The Tiger Queens (11 page)

I glared at him. “And what is that?”

“Hit me. Or kick me. As hard as you can. And as many times as you want.”

My jaw fell to my chest. “You’ve gone mad.”

He shrugged, but the effort seemed to cost him. “You’re angry. When a man is angry, he hits things. Or kills someone. As you’re stronger than most men I know, I suspect that the same could be said for you. I’ve no wish to die, but it can’t hurt to let you beat me.”

I scoffed, but after a moment’s hesitation I let my fists fly and kicked him as hard as I could manage, releasing all the pent-up rage of the past months, growing ever angrier when I realized my full force wasn’t affecting my husband. At first he stood as still as a boulder, but he changed tactics once my nails came away with skin. “I made a terrible mistake, Borte Ujin, one I’ll never make again,” he murmured into my ear even as I jerked away and he struggled to subdue me. “I’ll protect you to my dying breath, but you have to let me.”

I finally allowed the warmth of his body and the rhythm of his breath to calm me. Only then did I realize his chest was damp.

I drew back, half-blind in the dark. His shirt smelled not of the salt of sweat, but of a familiar metallic tang, there above the smoke and horseflesh.

Blood. Not the cold blood of the dead Merkid where they fell with the night, but something fresher.

“What is this?” I drew back, holding out my hands and feeling the film of death upon them. “Whose blood have you spilled?”

As if another death mattered after so much slaughter. Yet something—perhaps my sight or a persistent spirit—whispered that it did.

The silence held so long that I feared he wouldn’t answer, but he finally touched my outstretched hands, mingling life and death. He sighed then, and I knew what his answer would be even before he held out the wolf-tooth necklace.

“Chilger will never hurt you again.”

My heart soared as if broken free of invisible chains, knowing I would never again have to fear Chilger’s intrusion in the night. My fingers curled around the familiar token, now blackened with the blood of the man who
had sought to break me. Temujin had carried out my revenge on Chilger, had taken the stain of cold-blooded murder on his soul for the second time since his brother’s death. But then I remembered the child I carried and knew that neither Temujin nor I would ever be free from Chilger even as I recalled Mother Khogaghchin’s words.

It’s not important whose colt grows in your belly. Only the womb that houses him matters.

Yet it did matter. My fingers wove between Temujin’s—just as they’d done moments ago with Jamuka’s—as if I might weave his soul into mine so easily. “I’m glad he’s dead.”

“I killed him with my bare hands,” he said. “And I was glad to do it.”

“Good.” I closed my mind against the image of Temujin’s fists pounding into Chilger. “But I’ll never be free of him.”

“As time goes on—”

“No.” I shook my head. “I’m pregnant.”

The tent grew cold, as if a north wind had blown open the tent flap. “I see,” Temujin said, his voice thick with emotion. “And the child is his?”

I knew the answer, but Khogaghchin’s warning bound my tongue. Alan the Fair, mother of all the Mongols, had once been pressed to name the father of her sons despite her lack of husband. She’d claimed that the light of the sun had planted the seeds of life in her womb, but I had no such excuse. Still, I’d been through too much to be turned away by my husband, or merely tolerated out of obligation. So instead I cloaked the truth in a lie.

“I don’t know.”

I strained to see Temujin’s face, waiting for the words that would cast me out to die a miserable death alone on the steppe. Instead, he peeled off his bloodstained shirt to reveal the thick bands of muscles on his chest and arms. “Then I shall greet the babe as my own.”

I stared in shock at this man I’d married. “You wouldn’t cast me out?”

“Would I throw out the mother of my child?” He laughed, but the sound was flat. “I see I must work harder to earn your higher opinion.”

I had no answer for that, so he sighed and patted the blanket beside him. “Come lie beside me, wife, and keep me warm. Killing and raiding are hard work.”

I did as he asked, feeling the hardness of his legs through his felt breeches and my filthy
deel
. I was glad when he didn’t ask for more, for I knew it would be a long time before I could respond to my husband’s touch. He fell immediately into an exhausted sleep so that I greeted the new dawn alone, Temujin’s promise and Jamuka’s declaration of love echoing in my ears.

I was a fool then to believe we might enjoy peace after all that had happened, and an even bigger fool to think we’d witnessed the fulfillment of my prophecy.

