Lords of Grass and Thunder

by Curt Benjamin

  He enjoys our grief. He did it to see me flinch. The prince reached that conclusion even through his exhaustion. He’d already dismissed the Tinglut as the thieves, though like his cousin he had sent a precious few of his Nirun to shadow the movements of Prince Daritai. The one report he’d received had given him nothing about Eluneke, but he’d learned that the Durluken were watching. Mergen Gur-Khan’s scouts had followed the Tinglut forces as well, but they wouldn’t find what wasn’t there.

  No, someone closer to home had taken her like a bride thief, or a murderer. Whatever he had done to her, Qutula’s face gave nothing away as he watched, with false concern, Tayy fall loose-limbed with weariness to the dais.

  Servants were called then, food and drink brought. Tayy chose a pie from a laden silver tray, but Qutula took it from him, bit into it and swallowed before he offered it to the prince. Tayy didn’t trust his cousin, but he didn’t think Qutula wanted him dead badly enough to poison himself first. So he ate when Qutula found his food safe and sipped when the kumiss bowl came to him. His mind, however, was on Bekter’s tale.

  “Play,” the gur-khan asked with a gesture to his blanket-son. “Let music ease our minds a little, if it can.”

  The usual court entertainment had been dismissed for the duration of the crisis, but Bekter’s music always seemed to soothe the gur-khan’s distress. He came forward, his instrument in his hand, and made a low bow.

  “As you wish, my lord.”

  A servant brought a low stool and Bekter sat on it. If his mouth were as choked with secrets as his eyes, Tayy thought, he would never get a song out. Presently he began to play the song he had practiced earlier. As he listened, Tayy realized the poet’s secrets were all there in his voice.

  “Long ago a princess lived,

  A child among warriors.

  Alaghai of seven summers

  bright with blood and sword

  Walked barefooted among the dead,

  weeping for their fate.”

  Tayy set aside the kumiss, concentrating on the meter. He knew the story, a popular one from childhood, of the little princess who was later known as Alaghai the Beautiful. Beside him, Mergen picked up the cup the prince had abandoned.

  “ ‘He’s gone to his ancestors,

  magnificent in battle,

  With sacrifices of enemies

  to pay his way

  And crowned with a silver cap,

  the bloodied khan.

  “ ‘Until I see his crow-pecked eyes,

  and touch his mortal wounds

  Your words are the wind to me,

  crying false sorrow.’

  She left them, to search barefoot

  through the red fields of her father.”

  In the end, of course, little Alaghai would find her father the khan, wounded but living on that dreadful battlefield. Because of her timely aid he would survive. An appropriate, if somewhat pointed, choice for a party resting from a search, it reassured that their efforts would not be in vain. Like the child princess, they would also have success. One might even smile at the reversal of roles in the tale in which a princess sought a khan to amuse their own khan seeking a princess.

  The tale might mean nothing more, except that Prince Tayyichiut remembered another night when his own father Chimbai-Khan had told the story of the grown Alaghai the Beautiful. Angry at her choice of the foreign king Llesho the Great as her husband, her brothers had kidnapped her and murdered her child before her eyes. Her husband, that foreign king, died of spell-crafted murder when a cursed spear turned in his own hand and killed him. The brothers likewise fell, in the war they had begun. Only Alaghai had survived, but as a madwoman alone in the tent of her captivity.

  Few in the court would connect the hopeful story of the little princess saving the life of her father with the tragic aftermath of betrayal and death. Tayy wouldn’t have done so himself, except that he had traveled in the company of that foreign king’s successor and repaid that debt of long-ago murder with the wounds on his own flesh. But he thought, looking into Bekter’s eyes, that the poet remembered, and that he sang the early tale only because he daren’t sing the later. Beside him, he heard a groan, and turning, saw his uncle wipe his lips.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  QUTULA BEAT with his fist on the support next to door to his mother’s tent. It was still night, but with a snap in the air that spoke of false dawn just off the horizon.

  “My Lady Mother!” he pounded on the support again and cast an impatient glance at the troop of Durluken massed behind him. “Saddle Bekter’s horse, and my mother’s,” he instructed two he trusted least. “The rest of you stay here unless I call for you.” He ducked his head and went in.

