Lords of Grass and Thunder (54 page)

Prince Tayyichiut strode into the ger-tent palace of his uncle, dripping with rain that had obscured even the light of the stars to search by. Dropping his wet coat in the hands of a servant, he approached the dais. At his back the Nirun fell onto the carpets below the firebox, weary from a day of searching for the shaman-princess. For days they had looked, in the shadow of every rock and behind every tree. In every tent they found the same answer: no one had seen Eluneke. The troops who went out every day had given up on finding her well and now hoped only to find her alive.

Tayy kept to himself and his Nirun the belief that Qutula held her prisoner. His cousin was too clever to lead him to Eluneke. He knew that, but had assigned men to follow him anyway. Qutula would expect that. For himself, he had begun by riding out on an alternate shift, following the Durluken in the hope that someone would slip up and lead him to her hidden prison. His own experience matched the reports of his Nirun, however. He would follow Mangkut or another of his cousin’s men as far as the wood where the Onga rose out of the dell, then would lose them as if they had fallen through the river into the underworld itself. They always rode out of the wood again at shift change, but none of his own could ever follow them to where they searched, or where they might guard Eluneke as Qutula’s prisoner.

At first, they’d all spent long hours at the search, but as the days in the saddle produced no results, fewer stayed out to exhaustion. He still saw his cousin very little, but that owed less to strategy and more to the fact that he kept no schedule now but rode until he could stay in the saddle no longer, and returned only long enough to restore his strength to ride again.

Tayy staggered slightly as he neared the dais. Bekter, fingering an old, half-forgotten tune in the corner, laid a hand across the strings of his lute to silence them. Bolghai was absent still. The empty place by the musicians ached like a missing tooth, but many of the chieftains and nobles had gathered above the firebox, watching as he advanced. He saw Sechule in a new purple coat sitting among them. Chahar was gone, on an errand of his uncle’s to Yesugei, but Jochi had returned to his place by the gur-khan, a low table covered in maps between them. It didn’t take a map to find a girl lost in the tent city, but they had enemies on their doorstep, and half of their army far to the south.

“We’ve found no sign of her,” Tayy said, with a nod to his cousin Bekter to acknowledge the courtesy of his silence. He thought the song might have been a warning, if only he could remember what it was. Outside, his dogs howled their distress, but in front of his uncle’s court he kept his own voice cold as stone. “No sign, either, of the Tinglut.”

Qutula had returned ahead of him, and was already seated at the foot of the dais. His eyes were wide and dark with a false concern. “I fared no better,” he said.

The gur-khan nodded, accepting the report, but his glance at his blanket-son hid questions he wasn’t ready to ask before the whole court. Tayy would have asked them with a sword, but killing his cousin wouldn’t find Eluneke.

“Come, sit by your grandmother and calm her weeping,” Mergen invited him. Lady Bortu was doing nothing of the sort, but Tayy accepted his place beside her. She looked not much better than he guessed he must himself, but kept her thoughts, tight-lipped, to herself.

“Rest,” Mergen ordered them all. “You can’t do anything more until the rain stops. Then perhaps Lun and her brothers will help us find one of her own.”

Great Moon watched over shamans in their dream travels. Tayy didn’t think that would help Eluneke now. Humans had taken her. He didn’t think it was the Tinglut, though not from Qutula’s assurance, “I sent Durluken to follow Prince Daritai. They returned today, but report no sign of my sister on the march.”

“Wisely done,” the gur-khan thanked him, though he must have wondered, as Tayy did himself, why Qutula waited until now to tell him. His cousin’s eyes were gleaming, though he kept his mouth turned down as if in sorrow.

He enjoys our grief. He did it to see me flinch.
The prince reached that conclusion even through his exhaustion. He’d already dismissed the Tinglut as the thieves, though like his cousin he had sent a precious few of his Nirun to shadow the movements of Prince Daritai. The one report he’d received had given him nothing about Eluneke, but he’d learned that the Durluken were watching. Mergen Gur-Khan’s scouts had followed the Tinglut forces as well, but they wouldn’t find what wasn’t there.

