Curt Benjamin - [Seven Brothers 03] - The Gates of Heaven

by Curt Benjamin

  Tayy, however didn’t seem to blame him, and Llesho remembered that the khan’s first wife had died suspiciously a season or more before their own band had entered the ulus of the Qubal people. Chaos stalked on more than one horse, it seemed. Perhaps fate had brought him here to save Tayy, not to cause his father’s death.

  The prince accepted Kaydu’s offer of company with a courtly nod. “I won’t be able to get away again until the ceremonies are completed, but Yesugei will explain the proper respects an outlander owes a dead khan.” They left together, Kaydu sweeping the area with the fierce gaze of a hawk—or a dragon—on the lookout for a snack. The Lady Chaiujin would do well to keep to her human form or she would find herself trapped in an unlikely gullet.

  Chapter Two

  WITH THE rituals returning a khan to his ancestors completed, Yesugei had called Llesho and his brothers to a formal audience at which strangers might pay their respects to the Qubal clans in their time of loss. Both sides would offer assurances of continued friendship, at least until a new khan was elected. The Qubal seemed unlikely to choose a leader who would move against visitors who had been granted the hospitality of the ulus, but the possibility remained a worry.

  Kaydu had flown out at dawn to report to her father, but Shokar gathered Llesho’s cadre and his brothers for the audience with the royal family. Since Hmishi still needed time to heal, he had called up as temporary replacement the Thebin corporal who had worked with Llesho in the recent battle.

  “Tonkuq,” Shokar introduced the middle-aged woman with the scar over her right eye. He had trained her with the other troops he had gathered for Llesho’s cause, and added from his experience with her, “None better with a knife.”

  “He says that because he hasn’t seen Lling work.” She didn’t mention Llesho’s own royal skill with the weapon, but Tonkuq gave him a look that told him she guessed it. Llesho remembered her competence in battle and accepted her temporary presence beside them.

  “And Sawghar.” With a gesture, Shokar motioned forward the Gansau Wastrel he had chosen to fill in while Lling recovered from her own ordeal. Llesho thought it no coincidence that his personal guard now counted in its number at least one representative from each place he had stopped since he had walked out of the bay to begin his quest. His brother had served as a diplomat to the Shan Empire before he took up farming in the aftermath of Thebin’s fall.

  “Welcome.” Looking from one to the other, Llesho wondered how many of them would be alive at the end of the day. Shocked at the strange death of their khan, the camp had grown wary around mysteries. Not least of these they counted the wizard-king, as they had come to call Llesho. Word had spread about the magical spear he carried and the messenger who came and went in the shape of a bird. With the tales came whispers that he had used his unearthly powers to wrest a Thebin warrior from the clutching grasp of the underworld to serve him.

  Llesho had given up his protests that he was merely the impoverished prince of a broken house on a mad quest. More than that he hadn’t figured out, though, and suspected he wouldn’t until he reached the gates of heaven in his mortal form and asked the Great Goddess herself what purpose he had on this her earth. Maybe not even then, if she decided he had to solve the puzzle of his existence for himself. In the here and now, however, Harnish warriors avoided the little valley by the Onga where Llesho’s forces made their camp, and they made warding signs against the evil eye when their paths crossed one of his fighters. His own small band of fifty could scarcely hope to stand against the grasslands if that fear turned against them.

  The trickster god joined the diplomatic party as they followed Shokar through their own camp. He uttered a long-suffering sigh when he saw where they were heading. To reach the ger-tent palace of the khan, they would have to climb the steep shoulder of the valley to the plains above.

  “What are you going to tell Prince Tayy?” Master Den asked, knowing without needing to be told the road Llesho’s mind wandered.

  Llesho shrugged a one-shouldered “I don’t know” but said nothing until they had moved a little way from the tents clustered around the commons at the center of the camp. He had to give Tayy some explanation, and he had too little information about the alliances shifting within the ulus—the gathering of clans under the khan’s spear—to figure out the prince’s position in all of this. Would he be sharing confidences with a friend, or demonstrating the powers he wielded among the mortal gods for a potential ally?

