Chapter Eight

IN THE DARKENING shadows of the fading lamplight, Mergen called for more music. Bekter looked up from where he sat with the court musicians, reviewing the new tale one more time as they quietly followed his direction. Although his own play did not match theirs, the musicians would always find a way to include him if he wished, for the sake of his songs. If the light and airy tune clung a bit more tenaciously to the ground, he repaid them with the sure flight of his words.

But tonight he left the second act to the masters. The epic singers came forward to recite the heroic tales of long ago and then, as the lamps began to flicker, the gathered company of the court made their bows and wandered off to their own tents to sleep.

Qutula was among the first to leave. With a smile that hurt his face he waved away another bowl of kumiss. Yawning was easier and, he realized, he didn’t have to fake that at all. “If I may be permitted, I would find my rest, the better to acquit myself with honor on the field tomorrow.” His bright and hopeful grin gave away more pleasurable plans.

“Rest indeed, but in whose arms?” Mergen guessed, as Qutula had meant him to do. With a laugh the khan warned him, “Don’t stray far from camp. You don’t want to miss the call to the games.”

“Great Sun won’t find me sleeping,” Qutula promised, and let his smile slide into a knowing smirk.

“Then go,” the khan urged him with a wave of his hand, “I’m sure greater rewards await you in the dark!”

Qutula gave a final bow before he made his swaggering exit from the ger-tent palace of his father. He carried himself with the fierce bearing of a warrior as he passed through the chieftains and advisers gathered under the khan’s roof. His thoughts, however, already flew to the lady whose mark on his breast burned anticipation in his veins.

Later, when Bortu and the prince left him to find their respective blankets, the khan quietly bid his general Yesugei to attend him.

“Find out what you can of the life of this girl we saw when we returned from hunting. I don’t want her to know she is being watched, but report her actions to me, and in particular if she should meet with the prince.”

“As you wish.” With a bow Yesugei withdrew to obey his khan’s command.

That would have to do for now. Tomorrow, he would talk to Qutula and Bekter about keeping a similar guiding watch on the prince. Which reminded him of Qutula’s own boastful withdrawal. When had his son found his way under a friendly blanket? He would have to uncover how serious the connection was, and how suitable the girl to make ties within the palace. At the least he must find a way to warn Sechule against arranging wives of her own choosing for her sons. When Tayy became khan, he would have his own ideas about the alliances he would bind with his cousins’ marriage beds.

Like so many of the matters that preyed on Mergen’s mind, this one must wait for events to develop. Lying awake fretting like an old woman wouldn’t help. A snore off to his left reminded him that not all old women let such cares disturb their sleep. Lady Bortu would have advice of her own—might already have plotted a path for her grandsons through the tents of their allies. Such decisions were the province of women anyway. Prince Tayyichiut, with his uncle’s guidance, might point in the direction politics would take them, but the grandmothers would decide which young men and women would seal the treaties with their bodies.

Bortu hadn’t approved of Chimbai-Khan’s instructions that Mergen wander through the tents of the Qubal clans, offering no promises but making the tenuous connections that Chimbai-Khan required of them all. She would advise Tayy against such a policy for his cousins as well. Qutula and Bekter must marry, but carefully. With that last thought for the well-being of his sons, Mergen rolled over in his blankets and went to sleep.

Qutula found his horse waiting nearby in the care of his followers.

“Company, Captain?” Mangkut, one of his own since childhood, had taken guard duty outside the palace. At his master’s appearance, he came forward into the light.

“I think I can manage on my own.” Qutula lifted himself into his saddle and demonstrated his meaning with a rude hand gesture that earned him a chuckle.

Mangkut returned the gesture. “Just the kind of duty I would have asked for! But captains have a habit of reserving for themselves even the most dangerous missions where women are concerned!”

“Initiative,” Qutula advised in jest. “A man who conquers the mountains may rest in the valley!”

“But first he must elude the barking dog at the door!”

Qutula laughed at this reference to a potential mother-in-law. He had seen no signs of such a barking dog complicating his current interest.

