Lords of Grass and Thunder

by Curt Benjamin

  Though her long dark hair hid her face from him, her emerald green coats hung open from her shoulders, lamplight gilding her naked curves. Her legs remained partly in shadow; he made out just the suggestion of their long, curving sweep, outlined in the golden light. Almost absently her hands met across her belly, kneading softly the flesh over her womb like an invitation. Never before had she made herself so vulnerable to his eyes.

  Qutula’s arms felt heavy when he reached for her. “Let me hold you.” He meant to command her, but it sounded too much like pleading in his own ears to please him.

  This time, however, she allowed it. “Of course, my beloved.”

  He could see her smile behind the drape of hair that crossed her cheek. Then she came to him, dropping the coats she wore in a heap on the ground before standing astride him. The lethargy that had overwhelmed him on waking had gone, but looking at her, he couldn’t breathe for a moment. In the half-light of the shuttered lamp, what he could see of her was as beautiful as feel had taught him in the dark and he wanted to touch her again, to relearn the delicate sensations of her skin against his rough fingertips, against his belly and thighs.

  Her ankles rested on either side of his hips and he took them in his hands, smoothed the skin of her calves, following that curve like a swan’s neck to her thighs. He pulled her down so that she must kneel to him, over him. Her breasts came within his reach and he took them, soft in his hands, and drew her down to bury his mouth in them.

  “This time tomorrow, it will be over,” he said, meaning the prince’s death.

  And, “How,” she answered back. “How will it be done?”

  “By poison. The vial in my sleeve.”

  Her fingers traced the knife-sharp bones of his face and he turned his head to kiss her wrist where it poised near his lips. She would, he supposed, return his coats with the prince’s death folded in the cuff. “Already I’ve dosed him in small amounts. The whole court believes he suffers some malady of evil spirits. When he dies suffering the same ache in his gut, they can have no suspicion. I have eaten the same food as he, after all, and drunk from the same bowl.”

  His mother had provided him the antidote, which Qutula had taken with great care. No suspicion would fall on him.

  “And if he doesn’t eat or drink the tainted food? Or if he survives the poison?” Her voice was muffled, her face buried in his neck then lower, trailing a flicking dry tongue over the taut flesh that banded his rib cage. Not a human tongue, but when her fingers were so busy elsewhere on his flesh, it was hard to remember why that might matter.

  “Then war,” he answered, thinking, One, two, three, and who knew he had so many ribs? Not enough of them, if it meant she had come to the end of that careful addition of their sum. He had other parts, however. His belly, his hip: she found each with her mouth and explored it with her fingertips, leaving the bloody traces of her sharp nails to show where she had gone.

  “Steal the girl,” she murmured into the hollow of his throat. “If the poison fails, the prince will look for her. You can draw him away from the court and kill him then.”

  She was right. A hostage would simplify the murder of the prince, if it came to a fight. Qutula hesitated to tell her so; he hated taking orders from a woman, even his mother, who had worked all her life to put him on the dais. He didn’t want this one to think she could control him with her ideas.

  “Of course, I may have misjudged you.” Her cool belly brushed against his softly, but she withdrew from him with her voice. “She is your sister, after all.”

  And his father had acknowledged her before either of the sons who had served him all their lives. “As Tayyichiut is my cousin,” he agreed at least on the kinship. “She is one more obstacle between my father and his true heir.” Once the prince was safely murdered, the girl would follow him to the ancestors. Killing her would be easier than holding her hostage, though.

  “She’s a shamaness and I am no bridegroom kidnapping his willing bride. She can vanish into the dreamscape and travel anywhere at the speed of thought. How do we take and hold her against her will?”

  As he talked, he traced circles insubstantial as a kiss around the pink nipple that brushed his fingertips.

  “With this.” From around his neck the lady of mysteries plucked the gold thread and passed it over her own head, so that the smooth jade fragment rested gleaming over her burnished breasts. “Let me keep it for a little while; you will have it back soon enough. When the time comes, set the talisman around the girl’s neck. At our command, the power it binds will pin her to the mortal realm, invisible to her teachers in the dreamscape, until she goes to meet her ancestors. Which will, I trust, be soon.”

