The Tiger Queens Page 30

Jingue smiled in the dark. “Genghis Khan may lose the occasional skirmish, but has he ever lost a war?”

  “Never.”

  “Then I doubt he’s about to start,” he said.

  “My father claims it’s easy to conquer the world on horseback. It’s dismounting and ruling that are difficult.”

  “Your father would know,” he said. “However, I suspect the deeds of Genghis Khan will be retold around hearth fires and gilded palace halls for centuries to come.”

  “I think you mean the tales of his bloody conquests.”

  Jingue chuckled. “I rather believe your father enjoys that version of him, the image of the ruthless savage that has his enemies’ knees quaking before he even reaches their walls.”

  I smiled at that, knowing that my father had relished the stories during the Blood War that his body was made from copper and iron forged so strong that no weapon could penetrate it. “Perhaps so.”

  “And you never know,” Jingue said, “but perhaps one day songs of his daughter’s deeds will be sung as well.”

  The uncommon praise caught me off guard. I’d done nothing to earn being compared to my father, had in fact failed at everything I’d been set to do.

  “We’ll soon have our own war to fight,” I said, feeling suddenly awkward. “I fear the first battle shall erupt when we collect the taxes to pay for my father’s supplies.”

  Jingue ran a hand over his close-cropped hair. “My uncle has already called me a coward for not arguing against this campaign.”

  I shrugged. “Camlet is a luxury item. Orbei’s brother can make common felt if he prefers.”

  “He’d sooner cross the Great Dry Sea on his knees.” He looked about to say more but sighed. “It may be a good idea to keep a blade on you, in case one of the nobles thinks you an easy target for revenge.”

  So I was to fear death in every shadow yet again. I was moved by Jingue’s thoughtfulness and wished I could touch his arm, but the weight of my headdress stayed my hand. “I’ve slept with my tiger sword every night since I came to Olon Süme. And no one would dare attack me, not after seeing my father and his army in the flesh.”

  “I pray that you’re right,” he said as we approached my ger. “For all our sakes.”

  I watched him go, his words making me realize that my father’s campaign endangered not only the lives of his men, but also those of my Onggud family.

  Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do about that now.

  * * *

  It had been a week since my father had left Olon Süme, and despite Jingue’s warning, the herders continued to graze sleepy camels in the hills and merchants still hawked their treasures of silk, tortoise shells, porcelain, and honey. I convinced myself that the Council of Nobles in their ridiculous red hats had realized their mistake and reconciled themselves to the higher taxes that had been announced, all with relatively little dissent. Now I stood on the walls dressed as the beki I wished to be, ignoring the pattering raindrops as I stared at the horizon and willed Sorkhokhtani or another messenger to appear. Darkness fell quickly those days, so I didn’t question the extra torches being lit in the square across from the Great House. By the time I heard the rising voices from the same square, it was already too late.

  First came the rumble of angry shouts like a coming earthquake, then the growing light and heat behind me, as if the sun had decided not to set but to rise again from the west. I turned to see the wildfire of torches below me, but it was the flashes of silver amongst the gold, like fragments of the moon upon the sun, that caught my eye.

  Swords.

  “There she is!” An Onggud noble dressed in black silk pointed his curved scimitar at me. Even without his official red hat, I recognized him as Orbei’s brother, the loudest detractor against my father in the debates of the Council of Nobles.

  From the numbers of men surrounding him, I guessed this had been planned for days, perhaps since before my father left. Thankfully, I’d taken Jingue’s advice, and I unsheathed my tiger sword as the man in black charged up the steps two at a time. I didn’t wait for him to reach me, but leapt off the wall and landed in a cart piled with oiled leather sacks of camel hair waiting to be sold to the weavers. I stumbled out, feeling the rain start in earnest and the fast-forming mud soak through my worthless felt slippers.

  “Get her!” he screamed, shaking his sword at me. “All those who support the heathen Khan must die this night!”

