Lords of Grass and Thunder (64 page)

Then it struck him: that was the point. “You’re right, of course. You have to go and get him.”

Her final test. They didn’t usually come at quite so high a cost. Bolghai wondered if he had grown too old to serve as shaman to the royal household. He’d lost two khans, after all, and the prince before he even took his proper place at the head of the ulus. Had the fates intended Mergen’s daughter to challenge the underworld for a life the hungry spirits must already have claimed for their own? It was too much to bear.

Eluneke peered out the door and pulled her head back with a grimly satisfied smile. “The human guardsmen are gone. They’ve been relying on the demon to control me for too long, it’s made them careless.”

“Will your totem animals willingly attend you on such a trip?” Toragana asked, while Bolghai was still trying to figure out if his own love for the prince was strong enough to find him among the tormented dead of the underworld. Eluneke’d had little time to gather skins of the naturally dead among the toads. Their kind usually slid down some gullet to die in the belly of a larger beast.

That didn’t shake Eluneke’s determination. “If not,” she said, “I’ll go alone.”

But the queen of King Toad’s harem would not hear of such a thing. “Ribbit!” she said. “The toads did well enough in heaven and would like to see for themselves this underworld of spirits and demons. So I’ll go, and my fellow wives will come with me. A harem is a boring place to live, after all, even for a toad. We wish for adventures to entertain our lord. And true love is our specialty.”

The little baskets that hung from Eluneke’s shaman’s robes had splintered and broken, but the toad wives wove them into makeshift nests and tucked themselves away in such numbers that it seemed Eluneke could scarcely move. This was how she had traveled to the sky god, Bolghai remembered. He liked the symmetry of it if nothing else. They slipped outside, but no one stopped them. The camp, it seemed, was empty.

“I’ll lead the horses away,” Toragana offered, and then they were left with the beaten ground.

“What do I do?” Eluneke asked.

“Use the gifts the gods have given you,” Bolghai instructed her, “And dance.”

The Lady Bortu sat among her women and the nobles and chieftains past the age of fighting battles. One granddaughter was missing. Eluneke might still live, but she had disappeared from Bortu’s inner vision. At her knee the other, Princess Orda, had curled in a restless sleep. Mergen should never have sent for her. Old Tinglut had wanted a woman, not a child bride. They’d torn the little girl from the only home she’d ever known and, in so doing, had revealed the existence of Chimbai’s daughter to an enemy for nothing.

Like Chimbai himself, Mergen had paid for his mistakes, of course; Bortu had given both her sons to the funeral pyre. She mourned them both with open eyes, however. The ulus was still paying. As she stroked the princess’ tangled hair, her eyes took on the flinty, black light of the eagle. Long ago she had discovered her totem animal in the dream realm, but had turned away from the path of the shaman to mother khans instead. She had never doubted her decision. But gifted with the insights of her abandoned calling, she felt the child of one son die at the hands of the other. Prince Tayyichiut, her beautiful Prince Tayy, was dead.

And Princess Orda had cried as though the world were ending until, exhausted, she had fallen asleep where she lay. The name she called in her dreams didn’t belong to her foster family, however. “Tumbi,” she’d whispered under her breath. Bortu knew no one by that name among the Qubal, but Prince Daritai had a son called Tumbinai. Her spies had reported sighting Daritai’s army, camped the other side of a rise in the grasslands, waiting, she guessed, until the Qubal forces had exhausted themselves on each other before seizing the leavings.

“I’m too old for war,” she muttered querulously under her breath. Her ladies-in-waiting questioned her but she hadn’t meant for them to hear.

