by Neal Stephenson; Erik Bear; Greg Bear; Joseph Brassey; E. D. Debirmingham; Cooper Moo; Mark Teppo
Following Illarion’s lead, Raphael guided his horse out of the main path to evade a cadaverous merchant’s thudding, grumbling wagon. It says much, Raphael reflected, about the tenacious nature of men that one with wares to sell would be willing to brave such a place. The profit, it seemed, was small indeed. No doubt much of the money changing hands was ultimately swept into Mongol coffers.
Between the ruins on another street, he caught sight of Feronantus and the rest of their company entering via another gate—no, on second thought, this was a breach in the wall—and heading away in the direction of the riverfront.
The craggy face of the lord of Týrshammar had taken on a more haunted look since Taran’s death, and Raphael could not blame him. The loss of their brother was a knife wound that continued to bleed even days after the blade had been withdrawn. Taran had taught several who were numbered among their greatest. His departure was a bitter draught to choke down upon waking each morning—particularly for Feronantus.
And now…another, perhaps even more unexpected disappointment had beset their leader.
“Come,” Illarion said, resuming his course in the wake of the wagon. “Pointless dawdling will draw attention.”
Illarion had made an impressive recovery, but the absence of his ear impaired his hearing on that side, and the bruising his body had taken under the planks still slowed his movements. Nevertheless, he was a better and more alert guide than Raphael had anticipated. No doubt the Ruthenian, as he looked around him, saw other days, another city—the Kiev of old, in its fabled glory.
Percival rode to Raphael’s right, and Roger guarded the rear. The Frank and the Norman made odd friends, Raphael thought, but good ones. Every true heart needed a pragmatic counterweight, and every cynic an idealist to lift his spirits. It was easy to think that Percival was naive if one had just met him, but Raphael had long ago learned that no man was easy or simple, and he had heard enough of the knight’s conversations with Taran to know that there was more to him than what first appeared. There was a reason behind every vow, a driving goal and belief behind every action.
The possibility that Percival had received divine grace—or thought he had—made the situation unusually complex, but Raphael found himself strangely untroubled by this. The brute facts of their situation, taken alone, were disheartening. Strange visions might make their way more tortuous but gave Raphael welcome respite from thinking all the time about food, warmth, and rest. In truth, epiphanic episodes fascinated him. How, after all, could something as powerful as God touch so lightly but firmly upon a human frame? Curious circumstance, indeed. Of course, God might be capable of any sort of subtlety…but why Percival? Or, for that matter, Feronantus?
As Raphael mused on these puzzlements, the quartet picked their way into the city’s interior, following paths that wound through ruined neighborhoods like the trails of wild game. Hard memories of the Siege of Damietta and other catastrophes in the Holy Land now tugged at Raphael, shouldering aside his loftier speculations about gods and men.
His horse shivered as the ascent became more demanding. He wants my complete attention here, Raphael thought, and reluctantly came back to the here and now. The priory at the top of the hill, environed by ascending slopes and tiers of toppled lane walls and burned orchards and vineyards, seemed almost to lean out over them in the wan light of the cloudy day, as if the buildings themselves kept vigil.
Though they were now in the heart of the city, the hillside that rose between them and the foundations of the priory had a wide-open, rural character. Or at least that was the way it seemed to Raphael, accustomed to the densely built cities of the Levant. Blessed with vast lands, the Ruthenians had learned to build in a more expansive style, enclosing broad plots of open ground with rambling fences, growing vegetables and raising livestock close to where they would be consumed. Closer to the summit, the fences were replaced by stone walls, which grew higher and thicker as they circumscribed narrower and narrower rings of territory around the summit. The ones at the top bore the unmistakable look of fortress walls and seemed to have suffered accordingly during the siege.
But they would have to wind their way up several switch-backs and pass through many stiles and gates before they need concern themselves with actual fortifications. The first part of the ascent felt, to Raphael the urbanite, more like a ride through a rural estate than passage through a city.
Riding through the torn-up and burnt remnants of a small vineyard, they encountered a single old man in filthy rags, seemingly the only remaining inhabitant of these heights. He sat in the shade of a small, open-sided, decrepit prayer station, clutching a stem of tiny, moldering grapes and looking blankly at the outer world.
Illarion stopped to address the man in the Ruthenian tongue. The old man regarded them all in silence, as if judging their solidity, their reality, then nodded to himself and replied. Even in his ignorance of the language, Raphael perceived an educated tone and bearing. The man must have once been proud and useful enough to receive some training in speech and letters—a yeoman or vassal, perhaps, who tended the vines and helped supply the priory.
The conversation ended abruptly when the stranger decided enough was enough, brushed his torn kecks, and wandered off down the hill, turning back once to look at them almost in dread.
“I told him we wished to pay a visit on those who live above,” Illarion said. “He suggested we leave. He said that they would never open their gates to us and that they would kill us like the others or die trying.” Illarion’s puzzlement at these cryptic words was so plain on his face that the others—even Percival—could not avoid breaking into shocked laughter.