For what we would soon face would make all we’d survived pale in comparison.

O
ng Khan’s troops returned to their leader, but Temujin and Jamuka rejoined their clans at the outskirts of the Black Forest, near the holy site dedicated to the Earth Mother. Every spindly birch was looped with blue felt sashes—each representing a prayer to the sacred spirit—and the ground was pale from the profusion of milk offerings poured into the earth. I was loath to leave the Bugura Steppe and the woods I believed still hid Toregene and Sochigel. The girl with the mismatched eyes had disappeared as if she’d never existed, and although I’d ordered the piles of dead Merkid to be searched, we’d found no trace of her body or her faintest footprint within the forest. It would be a miracle for so young a girl to survive on the steppes alone, but I poured an offering of milk from a mare who’d just delivered her first colt into the earth each morning in the hopes that the Eternal Blue Sky might protect her.

It wasn’t only Toregene’s safety I worried for, but our own as we approached our new home. The position of our camp troubled me, situated as it was on the borderlands of the fearsome Tatars, a mountain clan renowned for their skill in battle. My dreams were still plagued with the scent of scorched wool and blood. Always blood.

Bone weary after many days in the saddle, I had scarcely let the tent flap fall behind me when Hoelun entered unannounced, bearing a pile of
heavy blue felts and a familiar polished birch-bark pole knotted with horsehair.

“No.” I sank to my knees, the single word drawn into a moan. I wondered then how many burdens my shoulders would be forced to bear.

“Your father journeyed to the sacred mountains first,” Hoelun said, reverently placing the package with its lifetime of memories on the ground before me. The black strands of hair from my father’s Spirit Banner fanned over the felts of my mother’s tent. “Your mother followed him shortly after. The messenger said that death claimed them while they slept, that your entire clan sang them to the sacred mountains.”

Just as my mother had foretold. I wished now for her wisdom but realized I’d already broken my promise to her by forsaking my own gift of sight.

“Did they know—” I took a deep breath as Temujin entered our
ger
, his expression telling me he’d just received the news. “About me?”

Hoelun shook her head. “There wasn’t time to inform them of the Merkid raid.”

My mother had once prophesied that Temujin would fail me, but she and my father had died believing I was safe. I was grateful for that.

I blinked hard, willing Hoelun to leave. I cared little for my mother-by-marriage after her willingness to sacrifice me during the raid. Blood meant everything to the Borijin clan, even excusing Temujin’s murder of his half brother, Begter, yet my blood would always belong to the Unigirad, a certain deficit in Hoelun’s eyes. I turned instead to Temujin. “I’ll raise my mother’s tent today,” I said, my voice breaking.

Mongol men were bred to be warriors, as restless as the wild horses they so loved, but we women ruled the hearths. It was tradition to raise the
ger
of a Mongol woman, the home of her heart, so that her soul might live on after her death. My husband nodded and clasped my shoulders, his presence as strong as the mountains he so loved. “Of course you will.”

And so it was that instead of feasting on the day of my homecoming, I smudged my forehead with cold ashes and walked alone onto the steppes to raise the tent poles of my mother’s
ger
. Behind me, our tents were white specks on the horizon, guarded by a man on horseback. I recognized
Temujin atop his new yellow horse, taken as spoils during the Merkid raid, but it took me a moment to realize that my husband wasn’t guarding the camp.

He was guarding me.

I watched as another rider joined him, tall and slender atop his saddle.

Jamuka.

I turned my back on the men as I erected my mother’s tent and unrolled her felts, breathing in the scent of her cook fires and herbs, trapped over the years in the precious wool. My father’s spirit would reside in the horsehair banner outside our
ger
, and I would visit my mother’s spirit within these thick felt walls.

I could only pray they would both watch over me.

*   *   *

The days piled up on one another, their weight turning the season to that of falling leaves, and the days grew shorter even while the whispers over my belly grew louder. My claiming by Chilger had become common knowledge—the mischief of the Merkid slaves we’d claimed—and although my skin had grown thick after the seven years of gossip when Temujin first abandoned me, sometimes it was near impossible to remain indifferent to the smothered giggles and blatant stares.

