Lords of Grass and Thunder

by Curt Benjamin

  With a shiver that started at her head and rippled all the way through her, the demon’s serpent-self stretched until once again she stood in a woman’s skin. Her scales became the fine embroidered silk of her coats which she settled around her as she sat across from her recent captor.

  “Don’t do that again,” she said. “The serpent has a mind of her own, and she doesn’t like you.”

  “I’ll leave my herb chest open a crack, like this,” Sechule negotiated a truce with a bow that indicated her regret without lowering herself to apologize. “If someone comes in unexpectedly, you can hide inside until they are gone.”

  The chest had a lock which might be turned to trap her, but the false Lady Chaiujin accepted that some risks came with every alliance. As Qutula’s mother, the human female must be put off her guard until the son had attained the dais. It would be easier to kill her then. Until that time, she must convince Sechule they were allies. Friends, the humans called it. The word had uses when persuading an enemy to one’s aid.

  “Friends.” She smiled at Sechule and took a cup of tea from her hands in a show of trust between poisoners. “I regret the pain I caused your older son, but I assure you his rewards are equal to his punishments. The younger, however, proves resistant to the charms of a stranger in his bed.”

  “Bekter is a fool,” Sechule agreed. “But his loss at this time would rouse suspicions before we are ready to act.”

  “But later,” the serpent-demon bargained in her human form. His rebuff had insulted her; she would not be denied her revenge.

  “Later,” Sechule agreed. Her eyes told a different truth, however, of serpents crushed underfoot and herself on the dais. The lady recognized the ambition, and didn’t begrudge it in her ally. It was, after all, what she planned to do to Sechule, once she had planted her egg on the dais of the khan.

  “Then our bargain still stands,” she agreed.

  Sechule bowed, dropping her lashes respectfully. When she looked up again, the lady had vanished into smoke. As vapor she watched a moment more, but Sechule went back to the potion cooking on the firebox. And the lady found that she missed the warmth of her lover’s breast.

  As Qutula rode deeper into the camp in search of his brother and the shamaness, the tattoo made itself felt as a missing part of himself, falling into place beneath the shard of jade he wore by a thread beneath his shirt. He had found the jade outside a cave in which the hideous king of demons had died at the hand of the god-king and had picked it up for luck. Once it held a coiled serpent incised on it, but the carving had faded or the lady had taken the jade and had replaced it with a talisman of her own while he had slept beside her in the grass.

  He had grown into the habit of worrying it when he sensed the absence of his lady’s attention, but now his hand dropped to his side. The low hum of the returning presence tingled through his nerves with a kiss of warmth that carried the promise of her anger. He wondered what had caused her fury, but hesitated to invite her retribution again with the question. Perhaps, when their bodies locked in lovemaking, the lady herself would more freely give up her secrets. Now, however, he had his brother to consider, and their father waiting impatiently with dangerous guests on the way.

  The shamaness was easy enough to find. There were fewer of the lower ranks remaining in the khan’s city every day. He recognized her tent by the raven feathers sewn to the felt covering and the raven staring at him from over her door. Dismounting in the wind-driven rain that tore at his clothing, he left his horse to graze what it might from the beaten grass between the scattered tents and entered without announcing himself, as one might do among lowly neighbors. The shamaness knelt at the firebox, making barley tea. Though it was midday, the bedclothes lay in an untidy tumble on the floor. Qutula saw no sign of her apprentice or his brother.

  “May I help you?” She rose unhurriedly and reached for her shaman’s robes, which hung from a peg on the lattice. It seemed like an accidental brush of her hand that turned the mirror on him, but under his clothes the tattoo shrank in on itself, so cold on his skin that the shamaness had to ask the question again to pierce his distraction.

  She had put on the robes and her headdress. He knew the raven was dead and stuffed on top of her head, but still he saw it blink its beady eyes at him. “I can help you with the demon you carry,” she said, and stretched a finger to his breast.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s a decoration, just ink.” He drew back as if hers were the poison touch, while the emerald green bamboo snake burrowed into the flesh above his heart. “I’m looking for Bekter, the gur-khan’s poet.” Annoyance at his brother cut through the distraction of the lady’s token.

