by Mark Teppo
Ferenc nodded. He pointed, on the map, to the interior of the building. “Father Rodrigo?” he said.
Ocyrhoe touched his wrist. “Maybe,” she squeezed, then shook her head. It would take far too long to explain that the Septizodium was a temple that wasn’t really a temple, just an ornamental wall on an otherwise nondescript building. Instead, she pointed to various other buildings on the map, each time signing “maybe here,” until Ferenc nodded that he understood: the priest was somewhere nearby, and they had to find him.
“Hidden door,” Ocyrhoe added, and then he understood why she had been staring at the wall when they first came here. He stood up, anxious to continue their search, but she shook her head and pulled his arm to return his attention to her crude map.
“Priest,” she said, pointing to each of the smaller buildings in turn. “Priest, priest, priest, priest, priest.”
Ferenc’s eyes popped wide open. He babbled something in his native tongue and then, grabbing her wrist, hesitatingly fingered out, “More. More. And more.” He frowned, then firmly amended, “Many. Prisoners?” Rendering a question in Rankalba was not easy. She took his point by the lifting of his brows and general plaintive expression.
Ocyrhoe nodded. “Many prisoners,” she signed. It wasn’t quite accurate, but at least it gave him a vague understanding of what they were up against. He blinked and held his hands out wide, shrugging-a universal gesture of confusion, wanting to understand, not knowing. Ocyrhoe winced. There was no time to explain to him who Senator Orsini was or that he was keeping the cardinals captive until they voted in a new Pope. Even if she could somehow find a simple way to tell him, it would not help him understand her plan to reach his companion.
Not that she really had a plan to reach Father Rodrigo. Just an idea. And probably a very feeble one.
Ferenc patted her arm to get her attention and made a brushing-aside gesture; the bevy of imprisoned priests could await explanation. “Father Rodrigo,” he said gently.
She nodded, relieved that he was willing to stay focused on the task at hand, without a lot of explanation. When he stood this time, she let him.
Ferenc patted the wall and imitated what she had been doing earlier: searching out a secret door. He glanced at her; she nodded. He began to scan the wall himself, one cheek pressed against it as he pressed the opposite hand in front of him against the stone, examining. He did this for about as long as it might take to cross through the green market at midday. Then he shook his head and stepped away from the wall.
He held his hand out, and Ocyrhoe offered her wrist. “Not here. Look other walls,” he signaled. It was slow and awkward; he lacked her fluidity in gesture and movement, but he clearly understood what had to happen. “Where look now?” he asked.
She pursed her lips and, after a moment, pointed toward two other places on the map. He sat beside her again and followed her finger. “Underground,” she signed, trying to communicate the idea that all these buildings were connected by underground tunnels.
Ferenc nodded. “Like rabbits,” he signed.
She offered him a tiny smile. Perhaps it was better that he didn’t know the full extent of the task before him. He had a simple determination about him. It wasn’t that he was feeble or slow minded, but that he didn’t worry about anything else.
She led him out of the alley, back into the beating heat, and into another alley on the far side of the main road. She was sure it was from one of these two alleys that Fieschi must have escaped the maze of rooms and tunnels, but the actual egress remained a mystery.
Ferenc’s patience, she realized, was exactly the sort of trait required to find a hidden door in a featureless stone wall. The cracks, even under her careful prodding, would have seemed to be nothing but cracks to her. Ferenc’s hand somehow recognized them as something else. He pushed in one spot; nothing happened. He moved half a pace to his left and pushed another spot.
Suddenly, and with an eerie silence, an entire arm’s-width slab of the wall moved, pivoting under his touch; the musty smell of subterranean air hit her nose.
Some part of Rodrigo knew he had fallen into a nightmare again, that he had slipped away from the real world. He knew there was no hope in trying to run from what was to come, even though it was worse to relive it, over and over again, knowing what would come, than to have lived through it the first time. He knew he had to suffer the nightmare. That was part of his trial, part of his burden.