  “Mother! My lord, the gur-khan, needs you!” he said, conscious that he could be heard easily through the tent felt.

  Sechule seemed to have few such concerns. “Even the gur-khan doesn’t always get what he wants.” She had risen, and set a taper to a lamp. In the yellow glow she reached for the new purple silk coat Mergen had given her. “This is hardly a proper errand for a son.”

  Curled on his side of the firebox, Bekter made a noise in his sleep like a yak in heat. He rolled over in his bed, burying his head in his blankets.

  “The gur-khan has fallen ill,” Qutula explained. He hadn’t come as Mergen’s procurer. “No one knows what to do.”

  He tried to warn her with his glance to listen past his words to the meaning he couldn’t speak out loud.

  “I’ll come with you, of course. But the court’s shaman has a reputation for his skill,” she added, playing her part, though with real concern behind it. If he’d been there, the shaman might have recognized the poison and even figured out who had dosed the gur-khan. Or, if he didn’t identify it at once, Mergen might have died while he cast about for a likely cure. “Surely he must be able to help more than I.”

  Qutula shook his head. “Bolghai has disappeared.” No surprise that the old stoat had vanished. He’d abetted the toad-girl’s training, after all, and now she was missing. The shaman’s absence could only work to Qutula’s benefit, however. Murdering the gur-khan hadn’t been part of Qutula’s plan. At least not yet. And he wanted none of the blame to tarnish his own name.

  “Bek, wake up!” He strode over to rouse the lump hidden in the bedcovers. “The gur-khan needs your help!”

  “Anything, of course.” Bekter rolled out of his blankets, bleary-eyed but tracking. “What’s the problem?”

  “Mergen is sick. The Lady Bortu thinks he may be dying.” He omitted his own certainty of it. His brother knew nothing of the plots he had hatched with their mother and the Lady Chaiujin. For his brother, and for the court, Qutula had to appear the concerned blanket-son, frantic to help his beloved, if only clandestinely recognized, father.

  “Bolghai is off looking for our sister, so we need you to find the ragged shamaness who trained the girl and bring her to the palace. Our father may die without her help.”

  “She’s not there.” Bekter grabbed for his coats where they had fallen from their peg onto the carpets. “She’s looking for Eluneke, too, but in the sphere of dreams. Time runs funny there; she could be back yesterday, or a week from now.”

  “For your father you have to try,” Qutula insisted. He might have said more, but Mangkut knocked to tell them the horses were ready.

  Bekter yawned, but he was moving with a sense of urgency now. “I’ll check her tent; she may have come back while I was asleep. But if she’s not there, I don’t know what I can do.”

  “You’ll do your best, I’m sure of it.” Qutula added an encouraging slap on the arm and assigned a handful of his own men to accompany him. He urged his brother to speed, confident that their mother would have the matter under control before he actually found the raven woman.

  Sechule had begun to gather herbs and other things from the jars and boxes on her workbench. “What are his symptoms?” she asked for the Durluken witnesses.

  “He suffers much
the same as the prince’s recent disease, only to a much more serious degree: a clenching of the belly and nausea, headache. Even the light of a candle brought near causes him to scream in anguish. The Lady Bortu has tried all the cures she knows, but nothing seems to help. Most just make the pain worse. The prince is frantic with worry.”

  Mergen had drunk the kumiss meant for Tayy and it was killing him instead of the inconvenient prince. He thought Mangkut might have guessed what had happened, but didn’t risk the truth in case his band of Durluken harbored a spy. Sechule had nodded her understanding as he recounted the symptoms, however. Of course, she would know them and know what they meant. When he had done, she asked, “Is anyone else ill?”

  “No one else seems affected. The prince says nothing of his own condition, but I believe he suffers his usual mild version of the disease. We fear he may worsen.” No one said the word “poison,” but Qutula felt it as a question on every mind. Sechule, of course, would realize that Mergen hadn’t taken the full amount. She had calculated the dose for a younger heart, however. Qutula feared the gur-khan might be dead before they could reach him with the antidote. If that were to happen, it would mean war over the succession. Until he was certain that his original plan had failed utterly, however, he needed to play out his part as a loving son and cousin. His Durluken, reporting as gossip his desperate efforts to save his father, would allay any suspicion against him.

