Lords of Grass and Thunder (48 page)

The boy’s father might have turned to stone. He didn’t panic, but something desperate and dangerous coiled inside his stillness.
Don’t draw your sword,
Mergen prayed,
let him finish.
They’d already lost a boy today. With luck and a little common sense, nobody else had to die.

“My father doesn’t either.”

Prince Daritai said nothing, but the coiled springs of his muscles all relaxed at once. His eyelids slid down, rose again without hope, as he pulled himself upright, his chin held up, his chest thrust out, ready for the sword or the knife.

Don’t be a fool.
Mergen couldn’t make the warning out loud, or tell the man,
At this moment we are allies in getting this child home alive. Don’t mess it up.
He could, however, learn over his horse’s neck and whisper conspiratorially to the boy, “I don’t like him either. But I do like Princess Orda. If you go with your father, I will make sure that nothing happens to her.”

The look that came back at him shook him to his boots. Tumbinai didn’t think this khan would live long enough to protect his little niece.

“You see too much, boy,” Mergen warned him. “Get those eyes of yours under control if you want to survive your grandfather’s court.” He let a little of his own cunning reach his eyes but didn’t wait to see what effect he’d had on the boy. “Go,” he told the father.

With a precise bow Daritai mounted his own horse and grabbed the reins from his son. Then, without another word he turned and led the boy away from their avid audience. His guardsmen followed, and Mergen sent a handful of his own to see them on their way. As mistakes went, he thought he’d just made a big one. The boy was innocent, but his father was a spy, going home without a treaty or a bride for the Tinglut-Khan. He couldn’t bring himself to regret it. And when he heard Tayy’s soft, “Thank you,” at his side, he was glad.

Prince Daritai rode with sedate dignity toward the Tinglut camp. Mergen would have his own spies watching and he didn’t want to arouse more suspicion, or interest, than the gur-khan had already shown. Unfortunately, this left Tumbinai with the leisure, and the breath, to talk.

“I can’t believe you did that.” The Tinglut court was a harsh school, but Tumbinai had learned his lessons well. In spite of his obvious distress, he kept his tone flat and emotionless. “Did you think I would leave you in enemy hands and run home to my grandfather like a frightened ewe?”

“I expected you to behave like a soldier and do as you were told. Clearly, I expected too much of you. That is my failing.” Daritai had learned restraint at the same harsh knee. His heart twisted in his chest for the things he could not do—hold the boy safe and protected in his arms, rage at him for risking his life, weep for the peril which required such bravery of a child. He should be proving himself with blunted short spears at jidu, demonstrating his prowess at wrestling or in horse racing, not defending his father in an already bloody situation.

He hadn’t planned to teach this particular lesson so soon, but dire need might settle it the more firmly in both heart and head. “You’re fortunate that the gur-khan is a wise and a merciful man. If he’d decided to punish you for your impertinence, I’d have been honor bound to stop him. And he, to save face before his court, would have punished you even if he had to kill me to do it.”

As he had hoped, Tumbinai was measuring the truth of the words, his agile mind all in his eyes. Mergen was right; he’d have to control that. Tomorrow would do for that lesson, but no later. They still had Tinglut-Khan himself to face. But the boy was adding up the afternoon and the total was tugging down at the corners of his mouth.

“He wouldn’t kill us, there’d be war.”

“Think, boy. Do you see a princess coming home with us?”

They had entered their own camp. Daritai spoke more sharply than he otherwise might have done, between orders to break camp and move out. Servants ran to drag down the felted tent cloths. Urged on by the sharp end of his tongue, his warriors leaped from their saddles to help in the bundling of the lattices and the packing of the wagons. At the very center of this furious burst of energy, Tumbinai sat and thought.

“We don’t have a treaty,” he said slowly. “I liked the toad-girl, but I don’t think Grandfather would marry her.”

“I think he’d be damned insulted at the offer,” Daritai agreed.

Tumbinai fell silent, mulling over all that he’d seen and heard, while his father made plans and cast them aside as quickly. He had to get his son out of here, before Mergen changed his mind. Going home meant Tinglut and his half brother Hulegu, and the dangers that came of being one heir too many.

Daritai thought he might have another answer, but he had to move fast and gather more soldiers before Tinglut-Khan had a chance to react. A displaced heir was a threat to the backside sitting on the dais; he was surprised that Hulegu’s assassins hadn’t murdered him already. But a prince who claimed for himself the Qubal khanate became a power to be dealt with on his own terms, and if that prince claimed the title of gur-khan, khan of khans, for his father, they both might prosper.

There was the problem of the Uulgar clans in the South, whose army had gone home under a Qubal-Khan in Mergen’s name. But he thought that he might strike a bargain there. The man could keep his new title and answer to no overlord. The Uulgar were, after all, far away and of no consequence to the Tinglut-Khan or to Daritai. And if, in the future, Daritai should cast his eye in that direction, he would do so for the glory of his father, with all the horsed warriors that the two ulus together, Tinglut and Qubal, could muster.

“What will happen to the gur-khan?” Tumbinai asked, and made a face. He knew the board and how the stones must lay or be swept away. Mergen might fall at the hands of a Tinglut warrior, but he was more likely to die as his brother had, of ambitious relatives, before Daritai had mustered his army. Living seemed the longest odds. “I promised the little girl she’d be safe.”

It was on the tip of Daritai’s tongue to remind the boy not to make promises he couldn’t keep, but something stopped him, a warning in his son’s eyes. They were young yet, but Chimbai’s little princess in his own household, as the future wife of his son, would legitimize his claim to the Qubal khanate. His father wouldn’t be happy about it, but with an ulus behind him, Daritai could deal with old Tinglut-Khan.

“That’s right, you did.” Daritai smiled. “We will just have to make sure that you keep your promise.”