He sat on the mud-caked rim of an upended wagon wheel and looked out over what had been, just weeks before, a thriving village. The river had supplied fish; nearby fields had supplied corn; gardens around the farmsteads had brought in root vegetables of all sorts. Honey merchants had catered their sweet clay jars to mercenaries hired by King Bela massing on the drier margins of the muddy fields, excluded by their lowly status from Bela’s fortified camp, grumbling as they paid for food, mead, beer-grumbling more as they moved their own makeshift settlements away from the advancing river. The marshes had swarmed with biting gnats and flies, like white-hot lancets as they supped, as now they swarmed with carrion flies. Even before the battle, to Rodrigo, it seemed Hell itself held no match.
The battle had been another kind of flood, this one comprised of blood and disintegrating humanity. He could not recall all the logistics and the plans, the victorious sweep across the bridge, the later repulse and encirclement, the fleeing of selected units, followed by rains of stones, exploding pots, arrows. The screaming of the horses and men, confusion, escape, and then the endless press of the Mongols plowing into the roiling flocks of disheartened mercenaries, having already dispatched many of the main ranks of Teutonic Knights in their white riding coats emblazoned with black crosses-the flowing banners weaving back and forth through the slaughter, some ablaze, others leaning, vanishing to be trampled into the bloody muck as the standard bearers fell victim to an arrow or a saber. Mongol raiders plunging in and out, shouting and grinning and sweeping their sabers as the soldiers of Bela and Archbishop Csak tried to flee the burning, bombarded fortifications-dying by the hundreds on the ramparts, dozens of riders and horses at a time knocked over by flying, bouncing, cart-wheel-size stones. Or being caught in the fiery wash of those smoking, blazing, exploding jars that fell along with the stones.
So many dead. Vultures wheeling overhead were not the only beneficiaries. During the day, the fields of battle hosted thousands of darting, swooping swallows, feasting on the flies that, in turn, plagued both living and dead. And at night came the bats, leathery wings whispering through the fetid air, feasting on mosquitoes that had the grace to plague only the living.
Rodrigo remembered his own attempted flight as a series of vignettes, one horse after another dying beneath him of wounds or exhaustion, then on foot, wearily avoiding the clusters of fleeing knights-many having shed their armor and crosses, stumbling as fast as they could through the carnage, heading south and west, where they would loot farms and murder farmers and their families and servants in panicked desperation.
How different were the knights from the Mongols? Little different, in practice. Even before the battle, or in their brief days of victory, they had drunk deep and sallied forth from the fortress and their shifting lines of tent camps to rape villagers’ wives and daughters, even aging crones. In defeat, they returned to rape and then kill, loot and then burn, practicing the last desperation of destroying the land so that the Mongols themselves would have no benefit. The knights of the black cross had turned on their own with a ferocity that shook Rodrigo’s faith and overturned all his youthful views of righteous Crusades, Christian good, and Mongol evil.
The savagery proved, to Rodrigo, the end of human civilization. No emotion, no interaction between two living people, could ever mean anything real now; it was all a feint, a gauzy veil of deceitful civility over the true color and timbre of mankind, which was becoming unadulterated evil. There was nothing decent or good or truly Christian left under the sun. The stink of hellfire spewed up from narr
ow fissures in the earth. Even if he could have died, Hell would not have taken him; there were worse torments, and they would come seeking him.
He rose from the wagon wheel now and stumbled through the mud, retching, trying to tear away his clothes, which sickened him with their filth, but he was too weak even to manage that. The rain was torrential. If he could inhale mud, that might quench the fire of his lungs, his heart, his liver. The mud was the only simple thing left, and now even that was running with the blood of infidels and Christians alike. No, it was all the blood of infidels; there were no Christians left. He was the only Christian left at Mohi, and if he did not turn the tides of fate, he would be the only Christian left anywhere on earth.
He trudged on blindly, no idea where he was going. Despite the pain and the exhaustion, his soul was in such a panic that he needed to keep walking; he would have run, but the mud sucked at his feet and ankles.
A battlefield is never silent, even when the battle has been decided. The sounds of the dying men and horses, the cries of the carrion birds circling and then settling, and here, the sound of rain. But somehow, through all these noises, Rodrigo heard a single human voice cry out plaintively to him: “Holy man, help me.” That was all it said.
