by Mark Teppo
Others, sensing that something was terribly wrong, were now calling out in alarm to their brethren farther ahead. Percival, seeing that the advantage of surprise had been lost, now bellowed out the war cry of the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae in a voice as loud and clear as the blast of a trumpet, its final syllable collapsing to a deep grunt as he hurled himself into some hapless defender. A similar cry erupted from Vera’s throat, from which Raphael guessed that the two forces had smashed together in a space up ahead that was wide enough for two or three to fight abreast.
Caroming around a slight bend in the tunnel, he came in view of a chamber, dimly illuminated by the guttering, hissing flame of a torch lying on the floor-apparently dropped by one of the Livonians. It was only a few paces ahead of him, its light partially eclipsed by the silhouette of a man, clad in maille and a helm, moving crabwise. Raphael immediately understood that this man was trying to get around behind Percival or Vera.
Raphael flexed his wrist, bringing the tip of the arming sword up, and at the same time brought his left hand across his body to grip the flat of the blade between the heel of his hand and the balls of his fingers. The technique, called half-swording, enabled finer control of the weapon’s tip, and a moment later, Raphael took full advantage of it to insert the blade beneath this Livonian’s aventail and ram it up into the base of his skull. The man’s head snapped backward, which Raphael found odd until he realized that Vera, whipping around, had backhanded the pommel of her knife into the bridge of the fellow’s nose at the same instant.
The Livonian crumpled to the floor between them, and Raphael’s eyes met Vera’s for an instant. Then they returned their attention back to the chamber, a wider space where at least three passageways came together. Raphael gathered quick impressions: Roger collecting a downward stab with his right arm and turning it into a hammerlock, bending his foe to the ground and prying the dagger from his hand in one fluid motion; Percival, having locked up another man’s sword arm, sweeping around like a compass tracing an arc while shoving his hands downward to dislocate the shoulder. A bobbing light approached from up the leftmost tunnel-other Livonians hurrying back to help their brethren. Raphael hefted his stolen sword and hurled it like a spear in that direction.
At the same moment, Percival’s foe collapsed to the ground, snuffing out the only torch in the chamber. The left tunnel went dark as well. Raphael’s thrown sword seemed to have found its mark.
“Vera! It’s me,” he called, groping through the dark until he felt her hair beneath his hand. She spun toward him and he felt a momentary apprehension that she would put her blade into his heart-but instead, she gripped his elbow, patted his chest with a strong hand, and said, “You aim well, sir.”
“I stand here,” Percival called from off to their right. But Roger’s plight they knew only from his war cry, as he went into combat with one who had, it seemed, emerged silently from the tunnel-a more formidable foe than the others, since Roger was unable to instantly dispatch him. The combat was turning into what sounded like a grappling duel, both men going to the ground, gasping and grunting as they struggled to achieve dominance. Raphael scarcely had time to wonder what sort of man could challenge Roger in that kind of fight when he felt Vera’s grip shift on his arm, and a moment later, she spun about and slammed up against his back. Other Livonians were entering the dark chamber. A voice-not one Raphael recognized-let out an unearthly shriek as Percival did something terrible to him. Perhaps warned off by that sound, other foes shied away, instinctively seeking the silence around Raphael and Vera-a quiet space, but hardly empty, as they quickly discovered.
A long, exquisite confusion followed-a shifting scrum of bodies, flick after flick of Raphael’s dagger blade, the press of Vera defending his rear as they circled around each other, the clang and spark of swords striking the roof of the cave, shouts of pain, pig-like grunts as blades struck home-finally broken by a light bursting into the chamber. Raphael and Vera looked up to see Yasper holding a torch and Finn brandishing a lance, and in the dimness behind them, Cnan darting left and right, trying to peer around their shoulders.