  The shamaness reached for her medicine stick. “And to what purpose?”

  He wondered if they had met before, though he remembered no such encounter. For whatever reason, she didn’t seem to like him, not surprising if she had designs of her own to use her apprentice against the prince and gain the dais for herself. Mergen had already seen through that ploy, however. He had only to find his brother before his father sent guards to arrest her.

  “The gur-khan has need of his services. If you know where I can find him, it will go better for you to tell me now.” She had begun to mutter some incantation beneath her breath when two things happened at once.

  The rumpled bedding heaved like an earthquake.

  “Better how?” Bekter’s head appeared over the blankets, followed by a naked shoulder. He rubbed absently at his tangled hair, loosening the braids even more than a roll in a shamaness’ bed had done, but his gaze was sharp with questions.

  At that moment, the door was swept aside to reveal Mergen’s blue-coated guardsmen, Captain Chahar at their head.

  “Captain,” Qutula ground out between clenched teeth, though he managed to produce the proper bow between equals in rank.

  Chahar returned the courtesy, “Captain,” with the same precisely calculated bow. His eyes, however, absorbed every detail of the scene, including the court poet, Qutula’s brother, diving under the shamaness’ blankets in search of his clothes.

  “What is going on here?” Bekter grumbled when he appeared again a moment later, still shoving his arms into the sleeves of his court silks. He had made no effort to disguise himself for his lover and Chahar was no fool. This was exactly the confrontation Qutula had wanted to avoid.

  “I know why Captain Qutula has come,” the shamaness added her own questions, showing in her glance that she understood more by that than Qutula’s search for his brother. “But to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit after so many years, Captain Chahar?”

  “No pleasure at all, my lady shamaness,” Chahar announced, half stumbling in an aborted bow much deeper than Qutula thought proper for any errand of the court in this tent. “I have come as a matter of honor between my lord the gur-khan and my father’s tents, to take you into custody, together with your apprentice, the girl Eluneke.”

  “You mean, he wants to arrest her.” Bekter had pulled himself to order and now he stood between Chahar and the shamaness.

  “I’ll attend the gur-khan and be honored to do so.” She stepped away from Bekter’s offer of protection with a sweeping gesture to demonstrate that the little tent was empty, except for her disheveled lover and the khan’s various emissaries. “But as you can see, my apprentice isn’t here.”

  “And does her disappearance have anything to do with my father’s absence from his place at court?” Chahar asked.

  Before Qutula could chastise his fellow captain for usurping the gur-khan’s right to question his prisoner, the shamaness herself rebuked him.

  “You know I can’t answer that,” she told him, more gently than Qutula would have done it.

  That seemed to be all the answer Chahar needed, however. “Everyone doesn’t have to become a shaman,” he complained, confirming Qutula’s suspicions about the girl.

  “For some, there is no other choice.” She spoke as if this were an ol
d argument between them. Worse news: though Bekter seemed uneasy with her answer, he didn’t seem surprised.

  “It will go ill for you. The gur-khan would not have chosen that road.” Chahar shook his head, trying, Qutula thought, to rid it of the inevitable conclusions he had himself drawn. Whatever plot the shaman folk had to use the girl as a lure for the prince, Bolghai was a part of it. It only remained to ask how deeply they had ensnared his brother, Bekter.

  But: “Ill or well, it must be faced,” the shamaness said. She already wore her robes and she ruffled out the feathers that hung from every leather strip.

  “I’ll be there to speak for you if need be,” Bekter promised her.

  “I know you will.” She smiled more like a proud mother than a lover, but kissed him with enthusiasm. Then, in a flurry of robes and feathers, she disappeared.

  Captain Chahar peered up at the smoke hole over the firebox. “I expect she’ll meet us there,” he said, and shepherded his guardsmen on their way.

  Bekter, too, stared up at the smoke hole for a moment, but then he seemed to come back to himself. “Best not keep the gur-khan waiting,” he said, as if he hadn’t been doing just that.

  Qutula seethed with fury at his brother, a fury fueled by the token of his lady on his breast, which had woken to renewed pain.

