by Neal Stephenson; Erik Bear; Greg Bear; Joseph Brassey; E. D. Debirmingham; Cooper Moo; Mark Teppo
Her knife, in desperation; Percival’s, in mercy.
“We are lessened by your departure,” Percival said, his voice breaking. Two companions lost, one at the hands of the enemy, one he must now release himself. Again, she had seen this last rite many times across the years and across the miles. Animals so grievously hurt that it was a mercy to put them down rather than leave them to suffer and die slowly.
But never before had it been like this. The truth of that was etched in the way he held the blade and in the quaver of his eternally calm voice. Cnán turned away and tightly closed her eyes. She couldn’t bear to look.
There came a spasmodic pounding of hooves, a brief, rustling flurry of violent shuddering, and then stillness.
The trembling and heaving of the Mongol she had killed flashed before Cnán’s closed eyes. She clenched her teeth. When she forced herself to look again, she found Percival standing alongside the unmoving animal. He turned toward her slowly.
In the shadows of the woods beyond, she also saw Raphael, arms crossed, watching with that analytical expression she sometimes found so irritating. How could the physician not be moved?
Percival, however, saw only Cnán. He opened his mouth to speak. His cheeks were slick with tears. But he said nothing. He faltered. Slowly his body turned sideways to her, and his eyes rose up in his head until only the whites showed. He sagged to both knees and dropped his chin to his chest. He might have been sleeping, but his head moved slowly from side to side, as if he were listening to secret music. Then, impossibly, he smiled, as if at the sight of a long-absent friend. He raised his eyes to the branches and sky overhead and stretched out both arms, palms upward, as if catching a warm rain. From the former rigidity of grief, she saw the knight’s body loosen, and then he jerked once, twice, at some inner paroxysm.
He began to murmur in Latin, and she strained to hear his words. “Ego audio Domine. Animus humilis igitur sub ptoenti manu Dei est. Mundus sum ego, et absque delicto immaculatus. Verbum vester in me caro et ferrum erit.”
The glow upon his face—impossible in the morning light, in the woods! He looked around, seeing nothing earthly, but beaming like a small child, and the light of his expression seemed to flash through the forest.
Light without shadows.
Stifling a cry, Cnán fled. Her feet carried her out of the ferns and into the open field, wonder, guilt, and memory hot on her heels. At twenty paces, she paused, stood with shoulders stiff as stone, then—she could not help herself—she turned and looked back.
Percival had not moved. Raphael, who had witnessed this moment as well, was walking away—not toward Percival, she noted—a bemused look on his sun-browned face.
Cnán ran once more, slipping through the mouse hole in the hedge wall, getting out into the large field beyond, where she could have some privacy. The old snag that she had climbed earlier was a short distance away. She ran to it, circled around to the other side where no one could see her, and sank shuddering to the tangle of roots at its base. Pressing her fingers against the ancient bark, she wept until her entire body ached, for the pain, the grief, and in the middle of grief, the unexpected, impossible beauty of Percival’s illumination.
Sometime later, chest still full and cheeks tight with dried tears, she made her way back to the camp. The voices of the Shield-Brethren, less ghostly now, seemed to be handed from tree to tree across the field before Cnán caught sight of them. Yasper’s smoke had long since faded, and the air was clear. In the aftermath of the battle, silence had given way to anger. The Shield-Brethren were at odds now, and the former battleground resounded with the din.
“Roger, stop!” The shout rose over all as the camp came back in view. Raphael had interposed himself between the Norman and Istvan. The former held a drawn hatchet and arming sword.
“Stand aside,” Roger said. “He’ll be the death of us all, one by one. He doesn’t deserve your protection, much less your faith.”
“We are not barbarians,” Raphael said sternly, “to cut down one of our own when the enemy is yet near. Lower your weapons. For God’s and all our sakes, be reasonable.”
“Reasonable?” Roger snarled. “Taran is dead, and that man”—he leveled his sword in the direction of the Hungarian—“as good as drew down upon us all the Mongols who killed him. It is madness to keep him—and his insanity—in the company; reason demands he be put down before he gets us all killed. It would be a mercy to him—and to us all!”
