Katabasis (The Mongoliad Cycle, Book 4)

by Joseph Brassey

  “It wasn’t an accident,” Haakon repeated.

  Cnán barely managed to get into the tent before she passed out, and Lian arranged the other woman’s limbs and body as comfortably as possible. Cnán didn’t stay that way for long, and by the time Lian prepared herself for sleep, Cnán had already sprawled over half the tent. Making room for herself, Lian flopped on her back and stared at the ceiling.

  The concoction made by Yasper and Bruno was stronger than anything she had had at court, her posturing notwithstanding, and even though she was lying as still as she could, the world still spun. Under her blankets, she clutched the box containing the sprig and hung on.

  Was she hanging on to more than just the sprig? She was far from home, and traveling farther away every day. Was she clinging to some hope that she could return to China some day? And if she did, where would she go? Her family was gone and she wasn’t even sure if the city where she had been born and raised still existed.

  Or did she think that Gansukh was going to come and find her? He had given her the sprig for safekeeping, but was it important enough to chase her? He had nothing else; deciding to fire his tent had been a spontaneous decision. She had needed a distraction while she fled the Khagan’s camp, and Gansukh’s tent was the only one she had known would be empty.

  But if that was the sole criteria, why hadn’t she burned Munokhoi’s tent?

  Because the insane ex–Torguud captain would have come after her, and if she had to choose who was chasing her, she would much rather it be Gansukh.

  Would he, though?

  The tent kept spinning, and she tried to steady herself against the ground, but it didn’t help. With a groan, she threw off her blankets and crawled out of the tent. She made it only a few paces, still on her hands and knees, before her gorge overwhelmed her. She gagged and then threw up, her throat burning as the acidic contents of her stomach came out.

  Once her belly was empty and the quaking heaves had passed, she spat several times to clear the foul taste left in her mouth, and then crawled away from the stinking mess that had come out of her. She had almost made it back to her tent when she sensed the presence of another person nearby. “Who’s there?” she whispered.

  A portion of the night became more solid, revealing Yasper. The Dutchman swayed slightly as he approached Lian and sat down with a thump next to her. He was carrying a skin and he offered it to her. “It’s just water,” he said when she shook her head savagely at the idea of drinking more of the vile spirits. “You look like you could use some.”

  She accepted the skin and drank heavily. The water tasted dusty, but it was cold and clean. “Thank you,” she said when the pain in her throat had faded.

  “You were drinking some of the spirits that Bruno had, weren’t you?” he asked. “That is foul stuff,” he continued when she nodded. “I think it’d be effective at getting a blood stain out of almost anything. I wouldn’t drink it.”

  “But…but Bruno was drinking it,” she said.

  “Bruno likes retsina,” Yasper pointed out. “It’s a drink of the Greeks,” he explained. “It’s particularly bad because they didn’t want the invaders thinking that they knew how to make wine. The trouble was the invaders stayed a long time, and the Greeks got used to drinking it.”

  Lian laughed lightly, and Yasper seemed pleased that he had said something funny. She let him savor the moment and drank again from the skin.

  “How’s Cnán?” Yasper asked. “Did she…?”

  “She’s sleeping,” Lian said. “If you listen carefully, you can hear her snoring.”

  Yasper ducked his head and looked away. “I…I don’t need to hear her snoring,” he said. “I just wanted to be sure she…you two…I wanted to be sure you two were faring well after a night of debauchery.”

  “Dee-botch-air-ee?” Lian shook her head. “I do not know that word.”

  “Heavy drinking,” Yasper explained. “Or merely: what Bruno does every night.”

  Lian laughed again. “We frightened him,” she said when the laughter left her. “That is why he drank heavily. Haakon told him what he had done.”

  “Ah,” Yasper said quietly. “Well, I suppose it was bound to happen eventually.” He sighed and stared off into the night.

  “Do you think the empire is chasing us?” Lian asked. “Do you think everyone knows?”

