The Mongoliad: Book One tfs-1

by Neal Stephenson

  CHAPTER 21:

  A PLEASANT STROLL

  When Kim had first met him, the man who now fought as Zugaikotsu no Yama had been hanging around the docks of Byeokrando, scraping barnacles and unloading ships for whatever coins the skippers would throw at him. Local opinion had been divided as to whether he was insane or merely an imbecile, but he was definitely Nipponese. In those days, he gave a different answer whenever asked his name, and Kim—who had picked up a few words of Nihongo by talking to traders and fishermen—had figured out that he would merely glance around and say the words for whatever object first presented itself. So on successive days he might be known as “Barnacle,” “Stray Cat,” “Cresting Wave,” or “Bucket of Fish.”

  Kim—who had been chased down to Byeokrando after the Last Stand of the Flower Knights—had found employment as a sort of constable, maintaining order along the waterfront. Even at that age, he had been tall, broad of face and shoulder, heavily bearded, and serious looking. These qualities, which intimidated most of the rough characters who hung around the docks, had only provoked the many-named Nipponese vagrant. They had had many fights. Some of these Kim had won. Kim considered this to be the normal and expected outcome, given that he was, as far as he knew, the last living embodiment of a martial tradition reaching back for over a thousand years. But it always seemed to astonish the man who would later be known as “Zug.” When Kim did lose, which was extremely remarkable as far as Kim was concerned, this outcome seemed to confirm to Zug that all was as it should be.

  It would be too much to say that Kim and the Nipponese man had become friends, but they had established a relationship of wary respect. Enough so that Kim had once insisted that the other tell him his real name. He had responded, “Shisha,” which Kim suspected, and later confirmed, meant “Dead Man” in Nihongo.

  Exasperated, Kim had looked out the window of the tavern in which they were having the conversation, saw a pair of dogs copulating in the street, and dubbed the man “Two Dogs Fucking,” later shortened to “Two Dogs.”

  In due time the Mongols had extended their control over the entire Korean peninsula. The royal court had taken ship at the docks of Byeokrando and sailed to exile on the nearby island of Ganghwa, visible only a short distance offshore, from which they meant to organize a military resistance. The Mongols had been hot on their heels, and so it had been deemed necessary to fight a delaying action to prevent the docks from being overwhelmed before the king and his court could get away. In this manner, Kim and Two Dogs had found employment in the capacity for which they were best suited: dying in a hopeless, valiant struggle against vastly superior numbers.

  Fighting back-to-back, they had killed an inordinate number of Mongols and thereby drew the attention of the young Onghwe Khan, who had ordered his men to down their arms. Through an interpreter, he had called out to the two exhausted fighters, asking them their names. “Kim Alcheon, last of the Flower Knights,” Kim had answered, which was the truth. Two Dogs, who had been quite busy with his naginata, had taken a quick look around and answered, “Zugaikotsu no Yama,” which meant “Mountain of Skulls.” The name stuck.

  Rather than having them killed on the spot, Onghwe had inducted them into his Circus of Swords, to fight in what had been their occupation ever since.

  All of which helped to explain why when Kim was made aware that Zug was going through histrionic death throes in a locked iron cage, he only rolled his eyes. It served the idiot right for having gone crazy and beheading all of those Mongols after his defeat at the hands of the Frankish knight.

  When the “death throes” extended into their third day, Kim went to visit the cage and insisted to the horrified guards that the door be unlocked and that he be allowed to venture inside.

  The situation there was really quite disgraceful. Given the nature of the circus’s operations, it was naturally equipped with a number of cages suitable for confining human beings. This was not the first time that Two Dogs had been confined in one. Normally he had the presence of mind to make use of the bucket provided. But whatever demon had taken him now had caused him to lose control of his bowels, and so there was diarrhea all over the place. Two Dogs was lying in the middle of it, trembling all over, pawing and scratching frantically at his skin. Quite understandable when one was covered in his own shit, but Kim suspected the frantic clawing was something else. He had heard stories of drunkards who, deprived of drink, had come to believe that insects or small rodents were crawling all over them.

