The Mongoliad: Book Two

by Neal Stephenson

  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 understood. 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?

  An older voice inside him—it sounded like the Archbishop, though Rodrigo knew that it wasn’t—rebuked him. Quoniam iniquitates meae supergressae sunt caput meum. The burden of one’s sins was a heavy weight to bear. Grave gravatae, he thought, remembering the next line of the Psalm. He had come to believe, over the course of the journey to Rome, that if he delivered his message, his prophecy, to the Pope, then he himself would be relieved of it, and he would have earned a peaceful death, in the city of his youth. All he wanted was rest. Surely the furious angels would let him rest once he had turned over his fearsome message to Christ’s representative on Earth.

  But Gregory was dead, and no one had been chosen to replace him, and that required Rodrigo to remain alive, the only soul who knew the future, the only one who knew what had to happen, what had to be done. God had killed Gregory to keep Rodrigo on the hook. He should have been honored and humbled that he was singled out for this momentous job, but he felt none of those emotions. He only felt hollow, as if Rodrigo the man was steadily being devoured by the burden.

  All that remained was the burning fervor of the message.

  20

  A Simple Plan

  DURING THE NIGHT, Raphael feared that Vera—like Alena—was taking a turn for the worse. Her wounds seemed to be winning; her fever spiked, her skin grew pale and damp, and her eyes fluttered whenever she managed to come up out of a sleep very near to death itself. The change in Vera saddened Raphael greatly. He knew he should not allow himself to be so troubled by her condition. This was not the first bedside vigil he had kept, and he knew the danger of the bond that could be created between two people. Death was seldom just or predictable when it came to loved ones.

  Still, he remained, renewing candles as they guttered and died, and fading in and out of his own napping reverie, but with a hand always on her wrist and another at her forehead. To his surprise, as night merged into early dawn, there came a scuffling noise before the door of the drafty old house—then, a mouse-gentle knock. Feronantus answered and led in a group of men and women—Khazars who lived in the neighborhood. They brought in two generous bowls draped with woven cloths and containing rich broth and gruel, which Raphael gratefully accepted. Feronantus thanked them for their help and led the curious group of five back to the door, managing to persuade them through signs that it was best if Vera was not disturbed.

  Raphael found their visit remarkable. A much safer course would have been for the Khazars to turn them over to the Mongols, for Graymane’s jaghun would not have stopped at the Volga. They likely had crossed at the nearest convenient ford and even now were hunting them, or else preparing another ambush.

  Raphael fed broth in measured spoonfuls to the Shield-Maiden. Her lips opened, and by slow degrees, she consumed a third of the bowl, but when he tried some gruel, she swung her head aside and almost knocked the bowl from his hand—a sign he found encouraging. He put aside both bowls and resumed his vigil, until a thin shaft of sun through a far window struck his eye—and simultaneously, the woman stirred and spoke.

  “Graymane’s Mongols must have guessed our plan,” Vera said. With his aid, she sat up, looked around with half-focused eyes, and then motioned with a raised hand not for broth this time, he determined, but gruel. “They scouted the ground and laid their ambush well.” She ate sparingly of the pasty mixture, then turned her full attention to him. “I thought it was you. Always...”

  Feronantus, straddling a stool beside the cot, folded his arms and looked at Raphael with a slight smile.

  “It is my duty,” Raphael said, and immediately felt awkward. Both Vera and Fero
nantus knew otherwise; straightforward and direct, she possessed neither the guiles nor the protections of Raphael’s own civil manners.

  “We changed course to avoid their first patrol and rode directly into a canyon with no exit,” she continued. “We should have seen it coming, but they had already slain Sister Sofiya, our forward scout...” Her voice trailed off, and she devoted a few moments to staring dully into empty space—something she did whenever she spoke of her sisters who had fallen in battle.

  Which now meant all of them, for during the early hours of the night, the red lines creeping up Alena’s arm from her infected wound had reached her armpit and then, Raphael guessed, her heart. She had died in a series of backbreaking convulsions so terrible that Raphael knew he would replay them in nightmares for weeks to come. Lockjaw was not such a bad way to die if it affected only the muscles of the jaw; what horrified Raphael was its effect on the great sinews of the spine.

