The Tiger Queens Read online

  But then I’d awoken one chilly morning to discover Jingue’s horse tracks interspersed with those of a raven in the dusting of fresh snow, returning him to the Nestorian monastery to which he retreated from time to time.

  “I did nothing to urge Jingue to leave,” I said, restraining myself from dumping the extra pot of porridge over my husband’s head.

  “That’s not what he claimed.” Ala-Qush scowled, using his finger to lift the last drop of lumpy porridge from the bowl. “He couldn’t have left any faster than if his horse’s tail was aflame.”

  I didn’t know why Jingue had left again, and I told myself that I didn’t much care. My only concern at his absence was that it would be impossible to learn Turkic—and therefore truly rule the Onggud—now that both my teachers had abandoned me.

  Then I realized there was another teacher right under my nose. I took advantage of the fair winter weather to instruct Boyahoe on riding and wrestling, and together we climbed the great oak tree that grew inside the city walls, shimmying along its thick branches to jump over the stone wall into drifts of snow on the other side. Ravens often paused in their digging to watch us, snow speckling their beaks and faces before they continued their search for food. At night, Boyahoe tolerated me peering over his shoulder as he practiced his lessons in my ger with my dogs at his feet, my stepson’s tongue caught between his lips as he struggled to make perfect characters for Jingue to marvel over upon his return. We held competitions on who could master the most symbols each night, competitions I won as often as Boyahoe did, until at last I could read and write Turkic with some ease.

  Life was dull but almost pleasant. How quickly things change.

  * * *

  A temperamental spring brought warm rains, and with them, my roof leaked and dampness seeped into the ground beneath my ger. My morning porridge remained uneaten and as gray as the weather outside as I locked away damp scrolls and rolled up sodden rugs while ordering Boyahoe to place every bowl and bucket at my disposal to catch the drips. A spotted ewe had dropped twin lambs early and I’d brought them inside to avoid the deluge, but their downy coats were drenched and they bleated at me in consternation. I cursed back at them and found myself wishing for a solid roof above my head for the first time in my life.

  The door opened, bringing the sound of spitting rain, and my waterlogged husband stumbled inside. His drenched hair obscured his face, and his boots squelched with each step.

  “Have you come to help us, revered husband?” I asked over my shoulder. Ala-Qush rarely deigned to set foot inside my tent, and I awaited the inevitable comment about my living in filth and squalor while surrounded by muddy beasts, but he only mumbled something under his breath.

  “Father?” Boyahoe’s voice trembled and I straightened over the chest I’d been lugging away from the growing lake at my feet. I wiped the wet hair from my eyes and gasped in horror.

  The flesh on the right side of Ala-Qush’s face drooped like hot wax, and one of his pupils was dilated larger than during the worst of his headaches. He opened his mouth to speak, but the words were slurred to incomprehension. He fell to his knees with a muddy splash.

  I abandoned the chest and wedged myself under his leaden arm, struggling to lift him until Boyahoe helped support his unaffected side. Together we scarcely managed to drag him to my bed. “Find a physician,” I ordered Boyahoe. “Now!”

  The terrified boy ran from my ger while I maneuvered Ala-Qush to his back. I didn’t know what to do; I’d never heard Toregene describe an illness like this and prayed it wasn’t the plague I shared a name with. Ala-Qush moaned and attempted to speak again, but I could only make out a few words in jumbled Turkic.

  Pain.

  Children.

  Death.

  “Don’t you dare die,” I said, jabbing a trembling finger into his chest. I was ambivalent toward the man who claimed to be my husband, but as his childless widow, I’d be cast back to my family. Unless the Onggud decided to dispose of me in some other way.

  The rain slapped harder against my felt walls and the lambs bleated so loudly I threatened to turn them into stew before Boyahoe finally reappeared, trailed by Enebish and tugging the sleeves of a long-bearded physician. Enebish remained by the door, her eyes glistening. “What can we do?”

