Chapter Twenty-three

THE LIGHTNING’S TRUNK grew more tenuous as Eluneke climbed. Great branching limbs spread out above her and she stretched, reaching for the sturdiest that blocked her upward path. From there she grabbed another, making her way into the great crown of clouds that billowed around her. The clouds were like ice, the lightning like fire. Trembling from the cold at her back and the brilliant energy crackling through her limbs as she climbed, she wondered which would cause her to fall back to earth first. Would she lose her grip because her hands had grown too numb to hold on? Or because the heavenly fire had burned through muscle and sinew to the bone?

“So this is heaven,” the king of the toads croaked.

“Huh,” she said, too focused on the task of surviving the climb to do more than acknowledge that suddenly she understood his speech. Nearby, one of the lesser bolts of lightning wavered and snapped out.

“Whoa!” her passenger observed, a bit breathlessly. “Not exactly my idea of perfect bliss.”

He shifted in his seat atop her head and she snapped, “Keep still, unless you want to end up a smear on the muddy ground!” The words came out in foreign croaks that strained her throat, but King Toad stopped moving. She wasn’t sure if he was following her orders or frozen in terror—or from the cold.

One by one the lightning bolts that had danced around their central tree collapsed until only the great tree at the center of the world remained, wobbling uncertainly under her weight.

“Are we there yet?”

“No,” she gritted between clenched teeth, and wept silent, frozen tears as one toad and then another lost its grasp on her shaman’s robes and fell.

But: “Yes,” a woman’s voice answered from above. Hands reached down and took hold of Eluneke’s arms and shoulders, drawing her into the warmth of the summer sun just as the tree she climbed disappeared in an ear-shattering crash of thunder.

“Thank you.” Unable to bow—the king of the toads still squatted precariously in a basket on her head—Eluneke curtsied politely to the beautiful young woman who stood watching her with a grim and forbidding countenance.

The woman was tall, so that the top of the basket on Eluneke’s headdress came only to her shoulder. Her coats were of gold embroidered all over in silver dragons and in her hand she carried a spear. At her side stood another young woman of an equal height and dressed just as lavishly with all the animals of the grasslands embroidered in silver on her coats. In her hand she held a drum. Next to her another woman, with all manner of healing flowers embroidered on the silk of her coats and a laurel bough in her hand, studied Eluneke as if she were some new specimen that had not yet proved its usefulness. Nine in all, the women circled her as the lightning had on the stormy plains. Eluneke thought they must be the daughters of the great sky god of the heavens, but she was too polite to ask.

“Thank you,” said the king of the toads, inflating his throat in a pompous balloon. Although he had spoken in the language of the toads and Eluneke in the language of the Qubal, they understood each other.

The women seemed to understand them both. “You’re welcome,” the first said with a smile but no bow. Eluneke and her totem were supplicants here, not equals.

“Here” did indeed seem to be heaven as the stories had described it. No sign of the terrible storm below disturbed the fragrant grass, where only soft breezes lifted the hair of the nine maidens in gentle waves. It should have been later in the afternoon, but Great and Little Suns both shed their light from the very top of the sky above them. An open door flap showed Great Sun to be a ger-tent palace of gold, larger even than that of the khan. The abode of the sky god, Eluneke figured, though she saw neither warriors to defend him nor the sky god himself. Great Moon Lun shared the vaulted heavens with both suns and her brother moons, an impossible sky in the mortal world, but here all things were possible, if one had the knowledge.

“May we ask why you left your own world for ours?” the woman of the drum asked. “The path is difficult for a reason. Humans aren’t welcome here.”

“Nor,” her companion with the laurel bough added quickly, “do we welcome their toad companions.”

“I wish to serve my people and my prince as a shamaness.” Eluneke gestured at her distinctive robes as evidence of her calling. In her own small circle the toads who had accompanied her were leaving their baskets and crawling down her silver chains for the sweet grass of heaven.

“Following the teaching of my masters, I climbed the tree at the center of the world to beg the secrets of healing and long life from the sky god and his daughters.” Eluneke curtsied again to show that she recognized the women to whom she spoke.

“A shamaness, perhaps,” the first conceded, settling the butt of her spear on the ground. With the familiarity of a warrior, her hand wrapped the shaft below the leaf-shaped blade. “but I sense an urgency in your voice that few among your number have expressed on coming here. Fewer yet have the courage to climb the tree when it manifests as the lightning.”

“A vision sent me.”

The god’s warrior daughter accepted this answer with a tip of her head and another question, phrased like a riddle: “A vision more powerful than the storms of heaven.”