“Enough,” Feronantus said, rising from where Taran lay. Illarion still sat on the opposite side of the body, and the two had been speaking in low voices. As she drew closer, she saw that the Brethren’s leader wore an expression between grief and grim determination. There was a calm hardness there that would brook no argument. “His foolishness has cost one life; let it not cost us more. Break camp and round up the spares we have found; we set out as soon as we have properly seen Taran to his rest.”
Roger, his weapons poised, did not move. Istvan’s hand rested on the hilt of his curved blade, his eyes set on the Norman’s with a hard glare bespeaking a ready willingness to do more violence, even to take joy in it.
The blood and dust in the Hungarian’s beard had caked to muddy black. He looked more demon than man.
Raphael remained between the two, eyes leveled steadily on Roger’s. The others waited, hardly daring to draw breath, none wishing to make the move that would provoke their brother into retaliation.
Roger broke his stance first. “So be it, then,” he said as both sword and hatchet dropped. He half bowed and stepped back, moving his attention toward Feronantus. “On your head be this, Ferhonanths. God and the Virgin save us all if this…if this…”—he cast his eyes once more on Istvan—“mad dog cannot be kept to leash. He is nothing to me—no companion, no warrior. He is a demon-ridden butcher, and I am done with him. He should be staked to a tree and left for the Mongols.”
Istvan received this imprecation with a courtly nod, his assurance unbroken, his arrogance galling to all around him—with the exception of Feronantus.
Disgusted, Roger turned on his heel and stalked away. The group slowly dropped their shoulders, shrugged them out, and then set to breaking camp.
Only Istvan seemed to notice Cnán’s arrival, though she raised her shoulder to avert his look. A demon-beleaguered man, cursed by his comrades, yet still defiant and proud. She understood nothing, clearly, about Feronantus and his intentions.
When Percival returned, they set about the finality of laying their comrade deep under foreign soil. Together, two on each side, they grasped Taran’s cloak, carried him a few steps, and lowered him into the fresh-dug grave, then wrapped him against the coming fall of dirt.
Slowly and in silence, the oplo’s comrades, eyes downcast, gathered around the grave. Feronantus spoke a quiet eulogy. Cnán understood the old Latin words well enough. She had some passing familiarity with the ways Christians buried and blessed their dead. She knew that they laid the bodies in the earth intact, in the belief that, upon the final Day of Judgment, their God would raise them up again and that any whose body was destroyed would have no vessel in which to return. It was a strange practice to her, no less so having now seen it, so unlike the burials she had witnessed in the East. Though in truth, one way of disputing the finality of death was as odd and pointless to her as the next.
Feronantus’s speech was short, but imbued with an ardent affection and sense of loss in every word. “God keep you, Taran, oplo to many, and best amongst us. The world may not remember, but we will never forget.”
Now he began to speak in a different language, one she had seldom heard before and only sparingly. Low-voiced, yet strong, he chanted rhythmically in the tongue of the Northmen who had given the fortress on the rock its name. She knew nothing of what was being chanted, but soon the others joined their leader. Something in the rhythm and the hard guttural words of the chant told Cnán that this was also an old, old ritual, perhaps older than Christianity itself—a ritua
l of which the Church they supposedly served would never approve.
When the chant was finished, all had tears in their eyes, and one by one they knelt, and each dropped a handful of earth into the grave.
It struck her then, the true meaning of the word they used to refer to him: oplo. Taran had been their friend, but for some of them, he had been more: their teacher, their confidante, their calm and patient tutor. In the way they lingered at the grave, and in the way they let their loss wash over them, she saw the first hints of uncertainty. One of the best warriors amongst them had fallen. No amount of confidence would remove the hard truth that they all faced this same fate—if not on this journey, then on another. Miles of hardship and toil, with nothing at the end but a ragged hole in the ground. What dirges would be sung would be voiced by fewer and fewer still.
