Lords of Grass and Thunder (70 page)

The demon-king’s face suffused with his anger, but he gave her his secrets as he had promised, and when she demanded the way home, he said, “Rain or river, find it yourself. And don’t count on my good nature if you should come back.”

She bowed her head but didn’t make any promises.
Not if I can help it,
she thought as he drove his spurs into the sides of his nightmare steed. Then the hunt was sweeping by them. They had left the river far behind, but Eluneke had an idea. She spat onto the ground and stepped where her spittle had fallen. Sinking upward, she found that they had traded one battlefield for another.

Chapter Forty-three

G
ENERAL JOCHI fought like a madman. Slashing about him with his sword, he called his captains to form their men into tight defensive circles. A serpent-demon downed his mount. Before the monster could strike again, he leaped into the empty saddle of a riderless steed which had, like himself, run mad on the battlefield. Sweat rolled off his braids and formed rivers on his brow that splashed stinging into his eyes. he ignored the discomfort, like he did the rub of his leather half-armor against the sword cut under his arm and the ache in his legs as he clung to the flanks of the horse with his knees.

They had lost already; he could hear it in the strangled screams of the fallen and smell it in the iron tang of blood running down the back of his throat. The sickly stench of their dead, untimely rotting on the battlefield, coated his tongue. His death had long since ceased to matter to him. He had served two khans, seen them both killed by treachery, and lost his son to the same evil. Jochi now courted his own murder against the monsters Qutula had raised against the Qubal ulus.

He trusted the man at a side to drive a sword through his heart when he fell, ending his suffering before the demon serpents made his last hours a horrific nightmare of suffering and living decay. He would offer the same service to any man beside him. Knowing they could depend on each other for a quick death made it possible to go on in the face of certain defeat against an enemy their weapons could not touch.

“General!” Captain Chahar reached over and grabbed the bridle of Jochi’s horse to force his attention. The son of a powerful shaman, he saw too deeply into the bleak depths of his general’s despairing heart.

Not yet,
Jochi denied him irritably.
I haven’t fallen yet.
He wanted to account for Qutula before the demons took him. That purpose alone kept him alive and fighting. But Chahar was pointing back toward the city.

Reinforcements? Prince Daritai had taken several of his thousands out of the battle to rest for a few hours, but these men looked too fresh, too unstained to be accounted by so short a respite. His few surviving warriors took no sleep at all now, determined like their general to fight past hope until they fell, which they did in staggering numbers.

Not his own thousands, then, miraculously raised up in their black and swollen bodies from the killing field. But he recognized their banner.

Yesugei. For a moment, the relief was so powerful that it unhinged all his joints, so that he almost swooned from his saddle. Yesugei had come, with five thousands of his Qubal troops and ten more thousands of the conquered Uulgar.

Drums rolled and cymbals crashed. Yesugei’s trumpeters announced his arrival with a fanfare to strike terror into the heart of any foe. The serpents turned their vaporous shadow-forms on the newcomers, and Jochi saw Yesugei blanch.

Then the earth moved.

Rain was falling. Prince Tayyichiut screwed his eyelids more tightly shut against the stinging drops. He wondered for a moment why he was lying on the ground with rain leaking into his eyes.

A familiar smell of badly cured stoat pelts assailed his nostrils. Then a callused but gentle hand touched him lightly above his heart. “My prince?”

Tayy had never heard the shaman Bolghai speak so tentatively. He wanted to wipe away the water so that he could see this newly chastened shaman for himself, but his arm was too heavy; he might have been trying to lift his horse and not his own hand.

“That’s all right,” Bolghai soothed. “Let me do it for you.”

The silk cloth that wiped his face was scented with sweet herbs. Tayy didn’t object, but relaxed into the soothing touch. When the cloth went away, he opened his eyes. “Where’s Eluneke?” he asked, or thought he did. But when he tried to form the words, he realized he’d forgotten how.

Just then the earth shook. Thrown from his perch on the edge of some overhang, Bolghai landed on top of the prince. Distantly, a wound in Tayy’s back protested the abuse.
Now I’ll have matching scars, front and back,
he thought, but didn’t, immediately, recall why.

“My lord khan, forgive me.” The shaman struggled upright but didn’t move away. “We have to get you out of here.”

Out of where? He formed the words in his mind and this time forced them past his teeth. “Where am I?”

“Where spirits rot: the dead.” Bolghai answered with a riddle that would have annoyed him, except that suddenly Tayy remembered the serpent, and Qutula’s sword separating the ribs from his spine as he fell. Other, more terrible things, half memory, half spirit-touched, drifted gossamer as a dream among his thoughts: dirt covering his eyelids. Hungry spirits devouring his flesh. Part of the awful smell didn’t come from Bolghai at all. His wounds were swollen and rotting.

“My grave,” he answered. His hand, when he looked at it, was blackened and cracked, charred to the bone. He didn’t dare open his fingers for fear they would shatter into ash.

“And about time you got him out of it.”

Eluneke.

Tayy looked up to find her watching him from the edge of the pit where Qutula’s minions had thrown him. He’d been dead, and now he wasn’t. The time between remained a lurking shadow in the back of his mind, but he was free of the details if he didn’t look too closely.

He knew Eluneke had come for him. That was worth a smile, if he could remember how to do it. He must have gotten it right, because she smiled back at him. Tayy remembered his mother then, and his father.

“My parents?” he asked as Bolghai manhandled him out of the hole in the ground. “We didn’t leave them behind?” How could he ever forgive himself if he’d committed such an unfilial crime.

Eluneke was shaking her head, barely controling the shudder of superstitious dread. “They’re gone now. They’ve done their part and are eager to start their new lives together among the ancestors.”

