He could smell the dead bodies now, and he lowered his bow as he approached the lean-to. Alchiq was already there, and having seen what they were both smelling, had sheathed his sword. “Three,” Alchiq said as Gansukh came around the side of the lean-to, and he stumped off toward the fire pit.
Gansukh looked anyway, his curiosity pushing him to look on the bodies. He had to know who they were, or who they weren’t.
The three were all men, dark-haired and dark-skinned. It was hard to tell from the condition of the bodies, but Gansukh thought they had all died from multiple arrow wounds. He examined the arrangement of the bodies and then scanned the ground around the lean-to. “They didn’t die there,” he said to Alchiq as he caught up with the old hunter.
“Dragged,” Alchiq said. He pointed at a stretch of open ground where several wooden stakes had been pounded into the ground. They were almost in line, an arrangement that wasn’t conducive to their being tent stakes. As Gansukh was trying to puzzle out the significance of the stakes, he realized what Alchiq was directing his attention to was the confusion of hoof prints on the ground.
“Mongols,” Gansukh said. “They would collect their arrows, but they wouldn’t bother dragging the bodies under cover like that.”
“Someone survived,” Alchiq pointed out.
Gansukh’s horse whinnied, and both men turned back toward the lean-to. A dark-skinned man dressed in a filthy tunic and trousers was attempting to restrain Gansukh’s horse long enough to get into the saddle.
“Don’t kill him,” Alchiq said calmly as Gansukh raised his bow.
“I’m not,” Gansukh replied, a touch of annoyance in his voice. Man and horse were performing an awkward dance, and he was waiting for a clean shot that wouldn’t endanger his horse. The man had gotten hold of the reins and the horse was finally calming down.
“He’s going to steal your horse,” Alchiq said.
“He’s not going to steal my horse,” Gansukh replied.
Alchiq let out a grunt that said he thought otherwise.
The horse was standing still but the man was on the other side of the beast now. In another second, he would get a foot in one of the stirrups and swing himself up into the saddle.
Gansukh held his breath for a second, and then exhaled slowly as the man’s hands appeared on the horn of the saddle. He let go of his bowstring, the arrow flying in a shallow arc, and the man appeared from the other side of the horse, settling into the saddle. Gansukh’s arrow caught him in the shoulder, knocking him askew, and his sudden motion spooked Gansukh’s horse. The animal bolted, and the man fell out of the saddle in an awkward confusion of arms and legs.
Alchiq made another sound that Gansukh interpreted as approval, and they walked toward the lean-to and the stunned man. Gansukh didn’t have another arrow, and so he slung his bow across his back and drew his sword.
The man was on his knees, his face pressed against the ground, whimpering into the dirt. The arrow protruded from the junction of his arm and torso, not quite in his armpit and far enough forward that if he tried to raise his right arm, he would jostle the shaft. Alchiq tapped the wounded man lightly on the head with the flat of his sword, and the man jerked upright. He was Persian, like the dead men in the lean-to, and his face was thin and sallow beneath a scraggly and unkempt beard. His lips were cracked and dry and when he spoke, babbling in a tongue Gansukh did not understand, his voice was not much more than a ragged whisper.
Alchiq said one word and the man stopped. He sagged back on his heels, nearly falling over from exhaustion. The fabric of his tunic beneath his right arm was damp with blood.
“Do you understand what he’s saying?” Gansukh asked.
“Somewhat,” Alchiq said. He spoke again, and the man stirred, his eyelids fluttering. He replied haltingly, and Gansukh sensed that the man knew his death was coming. Alchiq’s questions were the only respite he was going to get. He didn’t have the will to refuse to answer; he barely had the strength to speak at all.
Gansukh sheathed his sword and went to calm his horse. He didn’t have anything to contribute to the interrogation. The sun was getting close to the horizon. They would camp here for the night. He might as well feed the horses and see about finding some water.
There was a mystery about what had happened at the rock. They could try to puzzle it out after Alchiq had learned what he could from the wounded man.
Gansukh was poking at the ashes in the fire pit, thinking about starting a fire, when Alchiq joined him. The sun had fled from the sky, and all that was left of the day was a fading line of orange light on the western horizon.
