The Mongoliad: Book Three

by Neal Stephenson

  However, small raiding parties began to whittle down the Livonian ranks. These guerilla-style attacks were successful for two reasons: the islanders were intimately familiar with the local terrain; and, given the relatively wild nature of the landscape, a number of men used to such conditions proved to be exceptionally useful. They wore no insignia that could connect them to Týrshammar, of course, and in the end, their presence was overshadowed by the exploits of a single man. A hunter, who was neither one of the Shield-Brethren nor a native of the island. His prowess and zeal were so great that his exploits were already immortalized in song and drunken tale-telling before the last Livonian had fled the island.

  The hunter’s name was Finn, and he never spoke of why he had devoted himself to the islanders’ cause, and Feronantus never asked. When the Shield-Brethren longboat returned to Týrshammer, Finn had been seated on the oar bench with the other men. He pulled an oar as an equal, stayed for a fortnight at the Rock as a guest, and then vanished one foggy night.

  When Feronantus and the rest of the Shield-Brethren landed at Stralsund to come to Legnica, Finn had been waiting for them. Without a word, he had joined the company as if no time had passed.

  “You always leave out the best parts,” Yasper groaned when Feronantus finished his story. “Who was the woman?”

  Eleázar lowered the satchel of arkhi. “What woman?” he asked, wondering what part of the story he had missed.

  “The whole reason he was on Saaremaa in the first place.” Yasper smacked his forehead with one hand. “You don’t think he was up there because the hunting was good!”

  Cnán glanced at Feronantus, who met her gaze briefly, his lined face giving nothing away. Then he leaned back, and the firelight no longer reached his eyes.

  “It’s not always about a woman, Yasper,” Raphael observed as he returned to the circle, Percival not far behind him.

  “Is that so?” Yasper retorted, making a big show of leaning forward and glancing in Vera’s direction. He had drunk more arkhi than the rest of them, and even though he wasn’t standing, he nearly toppled over. Eleázar reached out a large hand to steady the slight alchemist. When Yasper had recovered, Eleázar shoved him, knocking the Dutchman sprawling on his ass.

  “Excuse the wretch,” Eleázar said to the circle at large. “His tongue has come loose in his head. Hopefully, he’ll get it tightened before he joins us again.”

  From his supine position, Yasper raised a hand and made a rude gesture in the Spaniard’s general direction. The company laughed, forgiving the Dutchman’s momentary enthusiasm; and as Raphael and Percival sat back down, Cnán caught the glance that went back and forth between Raphael and Vera.

  Vera noticed her watching, and suddenly embarrassed to have been caught spying on a private exchange, Cnán leaped to her feet. Waving everyone to silence, she launched into her own story about Finn. She was flustered at first, stumbling over the tale, but after a few seconds, she stopped thinking about Vera and Raphael—and Percival too; how had he managed to get in her thoughts like that?—and sank into her role as bard.

  It was a simple story. One that had little room for embellishment the way Yasper would have told it, and none of the romantic gravitas of Feronantus’s, but it was her story. She prided herself on her woodcraft: on her ability to read the trails; to know where water and fruit-bearing plants could be found; to move so silently through the woods that the birds never betrayed her position with warning calls to another. Yet, compared to Finn, she was a large cow, blundering through the heavy brush.

  No matter how far she ranged ahead or behind the company during their journey, she invariably found sign that Finn had already been there. At first, she thought he was clumsy in how he hid his passage, and then she allowed herself to think she was actually sharp-eyed enough to notice the tiny marks of the hunter’s trail. When they had been traveling in the forests of Poland and Rus, she would find tufts of hair from the pelts he wore caught on the unruly bark of the black alders. She would find the occasional boot print—usually only a partial print, at that—on boggy ground. His marks, tiny chips cut out of tree bark high above ground, indicated the presence of water, wildlife, and possible ambush sites; over time, she deciphered them all.