  In the distance, the School of Healing was in flames, as if the mob sought to destroy all I’d touched. I was thankful Enebish wasn’t there, but instead safe with my father and his men. I fled then, quickly realizing I couldn’t outrun my pursuers. Before me, a group of men herded stumbling people into the square—women screaming, children crying, and men mumbling prayers to whatever gods they worshipped. I knew them all as my supporters in the council debates, and their innocent families.

  This was no simple mob, but a revolt.

  I kept the tiger sword ready and ran like a shadow through dark alleys, winding my way through the warren of passages in Olon Süme’s religious section. Angry voices and the flicker of torches threatened to head me off, and the copper tang of blood and screams of the dying chased me as I ducked into the first dark building.

  The Nestorian school seemed blessedly empty at first, and I’d likely have missed the scuffed boot poking out from an overturned bench had it not been for the muffled whimper that came from that direction. Only then did I see the yellow puddle of urine, smell the acrid scent of a child’s fear.

  “It’s all right,” I whispered. “You can come out.”

  There was nothing.

  “You can’t stay here,” I said. “They’ll find you.”

  I gasped when Boyahoe’s face appeared, cheeks streaked with tears as he launched himself into my arms. Small for his eleven years, he suddenly seemed as young as the day I’d met him and I clutched him to me.

  “Where’s Jingue?” I managed to ask. “And your father?”

  “I don’t know.” Boyahoe hiccupped, still clinging to me. “Jingue was here when the fighting began. He told me to hide before my uncle came.”

  “Your uncle was here?”

  “He asked Jingue to come with them.”

  My heart stalled. “And did he?”

  Boyahoe nodded. “He said he’d be glad to serve his family. My uncle gave him a sword.”

  Glad to serve his family.

  Jingue had feigned his friendship with me, had waited all this time like an adder in the grass, preparing for the right time to strike.

  Boyahoe’s words echoed louder and louder in my mind. Once I was dead Jingue could take his place behind his father’s throne, a place I’d usurped with my father’s forced alliance. The betrayal cut deep, but I didn’t have time to think on that now.

  I had only one thought in my mind at that moment: to survive.

  I thought to leave Boyahoe in a barricade of benches, but the screams increased and blood spattered the paper windows from outside. Boyahoe cringed and buried his face in my shoulder. My greatest fear had come true; this walled city was caving in and threatening to kill me.

  “I need you to run with me,” I said, hauling him up. “Can you do that?” I knew Jingue would never harm his brother, but I couldn’t be sure about the mob outside. At least with me, Boyahoe would have the protection of my sword.

  He nodded and drew in a shuddering breath. “What about Jingue?”

  I wanted to lie, to say that he’d be fine, but I couldn’t find the words. “Pray for him,” I said. “And for us.”

  His small frame melded to my side, we ducked out of the school. I managed only a few steps before I stumbled over something firm and wet.

  A body, slick with warm blood.

  My stomach heaved, but I yanked Boyahoe away before he could see the gruesome face screaming up at
us with glassy eyes. We crouched behind a wagon loaded with metal cauldrons and I prayed that the fire in my soul would protect us from the bonfire of death and flames closing in upon us. Wooden houses popped and hissed before they collapsed in showers of glowing sparks, and bodies lay outside the Great House, more familiar features twisted with death and many coated with masks of blood. Beyond that was my ger, now a fiery inferno. Then the door of the Great House opened and a man in a wooden chair wheeled out.

  “Father!” Boyahoe yelled, but I clamped a hand over his mouth.

  Stooped like a man twice his age, Ala-Qush jolted his chair to a stop, his eyes vacant and unseeing, as if in a dream. He trembled, not with fear but with shock, his bones unable to bear what his eyes were seeing.

  No one had glimpsed my husband yet, but soon one of the rebels would sound the alarm. I could run up the stairs and push him back into the relative safety of the Great House, thereby exposing Boyahoe and myself.

  Or I could do nothing.

  “If it isn’t Ala-Qush, the doddering Prince of Beiping.” Orbei’s brother and his supporters emerged from an alley just as I pushed Boyahoe under the wagon of cauldrons. They wiped stained sleeves across cheeks streaked with soot and blood, and I searched their faces in vain for Jingue.

