The Tiger Queens Page 5

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  The days before Gurbesu’s marriage blew away like the seeds of a cotton flower in the breeze. Gurbesu and I slept under the stars each night, curling into each other’s warmth and talking long into the dark despite our heavy limbs and tired eyes. We both realized these were the final moments of girlhoods about to be set aside forever.

  The day of Gurbesu’s departure dawned fair and clear with a scattering of black storks in the sky, a good omen for the long future I’d glimpsed so many times in the oracle bones. She wore her mother’s red wedding headdress and laughed at the ribald jokes of married women as they washed her hands and feet and brushed her hair until it shone like a raven’s wing. She would leave today with her father and bridegroom, never to return to our clan. I smiled and forced my voice to be light, but Gurbesu pulled me to a corner while the mothers and old women reminisced about their own weddings. “This isn’t good-bye,” she said, her hands on my shoulders. “We’ll meet again.”

  All the words I might have said lodged in my throat. I pulled her into an embrace and breathed in her soul’s scent, the traces of tallow, smoke, and hope. I sniffed and dashed my sleeve across my eyes. “Don’t tell me you’ve decided to become a seer, too.”

  Gurbesu touched my cheek. “I feel it, deep in my heart. The Earth Mother wouldn’t bless me with such a sister only to steal her from me.”

  And so I watched Gurbesu leave to marry her Naiman warrior. Chuluun was a straight-backed soldier dressed in his finest felts, and he wore at his throat a silver talisman of the foreign god who had died on a wooden cross. I’d touched the wolf necklace I always wore and thought to ask him more about this god of his, but then Gurbesu had laughed at something he said and the words died on my tongue. One by one, the people I cared about left. It was only a matter of time before I was truly alone.

  I waited until they disappeared over the horizon, unable to speak from the emptiness that pressed on my chest and made it difficult to breathe. I couldn’t force myself to linger a moment longer with our clan’s drunken well-wishers. Instead, I ducked my head as if against a winter storm and strode toward the Black Mountain. I climbed until my legs burned, running to and from something at the same time.

  At the top of the rocky hill, I curled with my back against a white boulder, its stolen warmth from the day seeping into my flesh. A brown spider skittered across a stone at my toe and tiny white flowers nodded in the breeze.

  The tears wouldn’t stop once they started, a barrage of sobs and salt water that I was powerless to stop.

  I wallowed in my self-pity as the air chilled, letting my sadness consume me until the Earth Mother opened her mouth to swallow the sun.

  Wolves howled in the distance and an owl called overhead, searching for a meal of shrews. A branch snapped nearby and pebbles crunched underfoot. I scrambled to my feet, heart thudding in my ears as I waited for a wolf to emerge from the darkness. Instead, a man stepped into view.

  Jamuka.

  The breeze swirled toward me, bringing the familiar scent of pine needles, horse, and man.

  “I was beginning to wonder if you’d decided to pitch your ger up here,” he said, offering a rare smile.

  I rubbed my eyes. “I wanted to be alone.”

  He ignored the hint. “It seems to me you’re always alone,” he said, handing me a leather waterskin and a hide blanket, one that smelled of horses and the northern forests of our winter camps.

  I opened the skin, expecting the cool scent of water, but instead wrinkled my nose at the familiar tang of fermented mare’s milk. “No, thank you,” I said, but Jamuka pressed the flask into my hand and wrapped the blanket around my shoulders.

  “They’ll ward off the cold,” he said. “Unless you were thinking of returning to the celebration?”

  I winced and opened the waterskin, filling my mouth with the pungent and slightly cheesy tang of airag. It burned the back of my throat and I coughed, grimacing as Jamuka chuckled in the dark.

  “Not accustomed to airag?”

  “Today is an exception.” I took another sip, feeling its warmth spread through my limbs like a summer breeze. I offered it to Jamuka and he took a long draft.

  Jamuka sat and crossed his legs neatly in front of him, every movement precise, a testament to his white-boned ancestors. Next to him I felt like a mangy dog. One with fleas.