Cnán watched as Feronantus quietly took Taran’s battle-scarred sword, removing the scabbard from the fallen man’s horse and affixing it to his own saddle, clasping the hilt with closed eyes and whispering a prayer.
The others finished filling the grave and built a cairn of stones over it, then pounded a cut shaft of wood, tall enough to serve as a staff, at its center. The shaft rose from the ground, already ancient looking, their pronouncement of ageless grief.
Cnán remembered Percival’s whispered words to Tonnerre. Only now was it sinking in to all of the group that, on this journey, they were all expendable—no different from horses.
“I need a drink,” Yasper said as he brought his horse in line with Raphael’s. They had been riding for several hours, traveling more south than east by Raphael’s reckoning, and the company had been lost in their own thoughts. Raphael had been reflecting on the siege of Córdoba, remembering those—both Moorish and Castilian—whom he counted as friends, and he was glad to be interrupted by the Dutchman. The litany of loss that always came on the heels of battle was the perpetual wound sustained by the survivors.
“A drink, you say,” he replied, glancing shrewdly at Yasper. “I suspect that you are not seeking permission to drink so much as to inquire if I would like to join you.”
Yasper nodded, his eyes twinkling. His hair was still stained by the smoke from his alchemical smoke pots, and Raphael smelled the acrid aroma of his chemical reagents. If it was not evident from the proliferation of pouches and pots as well as the curling spouts and narrow mouths of other arcane containers that peeked from his bulging saddlebags, then the pervasive smell that surrounded the smiling Dutchman was ample clue enough as to his profession. “Of course, Raphael. You and I have traveled together long enough that my preferences are well known to you.” He thrust a round object at Raphael.
It was a leather skin, and Raphael noted that, among the panoply of equipment burdening Yasper’s mount, there were several others just like it, each hanging from a cleverly tied loop, identical to the strap on the one in his hand. The skin—horsehide from the feel of it—was oblong, narrow at the top, much like their own water skins, and when Raphael lifted it to his lips, his nose was assaulted by the smell of the liquid within.
“This is putrid,” he said.
“That is the point, I believe,” Yasper chuckled. He motioned with his hands, indicating that Raphael should drink.
Dubiously, Raphael tried again, expecting the taste to be as foul as the smell. The liquid was thicker than he expected, though not unpleasant, and it tasted like… “Almonds,” he noted. “Where did you get it?”
“The Mongols. Each of them had a skin, as well as…” Yasper shuddered.
“What?”
“Under their saddles.” Yasper made a face and indicated Raphael should either drink again or give back the skin. “Meat, wrapped in oiled rags.”
“Raw?”
Yasper took a huge pull from the skin and nodded as he wiped his mouth. “It was,” he said, and Raphael noted there was a note of admiration mixed in with the revulsion in his voice, “the most tender meat I have ever seen. But…” He handed the skin back to Raphael.
“We are not that hungry,” Raphael said. He tried the drink again, noting that the back of his throat tingled as he swallowed.
“Not yet,” Yasper agreed. He leaned toward Raphael, lowering his voice. “But this”—he indicated the skin—“this is pretty good. Not strong enough, in my opinion.”
“Can you make it stronger?” Raphael asked.
“Probably. But I will need assistance. And some supplies.”
Raphael glanced over at Istvan, who was riding ahead and to the right of the main party. Far enough away to be out of range of simple conversation but close enough that they were aware of his presence. “We already have one member of our company who wanders off, looking for supplies. I do not think another will be tolerated.”
Yasper snorted. “Nothing as illicit as what he seeks. I can find what I need in any good-sized settlement. Provided we travel near one.”
“I hesitate to offer any hope in that matter, my friend. We are far from any settlement I would call friendly.”
Yasper took the offered skin. “I agree, and in reflecting on the matter, I have begun to wonder about this journey of ours.”
“Begun?” Raphael responded.