  When they had drawn away from the curious glances, he pondered his lack of a ready answer. “I’d like to tell him that Carina made a mistake which we happily discovered when Hmishi sat up and asked for a cup of tea. It’s happened before.”

  “That’s why someone always sits with the body until the pyre is ready,” Master Den agreed.

  Llesho shivered in horror at the thought. Hmishi hadn’t been alive, of course, until Bright Morning brought him back from the underworld. Carinadidn’t make mistakes like that. Still, it gave a soldier pause.

  “But?” When he didn’t continue, Master Den prodded with the less than patient tone he took when a student deliberately avoided the point of a lesson.

  They were passing through a stand of spindly trees, and Llesho gave his surroundings a wary inspection. The bamboo snake had killed the prince’s father in his sleep. As Lady Chaiujin, she’d tried to seduce Llesho to his death as well, and might have succeeded if Master Den hadn’t found him just then and sent her off to do her mischief elsewhere. He didn’t think for a minute she was done with him, however, and kept a wary eye on the reaching branches.

  Before they began the steep ascent up the side of the dell, Master Den took the opportunity to relieve himself on a slender sapling with much contented sighing. Llesho kept his eyes carefully averted; he had come to know too much about his godly companions already. Wondering if the trickster god intended his relief as an insult to murderous Lady Chaiujin, Llesho decided to hold off on both question and answer. There were too many leafy hiding places where the lady might be slinking nearby, so he waited until they had climbed out of the little valley.

  A chill dread pushed him ahead of his companions. Llesho reached the lip of the valley in the lead and he took a moment to look around. Here, on the high ground, the Harn had raised the white-and-silver ger-tent of the khan’s palace. Lesser tents had grown up around it, dotting the rolling landscape with round white mounds among the stony outcrops. In the late morning light of both the Great and Little Sun, sparks bright as fireworks flashed off the chips of mica in the stone. He squinted, and sniffed cautiously at the air. It still carried the taint of flesh and other objects burned with the dead khan. On a pyre taller than Llesho’s head, the Harn had stacked the most prized of their khan’s personal possessions, including his favorite horses, and a flock of sheep to feed him in the underworld.

  Spirits did not eat mutton, but Bolghai, the Harnish shaman, had spent most of yesterday afternoon in the ritual slaughter of the sheep anyway. “It’s not important how useful the gift is to the one who receives it,” he’d explained to Llesho. “What counts is how much it means to the giver.”

  In this case, one sheep from each clan plus horses and other goods demonstrated not only the loyalty of the ulus, but also the wealth of the respective clans that made up the gathering. “And wealth,” Bolghai had added, “is just one among the many powers in competition here until the new khan is installed.”

  “There you are.” Huffing a bit from the exertion, the mountainous trickster god crested the rise. Leading them a little away from the edge of the tent city, where they could talk without being overheard, he waved a hand to signal a halt at a curved sweep of stone cushioned with a thick mat of grass.

  “Better,” he declared, dropping heavily onto the stony seat.

  Llesho doubted this heaving display of weakness. As Master Den, servant, launderer, and combat instructor, the trickster had walked most of the way from Pearl Island at his side, and had never drawn a labored breat
h. But if it bought him time, he was willing to give ChiChu even this small trick.

  “But?” Master Den repeated, bringing him back to the matter of explanations. Friend or not, as the prince of the Qubal clans, Tayy would demand answers.

  Llesho gave the grass at his feet a distrustful frown, but saw no creature who might be the Lady Chaiujin or one of her spies. “Prince Tayy knows his father’s death was murder, and no accident,” he offered his opinion. “He doesn’t know how the Lady Chaiujin managed it, or what part I played in the murder. I’d rather he never did—at least the last part, about me.”

  “You had nothing to do with the khan’s death, Llesho.”

  Master Den patted the grassy seat next to him, and Llesho climbed up, careful not to disturb the bluebells and the buttercups rising on slender stems at his feet. He was much shorter than his master and his dark legs hung inches above the ground. Shokar sent Balar and Lluka with his cadre to form a circle of defense to guard Llesho’s privacy. For himself, he remained nearby in a watchful pose that did nothing to hide his agreement with the trickster god—or, Llesho noticed, to mar his dignity like a dangling child.