  We sat in silence for so long that I could hear his even breathing. I prodded a stone with my toe. “You’re wondering why I’m up here.”

  “It’s not my place to wonder.”

  I plucked several blades of grass and began plaiting the strands together. “Sometimes it’s difficult to imagine what might have been.”

  “This life is too short to dwell on what might have been. Focus instead on what still might be.”

  For one terrible moment, I wished he didn’t know of my prophecy, yet it didn’t matter. Although word of my curse had spread across the steppes, I’d sworn never to speak of it again.

  “Mine is a shadow I won’t soon escape.” I tried to sound nonchalant but failed.

  “Perhaps not.” Jamuka shook the flask, still partly full, and handed it back to me, his thumb brushing mine and lingering, and my heart became lodged in my throat. I could feel the heat of him, as if he carried some part of the sun. “Black shadows follow us all. It’s our decision whether we allow them to darken our days.”

  We finished the rest of the airag in silence, but I was loath to leave. I smelled his scent again. I breathed deeply this time, wanting to remember this moment, when the mare’s milk and the man next to me held the loneliness at bay.

  For one night I wanted someone else to be strong for me. Tomorrow I would bear it all again and return to shouldering my past and my future. But tonight I wished to forget, to live as Gurbesu had told me to.

  The warmth of the airag made me bold, and I dared graze the smooth skin of his cheek with my fingers. He flinched and for a moment I feared he’d turn away, but his eyes grew hot and he drew a shuddering breath. I knew what I wanted, and for once I would reach out and grasp it.

  I took his hands and brought them to my breasts under the blanket, trembled at the pressure of his palms through my deel, and felt the smoothness of his chest under his felt shirt. I wondered for a moment if it was true what they said, that women were made of the cool surface of the moon, and men the scorching heat of the sun.

  I waited for him to push me away. Instead, he pulled me to him, his lips on mine tasting faintly of mare’s milk. A warmth I’d never felt before rolled over my body, making me gasp with pleasure. I understood now why Gurbesu had met with boys under the pine tree.

  Jamuka’s lips caressed my neck and then his fingers traced the leather thong at my neck, lingering on the wolf tooth at my throat. He drew away, leaving me suddenly cold. “We can’t do this,” he said, heaving a ragged breath. “You don’t belong to me, Borte Ujin.”

  “I belong to no one.” I leaned into his hand as he tucked a stray hair behind my ear. “I can do as I wish.”

  How easily the lie fell from my lips.

  Jamuka crouched in the darkness so I couldn’t see his face. “That’s not true,” he said. “And you well know it.”

  My heart stalled for a moment, then pounded to the rhythm of a galloping horse. “You think highly of yourself,” I said, my voice sharp, “to rebuke me as if you were my father.”

  Jamuka looked at me with an expression of such sadness that I wanted to touch him again, to ease the heaviness in both our hearts. Yet his next words froze my hand at my side.

  “I know you can never belong to me because I am Temujin’s anda.” Jamuka’s tone was quiet, the same tone a man used when announcing the death of a revered elder.

  Temujin. A man I hadn’t seen in seven years.

  Anda. Blood brothers.

  Jamuka and Temujin had swallowed each other’s
blood, sworn sacred vows before the ancestors so they were closer than brothers of the same womb. The man before me had been Temujin’s only ally after his father’s death, and it was his support that had ensured the survival of Temujin and his family.

  I will cleave two men apart and ignite a great Blood War that will rain tears and destruction upon the steppes.

  Such was the curse I bore, the prophecy I refused to fulfill.

  I stifled a sob as I clambered to my feet, but the darkness chased me as I stormed down the hill, silently cursing Jamuka while ignoring his pleas at my back. I ran until I could breathe no more and collapsed onto the cold riverbank, pounding my fists and screaming my frustration into the Earth Mother, feeling her silent rebuke.

  Still Temujin sought to ruin me, even from afar.

