Gates of Heaven

Chapter ThreeLLESHO watched, taking in every step in the process of electing a new khan. For something so important-the khan would lead the clans, including their army of ten thousand-the method proved disappointingly simple. As the ceremony progressed, however, he found himself drawn into the gravity of even the simplest act. Bolghai was summoned and came at the call. He wore his hair in a mass of plaits from each of which hung a talisman of metal or bead or bone. His robes, cut to show their many layers, still bore the bloodstains of the sheep he had slaughtered for the khan's pyre, but he had cleaned the pelts of the stoats that hung by their sharp little teeth in a collar around his neck. He did not walk with a stately pace to the dais as a Thebin priest might do, but scampered and pranced like his totem animal, setting the pelts to kicking at his shoulders in a little stoat-dance. His clothing jingled at each step with bells and amulets that swayed on silver chains sewn onto them. The first time Llesho met him, the shaman had shocked and repelled him. But Bolghai had helped him to find his own totem, the roebuck, and had taught him to control his gift of dreams for his own ends. Sometimes at least. Now, he watched with interest as the shaman hitched and hopped to the dais in the persona of his totem stoat. Bolghai carried a flat skin drum and the thighbone of a roebuck that he used as a stick. He wouldn't be creating totemic magic, so he wouldn't use his fiddle. Rather, he'd need the drum to set the pace of the coming ceremony. When he had reached the fur-heaped royal dais, the shaman grasped the thighbone in the middle and tapped with first one end, then the other, in a rapid tattoo on his drum. "When is a prince not a prince?" he demanded, confronting Tayy with more beating of his drum while he waited for the answer to his riddle. If there was no khan, there could be no prince. Tayyichiut bowed his head, accepting the judgment dictated by custom and the sacred nature of the riddle. Allowing himself to be ritually driven off by the beating drum, he left the dais to sit with Bortu and Mergen of his clan. "When is a wife not a wife?" the shaman asked next, subtly changing the rhythm of his drumming. It wasn't what she expected. Llesho, watching Tayy carefully, saw the surprise in his eyes as well. Bortu's features, however, relaxed in grim satisfaction. Her son was dead, but she was no fool. "I am no barren tree, but bear the khan's heir in my belly." she clutched a hand below her unbelted waist and spat at the shaman's feet. So, the riddle had set her aside not as the widow, but as one who had not truly blessed the marriage bed of the khan. Llesho figured that much. Sort of. And she objected. He wondered not for the first time what, if anything, the Lady Chaiujin did carry in her womb. Bolghai accepted her correction, more or less, with the smallest of stoatlike gestures and adjusted his drumming accordingly. "When is a queen not a queen?" he amended. A wife remained a wife even at the death of her husband, but with no khan there could be no queen. Lady Chaiujin bowed, as Tayyichiut had done, but with less grace, and let herself be driven from the dais. She took a step toward her husband's clan, but Bortu turned her back, and the Lady Chaiujin hesitated, finally taking up a position alone, though closest to the dais. No one challenged her for the assumption of that right, but no one came to support her either. While few might guess her part in the death of their khan, she had made no friends among them. Alone on the dais, Bolghai let the thighbone hang by a cord that tied it to the drum. Holding up his open hand, he asked another riddle: "Apart they are weak, together they smite their enemies." As answer, he closed his hand tight and raised it high over his head: the separate fingers were each fragile, but made into a fist, they made a poBenjamin, Curt is the author of 'Gates of Heaven' with ISBN 9780756401566 and ISBN 0756401569.