The tents of Jamuka’s clan remained pitched alongside ours in the green expanse of the Khorkonagh Valley, both groups flush with their victory over the Merkid. One morning as I dressed, I learned the real reason why Jamuka’s clan lingered.

“Jamuka and I will take our final vows today,” Temujin said. My back was to him as I slipped my favorite brown wool caftan over my head, gladly reclaimed after my ordeal with the Merkid. The material was worn to the softness of wild columbine petals and already snug around my middle. It was difficult to imagine that I’d soon be a mother, that I’d face the ordeal of childbirth and then greet a child whose face might always remind me of everything I so desperately wished to forget.

I exhaled slowly, letting my fears fly loose into the air. I smoothed the wool over the gentle swell of my belly. “What vows?” I asked.

“The
anda
vows.” Temujin sat cross-legged near the fire, rubbing sheep fat into his bowstrings.

I fumbled with my belt, my fingers suddenly loose. “Haven’t you already taken vows?”

“Years ago.” Temujin chuckled. “The first time we exchanged children’s toys with our blood. Jamuka gave me a knucklebone carved from a roebuck and I gave him one of brass.” He set down the bow. “But we’re no longer children. Today we exchange much weightier gifts, and one day Jamuka will help me become a khan.”

“Did Teb Tengeri tell you that?”

“You don’t care for my shaman.” Temujin smiled indulgently despite the venom in my voice. “Why?”

“He’s no true seer.” The words were as hollow as my heart. My husband was flanked by one false shaman and another who’d forsworn her sight. I’d begun to dream again when my feet had touched this holy ground, often visions of Toregene dancing with three young girls, yet the bones and divination flames repulsed me, reminding me of the scent of death and burning flesh after the Merkid raid.

“Teb Tengeri predicted your return to me.”

“A lucky guess.”

“Perhaps your visions will return in time. As you heal.” He picked up the bow again and balanced it on the open palm of one hand, then set it aside. “I don’t deserve you, Borte Ujin, but someday you’ll be greater than a seer. One day I’ll be a khan—maybe even the Great Khan—and then I’ll make you khatun.”

Khatun.
Queen.

I pushed away the idea, as likely as birds in the sky turning into stars.

“Khatun of a clan of outcasts and misfits?” I scoffed. “That’s hardly a title.”

“We all start somewhere.” Temujin stretched out his legs in front of him. “And Jamuka is hardly an outcast.”

I stiffened, then forced myself to relax. “Jamuka is not part of your clan.”

“No.” Temujin stood and cleared his throat. “As my
anda
, he’s closer
than the family of my birth. And he’s here to lend my clan some semblance of dignity.”

As was I.

And I carried none of Temujin’s blood, and the child of another man in my womb. I wondered then whom Temujin would favor if pressed: his blood family, his
anda
, or his only wife.

“So Jamuka comes when you call him?” I asked. The white-bones were not faithful dogs. If Jamuka lingered, it was because he wished to.

“He answered my call to rescue you.”

I turned my face and struggled to keep my voice light. “What will you trade with your pledges now that you’re grown men?”

“This.”

A shimmer of summer sunshine flowed over his hands. A belt of pounded gold with a design of intertwined arrows and a fringe of black leather tassels.

“Toghtoga’s belt,” I said.

Temujin nodded. “And his warhorse, the yellow mare with black mane and tail.”

They were rich treasures indeed, yet Jamuka was well accustomed to such luxuries.

“Can you afford to give so much?” I asked.

Temujin smiled. “I have more than enough riches now that we’ve vanquished the Merkid. A horse and a belt are mere tokens of my brotherhood with Jamuka. Our shared wealth proclaims our alliance to the world and our plans for ruling the steppes one day.”

I knew Jamuka’s motivation for fighting the Merkid—uncomfortable as it made me—yet I was stunned to realize that my kidnapping had provided the perfect excuse for my husband to attack the wealthy clan. Temujin was richer than he or his father had ever been. The fact that my dignity and honor had been traded for gold and horses made me feel more degraded than I had before the fire with Chilger.

Temujin hesitated to speak, as if he sensed the change in my mood. “You’ve overcome so much, Borte, yet I have one more thing to ask of you.”