  Orbei’s brother circled my husband, then gave his wheeled chair a shove. The wooden contraption careened down the steps, spilling Ala-Qush in a heap at the bottom. I moaned and covered Boyahoe’s ears. “You should have died before bending a knee to the heathen Khan,” the man in black said, leaning down to grab Ala-Qush by his deel’s collar. “You’re a disgrace to the Onggud, weaker than an old woman.”

  I clutched Boyahoe tight, ensuring he didn’t witness his father’s last moments, but I forced myself to watch without blinking, hearing Teb Tengeri’s accusation in my ear.

  The foot soldier of death.

  Ala-Qush remained kneeling on the ground, as trusting as a goat awaiting its slaughter. The knife across his throat flashed quickly, and his eyes grew wide as a flag of crimson unfurled down his chest. He fell forward onto the trampled earth and blood of his people, but Orbei’s brother kicked him onto his back, then spat on his ruined face before scuttling away with the rest of the rebels.

  The rain fell harder then, great, fat drops as if the Eternal Blue Sky wept at such senseless slaughter. I waited until the mob had moved on, holding my breath as they passed our hiding place under the cart, and then I crawled out on my belly.

  “Run to the climbing tree,” I ordered Boyahoe. “Faster than you’ve ever run before.”

  We left Ala-Qush behind in a growing pool of blood, my husband’s frail body already being washed clean by the rain. We had only one chance to escape, and together we raced toward the oak tree that Boyahoe and I had climbed the first winter I’d spent in Olon Süme.

  The spirits of the dead must have clouded the eyes of the living, or perhaps it was only the thirst for blood that blinded them to us, for we had to backtrack often and I dared not sheath my sword as I ran. Once we rounded a corner and came upon an Onggud woman removing the decorated leather boots of a fallen man. The boot came off with a wet squelch and the woman gave us a gap-toothed grin. I ran as fleet-footed as a fox down the opposite alley, dragging Boyahoe behind me.

  Finally, the tree was before us with its spread of bare branches.

  I unclasped Boyahoe’s grip and pushed him in front of me. “Climb,” I said, whirling around, my sword ready against anyone who might spot us. “Up and then along that branch close to the wall.”

  “I can’t.” His body shook violently and he started to cry, great, heaving sobs that obscured his ability to speak. Voices followed us, echoing off the thick walls and making my heart thump like a war drum.

  “On my back, then.” With great misgivings, I tucked the tiger sword into my belt as he clambered onto my back, smelling of piss from where he’d wet himself earlier, and his slight frame quaking with tremors so strong I worried he might shake himself loose. Slowly, one hand over the other, I hauled us up the tree, the dried bark cutting into my palms, yet I felt no pain despite the sensation of warm blood slick on my hands.

  Once up the tree, I clung to the trunk and tested the branch with my foot, my heart falling as it creaked with the slightest pressure. It had gone rotten and was no longer strong enough to hold my weight, let alone that of myself and an eleven-year-old boy. This time of year there were no snowdrifts on the other side to jump into, nothing to soften our fall. Even the ravens had fled.

  The rain obscured my vision, but a man on the other side of the wall stepped from the shadows and into the circle of light created by the conflagration behind us. I swallowed a sob and waited for the arrow’s whistle that would end all this, but instead, a familiar voice called to us. “You don’t have much time, Boyahoe.” Jingue spread his arms open wide. “Leap like a flying squirrel, and I’ll catch you.”

  Jingue wouldn’t harm Boyahoe, regardless of whether he sided with the mob. “Do as your brother says,” I murmured to Boyahoe.

  The boy hesitated, then shimmied down my back. The branch groaned, but he leapt with the swift motion of a soaring hawk. Jingue caught him with a pained grunt and they both tumbled to the ground.

  My stepson safe, I now had two options. I could follow him over the wall or scramble down the tree and try to find some other route to safety.

  But there was no other route, and Jingue and I both knew it.

  “Come, Alaqai,” Jingue ordered from below. “They’ll be here any moment.”

