Lords of Grass and Thunder (8 page)

Chapter Five

A
S THEY MADE THEIR WAY home to the great tent city, Duwa and Jumal regarded each other with suspicion across the backs of their champions. Each had mis trusted the other since some childhood prank—Tayy couldn’t remember what had happened—which had set them eternally at odds. They usually put their differences aside for the more important task of defending their prince as his guardsmen. The division of the recent prize, however, seemed to have added chips to the flame of their animosity.

“I’d have thought fighting a war together would have . . .” Tayy started to say to his cousin. But Qutula, who had lately escaped a bloody death at the jaws of the maddened bear, had fallen into a brooding silence that the prince recognized only too well. Like the two quarreling guardsmen, they had been to war together in the Golden City. Fighting hand to hand in the squares and down streets both wide and narrow, they’d had to worry about an arrow in the back or a monster swooping down on them from the air.

On the battlefield, memories of the tent city of the Qubal Khan must have filled Qutula with a sense of safety and warmth just as it had Tayy. Neither of them had expected to find his life hanging in the balance on their own ground. The realization that they would find no safety even here at home heightened battle nerves more happily left behind. The prince took a breath to say some word of sympathy, but his cousin’s brooding, closed-in silence rejected any comfort before it could be spoken.

They were passing through the outskirts of the tent city. Qutula’s hooded gaze ranged over the camps, smaller and more widely scattered here than they were closer to the ger-tent palace of the khan. Tayy did the same, saw the gaps and absences of a city eroding at its edges as clans with no particular wealth or political connections packed their tents. They would follow the horses grazing afield on the rich grasslands that rolled away from the river in a sea of green and wildflower blue. Soon there would be nothing left but the political center around the khan, and his army of young fighters.

Against these lowering thoughts, only Bekter seemed to have an antidote. He held his bow in the position of a lute and muttered nonsense words under his breath while he fingered imaginary strings, working out a tune. He’d want the story out of his brother before Great Sun set, Tayy suspected; they might have the first performance after the feasting.

“So,” he said, directing his comments to Bekter, but speaking loud enough for all his companions to hear. “Do you think our bear is bigger than the one Nogai presented to the khan on his wedding night?”

Qutula looked at him strangely, but Bekter had perked up at the reference to the old story. As Tayy had hoped, he recited the first exaggerated description of the bear that Nogai killed.

“Old Brown raised up on his feet
Twice taller than the center pole
On which the silver palace stood,
In girth, wider than the lattices around.”

Songs often called the ger-tent of the khan “the silver palace” for the glittering silver embroideries that covered the white felt. Tayy would have had the recitation end there, with the bear, but Jumal, with his usual absence of tact, picked up the tale where Nogai entered it.

“The khan called Nogai to his side
His eyes aglisten with the dew of tears.
‘All I have is yours, good friend, but
find for me what I have lost.’ ”

“Our own tale reversed!” he said, pleased that he had made the connection. In the tale, the bear had stolen the khan’s new bride. Nogai had caught up with the bear and in a savage battle killed it. At the end of the tale he presents his khan with the huge bearskin, in which he has wrapped the rescued bride. “Instead of the friend saving the heir, the heir has saved the friend!”

Qutula glared murderously at his fellow guardsman and Tayy groaned under his breath. He’d have been annoyed enough if Jumal had compared him to the khan’s wife. But Jumal meant what happened next. Nine months after her return, the bride had produced a son and heir for the khan, thus Nogai had saved not only the bride, but the heir as well. The Nogai cycle didn’t end there, of course. The heir, it turned out, was the true offspring of the bear. When he reached the age of manhood, the bear-boy wreaked vengeance on the Qubal people for the death of his father. Finally Nogai met with him in a great battle fought on the banks of the Onga, where both had died of their wounds.

But that came much later. The story of Nogai’s bear was a favorite of childhood and only the coincidental symmetry of their ranks would have brought the end of the cycle to mind at all.

Fortunately, Bekter had his mind on his own version of the song. “Our Prince Tayy killed a smaller bear, of course,” he mused, though it went without saying.