“The death of a prince,” Eluneke answered, still cautious. But if the daughters were asking questions that Bolghai might, they weren’t likely to throw her back to earth quite yet. She would have kept the rest to herself, but if the sky god sent her visions, then they already knew. “My husband.”

“A hard path,” the daughter with the drum muttered.

“It has its rewards.” A little smile escaped Eluneke’s lips. He was handsome, after all, and he took her communion with the king of the toads in his stride. If they survived the coming threat, she thought they might make a comfortable pair. As for the prince part, and the differences in their ranks, she just wouldn’t think about that.

It seemed that the warrior maid had passed the questioning to her sister, for once again the woman with the drum spoke up. “I have greeted the totem spirits of many shamans before, but only in their empty skins.” The animals embroidered on her coats shimmered in the sunlight as she peered curiously at the king of the toads. “It is a strange shaman indeed who lets her living totem speak for himself.”

“We have an arrangement,” Eluneke explained, which seemed to amuse the nine maidens.

“And what do you get out of this arrangement, toad?” The warrior daughter didn’t seem perplexed. Rather, it felt like a test, which it probably was.

“My skin,” the king of the toads answered, “safely where it belongs, wrapped over my bones and not shriveled and dangling from a string on a shaman’s coat. The same for my people, of course.”

“Nothing more?” the maiden asked again.

Toads don’t have shoulders formed for shrugging, but he bobbed his head in his species’ version of the gesture, admitting to an ulterior motive. “Even a toad can have a sense of adventure. How else would one of my kind climb the tree and see heaven, or greet the nine daughters of the sky god in person?”

In fact, his people had scattered widely, exploring by smell and touch and taste the rich loamy ground and the sweet green grass of heaven. With their raspy croaks they reported their findings back to their king: fat insects, soft earth, and—far off—trees bordering a river that flowed like the Onga through heaven.

“Then enjoy your visit, for it may be a long one,” she said with a warning glance at Eluneke. “Climbing up the tree at the center of the world is difficult enough. Climbing down is more so.”

“And learning the skills to banish evil spirits that cause sickness and death?” Eluneke asked. She knew better than to invite trouble before its time. If she were clever enough at her lessons, she felt sure that the maidens would teach her what she needed to solve the riddle of the way home.

“For that you must ask permission of our father, who rules the sky,” the first of the daughters answered. Great Sun had begun his journey toward evening and the daughters turned to track his shadow across the flowing grass. Eluneke had expected the king of the toads to leave her as his countrymen had, but he remained on his throne atop her shaman’s headdress and together they followed the nine magical women home.

Mergen’s court buzzed with excitement, but the gur-khan paid little heed to the preparations going on around him. Prince Tayy had returned to the palace in the middle of the storm with marvels glittering in his eyes and would not say where he had gone or why he had abandoned his guardsmen. Bolghai hadn’t returned at all, nor had Bekter, whom he’d sent to spy on the girl Eluneke. And scouts had come in reporting the appearance of the Tinglut prince Daritai and his party approaching from the north, come to seal the peace with a bride for the old khan.

It would matter little what carpet he sat on, or who waited to greet him, if he found no potential brides to choose from among the Qubal. Mergen had already sent General Jochi to find Princess Orda. Though she’d only seen seven summers, as the direct descendant of Chimbai-Khan and the sister of the khan-to-be she made the best choice for a long-term peace. And the old khan might be dead before they had to present her, at fourteen, to his tents. But the princess had spent all her short seasons fostered to a remote member of his brother’s clans. The general could not return with her before the Great Hunt in the morning.

“What are you going to do if the old khan decides not to wait until the child has grown to a marrying age?” Lady Bortu paused in directing the servants to ask the question he’d been avoiding. If not the princess, they found themselves with few appropriate female relations to trade.

“Perhaps he’d like a wife of his own age,” he taunted her. After the death of her husband, the Lady Bortu had freely taken lovers, but never again an ambitious husband. Now her opportunities were few and expensive.

“They never do, old fools.” She scratched thoughtfully at a stray whisker that sprouted from her chin. “Yesugei’s daughter has gone out of reach—”

He had thought Yesugei’s daughter might do. She was pretty enough, but her father had taken her far to the south. He knew what the khaness thought of that. “Send the woman away, not the general who serves you,” she’d complained. For Yesugei’s service in the war and before it to Chimbai, however, Mergen owed his old friend this opportunity to advance his status. The daughter might yet prove useful as a match to one of his own sons, to bind the new khan more closely to his old ulus. Now, however, he had to count her out of his calculations.

“Eluneke,” he said.

