Read Online Lords of Grass and Thunder by Curt Benjamin - Free Book Online Page B

that he could laugh at painless cuts as well. Since then, war and death had taught him otherwise. No wound came without its cost. Scars marked not the wounding of a king, but his ability to heal himself, and with it, his people.
    Fighting beside Llesho, the god-king, he had grown to understand more about what it meant to rule. People need their gods and shamans, their peaceful lives. But someone had to protect them from the evil of the world, even it if cost him some scars. He figured he’d be good at that now, good at being their khan.
    “I was thinking of my father, and hoping that the way I carry my own wounds speaks well of me.”
    Qutula looked at him strangely and he gave a little shrug, as if to let the words slide off his shoulders. “I hadn’t meant to say it out loud.”
    His cousin’s answer, when it came—“All who follow you are honored to serve you”—felt like a line recited from a hero’s tale. Tayy ducked his head, feeling foolish. No one but himself cared about his old war wounds. The girl couldn’t know about his scars anyway.
    Her eyes were very dark and very large, he noticed. She held his gaze while the pink tip of her tongue reached out and delicately touched the corner of her rich, full lip before disappearing again. He didn’t know what that revealed of her thoughts about him, but he had a suspicion that he ought to.
    Who are you? he wondered. What clan? What name?
    He dared not stop to ask. Her tent was small, not even two lattices and so far from the palace, indicating a family of low station. He didn’t want his companions to mistake his curiosity for interest. Qutula, he thought, might have noticed something, but his cousin made no comment. Tayy was relieved. They moved on and soon the mysterious girl had passed out of sight behind them.
    The laughter had died in the strange moment before the raven tent, but the companions resumed their boasting as they neared the center of the camp. Challenges were accepted for wrestling matches and, if they noticed that he didn’t join in the merriment, they were discreet and did not remark on it. Left to his own thoughts, the prince considered the wagons heading away from the outskirts of the city. The passage of the peaceful folk meant nothing to the fighters who would stay at the right hand of the khan wherever he raised his tents. But Prince Tayy wondered how he could impel the family of the girl to stay until he had learned more about her. For the sake of curiosity, of course. He did not consider that he might fall in love until his uncle supplied him with a wife.
     
     
     
     
    M ergen picked at the blood itching under his fingernails. The hunt had gone well. For a few hours he had forgotten all about the decisions waiting for him in the ger-tent palace where he served as an uneasy place keeper for his brother’s son. The khan understood the value of war, had fought it well enough as a strategist and with the force of his own arm. Stretching out over the neck of his horse, following the baying of the dogs in pursuit of a fleet-footed stag or a wild ram, however, he felt his connections to the earth and the sky and the people of the Qubal clans more keenly than he ever had on the battlefield.
    The moment reminded him of what he was beneath his coats, at heart and soul. A man of the grasslands. Harnish, the Tashek mystics named them, for the wind that passed over the grass, never resting. The wind. That’s what he was. The wind.
    Even an afternoon in summer must end, however. Returning to the tent city with their prey securely tied on the back of a horse, Mergen joined his companions in their jokes and boasting.
    “You have cut short that ram’s lazy reign over his harem of ewes,” Mergen praised the skill of his friend Yesugei. “You must insist that the cooks honor the virility of beast and hunter with their best recipes.”
    “Perhaps he can help me with my own harem,” Yesugei agreed. None but the khan knew how deeply from the