Lords of Grass and Thunder (10 page)

“I want to ask Bolghai’s opinion, but I’ll be back before Great Moon rises,” she said. “In the meantime, say nothing of what you have seen to anyone. Speaking with the dead is one thing, but predicting death is quite another. Some do it, of course, but no one ever speaks of it, you understand.”

“Of course!” Eluneke couldn’t hide her indignation. She wouldn’t have told her own teacher except that the words seemed to pop out of her mouth of their own will.

“I know. You’ve always been a good girl.” Toragana absently patted her cheek and reached for her drum and the drumstick she had carved from the shin of a sheep. Then she hurried away with long swooping motions to signify the flight of her totem raven.

“I won’t tell anyone,” Eluneke whispered after her. She went back to the work of becoming acquainted with her broom but could not put out of her mind the image of the death’s-head she had seen riding a skeletal horse among his laughing companions.

Her husband. That was the second part of her vision. The dead rider would someday be her husband. She had kept that part to herself. It might, after all, be a trick of mischievous spirits having sport at her expense. She didn’t want to look like a fool for listening to them.

Resting her cheek on her hands, which were wrapped around her broom, she thought about the husband that fate—perhaps—had given her. He was very handsome, she decided, or the smooth bronze face that had hovered like a mask over the death’s head had seemed so. She wondered who he was. He had ridden like a warrior and had shown no sign of leaving the great avenue among the lesser clans, so he must at least be rich. Probably returned from the wars as well, and a hero of some sort. That didn’t mean he had good sense, certainly, which she would wish in a husband. His impending doom seemed even to cast doubt on his judgment. Her own low station didn’t trouble her, but Eluneke insisted on intelligence in a husband.

With a sigh she dismissed all thought of the mysterious young huntsman. A girl could change her fate if she was determined. But as prophetic visions went, this one seemed particularly unlikely in all the wrong places. Perhaps the spirits of the underworld were trying to bribe her for her help in keeping him alive.

“It’s completely unnecessary,” she said out loud in case any of the spirits were listening. “I would save him for the sake of his family and his clans even if he had no money at all. Empty promises just annoy me.”

Alone with her thoughts, she set her broom aside and grabbed a polishing rag. On Toragana’s workbench stood a chest with designs inlaid in contrasting shades of wood. Eluneke opened the small hinged doors, took out the first nest of feathers in which the shamaness kept her silver charms and amulets. They had begun to tarnish, and she set her rag to work with fervent energy. This one, shaped like a wreath, she knew to foster a good marriage. Aunts bought them, and grandmothers. The supply was running low; war, it seemed, set the old heads to thoughts of ensuring their family line.

Another, in a shape that made her blush, was meant to ensure a couple’s happiness. She understood in theory, but had never experienced that particular form of happiness herself. That thought led to the next, a dead husband laughing among his companions, fresh from the hunt. What had she seen in him when their eyes met? Other than his fleshless skeleton riding a nightmare horse of bones, of course? Toragana would find out, but in the meantime Eluneke put the silver charms away and took down the next feathered nest. Bits of bone, carved in the shapes of animals. Her teacher would make one for her specially when she found her totem animal.

In the last nest Toragana kept her hexes and bad luck charms. She didn’t sell them, but said that a good shaman had to know them anyway. “You cannot cure what you do not recognize,” she had explained, taking out with care the tiny silver ram’s horn, and the dagger no bigger than the moon of a child’s smallest fingernail. That one troubled her. The victim of the hex would cut himself fatally, with his own knife, under the strongest hex. It would look like an accident or suicide. No one would suspect murder.

Eluneke put away the hexes and set the case back in its place on the workbench. She had already learned how to defend against each of the spells in Toragana’s box. She could sew up a wound and she knew how to stop bleeding with spiderwebs, and what molds to press against a cut to prevent the hard, red swelling that often meant death. To keep her husband alive, however, she would have to be there when he died.

But what would she do if his enemies didn’t use a knife or a sword? Those counted highest in the eyes of their rivals had a way of dying by poison. Their own Chimbai-Khan, it was whispered, had died just so. It seemed a likely place to sharpen her skills. Toragana had many antidotes on her shelves for accidental poisonings, and the ingredients for more, but their own small clan lay far out of the eye of politics. Deliberate poisonings, meant to do murder and leave no sign of their presence, didn’t come up much.

Bolghai, whose tent lay on the path traveled by gods and khans, must know about such things, however. She would ask Toragana to petition him to teach her the arcane knowledge they would need to keep the handsome young man alive.

As if tracking the movement of her student’s thoughts, Toragana popped her head back in through the doorway by which she had lately exited. “Best you should explain it yourself,” she said, and waved Eluneke forward.

“Bolghai will doubtless get more out of you than I can.” She grinned, twitching her head in a birdlike way, to take the sting out of her words. “He always had more success with me than I would have wished.”

That she needed to see Bolghai anyway didn’t ease the sour churning in Eluneke’s stomach. She put on her coat and started to follow.

“Don’t forget your broom!”

As if Toragana would let her forget! What humiliation! With her face flaming red, Eluneke picked up the wretched broom and brought it with her. Somehow this bundle of sticks was supposed to reveal the true totem shape of her traveling spirit. So far it had revealed a quantity of splinters but little else. Sometimes it was no more than an inconvenience. At other times it served as a reminder of her failure to find her true form and she hated it with a passion so great her heart could scarcely contain it. Now was one of those times. Not only would her own clan know that she had not yet learned to fly, but she was about to parade her failure before all the clans of the khan’s great ulus, into the heart of the very court itself. What would the khan’s own shaman think of an apprentice who had not yet lost the companionship of her broom?

With a sigh, she picked it up with a loathing she was certain the broom shared for her and followed Toragana.