“They are with us,” Raphael said, laying a steadying hand on Vera’s knife arm, which was covered with blood to the elbow. He looked up into her face, fearing she might have been wounded during the struggle in the dark. She was blood-spattered but seemed unhurt and resolute. She gazed curiously at the newcomers, but Yasper and Finn were staring aghast at something on the other side of the chamber. Following their gaze, Raphael saw Percival-but there was no sign of Roger.
Percival was kneeling, intent on a body slumped on the floor, and there was no aggression in his posture. In that moment, Raphael understood whose body Percival knelt over. Roger was dead.
Raphael, unwilling for the moment to accept such a loss, turned his attention to the scene. Dead or dying Livonian knights almost covered the stony floor. One of the latter managed to push himself to his feet, but his leg gave way immediately, and he collapsed against the wall. Frantic, he tried to roll along the wall and feel his way toward the entrance of a narrow side tunnel.
For a moment, he glared at them from stark white eyes set in a bloody face. Then he toppled into the passageway, pushed himself up onto all fours, and began to crawl. “Kristaps!” he called. “Kristaps! Take me with you!”
Raphael saw now a faint gleam of firelight reflected from the walls of that passageway. Kristaps was making good his escape-leaving his dead and dying fellows behind.
They all reacted at once, and in the same way, but Finn happened to be closest and entered the tunnel first, hefting his lance onto his shoulder as if he might hurl it at the retreating Kristaps. He planted his foot on the collapsed and wounded Livonian’s back and slammed him down onto the ground, then trod up and over him.
“Finn!” Percival called. “Hold!”
Had he said it in anger, or in a voice of stern command, Finn might not have heeded him. But Percival spoke in the pleading tones of a man whose heart was breaking, and this was so shocking that it spun the hunter around. He, and all the others, gazed in astonishment at Percival’s face, which was streaming with tears.
“Were it our purpose to seek revenge,” Percival said, “none would burn for it nor pursue it more ardently than I. Perhaps I shall have it one day. But duty calls us upward into the sunlight. Even now, the Shield-Maidens may be under assault. We must go to stand by them in the defense of their hospice.”
The whole struggle had lasted but a few moments. Raphael’s impressions of it were now as dim and blurred as one of last night’s dreams. And yet, a month later, he was still unable to purge it from his mind.
For many days now, they had been riding over the steppe, surrounded by a sameness of grass and low hills, topped by swifting clouds, or by nothing but eye-draining blue sky. Raphael’s mind, seeking stimulation, rooted around in his memories, perversely hunting out those that were freshest and most troubling-the circumstances surrounding Roger’s death.
There had been no fixed boundary, no moment when they had crossed over a river or a ridge and seen the steppe stretching before them. Rather, during the weeks that they had ridden east in the company of Vera and a dozen other Shield-Maidens, the land had insensibly grown flatter, the rivers more widely spaced, the patches of forest smaller and sparser. Cultivated fields, which earlier in the journey had been packed up against one another like stones in a rubble wall, spread apart, dwindled to isolated farmsteads like islands in a sea, and then vanished altogether.
One day, it occurred to Raphael that he had not seen a farm or a forest in nearly a week, just the occasional lonely tree or dugout shack, swallowed up in grass-endless grass, creeping up over the horizon, then falling back behind them.
Out here, only the grass had a voice. Human sounds seemed to fade to whispers, and the whispers were swallowed in turn by the rustle and hiss of the grass in the steady, slight winds. The thought of months of this steady, low hiss depressed him, drove him back again and again to the
awful memories…until, in desperation, Raphael finally decided that he would listen closely to the hiss and study the voice of the grass as he might a foreign language.
