The Tiger Queens Read online

  If they failed, I would soon stand among the People of the Felt as a widow.

  * * *

  Tolui whimpered in his sleep the night before the full moon, but Alaqai crooned a lullaby to her little brother before I could get up. I lifted to one elbow to see my children in the silver cradle, my daughter’s arm wrapped around her brother as she made up new verses more to her liking. A two-stringed horsehair fiddle often accompanied the common milking song, but her sweet voice needed no instruments.

  “The mare’s milk flows like

  The green grasses of the steppes

  And the cow lows for her calf.

  The rivers ripple with sunlight,

  Goats cluster like woolly clouds,

  Leaving their dung all around.”

  I stifled a chuckle at the last line, for at least we knew my daughter wouldn’t end up a singer or plucking a shant. Ogodei and Chaghatai snored through the song on the boys’ side of the ger, but Jochi slept under the stars with the soldiers. My solemn son had just taken his first wife and was eager to prove himself, to rid himself of the stain of his birth, and thus he’d asked to be allowed to join his father on the field. I’d protested until my voice was hoarse, but Genghis had remained steadfast, convinced this was something my son needed to do.

  “You can’t protect Jochi forever,” Genghis had said. “He’s a man now. It’s time the clans viewed him as such.”

  Yet never before had both my husband and my son ridden to battle at the same time.

  Realizing I wouldn’t win the argument, I spent the day beseeching the Earth Mother and doubling my offerings of milk to the spirits. At dawn, the two armies would charge at each other, riding up and down the sides of the mountain, reforming and charging like waves. My firstborn would be among them, leaving me wondering whether all mothers felt so terrified and powerless as their children ignored their admonitions to stay small and instead grew into adults with minds of their own.

  Genghis tossed in his sleep next to me and finally woke, his lips moving in a silent prayer so his first words of the day would be dedicated to the khan of the mountains and the Golden Light of the Sun. I waited for him to finish, then traced the line of his jaw, and he stared at me with such intensity that I almost blushed. Then he kissed me.

  My husband never left for battle without first kissing me, but we both sensed this time was different. He rolled atop me and I threw caution to the winds, opening my legs to receive him and seeking to hold him for as long as I could, even as the sunlight stole precious time. I hadn’t allowed Genghis into my bed since he’d returned with his new wives, so our coupling was silent but fierce, an urgency in our grappling flesh and swallowed cries. He withdrew before his seed spilled into me, protecting me even now, and afterward, as the children stirred, he caressed my cheek.

  “You are the light in my sky, Borte Ujin,” he said, breathing deeply. “I love you.”

  I touched the pale scar on his chin, and another on his shoulder. “And I love you, even though there are times when I’d rather strangle you.”

  I helped him dress in his leather armor, tying his leather greaves and handing him his domed helmet. He gave me a lingering look, as if he would say something more, but then stepped into the dawn, leaving me to ready the children. I swore to the ancestors I’d remain dry-eyed when we bid him good-bye before all the clans. There would be time for tears later.

  The children dressed hurriedly, all except for Ogodei, who dawdled as he always did. I snapped at him and finally tied the sash on his deel too tightly. Together we stepped outside to the acrid tang of storm clouds and rain on the horizon. A great storm arose from the wooded mountains across the steppe, angry clouds racing across the sky and blotting out the sun.

  Jochi waited with Shigi on the other side of the camp, where Genghis spoke to Khasar, his younger brother. Shigi, the young Tatar captive raised by Hoelun these past years, now filled out the shoulders of his boiled leather jerkin. He would accompany the men today not as a soldier, but as a scribe, recording the exploits of my husband and his warriors in the new Mongolian script my husband had commissioned him to create.

  “It bears little difference to the Uighur script,” I’d heard him murmur to Alaqai during one of their infrequent lessons.

  “But I don’t understand Uighur either,” Alaqai had said, wrinkling her little nose. “The marks all look like the scratchings of a drunken chickadee to me.”

  Genghis had commanded Shigi to write for a nation, but I bade the Tatar scribe to instruct my unruly brood in reading and writing, a skill I myself lacked. I wasn’t sure whose was the more difficult commission.