She had not come to him since that one meeting in his war tent, but the tattoo on his breast tingled promisingly. The memory of her touch drew him like a hawk to its prey, though he couldn’t say how he knew she would be waiting. With a last farewell to his fellow guardsmen, he turned his horse about, and headed down the wide allée to the river, far from the tents of watchful aunts and mothers. Sechule would want to hear his plans, but that could wait until tomorrow. His breast burned and he kicked his horse to greater speed.

Sechule examined the chains of silver-and-turquoise beads that framed her face in the mirror that hung from the wall of her ger-tent of two lattices. The tent was larger than those of her lesser neighbors but in no way as ostentatious as it should be to shelter the sons of the khan. As she ran an elaborately carved comb made of bone through her long dark hair, she brooded on the unhappy fate that Mergen’s fickle attentions had left to her. She still looked younger than her years. Her hair had remained thick and unstreaked by gray, so she had no need to increase its volume with strands pulled from a horse’s tail as many women did. No evil surprises for her lovers, she mused, when the headdresses of a matron came off. Not that she had many lovers, of course—she didn’t need that sort of reputation attached to her sons. Mergen must have no excuse of paternal confusion by which to reject his own offspring.

Since his election to the khanate, Mergen had ceased to visit her tent. With inducements of many presents, however, her resolve against the general, Yesugei, had softened. She had allowed him to crawl under her blankets. The general lacked skill as a lover, but he did have the ear of the khan.

She didn’t put her hopes in any romance. Men who craved her blankets had proved inconstant once they had warmed themselves to their satisfaction. Her sons, however, shared the blood of the khan. Bekter seemed content to bask in the reflected glory of the palace, but in Qutula the burning of her own heart for justice found a second home. He would find a way to take his rightful place on the dais and she would be khaness, the mother who ruled a khan. . . .

Through the night Bolghai played his fiddle, taking turns with Toragana on her drum, one playing while the other rested in the grass. Now the tune mimicked the hopping of a jerboa, now the quick, elusive movements of the stoat, now the sinuous slither of the snake. Eluneke danced to them all. The determined rhythm of a mountain ewe didn’t call her spirit. Not roedeer nor wolf, not rabbit nor any creature that Bolghai or Toragana could imagine between them brought her totem spirit forth. . . .

By a sharp upthrust of rock Qutula spread his coat and lay in wait for the lady who came to him in the dark. As yet she had given him no name, nor had she let him see her face. This time was no different. Great Moon set, the darkest pit of night descended. In the distance, farther from the camp than he had come himself, he heard the shifting rhythms of music played on the drum and the fiddle. The sound came no closer, however, and he easily put it out of his mind. Slowly his eyes began to droop.

“Aieee!” A slithering pain in his chest brought him suddenly awake. Qutula clutched at the place where the tattoo burned deep into his flesh, but the angry ache suddenly lifted as if it had not existed at all. Breath came easily to him as it had not since the morning he had awakened to find the mark of the coiled serpent on his body. He blinked, staring up into the darkness that blotted out the stars.

“Thank you.” He knew she had something to do with the sudden absence of pain, he just didn’t know what.

“You’re welcome.”

Though he still couldn’t see her face, he followed the shadow of her movements as they darkened the night sky behind her. The lady of no name slipped her arms out of her coat and spread it to cover him. Then her waistcoat fell. He heard the slide of silk as she stepped out of her caftan, then she was naked between the coats with him, her skin night-cold where it touched him.

Assertive fingers sought out his buckles and the laces on his clothes. As before she did not permit him to undress, but nuzzled him through the openings she made in his shirts and trousers, rubbing her soft face everywhere on his body, as if his scent were the air she breathed.

“I’m starting to think you don’t want to know my name,” she whispered, and her words crossed his skin like scales, tormenting him with the pleasure of her soft breath.

“I do.” He moaned, reaching for her breast with his mouth gaping wide, gasping for the sustenance of her flesh.