  “Why would they?” Yasper asked. “Do you think criers have been running from village to village proclaiming the news? Huzzah! Our immortal ruler is dead. Stabbed in the woods by a Northerner boy. But it’s okay. We didn’t like him all that much anyway, did we? Rejoice!”

  “Another Khan will replace him,” Lian said. “They’ll fight amongst themselves for the honor of being named Khagan by the kuraltai. Who knows if the next one will be better or worse.”

  “No one ever does,” Yasper said. “We’re like swallows. We just flit about”—he waved his hand like he was imitating the flight of a bird—“and hope to find a safe place to roost every night.”

  Lian leaned her head against Yasper’s shoulder. “I do not want to be a swallow,” she said.

  In the days following their departure from the rock, they saw signs of riders. Some were the same size as their company; others were larger. All were to be avoided. All of the Mongol ordu were heading for Karakorum; the steppe, which had been empty months earlier, was going to be less so as the weather improved. Clans would be moving east, and all of them were to be considered unfriendly.

  Haakon continued to scout with the Seljuks, which meant he had hours to himself in which he could wallow in his own thoughts. His confession to Bruno the other night weighed on him. He knew he shouldn’t have said anything, but the weight of that secret was difficult to bear. It had become heavier after his injury, too, as if the Mongol arrow were a reminder that he had taken something very important from the empire. At the time, he hadn’t given much thought to what he was doing—Ögedei had been trying to kill him, after all—but as they traveled west, the import of his actions had started to sink in.

  It had been his hand that had killed the Great Khan. He had taken Ögedei’s—no, it was Genghis’s—knife as a trophy. What had he been thinking? Did he think he could wear it proudly like it was some sort of badge of honor? Lian had recoiled from the knife as if it had been a serpent. It was evidence of what he had done.

  The irony was that he, Haakon, was the one who had killed Ögedei. The others had ridden thousands of miles to kill the Khagan, and several of their company had died along the way, but they had arrived too late. By no direct action of his own, he had gotten there first. Kill him quickly, Feronantus had told him. We have very little time. As if he were slaughtering a pig for a Kinyen.

  As he scouted the steppe, Haakon realized he hated Feronantus. The master of Týrshammar had not come for him; he had not even cared that Haakon had survived the Mongols’ arena games and escaped the Khagan’s camp. Kill him quickly was all he had said, and then he had left him to bear the burden of his actions alone.

  He had fought in the arena in Hünern—and he had won!—so that Onghwe Khan would not know that the best warriors of the Shield-Brethren had not been present at the Circus of Swords. He had bled for the order—he had killed for his master—and his forearms were bare. He had not yet made the pilgrimage to Petraathen and taken the final test. He was not a knight initiate, and yet he had sacrificed so much for the order.

  His horse trotted up a slight incline and at the top of the rise, he pulled back on the reins. Off to his left, he could see the company, a long string of horses moving slowly across the steppe. Ahead of him were the tiny specks of Evren and Ahmet. He turned slowly in his saddle, looking for any other movement on the steppe.

  His hand fell upon the bone handle of Ögedei’s knife. Drop it here, he thought. No one will ever find it. No one will ever know.

  The frozen image of Bruno’s expression swam in his mind—equal parts horror and awe that mirrored what Haakon felt when he allowed himself to ref
lect on what he had done.

  You have seen more of the world than I.

  Those had been Ögedei’s final words. Occasionally, Haakon would dream of the sea, even though it had been almost a year since he had seen it. The white spray as the waves battered themselves against the stark stones of the cliff below Týrshammar. Rainbows caught in the spray of sea water. The smell of the water and wind—like no other smell he knew and the smell that he would always associate with home. He had stood on the rocks and felt the thunder of the pounding waves. He had heard the endless song of the ocean—the grinding roar and the fleeting hiss of the waves.

  Haakon’s heart ached for the sea. He yearned to go home again. He didn’t want to die here, on the steppes, so far from the sea.

  He didn’t want the blood that was on his hands.