  “I tasted every drink and dish for the prince, and Jochi did the same for the gur-khan. If something found its way into the food, we have failed our duty.”

  With a glance at the painted chest where she kept her poisons and potions, Sechule let him know that she knew he had done it, and something had gone wrong. “Don’t take it on yourself.” She followed his lead and acted her concern for the benefit of his companions, who needed very little to secure their trust. “Of course, we may find that Jochi has also fallen ill. But if neither of the tasters has suffered, it means the dose, if any, can be strong enough only for mischief, not murder.

  That might have been true if Qutula hadn’t taken the antidote, but it would convince his men, who would spread that gossip most convincingly.

  “I am more concerned that the dark spirits have brought ill luck into the house.” Sechule finished gathering her herbs and flowers and picked up last a pot of leaves pounded into a paste.

  “I’m ready,” she assured him, and led him from the tent.

  “A aaaaahhhhhhh! Aaaaaaaaaaahhhh!” Tayy paused, his hands arrested as he buckled his sword belt around his waist. Closing his eyes, he shut out the sight of his uncle’s anguish, but nothing blocked the sound of his wretched cries.

  “You are not well yourself, my prince,” Jochi reminded him in low tones. No one else had dared to remind him that he was himself mortal and subject to whatever evil beset the gur-khan. Over the sweat-soaked head of her only remaining son, Lady Bortu had watched him prepare as if for battle, but she had not chosen to stop him. None of the chieftains still assembled at the court had the rank, or the death wish, to stand in his way. General Jochi, however, had both position and his own grief to use against him, and the wisdom to know that sleep would be impossible in the palace.

  “You might rest more comfortably in a friendly tent. My own are at your command.”

  “I don’t need rest.” He shuddered at another piercing scream from his uncle, who had suffered sword wounds in the past without a whimper. “I have to find Bolghai.”

  “With a sword?” Lady Bortu looked up from tending her son with questions brooding in her eyes.

  “I have to find Eluneke.” When he said it, his fingers clenched around the hilt of his sword. “I have to find out who has done this to my uncle, and stop them.”

  Mergen had passed into delirium, tossing his head restlessly against the fever that soaked his braids and sweated his brow. “Sechule!” he cried.

  Tayy took a step closer. “What about Sechule?” he asked eagerly. If Mergen knew who had done this to him . . .

  But Jochi stared long and hard into the darkness that filled the bottom of the ger-tent palace. “Your uncle has lately renewed his interest in the Lady Sechule,” he said, as if he expected salvation to walk out of the shadows. “He calls for his pledged wife. I sent Qutula to bring her.”

  He must have let his feelings show because Jochi, misinterpreting them, hurried to reassure him. “Your uncle never intended to displace you as his heir, but hoped, when you had taken his place on the dais, to follow his heart with the lady. He wished very much also to repair a grief he has long felt for his nameless sons.”

  “I wasn’t jealous.” But he couldn’t say what he’d been thinking, that his uncle had cried out the name of his murderer and not his lover. The Lady Sechule hadn’t approached the dais that evening, but her son had. With his own stomach churning, Tayy wondered suddenly what poison had come to the gur-khan, a wedding gift from his pledged wife, through her son. And then he wondered if Mergen had been meant to die at all. Qutula intercepted all of Tayy’s food, not his father’s.

  Lady Bortu wiped Mergen’s neck and shoulders. “He’s dying,” she said. He had fallen into a muttering stupor, his eyes showing white beneath the half-closed lashes. “Nothing I do helps him.”

  “I’ll bring Eluneke back,” Tayy promised, “She’ll know how to help.”

  “Find her,” Bortu agreed, but she said nothing of saving the life of the gur-khan.

  Qutula passed him in the doorway, escorting his mother who carried with her an assortment of remedies. Tayy didn’t wait, but acknowledged his cousin’s bow with a nod of his head that bordered on insult.