At her feet, the little girl turned in her sleep. “Not too old,” the princess murmured, though she couldn’t have understood the Lady Bortu’s weariness with a life that had outlasted all she loved. She spoke with such perfect confidence even in her sleep, however, that Bortu wondered if the spirit of a shaman didn’t move within the child as it moved within her grandmother and her brother. Prince Tayyichiut had never recognized his powers, though he had drawn on them at need. If the child spoke prophecy, then perhaps there remained a reason why Bortu still lived. At the least, she thought, she might save Princess Orda when the Tinglut horde swept over them. The little girl gave her hope that she might yet contribute more than dead sons to the honor of her name before she joined the ancestors.

“My lord.” Qutula turned at the sound of his lover’s voice. Somewhere, Lady Chaiujin had found herself a horse which cantered over to bring the lady to his side.

“What are you doing here?” he asked with a little less confidence than he would have liked in front of his gathered army. He might need her demon powers if Jochi’s experience should prove him the abler general, but the horde was no place for a woman. Why hadn’t she coiled her inky serpent on his breast, where she had been in the habit of traveling?

The cold condescension of her features did not invite the question.

“We ride hard into bloody battle,” he reminded her. The demon’s face and figure seemed a little out of shape today, with the faint tracery of scales almost visible where her coats fell back on her wrists. “If you are unwell, my lady, I can find a servant to attend you.” His mother might have been able to help, but he’d killed her. “Or my sister Eluneke . . .”

“The blood of battle is all I need,” she said, and it was clear to him that she was as anxious as her mount to enter the fray. No human power could keep her in the camp if she chose to ride, so he gave up trying to dissuade her. The emperor of Shan, after all, had ridden to war with his own supernatural mistress at his side. Raising his arm to signal the advance, he decided that the comparison boded well for his success.

“Ayyeee—ayaaa! We ride!” he cried, and his captains took up the order.

Though his army was sadly reduced, still the thunder of four thousand horsemen with their replacement mounts charging into battle is a wondrous thing. The ground shook and the banners of his thousands lit the fire in his belly. Between his legs his mare stretched out, her hooves beating a battle song on the grass. Behind, the drums rumbled and the trumpets blared in terrifying cacophony. Dark as storm clouds and loud as thunder, their arrows swift and bright as lightning, Qutula’s army advanced.

The great dark line of Jochi’s force faltered. They had stumbled on the survivors of Prince Tayy’s failed rescue, no doubt. The general wouldn’t stop to hear the whole of the tale, but he knew now that the man he had hoped to rescue with his attack lay dead under the ground, food for the worms and the hungry spirits. He fought for no living khan, against Mergen’s true son, the only heir left standing.

Stealing a glance in her direction, he saw that his lady’s eyes were gleaming. Pride, he guessed, and the exhilaration of riding against a man who was defeated before the battle had began.

“”Ayy-ayaaa-eee!” he cried, and drawing his spear, held it aloft so all who followed him might gaze upon the bright point casting sparks of sunlight like a challenge.

Jochi, he saw, had lifted Tayy’s sword as if it were a talisman in his hand. It would fail the general as it had failed the prince. With a sound like mountains colliding, the armies met.

Chapter Forty-one

T
HE GIFTS OF THE GODS. Among the baskets and other decorations of her shaman’s robes, Qutula hadn’t noticed or recognized the value of the little pouch where Eluneke had stored the gifts from the daughters of the sky gods. Commanded to dance, she drew out the drum and horse-head drumstick. As she danced, she remembered. The daughter of the drum had taught her all the languages of the animals, but more importantly, Eluneke had learned from the daughter of the spear the skill of casting out demons. Like most of the skills of a shaman, they only worked on other people, so they hadn’t helped her much with her own demon. Tayy was dead, something altogether different, but she hoped that while she tried to rescue him the incantations would protect them from the demons and hungry spirits that roamed in search of fresh souls.