  Chapter 4

  M y mother claimed the steppes had echoed with my laughter as a child, yet as a young woman of seventeen winters, I walked through this life with a heavy spirit, plucking the whispers of the ancestors from the winds and weaving the jagged cracks of bones into warnings and prophecies. The heaviness of the future and the weight of my past stooped my shoulders like an old woman’s, despite my soft cheeks and unlined skin.

  And then Jamuka had come.

  And I, being the fool I was, had allowed that hope to smolder to life again.

  There was no trace of Jamuka the morning after our kiss, and I soon learned he had departed camp under the cover of night. I couldn’t rail at him for deceiving me but had to content myself with gathering soot from his cold hearth to curse him. And Temujin.

  My shouts into the Eternal Blue Sky startled a flock of brown sparrows before I turned the curses on myself. They were black words I could never undo, just as I could never take back my moment of weakness in Jamuka’s arms. I swore to the Earth Mother that I would never waver again, that I would bear my necessary solitude like a sturdy oak. I sanctified the promise by adding drops of blood from my palm to the tears already splashing on the ground. It would be far better to water the earth with my own blood than with that of countless men.

  The short golden season burned itself out and I spent the long months of winter in dark silence. It was a bleak season full of angry winds that cut through the walls of our ger and threatened to crack the skin of our sheep-stomach churn as I pounded our meager supply of winter milk into butter. The wolves grew daring as temperatures plummeted, and men often had to chase the beasts away from our ever-scrawnier herds in a perpetual struggle for life over death. That terrible winter also stole my mother’s vision. Her eyes flickered and the light finally went out on the solstice. Since then her tongue had become sharper and her temper flared brighter, but I tried to keep my patience as the darkness of eternal winter surrounded her.

  Finally, a false spring warmed the air, teasing the snow into melting so the fields filled with slush and, beneath that, rich, beautiful mud and the first tufts of new grass for our grazing herds. It was a hint and a promise of better days to come.

  Yet some promises are easily broken.

  The mountains on either side of our camp were still asleep under thick white blankets of snow on the morning I slung a dented iron milk pail over my shoulder, my father snoring beneath a mound of hides. A constant chill had settled in his bones, so deep that the earth below our tent had trembled with his shivering the night before. I dropped a feather-light kiss onto his brow, and another on my mother’s forehead, wishing I could smooth away the frown lines etched so deep around her lips that not even sleep could erase them.

  I stepped outside into the bracing air, heading toward the paddock. I’d never taken much interest in my father’s herd before, yet over the winter I’d studied all the animals, learning which ewes had the thickest wool and what horses had the softest hooves. My father had no sons or brothers to take me in when my parents passed to the sacred mountains, but I was determined not to meet the same fate as Temujin’s family, cast out for my worthlessness. I would provide my own milk and meat, and my gift of sight might prove valuable to my clan. Already girls came to me eager for their futures, and one of the old women had sought me out to read the winds on the equinox to determine the best day to move to our spring camp.

  I would not be cast aside again, not while I still drew breath in my lungs.

  I neared the paddock and set down the pail, blowing onto my hands to warm them and stomping my feet. My father’s white mare whinnied and threw back her head, as if to warn me of an encroaching storm or nearby beast. She was too late, for the danger had already come.

  Across the field, a straw yellow mare with a hairless tail snorted, steam curling from her nose in the chill morning air. On her back sat a man with broad shoulders and two black braids hanging down his back. I’d have recognized his gray eyes anywhere, stolen from some brooding wolf.

  After seven years, Temujin had finally returned.

  My blood turned to water and I dropped the milking pail to clutch the rough gate of the paddock, relishing the bite of the splinters as they burrowed deep into my skin. I knew then the feeling of a deer being stalked by a predator and wished that I could flee from what was to come. At the same time I wanted to unleash the pain and fury of the last seven years, to make Temujin suffer as I’d suffered. Instead, I stiffened my spine and hardened my face into stone, hoping he couldn’t hear the drumming of my traitorous heart.

