Chapter Twenty-two

“MY PRINCE, we have to go!”Altan shouted. Startled, Tayy looked up from the shrine that had grown up around the place where his father’s pyre had burned. At Mergen-Gur-Khan’s insistence, he had brought Qutula and Altan with him as guards. The two didn’t get along—’Tula had wanted to bring Duwa instead—but Altan was Nirun, his own man. Duwa served the Durluken. They were just names for the games, but in the subtle push and shove for status in the court, the prince determined to hold the line for his own team in front of the khan. So it was Altan who first brought his prince out of his prayerful meditation with the reminder, “You will want to be off the grass before the Tinglut prince comes any closer.”

The Tinglut-Khan’s messenger had announced the arrival at sundown of Prince Daritai, second son of Tinglut’s third wife, to discuss a marriage between their clans. Mergen had declared a great hunt for the morning to celebrate the visiting prince. But first they must receive him at sunset with all the splendor of the gur-khan’s court.

“At least you get to wear silks,” Qutula added with a mock grumble. “We guardsmen will be in half-armor until the Tinglut are back on their own ground.”

“Count your blessings that you will have a place by the dais, inside the ger-tent palace,” Altan challenged him. Fat raindrops started to fall on the stones of the shrine. “The rains are coming. I would not be on guard outside the doors tonight. We need to ride now if we don’t want to get caught in the storm ourselves.”

“The gur-khan will have our heads if anything happens to you,” Qutula agreed, glaring sourly at Altan, as if he had usurped his better’s place in sounding that alarm. The dogs would have done it, and considerably sooner, if they’d come with him, but he’d left them behind out of deference to the battle they waged with his cousin. Both of his guardsmen were looking back over their shoulders to the clouds roiling the sky to the north, however. Tayy did the same. A line of heavy rain dropped a gray curtain over the horizon.

“Let’s get out of here,” he agreed, and mounted his horse. Foreign prince or not, darkness was moving toward them from the south as if some terrible beast was swallowing the sun; already they could see forked lightning reaching for the heavens in the distance.

He knew more about storms now, having watched the approach of the like in the belly of a galley slaver. This one was coming in off the Marmer Sea. He half expected it to sweep him up as it had his friend Llesho in that terrible storm at sea. The gods used storms to pull human beings out of the living world into the sky, only to return them dead again of the experience. King Llesho—not the old legend, but the new one—had survived the experience, but it turned out he was a god himself so that didn’t count. The prince tucked his head down against the neck of his horse and settled her with a murmur of reassuring words before letting her set her own pace. He didn’t have to urge her, just pointed her in the direction of the tent city, and she went like her feet were on fire.

Qutula was ahead of him. Behind, Altan urged him to greater speed—“Hurry!”—but after that the rising wind snatched his voice away.

They were galloping full out now, all three of them. Altan caught up, terror blanching the color from his face. In the wind, Tayy heard the shrieking voices of the nine maidens, daughters of the great sky god who rode the storms in search of earthly lovers to snatch up into the heavens. Puddles had already begun to form in the rain and he guided his horse around them, one more hazard of the storm. The spirits of the restless dead could reach out and snag a man by the ankles, dragging him down into the underworld through standing water.

Cold and wet, he rode through a terrifying landscape where the underworld of the spirits and the heavens of the gods turned the mortal realm into wind and water and fire with no flame. He looked back, saw the branching stretch of lightning joining grass to dense black cloud. In the blinding white light that washed the air between black sky and blacker earth, he saw the silhouettes of two figures, running. He recognized the man as Bolghai by the skins flapping around his neck as he ran. The other figure, shorter than the man, seethed with no sharp outline to her figure, but instinctively the prince knew who it must be.

“Eluneke!”

Tayy hesitated. His guardsmen had ridden far ahead of his voice and didn’t turn or show by any sign that they had heard. Eluneke and the shaman were still too far away to hear, but he could tell they were heading in the direction of his father’s shrine. Toward the storm, which was bearing down on them as if it had a will to seize them for heaven.

Maybe they were looking for him, but he was as clear against their horizon as they were against his. And if that was Eluneke, the shifting movement around her could only mean that she had called the kingdom of toads to attend her. He didn’t know what the shamaness in training was doing, but he wasn’t about to leave her to the storm. Wrenching the mare around to face the lightning he drove his knees into her flanks and cried out, “Eluneke!”