His mother pursed her lips, as much a denial of his wishes as she might make to a royal edict of the gur-khan. He wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t blind, however. It looked to him like his own mother had joined in a conspiracy with the Qubal shamans to make the girl one of their own. He feared they had bewitched the prince, whose shivering ague had wakened him again in the middle of the night. Though he declared himself well in the morning, Prince Tayyichiut’s complexion had lost its healthy color, and he spent too much time moping about his father’s shrine. The Lady Bortu wouldn’t allow her allies to murder her own grandson. Short of lethal, however, he would lay no wager on how far she would go to achieve her mystical ends.

It only remained to discover whether his own son Bekter had joined in their conspiracy or had himself become their prisoner.

“Qutula!” he called to his loyal son, who caught his eye with a hawklike darting gaze over his own preparations as Prince Tayyichiut put aside his muddy clothes for the stiffly embroidered silks of his court dress. He, too, must have heard the prince’s teeth-chattering moans in the night.

Qutula left the prince and stood before him in the blue coat of a guardsman. He wore his sword at his side and carried a spear in a sheath slung over his back. Mergen hesitated to separate him from the heir, but who else could he trust to find Bekter without spreading his actions throughout the tent city?

“My gur-khan,” he acknowledged the summons, bowing so low that the top of his pointed hat brushed the carpets.

No one else, Mergen decided, and said, “I would have your brother’s songs to entertain our visitors, but I see him nowhere among our musicians and poets.”

He smiled, but his son read his displeasure in the wrinkles of his brow and the creases between his eyes. Bekter had disappeared on a mission to find out more about Eluneke and her shaman teacher. Mergen wanted his delinquent spy brought in front of him to give an accounting both of his mission and of his absence.

“As you wish.” With another bow, Qutula turned and made his swift way from the royal presence. He would find his brother and drag him from whatever shelter from the storm he had found for himself, Mergen knew. Or he would report back that the gur-khan’s poet, like his court shaman, had disappeared. Either way he would have his answer.

Chahar seemed most suited to his next errand. Mergen’s own age-mate, he stood closest after General Jochi to the gur-khan in his guard. As Bolghai’s son he had seen many wonders, but he possessed for himself little interest in the spirit world. The shamaness wouldn’t frighten him with her magic, nor was he likely to fall under her spell. With a nod of his head he gestured for the captain to attend him.

“My gur-khan.” Chahar bowed as Qutula had done.

“This shamaness, Toragana, has crossed my wishes. I don’t care what her powers are. I want her brought to me.”

“Yes, my khan.” The slow lowering of Chahar’s lids offered only agreement. The power of a shaman must be harnessed by the will of khan or chieftain or it grew wild and dangerous. If the teacher didn’t bow to the orders of the gur-khan, Chahar would execute her before she became a threat. That would be obvious to anyone who had survived the royal court, and to the son of a shaman more than others. Mergen accepted the captain’s obedience.

“Bring her apprentice as well, but make sure the girl remains unharmed.” If the Tinglut prince refused Princess Orda in the old khan’s name, the whole court would know Eluneke for his daughter. For now, however, he would keep his secret and his hope for a more exalted match.

“As you wish.” Again, the proper answer, given with the proper bow, and Chahar, too, had gone. Mergen glanced up then to see his mother watching him with secret calculations in her eagle gaze. He said nothing but stood and let his servants strip off his clothes and replace them with the more elaborate silks he wore for court visitors.

First the servants dressed him in a full caftan of red-and-yellow brocade, which they followed with a dark-blue sleeveless coat woven in the patterns that symbolized all the worlds of heaven and earth and the underworld. At his knees, dragons flew above the waves below which the underworld lurked at the hem. White clouds drifted across a blue silk sky at his waist while the diagonal stripes of a rainbow, the kingdom of the sky god and his daughters, banded his breast. His cone-shaped silver hat and the ornate scrollwork on the fronts of the coat were richly embroidered with gold threads. Chimbai-Khan had worn the same court dress to greet visitors before him, and Mergen felt the presence of his brother at his shoulder as he took on the clothes of his office.

“What have you done to my son?”

He thought he heard the words whispered in his ear, but that would mean Chimbai’s spirit had become trapped here, between heaven and the underworld. Mergen didn’t want to consider what such an omen might presage for them all.

Tayy watched his grandmother watching Mergen Gur-Khan give his orders. His cousin’s attentions weighed on his shoulders of late, and he felt his breath come more easily when Qutula departed with a purposeful swift step on the gur-khan’s errand. The Lady Bortu seemed relieved as well, and he wondered what she knew, how many of his suspicions she might confirm. As if she felt his eyes on her, she turned her predatory gaze back on him, searching for something in his face. What she found seemed to worry her. Well, good. It worried him, too.