  “Then we are agreed.”

  Though he felt more naked in its absence than he had from his lack of clothing, Qutula didn’t ask when she would return the jade talisman, or how. A lifetime spent in the tent of his mother had taught him not to question certain powers but to command them through others, by cunning. Now, the thought of such powers in his hands fed his desire. He would have tipped her over and taken her in one sweep of his strong body, but she nipped him more than playfully on the shoulder and he felt a cold like death spread from the wound.

  “I will give you the means to take the dais of your father,” she said, though as yet she had done little more than suggest the ways by which he might do it for himself.

  He owed her nothing, but it cost him less to humor her, at least until the princess his sister had gone to her ancestors. He might need her help for that. So he lowered his lashes humbly and answered, “I am in your debt, my lady.”

  “I know. And tonight you will give me my heart’s desire in payment of that debt.”

  Her voice, imperial and desperate, fired his senses. “You already have it,” he assured her. “The prince will die tonight, I swear it.” The bargain cost him little. He had already told her of his intention to kill his cousin that very day.

  “Not enough, not enough,” she groaned into his ear. Frustrated in his desire to have her, it was on the tip of his tongue to rebuff her demand and override her objections by force, if necessary. But: “It’s time,” she moaned, her voice rising in an anguished cry of desire more powerful than any he had felt in her before.

  “Oh, gods, my fathers, it’s time!” With those strange words she took his willing body inside her, rocking with little moans, “Mine, mine.”

  He thought she meant himself, her willing property at such moments, and answered, “Yours, yours.”

  Suddenly, she went very still over him. He would have screamed, or strangled her until she had no choice but to serve his body or die, but the cold on his shoulder was spreading. She might kill him if he tried.

  He needn’t have feared, however. She said only, “Do you mean it? Mine?”

  How could she doubt? When she had him in this way, at least. “Anything,” he answered, “I have sworn my life to you. Anything I am is yours.” The thing about promises, he had already learned, was that they were so easy to make when they served him, and so easy to break when that served him better.

  He could tell by her sigh of satisfaction, by the renewed interest she showed in his body, that she had believed him. When finally he had spent himself inside her once, and again by the power of his youthful vigor and her eager encouragement, she lay across him weak with her own pleasure.

  “You, too, have made promises, my lady,” he said, and brushed her hair aside with fingers gone slack with satisfaction. “Before I leave this place, I must know who you are.”

  “Time,” she agreed, and lifted her head. Suddenly, it seemed as though a hood had been lifted from his eyes, so that he could see for the first time.

  “My Lady Chaiujin!” His heart stuttered in his chest, for reflected in her human eyes he saw the slitted obsidian of the serpent. Framing her sweet oval face he saw the faint tracery of a serpent’s green scales. A part of him, he realized, had known all along that it was she, or something very like the serpe
nt-demon who had taken the Tinglut princess’ place in his uncle’s bed. Torn between a natural terror and covetous lust, he wondered if Chimbai-Khan had seen the demon behind the human face of his second wife, and if he had courted the danger in the pleasure, until it killed him.

  She must have seen the confused lust in his eyes, because she smiled and revealed to him the forked tongue that flicked pleasure where his neck joined his shoulder. Her sinuous hands stroked him and he felt the smooth dry shift of scales against his skin when she wrapped her legs around him.

  Qutula grinned up at her, then quick as any snake rolled her under him. “With you beside me, and your power in my grasp, we can rule the world.” He took the globes of her breasts in his hands; through the pale green of her skin, a rosy blush deepened at their tips as he mapped the paths of his conquests on her flesh. She wanted him, and by her acquiescent smile let him know that she would allow his dominance this once.

  He took what she offered, kissed her mouth with its strange tongue and plunged deep between her parted legs. Still a woman there, she could not become fully serpent while he pressed her thighs apart. Then he was done, gasping for breath while his sweat fell, drop, drop, drop, on her dry, smooth skin. Her fingers soothed him, tracing the fall of his braids on his shoulder.