  When questioned, the guards, somewhat gleefully, confirmed that, by express order of Onghwe Khan, Zug had been deprived of alcohol. It was clear that had they been given freedom of action, they would have inflicted far greater injury on Zug than simply taking away his liquor. So Zug’s current state pleased them, and they were in no rush to ease the Japanese man’s torment.

  Kim patiently explained to them that if Onghwe had wanted one of his favorite gladiators dead, he would have simply killed him. As that was not the order he had given, it followed that the loss of alcohol was a mere punishment. To deny Zug medical treatment might be the same as a death sentence. One of the more quick-witted guards leaped at Kim’s suggestion and saw to it that a Chinese doctor was brought in to treat the ailing patient with an extract of poppies.

  Once the drug had calmed Zug to the point where entering the cage was no longer considered to be instantly and invariably lethal, slaves were sent in to clean the place up a bit and wash the shit off of him. Thanks to these ministrations, his condition improved. Over the next few days, he was weaned from the poppies, and eventually he grew lucid enough that talking to him was not a complete waste of time.

  “We have been reduced to the condition of slaves and are no longer fit to live,” he answered to Kim’s general question about his state of health. He was speaking in the language of Korea, which he and Kim used when they did not wish to be understood by the Mongols.

  “You are only just realizing this now?” Kim asked. “Because in that case your dementia is even worse than I had supposed. Either that or you have begun to believe the stories that the Khan tells of you.”

  Two Dogs waved him off with a trembling hand. “I have known it for years,” he said, “as have you, O Flower Knight.”

  Kim had been trained to endure great pain—and had been for years—but the casual declaration of Zug’s words cut deep, and he struggled to not react visibly to what the other had just said. “The world is full of slaves,” he said carelessly, “most of whom are in a much more degraded condition than we.”

  “Some would say that they are less degraded, in that, being shackled and whipped, they are unable to delude themselves as to their true condition,” Two Dogs returned. “The events of the last few days, thrashing around in my own shit and begging on my knees to be given a swallow of wine, have left me with a very clear understanding of how things really are. And I do not care to continue living in these conditions.”

  “This is not the first time you have expressed such dismay at the state of your existence,” Kim reminded him. “Three times? Or is it four? I cannot remember. But what would you do to change things?”

  “Kill the Khan and get away from these people.”

  “Get away to where? You are an infinity of miles from your home.”

  “I don’t want to return to my home.” He struggled to sit upright and leaned toward Kim. “But I no longer want to die here. Do you?”

  Kim regarded Zug carefully. Why not? he shrugged. He’s right. My cage, while cleaner than his, is still a cage. “No,” he replied. “I do not. But how do you propose to accomplish this…this mission, though? There are only two of us, and you’re half dead and locked up in a cage.”

  “We must form an alliance with the Monks of the Red Plum Blossom.”

  Kim shrugged. “Who are these monks? Some martial order in your native country…?” Suddenly he wondered if Zug’s dementia might be subtler than he had first thought. An imaginary order of assassins…?

&
nbsp; “No, they are here. I have seen them. The Frank I fought in the arena. The man who—”

  “Who defeated you?”

  “He did not defeat me,” Two Dogs insisted. “I had my tanto in his fucking armpit. He had better armor, is all.”

  Kim did not think it was fitting to belabor a sick man, and so he allowed this to pass without comment.

  The floor of the cage was dirt. Two Dogs arose from his litter with some difficulty and then used the tip of a stick he had scavenged to scratch out a design—a five-lobed flower resting upon a sunburst design with many sharp-pointed rays. “The warrior monks who use this as their mon are different from the other Franks. I think that they are like us.”

  “Like we used to be,” Kim corrected him.

