Lords of Grass and Thunder

by Curt Benjamin

  “Tell her to stay—discreetly,” he muttered, though he might as well be wearing the stag’s horns for all the discretion he was exercising with his eyes or the flush of his skin.

  Jochi was Altan’s father. The son—perhaps the father as well, though Mergen doubted it—had slept with Sechule at one time or another. He bowed without comment, however, and disappeared into the crowd, making his roundabout way to the woman the khan would take to his bed that night.

  A “Tsk” from beneath the nearby covers told him all that he had to know about his mother’s opinion of his choice. Prince Tayy, at least, seemed really to be sleeping but Bekter flicked him a quick, fretful glance, expecting trouble. He half expected it himself, though Sechule had never given him anything he couldn’t handle, and then only to further the cause of his children. Mergen looked forward to the day when he could invite his sons to call him father. Soon. When Prince Tayyichiut was khan.

  But Jochi had found his way to Sechule’s side, resting his hand on her arm while he put his lips to her ear. Mergen forgot what he was thinking. In that distant way that happened sometimes in moments of intense desire, he felt the smooth, warm skin under Jochi’s hand, felt his own mouth so close to her skin and her hair that the moisture rising off her heated body left a fine dew clinging to his lips.

  “I’m tired now,” he said, “and the day is long tomorrow,” a signal for his court to find their own beds. As he expected, Qutula didn’t leave the prince’s side. Flustered, Bekter gave him a proper bow, but Mergen only dimly noticed the distress that crossed his face.

  This is a mistake. Mergen knew it as well as Jochi or his mother or his sons. Or the rest of his court for that matter. In affairs that touched the heart and the ulus he would agree. But Sechule’s attraction fell rather farther south than that, taking the body as a map of the world. Which it was, right now. All the world, and the capital of the ulus was nowhere near his heart, or his head. He was usually better at resisting the pull of her sensuality. But when the light glistened on her lips just so, and her eyes grew wet and her shoulders drooped, limp with her own passions, he found himself leaping onto the pyre over and over again.

  The last of the crowd were leaving with backward nervous glances, especially those who had heard her curse him for his neglect in the past. His advisers knew her desires well enough—not just the legitimacy of her sons, which he could give her, eventually, but her own place on the dais as his wife, his khaness. A political disaster he’d well avoided since becoming khan. There’d been other women, of course. Simpler, less demanding women. Even in death, however, they left their own complications behind. He’d have to do something about Eluneke soon. In the meantime, better the traps he understood than a stranger whose baggage cart he just hadn’t seen yet.

  The tent was almost empty now. Jochi stood with his back to the departing court, Sechule held in front of him. With an arm across her waist, he blocked her from the view of the curious. Disapproval carved a frown line between his brows, but Mergen didn’t notice. His eyes were filled with Sechule, who was as beautiful as she had been the night they’d first run off to the river together. He’d have liked to do the same again, pretending to that youthful freedom from responsibility, but that wasn’t possible anymore. Sometimes he wondered if she’d cast a spell on him.

  Most of the time he knew what drew him back to her in spite of good sense telling him to send her away: warm flesh that, no matter their quarrels in daylight, had always held him safe in the night. So he’d settle for the furs of his own bed, more forgiving of aging bones than the riverbank anyway. It didn’t matter, now. Nothing stood between him and the only woman for whom he had ever felt such need.

  Throughout the ger-tent of the khan servants had dimmed the lights. All lay in darkness and shadow except for one lamp on a near chest, and the glow of the firebox. In that pale light Sechule took her leave of Jochi and walked toward the khan, unclasping her coat with each step until she let it slide from her shoulders behind her. It wasn’t her best. She hadn’t intended to seduce him, which made him feel lighter, almost happy to invite her to join him in the blankets.