“Then prove it.” She moved over him, taking him in, between her thighs, and pressing him down into the loamy earth with her round, soft hips. His lips found her breast and he latched on, drinking the sweat that bloomed with their exertions. The perfume of her skin made him dizzy.

“Anything,” he said when she pulled away from his mouth. In the small part of his mind left for thinking such thoughts, he mused that her mountains and valleys had conquered him and not the other way around as the riddle suggested.

“The prince.” She took his mouth, her lips cool with a liquor that numbed where she licked them and left him light-headed and short of breath. “Not too much.” She freed herself from his kiss. “Not yet. You promised me the life of the prince.”

“He’s too closely watched.” He didn’t want to tell her that his plan to murder the prince while hunting had fallen to the baser imperative of saving his own life from the maddened bear.

She stopped moving, tilted her head as if trying to comprehend a riddle in a foreign tongue.

“You promised.”

Qutula was finding it difficult to breathe. He thought that perhaps he ought to worry. But her fingers toyed with the braids of his hair and he knew that whatever she wanted of him she could have, if she would just move her hips, or let him—he reached up and took her shoulders, began to roll her over, but she slipped away—“Tsk, tsk”—leaving him bereft.

“Next time,” she suggested. “Maybe. Bring me a token. A finger bone, perhaps, or a rib of the prince. Then we can take up where we left off—”

“You can’t!”

“I have.” She had already left him when her final words came back to him. Something slithered across his belly. He went to throw off the coat that had covered them and realized it was gone, as was the mysterious woman who wanted him to be khan. Whatever serpent had crossed his flesh after she left him had disappeared into the grass. In its path it left the smell of moist earth and poisoned meat.

Qutula’s heart was beating more steadily, but he struggled for each breath. He couldn’t feel his lips. He knew he ought to be afraid of her. He had thought her a woman of the clans wishing to tie a khan to her skirts, but a witch seemed more likely. The tattoo burned more fiercely on his breast since she left him, a reminder of his promise.

It didn’t matter. He would do as she asked because it was in his best interest. He would have her then, when he was khan. If she tried to leave him unsatisfied again, he would have his followers hold her down until he had his fill, then he’d kill her. No one would blame him. She was a witch and he would be khan.

Pulling his clothes together, he made his way back to his mother’s tent, unwilling to listen to the jokes of his followers at his return. Sechule could have been a problem as well—politically, she wanted much the same from him as his night visitor did. But she was herself occupied under the blankets and didn’t notice his return. He crawled into his bed of furs and turned his back on the sounds from the other side of the firebox. Soon enough he fell asleep.

FALSE dawn came, and the light of Great Sun. And still Eluneke danced, leaving bloody footprints in the grass. Her thoughts wandered from the broom in her hand to the tent of her childhood, which had no father in it. As she danced, she wondered about the man who had fathered her. She remembered only the stealthy movements and rumbling voice of the lover who came to call in the middle of the night and disappeared again before dawn. Her mother had loved her, but after one midnight call from the stranger, Eluneke had been sent away for fostering to a minor clan.

Fostering was common among the clans. She had expected to go to the family of one of her mother’s brothers. With plenty of time for visiting back and forth, her aunts would have chosen a suitable husband for her. None of that had happened, however.

Eluneke hadn’t understood why a distant branch of her mother’s family had come to take her far from all she knew, though she thought it must have something to do with the man in the night. She had cried to be torn from her mother. Once she’d settled into her relatives’ tent, she’d had few visits home. Her foster family had been kind to her, but she had learned from the experience to hold herself a little aloof. She had promised herself never to give her heart so fully again.

When she heard that her mother had died of a wound in her breast that would not heal, Eluneke made the proper offerings and sacrifices. But she felt that all her ties to the mortal world had been cut. Toragana had come for her shortly after and she left her foster family behind with little regret. She had determined to maintain the same distance with Toragana. Now she wondered. By withholding her heart, even from her broom, did she stand in the way of finding her totem spirit?