“Ah, but consider this,” Tayy argued his case, glad to be back on the trail he had meant them to follow from his first mention of Nogai’s bear. “Tales always grow in the telling, right? So the bears in them must also grow. How big do you think this bear of ours will grow by the time we are old men?”

Bekter needed only a moment to consider. “Very large,” he agreed with a grin. “I think I can guarantee that it will become a very tower among bears.”

The clans did not build towers, of course. Cities that stayed in one place had once amazed the prince. In their travels to the Cloud Country, however, the army of the khan had seen great walls and towers built of stone or mud or wood that stood much longer than the life of a man, even a king. So they laughed, as they were meant to do, at the notion of a bear as tall as the great Temple of the Moon at the heart of the Golden City.

“And did I bring down the beast alone with my simple bow? Or did a valiant guardsman come to my aid with a spear carved with a charm for good fortune?” Tayy teased both cousins with the question.

Bekter picked up his tone, fluttering his fingers across the bent bow, mimicking their travel along the strings of his lute. “The young prince will win the day since that is the true history. And, of course, a singer at court always knows where his pies are coming from. Though the friend and guardsman must get in his blows, since brothers are closer than cousins.”

“And the rest of his companions? Do they appear as the villains in the piece, or the comic relief?” Jumal rolled his eyes and let his tongue loll out of the corner of his mouth in answer to his own mocking questions.

“They could be led astray by mischievous spirits,” Bekter thought out loud. Tayy was relieved that he had taken up his prince’s cause to draw his companions out of their dark moods with frivolity. In that vein he offered another end to their tale: “But is it not true that the companions had spread out in the woods, hunting prey and also alert to every danger? Good fortune made the prince a hero, but who would not have bagged the same shaggy prey in his position?”

“Not I,” Jumal cast a dark and complex look at the cousin who now rode in his place at Tayy’s side. “Qutula had my spear.”

“I thought I might need one but discovered a flaw in the shaft of my own. I meant to return it to you, or replace it if it took damage.”

“And a good thing you did,” Bekter asserted with fervor. Tayy thought he meant because it had helped to save his life, but in the true spirit of a singer, Bekter explained, “It gives me a way to add Jumal as another character in the tale.”

“The fool who left his weapon behind?”

They passed through the palisade of carts that marked the boundary of the tent city. As they entered the broad avenue that led to the palace of the khan, Bekter waved his hand to dismiss Jumal’s contribution. “That will never work. We must have only heroes in this tale. I think you gave the brave companion Qutula your spear, to replace his damaged one as a token of your regard. And so you are implicated with the prince in saving his life as well.”

Jumal seemed on the point of objecting to this version of the tale, which caused Tayy to wonder himself at the histories he had taken for truth all his life. Not the giant bear, of course. Even as a boy he had recognized the rich embroidery of a poet’s imagination, but he wondered now what less miraculous truth like his own hid behind the singer’s art.

Riding between the round white tents of the city, however, his companions had taken up the decoration of the afternoon with elaborations of their own exploits at the hunt. His objections lost in the laughing contributions of his fellows, Jumal accepted that he would have no say in the part he would play in the coming epic. Which was exactly what Tayy wanted. He laughed with the others, adding his own variant: “Where is the maiden in the tale? How can we have a hero without a maiden?”

Qutula paled alarmingly at the suggestion, but Tayy spread his arm wide to express his generosity when he said, “I will gladly cede my place in the tale to a princess. Perhaps the warrior queen of Pontus may rescue the embattled warrior? Even Qutula could have no objection to such a womanly rescue!”

They had all seen the warrior queen and her women’s army in battle, and agreed that she made a more comely heroine than the prince, “Though as likely to skin the brave companion as the bear,” Bekter pointed out, which made them all laugh the harder.

“A gentler maiden, then,” Jumal suggested, to which Tayy made one change: “Then she must take your place, good friend, and offer up the charmed spear to the gallant youth.”

Jumal flashed his eyelashes, ever the fool for a joke, and Tayy added his own jeering to that of his companions.

Then he saw the girl, conjured, it seemed, by their discussion.