  “You acted too soon,” he murmured under his breath as he knocked Qutula’s elbow in passing. “If he dies, you receive nothing. Except the point of my sword.”

  The chieftains who had gathered to await the outcome of Mergen’s illness hadn’t heard him, but they watched with interest as Qutula answered in a voice meant to carry, “Your grief makes you rash. I have not heard you.” With a deeper bow still Qutula signaled his unwillingness to engage in open conflict in anger.

  A murmur of approval went up among the watchers. Qutula seduced them with false candor, but he didn’t fool the prince.

  “I will find Eluneke,” he said, again too low for any but his cousin to hear. “You won’t get away with this.”

  “Watch me.” This time Qutula, too, spoke just between the two of them. Prince Tayy would have drawn his sword, but he had already offered combat. Qutula had refused it and he had no evidence to justify a seemingly unprovoked attack. Had no evidence to convince anyone in the court to keep Sechule, his uncle’s chosen consort, away from his sickbed either. But Eluneke was out there somewhere, counting on him to rescue her as much as he counted on her help to save his uncle. So he went.

  Somewhere his body lay in pain, but Mergen didn’t feel it anymore. He had become spirit, and spirit rose out of the shell that ceased to writhe when he left it. He still breathed down there in the fever and sweat, with a belly corroded by whatever poison she had given him. Through her son, no doubt. He couldn’t believe it of Jochi, though now he wondered at how natural the idea felt, that Sechule and her son had murdered him, when only hours before he had been arranging his life around his love for them.

  They had come, of course, like the carrion crows to peck his liver. Only Tayy had guessed what she had done. The rest seemed bent upon drawing her nearer, to repeat the dose if this one took too long about its task, he thought. She was weeping prettily, just the occasional teardrop as her choked voice gave directions to those who tended him.

  “Have this made into a tea, please. And don’t mind the smell. Sometimes the bitterest herbs produce the sweetest results.” She gave over to a servant enough of the mixture of curled leaves and blackened stems to brew a large pot with the instructions, “All who attend the gur-khan should take a cup as well, to protect them. When the evil spirit is expelled, it will look for a new home.”

  “No!” Mer
gen shouted. “She poisoned me!” But they couldn’t hear him and soon each of those near the dais had taken a cup. Qutula sipped with the rest, so perhaps this time she meant no harm. In fact, as the evil drink trickled down his own throat, he saw the rigid tension ease out of his convulsing muscles. Curious, he allowed the apparent calm of his own face to draw him back.

  Pain! Terrible, terrible pain. The drink had softened his muscles, relieving the outward signs of his disease while making it impossible to control his limbs. Inside, however, the poison continued to eat at his liver while his gut turned to water.

  “Now a cup, very clean, half full of cool water,” she instructed someone over his head, and soon he felt the cup pressed to his lips, spilling drop by drop over his tongue so he had no choice but to drink or drown. Not water, she had doctored the drink in full sight of all the court. He recognized that bitter taste—it had tainted the kumiss which Qutula had poisoned the night before—but he was helpless to spit it out.

  “Drink, my love,” he heard her whisper in his ear. “It won’t be long now. I”m sorry it has to hurt so much. I didn’t plan it this way. It was supposed to be the prince, to clear the way for your own son’s ascension to the khanate.

  “Qutula will be unhappy with me, since your death will doubtless mean war with the prince. And he truly wished for your love.” Softly crooning words of madness and hate into his ear, she fed him sip by sip from the poisoned cup, while the first relaxing draft kept his spirit trapped inside his body. “Your power, too, of course; even that would have been evidence of your love. But who can argue with fate? Certainly not I, who would have been khaness but for your scruples. Now I will be the mother of a khan and you will be dead.”

  NO! he thought. Then, when the pain grew worse than he imagined possible, he thought, “Yes, gods and ancestors take me, I cannot endure this anymore.”

  His bowels had let go early in his sickness. He would have hidden himself from the shame as each clenching seizure loosened his gut again, but he had lost the power even to turn his head away.