Lords of Grass and Thunder

by Curt Benjamin

  She didn’t think he meant for her to follow in the footsteps of the lady who had murdered his mother. King Toad, however, bent a baleful look in his direction, reminding Eluneke that he was not only very large but poisonous as well. A casual or therapeutic touch of skin against skin should do no harm. She was uncertain of the damage if the toad aimed an attack at eye or nose or mouth and hastened to set the creature’s mind at ease.

  “I could no more keep my totem caged against its will than I could wage war against the toads for their dead skins to decorate my costume. But—” She caught the gleam in his eye, knew when their minds found harmony. “—I might, I suppose, make a treaty with the king of toads, as a traveler in his domain.”

  King Toad had started down out of his tree. He was larger even than she had thought, and the leaves that had seemed a fanciful accident remained in a crown about his head.

  “Exactly.” Prince Tayyichiut kept his eyes on her, but he spoke a little louder than necessary, cocking his head as though he meant the authority behind him to hear as well. “Lady Chaiujin forced the attendance of her toad by locking her cage on the outside. But if you made comfortable little baskets in which the toads might join you at will on your healing journeys, and if you promised to leave them in peace except at need, killing none of their number to pin their hides on your clothes, you might strike a bargain very nicely.”

  “The latch should be on the inside,” Eluneke agreed. “We wouldn’t want anyone falling out and getting hurt. But they must be able to unlatch the baskets whenever they want.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  WHEN THEY REACHED the very edge of the dell that fell away to the river below, the shamaness Toragana continued flying, into the tops of the spindly trees that crowded close to the river. Lady Bortu stopped. She had sat astride her first horse in her second summer and could take her mount down the steep incline as well as any of the khan’s soldiers. The clatter of hooves breaking through the undergrowth would make it difficult to study the girl Eluneke unobserved, however, so she waited until the raven returned with news from her reconnoiter.

  Fluttering to the ground, Toragana took human form, straightening her feathered robes around her as she settled. “This way,” she said. Her sleeve fell back to the elbow as she pointed. “Bolghai’s gone. They’re sitting by the river.”

  “They?” If not her teacher, then who?

  The shamaness lowered her lashes and said only, “Back to back, or front to front? Who knows?”

  Bortu understood the riddle: the girl had met someone at the river. But did the two join together for love or had her companion come upon her as a chance encounter? She would only find the answer at the bottom of the dell, so she followed as Toragana led the way off the high plain, into the little valley below.

  Taking the slope on her own feet proved more difficult than riding for the Lady Bortu. The shamaness took her arm, however, and helped her over the rough places with a professional ease the khaness found comfortable to accept where even a single word of sympathy would have driven her to reject any aid. In the shelter of a spruce tree above the river, Toragana halted with light pressure on Bortu’s arm to signal their stop.

  “There,” she whispered.

  Lady Bortu saw, and her eyes grew wide with the shock of her discovery. “The prince!” she hissed. “What is this?”

  “Fate,” Toragana answered.

  “But what fate?” The khaness pressed. “They are no use to the khan together!” She felt spirits moving in the little dell, the boy’s dead father and others both benign and deadly.

  “The girl has visions.” Toragana didn’t speak aloud, but Lady Bortu heard her voice, a whisper in her ear. “Since childhood, or so her guardian informed me when I took her in. Lately, they have all centered on the prince.”

  “Many young girls dream of princes. That’s the way of a girl’s heart, not magic or fate. Am I to believe these visions brought them together, and not the ambitions of a raven who would install her apprentice as a shaman-khaness in the highest tent?”

  “She did not know his name until the day of the matches.” Toragana answered. “I was uncertain of his identity myself until this moment. But prince or slave, it little matters when the maggots are crawling out his eyes.”

  Easy enough to solve that riddle, Bortu thought. Not so easy to hear it, however. “She sees him dead, then.” If true, the girl had a rare talent. The calling required that a shaman intercede with the spirits of the dead on behalf of the living. Few saw into the future, to speak to the dead while they still lived.