  She smiled at him, her fingers working the fastenings of the elaborate headdress that spilled her hair like waterfalls at each side of her head. Jewels lay like a trail of crumbs behind her, freeing her hair to fall loosely to her waist as she stepped up onto the dais. When she was sure she had his full attention, she drew her dress over her head, heedless of the way her shift rode up over her naked thighs and hips. Then the dress dropped in a heap. In nothing but her shift, she knelt before him.

  Somehow, modesty seemed meaningless with Sechule. Her hair drifted across his body like an army of delicate fingers; he wanted to feel it on his skin and worked at the bindings of his own clothes. She helped, freeing him with her hands while complicating his efforts with her sensual attacks on his face, his throat, each part of him as it was revealed from his discarded clothing. Finally, there it was, her hair, his skin.

  He couldn’t hold in the moan that built in his throat and he plunged his hands into the depths of the rich dark folds of her hair, fanned the long strands until they covered him like sable, all soft fur and prickles on his skin.

  “Mergen,” she said, and covered his mouth with her kisses. “Beloved khan. Love me, love me.”

  “Sechule.” He was a wise man, and so knew himself for a fool, but he let himself believe her words meant what he wanted them to mean, that her body desired the same things he felt when she touched him, when her body slid under his and the power of their senses built between them. Because he couldn’t give her what she wanted, he pretended not to know. This was enough. It had to be enough. It was all he had to give her. The rest belonged to Prince Tayyichiut, the son of his dead brother, and nothing could stand between the khan and that sacred trust. Not even Mergen the man and his lust for this one woman.

  When the emerald green bamboo snake who was sometimes the Lady Chaiujin, and sometimes Qutula’s lover, woke again, Bekter had returned and lay snoring in his bed. Slithering under his covers, she curled around him in her snake form and turned back into a woman.

  “Bekter. Beautiful, kind, wise Bekter—” she made the words a breathy whisper in his ear, a promise of pleasures to follow if he would just open his eyes.

  He snorted, batted aimlessly at his nose, and rolled over. “Beloved, soft, sweet Bekter—” A little louder now, with a stroke of fingernails at the back of his neck.

  He flopped on his stomach, burped long and loudly, sighing contentedly in his sleep when he was done. A bit of drool hung from his lip. Stretched. Broke away and fell into the furs he slept on. Her fingertips dug in, left little half-moons of blood between his shoulder blades, under a braid of hair slicked flat with sheep fat.

  The false Lady Chaiujin had just decided that she had tried hard enough to seduce the insensate pile of blubber. Then he snorted, twitched like a shaman with a vision, and lifted his sleep-wrinkled face with a vague look in his eyes. “Huh! What?” he half rolled, and stared at her as if he had never seen a naked woman before. Which, perhaps, he hadn’t.

  “Who are you? I think you have the wrong bed. Qutula sleeps over there.”

  He pulled the blankets up as if to cover his nakedness, although he wore little less in bed than he normally walked around in.

  “What makes you think I came for Qutula? Don’t say you haven’t had your own admirers before now.”

  “Strange women show up in ’Tula’s bed, not mine.” He took her hands away from the laces on his pants, then didn’t know what to do with them. “Nothing personal, you understand, but I prefer to make the acquaintance of the women I sleep with before the fact, not after. In the daylight.”

  Or he imagined that’s how it would go, she thought. He experimented with releasing her hands, grabbed them again when she set them back to work on his laces.

  “Don’t do that!”

  He wasn’t pretty like his brother, and his spirit of adventure seemed sorely l
acking for a warrior. But his indignant resistance made her forays at his clothing more of a game than a seduction. “Why not?” she baited him. “Afraid of a defenseless woman?”

  “Anyone who grew up with my mother would be a fool not to be,” he muttered, then scowled, unwilling to have thoughts of his mother intrude on a moment already more disturbing than he liked. “For all I know you could be a demon sent to snatch me away to the underworld.”

  If only that were possible, she’d set her sights a bit higher, or better yet go home alone, finally and at last. Only they’d closed the crack between the worlds with their wars. She was stuck here. Qutula had been much easier to seduce.