  Two Dogs waved his hand as if the distinction were trivial. “They will become like us, or be destroyed, if the Mongols are not stopped. We need to get them a message to that effect.”

  “How do you suppose this is possible, given that we have no language in common with them?”

  Two Dogs raised a quivering index finger, drawing attention to the following important point: “In the village of scum and rabble that surrounds this circus, there is a Frankish priest who has spent years among the Mongols and speaks their language nearly as well as his own.”

  “Yes,” Kim interrupted, “I know the one.”

  Zug nodded. “Go and find him and ask him to write out a message in one of the languages of Christendom and deliver it to the Monks of the Red Plum Blossom.”

  “I might not be able to trust him.”

  “Of course not. But is there someone you could trust more?”

  Kim stalked out of the cage in a state of considerable irritation. No one could make the anger rise up in his face the way Two Dogs could. He did not like being sent out on errands, but he could not defeat the riddle Two Dogs had posed to him, nor could he argue against the simple truth of all that Two Dogs had said.

  He had been told never to stray from the immediate vicinity of the Mongol compound and the arena. But Kim knew that this rule would never be enforced so long as he remained in the Khan’s good graces. He had tended to remain close to home anyway. He had been provided with a private ger that was of adequate size, clean, and comfortably furnished. Its situation in the heart of the Mongol encampment meant that it was well guarded at night so that he could sleep soundly. Food, drink, women, and massages were available to him. He did not avail himself of these quite so lavishly as Zug. Yet the mere fact that he could get them gave him little reason to wander past the camp’s defensive lines and out into the slum that had sprung up, like toadstools on a stump, around the arena during the months that the circus had been in operation.

  He now disguised himself by casting a hooded cloak over his shoulders and went out into it.

  The disguise, of course, would not fool the Mongols guarding the camp’s exit. They knew perfectly well who he was. His reasons for donning it were twofold: one, to show a decent respect for the Khan’s order that he not go out, and two, to prevent himself from being recognized immediately by the young aspirant fighters who had flocked to the arena from all over the known world when Onghwe Khan had sent out his call for combatants. This slum was in large part the monument that such men built to themselves when they tried to settle in one place. Compared to any other city it was oversupplied with adventuresome and cocksure young males, prostitutes, bladesmiths, armorers, and drinking houses. It was lacking in sanitation, cultural refinement, officers of the peace, and decent women. Those who arrived soonest and defended their turf with greatest ferocity ended up in possession of the permanent structures, which, here, were the old stone and wattle-and-daub buildings of a tiny village, burned out and gutted some months ago, now supplied with improvised roofs and doors. The slow and the weak had ended up living in shanties and lean-tos constructed from rubble that had been hauled in from the nearby ruins of Legnica, or mere tents. These had been piled up willy-nilly.

  There were no real streets, just wandering and forking paths paved with the shit of humans and beasts. Every time Kim ventured into it, it was bigger and dirtier. Every time he was reminded why he had no inclination to leave the comfort of the camp and his ger. The squalor he could tolerate; what made it truly insufferable was the young fighters who wanted to challenge him. They came to this place because they believed they knew something about fighting and imagined they would find opportunities to prove as much. What they found was an arena to which they had no hope of gaining admission, save as spectators, once a fortnight, when the Khan held his great competitions. At other times there might be preliminary bouts, used by the organizers of the circus to choose the fighters deemed worthy to appear in the next great competition. But these were by invitation only. The way to get invited was to know someone, to bribe someone, to have been noticed in battle, or to distinguish oneself in the informal fights that were staged in a few makeshift dens that had been constructed in the slum by extremely unsavory characters who knew how the system worked and how they could profit from it. It was these places more than anything else that drew in the rootless and damaged young men who believed that they had a future in the Circus of Swords.

  The last time Kim had ventured out here, there had been a few yards of open space remaining between the edge of the slum and the old temple of the Christians, which had fared surprisingly well during the initial Mongolian advance. But now the warren of tents and lean-tos was washing around the building’s foundations, with only a small clear space around its entrance so that people could go in and come out.