  “How old?” Death didn’t always mean tragedy, after all. If he had died old—

  “Young,” Toragana whispered. “Very young, as their elders see such things. She believes it will be soon. But even when she thought him no more than a simple soldier, she felt herself drawn to him by fate, to save him.”

  “At one time, perhaps, the girl thought only of her duty.” Bortu conceded that much. Seeing them together, however, she knew that time had long past.

  “They are deep in conversation,” Toragana agreed, “I can get closer, and hear them in my totem form—”

  “It hardly matters what they say.” The khaness dismissed the suggestion with a wave of her hand. “Love words or recipes, their hearts fill their eyes. See how she follows every change in his expression as if the wrinkling of his nose or the curve of his mouth hides the secrets of the universe.”

  “I never intended . . .”

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, the Lady Bortu knew that the shamaness made her apologies: for not having the talent to foresee this outcome, for not having the answer to saving the prince herself, for whatever. Bortu didn’t hear; she had come out to discover for herself what she must about the girl, and now her mind spun with revelations that froze her heart in her breast.

  Mergen’s daughter, with visions of her beautiful, precious Prince Tayy dead. She wanted to curse the shamaness for a liar but knew that to save the prince she must believe it, and act. The moment seemed ripe for the Lady Chaiujin’s deadly interference. Reflexively, Lady Bortu scanned the branches of the trees for an emerald green bamboo snake but saw instead a giant toad, creeping down from the very tree against which Prince Tayyichiut rested his back.

  “Look there, a poison toad!” She clutched at the shamaness’ arm, shaking it in her terror. “You must fly, warn them of their danger!”

  Toragana’s head twitched like her totem as she turned an eye grown suddenly more beady and sharp on the pair. “Eluneke’s totem,” she muttered. “What can it mean?”

  “Is she his salvation, or his doom?” The Lady Bortu asked, but there was no one to answer. The shamaness had turned into a raven and flown away.

  “ Pin their hides on your clothes, you . . . might strike a bargain very nicely.”

  Not an option, King Toad agreed. The thought of his people dead and dangling like so many beads for the pleasure of the toad girl set the poison glands in his skin to quivering. Caged in little baskets seemed no alternative at all. But she had said she wanted to bring them no harm, so he listened, creeping down the trunk of the tree.

  “. . . they must be able to unlatch the basket whenever they want.” Better no baskets at all, but they had come, at least, to a talking place.

  “RRRRibbbit!” he added his own voice to the negotiation. He’d been listening from the beginning and had opinions on all of it, including the lady’s appearance. She might, he thought, be beautiful enough to a human. He’d seen her in her toad form, however, and she would not have made it past the lowest ranks of his harem. An air clung to her, in effably human even in her toad shape, that he found vaguely unnerving.

  As a veteran of the eagle war debates he had enough diplomatic sense not to mention that though it didn’t seem to matter. The human shaman and her prince were staring at him eagerly, as if they expected him to break into a speech on the rights of toads in the Harnish tongue at any moment. As king of the toads, it would be beneath his
dignity to do so even if he had the skill in the language or the physical ability to form its sounds. Which he didn’t. The girl could take her totem form, however, and they could talk as toad to toad if she had the sense to think of it.

  “Ribit,” he repeated with as inviting a little hop as he could manage without admitting her into his harem.

  The prince looked at him dolefully. “I don’t think it speaks Harnish,” he volunteered.

  What gave you the first clue? That I’m a toad, maybe? King Toad observed him with a sardonic eye. Aren’t you the master of the obvious.

  Not quite, though. “Ribit,” he corrected the prince. “ ‘He.’ I’m not an ‘it.’ ”

  “Do you speak Toad?”

  No, I’m a foreign toad. I speak salamander. Abashed, the king of toads realized the prince had addressed the shamaness and not himself. Fortunately, he hadn’t spoken aloud. The humans might not understand the language of toads, but other creatures did. He’d have been the laughingstock of the forest.