  “Pray to every deity you worship.” I rubbed my silver cross, worn smoother these past months, and flicked drops of milk from my porridge to the ground in an offering to the Earth Mother. “Pray for his recovery.”

  The physician made a great show of checking Ala-Qush’s breath and pulse, even removing his curled boots to palpate his feet and using a silver hook to open his eyes. I expected Ala-Qush to react to the latter, but he just stared at the ceiling, unblinking and scarcely breathing.

  “The Prince of Beiping has an imbalance of water,” the physician declared, tucking his arms into his wide sleeves. “And it has caused his body to revolt.”

  “What can you do?” I asked.

  The sage shrugged. “I may be able to alleviate the excess of fluids with my needles, but I believe the worst of the storm has passed.”

  By then my husband had fallen silent, his eyes closed in what appeared to be a restful sleep. Still, the right side of his face seemed untethered from the bone, and his arm hung slack at his side.

  “Use the needles,” I said, lifting his arm to lay it at his side. “And anything else that may help him.”

  The physician nodded, but he drew me away from the children. “I’ve seen this before, Beki. It is possible that the prince will never fully recover from this unfortunate episode.”

  “But will he live?”

  “I believe so.”

  I offered a silent prayer of thanks to the Eternal Blue Sky. “Then do all you can for him.”

  I began issuing unnecessary orders to occupy the children and distract them from their father’s condition. “Return the lambs to their ewe,” I said to Boyahoe. “And these crates need to be taken to the Great House.”

  Enebish hugged herself, her lower lip trembling. She put on a show of being older than her years but was little more than a scared child. “And my father?”

  “He’ll remain here for the time being, until the physician deems him able to be moved.”

  “May I care for him?” she asked. It was the only request I could ever recall coming from her, and I knew it had cost her dearly to even ask.

  I nodded, wondering if I’d regret my next words. “And bring your mother, if she’ll come. We’ll take turns tending him until he recovers.”

  “I’ll fetch her right now,” she said, as if I might change my mind. “Thank you, Beki.”

  It was the first time she had used my title without looking as if she might spit. Today was a day of tragedy, but also one of small miracles.

  “Wait,” I said, stopping her at the door. “Send a messenger to ride for the monastery. Jingue must return home.”

  “Of course,” she said. My request seemed aimed to bring her family together in its time of need, when in fact, I was motivated by reasons far less pure. In the terrible event that Ala-Qush’s spirit flew to the mountains, Jingue would become sole ruler of the Onggud and I’d be nothing more than a childless widow of sixteen winters. I couldn’t afford to have him out rallying the surrounding towns against me, or worse.

  Only time would reveal which role I would play in the days to come: beki, widow, or corpse.

  * * *

  I’d prayed for my husband’s survival, but death would have been a kindness.

  Jingue returned while I was with his father in the Great House, a crick in my neck and my mouth half-open in sleep, a Turkic book on herbs under my face. The treatise was open to the page on the use of a woundwort infusion for weak hearts, and although it had taken me much of the night to puzzle out the full meaning of the entry, I doubted whether such a treatment would have any impac
t on Ala-Qush. When I wasn’t in the Great House, I was often playing games with Boyahoe to divert him from the fact that his father could no longer eat, walk, or even relieve himself on his own. Ala-Qush’s ruined face rendered speech impossible, but my husband had yet to use the paper and ink I’d suggested we keep nearby. Instead, he vacillated between raging in grunts and moans and throwing things at us with his good arm. I understood the black moods a ruined body could bring, but my temper was being worn thin.

  “How is he?” Jingue startled me awake when he touched my shoulder, then knelt at his father’s bedside, his expression pained. He still wore his heavy travel clothes, and he smelled of morning’s crisp air and towering spruce trees.

  “The physician’s done all he can. Now we wait.” I rubbed my tired eyes and twisted in my chair to find some relief for my aching back. I’d been indoors for so long I’d almost forgotten what the air outside smelled like, and my nose twitched from the stink of Ala-Qush’s urine bucket.