My husband had no right to ask favors from me, so my voice was laced with frost when I answered. “And what might that be?”

“Will you officiate the
anda
ceremony?”

I shook my head. “I can’t, not without my gift of sight.”

His eyes shuttered, as if I’d denied him something precious, and he shrugged. “As you wish. Yet it would mean much to both Jamuka and me if you’d reconsider.”

It was precisely because it meant much that I would never reconsider.

Both camps joined together that afternoon, a sea of brown faces as plentiful as the steppe grasses. The sky was smudged as gray as charcoal, but we women sweated through the day, butchering a horse and two goats and lugging leather buckets of fermented mare’s milk to the open expanse of green chosen for the feast. A single ancient pine tree grew on the plain filled with stunted birch, its massive trunk gnarled like the hand of a lonely old woman.

This was the Great Branching Tree of the Mongol, the most sacred of the Earth Mother’s holy sites.

When the time came for the bloodletting, Temujin and Jamuka faced each other at the base of the tree, their clans forming a circle of flesh and blood to further bind our people together. Temujin wrapped Toghtoga’s golden belt around Jamuka’s waist, then raised his arms as Jamuka wound another stolen Merkid belt around my husband’s middle. These were no small gifts, but precious treasures that would proclaim the great alliance of these conquerors to every clan on the steppes and persuade the assorted khans to seek further alliances with my husband and his
anda
. And yet a tiny voice in the back of my mind wondered if perhaps the other leaders might view Temujin and Jamuka together as a formidable threat now.

And whether the blood brothers might someday see each other as threats to their own power.

A raindrop spattered on my nose, but the sun broke through the dark clouds then, illuminating identical swirls of wind embossed on the belts, as if the very spirits blessed this moment.

The men exchanged horses, the yellow mare for a tan warhorse with a
diamond on its forehead. The blood brothers mounted their new prizes and ambled around the tree, pausing at each direction to honor the water of the north and air of the east, the earth of the west and fire of the south. Once finished, Temujin grinned at his
anda
, but Jamuka’s taciturn expression remained unchanged, as if his thoughts had flown from this holy ground.

Then the men dismounted and their knives flashed with the Golden Light of the Sun. They slashed the soft flesh of their wrists and ribbons of blood unfurled toward the ground. Temujin tipped his arm so Jamuka could take some on his tongue; then Jamuka did the same.

“I pledge my eternal friendship to my
anda
, Jamuka,” my husband said, his teeth tinged with scarlet. “I shall love this man forever, as if we had shared the same womb.”

“And I pledge my eternal friendship to my
anda
, Temujin,” Jamuka said. “I swear to keep no secrets from my blood brother until the day the last of us draws our final breaths.”

I bristled when Teb Tengeri stepped between the men, wrapping a white sash around their wrists, a responsibility that might have been mine. Blood dripped down unheeded now, staining the sash with crimson. “When two men become
andas
they become one,” he said. “They will never desert each other and will always defend the tents of their brother. Thus shall it always be between Jamuka and Temujin.”

The two clans erupted into cheers and everyone flocked to the blood brothers, one short and wiry like an underfed wolf and the other as long and graceful as a dragon. I studied Jamuka’s features from under my lashes, yet his faraway expression from earlier had fled and he embraced Temujin now, clapping my husband on the back as if they were brothers born of the same womb. The people quickly took to dancing around the Great Branching Tree, men and women holding hands and laughing while the men’s deep singing rose into the Eternal Blue Sky. Our people danced until they’d beaten down a ditch as deep as their ankles and raised the dust to their knees.

“Borte!” Temujin motioned me to where he sat with Jamuka. “Join your husband and his brother.”

To me, Jamuka raised his cup of mare’s milk, still full. There was no denying his beauty, as if his face had been chiseled by the hands of spirits. My husband turned to answer some question, and I escaped toward the rough-hewn table laid out with platters of boiled horsemeat, the grease already congealing on top.

I almost dropped a plate of salted sheep fat when Jamuka touched my elbow. “You are unhappy,” he said. “I can see it in your face.”

I expected everyone to be staring at us, but the clans continued with their revelry, oblivious to the truth Jamuka spoke. Hoelun’s gaze lingered on us for a moment but flicked away when my eyes caught hers.