  Dignity wasn’t the issue, however. “Tayy’s father died because I wanted my friend back. You heard what Balar said: the universe demands balance. If Mercy grants a life, another must be taken in its place. I wanted Hmishi back and Bright Morning, in his mercy, favored my desire for a friend over Tayy’s need for his father. Now I have my cadre, and Tayy has no parent. Who will protect the prince from his stepmother now?”

  “His uncle?” Shokar suggested, arms crossed over his broad chest. “Yesugei? The ten thousand Harnish troops who now stand ready at a word to do battle in his defense?”

  “Bolghai?” Master Den added, with a wry little smile, “You?”

  “Oh, me, right. The Lady Chaiujin asked for my life. I stood with arms outstretched and offered it to her, and I am supposed to save her stepson from the same fate?”

  “You what?” Shokar came out of his slouch with fire in his eyes, and Llesho flinched at the rage he saw there.

  “It was nothing. A moment’s weakness . . .”

  “And knowing how you reacted to Hmishi’s death, you wonder why the dwarf felt you needed his mercy?” Shokar unfolded his arms and gripped the hilt of his sword as if he would slay the demons of Llesho’s mind. He wasn’t prepared for the eagle that swooped down and landed on it, and flinched when she wrapped her talons around his forearm.

  With a flap of her wings, Kaydu rose again, just enough so that when she became human, only a little bounce on the balls of her feet gave evidence of her return to earth-bound form. The distraction didn’t save him, however. “He’s taking the blame for killing the khan, isn’t he?” she asked as she settled next to Llesho on the grassy outcrop.

  He made a face at her. Jammed cheek to cheek and shoulder to shoulder on that rocky shelf as they were, he had the fleeting thought that they must look like three demons of misadventure in search of mischief.

  Looking on with evident disapproval, Shokar answered Kaydu’s question. “I thought he felt guilty because Bright Morning took mercy on his flagging spirits at cost to some other poor soul in the earthly kingdom,” he answered with acid in his words, “but now I wonder. Balar said that the universe must remain in balance, but no one ever said that the Chimbai-Khan’s death was the weight that countered Hmishi’s life. In fact, it would seem likely that somewhere a butterfly stumbled, or a miner cracked a rock deep underground to balance the small spark of a lowly soldier’s existence.

  “It would take a larger price to balance the death of a khan. The life of a boy-king, for example. By the Goddess, Llesho, where do you keep your brain, because you clearly aren’t using it today!”

  “He’s right, you know,” Master Den slapped his hands on his knees to emphasize the point. “Hmishi hardly seems the equal to a khan, even if murder could restore the balance upset by mercy.”

  “It can’t, of course,” Kaydu finished the thought. “Ac cording to my father, murder by its very nature creates a void in the universe. One murder doesn’t pay for another, and we’ve had two of them.”

  “Habiba is the servant of the mortal goddess of war,” Llesho objected, “He would say that—believe it even—to free himself of the guilt of murders done in her name.”

  Kaydu glared at him. “Don’t play those games, Llesho. War is not murder, as you well know. And you, at least, have never killed except in honest combat.”

  “So your death wouldn’t have saved the khan,” Shokar insisted, “But think of the people who follow you, who would have died in a vain battle to avenge you with no hope of seeing Thebin free at the end of it. Think of the Great Goddess, your wife, and what will happen if the siege against the celestial kingdom wins through and the gates of heaven fall.”

  “But what about Tayy?” He whispered the question to himself as much as to his companions. He saw too much of himself in the Harnish prince, now an orphan like him and eager for revenge against the forces at work against his people. Like Llesho, his life remained in danger as long as his enemies lived.

  “Good question.” Kaydu bounded up and dusted off her butt before dragging him to his feet and giving him a push. “Isn’t that what you were going to find out?”

