by Various
The mute girl smiled again. Cnán’s heart thudded. She knew that smile—had seen it too often around Mongol camps, decking the faces of the mindless and the broken—those kept alive to be used for lust. Men, women, and children… A smile worse than any mad leer.
Had Cnán felt free to speak her mind, she’d have cried out in protest about an arrangement that moved heaven and earth to get Illarion to safety while leaving this girl in a place where the Mongols could get to her again. But matters being as they were, she said no more.
Raphael took a clean cloth from his kit and wrapped it around Illarion’s head. “The flesh is mortifying,” he said. “But the maggots have trimmed it for you. And the girl’s chewed you a good green willow bark mash. You’re a lucky man.”
“No,” Illarion said. He shut his eyes and crossed his mouth with a fingered X. “Take me. Empty me. I want to die.”
The boy touched the girl on the shoulder, and they turned and departed. Cnán went to the door to watch them. The boy ran from the devastated grounds without a backward glance, but the girl lingered, stooping on one knee as if bowing to a lord and looking one last time at the hovel. Then she fled. Watching from beside the door, Cnán tried not to think about where they would go. God protects, she thought.
It was difficult to move Illarion over rough territory. The journey back would take almost three days, Cnán estimated, and Raphael agreed. But once they retrieved their horses—for the woodsman proved honest—they made better time. Illarion seemed to improve. He said little now, but what he said made more sense.
He was tall, not especially heavy in build but strong enough, Cnán sensed, to swing a plank with some abandon. His blond hair contrasted with a darker moustache and beard. His current troubles seemed traceable to the loss of his ear, the stump of which had suppurated, inflaming the side of his head and making it difficult to eat and talk. Sensing that pain was as much a problem as fever, Raphael dosed him with a bitter resinous gum and infusions of more willow bark. This gave the man some comfort and enabled him to stay on a horse for a few hours at a time.
They had hoped to push west quickly and return to the chapterhouse in the dense woods. However, Cnán spotted steady streams of refugees now moving along that route, harried by Mongol troops, and at her urging, they swung south for some miles before turning west again.
This brought them far too close to the Mongols’ encampment. Raphael told Cnán and Illarion that he, Feronantus, and Finn had sallied forth from the woods to reconnoiter, days before, and seen, from the west, these very mud walls, almost Roman in style, forming a great square. “Ordu built here during the siege,” Raphael explained. “When Onghwe showed up, Ordu must have refused him permission to quarter his men, so Onghwe pitched a temporary camp on the field of battle—a terrible place. No love lost between them. When Ordu moved out, Onghwe returned to organize the gleaners and tax-collectors, no fit duty for a true Mongol warrior.”
The ramparts were patrolled by regulars in pointed helmets, the forward positions occupied by troops of horseman. They could not see the tents of the soldiers over these ramparts, but a huge hump of a felted pavilion, orange and green and brown, rose high at the center.
Finn drew their attention to a field beyond the ramparts. The area had been cleared, and what he thought might be a castle was under construction—crude gray logs forming a circle, with walkways and tiers of planks visible through the unfinished west-facing side.
“That wasn’t here a few days ago,” Raphael observed, frowning.
“Mongols don’t build castles,” Cnán said.
Raphael agreed. “It puts me in mind of one of the great arenas that the Romans built for their gladiators,” he said. “That may be where they plan to hold the competitions.”
A tall rectangular tower at the south end supported a wide viewing stand overlooking the arena and below that dropped in a sheer face to the straw-littered ground, bare but for a great reddish-purple curtain hung on the lower third.
“Feronantus read us the invitation,” Haakon said. “It spoke of a Red Veil through which victors are invited to pass.” Cnán cricked her neck and looked back at the young man. His countenance had brightened at the thought of clean battle between champions of honor. Despite all he had seen on this journey, he clung to a vision of battle as a pinnacle to be climbed, with glory or swift death at the summit. Clearly, this boy was being groomed to die.
She felt no pity, however. He was a tool, and tools had their uses. When they were gone, you found another one. Getting emotional over one was to develop an attachment to it, and that was not the Binder way. Emotions sapped energy.
