The Mongoliad: Book Three

by Neal Stephenson

  Though, recently, he had been afflicted with the same malaise as the more experienced Shield-Brethren.

  Graymane’s trail had led them toward Saray-Jük—not surprising, given the presence of more Mongol troops there—and with some caution they had found the place where Benjamin had instructed them to meet him. The caravanserai was deserted—nothing more than a scattering of fire pits near a stand of scrawny trees and a tiny trickle of a stream. The ashes were cold and there were too many tracks of Mongol ponies—it was dangerous for them to stay in the area. Before they left, Cnán found the cryptic message left by the trader, a series of marks carved into the bark of one of the trees—almost as if she had known to look for them. South and east for six days, the message had read, look for the rock.

  Which rock? Feronantus had asked.

  It will probably be the only rock, Raphael had pointed out.

  Given how Yasper tended to focus so tightly on his own little projects, Cnán suspected he might ride right into the rock before he noticed it.

  While Raphael’s comment was all too accurate and would likely be the only guidance the company needed, she knew the rock. It was one of the landmarks the Binders used as they passed from the east to the west. A station in the wilderness where messages could be coded and left for others to pick up.

  Some Binders, like her, traveled widely, but others stayed within a few days’ travel of where they had been born and raised. At the verge of their domain, they would receive messages and instructions from other kin-sisters, and being more qualified to navigate the dense locality, they would complete the assignment for the foreign Binder. In this way, messages could be carried across the known world and delivery could be readily assured, because the kin-sisters were never dependent upon one messenger.

  Such a landmark was used by the Silk Road traders as well.

  Cnán glanced over her shoulder at the string of horses and riders behind her. While she was accustomed to traveling across wastelands such as this, she could tell the tedium of riding from daybreak to sunset was beginning to wear on the rest of the company.

  And they have no idea how many more days await them, she thought.

  “What are you smiling about?” Yasper inquired.

  “Nothing,” she replied, setting her face aright. “What could I possibly see that would provoke some humor in me?”

  “That’s why I asked,” Yasper said. He sat up and tapped his horse lightly with his stick, edging closer to her. “You’ve been this way before,” he noted. “Tell me, have you seen deposits of salt?”

  “Salt?”

  “Yes.” He spread his hand out flat and moved it across the landscape. “Like a dry lake. A place where the wind plays.”

  Cnán laughed. “All of this land is like that.”

  “No, no. Not like this. Perfectly flat. Alchemists call it a sabkha.”

  Cnán shrugged. “I do not know that word,” she said, though she had a dim recollection of a Turkic word that might mean the same thing. She tried to dredge up the word, but nothing felt quite right on her tongue. “Nor have I seen one,” she admitted.

  “A pity,” Yasper said. “Neither have I.”

  Cnán smiled again. “There’s still time,” she said.

  “I know, I know.” Yasper flapped his hands, and blew out, puffing up his cheeks. “This... wasteland... wears on me. I’ve been trying to find some solace in my recipes, but my supplies are terribly meager, especially after... “ He trailed off, and Cnán knew he was thinking about the loss of his horse in Kiev.

  When he had fled from the fight with the Shield-Brethren, the Livonian commander Kristaps had returned through the same stinking tunnels they had used to reach the Shield-Maiden sanctuary. Upon emerging from the well house, the Livonian had stumbled upon her, Yasper’s, and Finn’s horses. He had taken all three—a smart ploy to reduce their ability to pursue him. Yasper hadn’t been so distraught about the lack of his horse as he had been about the loss of his numerous satchels and jars and powders.

  All of his alchemical supplies, gone.

  Since then he had been trying to replenish his stores, with some mixed success. The market in the border town had supplied him with the firecrackers they had used so effectively against the Mongol war party, as well as a number of other basic ingredients. Yasper had been excited when they had first stumbled across the wormwood—the hearty plant native to these lands—but after days and days of seeing clumps of it everywhere, Yasper’s enthusiasm had diminished drastically. Cnán knew little about the alchemist’s recipes (and wanted to know very little, actually), but what she had gleaned was that all of his potions, unguents, powders, and salves were built from a carefully measured base of two or three simple ingredients.

  Salt being one of those basic ingredients.

  “What is it that you hope to create?” she asked, out of boredom more than any concerted interest.

  Yasper offered her a wolfish grin. “Why, nothing more than the secrets of the universe, of course,” he laughed. “Every alchemist seeks to unlock the riddle of existence by discerning the secret methods by which God constructed the world. All of this,” he gestured around them, “though this is not much, but all of the world was created through a complex set of instructions. Men have spent their entire lives trying to enumerate the multitudinous mystery of creation. Pliny—do you know Pliny? No, of course you don’t—Pliny wrote thirty-seven volumes on the natural history of the world. Thirty-seven!” He sat up in his saddle, his mood improving as he spoke. “Can you imagine how complicated this world is that God has created? Don’t you want to understand how all the various pieces fit together?”