  My grave awaited me if I stayed within these walls. And although I’d ushered others to their deaths, I had no wish to join their spirits in the sacred mountains. Not yet.

  I ran along the branch, then launched myself into the air and away from Olon Süme’s fiery inferno as the branch finally groaned and crashed to the ground. The impact when I landed on the far side stole my breath, and I expected a sword at my throat as I struggled for air, but it never came. Instead, I scrambled to my feet and drew my tiger sword, pointing it at Jingue.

  “What are you doing, Alaqai?” Jingue asked. His borrowed sword remained in his belt.

  “I’m protecting myself from those who seek revenge against me,” I said, echoing his earlier warning that I keep my sword close. “Boyahoe told me you joined your uncle to hunt me down.”

  He gave a strangled laugh. “After all this time, you still think I want you dead? Another dose of gu poison would have been far easier to arrange than torching all of Olon Süme and slaughtering my people in the streets.” His fists clenched and unclenched uselessly at his sides, and I kept the sword pointed at his throat. “I joined my uncle so I could save you. Aside from the tortoise gate, this is the only escape from the city, so I knew where you’d be.”

  “So your uncle let you go?”

  Jingue was silent for a moment. “Yes,” he finally said.

  “And your mother? Would you leave her behind?”

  I dared not mention his father, knowing that Ala-Qush still stared up at the night sky, his body bloodied and desecrated by his own people.

  “My mother’s family will protect her, but my lot has been cast with you, Alaqai, for better or worse.”

  I recognized the truth in his words. I owed Jingue my life and had destroyed his yet again, but there would be time later to wallow in guilt. “Then you’ll have to come with us to my father’s army,” I said, lowering my sword.

  “The Khan will bring his wrath upon the Onggud,” Jingue said quietly. “He’ll raze what’s left of the city and slaughter everyone taller than a wagon wheel to punish them for this revolt.”

  I had no desire to witness more death, yet there was nowhere else to go.

  “We have to go, and now.” I was already moving away from the city and its promise of death. “There’s no alternative.”

  Jingue glanced back at Olon Süme and all that
we were leaving behind. “The monastery is a day’s ride from here,” he said. “They’ll have horses.”

  “We’ll never make it there on foot.” At least not before we felt Onggud arrows in our backs.

  Jingue gestured toward the dark hillside. “No, but we have camels.”

  I’d forgotten the herds. There were no saddles, but fortunately the herders kept rope reins tied to the pointed wooden dowels strung through the animals’ noses. The beasts were a gift from the Earth Mother, but it took us so long to persuade the frightened animals to let us grab their reins that I almost screamed.

  “Boyahoe should ride with me,” I said once I was on the back of a particularly ill-kept camel, its hair matted with dirt. My stepson was too frightened and exhausted to control his own mount. Jingue nodded but hissed with pain as he handed him up. It was only then that I noticed his tattered sleeve and the angry wound hidden beneath the torn fabric, a detail that had escaped my terror-stricken mind in the dark.

  “What happened?” I asked, grabbing his wrist to inspect his forearm.

  “It’s nothing.” Jingue tried to pull his arm back, but I held tight.

  “It doesn’t look like nothing,” I said. The cut was long and straight, but not too deep. “This is a sword wound.”

  “A sword wound will heal as well as any other injury,” he said, yet his gaze wouldn’t meet mine. “But not if we get killed before we reach the monastery.”

  “Put pressure on it,” I said. “I can’t have you falling off your camel from loss of blood.”

  I let him go then, noting the dark stain of dried blood on his sword for the first time and wondering if I’d ever know what he’d faced while Boyahoe and I ran through Olon Süme’s streets. Now wasn’t the time to ask.

  We rode side by side all night, haunted by the ghosts of the dead and terrified of the living who might be pursuing us. I waited to speak until Boyahoe’s head lolled against my arm in sleep and the only sounds were the exertions of the camels. “Your father is dead.”

  Jingue’s jaw clenched in the watery moonlight and the vein in his temple pulsed like a tiny snake. “May his spirit rest well.”