  “If you have ruined all our plans with your choice of bed partner, I will kill you myself,” he said.

  Bekter looked at him as if he were a riddle he was only now beginning to solve. “Perhaps you should rethink your plans,” he said, but softly, more to himself than Qutula.

  There seemed nothing else to do, then, but turn on his heel and leave his brother to follow. But as he took up the reins and headed for the ger-tent palace, Qutula resolved to turn the shamans’ plots to his own use. He’d have felt better about that plan if he knew where Bolghai had taken the girl.

  The storm had nearly passed when Bolghai turned away from the shrine that marked the pyre of the fallen khan. Great Sun was setting, the low slanting rays creating arches of rainbows beneath the solemn clouds. The prince had demanded his promise to keep an eye out for the apprentice Eluneke, but the most dangerous part of the trip was over. The gods hadn’t rejected her, or he’d have found her close to where she vanished, dead with the sign of the tree burned into her breast.

  She’d be gone for three days, he figured, and if the past was anything to go by, she would find her way down again any place but where she’d climbed the tree. He figured the prince’s nature would call her home eventually. He could wait for that as easily in the comfort of the ger-tent palace as in the cold of a summer night. Besides, he missed his dinner. With that last grumbling thought, he fixed the palace in his mind, turned into his totem animal, and made his way home by the road between the worlds.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  PRINCE DARITAI of the Tinglut ulus sat in state as an honored guest on the steps of the dais of the Qubal-Khan. At the right hand of Mergen, who now called himself gur-khan, Prince Tayyichiut rested his back against the shoulder of a guardsman with a quick and wary eye. On his left the Lady Bortu, khaness of her son the gur-khan and Great Mother to the clans, leaned her chin on her knee and froze the Tinglut ambassador like prey beneath her eagle gaze.

  At the khan’s feet, but still above the firebox, sat Mergen’s court. Daritai’s own nobles had an honored place among the nobles and chieftains of the Qubal clans at the right of the dais, just below the little gathering of musicians, shamans, and fortune-tellers tucked away to the side. The shamaness in the raven robes had caught the khan’s attention, not happily, but he said nothing and politely kept his gaze from straying too often in her direction. Daritai figured he’d need to learn more about what was going on there before he made any recommendations to his father’s court.

  While he sat among the Qubal in their ger-tent palace, his honor guard set up the Tinglut camp outside the city. He’d brought his eldest son, a sturdy hunter of twelve, along with five hundred warriors to set against ten thousand of the Qubal, if there was trouble. Around him, fifty of his picked warriors sorted themselves among the blue-coated Qubal who girdled the ger-tent palace with their backs to the lattices. An equal number guarded their fellows against a stray spear through the felted tent cloth from the outside. But if trouble came from within, Daritai was dead, as simple as that, though his men would see that he didn’t die alone. If the Qubal overran his camp, he had another son at home to inherit his property.

  Not for the first time Daritai cursed his conniving half brother. Hulegu had the greater skill at diplomacy and should have been the negotiator for Tinglut-Khan’s new treaty-wife. But Hulegu had ambitions; he had seduced Tinglut’s warlike character with impossible schemes to conquer the Shan Empire. Then he’d remained at home, whispering poison in the khan’s ear, while Daritai was sent to accomplish the hopeless task and return in failure.

  Daritai had fought the plan and lost. As he had known from the start, his ten thousands were a mere handful against the empire, already on the march to war in the Cloud Country. In a rage, his father had stripped him of his honors, including his place on the dais as heir. Hulegu now wore the silver cap and sat at his father’s right hand, his intention from the start.

  Tinglut had other sons, however, and Hulegu wouldn’t risk his newfound favor with an absence from court, particularly to negotiate a marriage treaty. A new wife might mean new heirs, after all. So once again Daritai found himself confronting an impossible task for which he was ill suited, at which Hulegu doubtless wished him to fail.