  They stopped along a narrow stream to water the horses. While Percival and Gawain worked to switch saddles among the spare horses, Yasper, Raphael, and Vera wandered along the stream bed. There were heavy clouds to the north and west of them—the sort of clouds that carried heavy weights of snow—and none of them were terribly eager to plunge into icy weather again.

  “The boy told Bruno about the death of Ögedei,” Yasper said when they were well out of earshot of the company.

  “Aye, so I have heard,” Raphael said. He glanced at Vera, who was walking a few paces ahead of them. “We couldn’t keep them in the dark forever,” he said.

  “We could have,” Yasper said. “We’re far from Christendom. There are many who don’t like us in these lands. We don’t have to give them an explicit reason to hunt us.”

  “You think Bruno and Gawain will sell this information to interested Mongol parties?”

  “They might, if it meant saving their lives. They’re mercenaries. Their only master is the coin.”

  “Then we don’t give them that opportunity,” Vera said, tossing the words casually over her shoulder.

  Yasper raised his eyebrows and indicated with his hands what he thought of that idea.

  “We’re not going to kill them,” Raphael said, responding to both Vera’s statement and Yasper’s frantic hand gestures. “They have done nothing to injure us.”

  Vera glanced over her shoulder at Raphael. He held her gaze and she grunted wordlessly—saying much without saying anything at all.

  “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life running,” Yasper said. “You can disappear into the ranks of your Shield-Brethren, but where am I supposed to go? What am I supposed to do?”

  “A haircut and shave will make you unrecognizable,” Raphael said.

  “That’s—” Yasper stopped and sighed. “What am I trying to say?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Raphael said. “You’re the one who brought this up.”

  “What are we doing?” Yasper blurted out. “Where are we going? We crossed most of the world to do an unthinkable thing, and now we’re going home as if nothing has happened. But something has—something both terrifying and magnificent. We saved Christendom, but we’re not going to be welcomed home as heroes.”

  “That wasn’t why we set out on this mission,” Raphael reminded him.

  “I know. I know,” Yasper sighed. “It just feels like…we’re running. We’re running and hiding as if we are little children who don’t want to be caught for having stolen a loaf of bread or a shiny gold bauble.”

  “What would you have us do?” Raphael asked. “Raise a banner proclaiming that we have assassinated the Great Khan and demand tribute from all the peoples we have saved? Bearing in mind that I don’t know that we’ve saved anyone, much less ourselves. When we get back to Christendom, I suspect we’ll discover that all those who died at Mohi and Legnica will still be dead, and all those cities like Kiev will still be razed to the ground. And before you ask why we bothered doing what we did, let me remind you that we did it to save those who were imperiled by the Mongol horde. Our mission was to prevent any further decimation of Christendom.”

  “I know,” Yasper sighed. He kicked at a large rock, and it flew into a nearby bush that shook with rage at being so targeted. “I hate this place,” he said. “It’s endless and empty and it sucks away my will to live like—”

  “It’s not that empty,” Vera interrupted, directing their eyes to the north.

  In the distance, the clouds had parted, revealing a tiny curlicue of smoke that twisted into the sky. Yasper and Raphael squinted, trying to estimate how far away the source of the smoke was.

  “A camp fire?” Raphael wondered.

  “No,” Yasper said. “It would have to be an enormous fire to generate that much smoke. That has to be at least a half day’s ride from here.” He scratched his beard. “What could it be? There aren’t enough trees out here to make a fire that big.”

  “It’s Feronantus,” said a voice behind them, and they turned to find Lian standing not three paces away, her eyes locked on the tiny strand of smoke. She was holding her right hand against her breasts, clutching something tightly in her fist.

  CHAPTER 23:

  PLANK

  After verifying that Zuhzyn was dead as well, Illarion sent the remaining Druzhina to fetch the rest of the honor guard and to give the order for the army to occupy Pskov. Only then did he and Nika proceed to light the candles in the church. They were joined by more Druzhina, who wanted to know what had happened; Nika only shook her head and pointed to the bodies and then to the candles.

