Katabasis (The Mongoliad Cycle, Book 4)

by Joseph Brassey

  The figure looked to be an impossibly old woman, stooped and bent, her hair wild and matted and covered in dirt, as were the wretched rags that hung about her gnarled form like sodden cobwebs. When the mist was gone, she lifted her ancient face and fixed Illarion with the most terrible pair of eyes he’d ever beheld, their baleful gaze lancing like a bolt through his heart. As he stood, transfixed by the vision, the crone’s withered right hand slowly rose and, with a deliberate, unerring gesture, pointed towards the frigid north.

  The world seemed to fade, and Illarion’s vision narrowed until his eyes could see nothing but the old woman’s dire stare. The scream that had been caught in his throat withered and died, slipping back into his gut with a whimper. His eyes burned as if he had been staring too long into a fire, and he struggled to find the strength to blink.

  When he did, the crone was gone.

  Beside him, Nika stirred, as if she, too, had been released from the grip of some unspeakable glamour. He shivered, as the wind had shifted again and its breath was fiercely cold once more.

  “Did you see…?” he asked, reluctant to put into words the vision he had witnessed.

  “Aye,” Nika said, her voice as unsteady as his. “I saw the ghosts of my fallen sisters.”

  “No,” Illarion said. “There were men, carrying heavy shields, like the Greek infantry once did. And…and there was an old woman.”

  Nika stood close enough to him that he could make out her features in the starlit night. There was still a trace of fear in her face, but mostly Illarion saw a fierce determination in the Shield-Maiden’s eyes. “I only saw the faces of dead Skjalddis,” Nika said. Her throat worked and her eyes widened slightly.

  “You have been keeping a vigil,” he whispered, realizing she had been lying to him earlier. “You’ve seen them before.”

  “Every month,” she admitted. “When there is no moon.” Her eyes were bright now, tears reflecting starlight. “But I never saw the old woman,” she said. “Not until tonight.”

  “Who is she?” Illarion asked.

  Nika let loose a short bray of laughter, a cruel sound that was quickly swallowed by the night. “She showed herself because you were here,” Nika said. “You’re the one who summoned her.”

  “Me?”

  “Aye,” Nika said. “You stayed when the others left. You had family here. You are part of Rus. You have been down into the crypts and seen the grave of Saint Ilya. You know the stories.”

  “They’re just stories,” Illarion protested.

  Nika stepped closer to Illarion and peered into his eyes as if she were trying to see some flicker of light hidden deep within. “You know who she was,” she said softly. “From the stories. The witch with the leg of stone. The witch who knows what must be done.”

  Illarion’s heart was pounding. He looked at Nika, and though he already knew the answer, he could not stop himself from asking, desperate that she should tell him otherwise.

  “Nika,” he whispered, “what is it that must be done?”

  “You must go north,” she replied. “That is where Baba Yaga has instructed you to go, and wherever you go, my sisters and I will follow.”

  CHAPTER 2:

  CROSSING THE GAP

  He had not seen the sun for a week; the sky had been blotted out by a white fury of a storm that clung to the peaks of the mountains with the tenacity of a wild dog. The slopes were covered in snowpack that would not melt for many months, and his horse labored slowly, picking its way carefully across the ice-bound ground. More often than not, he walked beside it, gently pulling the reins to keep the beast moving. It was a sturdy beast; it had carried him all the way from the heart of the Mongol empire, but he doubted it would be with him for the entirety of his journey.

  This was not unexpected. He had made certain choices over the years that had isolated him; if asked, he would not have spoken of consciously creating his self-imposed exile from those he cared about, but he knew. It was the way of the Vor. He saw its patterns well enough to know the path that would be his and his alone.

  The Heavenly Mountains were a long chain of tall peaks that separated the Mongol homelands from the steppes roamed by the Turkic tribes, and the Zuungar Gap was one of the few passes that were not heavily patrolled by the Khagan’s men. It was too high—too exposed to the frigid wind—to be a trade route. Not since Hannibal had there been a commander of such fortitude to attempt such a risky crossing. And Hannibal had brought elephants with him.