Illarion raised his head. “Competitions?” he asked in a voice low and heavy. His ear had stopped bleeding, but his jaw had swollen to grotesque proportions, and his fever had clearly worsened. “You mean, a contest of courage between champions, to save the western lands.”
“Yes!” Haakon said.
“It is of this I must speak to Feronantus,” Illarion said. But he would not be drawn out even by curious Raphael, who brought out more bark-mash and stuffed it into the man’s thickened cheek to ease his pain.
Past the encampment, against both Raphael’s and Cnán’s better judgment, they turned north and west. Both knew this would take them past the ruins of Legnica, but daylight was fading and they needed to reach the woods before nightfall.
At first, blinded by haunted low mists and rain, the rescue party encountered only more burned farmhouses and piles of bones picked clean by dogs, crows, and vultures—or perhaps hungry villagers. Raphael spoke briefly of the habits of besieged populations, but Illarion glared, and the physician stopped.
The remains of the town proper surrounded a low hill on which had been erected a crude fortification of logs and partial stone walls, with square wooden towers capped with wide roofs. The interior buildings were made of stone ramparts, with higher walls of wattle and daub. The log enclosures had been knocked in and burned, the stones pulled down; the inner buildings still smoldered even in the drizzle. The village around the “castle” had also once been protected by several log walls, now breached in so many places they jutted up from the flat land like broken teeth. Few other structures survived.
Deep forest and sanctuary lay just a few miles from the ruins, but bands of Onghwe’s Mongols and gleaners roved the broad outlying farms and neighborhoods, having plundered the town over and over again.
Clouds parted and the rain slowed, then stopped. The rescue party was forced this time to merge along the roads with another general, coagulated flow of miserable and ruined people, scattered, stumbling, stalking, staring fixedly forward or heads hung low, wailing or silent: abandoned clumps of human detritus. Haakon stayed near Finn, casting dark looks about him—nothing in his experience had prepared him for such a place. Everywhere lay the bones and rotting bodies of men, women, children, horses. Cattle. The stench was almost unbearable. Dogs and vultures were few by now; they had been hunted, beaten down with sticks, eaten. The rats were more numerous, and some were defiant, fat and sleek, eyes flashing as they dropped their shoulders and lifted their heads to squeal at the passing horsemen.
The gleaners hunted unarmed survivors for sport, but avoided any who showed resistance, for in fact gleaners were the worst of cowards, brave only around the dead and dying. Spying a gleaner stripping a half-dead woman of her upper garments, Finn rode out over the mud and burned straw and slew the wretch with a single down-stroke of his sword. Then, swinging his horse about, with a sharp cry and another stroke, he dispatched the woman. He returned to the group cursing, his cheeks streaked with tears.
Raphael was about to chide him for this foolishness, but instead clamped his jaw tight and looked away. “Worse to come,” he warned.
Cnán knew these gleaners and their types well enough that she could pick them out even in a healthy city. Not always were they the furtive criminals or crazed drunks. Indeed, within her short life, she had seen drunks rise to glorious battle and city
fathers turn into ghouls. War did not just level, it plowed the field, raising the muck and sinking the stubble.
The general flow of misery lurched westward. They were forsaking lands that would not be productive for generations, avoiding paths and farm roads patrolled by regular Mongol troops.
Mounted and armed, the rescue party was as kings and princes compared to this rabble, and so felt no especial need to act furtive. Someone might be hungry and desperate enough to attack them, but Raphael felt that it was best to continue to boldly ride straight through and then, once in the woods, proceed directly to the chapterhouse.
The style of movement that Cnán preferred, which Raphael called “sneaking,” made her uneasy with this course. Surprisingly, Finn was also unhappy—unnerved by the monstrous depredation and this endless spectacle of cruelty.