  “What do we wait for?” Jingue removed a carved wooden cross from his throat and laid it across his father’s chest. “His last breath?”

  “The physician says the danger of that has passed. That shall have to be enough, at least for now.”

  Orbei entered with Enebish then, both their noses wrinkling until their eyes adjusted to the dark and they saw Jingue kneeling next to me.

  “Jingue!” Orbei pulled her eldest son to his feet and gathered him into her arms. Scenes between mothers and sons played out the same the world over, although I realized with a pang that I had little hope of ever clasping to me a son born from my own womb.

  I busied myself emptying the urine bucket and folding Ala-Qush’s blankets; where the Great House had once entertained Tanghut, Jurched, and Song ambassadors, now the dimly lit wooden house was only the sickroom for a broken old man. Finally, Orbei released her son and took up her bench by her husband, a wooden board and a bag of knucklebones on her lap.

  “I thought I might entice him to play when he wakes,” she said to me. Orbei and I had learned to speak civilly to each other while Ala-Qush slept, although our conversations were stilted and often more painful than slitting one’s wrists. Enebish and I occasionally shared talk of the School of Healing and often spent evenings in companionable silence sitting with Ala-Qush.

  “Good luck,” I said.

  Orbei set herself to the task of combing Ala-Qush’s long hair, and for a moment I imagined her with my husband as a young bride, performing the same simple act on a bed fresh from lovemaking. My cheeks flushed and I beckoned to Jingue. “Will you walk with me?”

  I was proud of myself for asking the question instead of commanding him, yet he only shrugged. “For a bit.”

  I swallowed my ire and swept past him, wishing I’d thought to wear something more intimidating than an old gray deel stained with my failed attempts at making Ala-Qush’s ox broth. Enebish caught my arm on the way out.

  “Be gentle with my brother, Alaqai,” she whispered. I searched her eyes for malice but found none, only the stony set of her jaw. “His is a gentle soul, and I won’t have your fire scalding him.”

  “I have no intention of harming your brother,” I said. “Although he does try my patience sometimes.”

  Enebish smiled at that. “As you do with all of us,” she said.

  I chuckled under my breath, prompting Jingue to raise an eyebrow as he gestured toward the door. “I had no idea you and my sister were on speaking terms,” he said, closing the door behind us.

  “On good days,” I said. But it wasn’t Enebish I wished to discuss.

  “How long to you plan to stay?” I asked, setting us on a path toward the tortoise gate and beyond that, the hills.

  “For now.”

  “I’ll need you here longer than that with your father in this condition.”

  Jingue shook his head. “There are plenty of people to care for him. My place is—”

  “Here,” I said, feeling a flutter of annoyance that this very man who’d proposed a School of Healing was, in fact, indifferent toward his afflicted father. “I’d not ask you to wipe the drool from his mouth or help him to his bucket, but—”

  “I’m not so weak as to fear caring for the man who sired me,” Jingue said, his voice harsher than I’d ever heard it. “But this hasn’t been my home for some time now.”

  Since I’d come to Olon Süme. I recognized the accusation but refused to acknowledge it.

  “You belong here,” I said, “not in some distant monastery. Your father needs you, Jingue. I need you.”

  He gave me a startled glance at that, but I walked apace, making my husband’s heir hurry after me. Olon Süme’s walls retreated behind us before he finally spoke. “What do you mean, you need me?”

  “I plan to build the School of Healing as you recommended,” I said. “I always repay my debts.”

  “Of course.” His face grew stony, the opposite of the reaction I’d expected.

  We’d reached the hills and I tossed myself to the ground with a dull thud, plucking several blades of new grass and plaiting them together to help my concentration. Jingue stood nearby, as tall and silent as a birch tree.

  “Your father isn’t going to improve,” I said, softening my tone. “No matter how much we may wish it.”