  Feronantus had just the one horse, and the Spirit Banner of the Mongol empire.

  It was a gnarled stick of hard wood, covered with generations of scars. When it had come into Feronantus’s possession, it had sported a crosspiece of cedar and a silk banner as well as several dozen strands of knotted horsehair. He had knocked the crosspiece off and discarded the banner, but had left the horsehair strands. They did not freeze. He did not like touching them.

  The banner was strapped to his saddle, pointing in the direction he wanted his horse to go, and the horsehair streamers floated and danced in the wind with utter distain for the ambient temperature. Whenever he stopped for a few hours of sleep, he would find his beard crusted with ice when he woke. The horsehair remained untouched.

  He suspected the only reason his horse had not died already was because the banner was keeping the animal warm. Soon, there would come a night when the clouds would dip too low and the wind would be too cold, and he would have to take the banner for himself, and that would be the night when his horse died.

  He had made much harder choices in the past, and he suspected there were one or two more that would be put to him yet. He didn’t spend too much time fretting about the animal’s death. It was inevitable. He had seen it in the swirling pattern of the Vor.

  He had first felt the touch of the Vor during the summer of his eighth year. Like all orphans claimed by Athena and given a home at Petraathen, he had learned how to hold a sword as readily as a hoe or a switch or a trowel. They were allowed only wooden weapons—nearly straight pieces of oak capped with ugly and ill-fitting hilts—and they were not allowed to learn any of the true art of fighting. The sticks were not long enough and the balance was all wrong, because their oplo—the fighting master of the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae—was not interested in having to break them of too many bad habits when they were old enough to hold real steel. What they had learned those first few years was how to not let go of their swords. How to use them, instinctively, to defend themselves. How to attack—even as clumsy as they were—when given the slightest opportunity.

  His oplo, a veteran named Peregrinus who had gone west while other crusades had gone east, was a giant of a man who moved with the incredible agility of a feral cat. Every day, he would stalk the boys for an hour or so, making sure they carried their swords. At the evening meal, the other knights could tell which boys had been caught by the oplo by the red welts across the backs of their hands.

  Feronantus had been careful to keep his wooden sword with him, eager to foil Peregrinus’s attempts, but after several days, he had sought out the oplo and demanded to know why he had been neglected. “You have caught all the other boys,” he complained. “Some more than once. But I have not seen you.” He dropped his sword in the dirt and held out his hand, palm down. “I am ready.”

  Peregrinus crouched and picked up Feronantus’s sword, cradling it lightly in his hands. “Why are you eager to be punished?” he asked.

  “I am worthy of punishment,” Feronantus said. “I am just like the others.”

  Peregrinus took Feronantus’s hand and carefully wrapped the small boy’s fingers around the misshapen hilt. “No,” he said quietly, staring intently at the boy. “You are not. I have been looking for you, but you are never where I expect you to be.” He turned Feronantus’s hand over and lightly stroked the unblemished back of the boy’s hand. “It is not enough to be worthy of punishment,” he said. “The one who metes out the punishment must earn that right as well. Do you und
erstand?”

  Feronantus nodded, though he was not entirely certain he did.

  The following morning, as he was squatting to take a shit, Peregrinus had appeared next to him and placed his foot firmly on Feronantus’s blade which was resting on the ground. He flicked it away, and Feronantus had felt his muscles tighten uncontrollably. “This isn’t fair,” he complained.

  Peregrinus snapped the switch, and Feronantus felt the tip lay open the edge of his ear. “Fair?” the oplo hissed. “If we were on a battlefield, would you ask your enemy to wait until you had wiped your ass?”

  Feronantus felt tears threaten to start, but he held them back. Blood dripped down his ear, and his naked rear was cold and exposed, but he did not move.

  Peregrinus watched him for a moment longer, and then nodded curtly. “You may live long enough to thank me for this lesson,” he said with a hard smile.