Near the western limits of the town, part of a stone perimeter wall still stood, built to withstand invasions coming out of the setting sun. Moving into the lee of this wall, they slowed as their horses skittishly avoided a rag-ribboned, sinew-strung litter of bones and moldering heads. Even in this carnage, the pitiful remains did not look or feel proper. They were too small… skulls crushed by a single blow… their garb not the undergarments of warriors or townspeople, but light, like nightwear.
Haakon pulled on the reins of his horse, eyes wild, until he fastened his look on Finn, then on Raphael—then on Cnán, who wrinkled her features. “Don’t look,” she said, “if you can’t bear it.”
Adam’s apple bobbing, Haakon lifted his eyes to the gray, misting clouds. Illarion did the same, touching his huge cheek and missing ear, as if to listen to faraway music.
These were the bones of children, from infants to toddlers to adolescents, and they stretched all along the wall, mounding near the base. Scores of children. An entire town’s future, crushed, broken, rotting in the mud.
Cnán knew what had happened here. She had heard stories out of the far East, at the limits of her ranging. With the hilltop fort broken and the other walls breached, the citizens had brought the infants and youth of Legnica to this final and strongest wall, in the last days. Near the end, as the Mongols swept in from behind and then all around, torturing and killing all in their path, the soldiers and the last of the parents had sacrificed the young that they might not suffer a worse fate. Their crowns had been bashed by hammers or hilts, then their throats cut clean like so many shoats, ten or twenty at a time, the bodies then heaved from the rampart.
Possibly the townspeople had harbored a faint hope of arousing pity within the Mongols or their lackeys, but that was impossible, Cnán knew. The tiger would pity the fawn, the wolf would weep over its lamb, before Mongol would cringe at the corpse of a child.
Haakon made small sounds deep in his throat. Surely hell itself lay not far below this stinking ossuary, bubbling up toward the world’s incomprehensible evil. None of the rescue party wanted to tarry among these dead. The vengeance of their young, unshaped ghosts might be worse than that of any Mongol.
They rode away from the wall and the bones as quickly as they could—corrupt mud spattering from the hooves of the horses and flecking their faces and armor—to reach the shelter of the thick woods before nightfall.
Cnán wiped a dollop of ooze from her cheek. It was tinted red with blood.
Dusk and more mist stole over them as they crossed the glacis of cleared land. The refugees had flowed south, and the old field of battle seemed deserted of all but the scattered bones of Legnica’s defenders. Their path was clear.
Cnán was about to release the breath in her tight chest when, directly ahead of her, pale and vivid in the twilight, Finn’s hand flew up like a falcon ready to swoop down on prey. She had learned to respect that gesture; it meant that his ears had picked up a trace of something, so faint that he risked losing it by shushing them.
The party drew to a halt to let him listen.
Finn’s hand descended and made the prancing gesture that meant horses. Then, thumb pinching quick against two raised fingers: small. He was hearing ponies. A great many ponies.
Cnán dismounted. She knew better than to try to outride what was coming. Haakon drew his great sword.
Finn’s hands now told them by darts and swoops that the ponies were not in one place, but all around. Cnán could finally hear their hooves, then the low voices of the men who had been quietly riding to surround their party. She bent her knees, dropping to a squat, and then to all fours, pulling her dark cape around her. They had drawn the attention of a scouting party. Perhaps a sentry had sighted them or some scavenger had ratted them out, hoping to purloin some small item of value once the Mongols were finished. Or perhaps someone had reported Finn’s attack on the gleaner.
No matter. Cnán could see it clearly. Her companions would end up like hedgehogs, bristling with arrows, but she would hide among their corpses, then scurry to the woods before the sentinels caught her.
Raphael nudged his mount forward and laid his hand on Haakon’s forearm. The boy’s drawn sword, shining like an icicle in the twilight, would make him the first target of the archers. Haakon lowered the blade, nodding.
A little squadron of Mongols filed into position between the rescue party and the trees. Cnán reckoned she might still be able to steal past them during the confusion of the fight, but some troubled part of her soul was telling her to stay with her comrades.
“The second one, in the armor that looks like fish-scales,” she said in low tones. “He is rich. Their leader.”
“We charge him, then,” Haakon proposed.
