Chapter Twenty-eight

IF NOT FOR the Tinglut warriors who rode among his own forces in numbers sufficient to make a bloody mess of a clear blue day, Mergen would have enjoyed the hunt. The rains had tamed the dust and the breezes were cool against his face as he rode. Beneath him he scarcely felt the strike of hooves on the soft ground. And ahead, among the lesser game, the beaters had spotted a ram standing as tall as his horse at the shoulder, with horns curled on themselves in a circle which he could scarcely have measured with both arms spread wide.

He would, on another day, have drawn his own bow for a shot at the beast. But the youngest warriors had forged ahead, shouting their allegiances to Nirun or Durluken, or to the prince of the Tinglut, each promising to bring down the wild sheep for the glory of his hero. Qutula paced him on the right, letting his Durluken run ahead for his honor, while on his left, the Tinglut prince, Daritai, rode with his own son close to his flank.

The boy rode well, as any born of the grasslands would. The moods careening across his face, however, spoke of a sharp mind behind the childish face. Smart enough to understand the danger, at least, and adventurous enough to enjoy the day in spite of it. His father need only teach him to keep those feelings behind his eyes, defended against enemies who would read him like a well-marked trail. A pity the boy wasn’t the groom on offer. He’d have suited Princess Orda when they both had a few years on them.

A compliment might seem like a threat under the circumstances, so Mergen kept those thoughts to himself. He followed the hunt for the ram, letting the drama of the chase unfold ahead.

“ Bolghai will know what to do,” Tayy promised the toad-girl, and put out his hand. “He’ll want to see you right away.”

He had tried everything he could think of to return her to her natural form, but Eluneke remained stubbornly toad. She stepped into his waiting palm, however, as he added, “He’ll be attending the hunt to bless the catch. I should be there myself—my uncle will have my bones for soup spoons for staying away so long.”

She listened gravely, then leaped from his hand onto his hunting jacket, nudging the edge where it crossed his breast.

“Oh, yes, of course.” That was clear enough. He loosened the fastenings to cradle her inside, close to his heart. As he climbed away from the river he tightened the strings again to keep her safe. “Just don’t make any noise until we find him. I don’t want to have to explain you to my uncle in this shape.”

She croaked some answer, though if she meant it as indignation or agreement he couldn’t tell. They both fell silent as he climbed. When the lip of the dell was in sight, Mangkut called down, “Who goes?” He’d set an arrow to his bow, pointed at Tayy’s breast.

Is this the moment? Tayy asked himself. Would Qutula prove now, with murder he could disavow, that his hands around the prince’s throat had been no accident but assassination, thwarted by the skills Tayy had learned in his travels with foreign armies?

He answered Mangkut’s challenge calmly enough—“It’s only Prince Tayy”—and waited for the arrow to prove . . . something.

“The hunt has begun,” Mangkut informed him, and pointed his arrow at the ground. “I can hear the dogs in the distance.”

Tayy mounted his horse with a nod to his cousin’s follower. Mangkut didn’t ask about the girl. It wasn’t his place to do so and the Durluken followed Qutula’s lead, who perhaps had never expected the prince to find her. Tayy kept his own counsel about the small toad riding in his coat.

The young warriors, Nirun and Durluken and a few of the Tinglut as well, had driven their prey to staggering exhaustion. While their lesser fellows contented themselves with smaller game, more than a hand of young warriors had pulled taut the strings of their bows in hope of bringing down the ram. As Mergen bore down on them with the rear guard, they let fly over the heads of their horses.

A strike, there on the flank. The ram, already running, surged ahead. Another arrow, glancing off the horn, fell harmlessly to the ground but a third caught him in the neck. The ram staggered to his knees, rose again as more arrows pierced his shaggy hide. A drunken step, another, as if the creature did not own the legs that carried him. Unchecked, his forward motion brought him down on his great spiral horns as the young horsemen drew up around him, Altan and Duwa among them, which boded ill for a peaceful day.

Altan drew his arrow from the neck of the beast and held it over his head in victory for the Nirun. Duwa snarled something, curse or challenge, over his shoulder while he cut his own arrow from the ram’s breast. Whatever he’d said carried sufficient heat that the others who had come to retrieve their own arrows drew back in a wary pack.