  He was a soldier; no strategist, just a tactician whose diplomatic skills narrowed to one: in his youth, Daritai had made an excellent spy. Face blandly free of his opinions, therefore, he let his glance travel over the decorations that adorned the foreign palace, collecting data for his khan. Mirrors in elaborate frames hung from the lattices. They hadn’t kept the demons out or saved the Lady Chaiujin, Daritai’s half sister, but they reflected the lamplight, giving an unearthly sheen to thick tapestries of silk and fine wool that covered the latticed walls in every direction.

  The Tinglut-Khan preferred to express his love of war with many weapons both antique and modern as his decorations. Mergen’s blue-coated warriors, at attention along the lattices, carried sufficient armaments to balance the more peaceful appearance of his ger-tent palace, however. Daritai resolved to keep his guard up and gave a nod to one of his own warriors sharing duty along the lattices.

  Imperceptible to any who didn’t expect it, the gesture marked the place where he would run if he needed a fast escape. The man set his hand casually on his knife hilt to show that he understood his duty, to slash an exit through the densely embroidered tent coverings at need. Planning for trouble had kept Daritai alive on the battlefield. It couldn’t hurt on a diplomatic mission either. Satisfied, he gave his attention to the dais, where servants had appeared bearing trays of food and drink.

  The Lady Bortu, Mergen-Khan’s old witch of a khaness, was still watching him. To let him know that nothing escaped her attention, she turned with exaggerated care to the guardsman he had lately signaled. Then she repeated his own gesture, but with the large movements of an epic singer, setting the cascades of precious jewels that dripped from her ears and the horns of her matron’s headdress to clacking sharply one against another.

  “I trust our cooks have understood the wishes of your steward, young prince.” The lady motioned at a tray with a gnarled hand, each twisted finger circled with a heavy ring. Nothing escapes my notice, boy, her eyes told him above a smile false as her teeth. Though he had seen more than thirty summers and fought in battles for half of them, he didn’t contradict her. Only that long experience kept him seated, though all his instincts told him to run when she looked at him that way.

  “Excellent.” He picked through the bits of roasted meat and crumbled cheese displayed on a tray held out to him by the serving girl. Pies and other artful dishes also circulated among the khan’s party, but Daritai’s
steward had made known to the Qubal cooks his preference for unmixed foods. Particularly in a foreign camp, such dishes were harder to poison. His steward had said nothing about the motives for his tastes, however. It wouldn’t do to give any ideas to this Mergen, who called himself gur-khan.

  The old khaness knew, of course, just as she knew where he would run if negotiations went very badly. And what she knew, Mergen knew as well, though the khan’s smile was all a host’s welcome should be. If Tinglut-Khan chose war over marriage, he’d have to take out the old lady first thing, because Mergen took all his cues from her. Daritai kept his eyes downcast on the tray until he had his thoughts well hidden.

  The serving girl provided the distraction he needed, leaning over him so that the back of his hand brushed her breast as he hesitated between choices on the tray. He knew that women found him a handsome man. His wives had often commented on the heat of his gaze, the manly proportion of his chest and thighs. And he had worn his best coats of beaten silk, black as night when Great Moon Lun had chased her little brothers over the horizon and embroidered everywhere with silver stars in the pattern of the summer sky, Great Moon herself emblazoned in an auspicious house. So he might have thought the girl favored him for her own pleasure. The Qubal-Khan looked on with a benign smile, however, offering more than mutton and curd for his satisfaction.

  If he’d been inclined to ardor, Mergen’s interest in it would have dampened his enthusiasm. But he had more important matters on his mind, and old Bortu was looking at him as if he were a tasty rabbit. He imagined she might swoop down on him and snap his neck with her strong, sharp beak. Daritai therefore made his choice of meat and cheese and dismissed the girl, not unkindly, but with no invitation for later.

  Casting about for a suitable conversational gambit, he settled on the sculptures in bronze and silver inlaid with coral and lapis that stood on carved and painted chests scattered above the firebox. One in particular drew his notice, a bust of Llesho, the god-king of the Cloud Country, whom the artist had depicted as an older man. The god-king had many allies, including the emperor of Shan who, while traveling to war against the South, had uncovered Tinglut-Khan plotting with the Uulgar raiders to overrun his empire.