Yasper quirked his lips. “If, as you say, we are far from friendly lands, and as I judge, we are but a fraction of the way to our destination, what is our plan for the supplies and aid that we might require?” He drank from the skin of Mongolian liquor. “We are accustomed to long marches and sleeping under the stars, but after this morning’s…loss, a man’s mood darkens. It becomes more difficult with each passing hour to sustain his…enthusiasm. A man begins to think of a warm fire and a bed—a roof overhead, even. If only for one night.”
“Every soldier dreams of the night when he can put aside his armor and sleep without care,” Raphael said. “It is a familiar part of our burden to be denied such comforts—or any comforts.” He returned the skin bag. His words were slurring. “As you say, we have all marched to war before; these hopes and disappointments are not new.”
“True,” Yasper said. “But in the past, I have always found solace with hope of our destination, of knowing that we will—someday—reach a shining goal. If my destination is a place I have never visited, there is usually someone in my party who has, and I can persuade them to tell me tales of that place so that it becomes more real to me.”
“None of us has visited this destination,” Raphael pointed out. “We knew that when we accepted Feronantus’s call to join the company.”
Yasper laughed. “I’m not a member of your Order, remember. I volunteered.” He took one more swig from the skin and offered it back to Raphael, who held up his hand in denial, then relented and accepted another swallow. “But,” he said, all levity gone from his voice, “it has occurred to me since we buried Taran that you and the others are good soldiers. You will follow Feronantus wherever he may lead you, and that is all you need to know. But me? I fear not the repercussions of curiosity, nor of insubordination, and so I do wonder if that man knows where he is going. Where he is taking us all.”
Raphael recalled the look on Percival’s face in the woods, the serenity of knowing, and he mentally noted how cleverly Yasper had maneuvered their conversation. He knew the alchemist to be an intelligent and inquisitive man. The strange and esoteric matters that he strove to comprehend and master with his experiments were much more arcane and mystic than simply crafting smoke pots and figuring out how to distill this Mongolian liquor into something stronger. Of all the company, the Dutchman was probably as fluent in as many languages as he was himself, and he didn’t doubt the man could read and write all of them as well—even, very possibly, Arabic. If he knew the Greek physical sciences, then it followed he knew their rhetoric and philosophy as well. The man was no fool, as much as his countenance and his jangling pots and potions suggested otherwise.
Raphael nodded. “‘It is an ill plan that cannot be changed.’”
“I raise my drink to the wisdom of Publilius Syrus,
” Yasper said.
Raphael lightly kicked his horse. “And I will go inquire after our leader’s mood.” He rode ahead, leaving the Dutchman to his depleted skin of fermented drink.
Feronantus was in conversation with Cnán, the dark-skinned Binder who had proved to be an interesting addition to their company. She was not the first Binder Raphael had met. She carried herself with the same distance and arrogance that most Binders did, but over the course of the last month, he had had time to observe her. She conversed mainly with Feronantus when she was with the main party, and Raphael knew the bulk of their conversation dealt with her reports of the surrounding terrain and the route they were taking. Once or twice, she had found some excuse to talk with Percival, whose deferential responses were so off-putting to the young woman that she never stayed long in the conversation.
He knew she had seen him in the woods, watching Percival. He did not know if she understood what she had seen, but she had seen enough.
He rode up to the pair and caught Feronantus’s eye. “A moment, if you please,” he said, and then nudged his horse farther on. He kept the pace for a little while, until Feronantus joined him.
“Raphael,” the old veteran of Týrshammar said, “what is on your mind?”
“A topic on Yasper’s mind, actually,” Raphael said. “I did not have a suitable answer for him.”
Feronantus twisted in his saddle and looked back at the column of riders. “What is it that Dutchman seeks to know?”
“Our route to Karakorum.”
“I do not know that route. That is why we have brought the Binder, why we have Illarion. He knew that before we left, and nothing has changed. Our route will be revealed to us as we travel, by—”
“When?” Raphael interrupted.
Feronantus’s face darkened. “By what our scouts discover, and by the information they glean from local sources,” he said. “You know this, Raphael.”
“Of course. Nor do I doubt it. But, as you have just said, our route will be revealed. My question remains. When?”