Withdraw, Mergen wished of Altan, who might have had the right of it, but who always lacked for tact. Altan, of course, didn’t hear his khan’s thoughts, and acted as he always did, with an instinct for the killing shot. He laughed. Duwa’s face suffused with bloody-minded rage.

If Qutula had ridden with his followers, he might have stopped it, but his blanket-son had remained at Mergen’s side, his eye on his own soaring prey. His arrow flew, a bird fell from the sky, and a little farther ahead, Duwa raised his knife.

“Don’t do it . . .”

Qutula didn’t seem to hear, but the Tinglut prince turned sharply to stare at him as the knife found its mark over the body of the ram.

“What—?” Daritai began, but their line was breaking around the fallen in front of them. Mergen would have wished the foreign prince with their flank, following the game and none the wiser. Instead he stopped, the child at his side, while the gur-khan on his steaming horse drew up to take accounting of the tragedy before them.

What have you done? he wished to demand of the young man who stood with bloodied hand before him. What have you brought down on your house and clans by your rash actions? But a khan could show no such human weakness even for the boyhood companion of his blanket-son. Not when Altan, the pride and heir of his own general Jochi, lay dead beside the ram.

So, so, so. “Find his father. General Jochi must be told,” Mergen instructed Qutula, whose man had committed murder over a dumb beast for the cook pot. “Tell him I sent you to stand guard over the princess; he may come at the will of his gur-khan.”

Qutula gave him a sulky look, as if he was being punished, which Mergen supposed he was. Later he would talk to his son and his heir both about letting rivalries grow into blood feuds, but now he had justice to administer, and a general with powerful clans behind him to appease. Duwa was himself the child of clans who had set their hopes upon their son’s position in the ger-tent palace. Now those hopes would die, as Altan had died. Except, of course, that luck and time might see fortune return to Duwa’s family some day. Altan would not rise again.

“My lord gur-khan.” His head properly bowed, Duwa fell to one knee in the mud awash with the blood of man and beast, but he showed no contrition as he complained, “It’s not my fault. He mocked me in front of all the court—in front of foreigners!”

“Silence,” Mergen commanded. At his most killingly furious his voice dropped almost to a whisper and it did so now. Only those nearest—Duwa himself, and the Tinglut prince, who looked like he would rather be anywhere but in this company—could hear. Duwa had hung from Qutula’s coat sleeve since they were children, however, and heard the deadly warning in that gentle tone. He blanched and held his tongue.

While they waited for the dead boy’s father to claim his body and his vengeance, Mergen called a guardsman to him. “Find the chieftain who rules this one, and bring him to me,” he ordered with a tilt of his chin at Duwa. “Someone will have to pay for this.”

A protest reddened Duwa’s cheeks, but he kept the words he might have spoken to himself. Restraint now, too late to do you any good, Mergen pondered. Prince Daritai looked pale, and Mergen remembered the child who rode with him, who had sensibly kept his mouth shut and his eyes open. He would have given the man leave to find his own tents but needed all his witnesses present when the fathers came. And he could find no way in front of both their guardsmen to make the assurances of safety the Tinglut prince needed to hear. They wouldn’t have been true anyway.

“I saw nothing, my lord gur-khan, nor did my son,” Daritai muttered, reading Mergen’s intentions with a courteous bow. If he wasn’t a witness, the gur-khan needn’t require his presence.

The boy’s sudden sharp breath told him otherwise. Daritai pretended not to notice and the boy wisely thought better of his objection. It gave him a pretense to free the foreigners from an embroilment in Qubal politics, something he wished for both their sakes. But Daritai had heard him send for the general. The man was no fool, but a likely spy as well as emissary. Mergen might yet need the child as a hostage for his father’s silence.

Too soon the gallop of approaching horses heralded a new arrival. There hadn’t been time to bring the general; Prince Tayyichiut entered the unhappy circle, Mangkut the Durluken following. With a glance from one side to the other, the guardsman took in the hostility, if not the cause, between the teams. Quietly he fell back, unwilling, it seemed, to draw attention to his allegiance in the conflict.