He became sensitive to different varieties and listened to what they said about the weather and the soil. Closer to Kiev, where the climate had been moist enough to support farms, the wild places had been dominated by feather grass, a robust and luxuriant species that, at this time of year, was topped by silky blond fibers that purred in the wind. Mixed in with it was a good deal of wild rye, wheat, and barley-not such as could sustain human life, but enough to give Raphael an idea of how the descendants of Adam had first come to cultivate such plants and learn the art of making bread. As they went on, making their course a bit south of true east, the climate became more arid and the fur of grass became mangy, with patches of bare earth showing through. The grass here was stunted, with finer shafts and less luxuriant tops, growing in stiff clumps instead of a carpet. Rising above these spiky tufts from place to place were fragrant shrubs, thigh high, which elicited some interest from Yasper at first: he identified them as wormwood and seemed to know something of their properties. After he had seen a thousand, then ten thousand of these go by, he no longer found them remarkable and stopped taking samples.
Vera was their guide. She had traveled in these parts before. Her order maintained old maps and manuscripts, compiled by travelers of yore, which she had studied since the nuns had first taught her to read. Many of them told tales of a great empire, the Khazars, who had once controlled this territory, holding at bay the Mahometans and Persians in the south, the Turks in the east, and the Slavs in the west, until the great Sviatoslav, at the head of an army bolstered in part by Vera’s predecessors, had broken their power. Now surprisingly little trace of them remained. Or perhaps the landscape was actually dotted with ruined cities, which Vera was taking care to avoid. Some days the only signs that humans had ever inhabited these places were the occasional kurgans, the burial mounds left by the steppe people as monuments to kings, heroes, and-to judge from the size of some of them-fallen armies. It was these, more than anything, that troubled Raphael’s mind. For the last thing they had done before riding out of the gates of Kiev had been to bury Roger in the churchyard at the top of the hill, and like all fresh graves, this one had looked like a long, low mound-a small kurgan that would, in time, sink into the earth like all the others.
When he thought of this, his hand would sometimes stray to the dagger in his belt. Not to its hilt, but to the blade, which he could feel through the leather scabbard. His fingers would trace its outlines and he would wonder whether this steel had been responsible for Roger’s death. For there had been a moment, during the fight in the dark, when Raphael had collided with someone-someone armed and moving with a purpose-and his arm had lashed out unthinkingly and driven this blade home in a body. He was sure of that. He had not struck a limb, but a torso. He could remember how the grip had twisted slightly in his hand as the blade found its way between ribs. Raphael’s fist had thumped against the torso as the blade had gone in to its hilt. And that torso, he was quite certain, had not been protected by maille.
During this endless ride across the ruins of the Khazars’ empire, it happened a hundred times that, while ostensibly thinking of something else, he would glance down to find his fingers tracing the outline of that blade and realize that some part of his mind was reliving the fight in the tunnels yet again. When this happened, he would always tell himself the same thing: it meant nothing. Not all of the Livonians had worn maille. They had been accompanied by local monks, who, of course, didn’t even own maille.
Had they not been so worried that the Shield-Maidens above were being attacked, they might have stayed down there and sorted through the bodies, and Raphael would have found one, unarmored, with a small but fatal dagger wound in the ribs. But it had not happened that way. They had rushed up through the cellars of the priory to find nothing amiss and Feronantus and the other members of the party awaiting their return. Others had gone down later to retrieve the bodies. The thought that he might have slain Roger in the dark had not fully entered Raphael’s mind until late that night, when he’d seen it in a nightmare, and by that point, all of the corpses had been put under the ground except for that of Roger, who was allowed to lie in state in the church while they prepared a proper burial. Raphael had succumbed to what he freely admitted was a species of moral cowardice: he had not inspected the body, not looked for the wound that had done his friend in, because he was afraid of what he would find. The image of that hypothetical dagger wound was now burnt into his mind like a stigma.
8
Naked Upon the Steppe
Nothing but a vast emptiness, as if he lay naked on the steppes and the stars had all gone out…
Ogedei sat up with a gasp and then immediately fell onto his side, retching and puking. His head was caught in the grip of a horrid demon, squeezing his brain like it was wringing juice from a piece of fruit. His skin was hard and brittle over bones that seemed to smolder. Breathing was both painful and thrilling, as if he were stealing each inhalation, past the number he had been allotted for his life. He gasped and spat, trying to rid himself of the sour-tasting bile on the back of his tongue. His cheeks ached, and his vision was filled with dancing motes.