There was nothing outwardly noteworthy about her, he would later admit. Pretty, but in a self-contained way, with none of the obvious allure that Sechule seemed to hold for her suitors. The girl stood with a broom in her hand in the doorway of a tent with ravens embroidered on the flap that closed over the smoke hole. He didn’t know why the broom seemed so important—he’d seen enough of them in the hands of slaves and servants. But raven feathers decorated the doorway of the tent the way pelts of stoats hung from Bolghai’s burrow. Brooms hung from Bolghai’s roof as well. Tayy’s friend Llesho, who had turned out to be a mortal god, had danced with a broom to find his totem form. So he wondered if the broom in the hands of the girl had magical properties, too.

She met his gaze, her dark, thoughtful eyes taking his measure, though he couldn’t tell what judgment she made about him. She wore the simple dress and hair ornaments of a maiden, but she didn’t giggle or hide her face or disappear inside the tent as most girls would do. She didn’t call out to him or smile either. Tayy felt turned inside out, with all his guts exposed to view. His thoughts from the deepest to the most frivolous, his feelings from the meanest to the most exalted were suddenly there on the surface for the girl to examine and to judge.

If he’d had a place to hide, he might have done so—except that for some reason he didn’t mind the intrusion of her gaze as he might anyone else who looked at him that way. Anyone but Lady Bortu. His grandmother had the same way of reading him to the ground with her glance. He didn’t get this funny feeling in the pit of his stomach when Lady Bortu did it, though.

Look your fill,
he told the girl with his own gaze. “Scars are the measure of a king.”

“Excuse me, my prince. I didn’t hear.” Qutula asked, polite attention on his face, while a little behind them, their companions watched expectantly for his answer.

“Nothing—” He must have spoken aloud without realizing. “Nothing, just a riddle my father used to tell. ‘Scars are the measure of a king.’ ”

Chimbai-Khan had laughed at the wounds he took in battle, giving the riddle as his reason. Tayy had thought he meant that a khan was spared the pain of his injuries. Bruised from weapons practice and combat games, he had longed for the day he became khan so that he could laugh at painless cuts as well. Since then, war and death had taught him otherwise. No wound came without its cost. Scars marked not the wounding of a king, but his ability to heal himself, and with it, his people.

Fighting beside Llesho, the god-king, he had grown to understand more about what it meant to rule. People need their gods and shamans, their peaceful lives. But someone had to protect them from the evil of the world, even it if cost him some scars. He figured he’d be good at that now, good at being their khan.

“I was thinking of my father, and hoping that the way I carry my own wounds speaks well of me.”

Qutula looked at him strangely and he gave a little shrug, as if to let the words slide off his shoulders. “I hadn’t meant to say it out loud.”

His cousin’s answer, when it came—“All who follow you are honored to serve you”—felt like a line recited from a hero’s tale. Tayy ducked his head, feeling foolish. No one but himself cared about his old war wounds. The girl couldn’t know about his scars anyway.

Her eyes were very dark and very large, he noticed. She held his gaze while the pink tip of her tongue reached out and delicately touched the corner of her rich, full lip before disappearing again. He didn’t know what that revealed of her thoughts about him, but he had a suspicion that he ought to.

Who are you?
he wondered.
What clan? What name?

He dared not stop to ask. Her tent was small, not even two lattices and so far from the palace, indicating a family of low station. He didn’t want his companions to mistake his curiosity for interest. Qutula, he thought, might have noticed something, but his cousin made no comment. Tayy was relieved. They moved on and soon the mysterious girl had passed out of sight behind them.

The laughter had died in the strange moment before the raven tent, but the companions resumed their boasting as they neared the center of the camp. Challenges were accepted for wrestling matches and, if they noticed that he didn’t join in the merriment, they were discreet and did not remark on it. Left to his own thoughts, the prince considered the wagons heading away from the outskirts of the city. The passage of the peaceful folk meant nothing to the fighters who would stay at the right hand of the khan wherever he raised his tents. But Prince Tayy wondered how he could impel the family of the girl to stay until he had learned more about her. For the sake of curiosity, of course. He did not consider that he might fall in love until his uncle supplied him with a wife.