  For her part, the human female answered her male with a noncommittal shrug. “Not in my human form.”

  Figure it out, girl.

  She finally did, shaking herself all over to loosen sinew and bone. “I haven’t done this without Toragana or Bolghai to watch over me,” she warned the prince, whose face shone with new purpose.

  “I’ll watch for you!” he promised.

  Shifting her determined grip from one branch to the next, Lady Bortu edged her way down the steep slope. Still too far away to save the young folks—or the prince, if the girl had called the toad to murder him—she searched the sky overhead, saw the arrow dive of the raven which was Toragana. If she attacked it in her totem form, the toad’s skin would surely kill the shamaness. But Bortu couldn’t reach them to warn them, or to stop terrible murder. She braced herself for a skittering run down the slope.

  As she took her first running step, however, the girl Eluneke began to transform before her eyes. Not as fast as her mentor or Bolghai could do, but slowly, surely, the girl shrank, bent, and colored until she sat on a rock, face to face with the toad that seemed to threaten her.

  The khaness saw through the eyes of the raven, heard through her ears. Toragana had seen her pupil’s transformation and aborted her suicidal attack. She lighted on the lowest branch as if she had meant to do so all along and cocked an eye at the two leaf-colored diplomats. For so, it seemed, they were. Though the girl and the toad—king of toads, she discovered—spoke the language of their species, the raven understood and so did Lady Bortu.

  Eluneke was much smaller in her true totem form than the king of toads, and her skin possessed no poison glands at all. She wanted to give him no such obvious advantages, so she wove a glamour around herself as she drew her body tighter. She would appear to be a much larger toad to anyone who didn’t know to look beneath the surface. If the prince were worth the struggle she expected in his future, he would see her for what she was, but she hoped her toady adversary would give her the dignity of her chosen image.

  He croaked a greeting and bobbed his head in a way that neither submitted to her dominance nor demanded that she submit to his. Very nicely done, she thought, and he was looking into her glamour eyes, not down into her true face. She answered the bobbing of his head and, since she had opened the negotiations, began with an explanation that she hoped would make her offer palatable to the toads.

  “As you can see, I share a common soul with the toad people.” Great Sun had chased Little Sun nearly to the end of the sky. The air grew cooler, the signal for the mosquitoes and flies to make their presence felt. Eluneke smelled them on the air and realized she was hungry. As she spoke, it seemed natural to flick out her tongue and snap a fly out of the air. Almost before she knew what she had done the thing was sliding down her gullet.

  “So I see,” King Toad agreed, with—if such were possible—a smirk upon his lipless mouth. He followed her lead, snatching up insects on his sticky tongue and swallowing with a great show of exercising his throat.

  The two sides of Eluneke’s nature strove for control. She allowed none of that to show in the way she dipped and nodded at the king of toads, however. She had just made a claim to a relationship and proved it with her dinner. Now was not the time to let her human taste exert itself. “As I was saying,” she continued when she had regained her composure, “I am a shaman among the humans. My totem spirit is in the toad family.

  “It is the practice of our craft to secure the skins of the totem animal to our sacred robes and by their presence assume their character. The shaman Bolghai wears the pelts of stoats about his neck and lines his burrow with them. Toragana bears within her the spirit of a raven. Though she has collected most of her costume from the fallen feathers of birds in flight, she has taken the lives of that people at need for the more limited requirements of her headdress and her tent.”

  “And you wish to take the lives of the toads for this purpose—” The king of the toads puffed himself up, his poison glands swelling threateningly.

  Eluneke’s toad nature lacked the instinct to spit venom at her foes. She held herself erect against the threat but had no way to counter it. The human prince, however, had kept his promise to guard her. From above, as if the gods of the heavens had set their protection on her, the point of an arrow appeared. It came to rest on the head of the king of toads.