He stopped and turned automatically in the direction of the voice, as if compelled by an invisible force. Among the piles of corpses he did not see any sign of life. Oh God, there was a boy, alive. A local youth, not a soldier. He recognized him. Ferenc, that was his name. Ferenc. He was from Buda, survived as a hunter. His mother had been a wisewoman, an herbalist, a healer.
Just after the battle, two days or so ago, Rodrigo had held Ferenc back, with a strength now almost gone, and the boy had tried to fight him off, to throw himself at a group of six Mongols who were taking turns raping Ferenc’s bloodied, dying mother. Two eternal sunrises ago, Rodrigo had had the strength to wrestle with the boy and drag him away from the horror, into the shelter of some battered bushes and behind a wolf-chewed horse. Somehow Rodrigo had managed to pin the boy to the ground until the atrocities were over. The woman was dead; the attackers had moved on. Then he had allowed Ferenc to shove and kick him away, even punch him. Fallen back on the mud and filth, he had watched the boy run to his mother’s corpse.
That was the last he’d seen of Ferenc until this moment.
The boy lay faceup, pinned between a layer of mangled dead and a single Mongol. One of the corpse’s eyes stared without interest at the wheeling birds above; the other was gone, gouged out by a knife. The boy was pale and still, his breathing labored.
Rodrigo stared at him for a moment, working idly through what he could do, what he could not do, making the gray, soulless calculations of a weary, overburdened man.
It would be best for the boy, he finally decided, to die now, to escape from current and future misery. Before the gates of Heaven slammed closed against this entire generation of human beings, perhaps young Ferenc would be allowed to enter. Even if those gates slammed in his face, and he spent eternity in Purgatory, that would be infinitely better than what awaited him here on Earth.
Rodrigo closed his eyes and began to turn away. But then he heard a whisper, cool and certain. He looked over his shoulder, wondering if the boy had spoken, but no, Ferenc was simply watching him, the fingers of one hand slowly opening and closing-listless, resigned.
A sensation at once warm and chill came next, and Rodrigo reached back to feel at his cloak and shirt, wondering if blood was seeping from an unknown wound, if his spine had been pierced. No, he was sound enough-no arrow, no unexpected gash.
He turned slowly again, eyes leveling with the distant horizon, words of impossible greeting frozen on his lips.
What came next staggered him. He lurched across the field and nearly fell over another tangle of corpses. The sky blinded him. The cascade of light was without color, without depth, but not without sound: in the middle of his searing vision, that unexpected blinding brightness, millions of unvoiced words hollered and echoed through his mind, speaking of infinities, impossibilities, revealing all the truths in the forms of endlessly detailed wheels of entities, histories, implications, connections-sucking his soul up and out like whirlpools.
Rodrigo’s knees gave way, and he fell. For a time, he forgot everything and felt nothing, not the mud on his hands or knees, not the rain on his head and back, not the diminishing sounds of the battlefield. His relief was as intense as his confusion; here at last was divine rescue from all the gruesome realities around him, all the unsolvable dilemmas of his life.
Then, in the place of here and now, doors opened, and through those doors he saw vistas limned in infinite detail with grim and gorgeous details. The images rearranged and merged, and now he saw all too clearly how the world might end, all life and hope and sin and travail ground away by more spinning wheels of history, infinite clouds of implication and fiery storms of devilish conspiracy, and it was worse than anything any prophet of doom had ever uttered. He was being filled with awful, sublime, eternal thoughts and teachings-and instruction! With a horrible, paralyzing clarity, Rodrigo understood he was being forced to absorb these commands, brutally but masterfully stuffed like a sausage with all the things he needed to understand, all the places he needed to be and acts he needed to make flesh-all that he had to do.
Then the flood slowed, became a trickle again, and vanished into the mud and ash of his physical body. He forced himself to open his eyes, forced himself to stand.