  Feronantus stared up at his oplo and, with a shiver, knew that he would. Peregrinus saw something in Feronantus’s gaze and took a step back. The switch twitched in his hands, but he thought better of it after a second. “Get that cleaned up,” he said, thrusting his jaw toward Feronantus’s bloody ear.

  He nearly lost the fire when he added the heavy branch. The kindling and materials he had used to start the fire had turned to ash, and he had no choice but to add damp wood; otherwise he would lose the fire entirely. The branch was a thick piece of fir that he had pulled from deep within the tree’s canopy, hoping that it would be less soaked than the outer branches. The log threw off a heavy plume of white smoke—his own contribution to the winter cloak laid about the mountains—and the ashes beneath the log whitened as if all heat had been drawn from them. After a few moments, during which Feronantus held his breath in anticipation, a tiny tongue of flame licked the end of the log. It was followed by a second, and Feronantus relaxed his vigil on his meager fire. Confident that it wouldn’t go out in the next few minutes, he left the tiny camp and walked the short distance to where his dead horse sprawled in the snow.

  They had reached the peak of the pass a day or so ago—it was hard to tell night from day when the clouds were so impermeable about the mountain tops—and Feronantus had thought that he might have been mistaken about his horse, but when his animal started to lag, he started to watch for a possible camp site. On this side of the gap, there were shrines for Khan Tengri, the god of the Mongols. He found a few that were marked by faded scraps of linen wedged between the top two rocks in crooked cairns, but they offered no protection from the wind. As he and his wobbly horse limped along the edge of a ridge, a steep drop down to a craggy mouth of broken stones on his left, he spotted an irregular cluster of rocks like a moss-covered crown atop the skull of a dead giant. His horse balked at the nearly flat incline up to the ring of stones, and as he tried to coax it onward, it shivered uncontrollably and then collapsed.

  He collected the Spirit Banner and his kit from the dead horse, carrying them back up to the smoking fire, and then returned for his saddle and bags.

  The log was burning slowly, popping as it dried, and it was still putting off a lot of smoke, but not nearly as much as when he had first put it on the fire. Several of the tall stones near the fire were glistening, their icy shells starting to melt from the fire’s heat. As best he could—his back and hands were stiff—he cleared the snow from the ground at the base of these stones. He chipped as much of the ice from the stones as he could, and only after he put another branch on the fire and was assured that it wouldn’t smother the flames, did he spread out one of his heavy blankets and sit down.

  Feronantus thought he had closed his eyes for merely a moment, but when he looked at the flames again, the first log was nothing more than a charred rib of wood and the second was half devoured by fire. He stirred, a flash of anger lending a brief flush of color to his pale cheeks.

  This isn’t fair…

  Peregrinus had died in the Holy Land, when Richard Lionheart had taken Arsuf from Saladin. The Shield-Brethren had come to the crusade with the English king, and they had been fighting nonstop since they had arrived. Of the three dozen new initiates who had gotten off the boat in Acre’s harbor, less than half survived the siege of Arsuf. Their oplo and several other veterans had fallen in the service of Richard as well, and by the time the English king had decided to return home, there was no longer any distinction between initiate and veteran. They were all survivors.

  Feronantus glanced at the Spirit Banner, which he had propped up with several rocks so that it leaned upright against a nearby shrine stone. The horsehair strands were bedraggled and kinked with knots, and the staff was so old that the wood appeared to be gray in the dim snow-light of the winter evening.

  Am I wrong? he wondered. Have I abandoned everything for a warped stick?

  The staff of the banner was nearly five feet in length, and the wood had been ash once, but time had hardened it to nearly the strength of iron. It had belonged to Temujin, Ögedei Khan’s father, and according to the stories Feronantus had learned during his recent travels across the Mongol empire, Temujin had been given the staff by mystics who dwelled in a sacred grove near Burqan-qaldun. With the banner, Temujin had become Genghis Khan—the Khan of Khans—and all of the wild clans had bowed to him. Genghis’s dream of a unified empire had been realized by his sons, and when the armies of the Khan of Khans had come to the West, threatening Christendom, Feronantus and a company of his fellow Shield-Brethren had journeyed east, to the heart of the empire. It had been their intention to kill Ögedei Khan—Genghis’s son and the current Khan of Khans.