The mare leaped and curvetted a moment, ran a few paces and dug in her hooves, refusing to go any farther. Her eyes rolled in her head and froth steamed at the corners of her mouth. Too much a lady to throw him, she stood her ground trembling and would not go on.

“You’ve got more sense than I do, girl,” he agreed, soothing her with long strokes of his hand on her neck while the wind kicked grit in his eyes and whipped his braids where they hung below the silver cap of his royal helm. His guardsmen, confident that he was with them, had pulled well ahead and reason told him to follow. The Qubal people needed him alive, not dead in the grass with the tree burned into his chest. But he wouldn’t leave Eluneke to whatever mad venture Bolghai had set her. Not in this storm.

“I don’t know what you expect of me!” he shouted at the unseen gods advancing in a line of thunder and rain. With a frustrated sigh he slid from the terrified horse. “Go,” he told her. “Find safety, and come back for me when you can.” Foolish orders to give a dumb beast, but he slapped her flank with the irrational certainty that she had heard him and would obey. He didn’t stay to watch her go, but turned and ran back toward the shrine. He would intersect Eluneke there, he thought, and put on a burst of speed that carried him back into the storm.

Rain pelted his shoulders and ran off his pointed silver cap. His boots kicked up gouts of mud in the beaten grass. Lightning passed from cloud to cloud, returning day to the grasslands in a flash that was quickly snuffed out by the rain. He was close enough now to see Eluneke, a hundred or more toads clinging to her shaman’s robes while their king rode in state atop her headdress. The sight filled him with an unearthly dread even though he had been there when the pact was made. Hesitating, he slipped in the grass and fell backward, knocking the air out of his chest. Overhead, the clouds pulsed with the signal fires of the gods, rumbled with the drums of heaven that mortals called thunder.

The prince squeezed his eyes shut for a moment to clear them of the rain that filled them, then he dragged himself to his feet and started to run again. “Eluneke!”

She didn’t hear him, or didn’t acknowledge him if she did. Bolghai, however, turned his head. Dismay had rounded his mouth into a wide “O.”

“Go back!” he shouted. “Go back!” Tayy didn’t listen. Whatever fate the old shaman had planned for Eluneke, he wouldn’t let her go through it alone.

She was almost there. Already the storm was focusing on her, on the shrine where the sky gods would call her. Eluneke didn’t know by what sense she felt their presence, but Bolghai didn’t stop her. Riding in his throne atop her head, King Toad seemed content with the direction she was taking his people as well. The sound of a familiar voice reached her in strands of fog torn apart by the shrieking wind and the thunder rumbling overhead.

“Stop!” Prince Tayyichiut cried, and she thought she heard him say, “Wait for me!”

He couldn’t follow where she planned to go, however, so she ran faster, toward the shrine that rose higher each day on the plains. A toad shaken loose from its hold on the leather ribbons of her robes fell to the grass, and another, but most of their number hung on.

Lightning struck as she neared the low pile of stone in its circle of ash. It didn’t flicker out, but held steady, linking earth to heaven. Another rose out of the ground beside it, another, until they circled the shrine, nine great trees of lightning with Eluneke inside the circle. This is it, she thought. The gods accept me as a shamaness, or I die with the mark of the tree on my breast. But which of the nine dancing trees of light was she supposed to climb? Which was the tree at the center of the world?

“Ribit!”

In human form she couldn’t understand the words of King Toad. His meaning, this time, was clear enough, however. “That one,” he must have meant.

Over the topmost point at the very center of the shrine the sky seemed to open in furious white light, and from the heavens came a searing purple bolt. Above, great purple branches joined cloud to cloud in a towering crown while below the stone of the shrine shattered with the sound like a rocket from Shan going off. The air itself, fleeing the wrath of heaven, blew her off her feet in the broken stone. Eluneke’s hair stood on end. Her skin lifted from her flesh in the way it does when a ghost passes nearby. She wanted to run away, to bury herself beneath the shattered shrine and hide until the terrible storm had passed. But that wouldn’t win her the knowledge she needed to save the prince. Pulling herself to her feet, she glared at the tower of dancing light at the center of the destruction. “Now,” she said, and took the few steps that brought her to the base.

