shook her head a second time just to be certain, then with her clawed feet carefully shredded the carcass. And if Bortu was careful to avoid the poison glands in the creature’s pitted jaws, the meat was quite tasty, really. Quite tasty indeed.

  Tayy had forgotten the marksman with his arrow but when he looked up, the man had fled. Which was fortunate, since he didn’t think he could lift a hand in his own defense. He hadn’t heard Mankgut go, and when he looked around, he was surprised to discover that the fighting still went on. A cocoon of silence had descended around him with the lightning. Steel clashed against steel, men cried out to exhort their comrades, or screamed in pain as they died, but none of it reached him.

  He thought he ought to be helping to route the serpent-demons, but the silence was such a relief that the tension had fled his weary bones. He found himself sitting in the mud beside his dead cousin and didn’t know how he’d gotten there. Nothing seemed to hurt in the way an injury ought, though, so he sat, surprised that the wind seemed to have gone out of him so completely. He still hadn’t wiped the sweat and the rain from his brow. His arms were covered in demon gore to the elbows, however, and the stuff burned when it touched his skin. It could wait until he had a clean corner of cloth to mop himself with.

  It wasn’t as bad as the burn on his hand. When he finally managed to raise it enough to check the damage, he saw the sign of the tree had burned into the palm. The trunk started at his wrist and branched out across his fingers. He wondered, with a remote part of his brain, what it meant, but couldn’t get past the one thought that drove out all others. Rest. He could . . .


  “They’re gone.”

  He couldn’t hear her, but she touched his shoulder and he read the words on her lips when she repeated them. Eluneke looked filthy and tired and as covered in the ichor of the demon-serpents as he, but blessedly, blessedly unhurt. It took a moment for the meaning of her words to sink in. Then he looked around. The demon-serpents were gone. Even the mortal snakes called to battle in aid of their demon brethren had slithered from the field.

  From somewhere on the battleground Toragana had appeared, and Bolghai. Yesugei followed. Each looking as weary and filty as he, but Tayy saw no injuries except, he thought, to the soul.

  Bolghai touched his ear. “She’s dead,” he said, grinning. Tayy realized he could hear again and figured out the answer to that riddle easily enough. The false Lady Chaiujin, who had caused them all so much pain. Toragana had tears in her eyes and left them quickly to minister to the dead and the wounded.

  He closed his eyes and let Bolghai bring him to his feet and steady him.

  “My lord gur-khan,” General Yesugei said.

  Gur-khan. Tayy opened his eyes again, but of course Mergen wasn’t there. Slowly, he realized that Yesugei meant him.

  Prince Daritai was there as well, eyeing the general warily. “Tayyichiut Gur-Khan,” he said, and bowed as one of slightly lesser status to one of greater rank.

  He wasn’t sure what Daritai was doing here, but figured he ought to be grateful for the help. “You may tell your father that the Qubal gift him with the death of the creature who caused the loss of his daughter, the beloved Lady Chaiujin of the Tinglut.” He gave a little bow of his own, as one who has received a service of an ally and has repaid it with one of equal or greater value. “The false Lady Chaiujin is now dead.”