  Jingue sat and crossed his legs then, folded his hands in his lap. I imagined him this way at his Nestorian monastery, at peace with himself and the god of the cross. I cringed to think that I was ordering him to leave all that behind, but there was no way to avoid it.

  “I know,” he said.

  “The taxes must still be collected and appropriated. The border guards must be paid.”

  “Life goes on,” he said, his voice pained.

  I dared touch him then, thinking of what I’d feel to face my father as a man broken by his own body, yet such a thing was impossible to contemplate regarding Genghis Khan. My fingers brushed Jingue’s shoulder first; then I let my hand fall to join his. My heart tripped at the moment of uncommon intimacy and I waited for him to withdraw his hand, but he didn’t move.

  “I plan to allocate a portion of the tolls to build the School of Healing,” I said, breaking the moment by clearing my throat and returning my hands to my lap. I stared at my palms, the innocent flesh and bone that had just trespassed against some invisible boundary. “I’ve been thinking about it since before you ran away to the monastery.”

  “I didn’t run away.” He looked askance at me then, and I saw the lie in his words. This was a man who might have walked calmly through any of life’s storms, had I not enveloped him in my unique sort of chaos.

  “That’s not what your father claimed. He said you left to get away from me.”

  Jingue looked ready to deny it, then sighed. “You were far from what I expected. I found it difficult to hate you as I planned.”

  “And do you still wish you could hate me?”

  “It would make things easier.” Jingue stood then, as if he needed to put distance between us. I was struck then by his noble height and the way his white deel pulled tighter across his shoulders. I wondered for a moment what the muscles looked like underneath, whether they were hard and compact, or long and trim, and what they would feel like under my hands. A flush crept up my neck at the thought and I had to look away.

  There was no one nearby, only the clouds overhead and the occasional chatter of a long-tailed ground squirrel. I was reminded of a similar grassy plain at my father’s khurlatai, the last time I’d been with a man, and terrible laughter bubbled in my throat at how my life had changed since then. It was inappropriate to be here, alone with my husband’s son, especially as my thoughts regarding Jingue at that moment were far from appropriate.

  I scrambled to my feet and stalked down the hillside ahead of Jingue, the burning in my chest so strong that I expected to see flames on my flesh.

/>   “You’ll get your school,” I threw back at him. “But I’ll need your support for my decisions as beki, so long as your father lives.”

  “And after that?” he called after me.

  I didn’t answer. I’d make no promises about a future I couldn’t see.

  Chapter 19

  1211 CE

  YEAR OF THE WHITE SHEEP

  We built the School of Healing and I learned to welcome foreign ambassadors in my husband’s stead, entertaining the Jurched and Song ministers with anecdotes from my newly discovered favorite books on travel and medicine while negotiating higher tolls for the use of our roads to carry their priceless silks and spices to the West. The Onggud bent unwilling knees to me, a result of my continuing role as Ala-Qush’s official wife, but it was Jingue’s constant presence behind me in the Great House that dissuaded the Onggud from attempting to depose me. Despite my gains in their language and the building projects I’d undertaken, I was still an outsider set above them, and they loathed me for it.

  Boyahoe I loved because he reminded me of a young version of Ogodei, and Enebish and Orbei tolerated me, but it was Jingue—the thoughtful religious scholar—who seemed content with me as I was. The longer I spent with Ala-Qush’s eldest, the more I came to appreciate his quiet approach to the world, so different from my own quick-blooded temperament. I told myself it was only because I was lonely here in Olon Süme that I anticipated the sound of his laugh with such eagerness or enjoyed the hot thrill of his hand brushing against mine, but I relished them all the same.

  We’d lived with Ala-Qush’s illness for more than two years, and it was a fair autumn afternoon when I managed to drag Jingue from under his pile of books for an impromptu archery competition on one of the last warm days before the frosts came. The golden grasses rippled and the breeze played with his hair as he nocked a quarrel and sent it flying, narrowly missing the center of the rice bag we’d set dangling from a willow tree.