  The sable edge of Genghis’ helmet rustled now in the wind and he stared at the nearest mountain—one with a crooked back like a camel’s—where Jamuka and his soldiers were camped. The storm clouds cracked and growled overhead with an unnatural ferocity, the lightning tearing the sky in two and making the children shriek and clutch my legs. I’d heard stories of this from my mother, ancient battles in which powerful seers called on the spirits of the winds to destroy their enemies. My throat tightened at the idea of both my husband and my son riding into a battle fought in part by spirits.

  “It’s their shamans,” I said, sinking to my knees and spreading my fingers into the earth. The reverberations of enemy drums pulsed up through my knees and palms. The ground in my vision swayed then and I gasped, eyes screwed shut against the vertigo.

  Genghis lay sprawled in the jade green grass, his dried lifeblood staining a path from his neck to where it had watered the earth. His white warhorse had been skewered through the spine, the shaft of the arrow buried in his hide, and a lifeless hand lay open on a slate-colored rock, palm up to the Eternal Blue Sky. The early morning light warmed the spine of a camel-backed mountain on the horizon.

  My eyes snapped open to the flesh-and-blood version of my husband, hale and solid as he mounted his white warhorse, the same animal I’d just seen dead on the steppes. The beast snorted and stamped its front hooves while the winds ripped around us. The mountain behind them was the same as in the vision and the grass an identical shade of brilliant green, damp with dew.

  I had forsworn my gift of sight, yet it sought me anyway.

  I rose slowly, glad for the solid earth below me. “Jochi,” I said, my knees threatening to buckle. “Fetch a cup of milk to offer to the ancestors before you and your father ride out.”

  “But—”

  “Fetch a cup of milk.” My voice brooked no argument. Jochi looked about to protest, but Shigi cleared his throat.

  “Perhaps we should make an offering as well,” Shigi said, smiling. “Asking that I don’t drop my brushes and ink during the battle.”

  My son kicked a rock and stalked off with an exaggerated sigh. “Don’t go,” I said to Genghis, waiting until my son was just out of earshot. Our relationship had been strained since the Tatar raid, but I couldn’t imagine my world without my husband, empty of his constant grin, his deep rumble of a laugh, his warmth against my back at night. “I saw the outcome of this battle. You will be wounded.” I couldn’t bring myself to say the rest.

  I saw you dead.

  Genghis chuckled. “You’ve seen my scars, wife of my heart. I’m often wounded.”

  I dragged my gaze to his, the wind whipping hair into my eyes. “This time you’ll be more than wounded.”

  I watched the understanding dawn in his eyes. “You saw my death?” he asked, and I could only nod. A vein in his neck throbbed and I longed to kiss it, to feel the life pumping through it. “When?”

  “A moment ago. The vision came to me unbidden.”

  He dismounted so we stood almost eye to eye, and I knew he believed me. “It will happen today?”

  “Today, tomorrow . . . I couldn’t see, only that it was here, in this battle,” I said, remembering the slant of sunlight on the crooked mountain. My husband w
ould die here, unless I could keep him from battle. “You were wounded in the neck.”

  A man cleared his throat behind us. Teb Tengeri stood in my shadow, leaning on his cane, his features as smooth as river ice. He was dressed in the full regalia of a seer today, swathed in a deel sewn with colorful silk tassels and gold discs to reflect the spirit world, and crowned by an iron helmet mounted with yellowing antlers. “The Great Khan will indeed fall in this battle,” he said to Genghis, looking past me. “But he shall not die.”

  My hands curled into fists and I wanted nothing so much as to sink my nails into the shaman’s face. I had seen it—my husband would bleed his lifeblood into the steppes today. “I saw his wound, the death mask on his face,” I growled.

  Teb Tengeri shrugged, an elegant movement for a half man with a beard that looked as if it might harbor a den of shrews. “Perhaps your vision is faulty.”

  I hissed with rage, but the shaman paid less attention to me than to the buzzing of an errant fly.

  “What about the storm?” Genghis asked, stepping between us. “I cannot risk losing men to the winds.”