Tumbinai looked uneasy, but he slapped the boy on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. The girl will be safe; that’s what matters.”

He left his son in the care of his guardsmen and galloped to find his own captains.

“Hurry!” he cried, gathering his warriors around him. A few of his forces must move at the pace of the wagons. The rest would travel to the tent city of the Tinglut-Khan at speed. There were armies to raise, and quickly, before Mergen brought his unruly princelings into line and the opportunity was lost.

Chapter Thirty

G
REAT MOON LUN RODE HIGH in the sky, veiled by the smoke that had taken Altan to his ancestors. In the shadows cast in her pure white light, Altan’s pyre stretched black and smoldering across the beaten grass. The men of the hunt had spent the day gathering turves and felling trees to supply the pyre. Tayy had worked beside them, hauling brush and logs roped to his saddle from the river. By late afternoon Bolghai had set torch to kindling; the night had passed watching the pyre burn. Midnight saw the flames fallen to glowing embers crumbling into ash.

After paying her respects, the Lady Bortu pleaded weariness and returned to the ger-tent palace. By ones and twos, the warriors and chieftains who had stayed with the khan’s army followed her lead to find their own tents and their rest. Mergen had stayed until his general, with much gratitude for the honor shown his son, had led his household away to suffer their grief in privacy, and then he, too, had gone, to his bed. Perhaps to one offering more human comforts, but Prince Tayy didn’t want to know about that. Sechule had wandered among the lesser mourners, leading the gur-khan’s gaze like a tame lamb until she attached herself to a knot of women making their way home while the flames still burned. Goodwives, they didn’t acknowledge her presence among them. Given the power of her whispers in the court’s ear, neither did they turn her away.

The prince noted it all with maddening clarity. The three shamans conferred over the fire and his cousin the poet with a lute in his hands plucked out some song to commemorate the life returning in smoke to its ancestors. With his face closed and secret, Qutula had stayed at his side for most of the night. Pleading only a desire to support his prince in his sorrow, he had allowed no one to approach until, as Great Moon shone down on them from the very top of the sky, he had drifted to the edge of the thinning crowd and quietly slipped away.

Tayy thought he ought to send someone to watch him, but the only person he trusted with the errand lay in cinders on the pyre. He wanted Jumal back in his own company, and General Yesugei to guard his uncle while Jochi digested the bitter herbs of his grief. But they were far to the south with the Uulgar prisoners, now vassals of the Qubal. The death of one soldier seemed hardly sufficient to require their return.

“Grim thoughts for a grim day.” Bolghai had come upon him silently, while his mind had lingered on his departing cousin. As with everything the shaman said, his words held a riddle connected at their center to Tayy’s own thoughts.

“I think he wants to kill me,” he said. “I think he worried Altan would figure that out. Duwa must have guessed as much and solved the problem for him.”

“Clever boy,” the shaman approved while Prince Tayy watched the woman, Toragana, approach his cousin Bekter with a promise in her smile. Bekter seemed not to mind the stuffed bird nesting on her head; his answering smile was warm and full of memories. So. The royal poet slung his lute onto his back. Taking the hand of the shamaness, he led her away from the crowd. Tayy didn’t begrudge them their happiness, but he felt like he’d swallowed a coal from the pyre, and that it had lodged beneath his breastbone where his heart should be.

“Am I going to die?” he asked more of the blighted night than the shaman. But the shaman heard, and answered anyway.

“Of course,” he said. “But as to when, who knows?”

He did know, though. Tayy could see it in his eyes. “Will it matter?” He qualified the question.“To the ulus? To anyone?”

“Oh, yes. I can assure you that your death will matter.” Bolghai gave him one of those enigmatic smiles with more mischief in it than seemed called for under the circumstances. Then, with a little hop in his step, the shaman walked away.

“It will matter to me.”

Eluneke. She’d come up behind him, silent as Bolghai had been, and had heard the conversation he’d meant only for his own ears, really. He felt like a whining fool when he remembered it, but she took his hand in hers and said, “Your death means everything to the ulus.”

She didn’t say it wouldn’t happen. In fact, she said it as though it already
had
happened. So, again. At least he knew. He let her draw him away from the dying embers, down to the place they counted as their own by the side of the river, where the light of Great Moon scarcely penetrated the mossy trees.

Qutula rode out past the glow of firelight. His heart felt light and he grinned in anticipation as he left behind him the gloom of a court in mourning. His lady was pleased with him. The fizz she sent through his limbs, like a well-fermented kumiss, might have addled the mind of a lesser man, but it spurred Qutula to greater feats of clearheaded machinations. Dead or sent away or in mourning, the greatest threats to his conspiracy now littered the field of the vanquished. Power fueled his sleepless energy. He would have laughed at the exultant pleasure of it, but restrained himself that much, to ride in silence. He didn’t own the night yet and wouldn’t have his plans ruined by a chance ear.

He found a place protected in shadows cast by an outcrop of rock and filled with flowers that had lost their color in the moonlight. There he dismounted and laid his coat on the ground. This time, he knew she would come and threw himself down on his coat to wait with the smell of the flowers in his nose and the pleasure of a plan well begun coursing through his veins. He had stripped the prince of his protectors; soon Tayyichiut, son of Chimbai, would be dead. With his rivals out of the way, the khan would look to his son for an heir. The thought warmed him and, in spite of his intentions, he slept.

It was no surprise that Toragana led him to her shaman’s tent. They’d left the girl, his sister it now seemed, at Altan’s funeral pyre. She couldn’t have arrived before them except in her totem form, but Toragana assured him she wouldn’t take that route. “It’s much too soon,” she said as they passed under the watchful eye of the stuffed raven over her door. “The risk is too great that she would lose her way.”