by Mark Teppo
As Cnan knew perfectly well, there would be no rest until the thing was finished. For there was nowhere to hide on the steppe, and childish tactics like running down streambeds could only delay the moment when Alchiq and his remaining threescore and seven Mongols would descend upon them in force.
Without being instructed to, she got ready to ride through the night.
What she had not expected-but, in retrospect, should have guessed-was that Feronantus would order them to seek out the main body of the jaghun and hunt it down as if it were nothing more than a wounded antelope leaving a blood trail across the steppe. Of course, it made sense. What Feronantus did always made sense in some or other insane way. The Shield-Brethren were supposed to be fleeing; the only way, then, to obtain the advantage of surprise was to turn around and attack.
It might have miscarried had the jaghun made its camp in the open. Instead, after a day and a half of hunting the Shield-Brethren across the steppe, the remaining arbans converged on a shambling market town that had grown up on the bank of a river.
The river meandered ten leagues in every direction for every one that it actually moved south. But its overall course was decidedly southbound as it flowed toward the Khazar Sea. Raphael was of the opinion that the river might be the one known as the Yaik, originating in a mountain range that might be the fabled Riphean Mountains that were spoken of by the ancient Greeks. If so, it was a boundary, and everything beyond was unknown territory-past the end of the world, as Alexander had conquered it. This detail wreaked a depressing effect on the other members of the party, who had hoped that, after so much hard traveling, they might at least have escaped, months ago, the boundaries of their known world.
In any case, the town had grown up at a place where it was possible to ford the river during the driest part of the year-which was now. Viewing it from a safe distance in the flat, golden light of the late afternoon, Raphael and Vera-huddled a bit closer together than was really called for, as far as Cnan was concerned-discussed it at some length and seemed to agree on something, which Raphael then passed on to the rest of the group.
“The place is far too small to be Saray-Juk, which is fortunate for us.”
Cnan had actually heard of Saray-Juk. “A garrison town of the Mongols, located somewhere on this same river, where it is crossed by the Silk Road,” she explained. “There, Alchiq would be able to summon as many jaghun as he pleased.”
Feronantus nodded. “Then we shall proceed as planned,” he said, “before Alchiq has had time to send messengers down to the place you named.” Wisely, he did not attempt to pronounce it. “Alchiq’s decision to make his camp in a settled place will favor us; the unfamiliar noises and smells of the town will conceal our advance.”
Our advance.
Cnan’s part in the advance was to sneak around in the dark with Yasper, who had gone ahead of them into the market town in search of Cathayan merchants. The time of year favored them. This part of the world was, as a rule, too dry for growing grain and other thirsty crops. But it seemed that some farmers and orchardists had found ways of coaxing food from the ground, perhaps along the windings of the river or in scattered dells watered by streams flowing down from the mountains that Vera claimed lay many leagues to the north. Where this was not possible, they took advantage of the infinite supply of grass to breed ponies. At any rate, this seemed to be the time of year when such people brought their produce here for sale, and so a warren of stalls and wagons had sprung up on a stretch of floodplain nearly surrounded by a loop of the river. It lay between the riverbank and the village proper, which had been prudently situated on slightly higher ground. The Mongols, having no particular interest in the river or the market, had made their camp farther yet from the riverbank, generally west and north of the village.
Yasper seemed to have spent a stimulating afternoon wandering about the makeshift market, which had attracted an assortment of outlandish-looking sorts from various parts of the continent that stretched before them on the opposing bank, as well as a few Westerners-even a Khazar or two. They had come to trade silver money and valuable goods from faraway places for the produce of the local farms, which they loaded onto river barges or oxcarts. Cnan, infiltrating the place after nightfall, smelled what was unquestionably Cathayan food being cooked and was ambushed by something like homesickness. Not a useful emotion for a Binder.
Rather later-an hour or two past midnight, she guessed-she and Yasper hiked up a gentle sandy slope toward the village, which was tiny and despicable compared to the seasonal market. In doing so, they left the savory smells of the cooking behind them. Certain odors, however, seemed to follow them wherever they went: the fruity aroma of alcohol on Yasper’s breath and a sharper tang that reminded her a bit of rotten eggs, but sharper, like pepper. The latter emanated from a capacious wicker basket filled with rustling objects-but apparently not too heavy-that Yasper kept slung over his shoulder. He patted it nervously from time to time.
The village was an oval compound of small thatch-roofed houses up on stilts, surrounded by a wooden stockade. They circumvented it, taking care not to expose themselves to the view of the Cuman standing guard at its gate, and made their way through a strip of scrub brush and tall grass to the verge of the field that Alchiq had claimed for the night’s camping place.
The Mongols’ ponies, numbering well over a hundred, had been staked out in a wide belt surrounding an inner core speckled with small campfires and the indistinct forms of Mongols lying asleep on the ground, rolled up in their blankets. Cnan had learned that there tended to be about one campfire per arban, and the rule seemed to hold true here, since there were seven such fires. Most were only smoldering since no one was awake to feed them, and the night was warm enough that their heat was not needed.
She numbered the sentries at half a dozen, and as usual in a well-ordered camp, they were all on their feet, moving about, only rarely gathering to converse.