They hadn’t brought Eluneke with them—just as well under the circumstances, Mergen thought. Though he dearly wished to know where she had gone, he wouldn’t have chosen to introduce the Tinglut-Khan’s prospective bride to her potential son-in-law this way. No one spoke as the prince walked his sweating horse toward the felled ram.

“What happened?” Tayy recognized his own Nirun marshaled in a glowering line across a fallen ram from the Durluken, who stared back with war in their eyes.

“Tragedy,” Mergen answered.

Something else spoke in his eyes. Murder, Tayy guessed. His own dogs had shouldered their way past the guards and they paced a worried path between their master’s horse and the young warriors gathered around their prey. Tayy dismounted and brushed his way past a guardsman who would not meet his eye, drawn like the hounds to the rich scent of blood at the center of the circle.

Ah; that explained it. Altan, his face still contorted with the shock of his death, lay with his arm outflung across the shaggy back of the fallen ram. His blood had ceased to drip and formed a crusting armor like a starburst across his breast.

Senseless, senseless death, and for what? A slab of meat and a pair of horns? Or the first move in a war that was no game at all? When had the teams formed for honorable contest in the games become opposing armies? And where was Qutula’s hand in this? Suspicion had grown into surety; his cousin’s mind must surely have guided this move, even if his palms were clean of blood. In time each question, like a stone, must be answered carefully with his own moves on the board. But first, his friend . . .

“Altan—” Prince Tayy fell to his knees, reached for the knife that lay beside him. He knew that knife. Strategy would have served him better, but desperate, grieving rage overwhelmed all his political calculations. The storm of powerful feelings set his heart to beating in strange and terrible rhythms. Suddenly he was on his feet with no memory of rising, a single thought drumming in his head.

“I’ll kill the man who did this,” he swore, looking straight at Duwa, who gazed back at him with growing unease but little remorse.

“Altan?”

General Jochi hadn’t been a part of the original circle, but he was here now, Tayy realized, and had the greater claim to vengeance. Following a few paces behind came Qutula, with a practiced apology on his face, and across the general’s saddle sat a little girl. The Princess Orda looked about her with fearless curiosity.

His hand with the knife clasped in it dropped to Tayy’s side. Terrible fury swelled his heart unabated, but he could not stain his sister’s unblinking innocence with Qubal blood, even that of a murderer.

“He wouldn’t leave her behind,” Qutula shrugged a helpless shoulder. Watching his cousin with clearer eyes, Tayy figured he hadn’t explained why the general was needed at the hunt.

“Let me hold her for you, sir,” a child’s voice interrupted the tense drama. The boy held out his arms. “I have a little sister at home and I’ve carried her before me lots of times.”

It was easy enough to see where the boy got his face, but where had he come from? And what was a Tinglut princeling doing here? Jochi’s attention lay wholly on his son, however. Tayy held his breath when the general absently passed the Qubal princess into the hands of the foreign boy. Mergen’s eyes widened with alarm, but he clamped his lips so tightly shut that wrinkles pleated his mustaches. His horse danced a little under him, but quickly came back to hand as the khan regained his watchful composure. Jochi noticed none of it.

“How did this happen?” the general demanded, his eyes fixed on the body of his son.

“Murder,” said a Nirun, who glared at the Durluken gathered behind the guilty Duwa.

“Quarrel,” a Durluken objected. “Hasty words, a deadly insult answered.”

“Too much haste all around,” Mergen judged.

Inside Tayy’s shirt the toad he had carried from the river scrambled to be let out and he loosened his ties and set her down beside the cooling body. “Can you help him?” he asked, inexplicably to the gathered company.

The toad bobbed and hopped. Then she turned into a girl with tangled hair and a smudge of dirt on her face, dressed in the shaman’s robes in which she’d disappeared. Now the baskets she had woven for her totems dangled bruised and empty from the ribbons of her coat, hardly suitable for a shamaness let alone a lady of her father’s rank. Mergen looked like he’d bitten into something rotten. She didn’t know he was her father, of course. She’d been in heaven, talking to the gods, when Mergen had revealed that bit of family history.

