Chapter Ten
“LIKEAN ARMY RODE HIS hunters after the bright shining one—hey! Watch where you’re going, there!”
“Excuse me!” Eluneke bounced off the chest of a warrior who parted the crowd like a walking mountain. Flustered, she smoothed the simple day dress of a maiden she wore. The warrior gave her a sharp frown but quickly passed on. Free of his hostile gaze, she rubbed absently at her forehead. He hadn’t bothered to ask if she’d been hurt by their sudden collision.
Eluneke had followed the flow of people to the great parade field in front of the ger-tent palace of the khan. Most days it was just an empty patch of churned-up grass where the young played jidu for practice and the warriors took it in turns to hone their own skills under the watchful eye of the khan. For the games, merchants had spread their wares on blankets and sat with their backs against the white felt tents of the high-ranked clans that marked out the dimensions of the playing field. The crowd, hemmed in between the blankets full of wares on the outside of the field and the warriors who paraded within it, buffeted her as she tried to find a spot where she could see the competitions.
“Beads, little one?” an old crone wheedled. “An amulet to attract a young suitor, perhaps?” From her seat on a greasy blue blanket she offered a charm on her upraised palm.
Eluneke dismissed the charm at once; Toragana did much better ones and she was learning the skill herself. But her fingers itched to touch the turquoise bead the size of a nut that nestled in the folds of the blanket.
The old crone followed her gaze and cackled appreciatively at the end of it. “For a richer purse than yours, my girl, but I’ll tell your fortune for a copper penny!”
She’d had quite enough of thinking about her future, and each new strand seemed only to tangle the weave even more. Professional courtesy demanded a polite reply, however, so she answered, “Not today, thank you!” before plunging back into the throng.
“I know where you’re headed even without the knuck lebones!” the old crone called after her, laughing.
No mystery there, Eluneke agreed as she made her way toward the games at the center of the field. She turned sideways, trying the childhood trick of sliding through the crowd, but it didn’t work anymore. Her breasts got in the way. Womanhood hadn’t stolen her best weapon, however; with a last jab of a sharp elbow in an anonymous rib cage she reached the front, where all the girls of marriageable age had gathered. Swaying like butterflies in their bright silk dresses, they had come to watch their potential husbands contest in mock battle.
An orphan and the apprentice to a shaman, Eluneke had no such finery. She didn’t mind, though; the leather robes of her office awaited the completion of her initiation. As for her husband, fate or a shaman’s calling had seen to that. Fine clothes would little serve her in the difficult task ahead—keeping him alive.
She had come out among strangers, but that was all right, too. The girls from her own clan would have asked her which of the young warriors would be their husbands, how many children they would have, would they be rich. If she answered as they wished, they’d run away laughing, as the company of an apprentice shamaness meant nothing to them. If she told the truth, some would leave weeping and others would leave mad. The rest would just leave, declaring their good mood ruined while they hid their secret smiles at having better luck ahead than their companions. She had more important concerns to worry about today, like finding out who her not-quite-dead-yet husband was.
Luck, or the spirits that drew a young shaman like a child on leading reins, had brought her to a place not far from the ger-tent palace of the khan. Sunlight flashed off the silver embroidery and Eluneke stared, amazed, at the scrollwork and the patterns of leaves and vines and wildflowers that covered every inch of the white felt. She had never attended a festival so grand, nor ever seen the palace or the khan, though she had heard enough in stories to recognize them now.
Resplendent in silks beneath his ceremonial armor, and with the quilted-silk-and-silver headdress of the khanate upon his head, the khan sat on the back of a sleek white horse caparisoned as richly as her master. On his left hand the mother of the khan and grandmother of the prince his nephew sat astride her own great steed. Adorned in patterned silks of orange and yellow decorated everywhere with chains of silver ornaments and beads, the khaness Lady Bortu viewed the gathered warriors from beneath a massive headdress of silver horns draped everywhere with strings of precious gems. Eluneke didn’t see anyone who might be the prince among the dignitaries, clan chieftains, and nobles who gathered to either side. He would, no doubt, participate in the games, but generals flanked the khan and his lady mother on either side, and Bolghai himself sat a cream-colored donkey among the highborn waiting eagerly for the games to begin.