  When Kim went into the temple, a priest was standing at the front of its largest room with his back turned, holding a cup above his head and chanting some sort of mystic incantation. Arrayed round him in a semicircle were three other priests, all raising their empty hands as if in sympathy. Scattered around the main floor were perhaps a dozen Christians all down on their knees. Kim, of course, could make no sense whatsoever of the rite, but this suited his purposes since the man he sought, Father Pius, was one of the three lesser priests standing at the front. He was tempted to go tug on Pius’s sleeve and draw him aside, but something about the way the people in the temple were behaving gave him the idea that this would be considered impolite, and so he stood there quietly and waited until the head priest stopped chanting and began handing out food and drink to the assortment of wretches who had been kneeling and waiting. The amount of food given out seemed extremely small and scarcely worth the trouble. Moreover, the priest laid it directly onto the congregants’ tongues, apparently to make sure they didn’t grab too much of it. Kim thought that if they were a bit more generous, they would not have to husband the stuff so carefully.

  But that was neither here nor there. When the serving of the food was finished, Kim approached the one named Pius and made it known that he wished to talk to him. All of the priests gave him dirty looks, and Kim belatedly understood that the ceremony was not actually finished yet. Nevertheless, Pius—once he had seen Kim’s face in the light of a candle and recognized him—assented to break away from the rite and led Kim out a side exit into a little room in the back of the temple that was illuminated by slats of daylight shining in between charred roof planks.

  “I require your help in writing a letter to the Monks of the Red Plum Blossom,” Kim began, speaking in Mongol, “and in delivering it to the master of their order. In exchange for your assistance, I offer to give you money, or to make myself useful to you in some other way.”

  Father Pius seemed too dumbfounded by all of this to say anything in return. While waiting for the priest to collect his wits, Kim supplied a description of the sigil, or mon, that Two Dogs had earlier scratched on the floor of his cage.

  Eventually the priest began to nod. “It is not a plum blossom,” he said, “but a red rose.”

  “Very well. The Monks of the Red Rose, then,” Kim said, shrugging to indicate that he did not really care what sort of flower it was or what this order called itself
.

  But Pius would not let go of the topic. “The rose is a symbol, in the heraldry of the Franks, for the Virgin.”

  “Fine. They are celibate monks. We have them too. Or at least we have ones who claim to be celibate.”

  “All monks are celibate,” Pius said. “That is not what the rose symbolizes. It means, rather, the Virgin Mary, Mother of God.”

  A number of questions came immediately to Kim’s mind, but he forced himself not to utter them, since the conversation had already dwelled on this topic much longer than he had any use for.

  Pius was unstoppable, though. “They are the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae,” he said, switching briefly into some other language that made no sense at all to Kim, “which means, the Order of Knights of the Virgin Defender.”

  “They are defenders of virgins?”

  “No. Well, yes. Of course they defend virgins. But that’s not what it means. The Virgin Defender is a sort of manifestation of the Virgin Mary that once appeared above a battlefield, holding a shield and a lance, inspiring the founders of this order to extraordinary feats of arms.”

  “Can you get a message to them or not?”

  “Yes. By all means.” Father Pius had begun rummaging in a chest socked away in the corner of the little room. All of its furniture had been burned or looted; this chest had been put in place after the battle. As Kim now saw, it contained the stuff that Franks used to write: dried animal skin, quills, and small clay jars that, judging from the stains around their necks, contained ink. A bit of time was lost now to fussing about with this gear, trimming quills and mixing mysterious fluids into the jars to get the ink to the proper consistency. Kim could see clearly enough that this was a little show that Father Pius was putting on to remind Kim of all the trouble and expense he was going to—trouble and expense for which he would expect to be compensated later. But in due time he got himself situated on the flat lid of the chest with all in readiness: candle, ink, quill, parchment, and Father Pius himself.