Chapter Twenty

THE GER-TENT PALACE was lit with many lamps reflecting off the mirrors on the lattices. It looked like the hunters of the Qubal had captured little moons Han and Chen and put them in cages to reflect their holy light upon the khan. Sechule slipped in at the back, where the light was dimmest, and gradually worked her way toward the brightest glow around the dais. There were those among the nobles and Mergen’s advisers who eyed her with a speculative gleam, wondering if she planned to entertain them with a scandal tonight. Would she confront the khan, spitting curses like a deserted wife? What would the khan do when he saw her? Bekter had begun to play, however—she recognized his playing by the slightly off-key G—and his presence in front of the khan gave her reason to be there.

“Sechule.” A hand reached out, stroked down her arm as she passed. Altan, that was, a friend of the prince in Qutula’s age group. He had graced her bed on a few occasions, but neither had sustained the other’s interest for long. She heard his family had chosen him a young wife from a wealthy clan. Still, if nothing else presented itself, he seemed willing to take a walk to the river. She returned the caress with a warning tap of her finger against the back of his hand. Discretion, that warned, and promised, “Maybe.” He smiled, and drifted away to take his place among the prince’s guard. Later, she knew, he would look for her in the half-light below the firebox.

There were other men. Powerful men, who stood almost as close to the ear of the khan as Yesugei had, would bed her for her looks and perhaps to challenge the khan, if he still cared. Young men who believed that sleeping with the khan’s mistress—even an old one—put them closer to the khan himself would pretend to an attraction they didn’t feel. In the dark, they would doubtless manage. The sheep never suffered for lack of company, after all.

No one hindered her passage through the crowd of followers and hangers-on, past the guardsmen with their blue coats and their backs to the lattices. They should, perhaps, have stopped her as she neared the dais. She had exceeded the limits of her rank. But Bekter was her son, and the whole court appreciated his songs, if not his playing.

The usurper, Prince Tayyichiut, was there, trying to pay attention, though his gaze seemed distant and given to restless sweeps over the crowd. Mergen seemed to be doing a better job of listening to his blanket-son, though sometimes a smile threatened to break over his face at inopportune moments in the song. Bortu was watching the khan with her own secrets simmering in her eyes. Sechule wondered what that was about. Then Mergen caught her gaze. He didn’t turn away.

The ger-tent palace was hot tonight, almost crowded, especially nearest the dais of the khan. Farther back, the crowd was thinning as it did late at night. Those below the firebox had less to lose at his displeasure, as if he wouldn’t have done the same in their places. Mergen took it all in with an ironic eye. All this belongs to me, he thought. A little bit of pride touched his lips. He’d kept the Qubal alive, after all, and together as an ulus in spite of murder and war. For the rest, he wondered what fate had put him here when he knew himself to be singularly unsuited to rule.

Fortunately, the assembled nobles and clan chieftains hadn’t figured that out yet. With a bit of work, he hoped they wouldn’t catch on until he had passed the khanate to his nephew, who should have had it by right of birth. He hoped the young man would take the reins of power among the clans more easily than his uncle had. He hoped they could do it with celebrations and ceremonies, with none of the death and anguish that usually accompanied the passing of power from one khan to another.

This time, however, the passing khan was ready neither for his dotage nor for his pyre. The new khan had neither to wrest the dais from his predecessor nor to convince the ulus of his fitness to rule. Any khan might step aside for a hero who had talked with dragons and lived to tell of it. An uncle who preferred a quiet life could do no less. This is all mine, he thought, but soon it will be his.

Bekter was singing a new song involving crashing swords and the king of the toads. A fond smile came of its own accord.

Tayy held his breath, but Bekter’s song put the hero-prince of the Nirun in the place of the shamaness in training, fighting rather than negotiating with the king of the toads in single combat. To the laughter of the court, the creature admitted defeat in the croaks and belches of Bekter’s own version of the language of the toads.

“The king of the toads indeed!” Laughing with the rest, Mergen took a sip of his kumiss. “What gave you such a notion?”

“As to that, you must ask the prince!” Putting his instrument aside, Bekter answered the khan with an easy jest as the tellers of tall tales were wont to do.

Tayy knew there would be talk. He might have sworn the Nirun to secrecy, but the Durluken would put this to a contest as they did everything, it seemed, between the captains. Who had the more beautiful woman to warm his blankets—Qutula or Prince Tayy? No one had seen ’Tula’s lover. Tayy hadn’t ever bedded the girl at the river—they’d spoken for the first time today—so the whole exercise seemed as pointless as a practice stick at jidu.

Declaring herself too exhausted from a day of visiting to partake in the gossip, the Lady Bortu had gone to her bed leaving more whispers behind her. Had she been out among the clans, sounding out political matches? Were the prince’s exploits at the river the first steps in a dance that would lead to a royal wedding? As the kumiss flowed and the roasted meats disappeared, the wagers grew more outrageous.

The tale of the king of the toads didn’t help. Bekter didn’t know the part about the shamaness in training making a treaty with the toad people, but like the Nirun and Qutula’s Durluken, he’d seen the girl. Tayy needed something to take their minds off what they had seen and at the moment King Toad seemed to be it.

“He was the biggest toad I’ve ever seen,” he said, “and he had a crown of leaves on his head. He walked up to us bold as a warrior of the khan and croaked his royal command.”