A little apart from the royal party stood an aging warrior in the armor of a strange ulus. Not a prisoner, since he held a post of some honor. Doubtless an emissary of some ally from the war, he pretended not to notice the guardsmen in their blue coats who created a wall of their bodies between him and the royal party. His keen eyes seemed to take in everything around him, however, including the girl watching him from the crowd. Not wishing to draw attention to herself, Eluneke quickly shifted her gaze to the guardsmen.
Only the best young men of highest family would guard the palace itself. Her soon-to-be-dead husband might hold such rank, so she carefully examined each of the warriors in blue. None of them bore the face drifting like a vapor across the death’s-head skull that had ridden past her door. The spirits were making her work for her reward. She would finish her training then, and when she had the skill to save him, they would find each other.
Scuffing the wooden sole of her boot in the turned earth, she couldn’t completely suppress her disappointment. Still, the day was clear and the many bright banners of the clans floated proudly on the breeze above the heads of the gathered armies arrayed on the playing field. Harnesses creaked and horses snorted impatiently. Great Sun glinted off shields and helmets and turned the silver embroidery of the ger-tent palace to liquid fire.
The khan nudged his mount with his knee and the mare took two careful steps forward. Next to Eluneke, a woman in brilliant silks and with many amulets in her hair ornaments caught her breath.
“He is . . .” Eluneke began, ready to offer her own praise of the magnificent khan.
The look in the woman’s eyes turned the words to stone in her mouth. She couldn’t tell how old the woman was, exactly, but her expression left no doubt that her gasp was a very private communication. Hunger and longing, and bitter anger lived uneasily together in that glance. Eluneke had seen pale semblances of the same emotions before, in the faces of men and women both who had come to Toragana looking for love charms, or to be free of love, or for amulets to cause the death of a fickle lover.
Toragana offered them soothing tea and listened quietly to their tales of disappointment and longing. She would send them away with a mild prescription for heart’s ease, or a harmless charm and then set Eluneke to scrubbing every cup and airing the cushions, lest the spirits who drove these poor souls should come to rest in the shaman’s own tent. So she took a step back, careful to keep her expression open and friendly but giving the woman’s spirits the space they needed. The woman didn’t notice. Her attention had locked on the khan and she scarcely breathed as he began to speak.
Mergen looked out over the gathered crowd, proud of his people and the youths who had gathered for the contests. Bekter had determined to sit out the matches, preferring to make tales rather than to star in them. Already his song about Prince Tayy and the bear had spread through the camp. Tinglut-Khan’s messenger had the tale on his lips when he petitioned the khan for permission to take back to his own camp a report of the games held to celebrate the event. With some misgiving, for the man was no stripling but a seasoned spy, Mergen had granted the request, while setting him under the watchful eye of his general, Yesugei, and the palace guard.
The wrestling matches, in which Qutula and Prince Tayy would compete, would come later in the morning, however. To open the games, Mergen introduced his army. He had strung his bow for the purpose, and he raised it over his head in salute.
“Now we celebrate the glorious moment of your warriors’ great return!” he announced. Throughout the crowd his criers repeated his words so that all might hear them. “They have filled the foreign gods and the rightful kings who serve them with wonder while striking terror in the hearts of their demon enemies!”
He would have played down the mystical part of the recent war, but Bolghai had recommended against it. As yet, no one had found the snake-demon who had taken the place of the true Lady Chaiujin in the tent of Chimbai-Khan. The demon-lady had escaped Mergen’s effort to have her executed, but the snake’s heart would burn with cold fury in her breast until she had taken deadly revenge. Until she was found, Bolghai warned, he must leaven even the sweetest moment of victory with the bitter warning that demons and spirits could strike at the heart of the khanate. Still, the people raised their voices in praise. If the fear of the unnatural shivered in their bones, they had the memory of honor and glory to warm them again.
“Fathers and mothers, honor your sons! Children, honor your fathers!”