  Illarion worked slowly; the church was large and there were many candles. His rage, which had been a pulsating red veil draped over his eyes, slowly faded. He no longer felt as if he were standing with his feet in a fire; now he seemed to be standing on the edge of a vast field that had been burned black. There was soot on his boots and his cloak. The sky was filled with a black haze, and there were no stars in the sky. Each candle was a pinpoint of light, a tiny spark that gave him hope. When he lit the last candle and saw that there were still shadows in the church, he called out for more. Find every living soul in the city, he told his men, and bring them and a stub of wax or tallow to the church.

  He was tired of the darkness.

  The church filled, both with bodies and with light. Word of what had occurred passed quickly among those gathered, and the bodies of the assassins disappeared. Belun and Zuhzyn were brought forward and laid out before the altar, their bodies composed in peaceful repose. A pair of candles was set on the stone floor beside their heads, giving the impression they were crowned with shining halos.

  The angry muttering of the army was magnified in the church, and soon everyone was talking loudly in order to be heard by their neighbor. Illarion’s head throbbed, and his mouth was dry; he wished he could send someone to fetch a flagon of wine or mead, but this was not the time for celebration. He could make out snatches of the arguments that were raging around him.

  A priest of the church had been located, and he continued to profess utter innocence in the matter of the assassins in the church. Illarion was inclined to believe the man’s protestations. If Kristaps had ordered his men to slay the city’s populace indiscriminately, priests would not have been excluded. In fact, Illarion was certain that priests would have been singled out as men to be put to the sword during the pillaging of Pskov. That this man had survived at all suggested he had been in hiding for some time. This was probably the first time the priest had been in his church in weeks. Moreover, why would Kristaps have left this priest alive if the man had known of the plot to assassinate the Kynaz?

  The Druzhina were angry; most of them were upset at him for visiting the church without a full escort, though Illarion knew such anger was misplaced. They had followed his order, and he had told them to care for the city while he had gone to pray. But they were afraid that he would blame them, though he did not know why he should. He had not been killed.

  He stared at the candle in his hand, and when he placed it on the sconce, he felt himself on the verge of the black field again. The soot covered his trousers and the whole
of his cloak was covered with it. He looked up and saw stars.

  “That’s the last one,” Nika said. “They’re all lit.”

  He nodded slowly and lowered his head. He turned to face the overflowing church. Druzhina and city folk were arguing noisily, and the only beings in the entire church who were quiet and calm were the two dead men lying on the floor beside the altar and a cloaked and hooded man who was nearly before them, his hands clasped in prayer. Illarion’s discarded helmet sat on the floor before the figure’s knees.

  “People of Rus,” Illarion called out, his voice hoarse. He allowed himself to wish for mead one last time before he worked up enough spit to ease the dryness in his throat. “People of Rus,” he tried again. “Why are we arguing over whether this man knew if our enemy had plotted against us? We know our enemy wants us dead. We know our enemy seeks to break our spirits in any way that he can.”

  He did not have all of their attention yet, but he could see it happening. Arguments were falling away and the gathered people were turning their faces toward him. So many hungry eyes and sallow cheeks! He was not one for grandiose speeches; that was Alexander’s duty. But he was here as the stand-in for the Kynaz. If the prince would have spoken to these people, so, too, would he.

  “This man is not our enemy,” Illarion said, indicating the cowing priest. “How many of you had children baptized by this man? How many of you received a blessing from him, thinking that it was a gift from God? He has shown himself to be afraid, and I dare any man or woman in this room to admit that they have never felt fear. How he dealt with that fear is between him and God. It is not our place to punish him for being afraid. It is our responsibility to look into our own hearts and ask how we failed him.”

  There was some grumbling from the Druzhina with that last sentence, and several men glared at him as if he were speaking directly to them. Illarion took care to not meet any of their gazes; instead, he let his gaze roam toward the high ceiling of the church where a few shadows stubbornly remained.