Feronantus had said that nothing would happen until the moon’s crescent touched the western horizon. It was two fingers away from doing so, and so Cnan left Yasper to his preparations, and stole away from the camp back toward the river along the route she expected to retrace later. She had studied the way hastily before sundown, but it seemed prudent to reconnoiter it once in the dark.
North of the village, a screen of trees-the tallest they had seen in weeks-grew between the Mongols’ camp and the bank of the river. It was only ten paces in breadth, but its undergrowth was dense enough for Cnan to become lost in it for a few moments, and she made enough noise passing through to alert Eleazar, who was lurking nearby, almost completely invisible in armor that had been blackened with a mixture of grease and char.
Thinking about that overlong sword of his, Cnan did her best to simulate the sweet song of a lark, which they had chosen as a sort of password. A moment later, she heard the call echoed from the branches of a tree over her head. Her call hadn’t been convincing enough to fool a real bird; this was Vera, perched somewhere nearby, no doubt with her crossbow. R?dwulf and Rafael would be up in other trees, ensconced in shooting positions with clear views of the ground between here and the Mongols’ camp.
Having been thus announced and heralded, she passed out of the tree belt and into open, sandy ground beyond to find Feronantus and Percival, fully armed and armored, standing silently next to their horses and brooding over the river, which ran shallow, and hence rather noisily, through a channel about twenty paces away. This was not its main branch. It divided around a long, slender island, a sandbar that had been colonized and reinforced by leggy trees that thrust from the water and sand like bristles in a brush. The fork they looked over now was the inferior branch, easily forded this time of year. On the opposite side of the little island, it ran deeper. Much of its breadth was suitable for wading, but the middle stretch would require swimming or a boat. A boat ought to be drawn up on that shore. Feronantus had paid for it and offered to pay the same amount again after the boatman delivered them to the
far bank-to Asia.
“What news, Vaetha?” asked Feronantus, using the false name that Cnan had given him the first time they had met-this had become a perverse, affectionate habit.
“None,” she said. “Yet.”
“Where does the moon stand?”
“One finger to go.”
“Yasper found what he wanted?”
“The market seems to have satisfied him in many ways.”
Feronantus enjoyed this, but Percival threw her a wounded look.
“One day, your skills as an observer will get you into trouble,” Feronantus said.”
“If this is not trouble,” Cnan returned, “then what is?”
Feronantus considered it, then shrugged. “It is what we do.”
“Attacking sleeping, unarmed men?”
“This undertaking is difficult enough to begin with,” Feronantus said. “You yourself have told us many times that it is nothing more than a slow form of suicide. If we were to forgo the use of stealth and surprise, and restrict ourselves to frontal assaults in broad daylight…” He shook his head. “They will all be awake soon enough,” he said, “and making them so is your responsibility; if you are so concerned with making it a fair fight, then go and do your job.”
With a parting glance at Percival-who declined to meet her eye-she turned back into the belt of woods and slipped through it as quietly as she could. Emerging from its western side, she got a clear view of the moon, just now touching the horizon, and felt shame for being late, followed by annoyance that these men had the power to make her feel shame.
The breeze was light, but unquestionably out of the west, and this told her where to find Yasper-near the eastern edge of the broad oval where the Mongols had staked out their ponies. Downwind, in other words, so that the ponies would not scent him and whinny in alarm. He was expecting her, glancing back nervously in her direction as she scurried among the moon shadows of shrubs and low trees. As she drew closer, her nose detected a new stink: Yasper had put fire to something that was smoldering rather than burning, and spinning out a long braided thread of smoke.
As she crouched next to him, he gripped her upper arm and pointed toward the Mongols’ camp. It was difficult to see much, given that it was dark and that she was peering through numerous ponies. Some of these had lain down so that they could sleep deeply, while others dozed standing up. But her eye was drawn by a flickering in the nearest of the campfires. This, she realized, was caused by the movement of at least one person who was on his feet and stealing toward it. Either Finn or Istvan.
Yasper began huffing and puffing on a twist of some fibrous material, causing the feeble wax to glow bright orange. He was working with a punk that burned slowly once lit. As she watched, he touched another punk to it and blew some more, igniting the second one, which he handed to Cnan. He then set his punk on the ground at a safe remove from his basket, into which he reached with both hands and pulled out a stack of flat packages wrapped in paper. This occasioned a lot of rustling and drew the attention of a nearby pony, but Yasper did not seem to care. He handed the packages to Cnan. “Remember, wait until you hear me-what I’ll do,” he whispered and then stood up in the moonlight and began to walk openly among the ponies, bending from time to time to sever a rope with a knife. This created minor commotion among the horses, which swung about and pawed the ground, snorting, but none bolted.
As Yasper ambled along, he began to hum an aimless sort of tune and then to sing in the slurred diction of the profoundly drunk. This drew the attention of one, and then another, of the Mongol sentries, who converged on him briskly, telling him to get lost. Yasper called back to them in an obsequious, apologetic tone, speaking in his native tongue, a Germanic dialect. More horses began to wake up and clamber to their feet. Now there was whinnying. It all sounded incredibly loud to Cnan, and she reckoned that it must have grabbed the attention of all of the sentries in the Mongol camp, which, after all, was not that large.