A cheer rose up, deep-throated from among the gray haired in the crowd and lighter-voiced from the children who bounced in their saddles as they waited for the call to race.
“Wives, welcome your husbands back into your tents and give them comfort after their labors!”
Women who had tended the tents of their husbands during the war answered with their own welcoming warmth. Mergen turned his hand and, in acknowledgment of the welcome of their families, the army advanced their horses one step and clapped their spears on their shields, raising an answering din. At a signal unseen by the crowd, but well known to the khan, the rattling of spears ceased, and row by row the warriors rode in dignity from the playing field.
The games proper would start with the children so that the warriors might prepare with no unseemly haste for their own competitions. As the last of them filed out, Mergen let his glance wander over the bright colors of the departing banners and the brilliant silks of the crowd.
At his side, Yesugei held still as a rabbit at the point of the hunter’s arrow. Following his general’s line of sight, Mergen found himself staring into Sechule’s eyes. Once he had thought them beautiful, but now they burned in their orbs with a demon heat. No. If anything possessed Sechule, it was her obsession, not demons. Yesugei stirred in the saddle, his face frozen with the jealousy that he dared not reveal to his khan.
For her part, Sechule seemed not to notice the presence of the general as she held Mergen’s gaze with her own. Enough! He turned away, and could not believe what he saw. So close that she might reach out and touch his old mistress stood his daughter, Eluneke, in the plain clothes of the lowest ranks. What relief he might have drawn from the fact that her clothes bore no mark of her shamanic training was completely overturned by the presence at her side of the one woman in the camp who might have both the experience to see the khan’s eyes in that lowly face and the motivation to use that knowledge against him.
“Interesting,” Lady Bortu whispered at his side.
So, not the only one, though he hoped his mother meant his daughter no harm. Of the two, Sechule showed no interest in the girl fate had put within her grasp. She did not miss the loss of his eyes upon her, however, and began to follow the turn of his head. Mergen continued his sweep of the crowd, leading her gaze to the children waitng on horseback. Boys and girls together, some as young as six summers but none older than eleven, eagerly sat their mounts in a line held back by a silken cord.
Clan custom made no distinction between the sexes at this age, but he saw that some of the older girls carried themselves with a military erectness to their spines. Tales of the women warriors of Pontus had traveled back from the wars with the army. The female warrior Captain Kaydu, servant of Shan’s mortal goddess of war, had ridden in their very camp, commanding soldiers both male and female. Times change, he thought to himself with hope and sorrow. Soon, so must we. He didn’t let the crowd see his thoughts, but kept his face grave and kingly as he handed the general his bow in exchange for a pike attached to which fluttered a silk ribbon embroidered in the khan’s silver.
“To the victor the khan’s ribbon!” As Mergen exhorted the youthful riders, he raised the pike so that the wide ribbon snapped in the breeze above their heads.
With one voice the children cried out, “Victory!” and the crowd cheered its approval.
Sechule’s attention had returned to his face, he noted out of the corner of his eye. His daughter had moved a safer distance from the mother of her unknown brothers. He didn’t let his glance catch on her again, but turned with a smile to the children waiting with their hands clenched in the manes of their horses.
“Ride!” he cried, and dropped his arm in a grand sweeping motion of the pike with the prize ribbon in his hand. At his signal, guardsmen let go of the silken cord that held back the riders.
Like a whirlwind the horses dashed away in a plume of dust. Their young riders clung to their backs as they thundered down the wide avenue, leaving the white-and-silver palace for the open grassland beyond the camp. They would follow the markers of silk fluttering on stakes that laid out the course; the sun would crest the zenith before the first of them appeared again, returning, on the horizon.
When only the dust they had raised remained to tell of the child riders’ passing, the crowd settled for the next call to arms. So many of their youths had achieved their blooding during the recent wars that few remained to play at jidu now. But the number sufficed to make two lines of fifty or so youths holding their mounts at the first yellow stake that marked out the playing field. Too old to ride with the children, they had been too young to travel with the armies whom honor had called to Thebin. Now that he thought about it, there seemed to be more of them than he’d expected. Many had just moved up from the simpler games of childhood and still played with blunted spears, but—
At such a distance, and dressed as they were in training garb, he couldn’t be certain. But he guessed the tales out of Pontus had made an impression among this group as well. Many of the new warriors in training were girls. A season ago he would have laughed at the notion. A season ago, his armsmaster would have done the same. Since then, they’d fought side by side with swordswomen and taken orders from a mortal goddess of war. So Mergen-Khan modified his prepared speech.