  And he wasn’t alone. Two men flanked him, one with a penetrating stare above his frothy white beard and a ragged squirrel-skin hat framing a weather-beaten face. The other I knew too well, the burning dark eyes set over aristocratic features as he sat stiff-backed in a polished leather saddle decorated with gold coins.

  I shuddered and pulled my cloak tighter against Jamuka’s gaze, even as my heart thudded in my chest. I’d imagined this scene many times, yet the words I’d rehearsed fled, leaving my tongue empty.

  Temujin swung his leg over the horse in one fluid motion, landing with a thud that shook the ground. He was built like a battering ram meant to conquer some far-off city. I stood rooted in place, powerless to stop my future as it strode toward me.

  “Borte Ujin.” He reached out his hands, but when I didn’t move they fell empty at his sides. Temujin was a hairsbreadth shorter than me, so I had to look down my nose to meet him eye to eye. “It took longer than I planned, but I’ve finally returned to you.”

  My mind felt frozen in the grip of a winter storm, unable to comprehend this man before me. “When you left you promised my father that you’d return by the next full moon. It seems time got away from you.”

  “Life sent me some unexpected surprises along the way.” He rubbed his wrists, and for a moment I imagined them circled by the rough wood of the cangue. “Still, I promised I’d return.” He glanced over his shoulder at Jamuka. “And I always keep my promises.”

  I didn’t answer. A fragment of my soul cried out with joy that I hadn’t been forgotten, yet another piece of me wanted to hurl a handful of horse dung in Temujin’s face. Instead, I drew myself as tall as I could while I gathered my thoughts, refusing to betray a glimmer of emotion before these men.

  The silver-bearded stranger inclined his head toward me, his black felts rustling like the wings of a vulture and rattling the beads sewn with jagged stitches onto his deel, bits of ivory earned by a shaman for successful visions. It was only then that I realized he was crippled, his right leg withered and bent at a painful angle.

  Temujin caught my recoil at the man’s impure energy. “Teb Tengeri has been with me since I left the Tayichigud,” Temujin said. “It was he who decreed this was a favorable time to ride to you. Much has happened since we last spoke.”

  I did my best to ignore Teb Tengeri’s probing stare and recalled the children who made a promise under the stars so many years ago, wondering now if anything of that naïve girl still remained.

  “I heard of your brother,” I told Temujin, watching his expressio
n carefully. “I was sorry to hear of his passage to the sacred mountains.”

  His passage at Temujin’s hands. I stared at those hands now, stained with dark shadows like smears of blood. A flicker of emotion lit his eyes, but it passed too quickly to name.

  “Begter was more thief than my half brother,” he said. “I could manage his thieving when he stole food from me, but when he stole meat that was meant to feed my family . . .” His voice trailed off and his eyes grew distant; then he blinked and looked at me. “My brother, Khasar, and I killed him to save my mother and younger sister. I became a murderer to save my blood family.”

  The way Temujin tilted his chin told me he’d do it all again if he had to. My first reaction was revulsion that he had shed his brother’s unclean blood and touched death, but when I imagined watching my own mother die of starvation, her eyes growing sunken as her flesh melted away . . .

  “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling the inadequacy of the words, but Temujin only inclined his head toward Jamuka and the crippled man still inspecting me from atop his silver-white gelding.

  “You already know my anda, Jamuka,” he said. “We’ve been blood brothers almost since I could ride a horse.”

  “Yes,” I said, not meeting Jamuka’s eyes. “I believe you sent him to spy on me.”

  Temujin had the decency to look flustered. “Not to spy, only to confirm what Teb Tengeri had predicted.”

  I scowled. There was room for only one seer in each clan, and I would not relinquish my gift, certainly not in exchange for becoming Temujin’s wife.

  “And what did Teb Tengeri predict?” I asked, folding my arms across my chest. A nod from Temujin, and his seer and Jamuka backed away, out of earshot. There was no doubt who led this band of men, although Temujin seemed an unlikely choice to lead a white-bone and an accomplished shaman.