Surrounded by the bustling court, he could imagine that Eluneke was safe in the home of the sky god and would return soon with her toads and her secret knowledge. He hadn’t quite figured out what would happen next, though. She came from the wrong clan and wandered bootless in the mud collecting herbs and simples and consorting with the lowest of creatures as her totem. Mergen would laugh at his infatuation and auction him off to some far-off princess in exchange for a treaty.

And when had he come to view his own arranged marriage with such bitterness? Bolghai made more sense as a mate—at least he had rank, though the memory of his smell sent a shiver up the prince’s spine. Eluneke smelled warm and sweet, the scent of girl and sunlight and the moss they had rested on by the river, heated by the smooth rich skin at the curve of her neck.

He shook himself free of the direction his thoughts had gone, noted that his grandmother was still watching him, but with considerably greater interest now. Tayy knew he had to talk to someone about this feeling that somehow Eluneke was his destiny. Perhaps the khaness would understand. Maybe Bolghai had reported some whisper among the spirits that made sense of it all. But now wasn’t the time. He veiled his gaze and turned away.

Up close, Eluneke saw that the ger-tent palace of the god was made not of felt but of the stuff of clouds, embroidered everywhere with golden sunlight. She thought it must be uncomfortably hot and damp inside, but the warmth of the embroidery seemed to keep the rugs and furs of the dais dry while the clouds cooled the intemperate heat at the center of the Great Sun tent. The lattices were made of lightning and the decorations everywhere reflected the natural world as much as the heavenly one. Stars scattered between the spokes of the roof provided the light of heaven, but lakes and ponds rippled with earthly breezes in the mirrors hanging from the lattices.

Chests taller than her head were carved each out of a single tree. When she looked more closely at the scenes painted on their sides, she saw the figures moved, men and women and deer and herds of horses going about their days and nights across the sky god’s furnishings. She had never been inside the ger-tent palace of the khan, but she guessed not even Mergen-Gur-Khan could match such lavishness, or the splendor of the sky god’s retainers. Strange and terrible beasts wearing sky-blue coats and pointed caps that glowed with moonlight guarded the great ger-tent with their backs to the lattices. Nobles of the sky folk in marvelous clothes, with planets for jewels dangling from their ears, sat or moved about their business on the rich carpets. Some looked just like people, but others wore strange shapes of creatures Eluneke had never seen before. She met the eyes of a woman dressed all in silver and recognized the dragon nature looking back at her. Shivering, she dropped her gaze in a proper show of respect.

On the dais the sky god himself waited for them. The nine daughters had seemed very tall, but they looked like children next to the god, whose cone-shaped golden cap nearly brushed the roof of his palace. His coats were the hazy blue of a summer day at the shoulders, deepening to the clear, deep cerulean of a cloudless sky in autumn at their hems. Embroidered rainbows of red and gold crossed his breast, and red-and-silver stars glittered at the tops of his deep cuffs. In his hand the god held a thighbone as a staff with a horse’s head carved at one end and a flowing lock of golden mane at the other. Skins of silver wolves and golden foxes covered the dais.

The sky god gestured for her to sit and she did, holding her neck very still as the king of the toads climbed down off his perch. When they had settled on the gold-and-silver furs, the herbalist daughter handed her father a cup filled with pale yellow tea. Golden flowers floated in the cup. The sky god drank sparingly and handed the cup to Eluneke, who sipped in her turn. The tea tasted of honey and sunlight, burning away the icy cold of her climb as it soothed the tingling that remained of the lightning’s fire in her fingers.

“I would know the recipe and other herbal remedies for the ailments of humans and their creatures.” She passed the cup to the king of the toads, whose sticky tongue darted out to taste.

The sky god’s daughter whispered in her ear the secret names of the flowers and mosses and the barks of trees, and where they might be found. When she had told Eluneke all that she knew, she moved to take her place next to her father, making way for her sister. The daughter of the drum, whose clothes were embroidered in all the animals of the grasslands, followed next with food: the meat of some animal stuffed and roasted with coals and a bowl of sour yogurt for the sky god and Eluneke, a cage filled with buzzing flies for the king of the toads.

“I would know the secret languages of the animals,” Eluneke said, taking her cue from the clothes and the drum and the dishes served by the hand of the sky god’s daughter. “I would know how to cast out animal spirits and their diseases.”

The god’s daughter leaned over and whispered all the languages of animals, and she was surprised to discover that she already knew many of them. The stoat and the raven, the language of the toads, and the language of the golden eagle, though whose totem that might be she didn’t know. When she had learned how to understand all the animals, the daughter of the spear murmured in her ear the secrets to casting out demons. She paled at this terrible knowledge, but did not faint, which the sky god’s daughters would have scorned. Then another sister took her place, and another, whispering their secrets one by one.

Eluneke listened and learned.