“Qubal clans, I give you your Qubal young! Judge their skills and welcome them as the warriors of your future!” He’d taken out the word that specified adolescent boys for one that made no distinction by sex and waited to see if the criers would pick up the change. The nearest of them delivered his words correctly; he could only hope that those farther back in the crowd would do the same. His audience responded with jubilation.
Mergen had escaped a reckoning this time, but would speak with his weaponsmaster later about changing customs held by the clans since they first climbed the tree at the center of the universe. With that thought, he exchanged the ribboned pike for a spear which he raised over his head. “To the winner a spear from the khan’s own store!” he cried, “Now ride, young warriors, for honor and for glory!”
When he dropped his hand to set the game in motion, the first line of players galloped forward with a roar.
At its heart, jidu trained players in close-order team-work. Each player worked and trained with a partner who would catch and return the throw of a blunted spear while galloping at high speeds across the playing field. The most skilled of the catchers reached out and snatched a thrown spear out of the air, escaping unharmed. Those who missed the catch, or were unhorsed by a strike, stayed behind with their partners while their more skilled opponents wheeled around in the dust and noise of screamed battle cries and the thunder of horses to repeat the pass.
So it went, until just one team remained. The taller of the two players in the final team might have been a girl. Mergen wasn’t exactly surprised. He remembered the ferocity of the women at whose side he had lately fought, and wondered how long his armsmaster had been training girls on the sly before the recent war. The winners came forward, in their pride unmindful of the grime of the competition that covered them. Mergen did not press the girl to identify herself but handed her the spear as the eldest of the team. She stepped forward to touch her forehead to the back of the khan’s hand while her younger partner, a brother by the look of him, hung back, unaware that his mouth gaped open.
“Bravely done,” he praised them in his most regal voice, keeping his demeanor stern with an effort. They would not appreciate the laughter that struggled to escape. “Keep this spear as a mark of your hard work. When you come of age, I will look for both of you in the armies of the khan.”
The girl grinned, her eyes alight with the promise of a warrior’s future. Well trained in the courtesies, however, they each made a bow and backed away, the eldest nudging her partner to remind him to close his mouth. That one’s face suffused with embarrassment, but he kept his head and didn’t turn and run. Someday, when he captained a thousand, he would laugh about the day. He wondered what the girl would say from such a distance, and what a warrior’s life would bring her. To say more would unmask her deception, however, so he let them go.
With the games of jidu decided, it was time to return the field to the more serious sport of the blooded warriors. At the farthest end, targets were set up for the archers on horseback while in a protected area out of the range of flying hooves, swordsmen demonstrated their arts. In front of the khan himself, platforms were laid for the wrestlers.
While this was being done, the throngs settled in with lunches they had brought with them in pouches. Servants brought out yogurt and hard cheese and pies of minced meats and the fat tail of a sheep for the khan’s party. From his saddle, Mergen washed his mouth with kumiss handed up to him in a bowl by a fresh-faced young girl who blushed and ran away when he looked at her.
“Brazen thing,” Bortu muttered around her own meal of yogurt and cheese.
General Yesugei said nothing, but his gaze wandered over the crowd, looking for Sechule with a bitter set to his mouth. Obsessions seemed contagious this season. If only they could have caught it for each other, Mergen would have been well rid of the problem. As it was, he had a sterner cure in mind for his general, though well sweetened as all medicine ought to be. It would mean losing Yesugei’s subtle wit in the matter of Prince Tayy and the girl. Better that than lose the man altogether in his madness for Sechule.
Qutula already watched the prince for his father. He might find a way to use Bekter to find out more about the girl. No need to reveal her paternity; he could keep his secret yet. But the platforms were ready. Mergen turned his attention to the wrestlers.