“Kill us like the other what?” Roger asked. “What does the codger take us for—Mongols?”
“Brigands, perhaps,” Percival suggested, “for we have an ill-favored look about us.”
“Brigands don’t ride up to the gate and knock!” Roger returned.
“Then let us go and do just that,” said Percival, “and show them that we are not brigands, but men used to plain dealings.”
“We would seem to have little choice,” Raphael pointed out, “since we have been spotted in any case.” He nodded up toward a corner of the priory, where a lookout was peering down at them from an onion-domed cupola.
Before they had reached Kiev, Cnán had privately despaired of finding anything of worth or use within the broken walls of the city. She had witnessed the ruinous landscape left in the wake of the Mongolian army, and she knew how the devastation worked its way into the hearts of the survivors, devouring them from within until they were nothing more than hollow shells. She had armored herself against what the sight of Kiev would stir in her—memories, not altogether pleasant, of her mother—but as she and Feronantus and the rest of the party picked their way through the ruins, she was surprised to find that Kiev was not as bereft as she had anticipated.
Not only were there survivors, but they appeared to be building new lives for themselves among the ashes and ruins. Resources were scarce, clearly; one could only build so much with broken timber and shattered stone. Already the people who remained had shifted away from the center of the old Kiev to the banks of the river. The Dnieper.
It flowed all the way to the Axeinos, the Unlit Sea, a great snake winding from the north to the south across Rus. In Kiev, the river coiled around the twin hills that housed the holy buildings where Percival and the others had gone. Penitents, making a pilgrimage to hallowed ground.
Feronantus led her, Eleázar, Rædwulf, Istvan, and two horses slowly through the rubble-strewn streets of Kiev. Finn had dismounted after they had passed through the wreckage of the Golden Gate and vanished into the maze of wrecked buildings. Occasionally she would catch a glimpse of him as he scouted their route through the ruins.
Yasper had eschewed his horse as well, though he wasn’t nearly as invisible. Or as silent. They could hear him knocking over the charred vestiges of walls, tossing chunks of stone around, and even the sporadic cla
tter of metal as he rifled through the rare cache of household wares that had not been pilfered.
Cnán was surprised he was finding anything of value at all, which spoke of either the lackadaisical efforts of the survivors or the tenacious inquisitiveness of the Dutchman.
A loud crash startled her horse, and the noise was followed by a chortling yell from Yasper. He danced out from behind a wall, holding a bent and twisted vessel over his head. As she calmed her horse, Cnán stared at the object the Dutchman was carrying, trying to identify what it had been once upon a time.
“It’s perfect,” he said, in answer to the question that must have been plainly writ on her face. He lashed the oblong vessel to his saddlebags and trotted back to continue his search.
Istvan nudged his horse past Cnán, angling toward Feronantus. “He is making too much noise,” the Hungarian bristled.
Feronantus nodded in the direction they had come. “We aren’t trying to hide,” he said.
On the ridge where they had stood a few scant hours before was a single horse and rider. They were too far to make out any details of the man or animal, but to Cnán’s eye, the man seemed too large for his mount, or the horse was too small. A Mongol, she thought, and then she realized who he must be. The one who got away.
Istvan had come to the same realization, and vituperating in his native language, he reached for his bow.
“Ho, Istvan,” Rædwulf said with a smile. “Do you think he will stand still while you ride close enough to put an arrow in his chest?”
“I can track him,” Istvan snarled. “Eventually he will stop—to eat or sleep or piss, it doesn’t matter. I will put an arrow through his eye while—”
Cnán laughed in spite of the fear that had laid icy fingers on the back of her neck. “Mongols piss from horseback,” she said. “They eat and sleep there too.”
“That would explain how he kept so close to us,” Feronantus noted.
“Who?” Yasper asked, wandering up with a pair of stoppered jugs. He craned his neck to see what they were looking at. “Oh shit,” he said as he caught sight of the Mongolian tracker. With surprisingly alacrity, he leaped onto his horse, without losing grip on either jug. “What are we waiting for?” he said.
“You,” Feronantus pointed out, with a touch of dry humor. He tapped his horse lightly in the ribs, and in no particular hurry, the animal began to amble toward the river. “He’s seen us,” he remarked over his shoulder. “My guess is that he knows this area better than we do, so there is nothing to be gained by appearing fearful. The best we can hope to accomplish is to convince him this is our destination. After nightfall, when the others return, we can slip across the river and put some hard distance between us. Let us hope that will be enough.”
The route to the hilltop became more challenging. Not only because the ground was steeper, but because the path was blocked in some places by heaps of rubble that had tumbled down from damaged sections of wall. In other places, the gaps in the wall were large enough to provide new avenues for their passage, though they had to dismount and lead their horses forward gingerly over difficult footing.
During the increasingly rare stretches when the going was level and easy, Raphael looked up to see that the lookout in the tower had spread news of their coming to several others and that the defenses of the outer wall were becoming crowded with gleaming helmets and spearpoints.
“There may be more knights than monks in this house of God,” Illarion remarked.
“Some monks are knights,” Raphael pointed out, with a glance at Percival.