  “The details are unimportant...I cannot recite them anyway without turning this conversation into a funeral mass...and that would last the whole day long,” Vera finally said.

  Feronantus and Percival exchanged a look. Raphael knew what they were thinking: Good, the poor woman is coming around; she understands the danger and the need for haste.

  Vera took more broth and a little more gruel. Her face recovered some of its color, and her hands took up the wooden spoon so she could feed herself, but Raphael leaned in close so that she did not have to raise her voice to be heard.

  “Rather than let ourselves be cut to pieces at the Mongols’ leisure, we mounted a charge into what seemed the weakest part of their force,” she said.

  Raphael found himself wishing he could have been there to witness the foolish and beautiful glory of that charge.

  “Once we made contact,” she said, oblivious to his gaze, “we were able to cut our way through, killing perhaps a dozen. Escape to the west was impossible. They could retreat at will and shoot arrows at us. Only by confining them against the river could we fight at close quarters. So we continued making that way, losing Shield-Maidens one after another, and defeated all who stood between us and the water. It was an effective way—the only way—to inflict losses upon Mongols.

  “But they were too many. In time, it became clear we would not be able to scatter them completely. The river, then, became our only hope. We broke through their line once more and made a leapfrogging retreat to a place where trees and shrubs grew dense along the bank. Toward the end...all became confused. There were six of us, then four...” Her eyes closed. “My Shield-Maidens submitted to the sword of a sister, who then cut her own throat, rather than be harried and tormented by prancing, grimacing Mongols.”

  She lay back and stared up at the ceiling. Bowl and spoon clattered to the floor before Raphael could catch them. “At the end, it was just Alena and me, concealed in the bushes. We stripped off our armor. Darkness came, a mercy. We slipped quietly into the Volga and swam. The current carried us miles downstream before we could cross and fetched us up near a village. The adventure that brought us from there to here would make for another interesting story, but—”

  “But the only part of it that matters,” Feronantus said, “is whether you were able to cover your traces. Graymane would have crossed the river at first light yesterday.” He glanced toward a rude hole in the wall where a window had once stood. The pink light of dawn was warming to gold. The Mongols had been on this bank of the Volga for twenty-four hours. “His blood is up, and having gained the Vor, he is not the sort of man to release it until he has put us all in the ground.”

  “I would say we took reasonable precautions to cover our tracks,” Vera said, “but we had to get bandages. Those we obtained from village women going down to the river in the morning to draw water and wash clothes. And so all depends on whether Graymane is interrogating those people.”

  “We must move as soon as you are able,” Feronantus concluded.

  “I will only delay you,” Vera returned. “You must go without me.”

  “That is noble of you,” Feronantus said, “but you are assuming that the Khazars will allow you to stay.”

  Here Feronantus was alluding to developments that Vera could not have known about.

  Since the startling arrival of Vera and Alena yesterday afternoon, the behavior of the Khazars had been complicated enough to arouse Raphael’s curiosity. No people could have been more hospitable in bringing all sorts of aid and succor to the wounded Shield-Maidens. But it would be a mistake to draw too many conclusions from this alone, for these were mountain tribesmen, and such people always extended hospitality toward guests. More telling had been the behavior of the rabbi, Aaron, and the merchant, Benjamin, with whom they had been talking when Vera and Alena had arrived. Aaron seemed greatly troubled by the news that the two wounded Shield-Maidens might have led a Mongol unit directly here. Which only proved that Aaron was an intelligent man.

  No visible crack had yet appeared in his facade of hospitality, but his anxiety was obvious. To judge from the lights in the windows of his home, he had spent much of the night awake, talking to Benjamin, who, at first light, had begun making preparations to leave.

  Finding himself somewhat useless for the time being—since Vera seemed on the mend and there was nothing to do in her case but wait—Raphael excused himself from the tumbledown house and strolled through the half-abandoned village to the more modest but better-maintained structure, less than a bowshot away, where Rabbi Aaron dwelled.