Consequently, when some of the formerly sleeping Mongols began to cry out in agony, terror, or rage, the sentries’ response was not as purposeful as it might have been. She saw one of the sentries running toward that sound, only to double over with an arrow in his belly, and reckoned that Istvan must have sheathed his bloody dagger and gotten out his bow. Depending on how much time Finn and Istvan had had to accomplish their task, they might have wiped out an entire arban-and their plan, quite specifically, had been to focus all of their attentions on one arban rather than spread the pain around.
By now, it was obvious that whatever was happening back in the camp was much more important than ejecting a wandering nocturnal drunk, and so the sentries who had been converging on Yasper faltered and turned their backs on him. He took advantage of this to wheel about and slip away. A noise happened, shockingly loud. Soon, ten more-and then a hundred.
Cnan had spent enough time among Cathayans to know what firecrackers sounded like, and so she would have recognized the sound even if she hadn’t spent the whole day preparing for this moment. But the first time she had heard one, as a young girl, she had been stunned by the intensity of the noise-like nothing she had experienced in her life-and had been frozen in bewilderment for several moments. Now, during the interval when she hoped that every Mongol in the camp was in the same condition, she touched the coal at the end of her punk to the paper fuse projecting from one of Yasper’s packages, then threw it into the midst of the horses. As soon as the fuse began to spark and burn, she jumped back and ran, lighted another fuse, and hurled a second packet just as the first began a string of detonations.
The amount of chaos in this place now seemed well beyond anything that they could have hoped for. The few horses that Yasper had had time to cut loose veered to and fro across the camp, starting at each new burst of explosions. Others strained at their lead ropes, some managing to pull their stakes from the ground and gallop off for the wild steppes. Other ponies that were free tripped over the taut ropes of ones still tied. Mongols rolled up to their feet, stumbling over blankets, groping for weapons, converging on the place where Finn and Istvan had been at work.
Still, Cnan felt it would be bad form to return with unused firecrackers, and so she lit the last two packets at the same time and threw them in opposite directions, even while backing away from the scene and toward the shelter of the tree line. Her instinct was simply to turn and run, but she had learned it was sometimes better to know what was chasing you. What she saw, therefore, was Finn and Istvan making a fighting retreat from the camp, pursued by several Mongols who’d had the time and the presence of mind to arm themselves. The melee was eclipsed for a moment by a black shape, impossible to make out in the moonlight. But Cnan understood that Eleazar had moved out of the woods and positioned himself so that Finn and Istvan would lead their pursuers directly toward him. The long blade of his sword glinted like a line of sparks with the flashing bursts of firecrackers. Cnan had seen before what the weapon could do against lightly armed Mongols, and so she did now finally turn her back and make for the shelter of the trees, hoping that the archers would recognize her as a friend.
She reached the tree line without collecting any arrows or crossbow bolts and then could not resist the urge to turn back and look. What she saw, as best as she could make out, was a triangular formation with Eleazar at its apex, facing directly a growing Mongol onslaught, like the prow of a ship beating upstream. Arrayed behind him, protecting his flanks and rear, were Istvan, shooting arrows from a range so close that he could hardly miss, and Finn, wielding his lance. Both kept a wary distance from the blade of Eleazar’s sword, which was describing huge looping arcs; its momentum was too great to be stopped, and so each cut had to be joined to the next like the inward turnings of a Chinese knot. Whenever he felt as though he had the leisure to move, he would call out to the others, who would move back several paces, take new positions, and call back to him; he would then back up until he was told to stop. In this manner, the triad made its way back toward t
he tree line at a brisk but controlled pace, soon coming within range of the three archers posted in the trees. These began to pick off Mongols who were now trying to outflank Finn and Istvan.
All that had happened thus far was apparently demoralizing enough to bring this phase of their operation to an end. Orders were being called out that Cnan translated for the others: “They’re saying, ‘Fall back into the camp,’” she told them, “‘and regroup by arban.’”
All eyes turned to the Mongol camp, which was now brightly illuminated. The Mongols seemed to have understood that darkness was not their friend, and so fuel had been heaped on the fires and was blazing up, producing, through the shadows of men and horses, a wavering, tossing pool of illuminated ground.
In the center of this, Alchiq stood up in his stirrups, bellowing commands, rallying his troops around him, gesturing. Cnan could not make out his words, but she sensed his impatience. She knew what he was telling them: This is not a bandit raid. Stop treating it as one. This is a military operation. Let us show them what we are made of.
Almost directly above her, she heard the distinctive kerwhack of a crossbow being discharged.
Alchiq’s horse reared up and fell over dead. The leader tumbled roughly to the ground. For a moment, he could not be seen as his men rushed in to surround him. Then he was up on his feet, being dusted off, his teeth gleaming in the firelight as he made some humorous remark that elicited nervous laughter from those around him.
Vera, who had fired the bolt, lowered herself from her tree perch by sliding down a rope. She landed awkwardly, still hampered by her wounds, and paused with hands on knees, breathing deeply.
“I almost had him,” she said.