She didn’t think the question that rose out of her inner self made any difference in what happened next. But she gripped her broom a little more warmly when, in desperation, Toragana began to beat out a hopping jig on her drum. Eluneke hopped, and hopped again. And suddenly the grass was taller than she was.

“Bolghai! What leaps higher than it is tall, yet cannot see over the grass!” Toragana called to her old teacher.

“She’s halfway there,” Bolghai laughed. He dropped to his belly with his chin to the ground so that he was eye to eye with the toad hopping madly where Eluneke had stood. “Now all she has to do is cross the river.”

With that, he turned into a stoat and ran away.

Toragana clicked appreciatively and patted Eluneke’s little toad head. Then she turned into a raven and flew over the Onga.

This, Eluneke figured, was the hard part. The thought amazed her because just moments ago she would have said that finding her totem spirit was the hardest thing she’d ever tried to do. She had rather hoped to be something more stately, like Toragana’s raven. Birds knew how to fly already; that must surely give her a head start on crossing the river. She knew her shaman teachers meant more than that, however. She took a hop, another hop, and found herself leaping high over Bolghai’s little camp. When she came down again, she was on the other side of the Onga, with no idea how to turn back into a girl.

“ Eluneke! Eluneke!” Bolghai shook the water off his sleek fur and turned back into a man, the stoat pelts flying around the neck of his shaman’s clothes. Then he realized she wouldn’t have understood when he called to her in the language of the stoat, so he tried again. “Eluneke! Let me help you! Show me where you are!”

A hesitant croak brought him to a rock by the side of the water, where a small tree toad sat looking back at him with wide, sad eyes.

“I know,” he said as Toragana came to rest on a nearby branch. She didn’t return to her human shape right away; the piercing fixed gaze she set on her pupil made him nervous for a moment. Then she shook out her feathers and landed neatly on her feet.

“There we are,” she said, settling the folds of her many-feathered dress around her. “Eluneke, you must come back to us. You were looking very snackish even to me, and I knew who you were. Try to remember there are real hawks and ravens about. Snakes, too—”

“Yes, child. It’s time to come back to us.”

The toad blinked solemnly at him.

“Come on, girl!” Toragana remained a woman standing on her two long legs with her fists resting on her hips, but her head shifted, became a raven’s head with a raven’s beak. “Snack!” she clacked, and snapped a hair’s breadth from gobbling Eluneke right up.

“Think of something close to you,” Bolghai added, more helpfully, he thought. It surprised him when her broom took shape beside her—she’d given every indication of hating her partner.

Unfortunately, the rock she had chosen to sit on as a toad was far smaller than her returning human form. She tumbled into the brush and crumbling leaves, dazed for a moment, then hastily brought herself back to order, her first words for her costume.

“How will I catch enough toads to make my ceremonial clothes!” she wailed. “It will take me the rest of my life just to get started!”

“Exactly as it should be,” Bolghai grinned and patted her on the back. “Do you think that Toragana or I came to our present level of magnificence overnight? Not at all! Time and travels have brought feathers to one, the skins of stoats to another. To a third, time will bring the hides of toads. But all of that can wait. Breakfast is calling and you have yet to make your first dream journey.”

Great Sun rose, lighting the slender trees that huddled close to the riverbank. Its golden glow drifted like a cloak over Eluneke, who gazed wistfully at the sparkling ripples the current stirred in the water. They made a pretty picture, girl and river, but it wasn’t getting him any closer to his breakfast. Bolghai waggled his eyebrows encouragingly.

“Breakfast!” he reminded her.

Eluneke sighed. Toragana took up her drum and Bolghai set his fiddle to his chin. Picking up the rhythm of the jig, the girl hopped, hopped, in a fast tight circle. Suddenly, she disappeared.

“I think we’ve done it,” Bolghai complimented his fellow shaman. It seemed unlikely that she would return here to the woods when his little ger-tent, or Toragana’s tidier one, must call to her out of the dream lands. With that thought in mind, he turned into a stoat and dove into the river, heading home. He could track her through the dreamscape just as easily after a cup of tea.