  Benjamin was pacing about restlessly in the stable yard, keeping an eye on a pair of servants loading goods and luggage onto a short train of packhorses. Benjamin saw Raphael approaching, and guessed his intentions. But he was polite enough to begin the conversation by expressing condolences over the death of Alena and inquiring after the state of Vera’s health.

  They were speaking in the lingua franca, which Benjamin knew well. In his younger days, he had lived in Byzantium, and there had transacted a considerable amount of business with merchants from the great trading cities of Italy. Speaking it seemed to remind Benjamin of more pleasant and prosperous times, and so he and Raphael tended to use it instead of Hebrew.

  At their introduction, Raphael had assessed Benjamin as too old and fat to accompany them on such adventures. At each subsequent encounter, however, he had lowered his estimate of the Khazar’s age and finally saw that what he had at first taken for fat was just an uncommonly stocky build padded by heavy clothing. Benjamin had probably not yet reached the age of fifty. He carried himself well and was as capable as any man of undertaking the journey they now contemplated.

  Raphael badly wanted not to lose him.

  “You could be thinking,” Raphael ventured, with a nod toward the packhorses, “that the obvious attractions of doing business with us might not make up for being hunted across the steppe by a force of joyless Mongols.”

  Benjamin did not laugh—he was far too reserved and formal for that—but he did reveal a bare trace of dry amusement. “Perhaps if we knew each other better,” he said, “I would be willing to partner under such ominous circumstances. Or perhaps, if I could make any kind of sense out of your errand...I would find some way to align our interests. But neither condition pertains.”

  Before Raphael could respond, they were interrupted by the voice of Percival, rising over the wooden fence that surrounded the stable yard. He was but a few yards away.

  “Allow me to help settle both matters with a few words,” he said. A moment later, he appeared in the gate and entered the yard.

  Reacting to the annoyance on Raphael’s face, Percival continued. “I was following Cnán—not eavesdropping. But I’m afraid I’ve lost her.”

  “What is she up to?” Raphael asked, with a glance at Benjamin.

  “At the end of Vera’s narration, she slipped away.

  ” “I was unaware of that.”

  “As no doubt she intended. But I was not so distracted and happened to catch sight of her borrowing
one of our ponies.”

  “Or stealing it.”

  “No, she will return,” Percival said, with that placid confidence which alternately fascinated and infuriated Raphael.

  During the side conversation about Cnán, the Shield-Brethren had veered into Latin, and Benjamin might have understood a few words. But Benjamin was not interested in Cnán. He was far more intrigued by Percival’s first remark.

  “What did you mean,” Benjamin said, returning to the lingua franca, “when you spoke of settling both matters with a few words?”

  “In order that you should better know us and see how our interests align, it is simplest for me to tell you what we are doing,” Percival said.

  Raphael naturally assumed that Percival had come up, on the spur of the moment, with some clever stratagem. The Frank was going to tell Benjamin some plausible-sounding cock-and-bull story about their errand, innocuous enough to assuage all the Khazars’ fears.

  And so it was with a light heart and giddy expectation of quick success that Raphael now rounded up Feronantus and Rabbi Aaron and got them all together in the latter’s little house, with Percival standing before them, ready to spring his clever tale.

  As soon as Percival opened his mouth, however, Raphael saw it had been a terrible mistake. He knew this even before Percival uttered a word. He knew it because of the look on Percival’s face: the utterly open, childlike guilelessness—and that weird effulgence that surrounded him whenever he was seized by whatever angel or demon took delight in toying with him.

  “Weeks ago, I had a vision,” Percival announced, “that we should set our course for Kiev, where we would find something of inestimable value, without which our quest was doomed.”

  Benjamin shifted and threw Raphael an irritable look. His instincts were clearly telling him to run away. The packhorses were neighing restlessly in the stable yard. Yet here they were, trapped in a conversation with a Frank who suffered from supernatural visions.