  “You may kill her,” Prince Tayy conceded levelly. “But it will be your dying act.”

  “You heard me refuse that option,” Eluneke reminded him, “I am trying to find my way to the best solution for both of us. Right now, we are facing the worst.”

  “I see your point,” King Toad agreed. “It’s poking me in the head. Call off your male, please.”

  “I can’t. He doesn’t speak toad. You will have to show him it is safe to unbend his bow.”

  “All right.” King Toad flopped down into a submissive pose. “Can you send him away now?”

  Eluneke didn’t know why, but she had the sense that King Toad was laughing at her in spite of the danger he faced at the prince’s hand. She took two short steps back and forward again, settled her leaf-colored arms in a toad shrug. “I will certainly do that as soon as I return to my mortal form. We’ll all be safest if we finish quickly, I think.”

  “Very well.” The king of the toads relaxed over his arms, eyeing Eluneke with a baleful gleam. “State your case.”

  “The toads will agree to attend me in their baskets as needed for healing the sick, or for easing the way for the dead. In return, I will allow each the freedom to leave when the need has passed, and I vow to harm no living toad to make my shaman’s robes.”

  “You’re talking about a serious inconvenience to the toad people, for no return other than your promise not to commit mortal crimes against them,” King Toad pointed out. “It doesn’t exactly work as a long-term arrangement.”

  Eluneke had to agree the king of the toads had a point. The empty skins of a shaman’s totem animal didn’t complain about the hours. A powerful shaman might fill the dead husks with his or her own presence, so that the robes of office bore the stamp of the one who wore it into the next generation. But if she didn’t kill the toads—

  “How do the toad people feel about their dead?”

  “Glad not to be among them,” King Toad responded. Then he seemed to catch her meaning. "There is a place where my people go when they know they are dying. The branches of the trees hang low and golden drops of sunlight dapple the leaves. It is a sacred place of peaceful endings. But once the spirit has passed, a toad has no use for what is left behind.

  “There are no heaps of bones and skin,” he warned her. “Few enough of our number make it to the final home and few remain there long when dead—nature turns us all back into dirt soon enough.”

  “I understand.” Eluneke bobbed her head in a human nod that she realized belatedly made an offer she hadn’t intended in toad language. “If you show me this place, I can slowly begin to gathe
r the hides I need for my robes.”

  King Toad pretended not to notice the awkward suggestion about fathering her tadpoles. “Promise only to pin the dead out of sight of the living and I will do so,” he agreed. “Now, how do you plan to return to your human form without startling that young male into putting an arrow through my head?”

  “I think you ought to back away first, so he doesn’t think you are a threat.”

  The toad moved away in a submissive posture, but with an ironic gleam in his eye. “Come alone at this time tomorrow and I will show you what you want. But leave your male at home. And if you should like a toad husband . . .”

  King Toad’s intentions were lost in the croaking of his kind. Eluneke stood next to the prince and gave him a triumphant smile. “We have a deal.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “WHAT DID HE SAY?” Prince Tayy had seen many wonders in his travels. A galley slave who turned into a dragon and a boy who turned into a roebuck, then a king, and then a god came immediately to mind. So he controlled his instinctive jump back when Eluneke stood before him as a girl again. He didn’t make a habit of kissing toads and the great desire to kiss her that he’d felt when he first stumbled into the dell was considerably dampened. An edge of curiosity remained, however; it seemed he had an affinity for magical creatures, including the shamaness in training. He wondered about his children if such beings were his fate.

  “King Toad has agreed to our bargain for the time being.” She dusted her hands on the sides of her dress, looking as disconcerted as he felt himself, which raised the prince’s confidence. She was no more accustomed to making treaties with her totem animal than he was to watching her do it. He thought he ought to say something useful, but an explosion of feathery flight brought both their heads up, searching out the sudden threat. Just a bird. Her eyes narrowing with a tension he recognized, Eluneke followed its skittery flight into the higher trees.