“And die in a cloud of arrows before we get halfway,” Raphael said.
“On me,” Illarion suddenly commanded, surprising them all. He spurred his horse forward. Unsettled by the corpses and by the tension in the voices, the mount startled, but then, at a soothing word from his gaunt rider, dropped into a slow walk. “Follow. Single file. Slow. Like a funeral procession. Vaetha, walk your horse. All of you, hood yourselves.”
They did as Illarion instructed. The Ruthenian rode stiffly, steadily, at a plodding pace, his great hollow eyes staring straight ahead.
A single armored Mongol rode ahead of the band, grinning, striped bow held out in one hand, as if signaling peace, friendship. A chief, no doubt. Cnán counted their opponents. Fifteen horse-mounted bowman.
The groups were now separated by less than a hundred paces.
To bar the Ruthenian’s path, the chief crabbed his pony sideways.
Illarion continued straight on, his horse snorting and tossing his head.
She thought she understood Illarion’s strategy: by moving so, he projected dogged purpose, hopefully slowing the Mongols from making a pincered feint to scatter their smaller party. If the Ruthenian turned or rode too quickly, the Mongols would instinctively rush in and give chase like dogs coursing a hind.
The chief twitched his bow left, right, then up. He dropped back. The Mongol squadron finally split to right and left, then began to draw in like a slow snare or a purse-string against their flanks and rear, fifty paces, thirty paces… close enough that their first arrows would be certain to strike home, yet not close enough to bring them within range of Haakon’s bright sword.
The chief deftly spun his pony, as if daring them to chase after and catch him, him personally, with his back turned and everything. Grinning all the while.
Cnán did not understand what Illarion proposed to do when he reached the chief. Perhaps swing on him and die, giving the others some chance of reaching the woods?
Illarion and the chief were now separated by less than five paces.
With a sweep of his arm, Illarion drew back the cloak that had swathed him for much of the last two days and hurled it aside, where it spun and flew for an uncanny number of yards, like a bat, then fell—to precisely drape the picked skeleton and conical helm of a Polish knight.
A knight who had almost made it to the forest before taking three arrows in the back.
All heads turned, mesmer
ized by this.
Bones rattled. The round hump of the skull shifted under the cloak, as if finding new life.
Illarion reined his horse just to the left of the Mongol chief and canted his head with a careless jerk, exposing the swollen, earless right side of his face. Not once did his eyes meet the man’s.
Watching the Mongol’s reaction—for Cnán now understood—she saw first curiosity, then a twist of lip and brow—alarm and confusion. The chief’s features went pale and his mouth opened as if to scream. Frantic, heels kicking the pony’s flanks, he spun about and dog-yelped to his comrades. His pony bucked and turned but did not know which way to go.
Illarion rode steadily on. His missing ear dripped black blood, his hollow eyes knew death as an intimate comrade; nothing living could stop him… or would wish to.
Leaning over his pony’s neck, reining it in, the chief jerked its head left and spurred it even harder, leaving a gap through which Illarion rode without pause and without betraying the slightest awareness that the Mongols were even there. The Ruthenian did not need to act to appear to ride from beyond humanity, beyond life.
The chief gawped in terror. His pony stumbled in the muck.
On left and right and behind, the Mongols turned and drew back, muttering and shouting.
Behind Illarion, Raphael leaned to one side and cupped his hand to his ear, imitating the gaunt Ruthenian—but with a grim and toothy smile. He swiveled in his saddle to leer at the Mongols.
The entire squadron broke and scattered into the mist.
The rescue party rode on at the same pace. At Finn’s gesture, Cnán remounted. She could see that Haakon’s shoulders were drawn in, flexing and flinching just like her own.
The trees came up none too soon, and the horses parted to accommodate them. Cold, clean night air swirled from the west, bringing more rain and mist, and water dripped in pattering, rhythmic showers from the leaves and branches, as if to cleanse them of all they had seen.
“You speak Mongol, don’t you?” Haakon asked Cnán, when they had counted a hundred paces deep into the woods.