“I’ll miss them.” Tayy understood that he must accept their true state as his parents had themselves, but the air felt colder now that they were gone. “I think I always felt them with me.”

“As I recall, they were hard to miss,” she answered tartly. “You’re going to need new dogs.”

Tayy remembered a red head nudging his hand, a cold nose bumping his hip. Standing guard. It warmed him in spite of the rain and the chill of their absence, to know that they’d stayed behind to protect him.

While they spoke, Eluneke drew from the pouch the sky god’s daughters had given her a laurel bough with the power of heaven to cure ills of the spirit. As she brushed the laurel leaves over his wounds, Tayy felt the pain of them lessen, the swelling subside.

“Can you ride?” Bolghai asked. “We are at war. General Jochi might like to know he fights for the true khan, and not merely to avenge your murder.”

Khan. Mergen was dead. That made him gur-khan, assuming the chieftains voted to honor the chosen heir. Provided any survived the fighting to vote. His father had trained him for this duty and Mergen had trusted him to hold the ulus when his time came. Even the underworld had spit him out again to take up the reins untimely dropped by his father and his uncle.

“I can ride,” he said. But his hand still curled like a cinder at his side.

“Take this,” Eluneke said, and slipped the stem of the laurel bough into the curl of his fingers. Where it touched coals, flesh softened and grew brown and smooth as the bark of a young tree, with the flush of life running through it. Though he was not yet whole, the pain of his injuries had grown distant, and soft, tea-stained skin replaced the horrible purple and green of the serpent’s bite. The bloody wound at his back remained, but deep inside he could feel the healing had begun.

Horses were brought and the shaman-princess mounted the pale steed that had carried them in the underworld. “Where you go, my khan, there I also go,” she declared. “I won’t lose you now.”

He thought to turn her back to safety in the rear with Bolghai. But the shaman clapped his hands and smiled. “You will need your skills at banishing demons,” he advised them both. “The Lady Chaiujin has brought her serpent horde to fight in Qutula’s cause.”

Bolghai drew from a leather thong at his side a horse-head drumstick made of the shinbone of a roe deer and flung it to the grass. Where it struck, it grew hooves and legs and a tail and mane and strong, pale haunches. With a cheerful grin the shaman leaped onto the bare back of the magical steed. “Now,” he said, “begins the shamans’ war!”

“He killed our mother.” Bekter lay in her bed, shivering with fever. Half out of his senses, he muttered over and over the impossible confession, made as a boast. Sechule had murdered the khan, and her son Qutula had murdered her in turn, and then had tried to do the same to his brother.

“I know,” the shamaness soothed him with her voice. “But you are still alive, and we must make sure you stay that way.” She poured a cup of healing tea from the kettle on the firebox and scattered over it a variety of herbs for reducing fever. Already she had plastered his wounds with a poultice to draw out both foreign poisons and the kind that the body grew from its own damaged flesh. Now she held his head pillowed on her breast and tipped the cup to his lips. Withdrawing it quickly when he coughed, she wiped the escaping medicine from his lips.

“Rest, dear Bekter,” she crooned, lulling him to the sleep he needed more than any herbs she might prepare. In sleep, he might escape the pain of his injury, and the deeper wound of his brother’s betrayal. Though his breathing remained rough, his eyelids followed the gentle command of her voice. When it seemed that he had fallen into a troubled rest, she settled his head on the cushions and wrapped the bed furs tight against the hungry spirits who might steal his soul while he slept. Then she gathered her drum into her lap and began a chant to drive out the evil vapors that possessed him.

Suddenly, the ground rolled like a carpet snapped in the breeze. The brooms clacked against the lattices of her little tent and the kettle tipped over, spilling tea in a puddle that put out the fire in the firebox. A chest fell over, cascading its shelves of charms and medicines across the cushioned floor. Happily, it fell away from the sickbed so no harm was done.

“Ahh!” Bekter cried, starting up from his bed only to fall again on his side, panting.

“Eluneke’s back,” Toragana observed, setting her drum down to clean up the mess from the spilled tea.

Bekter’s eyes, bright with fever, sought her out with terrified questions he was too ill to shape. “Did the earth shake when you completed your training?” he whispered, which was all the voice he could manage.

She thought perhaps he was having second thoughts about a healer—and a lover—who could turn the grasslands themselves on end. But in fact, she had never known of such a thing. “Not for me, or for any shaman I have heard of,” she assured him. Of course, no shaman in all the collected memory of her craft had done what Eluneke had set out to do.

A second time the earth moved under her feet.

“Why now?” Bekter clung to the carpets with clenched fists and it was impossible to tell whether terror at the earth’s upheaval or his own fevered chills were the cause.

Toragana smiled, though in fact she was worried more than she let on to her patient. “Because she didn’t come back alone. And now you must drink, if you expect to get well.”

Bekter’s eyes went very wide. “By all the gods and ancestors,” he muttered breathlessly. She thought perhaps she had erred in telling him. He was too weak from his injuries to cope with the shamanic side of his brother’s war. But he surprised her. Or, she decided, she was more surprised that his answer didn’t shock her at all.

“I should be there. How can I record the tale if I do not see it?” He tried to rise, but already he had set the wound in his back to bleeding again.

“If you want to live, you will keep still. You’ve barely enough blood in you to keep your lungs in motion as it is.”

“But—”

“If things have gone as Bolghai and I hope, you will hear it from your sister and the khan her husband,” Toragana assured him. “If things have not . . .”

She turned without finishing what she had begun and put on her feathered headdress with the stuffed raven perched on her brow. Bekter didn’t press her to complete her prediction. They both knew that if things had not gone well, he wouldn’t live to compose the tale. And no loyal Qubal would live to hear it.

The shamaness wore the robes of her office already, but gathered the tokens of her craft about her—a flute and a drum, and a broom from its peg on the lattices.