E
luneke knew the reputation of the khan’s shaman, so she’d expected the long walk to the little ger-tent off a way from the main camp, close to where the Onga flowed. Bolghai’s totem animal was the stoat, so it came as no surprise that his felt tent lay half buried like the burrow of the creature whose coats he wore. She hadn’t imagined the smell, though, or the disarray. Her teacher’s teacher needed someone to keep house for him.

“Come in! Come in!” Bobbing his head in stoat fashion, Bolghai welcomed them into the little tent. Right away Eluneke noticed the heads of small animals in various states of fleshly decay crowding the tops of the chests. Their skins lined the floor and the walls, making a snug burrow for the shaman. A bit too snug for Eluneke’s taste. She preferred the clean order of Toragana’s more aerie home, and the sweeter smell. Toragana cured her birds carefully before using them to adorn her costume or her tent, something Bolghai might do better himself.

Still, some things were more usual—a pair of painted chests and a firebox over which he cooked water for tea—and other things Eluneke had grown to expect living in the house of a shaman. Mirrors hung from the lattices of Bolghai’s tent to chase away evil spirits just as they did in Toragana’s home. Musical instruments lay scattered between the painted chests. Instead of hanging neatly on pegs, Bolghai hung his brooms in profusion from the umbrellalike spokes of the roof, tucked in among the drying herbs.

Brooms. Eluneke ducked her head to avoid them. She’d be happy never to see a broom again in her life. Just to annoy her, one of the things reached with its spindly fingers and grabbed the hair wrapped around the silver combs of her maiden’s headdress.

“That’s very interesting.” Bolghai’s stoatlike nose twitched beneath his bright, observant eyes as Toragana patiently untangled Eluneke’s hair. “When a broom chooses, what secrets does it reveal?”

Eluneke didn’t know what the riddle meant, but Toragana seemed to have more of the story. “Is it the very broom?” she asked.

Bolghai nodded. “A visiting prince when he danced, later a god. Who can say what transformations a broom portends?”

“Well, I’m not a god,” Eluneke protested tartly. There were times the whole shaman business seemed too odd even for someone who regularly spoke to spirits. Healing people made her feel good inside, and she’d gotten used to talking to the dead long before Toragana had come for her. But this broom business was beyond embarrassing.

Bolghai looked at her carefully, recognition moving in his eyes. “Two steps in one,” he said.

“Greet the dirt,” Eluneke answered. She knew what the riddle meant. If you lifted both feet at once, your face would soon be doing their duty on the ground. But it also served as a warning not to reach higher than your station.

In the case her teachers discussed, the student might have seemed to take two steps at once, from prince to king, and then to mortal god. But he had come to Bolghai as an uncrowned king in exile and only slowly accepted his true station. Gradually his rank as a god was revealed to him. Bolghai hinted the broom announced a similar fate for her, but she had no rank of her own. Perhaps it meant her husband’s rank. But he was going to die, probably before they ever truly met, which made the prophetic nature of her vision false in one particular or the other.

It was confusing, and she took a breath to tell the teacher as much. Bolghai held up his hand to stop her, however.

“Tea,” he said, sweeping the skulls from one of the chests and rummaging through it for a cloth bag that rustled with dried leaves. “More will come clear when you dance with the broom that chose you.”

“But . . .”

“First things first. Who are you, when the animal spirit takes hold? Only your totem creature can take you where you must go for your answers.”

She needed her totem spirit to carry her to the underworld, he meant, but he didn’t yet have all the facts. Talking to the spirits of the dead could be of no help—the young man hadn’t died yet. She would have explained all that to him except that he had turned away again, busying himself with the tea. He only poured two cups.

“You have been asked to dance,” he told her with a wave of his hand. “It’s time you listened to the whisper of the sticks. We will talk when you can fly.”

Eluneke took the broom in a huff of temper. At least it would get her out of his noisome tent. The shaman’s camp stood a little apart from the city of the khan, protected by the undergrowth and spindly trees that grew along the river. No one would see her dancing with a stupid broom.

Temper set a more forceful pace than she might otherwise have chosen. Her feet beat out the rhythm and she began to dance.

Chapter Seven

W
ITH A BOW TO THE LADY BORTU, Mergen settled himself on the dais. Looking around the great ger-tent palace, he nodded to a face he knew. Already there were fewer senior chieftains in their places above the firebox. The clans were departing, leaving him his tithe of young men for the army but taking away their wives and daughters and herdsmen, heading back to their everyday lives. Yesugei remained, however, offering his support as adviser to the khan while he stalked Sechule for his second wife. Mergen would have been happier about the one if not for the other.

Tonight, however, he had more pressing matters on his mind. Leaving the general to wander among the courtiers, following the sign of Sechule’s passing—her dark hair, and the smell of the herbs she used in her clothes—Mergen turned to his mother with a question on his lips. “Have you seen Bolghai?” His glance roved everywhere in the great ger-tent palace, searching for the shaman in the thinning crowd of courtiers.

“Not today,” the lady answered, making room beside her on the heaped furs. Beads of turquoise and coral clacked and rattled on her towering headdress as she returned his seated bow. “Are you ill? Cursed? In need of counsel from the underworld?”

With Bortu, you never knew if she was being serious or secretly laughing at you behind her hand. Chimbai-Khan had never had that problem with her, of course. But Chimbai-Khan had been her first choice as khan. They were alone on the dais now, however. Though she didn’t seem exactly serious about the reasons he might want the shaman, he detected a glint of interest—his mother would never show concern—in her eaglelike gaze.

“That fool girl has gone and apprenticed herself to some woman on the outskirts of the camp. Bolghai has to put a stop to it!” He told her the truth. If he couldn’t find the shaman, he might need his mother’s advice.