  As he drifted to sleep, he felt the slither of a serpent cross his flesh. Reaching out with the last strength of his arm for her, he let the smooth scales glide effortlessly through fingers growing numb and heavy and strange. Without knowing quite how it had happened, he surrendered consciousness to strange and pain-filled dreams.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  IN HER SERPENT form the false Lady Chaiujin left the comfort of her nest for the grassy surface. Great Moon Lun had set, but Little Sun had not yet risen; she moved by starlight too pale to aid a human eye, and the vibration of the air, which she sensed with her flicking tongue. Wrapped around her green scales she wore the golden thread, with the fragment of smooth round jade balanced on her back.

  Once that fragment had formed the bottom of a drinking bowl, the match to a wedding cup carried by the god-king Llesho. At the bottom she had incised her image, a coiled rune that tied her demon soul to his more godlike one. He’d used her badly in his war against the demon-king, but that was over now. The cup was broken, her mark carved in skin instead of jade. A new war began; if she moved the stones on the board just so, she might go home or, barring that, place on the dais of the khan the son now growing in the egg she carried. What that child would be she did not know. Already, however, she felt the power of his demon kind stir within her womb.

  But first she must remove the obstacles to his ascendancy who littered the ger-tent palace: the khan’s heir, and the khan. Then Qutula, her lover, must die to make way for his own demon son. She thought perhaps she would eat him when the time came, and feed bits of him to his son, to give him strength in the nest. And, of course, the girl who stood to defend the heir, and who might produce her own offspring of power to contest the dais with Qutula’s son—first, she must be rid of the girl.

  She had come to the place she had intended and, hidden by the darkness, returned to human form. Around her the painstakingly slow process of rebuilding, stone by stone, hand by hand, the shrine of the khan her former husband, had begun. No one had touched the tumble of shards from which the sliding hiss of a thousand serpents whispered on the night air.

  Before she rested, she must rid her nest of the human she had used to fertilize her egg. Then she had one last task. Drawing the round flat circle of jade from between her breasts where it had fallen, she called to her serpent brethren, summoning a demon of her own kind. “Brother serpent, sister snake, my father bids you come to me.”

  She repeated the incantation not once but a hundred times, until the ground beneath her feet seethed with snakes, coming not only from their nearby nests within the ruin of the khan’s shrine. Far across the grass she saw the undulation of their backs, so that the grass itself seemed to blow against the wind. All of these were mortal snakes, kin with the power to kill, but not the skills of a demon to block the magic of the shamaness. These she sent to find the human hidden in her underground nest and carry him on their backs to the surface, to the cover of sharp upthrusting rocks where he had thought to await her. She forbade them his murder, but commanded that he must be gone before he awoke. He must never find her nest.

  When they had slithered away to do her bidding, she took up her chant again, searching the fading night with more than sight for one of her own kind. Most of her demon kin had been cast back into the underworld by the combined armies of gods and humans during the great battle high above the Golden City. Finally, however, when she feared the loss of darkness to the dawn, an answer came.

  “Mistress.” A snake, thick and black, with markings on its back, rose up on its tail to salute her. “I bow before you and your child.” He dipped his head to her belly and continued, “What would you have of me?”

  “Your power, for a day, a week,” she answered, imperious in command. Her father was a king in the underworld, and she would soon be mother to a khan in this. “A girl, to be hidden, her power muted for a while.”

  Qutula had promised to kill the prince soon. She would have done it herself more efficiently, but needed something by which to control her lover. Murder of his father’s heir seemed a likely tool, and he had promised that his plan would escape suspicion, or a costly war. But just in case he failed, she added, “We may need her later, so don’t do any damage.”

  “As you wish,” the serpent answered with another bow of his wedge-shaped head on its long neck.

  With that, she took him in her hand and with his own sharp fangs carved the coiled rune into the bottom of the shattered cup, which like a coin now lay on her palm. He grinned at her and poison dripped from his fangs onto the fresh carving.