“I’m sorry. He’s gone,” she said, meaning that Altan’s spirit had severed the invisible cord that tied it to his body. “Where is Bolghai? Evil has been done here; I feel the demon spirits drawing near already. This place needs blessing and a pyre to send him on his way as soon as possible.”

“First a matter of judgment, daughter, then the proper sending of my general’s heir to the ancestors. This ram for which he died will pay his way among his ancestor spirits.”

Prince Tayy knew the look she gave the gur-khan. He had grown up on the like from Bolghai. Eluneke made no acknowledgment of the rank he had given her, but with a lowering of her lashes took it in to contemplate later, when matters of the dead did not require her urgent attention.

Mergen knew the look as well. He withdrew from that contest with a tilt of his chin to cede to her the temporary victory of her shamanic station and turned to the Tinglut boy. “You aren’t in trouble,” he said, pretending not to notice the rejected child bride in the hands of a foreign princeling. “You have done nothing wrong. But to make a fair judgment, I have to know what you saw.”

The boy said nothing.

“My lord khan—” The prince, Daritai, nudged his horse a step closer to the gur-khan. From every point in the circle swords shrieked from their scabbards. Holding his hands carefully away from his sides, where sword and dagger rested, Daritai rolled a desperate look in the direction of his son, who held tightly to the Qubal princess with no notion of the danger he was in.

Or perhaps he knew too well, Tayy thought. His grip on the little girl wasn’t threatening, but of the two, it seemed the princess did the comforting, and the Tinglut boy the asking.

“No threat,” Daritai promised. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, but please don’t hurt my son.”

“I don’t torture children,” Mergen answered him with asperity and, exasperated, begged of his court, “will someone with the rank to do so take the Princess Orda into custody before I am obliged to notice and assume the Tinglut have taken her hostage?”

“I was just trying to help!” Shocked, the boy would have flung her from the horse to save himself from the accusation. Only her small round arms clinging like vines to his neck saved them from another inadvertent disaster. Qutula reached for her, but she wouldn’t let go, resisting him instead with her raised voice and with the curled toes of her little boots until Eluneke came and collected her.

In the midst of turning Altan’s death into a sorry farce, Duwa’s chieftain arrived with the guardsman’s father and uncles. Eluneke retreated, the little princess in her arms, as the men of Duwa’s clan picked their way through the gathering crowd to face the khan. The crowd fell silent, waiting for judgment. Tayy waited with them, measuring his uncle’s deliberation against his own need for retribution.

Impassively, Mergen greeted the chieftain of the Dobun-Qubal, who guided his horse to stand before the gur-khan. He knew Dobun for a good leader, sensible in his way and not given to ambitions for advancement in the ulus. In a court lately infected with assassinations, he valued the man’s modesty. A young warrior like Duwa, however, who had grown to manhood in the light of the dais, might have dreams that reached beyond the limits of the growing herds and the thickly wooled sheep of his family and his clans.

And so we are brought to this, good Dobun, he thought, and you are flung, unwished and unsuspecting, into the blazing sun of the gur-khan’s notice. Though he might have preferred to do so, he could not, in front of all the clans and the dead boy’s father, forgive the murderous actions of the young lieutenant for the loyal service of his chieftain.

“A warrior has died here,” he said. With a gesture of his bow he parted the gathered Nirun and Durluken to reveal General Jochi bent on one knee over his son. Prince Tayyichiut knelt at his side; neither wept, but vengeance crackled like lightning in the air.

Duwa’s father cast a beseeching glance at Qutula, saying more about the spring at the source of Duwa’s ambitions than he might have liked. Mergen’s blanket-son had taken a step away from his companion, however, distancing himself from his follower’s crime.

“A fine young man, son of my general, companion of my heir, has been murdered and his murderer stands accused by his own bloody hand and his bloody knife.

“Witnesses, then?” Dobun bowed deeply, dismay carved in the downturn of his mouth. This was politics far above his inclinations, about to cost him a nephew.

“My own eyes,” Mergen nodded. “And these.” Stretching out his hand he took in the gathered armies of the Nirun whose sword hands itched for vengeance and the Durluken, whose stubborn necks would not bend to accept any blame.

Dobun tugged anxiously at his mustaches. “What price?”