No, someone closer to home had taken her like a bride thief, or a murderer. Whatever he had done to her, Qutula’s face gave nothing away as he watched, with false concern, Tayy fall loose-limbed with weariness to the dais.

Servants were called then, food and drink brought. Tayy chose a pie from a laden silver tray, but Qutula took it from him, bit into it and swallowed before he offered it to the prince. Tayy didn’t trust his cousin, but he didn’t think Qutula wanted him dead badly enough to poison himself first. So he ate when Qutula found his food safe and sipped when the kumiss bowl came to him. His mind, however, was on Bekter’s tale.

“Play,” the gur-khan asked with a gesture to his blanket-son. “Let music ease our minds a little, if it can.”

The usual court entertainment had been dismissed for the duration of the crisis, but Bekter’s music always seemed to soothe the gur-khan’s distress. He came forward, his instrument in his hand, and made a low bow.

“As you wish, my lord.”

A servant brought a low stool and Bekter sat on it. If his mouth were as choked with secrets as his eyes, Tayy thought, he would never get a song out. Presently he began to play the song he had practiced earlier. As he listened, Tayy realized the poet’s secrets were all there in his voice.

“Long ago a princess lived,
A child among warriors.
Alaghai of seven summers
bright with blood and sword
Walked barefooted among the dead,
weeping for their fate.”

Tayy set aside the kumiss, concentrating on the meter. He knew the story, a popular one from childhood, of the little princess who was later known as Alaghai the Beautiful. Beside him, Mergen picked up the cup the prince had abandoned.

“ ‘He’s gone to his ancestors,
magnificent in battle,
With sacrifices of enemies
to pay his way
And crowned with a silver cap,
the bloodied khan.

“ ‘Until I see his crow-pecked eyes,
and touch his mortal wounds
Your words are the wind to me,
crying false sorrow.’
She left them, to search barefoot
through the red fields of her father.”

In the end, of course, little Alaghai would find her father the khan, wounded but living on that dreadful battlefield. Because of her timely aid he would survive. An appropriate, if somewhat pointed, choice for a party resting from a search, it reassured that their efforts would not be in vain. Like the child princess, they would also have success. One might even smile at the reversal of roles in the tale in which a princess sought a khan to amuse their own khan seeking a princess.

The tale might mean nothing more, except that Prince Tayyichiut remembered another night when his own father Chimbai-Khan had told the story of the grown Alaghai the Beautiful. Angry at her choice of the foreign king Llesho the Great as her husband, her brothers had kidnapped her and murdered her child before her eyes. Her husband, that foreign king, died of spell-crafted murder when a cursed spear turned in his own hand and killed him. The brothers likewise fell, in the war they had begun. Only Alaghai had survived, but as a madwoman alone in the tent of her captivity.

Few in the court would connect the hopeful story of the little princess saving the life of her father with the tragic aftermath of betrayal and death. Tayy wouldn’t have done so himself, except that he had traveled in the company of that foreign king’s successor and repaid that debt of long-ago murder with the wounds on his own flesh. But he thought, looking into Bekter’s eyes, that the poet remembered, and that he sang the early tale only because he daren’t sing the later. Beside him, he heard a groan, and turning, saw his uncle wipe his lips.

Chapter Thirty-four

Q
UTULA BEAT with his fist on the support next to door to his mother’s tent. It was still night, but with a snap in the air that spoke of false dawn just off the horizon.

“My Lady Mother!” he pounded on the support again and cast an impatient glance at the troop of Durluken massed behind him. “Saddle Bekter’s horse, and my mother’s,” he instructed two he trusted least. “The rest of you stay here unless I call for you.” He ducked his head and went in.

“Mother! My lord, the gur-khan, needs you!” he said, conscious that he could be heard easily through the tent felt.