  Teb Tengeri glanced at the approaching clouds, his braids whipped by gusts that cut through my deel like knives. He crouched to the earth and tasted the film of dirt on his thumb, then lifted his shoulders in an unconcerned shrug. “The storm is hollow as a bone. I could chase it away.”

  “Do it,” Genghis snapped. “Send it back where it came from; make it hail and sleet upon their heads.”

  Teb Tengeri clasped his hands before him, fingers as twisted as the Great Branching Tree. “As you wish.”

  “He lies,” I muttered as he walked away. “None of us can stop this storm.”

  And no one could stop the spirits if they decided to call my husband to the sacred mountains today.

  “Perhaps not.” Genghis touched my cheek with the same hands that knew precisely how to touch me in the dark of our ger, the same hands that held our children when they were first presented to the Eternal Blue Sky. “What will be, will be. It is not my place to fight it.”

  “Please don’t go.” My throat felt as if someone had cinched a harness around it so I could scarcely swallow. “I can’t bear to watch you leave, knowing what I’ll see the next time I look upon you.”

  “Then you’ll have to close your eyes.” Genghis pulled me into an embrace, and his chest expanded in a deep inhale, drawing my scent—my soul—inside his lungs, a piece of me to carry into his final battle. Greatness did not come without risks, and today my husband was prepared to make the greatest gamble of them all.

  “You’re a miserable piece of horse dung,” I said, stepping back and swiping at my eyes as Jochi reappeared. “I’ll never forgive you if you die now.”

  Genghis threw his head back and roared with laughter, making me smile through my tears. How could the Earth and Sky be so greedy as to claim such a man?

  My son handed me the cup of milk I’d ordered and I chanted a prayer, letting the earth and its spirits drink the offering as I poured the liquid into the ground. Genghis kissed our children, then paused to unwind a red string from his braid and tie it around Alaqai’s wrist. “Be good for your mother while I’m gone, little marmot,” he said, tweaking her nose.

  “I’ll try,” Alaqai said, fingering her new bracelet with a sigh. “But it’s so hard to be good.”

  Jochi touched my shoulder then and produced a lopsided grin. “Don’t worry, Mother,” he said, giving me a jaunty wink. “I’ll keep an eye on Father.”

  Shigi offered a smile as well, although his eyes lacked any spark of mirth. “And I’ll keep an eye on your son, Borte Ujin,” he murmured.

  Winter gripped my heart in its icy embrace. My husband and son stood before me, strong boned, the blood still pumping through their hearts, and yet I’d seen other men race into battle only to have their broken bodies sprawled in the grasses later that day.

  “Thank you, Shigi,” I whispered.

  Genghis kissed me then, his lips lingering a long while before he strode to his warhorse. He hadn’t said bayartai, but I touched my lips, knowing that this kiss was different from all the others that had come before it.

  It was the kiss of good-bye.

  * * *

  The storm conjured by Jamuka’s shamans rose and swooped down on us, fiercer than a black hawk, shrieking in our ears and blinding our men. Then, just as suddenly, it climbed into the sky and retreated back the way it had come, trapping Jamuka and his men under its wings. Later we would find Tayichigud bodies in the ravines on the mountainside, lying where they’d fallen, some trapped beneath their horses after they’d stumbled in the dark.

  As the sky cleared, our men turned wide eyes to a low rumble at the far end of our camp. It was Teb Tengeri, pounding his skin drum and beating the earth with his bare fists, his deep voice ululating into the spirit world. The silk tassels on his robe flashed and swirled as he danced, the gold discs sewn onto his chest catching the daylight and throwing it back to the sky in blinding flashes.

  Genghis would never give up his shaman now that the winds seemed to obey his commands, no matter how I wished him to.

  For the rest of that day and much of the next, I kept the women’s hands busy with butchering several old horses for either a victory celebration or a funeral feast, but my mind returned time and again to where my husband might be at this moment. I trembled to think that a Tayichigud warrior—or perhaps even Jamuka—was even now striking the deathblow that would end Genghis’ life. Finally, as the sun grew heavy on the second day, the cries of the watching children heralded the return of our soldiers. Alaqai took my hand in her little one with its nails bitten to the quick and Hoelun squeezed my other palm—a flesh-and-bone chain of three generations of our family’s women, and for that I was grateful.