  “You may go now,” she told him, setting him down in the grass. “You’ll know it when the token finds its way onto the throat of the girl, and you will come to my bidding as if I had summoned you that very moment. She must not use her powers, nor may shaman or magician find her. If any human comes near who is not bound to myself, or to my Lord Qutula, they must see only grass where her tents are raised, and only sheep where her guards stand watch. None may find her by magical or earthly means.”

  “As you wish, my lady.” The black serpent writhed into a knot of courtesy as a lesser demon to the daughter of a king, and when she released him, sidled away in the grass. He wouldn’t go far, she knew. There were gaps among the broken stones where he might rest and many female snakes who wriggled enticingly nearby.

  The wan light of Little Sun had begun to touch the sky with false dawn. She quickly made her way to her sleeping lover, now lying among his scattered clothes in the grass where the snakes had left him, and replaced the jade token on his breast. Then she adopted her serpent form again and returned, unseen, to the borrowed comforts of her nest.

  Languorous in satisfaction, Mergen, great gur-khan of the Qubal and the Uulgar clans, yawned and scratched absently at his crotch. “If we are to wed,” he told Sechule, “I should start wooing you with presents.”

  Sechule smiled with downcast eyes as she handed him a cup of tea. He had already forbidden her the prize she wished, and now he proposed to buy her with trifles. But scorn would come later, when her son had won for her the place her lover had refused her. Now, she gave him a flirtatious smile through gritted teeth and teased, “A fine silk coat then, or, no, two fine silk coats, with the most elaborate embroideries.” She could at least replace the finery that had vanished lately from her tent. “And a jewel bead for my hair. I must at least compete with the other noble wives.”

  “You will be the most elegant of wives,” he promised, “All the coats and gowns you wish, and I’ll choose the beads personally to enhance the glory of your hair.”

  He was teasing her, she knew, as well he meant it, too. She kissed him and helped him dress, thinking, she would have all the s
ilk coats she wanted, and the headdress of a khaness if not a wife, when her son defeated him and took the dais and the ulus with it from his father’s dead hands. The thought of murder lit her eyes with pleasure that he took for admiration. With one arm he drew her close and kissed her while she thought, poison, or perhaps a dagger to his kidney, once Qutula had begun his war.

  PART FOUR

  THE SHAMANS’ WAR

  Chapter Thirty-two

  “OUR GUESTS don’t come to us today,” Lady Bortu commented, over her breakfast, needling him between bites of crumbly cheese and millet stew. “The treaty which would have bartered your daughter for peace remains unpledged.”

  Mergen had noticed. “The Tinglut packed their tents while our noble Altan made his journey to his ancestors. By now they are doubtless halfway home.” He had offered as a bride for the Tinglut-Khan a shamaness who traveled in the shape of a toad inside the coats of his heir. Daritai would have seen the insult of that match on so many levels that he might not even have considered the murder in his decision. Mergen admitted to himself that the negotiations could have gone better.

  “And what do you plan to do about it?” The beads of his mother’s elaborate horned headdress clacked and swayed as she spoke, a reminder of the power of her station. She had made more than one khan, and could make another of her blood if not her womb.

  Smothering a sigh, he glared in the Lady Bortu’s direction, careful not to meet her eye, however. He didn’t want to have this conversation now. Didn’t want to have it at all until he’d dealt with the unruly youths of his court, and they hadn’t shown up yet. She would not, however, leave the thing undone.

  “You need Yesugei.”

  She didn’t accuse him of a mistake in sending the general away with his ten thousand of Uulgar, but it was in his own mind that he had. He would certainly need Yesugei and those conquered troops if he wished to use force against the Tinglut where marriage had failed. Picking over the breakfast for which he had no appetite, he considered whom to send as messenger to bring them back. Not Jochi, who was needed here and whose grief put him at risk in a mission of personal danger. He gestured instead for Chahar, who came forward with a deep bow. He had, Mergen noted, his father’s eyes, though with none of the shaman’s otherworldly gaze.