“They were here,” Alchiq said as he finished wiping his sword clean. Gansukh had piled Alchiq’s saddle and bags on one side of the pit, and Alchiq laid his sword across his saddle and started to rummage through his bags for some dried meat.
“How long ago?” Gansukh asked. He had had time to think about the presence of the Persians and the Western arrow in the dead horse beyond the gully where Alchiq had found sign of the alchemical powders.
“A few days,” Alchiq said.
“But?” Gansukh asked, noting the pause in Alchiq’s reply.
“There’s a war party between us and them. Several arban, maybe even a jaghun.” Alchiq chuckled. “The Persian could not count very well.”
Between twenty and a hundred men, Gansukh thought, not terribly surprised the Persian had had difficulty measuring the number of men who had found him and his three companions. “They were survivors of an attack on the Skjaldbrœður?” he asked.
Alchiq nodded. “Hay-door,” he said. “They were following someone named Hay-door. A theft of horses, somewhere”—he gestured toward the open steppe to the south—“out there.”
“Several dozen,” Gansukh replied. While scavenging rope to picket their horses, he had discerned the size of the paddock.
Alchiq found what he was looking for in his bag and sat down, his mouth moving slowly and surely about a piece of tough meat. “Horses,” he said after some concerted chewing.
“Yes,” Gansukh said. “They have spares now. They’ll be moving faster.”
“The Mongol war party will have extra horses,” Alchiq said. “And extra men,” he added, smiling wolfishly at Gansukh.
CHAPTER 20:
FEARFUL SYMMETRY
Feronantus woke to find snow on the ground, a layer of fluffy whiteness as if the clouds had settled down to rest and were determined to sleep well past dawn. He wrapped a heavy fur around his shoulders as he got to his feet and staggered away from the camp to piss. His back ached, his knees were complaining, and the only relief he felt was the satisfaction of emptying his bladder.
The veil of night was slipping away; in the east, the horizon was more purple than black and a few of the bright stars winked at him, wanting to get his attention for a while longer before the sun leaped into the sky and scared all the stars away. The flaming dragon that drove away the night birds with the glittering eyes.
There was no snow on the Spirit Banner, or on the ground in a rough circle around it. He was no longer mystified by the unnatural way in which the banner ignored the weather of the steppe. Was it sacrilege to be bored by the ineffable? Was he a heretic for not worshiping the stick? True crusaders were sustained by their faith, their unshakeable belief in something far greater than themselves, and history was littered with the corpses of men who stood fast against unbelievers and doubters. How could he be one of those men if he did not burn with the same zeal? He was nothing more than an addled old man, fleeing across a land devastated by men who believed in the power of this stick.
He raised his hand and ran his fingers through one of the horsehair strands, the hair rough against his calloused and chapped hands. For the first few weeks after he had taken it, whenever he touched the horsehair in the morning he would imagine hearing an immense herd of horses, galloping endlessly across the steppe. Over time, the echo of the foam-flecked horses had faded until he heard nothing when he tou
ched the banner, nothing but the slow rhythm of his heart.
Every night since he had imagined the tiger looming over Istvan, inhaling the Hungarian’s lazy breath, his dreams had been turbulent. He was not one of those who frantically tried to capture the essence (or even the particular details) of a given dream when he woke, but he was plagued by the persistent sense that he was forgetting something.
This was one of the more nagging aspects of the Vor—the awareness of knowing without knowing how or why such knowledge was gleaned. It had always been this way, even before he had known of his gift. Peregrinus had seen it in him, and the harsh lesson learned while he had been shitting was not one he had ever forgotten.
Feronantus let his thumb rest against the gnarled bump on the banner. The spot was healed over now, as if it had always been a knot of scarred wood, and not—as it had been when he had first acquired the banner—a fresh cut that was only beginning to scab.