  “I thought I was being clever,” she admitted to the company, “but I was only learning to see the signs Finn was leaving for me. I know he understood Latin better than he ever admitted, but out in the woods, it didn’t matter. He told me everything I needed to know without saying a word.”

  One day, a few weeks after they had left Legnica, she had spotted Finn near a tiny stream and had decided to shadow him. Moving as carefully as she knew how, she tried to keep the wary hunter in sight. Several times she thought she had lost him, only to have him reappear in a different direction from where she had thought he had been traveling. After a few hours of this cat-and-mouse game, she realized he knew she was behind him. He had known all along, and when he vanished again, she gave up, feeling very foolish for having indulged in such a whimsical distraction.

  When she turned around, Finn jumped back. He had been standing right behind her. Grinning wildly, he had scampered off as she had chased him, only to vanish in thick woods again. “He was a ghost,” she said. “I would catch a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye, but when I looked, he was gone. The only sign that I wasn’t imagining things was how the branches shook, as if the trees were laughing at me. They knew where he was, but they would never tell me.”

  They were smiling at her story, and she felt a warmth suffuse her that had little to do with the fire. She sat down quickly, suddenly very self-conscious, leaving her story somewhat unfinished. But she had said enough.

  Feronantus had called this gathering a kinyen, and she suddenly recalled what that meant. This was the private mess of the fully initiated members of the order. She had stood up and spoken about one of their fallen companions as an equal, and none of them had objected on the grounds that neither she nor Finn were sworn members of the order.

  They accepted her. She was part of the family now.

  As the night wore on, the Shield-Brethren honored their fallen comrades. After they spoke of Finn, they remembered Roger: his perpetual scowl, the endless supply of hand axes, knives, and other sharp implements that seemed to grow on him like fruit; his steadfastness in battle, regardless of his disgruntlement at being forced to fight. They talked of Taran as well—their eternal oplo—who, even in death, still reminded them of their bad form when holding a sword, of how often they failed to close the line, and how they consistently neglected to ready themselves for their next opponent as their first was still dying. Even Istvan joined in, though his tales were intermittently interrupted by disjointed conversations held with phantoms only he could see. After awhile, the others would take these asides as opportunities to pass the arkhi or to wander off to relieve themselves, confident they would miss little of the Hungarian’s story.

  Feronantus, however, listened intently to Istvan’s ramblings.

  What secrets do you hope to hear? Raphael wondered, his curiosity aroused. His interest lay, partially, in having something to distract him from Percival’s confession, but their leader’s enigmatic relationship with the Hungarian had always puzzled the others. His eyes half-closed, Raphael watched Feronantus, trying to read something in the older man’s features.

  Life on Týrshammar had changed the elder knight. The wind and rain of the north left their mark on a man’s features, but Feronantus had been more than weathered by his exile. His face had become like rough stone, making it very difficult to ascertain his thoughts and emotions.

  One of the failings of the Shield-Brethren’s hidden fortress was its very inaccessibility; too often, in the absence of real news, the boys of Petraathen would turn to embellishing stories of older members of the order to entertain themselves. It was a habit that he was not entirely free of himself. The story of the Electi’s displeasure with Feronantus and his exile was one of the more widely whispe
red tales.

  Raphael had heard enough legends and tall tales in his travels to know that each contained a kernel of truth. In the case of stories about Feronantus, the reoccurring motif was that the Master of the Rock was a strategist of unparalleled depth.

  Istvan was staring up at the sky again, babbling to one of his recurring ghosts, and this digression had become lengthy enough that the others seemed less inclined to wait him out. Yasper and Eleázar were bickering about who should get the last dregs of the arkhi, playing up their mock outrage to their captive audience, and no one paid much attention to the Hungarian’s mutterings.

  Except Feronantus, who was unmoved by the theatrics of the Spaniard and Dutchman.

  Raphael leaned forward, his eyes on the bickering pair, but straining to hear what Istvan was saying.