  They found Prince Tayyichiut of the Qubal people with his stepmother, Lady Chaiujin, surrounded by advisers in the crowded ger-tent of his father. The many guardsmen of the khan, who had failed him in his moment of greatest need, now watched the gathered clans with an alertness that begged to redeem itself. Llesho recognized Yesugei sitting in a traditional Harnish pose, with one knee propping up his chin and the other leg tucked under him, in deep but hushed discussion with Mergen, Tayy’s uncle. Around them were ranged the clan chiefs and old women, the Great Mothers of the clans, gathered there. Bortu, Tayy’s grandmother and the murdered khan’s mother, sat among them as Great Mother to her son’s clan. Llesho didn’t know what a Great Mother was, exactly, but he figured he was about to find out.

  As strange as it seemed, the Harnish chieftains would actually vote for the one among them who would lead the clans in their dealings with one another and in war with outside forces like Master Markko—or, he thought, like him. Would the new khan throw the clans behind the magician’s Harnish Southerners? Or would he side with Llesho’s foreigners, who had come into the grasslands in search of their companions and had stayed to forge alliances against a mutual threat? Chimbai-Khan had favored his cause, but Llesho was painfully aware that the next few hours could turn the tent city from a sanctuary into a prison.

  Leaving his Wastrels to guard the door of the ger-tent, Llesho advanced through the crowd to the foot of the dais where Tayy sat with his stepmother accepting the condolences if not the fealty of the clans. Llesho had put on the sumptuous traditional Thebin coat, sleeveless and embroidered all over with fine needlework, that Master Den had carried for him all the way from Farshore Province. Under his coat, he wore a rich Thebin shirt and breeches, with soft boots on his feet. Shokar likewise wore the clothes of his princely station. Kaydu appeared in soft greens and blues and grays, the military colors of Thousand Lakes Province, home to the mortal goddess of war in whose service Kaydu marched. Even Master Den had added a red sash on which were written many characters of prayer and good fortune, though it bound only his usual knee-length white coat over a breechcloth slung low under his enormous belly.

  The interior of the ger-tent had already changed in the aftermath of the khan’s death, stripped of the personal objects that would furnish Chimbai-Khan in the underworld. The ornately painted chests remained, however, as did various objects that would count as family wealth or the property of the khan’s own clan. As the prince and the lady, watching him approach across the vast expanse of the ger-tent, were themselves both the property of the clan and its potential leaders. Llesho noticed the bronze bust of his Thebin ancestor, carved ages past in Llesho’s own image. Someone had moved it to the painted chest nea
rest where Prince Tayyichiut sat in his father’s place. No personal object, this had come to Chimbai-Khan through his fathers, and would pass to his son regardless of the outcome of the coming vote. That Tayy displayed it so prominently at his right hand declared his intention to continue his father’s alliance with Llesho’s band. What his gathered clans would make of this, however, was impossible to guess.

  When it came his turn to speak to the grieving family, Llesho left his companions and stepped up to the dais with a deep bow. He knew where he stood with these two primary contestants in the coming battle for the khanate. The Lady Chaiujin, widow of the late khan and mother, as she claimed, to his unborn child, wanted Llesho dead. She’d already made attempts on his credibility and on his life.

  Prince Tayyichiut, his own age and stepson of the Lady Chaiujin, had become a friend. The two princes shared the ill regard of the lady, who had likely murdered Tayy’s mother as well as his father, and would wait only long enough to allay suspicion before sending the son to attend his parents in the underworld. In Lady Chaiujin, they shared Tayy’s enemy. As importantly for Llesho, however, Prince Tayy had seen the battleground of the stone giants raised by Master Markko. He’d lost friends to the monsters and understood the threat that the evil magician posed to his ulus. If named khan, he would fight alongside Llesho’s other allies of necessity. So they shared this enemy as well.

  The chieftains had no obligation to vote for a member of the khan’s family, however. Any one among them could win the confidence of the gathered clans, moving his own clan into the fore of power and wealth. A stranger might soon gather in his hand the warriors of all the clans to hold tight or loose against his enemies as he chose. The heirs of Chimbai-Khan would recede into obscurity then, taking Llesho’s negotiations with them. If it came to a change in rule, Llesho knew he might depend on Yesugei, who had found him on the borders of the Northern grasslands and brought him to his khan. Of the others, he had no clue.