“You are right and wrong at the same time,” Percival said obliquely, “for what you see are not monks.”
This game of riddles was interrupted by an exclamation from Roger, who was currently leading the way. The others saw that he had stopped in his tracks to examine, from a wary distance, a form lying full length on the ground in the middle of the path.
During their travels they had crossed many battlefields. To see an actual corpse, lying on the ground fully armored, was unusual. Most armies buried the dead, or burned them, if for no other reasons than to mitigate the stink, prevent disease, and frustrate ravens and carrion dogs. Even in those unusual cases where an army marched on before accomplishing that chore, surviving locals might tend to it once the coast was clear. Any who were so degraded as to leave human bodies lying out in the open would be inclined to strip the corpses for useful or salable loot.
Strange, then, to find a fully armored knight lying dead on the ground, out in the open. That he had been dead for some little while was proved by the number of flies teeming around him. His shirt of mail, and the shape of his helmet and of his shield, identified him as a knight of Christendom—this was no Mongol. He had gone down on his belly, his shield lying flat beneath him. But his head was turned awkwardly to one side and the neck bent back. As they drew closer—though only a little closer, given the stink and the number of flies—they got a clue as to why: he had taken a single arrow through the T-slot of his helmet, right into the cheekbone below the right eye, and its nock had struck the ground as he had fallen and wrenched his head around.
Their first instinct, of course, was to look up at the top of the wall and judge the range. They were certainly within bowshot, but far enough away that the archer who had loosed this shaft must have been lucky, or exceptionally good. Several bows were visible along the top of the wall now, and distant creaking noises indicated that some of them were being drawn. Raphael’s instinct was to seek cover, but Percival reacted in the opposite manner, turning toward the defenders and holding his hands up, palms out.
“Hold!” he called. “We are knights of Christendom and no enemies of yours.”
Raphael winced at the Frank’s naïveté. Could it really be that a man of his upbringing would not know of the Fourth Crusade and the atrocities inflicted by Christian knights of the West against their brethren in Zara and Constantinople?
“Before you try our patience with any more such foolish remarks,” called back a voice—the voice, Raphael realized, of a woman, speaking in Latin, “pray satisfy your curiosity about the Christian knight who lies at your feet. Ask yourself how he ended up in that estate if he was not our enemy, and then consider the wisdom of drawing any closer to our battlements.”
Illarion and Raphael exchanged glances, both having heard the woman’s stress of the word “our.”
“Percival was right,” Roger said, “they’re not monks.” He was staring up at the woman who had been shouting at them. Her femininity was obvious, since she had removed her helmet and tucked it under her arm, but there was something in the postures and the movements of the mailed and helmeted warriors around her suggesting that the priory contained not a single man.
Raphael nodded, somewhat distantly, as he recalled an old story—lore from many centuries past, before the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae had become Christian. Their first outpost had been Petraathen, high in the mountains between the Danube and the Baltic. Their second was on the island called Týrshammar, and many were the Nordic warriors—Vikings, as some called them—who had learned the way of the sword in that place. Those Northern peoples harbored ancient tales and myths of shieldmaidens—skjalddis—which happened to mesh perfectly with the tradition of the virgin warrior that had been promulgated on the crag of Petraathen since ancient days. The women who had become Shield-Maidens at Týrshammar were few compared to the men who became Shield-Brethren, and yet some of them had been present on the Viking ships that, in the later days of the Northmen, had ranged across Rus and down the Dnieper to the Black Sea. Some of them had put down roots here in Kiev, creating a third outpost. According to rumor, they had maintained their traditions, including the peculiar habit of teaching women to fight, even across the religious schism that had later arisen between the churches of the East and the West.
No wonder Percival had wanted to come here so badly.
The Frank had responded to the Shield-Maiden’s taunt with a respectful bow
and, as directed, turned his attention to the corpse on the trail. The mystery of its lying here, unburied and unlooted, had now been solved: the Shield-Maidens had left it here as a warning. Percival took a step toward it, then another, and then another, each pace slower and shorter than the last. The detail was noticed by the Shield-Maidens, who serenaded him with derisive laughter.
“Why do they hate us so much?” Raphael wondered. “And for that matter, why is she addressing us in Latin?”
“I have no idea,” Illarion said, “though I suspect yonder corpse could tell us much if it could speak.”
Before going any closer to the dead man, Percival went through a little ceremony of crossing himself and saying a prayer.
Roger, exasperated, cursed and elbowed past Percival and strode directly toward the dead knight, drawing in a deep breath and holding it. He planted a foot on the helmet and spun it around, making the arrow swing up into the air like the hand of a clock. “A face,” he announced, “like any other—any other that has been got to by flies and ants, that is.”
“Take your foot away,” said Raphael, stepping closer in spite of himself, “that we may read the escutcheon on his brow.”
Roger began to comply, but the weight of the arrow was wont to spin the head back round to where it had started. He drew out a hatchet and put his head against the fletching of the shaft to hold it in position, then withdrew his foot to reveal the heraldry on the front of the dead man’s helmet.