  Even though the death of the Khagan would trigger the kuraltai, the feverish election of a new Khan of Khans, it would only postpone the devastation of Christendom. The Mongol hordes would come back, and unless the kings of the West put aside their petty differences to band together against the common enemy, they would be overrun again.

  Would the banner be enough? Would the West rally around it like the Mongol clans had for Genghis? Would he be able to use it to command a host the size of which would rival that commanded by Alexander the Great?

  Feronantus climbed to his feet and reached for the banner. The wood was warm in his hand, and he prodded the dying fire with the worn end, breaking up the coals. Hanging on to the banner for support, he leaned over and put a few more branches on the fire. The new wood smoked and sizzled, enveloping him in a cloud of white smoke. He stepped back, coughing and waving his hands to clear the smoke from his face. His left hand, still holding the banner, felt as if it were being pierced by a thousand knives, and he shifted his grip.

  His thumb rubbed across a ragged spur, an aberration on the otherwise smooth surface of the banner.

  Feronantus backed away from the fire until he was pressed against the weeping stones. His eyes watering from the smoke, he peered at the spur on the banner. It looked like the stump of a tree branch, the scarred remnants of a tiny growth that had been sheared off. He had stripped enough saplings of their leaves and branches to recognize the swelling of the wood around the base of such a protrusion and the way the bark peels away when the leaf is yanked off.

  How is this possible? he wondered. The piece of wood had been severed from its parent for many years. How could it still sprout new growth?

  Out beyond the circle of stones, someone let loose a long series of chest-rattling coughs, and Feronantus forgot about the mystery of the banner. His right hand fell to the hilt of his sword and he peered into the gloom beyond the weak light of his fire. A shape stirred, becoming more than a gray shadow against the white sky and ground, and then it became several shapes—man-sized and horse-sized. Feronantus heard the familiar jingle of a western harness as a man staggered against the outer rocks, a pair of horses nearly pushing him forward in their effort to get close to the single source of warmth on the mountainside.

  The man, covered in a layer of hoar frost, fell to his knees and crawled closer to the fire. His face was a mass of ice, his beard a bundle of broken icicles. He c
ollapsed, nearly landing in the fire. His arms were outstretched as if he were trying to embrace the flame.

  “Istvan,” Feronantus croaked, recognizing the near-frozen figure.

  Istvan groaned upon hearing his name, and his moans became more pronounced as the fire began to thaw the ice on his face and chest. Feronantus looked at the pair of horses, recognizing the tack on each. He’s alone, Feronantus thought. They haven’t found me.

  Istvan had brought an extra horse, almost as if he had known that Feronantus would need one.

  Such was the mystery of the Vor.

  Istvan rolled onto his back, and the white mist of his exhalation rose and twined with the guttering smoke from the fire.

  “All-Father,” the mad Hungarian croaked.

  The thousand knives pierced Feronantus’s left hand again as the horsehair strands fluttered around the staff of the Spirit Banner.

  CHAPTER 3:

  THE WINTER PASSAGE

  The horse had been foundering all day, and as evening approached, Raphael announced he was going to slaughter it. Cnán felt a momentary spasm of horror, but her reaction was overwhelmed by a flood of relief that the company would be building a fire. It had been many days since the last time she had been warm, and she didn’t dare try to count the days, fearful that such an accounting would only make her burst into tears. She was no stranger to long journeys and uncomfortable terrain, but the last few weeks had strained even her fortitude.

  They found a stretch of ground that was sheltered from the wind in two directions, and as the Shield-Brethren went about the making of camp, Cnán and Vera wandered over to the nearby tree line to gather fuel for the fire. The other member of their company—Lian, the Chinese woman who had accompanied Haakon from the Khagan’s camp—did not join them, and Cnán wasted no breath wondering aloud to Vera why the Chinese woman did so little in the preparations.