Qutula handed him a bowl and he drank, gasping at the bitter fire of the kumiss. After only a few mouthfuls of the fermented mare’s milk, he had enough and set the bowl down next to him.

“Such creatures are dangerous when cornered,” Mergen reminded him, and then turned to the gossip that Bekter had discreetly left out of the song. “And yet, all I hear in whispers badly hidden behind the hands of your guardsmen is about this girl—” Mergen kept a smile on his face, but the prince felt his anger through the mask of good humor. “Or was she a toad as well?”

The Nirun laughed; they had seen her and assured their khan that the girl was no toad. “Beautiful,” Altan declared her, “with eyes to drive a man to deeds worthy of Bekter’s songs.”

Jochi, Mergen Gur-Khan’s new general, glared at his son. They had, no doubt, each drunk more than was sensible. Tayy knew he ought to silence his guardsman. He was occupied with a strange attack of dizziness, however, and failed to warn him when, in defense of his opinion, Altan grew more emphatic in his praise.

“Her lips were plump and other parts more so—” he held his hands in front of him in a pretense of holding up breasts.

“Enough!” Jochi struck out with the back of his hand, leaving the mark of his knuckles on Altan’s cheek.

As if one body, the whole court sucked in a great breath and waited for the khan to answer the quarrel on his very dais. Mergen, however, waved an indulgent hand. “Fathers and sons,” he said. “Who would stand between the molding of the young by their elders?”

At Jochi’s bow, the khan added, “You have my permission to continue his education later, in your own tents.” Few beyond the dais saw the blood flare in the khan’s eyes. It would have surprised no one. Altan had addressed the khan too familiarly, on a matter of great sensitivity. The general muttered something into his son’s ear and Altan dropped his head, obedience and shame in the dejected curve of his shoulders.

“My apologies, lord khan,” he begged with an abject bow. Mergen Gur-Khan gave a stern nod, accepting the apology but not forgiving the young man. “Go,” he said. “Guard the horses until you learn to guard your tongue.”

Altan’s face burned dark with blood, but he kept his head low and bowed his way down the aisle between the nobles and chieftains who watched him go with pity or jeers as they felt themselves in sympathy with the Durluken or the Nirun. When he reached the firebox, he turned and ran. They all knew he took the blame for Tayy’s indiscretion.

“So tell me more about this princess of the toads,” Mergen asked him sharply, when Altan had gone. But Tayy found himself overwhelmed by dizziness again and unable to answer.

Someone covered him—he felt the warmth of his blanket over him—but his eyes refused to open to discover who had done him the service. Qutula, no doubt. His guardsman spoke softly from somewhere high above him: “He sleeps my lord khan. Tomorrow—”

“Is he ill? What are you doing?”

Tayy’s body tried to tense, his eyes to open at the sound of alarm in Mergen Gur-Khan’s voice. His cousin had nearly strangled him during the wrestling matches and he didn’t want to be at a disadvantage if Qutula had one of his convenient accidents again. He couldn’t move, however, when someone took his hands and rubbed them with a salve that smelled like moldy herbs.

“I don’t think so, or at least not badly ill,” Qutula answered. “My mother gave me something for protection against the toxins of the king of the toads, though, and I thought it couldn’t hurt.”

He hadn’t touched King Toad and Eluneke wouldn’t have poisoned him even if she could, which he doubted. But he felt heavier than a normal sleep should make him, and the gentle ministrations felt good even if they smelled bad. The salve itself might be poisoned. But Qutula laid it on with his bare hands; he couldn’t do Tayy harm that way without hurting himself.

As if reading his mind, a woman’s voice spoke up from below the dais. “A harmless comfort, my khan. I would do no harm to your own—”

What was Sechule doing there?

“I know you wouldn’t,” Mergen answered her. “If it will give him comfort—”

“I think he only needs to sleep, my lord khan,” Qutula had finished rubbing the salve into his fingers and settled down beside him to guard his rest.

“As well should you all,” Lady Bortu muttered from under a pile of her own bedding. Soon her snores filled the quieting hall. It sounded like a good idea, so Tayy let the sleep take him.

Sechule. His breath came rapidly in spite of the fact that good sense told him to have her sent away. How had she gotten past his guards? Her sons, no doubt. She wasn’t looking at Qutula, however. She was looking at Mergen, her eyes as dark and mysterious as they had ever been. Her coats hid the curves of her body, but her round, soft lips made promises he knew her body would keep. The light gilded her hair and turned her face to molten bronze. He might have said once that she looked like a goddess, but he had seen goddesses since then, and none of them had her sensual beauty. He could no more imagine bedding the Lady SienMa, Shan’s goddess of war, than he would make love to his sword. Sechule offered more earthly hills, and a welcoming valley between her thighs.

He remembered the yielding lushness of her body and the ger-tent palace was suddenly too warm. He couldn’t look away.

Jochi, the captain of his personal guard, stepped closer to the dais, guessing what his khan’s instructions must be. The whole court must know—Mergen shifted in his stiffly embroidered coats, wishing they would all go away. His blanket-sons turned from one to the other of their parents; Sechule looked a challenge back at him as she made her bow and withdrew to a more proper distance from the dais.

“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 lacking 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.