“You’re awake.” A voice from Heaven, proclaiming a great truth that he now had to live up to. Ogedei managed a guttural groan and rolled onto his back, fighting a wave of nausea that threatened to send him to the edge of the bed again.
“I have died,” Ogedei whispered.
“Not quite,” the voice replied. “Though, for a while, I was not certain you would ever wake.”
Ogedei turned his head slightly and peered around for the source of the voice. The speaker had admitted uncertainty, a lack of all-seeing knowledge. The voice could not be divine in origin; it came from a man’s throat.
He lay in a ger, the air around him heavy with smoke. A censer hung from the ceiling, seeping a hazy fog from a smoldering patch of herbs. The fog made the air fragrant and pleasing, but harder to breathe. Other braziers glowed, dull red splotches that cast dull shadows on the rough hide of the ger walls.
Sitting on a low stool near his bed was the young whelp of Chagatai’s.
Ogedei’s eyes drooped, suddenly heavy, and with a great effort, he forced them open again, forced himself to focus on the face of Gansukh.
“Where am I?” he demanded.
Gansukh roused himself at Ogedei’s question, sitting more upright. “My Khan,” he said, “you were not yourself last night. I had to escort you away…to someplace safe. Where you would not be disturbed. While you recovered from the-”
Ogedei squeezed his eyes shut and winced as sharp jabs of pain lanced back through his head. He dimly recalled a dancer-no, he had been the one dancing-and let out a long sigh as he realized there could be any number of indignities that Gansukh was not telling him.
“My Khan…” Gansukh tentatively broke the silence. “The path you have chosen for yourself. It goes nowhere. It-”
Ogedei smacked his hand against the bed. “You dare to lecture me?” His mouth moved uncontrollably, trying to swallow away the acrid taste of his saliva.
Gansukh said nothing, but in the ruddy light of the ger, the dark bruise on his face said enough.
Ogedei fumbled for another stinging accusation, but all he could think of was I’m grateful. Someone had come to his aid; someone had given him shelter and succor. Boroghul, he thought. He was seventeen again, back at Khalakhaljid Sands, lost and dying. “I made a spectacle of myself in front of the entire palace, didn’t I?”
Gansukh shrugged.
“You are right, young pony,” he sighed. “What path is this that I am on? This is not the road my father saw for me. This is not the path of the Empire.” He held his hands over his face and tried very hard to hold back the tears. “I’ve been so weak, haven’t I? I’ve been lost for so long.”
“The hardest thing,�
�� Gansukh said, “is to admit you’re lost.”
“No,” said Ogedei, lowering his hands. “It is harder to find your way back.”
The ger belonged to a nameless shaman. As the old man mumbled and shook a deerskin rattle, Gansukh explained that he couldn’t have taken the Khagan to either of their chambers. They had to go somewhere where no one would find them, for as long as it took for Ogedei’s senses to clear. At first, Ogedei had bristled at the young man’s audacity, but he soon realized Gansukh had done the right thing. If they had been found, they would have been unable to have this moment of calm clarity. Ogedei, grudgingly, realized it was exactly what he needed, and what he never would have been able to find for himself, because no one in his court would have truly listened when he asked for such privacy.
The shaman stooped slightly under the weight of his cloak, made of thick blue-dyed wool and strung all over with dangling pieces of copper, eagle feathers, scraps of pelts, and dried herbs. His face, nearly buried beneath an elaborate feathered headdress, was leathery, almost skull-like, cheekbones sharply jutting and dark eyes twinkling. Behind him, crudely carved wooden puppets of men with animal features dangled from the ceiling, their heads hanging lifelessly.
When he spoke, the shaman’s voice was hoarser than Ogedei’s. “You seek guidance,” he wheezed.