  No happy song flew to us on the too-still air. Instead, there was only silence, the horses walking as if pulling heavy loads. Alaqai wriggled like a fish on a hook and gasped at the tightness of my grip, so I hefted her onto my hip instead and searched for her father’s weathered face and Jochi’s toothy smile. Instead, Khasar rode at the front on his yellow warhorse, his face as gray as a dead man’s. At his side rode Shigi, his jaw clenched tight and his fingers stained with ink.

  I couldn’t bring myself to ask the question burning in my throat, for I already knew where my husband lay right now, his flesh likely feeding the wolves and vultures. “The Tayichigud lost many men and have pitched their tents until morning,” Khasar said. “We have many wounded soldiers, but our clans won the day.”

  I looked past him, desperate for the sight of the skin sledges dragging the wounded home. My voice cracked. “And Genghis?”

  Khasar dropped his eyes and bent his head. “Shot in the neck with an arrow.”

  My knees threatened to buckle, and I clasped Alaqai and Hoelun for support as a mourning cry rent the air. I would not collapse before my people. “Where is my son?”

  Shigi glanced up then, his eyes pools of despair. It struck me then how poorly men deal with grief, how it is women who must bravely face the sorrows that men create. “Missing,” he said. “I watched them ride off together, chasing after Jamuka’s own horse. I’d have stopped Jochi if I could . . .”

  I wasn’t aware I’d closed my eyes until I felt a gentle touch at my elbow. “All is as it will be,” Hoelun said sadly, looking suddenly the old woman she had become. She addressed Khasar. “Go, and bring our sons back.”

  The bodies of soldiers fallen in battle were typically left on the steppes to feed the carrion and the Earth Mother, but it wouldn’t be Khasar or anyone else who laid out the corpses of my husband and son. It would be my hands that retrieved them and readied their bodies for the mountains. At least the vision had prepared me for what I would find.

  “No,” I said. “I’ll go.”

  “Absolutely not,” Hoelun said. “You’ll be taken by t
he Tayichigud.” She spat onto the dirt at the mention of the clan that had once betrayed her.

  “Only I can claim Genghis and Jochi.” I lingered on their names, struggling to make sense of this new world where my husband and son no longer breathed the same air I did or felt the Golden Light of the Sun. “Khasar will see to my safety.”

  “I’d go as well,” Shigi said. “If you don’t mind, Borte Khatun.”

  “So long as you bring a sword along with your paper and pens,” I said. “It seems only fitting that you be there to record the end of Genghis’ story.”

  I choked on the words, but Hoelun stepped aside. Khasar and Shigi followed behind as I walked to the horses, concentrating only on putting one foot in front of the other. The People of the Felt parted as I passed, their mournful keening like an invisible mist in the air. Wives reached out to touch me and a young girl hugged my knees. I looked down to see Alaqai staring up at me with her father’s eyes, the red string he’d given her still tied to her wrist.

  “I want to come with you,” she said.

  I touched the top of her head, the glossy hair always matted with tangles no matter how often I tried to comb them. “Your place is here, little marmot,” I managed to say. “In case your grandmother needs help protecting your brothers.”

  Alaqai cocked her head as if contemplating my request. She likely realized she was being tricked, but I could almost hear her father’s last instructions in her mind. “All right, Mother,” she finally said, crossing her arms over her chest. “I’ll get my bow and quarrels.”

  “Good girl,” I said, choking as I thought of the quiver of arrows Genghis had given her on her last naming day, every point sharpened and each feather fletched by his own hands. Although he’d never admitted it aloud, I knew Alaqai was his favorite child, the one cast in his own shadow. Now her memories of him would fade until she could scarcely recall the way he pushed her to ride harder than her brothers, or to nock an arrow for a perfect shot at a waiting doe. “Your father would be proud,” I whispered after her, my eyes stinging.