Sechule seemed to have few such concerns. “Even the gur-khan doesn’t always get what he wants.” She had risen, and set a taper to a lamp. In the yellow glow she reached for the new purple silk coat Mergen had given her. “This is hardly a proper errand for a son.”

Curled on his side of the firebox, Bekter made a noise in his sleep like a yak in heat. He rolled over in his bed, burying his head in his blankets.

“The gur-khan has fallen ill,” Qutula explained. He hadn’t come as Mergen’s procurer. “No one knows what to do.”

He tried to warn her with his glance to listen past his words to the meaning he couldn’t speak out loud.

“I’ll come with you, of course. But the court’s shaman has a reputation for his skill,” she added, playing her part, though with real concern behind it. If he’d been there, the shaman might have recognized the poison and even figured out who had dosed the gur-khan. Or, if he didn’t identify it at once, Mergen might have died while he cast about for a likely cure. “Surely he must be able to help more than I.”

Qutula shook his head. “Bolghai has disappeared.” No surprise that the old stoat had vanished. He’d abetted the toad-girl’s training, after all, and now she was missing. The shaman’s absence could only work to Qutula’s benefit, however. Murdering the gur-khan hadn’t been part of Qutula’s plan. At least not yet. And he wanted none of the blame to tarnish his own name.

“Bek, wake up!” He strode over to rouse the lump hidden in the bedcovers. “The gur-khan needs your help!”

“Anything, of course.” Bekter rolled out of his blankets, bleary-eyed but tracking. “What’s the problem?”

“Mergen is sick. The Lady Bortu thinks he may be dying.” He omitted his own certainty of it. His brother knew nothing of the plots he had hatched with their mother and the Lady Chaiujin. For his brother, and for the court, Qutula had to appear the concerned blanket-son, frantic to help his beloved, if only clandestinely recognized, father.

“Bolghai is off looking for our sister, so we need you to find the ragged shamaness who trained the girl and bring her to the palace. Our father may die without her help.”

“She’s not there.” Bekter grabbed for his coats where they had fallen from their peg onto the carpets. “She’s looking for Eluneke, too, but in the sphere of dreams. Time runs funny there; she could be back yesterday, or a week from now.”

“For your father you have to try,” Qutula insisted. He might have said more, but Mangkut knocked to tell them the horses were ready.

Bekter yawned, but he was moving with a sense of urgency now. “I’ll check her tent; she may have come back while I was asleep. But if she’s not there, I don’t know what I can do.”

“You’ll do your best, I’m sure of it.” Qutula added an encouraging slap on the arm and assigned a handful of his own men to accompany him. He urged his brother to speed, confident that their mother would have the matter under control before he actually found the raven woman.

Sechule had begun to gather herbs and other things from the jars and boxes on her workbench. “What are his symptoms?” she asked for the Durluken witnesses.

“He suffers much the same as the prince’s recent disease, only to a much more serious degree: a clenching of the belly and nausea, headache. Even the light of a candle brought near causes him to scream in anguish. The Lady Bortu has tried all the cures she knows, but nothing seems to help. Most just make the pain worse. The prince is frantic with worry.”

Mergen had drunk the kumiss meant for Tayy and it was killing him instead of the inconvenient prince. He thought Mangkut might have guessed what had happened, but didn’t risk the truth in case his band of Durluken harbored a spy. Sechule had nodded her understanding as he recounted the symptoms, however. Of course, she would know them and know what they meant. When he had done, she asked, “Is anyone else ill?”

“No one else seems affected. The prince says nothing of his own condition, but I believe he suffers his usual mild version of the disease. We fear he may worsen.” No one said the word “poison,” but Qutula felt it as a question on every mind. Sechule, of course, would realize that Mergen hadn’t taken the full amount. She had calculated the dose for a younger heart, however. Qutula feared the gur-khan might be dead before they could reach him with the antidote. If that were to happen, it would mean war over the succession. Until he was certain that his original plan had failed utterly, however, he needed to play out his part as a loving son and cousin. His Durluken, reporting as gossip his desperate efforts to save his father, would allay any suspicion against him.