The wheels became dust motes, spinning up and away into the clouds. As if in exchange, a feather dropped from the sky, wafting back and forth before him, inches from his nose. Like a child, he reached up with filthy, callused fingers to grab it, study it-but it eluded him and landed at his feet.
The feather of a buzzard, not a dove.
Terrified, relieved, he was nevertheless grieving at a great loss-the loss of that connection, those truths, like the sudden damming of a great torrent. For a moment, he had been part of the timeless. Now, part of mastery and creation.
Once again, he was just a man, just mud and ash, no longer filled with lightning and sun.
But now he had things to do, and they lay before him in reasonably clear order, all decisions made. He turned back toward the boy. Rodrigo’s eye fell again on that slowly clasping hand, the skinny body pinned forever beneath the all-seeing dead Mongol.
Rodrigo now needed human company the way he needed air to breathe. To be alone would be to remember his loss, and that he could hardly bear. Ferenc was the only soul he knew still living in Mohi.
He reached a hand toward the boy. “My salvation,” he muttered, then looked away, face racked by a pained grimace, and tried to remember that this battlefield, these corpses, the boy himself, were all part of an extended dream, that he was not actually living it but merely being reminded of it-to sharpen his heretofore blunted purpose.
If he could look more closely at those wheels again, he might comprehend. But no matter. The wheels of vultures, the wheels of hungry swallows and bats, the fluttering, chanting wheels of angelic wings…
No different. No matter.
With all the empathy and sorrow and compassion and fury in the world printed on his soul, he understood how all of this must end. He understood, with a divine-wrought clarity that he thought was reserved only for saints, what needed to happen for this worldly evil to be stopped. He shuddered at the enormity of it. He wanted to hide from his own understanding. But there was no escape; he, Father Rodrigo Bendrito, a humble priest, he was the one assigned by the Lord to end this madness. He did not want this burden-his aversion to it was emotionally violent-but he had no choice but to surrender to it.
He would take the necessary wickedness, the awfulness, the blame, and the sin on his own shoulders, attempt however miserably to follow in the footsteps of the Lord; Rodrigo’s suffering would be great, but it would be nothing compared to the suffering of Christ, and ultimately, this would all be in service to Him, whose nature Rodrigo alone now truly u
nderstood. The world was ending in fire, and soon. He knew it in his soul; it was more vivid to him than waking life: he could feel the heat, smell the scorching, hear the roar of it. The world was ending in fire, and he, and only he, was responsible for what must happen.
He could never tell anyone else about his vision. They would mock him, imprison him, torture him for a heretic. The very thought of confessing this moment shifted his nightmare away from Mohi and turned it instead to an inquisitor’s dreaded chamber of smoke and heat and screws and steel. Implements of horrific construction surrounded him: some with ropes and pulleys, some with spikes, racks and presses and nooses and chains. A robed figure with long, bony hands reached for his arm, and as the stranger’s cold flesh touched his, he screamed fiercely.
Memory and the hideous nightmare of his past merged in a shuddering rush with a higher awareness, a waking awareness of life and being. Praise God. He raised his head painfully and looked around, awake and drenched in sweat, his breath loud and raspy. A scorpion scuttled across the empty bed on the far side of the room and vanished into a crack between stone wall and stone floor. There was only one bed in this room-whose was that?
He raised his head in confusion, blinking as sweat from his scalp dripped into his eyes. Yes, he was in his own room, but in the hectic, unconscious thrash of his nightmare, he had actually dragged himself off his bed and into this cooler corner of the chamber. A wave of nausea overwhelmed him as he realized that scorpion could have been scuttling over him as he thrashed, and he would now be dying from the sting. Perhaps he had been stung, and that explained the memory of his vision. Perversely, he wanted to pull aside the plaster and stone and find that scorpion, poke it, taunt it to arch its awful dun-colored tail; death was welcome compared to the dread responsibility he’d been given by the furious, wheeling angels watching over him at Mohi.
He laid his head back on the stone floor. The scorpion was far less terrifying than the burden of his nightmare. Were there more scorpions in this room? In another? Did a scorpion’s bite always mean death? Would a scorpion attack a human on instinct, or did it need to be provoked?