She thought it would be difficult, and it was, but not in the way she’d expected. Though the tree of lightning seemed no wider than her hand from a distance, it grew unnaturally thicker with each step she took toward it. When she could bring herself to touch it, the life force of heaven passed through her, bringing every nerve in her body to painful life. There were no hand or toeholds to the eye, but when she set foot to the purple light, her toes sank in slightly and held. It was more difficult to plunge her hands into the burning tower but she took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and pushed. The tree held her, though by no solid substance she could identify.

She tried not to think about how high above the mortal world she must climb but focused on each arm as she reached over her head for the next handhold, each foot as she lifted it to the next unearthly toehold. And again, and again. Other girls of marrying age wore silk coats and beads of coral or jade in their ears, she thought, while she dangled toads for decorations. Other girls flirted with the wrestlers while their grandmothers made matches for them. She climbed the lightning to wrest the life of her intended from the gods—after which she must do the same on earth, with no grandmother to claim a prince for a shamaness and all the armies of the gur-khan to stand against her.

Below, she heard voices. Bolghai, she recognized, querulous, to Prince Tayyichiut’s pleading. The prince wanted her to come down, but she wouldn’t. She was doing this for him, after all. The king of the toads made some comment, ironic by the sound of it. The higher she climbed, the closer she seemed to understanding his language. Not yet, though. Not quite, but she thought it might be advice, and didn’t look down.

“Eluneke!” The shrine to his father’s memory exploded in a hail of dust and rocky fragments that peppered him with fine cuts and one bruise the size of his fist over his left eye. The lightning strikes didn’t snap and fade as they should, but remained untamed and writhing in a circle like the nine dancing maidens around a central strike that seemed to swallow up the world around it. His heart stuttered in his chest and the hairs on the backs of his arms rose in fine points of flesh. Overhead, limbs of the great lightning tree turned Eluneke into her own shadow, climbing higher and higher.

Tayy knew he was in the presence of unearthly magic but he would not let her go into that danger alone. “Eluneke! Eluneke!” he cried. When she didn’t answer, he threw himself into the circle of dancing light.

“No!” Strong arms wrapped across his chest and pulled him back. “It’s Eluneke’s path. Let her follow it!”

Bolghai. Tayy fought him with all his might, but the shaman had pinned his arms to his sides. When he kicked, the shaman picked him up in a bear hug, and when he tried to throw his weight to the side to escape, Bolghai let them tumble together into the muddy grass. Above them, the wind howled cold as night. Ice hard as stones fell from the heavens, pummeling them and littering the grass, some small as millet, some larger than his fist. And one, not ice at all, but a toad frozen solid.

“She’ll come back. I promise. She’ll come back.”

Tayy shivered in the shaman’s arms, accepting no comfort as Bolghai held him and smoothed his braids—Tayy’s cap had rolled away when they had fallen.

“To become a shaman, she must find the tree at the center of the world and climb it alone, child. How else is she to learn the arts of healing from the gods who reign in the heavens?”

“You did this, too?” Tayy looked up at Eluneke, whose seething shadow had reached the first branching of the great tree she climbed. His fists clenched helplessly as the clouds dropped lower, it seemed, to swallow her up. But if Bolghai had survived it—

“We each find the tree in our own way,” Bolghai answered, as cagey a way of saying “no” as the prince had ever heard. Tayy figured he could defend Eluneke in heaven even if he didn’t survive the return to earth. That would be enough for him, if it had to be.

As if he knew what Tayy was going to say next, Bolghai added quickly, “This is Eluneke’s path, not yours. Do you think she will thank either of us if I let you kill yourself against the lightning trying to stop her?” He released Tayy with a little shake, “To knock some sense into you,” he said. “She will need us both down here when she returns. Up there, she doesn’t need either of us.”

“But—” Tayy rolled to his feet, ready to follow but too late. One by one the bolts of lightning snapped out until only the tree at the center of the world remained. High over their heads Eluneke vanished into the cloudy crown of the great tree and that, too, imploded as if all the world had become thunder. Tayy clapped his hands to his ears and stared up where it had been.

“Where did she go?”

“She is with the gods in heaven now,” Bolghai answered.

The thunder had deafened him. The prince didn’t hear, but knew the answer anyway.

“What do we do now?” He didn’t need the answer to that either. We wait.