Free Lords of Grass and Thunder by Curt Benjamin

heart the general’s answering joke had come. Yesugei pined to add Sechule to his household. She rebuffed him, setting her aim above him, on the khanate Mergen could not, in conscience, give her. Like all the rest, however, he passed it off as rueful boasting to enflame the scandalous jesting insults of their companions.
    “Better the one end than the other,” someone joked from the back, and another, “Better the horns of a ram than the egg of a cuckoo!” This was an old riddle, which could lead to a murderous fight if a man’s sons strayed too far from the look of his own face. But this time they all laughed, knowing it for a harmless joke. If the general had no harem, at least Yesugei’s wife was faithful as Great Moon herself. All his sons and his one daughter took after their father.
    With no cause for insult in his own tent, at least, Yesugei shifted the boasting attention onto his khan. “If there is a point to this conversation,” he asserted with mock indignation, “then it is dangling off the head of that fine stag you have yourself caught.”
    Their party joined in laughing agreement, slapping the sides of their horses in goodwill.
    “A lover for every branch,” they agreed. The many points to the antlers of the stag must surely indicate something about the pointed manliness of the hunter who bagged him, after all. “But a bit hesitant to commit his shot.”
    Mergen had, in fact, hesitated to let his arrow go. He shuddered a little at the memory of wonders he had seen in the war. Even a khan had to consider, as he set the arrow, if he aimed at fair game or a neighbor visiting in his totem form. But the joke referred more to his lack of a wife. As his brother the khan had wished of him, he did, indeed, enjoy the welcome of many lovers among the clans without bestowing his tents on any one, or two of them.
    Beside him, Yesugei said something. He didn’t catch it all, but recognized the tag line of another ribald riddle with, perhaps, a knife edge glittering in the folds of its meaning—if he wished to hear it so. With the others of his own generation of guardsmen and counselors around him, however, he chose not to see the nettles among the clover and laughed his raucous appreciation of the jest.
    The day, he decided, was perfect. Warm, though, and the hunt was warm work. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and without thinking he wiped at it with the back of his hand. An uneasy silence fell suddenly over his companions. He didn’t need to ask what troubled them; he felt the bloody mark smeared across his forehead.
    “It’s nothing. Wipe your face.” Yesugei handed him a scarf and reached to take it back when he had wiped the red streak from his brow.
    My tether line , Mergen-Khan thought of his general, who accepted the wonders he had seen without letting them trouble his world. Since Otchigin had died, and then Chimbai-Khan, Mergen had had no friend as sure, no counselor as honest as the chieftain Yesugei. Blood was just blood. Men got it on themselves when hunting. It meant nothing, certainly pointed to no guilt on his part. He’d loved his brother and had no desire for his position.
    They all knew that Chimbai-Khan had died of a snake’s venomous bite. Fewer knew the snake for Chimbai’s second wife, the emerald green bamboo snake demon, but no part of the tale laid any blame on Mergen. Still, he would not return the soiled scarf but tucked it into his own clothes rather than deflect the omen onto his general.
    “Isn’t that the young Prince Tayyichiut?” One of his guardsmen pointed toward a minor tent as they came onto the wide avenue leading to the ger-tent palace gleaming in the distance.
    “The heir has turned to hunting rabbit,” Mergen’s guardsman pointed out in jest.
    With his attention drawn to the modest tent decorated in the raven totem, the khan saw where his heir’s hunt had taken him. Prince Tayyichiut had slowed his horse, his eyes fixed on a girl. She had high cheekbones and