Some wounds heal, he thought. Others did not. He looked at the scars on the back of his hand, the old cuts and nicks that had faded to tiny white lines on his flesh, as if he were a map so faded nothing could be read but the vague impression of ancient mountain ranges. Would that be the fate of the world? he wondered. After he and every Shield-Brethren were long dead. Would the world be wiped clean by snow or ice? Or fire, even? An endless plume of smoke and ash, belching from some volcano that finally erupted for a generation or more?
The Shield-Brethren would be gone. He knew that much. He had seen it come to pass, and he knew he had a part yet to play in that untimely disappearance. Just as he knew it would require a hard sacrifice, which is why he had left the others at Burqan-qaldun.
What father wouldn’t sacrifice himself for his children?
By mid-morning, clouds obscured the sky, a voluminous layer of white that sank closer and closer to the ground. The wind danced around the pair of horsemen for an hour before deciding that it would blow steadily from the north against their faces. Feronantus wrapped strips of cloth about his head in a vain attempt to keep ice from building in his beard, and Istvan huddled in his saddle, cloak pulled tightly about his lean frame. Seeing they were going to be undeterred in their route, the wind looped up in the clouds and returned with stinging rain and pellets of snow that flew at them like a swarm of icy bugs.
There was little respite from the storm, and even if they had wanted to wait it out, there was no shelter on the steppe. Istvan threw a length of rope to Feronantus and both men looped their respective ends loosely about their saddle horns in an effort to not lose one another in the blizzard. His horse continued to plod onward, its mane coated with snow and ice, its head hanging dejectedly.
They had been through worse, Feronantus reminded himself. The last blizzard they had suffered through had been in the mountains, where the terrain had been much more treacherous. The path had been narrow, and if they had strayed too far, they would have stumbled off the edge of a cliff. On the steppe, there was little danger of falling into a crevasse or being crushed by an avalanche of snow. They had to keep moving until they found shelter or the clouds ran out of snow to pelt them with.
The rope jerked taut between the horses, and Feronantus dimly stared at it for a while before nudging his horse to close the gap. Istvan’s horse hadn’t fallen; it had merely drifted from the course they had been taking. Their pace was so slow that it mattered little if they wandered more west than north. They were in the middle of the empty steppe.
Feronantus’s horse stumbled, and he clutched at the horn of his saddle. The horse continued on as if nothing had happened, but Feronantus felt the change. The horse was picking its way down an incline. It wasn’t a steep slope, but they had definitely crossed a ridge line.
The fury of the storm lessened, and his horse picked up its pace. He wrapped his shaking hands around the rope and pulled up the slack. The snow slowed to a swirling cloud of fat flakes as he and his horse descended beneath the level of the steppe.
The snow wasn’t sticking on the ground, and as he pulled the ice-encrusted cloth away from his cheeks and eyes, he spotted dark streaks in the dirt. No plants grew either. The ground was bare, marred by the black stains.
The rope slackened even more, and he brought his horse to a halt beside Istvan’s motionless steed. The Hungarian was shivering uncontrollably, his teeth clacking in his mouth; unable to form words, he pointed instead. Several paces ahead of them the ground became soft, dissolving into a pool of slow-bubbling darkness.
“What is it?” he croaked, but his voice was nothing more than a dry whisper and Istvan did not appear to have heard him. Shaking off the layer of rime that had formed on his cloak, Feronantus descended from his horse and stiffly edged closer to the pool.
The ground around the pool was stained black, and a pace or two in front of the horses, Feronantus crouched and slowly tugged one of his leather gloves off. The ground was cold but not frozen, and when he raised his fingers, they were slick with the oily darkness. He sniffed at his fingers, and rubbed them together, feeling the sticky texture of the muck. The smell reminded him of old keeps, stone towers built in an age when windows were a luxury and the stone walls and ceilings were dark with soot from torches and candles. It reminded him of something else as well, a memory of castle walls and an unrelenting sun, beating down on an empty desert.