With renewed confidence, she quickened the hopping steps of her totem dance while, clinging from her robes, the harem of the king of the toads urged her on. Once she had struggled to find her totem shape; now she set all her skill and concentration to finding the underworld in human form. It would have been easier as a toad, but Tayy had turned away from her monstrous face. She could not bear such a rejection again. To escape the world of the dead, he must follow her freely, so she danced as the girl he loved. When the urge to drop to her haunches and hop about on green-and-brown legs came over her, she fixed her mind on her purpose and the prince and set human feet on the path of the drum until, with one step, her foot passed through grass and earth like they were mist. With the next step she sank into the smothering darkness.

Nervously, Eluneke took a breath. Musty and damp though it was, she was relieved to find air, not earth in her throat. All around her was black as the bottom of a lake. With a hand held out in front of her, she trod as carefully as if through water, but met no resistance. She could see well enough if she didn’t think too much about the contradiction of it: a landscape of mountains pointed their roots at the sky, their whitecapped tops hanging precariously over her head.

Above her, a river like a mirror flowed through a roof of silver grass. Reflected in the water she saw the world of trees, and leaves blowing in breezes that stirred the land of the living. She thought she must be walking on the clouds, or their reflection, that must take the place of solid ground here in the underworld. Afraid of what she would see if she glanced down, however, Eluneke looked straight ahead.

Shapes without limbs or faces moved out of the darkness and passed without seeming to notice her. The harem of toads shifted uneasily in their baskets but, not surprisingly, were unwilling to leave her for their own explorations. Then something brushed against her leg.

“Ah!” she let out a little yelp, quickly suppressed before she called the attention of those gliding shapes down on her.

A nose butted against her hip while, on her other side, a second of the spirit creatures nudged its soft, triangular head under her hand. Dogs, she realized, and looked down at them to confirm her guess. Tayy’s dogs; the red whined anxiously and tugged at her sleeve, pulling Eluneke along.

“I’m coming,” she promised. The dogs seemed to glow with their own unearthly light in the darkness and it struck her that they had never behaved quite the way mindless beasts ought.

Who are you?
She didn’t say the words aloud, but it seemed that in this realm one had only to shape the thought to be understood. The black dog looked up at her with his tongue hanging from the side of his mouth, his eyes wide and wet with dismay. Then he shook himself and his limbs began to lengthen and straighten. He’d been a large dog, but Chimbai-Khan had been a big man, and that was who sat at her feet. Or so Eluneke guessed, since her clans had stood too low in the ranks of the ulus for her to have seen his face when he had lived. But he wasn’t Mergen, and she didn’t know who else would wear such elegant silk robes or the silver helmet of the khan.

Even with a pyre and ceremonies performed with utmost care, spirits sometimes found themselves tied to the earth through some unfinished task or a bond in the mortal world they couldn’t quite let go of. For the spirit of the khan, that bond was to his son. He dropped his head into his hands and wept with dampening sorrow.

“Come, come, we don’t have time for indulging our grief!” A woman stood at Eluneke’s side. There could be no doubt of her identity either.

“My lady khaness,” Eluneke acknowledged the dignity of the lady with a deep bow. “Your son, Prince Tayyichiut, looks very much like you,” she offered as an explanation for her greeting. Then, “Did,” she amended with dismay, her own eyes dangerously near to tears.

“Tayy was always more handsome as a boy than I ever was as a woman,” the khaness waved away the compliment. “But we have little time for pleasantries. My son’s life hangs in the balance.”

Eluneke was not in the habit of conversing with the spirits of the ancestors; she was still an apprentice shamaness and this was her first visit to the underworld and she had expected humbler souls to teach her. She didn’t know the niceties of breaking bad news to such exalted spirits, but couldn’t go on while the lady suffered such a misapprehension. “I’m sorry, my lady, but your son is dead. Qutula has imprisoned him, body and soul, in the cold earth.”

“And you have come to save him. Of course. Did you bring your horse?”

Eluneke just looked confused at that. The lady examined her with a critical eye and took the horse-head drumstick that dangled forgotten from her hand. When the spirit touched it, the stick transformed itself, growing four legs and stretching its neck with a shake to settle its mane.