  “... can’t go to the sea... can’t see the sky... yes, it hurts... the head... don’t let it look at me... I don’t care about your pain... I didn’t—no, it wasn’t my fault... there is no—no, let me go... I didn’t want... I didn’t!... who cut him down? Who did it? Who cut it down?” Istvan shuddered suddenly, his legs bouncing against the ground. “The staff,” he growled, “Where is the All-Father’s staff? She lost it, didn’t she?... When her favorite son... I don’t know... no... no, no, no—” He shook his head. “Not my fault that they lost it. Not my—I don’t want... so many horses... don’t let it look—”

  His voice was getting louder now, and his motions were more agitated. “The bitch lost it,” he said. “It’s not my fault. I never—fuck you! I will cut off your balls. The crows will eat your guts. Whoreson. Turd-eating cur. Stop looking at me!”

  This last was delivered to the company as Istvan leaped to his feet—his eyes wild, his face straining and purpled with rage. His chest heaving, he gulped in great draughts of the night air. He stared around the circle, and whatever haze had obscured his vision gradually cleared. His mouth snapped shut, and he scuffed sand at the fire before he stalked off into the darkness.

  Raphael cleared his throat. “That was my fault,” he apologized. “I was the one who was staring.”

  “You do that a lot,” Cnán offered, giving his polite lie some credence.

  Yasper snorted with laughter. “Who wouldn’t?” he asked. “That horse-lover is crazy.”

  “Perhaps he has cause,” Raphael mused. His eyes strayed to Feronantus, who was staring at the fire as if nothing had happened.

  You know who he was talking to, don’t you? he silently asked the old knight.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Different Worlds

  Afterward they lay together in each other’s arms. Gansukh’s hands, dry and rough as the leather they handled, gently abraded her smooth skin as they brushed over it. That porcelain pale surface had yielded gently in his grasp and the warm pulse beneath traveled from her heart to his fingertips, the rhythms of her body ebbing and flowing, rising and falling. She touched her head to his tanned chest and her breath fell upon him like spring wind, warm with the promise of life. Outside the ger the watch fires still burned, and they made the walls of the ger glow. Her hair was sleek as a midnight stream. Under the thick fur blanket her hand clasped his, and he felt how tender it was, how untouched by work or war.

  She was of a different world, a soft world, and here she was in his harsh land. It was shaping her as surely as wind and rain carved the rock. There was the faintest ochre tinge to her shoulders where the sun had begun to tan her as it did him. There was a callus on her finger, just between the knuckles, where the bowstring was held. This hand once had never touched a weapon, this heart once believed violence unthinkable. Now his world had marred her.

  And her world had affected him too. She brought him alien customs and manners, philosophy, polite civilization. The ways of the Mongols were ancient, customs passed down through seasons beyond count: births in the spring; nomadic grazing throughout the summer months; harvesting during the fall; surviving through the cold winters. It was an endless hardship, but it was what made a man a Mongol. These men now, who swaddled themselves in silk, sat on jeweled thrones, and never lifted a hand to tend livestock, what were they?

  “What do you think will become of the empire?” he asked Lian.

  She raised herself up on her arms, hair sliding down perfect shoulders. “You’d ask about history at a time like this?”

  “I wasn’t asking about history. I was asking about the future.”

  She favored him with a smile as she stretched out a hand for her robe, discarded so frantically some time ago. “History is the future. Its cycles repeat themselves like the seasons.”

  “You are always teaching me,” Gansukh grumbled, running his hand down her exposed back. He took delight in how she shivered at his touch. “So what does history have to say?”

  Lian elegantly slid her arm into the sleeve of her robe. “Every empire decays, in time. They become old and corrupt, and fall apart, or they become soft and complacent, and are conquered by the young and ambitious.”

  “Will the Mongol Empire suffer the same fate?” he asked.

  She paused, the sleeve of her robe pulled halfway up her arm, and gave him a raised eyebrow. It was a look she had given him many times during his studies, an expression that said, This question is not mine to answer.