  Bekter wasn’t just playing hard to get, though. While they’d been talking, his hand had inched slowly toward his sword. Whatever he thought her, he’d decided she was dangerous. He had no reputation for courage or brains for anything but his poems. She wondered, though. If he thought her just another camp follower, then he had neither and was lacking drives that made a virile man as well. If he really had guessed what she was, however, then he had more of both brains and courage than she would have credited even to Qutula. Interesting. But his fingers had reached the hilt of his sword. It was time to go.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and kissed him lightly on the nose. “You would have enjoyed it.”

  Clothing was simple. She wished herself covered and she was, leaving him bemused with the memory of their encounter growing less clear with each step she took away from his bed. When she reached the door, he would forget she had ever been there. Which was, she thought, a shame.

  If Qutula couldn’t bring his brother in line, he didn’t deserve her or the khanate. Tonight her lover stayed with the prince, setting him on the short and painful road to his funeral pyre. But tomorrow, she would find him where he slept and remind him of the rewards awaiting him at the end of his own road. And soon she would make him an heir. She didn’t know what the child would be—snake or human or demon—or which of her various natures drove her to create this strange new life. But on her way to the door she grabbed Sechule’s silk coat that she had lately rested upon. It would make a fine soft lining for the nest she must soon make in earnest. Not yet, though. Her egg was not quite ready yet.

  Mergen lay with his head on her breast, so familiar a gesture that Sechule’s heart ached. Idly, she trailed her fingers over his hair, tracing the pattern of his braid. Can it be he loves me after all? she thought. He has taken me to his own bed, in front of his whole court. Surely the favor he showed her in his palace sent a message to all his chieftains. He waited only to strengthen his position among the clans before acknowledging his own sons as heirs. Perhaps if they waited a little longer, it would all work out the way she had planned all those years ago, when she bore two sons to the khan’s younger brother.

  Morning was coming. As she remembered from his visits to her tent, Mergen woke before the birds or the horses, before even the slaves had stirred about their breakfast pots. She felt it in a flex of muscle as he tensed beside her. Then his smile spread upon her breast. He kissed her lightly there, and pushed himself up to look into her eyes.

  “Thank you,” he said, and rolled away, scratching at his head where the braid was bound tight to the skin. “Jochi will escort you home; he’s the most discreet of my guards. No one will know where you spent your night.”

  “I don’t fear the eyes of the clans,” she answered with a smile. “I would feed you breakfast with my own hands, as I used to do when you crept under my tent cloths all those years ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, seeing something in her eyes that brought instant regret to his own. “I shouldn’t have asked you to stay last night . . .”

  She saw it then, in the way he wouldn’t look at her, but cast his glance over her shoulder. He’d felt an itch and called on her to scratch it for him. Nothing had changed at all. Curses bubbled up in her heart, almost made it to her lips. But a shadow fell over their bed. Jochi, impassive, waited for her to get up and sneak away like a baby stealer. Her dignity in shreds, she could do nothing but bow her head in acceptance of his command.

  “Whatever you want, you have of me, my khan. I have only ever wanted to serve you.”

  Some emotion passed quickly over his face, regret, or discomfort that she hadn’t taken herself away yet. Perhaps he didn’t know himself. Jochi didn’t allow her the time to persuade him to her preferred interpretation, however. With light pressure at her arm he moved her away from the dais, saying, “This way, my lady,” as if a title she did not own might calm her anger at the indignity he did her.

  “I only meant . . . Of course.”

  With a last bow, she turned and walked away, remembering last night how Jochi had shielded her from the eyes of the court. So they wouldn’t know the khan had called for the services of his favorite whore again, she now guessed. And he would never make a whore’s sons his heirs. Unless there could be no others. Qutula had the life of the prince in his hands already. She considered the herbs and medicines in the chest at home. If she could somehow reach the khan’s food, he would find such visits as they just had few and unsatisfying indeed. Whatever marriage he made for politics or younger, softer flesh, there would be no heirs but Sechule’s sons.