He stood quickly and backed away from the pool. “Greek fire,” he swore, memories of the long siege of Acre coming back to him. It had been his first campaign after taking the Shield-Brethren vows. They had arrived in the Holy Land in the spring, and had joined the crusading army that sought to take Acre from Saladin. The crusaders had been camped outside the city for months, and disease was rampant in the camp. It wasn’t until Richard Lionheart had arrived several months later that the crusaders were able to rally themselves. Richard had had siege engines built, and after pummeling the walls for a week, he had given the order to attack. He remembered the smell of the sticky fire poured from the walls by the Muslims. It fell like black rain, and the Christian attackers did not understand the danger until Muslim archers sent a volley of flaming arrows down. In an instant, the entire rank was transformed into a wall of roaring flame, the men screaming as the greasy liquid ignited and melted their flesh.
Istvan slid off his horse and staggered to Feronantus’s side. The Hungarian’s beard was coated with ice and his eyes were bright with a fevered light. “World fire,” he murmured.
“No,” Feronantus said, grabbing Istvan’s arm.
The Hungarian turned his icy face toward Feronantus. “Is that not what you see?” he asked. “Is that not what you learn during the night when you hang yourself on the wood?” He raised a shaking arm and pointed at the Spirit Banner slung across Feronantus’s saddle. “Is that not what she wants?” Fresh ice glistened on his cheeks.
“She?” Feronantus did not understand what Istvan was talking about. The Hungarian had been coherent when they had broken camp but, as when Istvan had stumbled into Feronantus’s camp during the mountain crossing, the cold weather could trigger a resurgence of the mind fever as if it were a shield against the winter chill.
“You saved me once,” Istvan said. “That debt must be paid.” He drew his sword and Feronantus stepped back, unsure of Istvan’s intentions, but the Hungarian made no move toward him. Instead, Istvan knelt at the edge of the pool and thrust his sword blade into the sticky darkness. When he drew it free, the steel was black.
“Go,” Istvan said. “I will give her what she wants.”
“I don’t understand what you are telling me,” Feronantus said. “I don’t know who you are talking about.”
Istvan fumbled one-handed in the pouch on his belt and produced his flint stone. “Go,” he shouted at Feronantus as he slammed the flint against his blade. A shower of sparks leaped from the contact, and the horses whinnied in fear.
But they weren’t reacting to the sparks.
Feronantus heard a low rumbling growl, and he slowly turned his head and
looked to his right.
The tiger was less than ten paces away.
“Here,” Istvan shouted, banging his flint against his sword again. “I am the one you seek.” Sparks flew again, and the tiger snarled in response, revealing long white teeth.
Light bloomed behind Feronantus, and he heard a whoosh of sound as Istvan’s blade was engulfed with flame. The Hungarian raised his weapon and charged the tiger.
CHAPTER 21:
TO PRAY IN PSKOV
Sending cavalry alone would have allowed Nevsky to reach Pskov more quickly, but if Alexander wanted to do more than simply storm into the city, an army that included infantry was required. As a result, it took nearly a week to reach Pskov. The city was patiently waiting for them, the walls and towers rising from the morning mist that flowed off the Velikaya, eerily untouched, given the horrors the city had endured.
The bulk of the men in Nevsky’s force were infantry, foot-soldiers who wore lamellar armor over old maille, protecting their torsos, and battered conical helms such as those worn by the Northmen sat upon their heads. Long axes or spears were held by most, though the occasional sword, old and worn, hung from the hips of the few veterans among the many volunteers. Their clothes were well-worn, and there was little to no uniformity of color. Those who could afford the luxury of fur—sheepskin mostly—wore cloaks and gloves of the same. The greatest asset of these men was their number, and the fact that they were defending their homelands. The knights within the city, should they opt to not surrender, would have better weapons and armor, but that would matter little against the fervor and number of the prince’s men.
The Druzhina were a different matter altogether, and Illarion hoped their presence would be enough to forestall any desire for martyrdom on the part of the defenders. The Druzhina wore fine maille and helms with aventails that protected the backs of their necks. No two men were armed identically, for these were professional warriors whose whole lives were brutal affairs. Some were the sons of nobles, or nobles themselves, but many were mercenaries that had taken up service with their Kynaz for pay. Swords gleamed on belts decorated with metal, and lances were tipped with white spear-points that caught the light.
Katabasis (The Mongoliad Cycle, Book 4) Page 20