  “I think...” he sighed, and lay back to stare at the ceiling of his ger. “It has already begun. The Khagan carries a great sadness within him, and the drink only deepens it. These—” He shook his head. It wasn’t the fights between the foreigners that bothered him. It was... everything they represented. They were not fights for survival or for the glory of the empire. They existed for purely base, selfish reasons: the fighters were there to entertain the Khagan; the Khagan was there to vicariously feel the joy of battle.

  “What if he cannot rid himself of his sickness?” he asked, more of himself than of her. “It festers, like an arrow wound that is not properly dressed. The skin may grow back, but the head of the arrow is still inside the body. Eventually, the rot will kill him, and when he dies, the empire will fall as well.” He pointed at the thick pole rising in the center of his tent. “Take that down, and the whole ger collapses,” he said.

  “And yet you do not abandon him,” she said as she slid her other arm into her robe. “You still see something worth saving in him.”

  “I do,” he said. “I must, because—” He stopped, unwilling to give voice to what lay in his heart. He listened to the whisper of silk as Lian tied her robe. Was she getting ready to leave?

  “What if he does heal himself? What happens when the empire spreads across the world, from sea to sea?” He broke the near silence with his questions. Not because he thought she might know the answers, but because he didn’t want unspoken question to become true. “What will we become when there are no more lands to conquer? Will we become civilized, provincial administrators of our new lands? Instead of feeling the wind and rain on our faces, we will throw on more layers of silk and fur and hide inside our new fortresses. Instead of counting horses, we will tabulate numbers on our abaci. We will not chase the seasons across the steppes. We will stay in one place all year, and be neither Mongols nor Chinese. We will be...” What? he wondered. What will we become?

  “But what of the people you rule?” Lian said as she knelt beside him, her hair hanging down across her robe and jacket. “They will learn Mongol customs, they will bear half-Mongol children. As they change you, you change them. As I have changed you. As you have changed me.”

  Gansukh toyed with the yellow fringe on the lower edge of her jacket, contemplating asking her to take all her clothes off again.

  “How old were you when you first killed a man?” she asked.

  Gansukh frowned, annoyed at the intrusion of violence into his thoughts. “Ten,” he said.

  “So young! How did it happen?”

  “We were herding goats to pasture. My father, my uncle, and myself. Five men of the Spring Hawk Clan came down from the hills, thinking they
could take our goats. They rode noisily, trying to scare us with their numbers.”

  “Five against three. They thought they had an advantage.”

  Gansukh nodded. “They were poor shots, though. I was frightened, but my father and uncle did not flee. They calmly took up their bows, and my father admonished me to do the same. My uncle and father each killed one as I was trying to ready my bow. And then we each took one of the remaining three.” Gansukh let go of Lian’s jacket and touched the hollow of his throat. “Right here. That is where my arrow landed.”

  Lian’s eyes went to Gansukh’s throat, and she swallowed heavily.

  “Even then,” Gansukh said, “I was an excellent shot.”

  “Was it easy?” she asked.

  “If I hadn’t fired my bow, they might have killed me. As it was, we lost two goats to their arrows.” He shrugged. “The Spring Hawk Clan never challenged us again”

  “What did it feel—” She hesitated, and he watched her quietly as she struggled to ask her question. Her shoulders hunched forward and her body shivered slightly.

  “He was some distance away,” Gansukh said softly. “He fell off his horse and we left him. I never saw his face.” He reached for her hand. “The first man I killed with a blade was in Volga Bulgaria. To stare into a man’s eyes as he dies is a much different experience. Some enjoy the feeling.” He squeezed her fingers. “I did not.”

  “I’m afraid to sleep,” Lian whispered. “I’m afraid that his ghost will be there, haunting my dreams.”

  “You took a man’s life to save mine. Would you rather my ghost haunted your dreams?”

  She shook her head, and in the weak light, he saw the gleam of a tear tracking down her cheek.

  “Then you did the right thing,” he said. He tugged gently at her jacket.

  She slid down onto the bedding next to him, burying her face against his chest, and he let his arms fall around her. He held her tight and listened to the ragged sound of her breathing.