Jochi had risen as the moment for judgment came. He stood a silent witness with the drying blood of his son painting his fingers as the khan handed down his sentence.

“From the Dobun-Qubal, two herds of horses and one of sheep, to become the property of the clans of the Jochi-Qubal. Half the tents of his father with all their household goods now belong to General Jochi, as compensation for the loss of those things which might have come to his family through his own son who now lies dead.”

The Dobun-Qubal clans would survive, but Duwa’s family was ruined, impoverished possibly forever. The worst remained, however. Knowing it, Duwa’s father spoke up, asking the question that as a father he must dread the most.

“And my son?”

“My lord general?” Mergen turned to Jochi, the injured party. Tradition dictated the answer, and the general gave it. “My servants need a servant.” Duwa would become a slave in the household of the general.

“For as many cycles as the accused, Duwa, has fingers,” Mergen agreed. On occasion a murderer might be returned to his family quickly, with all his fingers severed, but Mergen didn’t think his general would stray so far from honor.

The chieftain accepted this judgment with tears in his eyes. “You will have your herds and tents by nightfall,” he promised the general and with a final bow to the gur-khan, departed in the company of Duwa’s uncles. His father remained, though he refused to watch as Duwa’s wrists were tied and he was led away. He made no apology to the general, but spat a speculative hawk into the dirt and silently followed his chieftain.

Jochi would receive the oldest and sickest beasts from among the Dobun-Qubal herds, but most of the animals would be sound and the tents well mended. He would, of course, have given it all up to have his son sit up and curse them roundly for making such a fuss at a mere scratch. Altan didn’t move, though, and wouldn’t be sitting up this side of the underworld again.

“Travel in peace to the land of your ancestors, and make a place for us when we follow,” Mergen prayed his farewell. Tayy had regained his saddle. The track of drying tears had cut their own path through the streak of Altan’s blood that crossed his cheek, but after a moment he started moving toward the forest that bordered the river. Together with the gathered hunters, Nirun, and the older bands with allegiances to the khan, they would collect the trees for Altan’s pyre. In the deceptive momentary peace, Mergen prayed for time to break his unruly children to his hand before they set chaos loose across all the grasslands.

At a little distance, and in his totem form, Bolghai watched the Durluken as by ones and twos they slunk away. Finally only their captain remained, close by his father’s side, contemplating the Nirun pyre with a cold eye. Trouble was coming; the stoat’s black button nose twitched with the stink of it. Conspiracy. Eluneke had been right all along.

Fortunately, the sky god and his daughters had been kind to her. After his own visit to the heavens, Bolghai had spent three days as a stoat before remembering how to be human again. The girl’d had help, of course; the prince had called her home as well as any shaman might. Still, the fact that she’d returned to herself so quickly spoke well of the power of her gifts. Which reminded him . . .

Stretching, the shaman shaped human arms and human legs, and drew his spine out straight and long. With a last thought for his robes, he stood up and made his presence known in answer to his gur-khan’s call.

“I’m here,” he said, “though your own daughter seems to have the matter well in hand.”

“She shouldn’t be here at all. She’s a royal princess, you old fool. She had no right to choose this path and you had orders to stop it.”

Danger rumbled in the words. Bolghai didn’t think the gur-khan would have him killed, but the part about being an old fool gave him the edge in their argument, especially the old part, though Toragana would doubtless tell him it was the fool part. Because he was ready to die, if he could leave the ulus in the hands of a shaman powerful enough to protect it. Like the gur-khan’s daughter. Now was not the time to have that discussion, however.

“The hungry spirits grow fat on our disputes,” he rebuked Mergen gently. “When we have sent this brave young man to his ancestors, you are welcome to flay me as you choose.”

“Don’t think I won’t, old man.” Mergen delivered the rebuff as an insult, with his back turned to the shaman. The argument wasn’t over.

Bolghai sighed and untied his drum from the strings where it hung at his side, and the drumstick made from the shinbone of a roebuck. Demons and lost souls drawn by violent murder had gathered thickly around the quarrel. With his drum and his dance and his prayers, he set about dispersing them while Eluneke, with the dead khan’s daughter still in her arms, directed the construction of the pyre.