  PART THREE

  SONS OF DARKNESS

  Chapter Twenty-one

  BEKTER STOOD BEFORE THE raven tent wondering how to explain his presence to the shamaness Toragana. He was supposed to be spying for his father, but he didn’t have the skills for it, even to serve the ulus. He’d done well enough the last time, he supposed; the shamaness had seemed happy when he promised to return. Five days had passed since then, however. Tinglut-Khan’s messenger had returned to announce the approach of a Tinglut prince, whose party would reach the tent city of the Qubal gur-khan in the morning. Tomorrow he would be called to attend to the duties of court; today he had a mission for his father.

  Eye to eye with the raven guarding her door, however, he admitted to himself that he hadn’t come back for Mergen Gur-Khan. He needed advice, answers to questions he didn’t dare bring to Bolghai’s attention even if he could find him. The court shaman appeared and disappeared on his own calendar, heedless of the khan’s wishes or the needs of royal spies with disturbing dreams of their own. So he found himself waiting outside the shamaness’ tent once again, his own worries simmering off the fire while he listened to the old tales she told to the children of her clan.

  In his world, tales still seemed to come to life. A prince had fallen in love with a princess of the toads, or so rumor said, adding that he had sickened from the poisons in her skin. Bekter knew better. Prince Tayy spent one night with a gut ache—too much drink, or something bitter in the pies—and recovered the next day. Even now he sat with the leaders of the royal guardsmen, planning a great hunt to entertain the Tinglut prince. The girl existed, of course, no toad but an apprentice in training to the shamaness in this very tent and one of the reasons he had come. The prince had better sense than to fall in love with her, though. Soon enough the khan would give him a political wife to be the object of his devotion.

  Mergen wanted to know everything about her, just in case. That was the spying part of his visit. Back the other side of catching the prince by the river with her, he’d thought the khan overcautious for his heir. But he’d seen enough between them to realize that she’d bewitched him, or the prince had fallen under the spell of her eyes if nothing more sinister. Even an innocent connection could end in disaster; adding magic to the mix made catastrophe almost a certainty.

  A shamaness might choose to walk out to the river with a young man because the night was warm and the grass was soft. Even a warrior should have better sense than to bring a shamaness in love to a casual bed, however. For the girl loved the prince, of that he had no doubt. He’d seen love denied for politics in his mother’s tent and understood why Mergen was so worried about Prince Tayy.

  It seemed to Bekter that some things ran true in the blood,
including a weakness for mysterious women with unearthly powers. He wondered what secrets ’Tula’s woman hid. His own preferences ran to simpler things, or it least it had until now. Which brought him to the second reason for his visit. His dream. He hoped it was a dream. Didn’t want to consider that the strange woman had entered his mother’s tent and his bed to offer him—what? Her body, certainly, but she hadn’t seemed that enamored of his person. What else she meant for him, he still didn’t know.

  Needing a deep, calm mind to share his concerns, he’d thought first of the shamaness. He’d forgotten about the children, though. They were back as well. He had no desire to make of himself a meal for the gossips again in front of them, so he waited while dark clouds gobbled up the sky. The summer rains had come; soon he’d have to find shelter. For now he listened through the creamy felted tent cloths as the shamaness recited the story of Nogai’s Bear, or the part of it suitable for young ears. The death of the khan at the hands of the bear’s son, raised as his own heir, made no tale for children.

  Entranced like the children by her voice, he waited through the first raindrops until the khan of the story had received his wife back in joy and rewarded Nogai with the rank of general and a place at his side. When the children ran out, declaring themselves to be the khan, or Nogai—the girls, he noted, seemed disinclined to suffer as the stolen wife or her grieving husband but wielded stick swords as Nogai—he still waited.

  Finally, the shamaness came to him still wearing her robes of office, with the keen dead eyes of the stuffed raven judging him from atop her headdress. Holding back the door with a smile of welcome and a question in her eyes, she asked, “What can I do for you today, poet of khans?”