  “I hadn’t really thought about it,” Cnán admitted. “But why do you want to understand it? So that you can become a god too?”

  Yasper shook his head. “That would be heresy,” he clucked his tongue at her, a grin stretching his mouth. “No, we seek to understand who we truly are, and what our true purpose is. If we can comprehend how the world was made, and learn the power of transmutation—the art of changing one thing into another—could we not give ourselves that same gift?”

  “Which gift?”

  “Transmutation.”

  “Trans-what?”

  “Becoming something new.”

  Cnán scratched her nose. “What’s wrong with what we are?”

  Yasper closed one eye and stared critically at her. “What’s right about what we are?” he asked.

  Cnán, now somewhat sorry she had even asked her initial question, shook her head and stared out at the horizon in the vain hope of finding something to distract the alchemist. He was warming to this one-sided conversation, and she feared it was only going to get more confusing. “Look,” she said, sitting up in her saddle and pointing. She was not embarrassed to hear a note of elation in her voice. “There!”

  Ahead of them, a thin black shape reached up from the flat ground, a finger stretching to poke the empty dome of the heavens. It wiggled, like a worm struggling to pull itself from rain-softened mud.

  “Rider!” Cnán called out to the others while Yasper stood in his saddle, shading his eyes. After peering through the heat haze for a moment, he sank back down into his saddle, and the slope of his shoulders told her everything.

  “It’s Istvan,” he said bitterly.

  As the Hungarian drew closer, she could confirm what the alchemist had noticed as well. The Hungarian was alone.

  But what chilled her was the fact that he was in front of them.

  Where had Graymane gone?

  CHAPTER TWO

  Factus Sum Tamquam Vas Perditum

  He needed to make a dramatic entrance.

  Not far from the secret door he used to come and go from the Septizodium, there was a crack in the wall that opened into a narrow slot. Previously, Fieschi had used it as a makeshift dressing room, exchanging the vestments of his station for a plain wool robe. Now, as the tunnels beneath the Septizodium began to fill with smoke and the cries of the panicked C
ardinals, he waited patiently in his hiding spot.

  Before squeezing into his secret sanctum, he had gone ahead to the secret door and released the hidden latch. He had pushed it open slightly, just enough for a little air to get in, and for a little smoke to get out. The young messengers had used the door, and while he suspected the two jesters—Colonna and Capocci—had known of its existence prior to the arrival of the intruders, he didn’t want to leave it to Providence that it would be found: he needed witnesses, an audience that would flock to his miraculous appearance.

  Fieschi set his shoulders against the back of his niche to get more comfortable. He opened and closed his right hand slowly, keeping the aching paralysis of his recent exertion at bay. Quoniam fortitudo mea et refugium meum es tu, he prayed, et propter nomen tuum deduces me et enutries me.

  Fieschi recalled a sermon St. Augustine had delivered on the thirty-first Psalm—in particular, a portion of the homily concerning Abraham. The patriarch was justified by the virtue of his faith; his good works came second. God is my rock and my fortress, and I am unshakeable in my faith. “Exsultabo, et laetabor in misericordia tua,” he whispered, knowing that God would hear him, “quoniam respexisti humilitatem meam; salvasti de necessitatibus animam meum.”

  By destroying Somercotes, he had saved the Church. Were such trials not part of God’s love and kindness? Surely God would forgive him of his transgression.

  The fire, incendiary agent of Satan, eagerly devoured the combustibles in the narrow room. It had licked the walls and found them wanting, and so it had fallen upon the dead body. Fueled by the cloth and the flesh, it had grown larger, sending out creeping tendrils of fire that wormed their way through the cracks in the walls. It was no longer a single blaze by the time Capocci approached Somercotes’s room but a string of fires, prancing with unholy glee, in a number of the tiny rooms the Cardinals had been using.

  Most of the smoke came from Somercotes’s room, rolling off the huddled mass that popped and crackled as the fire joyfully burned fat and flesh off bone. Capocci ducked his head, breathing through his mouth; he knew that smell. Years ago, when he still believed in Gregory IX, he had led papal troops into Viterbo and besieged the citadel of Rispampano. The Roman troops resisted for a few days, hurling everything they could haul up to the battlements down upon his troops, including burning pitch. The screams of dying men and the smell of their burning flesh had only hardened the resolve of his soldiers.

  Somercotes’s body lay curled near the center of his room. Not on his bed and not near the door—two places that Capocci would have expected to find the body had the fire been an accident. He pushed aside the inquisitive thoughts that crowed his brain, and waddled slowly into the hot room. His beard crackled as strands of his capacious whiskers began to curl and burn from the heat. Blinking heavily to clear the smoke from his eyes, he reached out with his gloved hand.

  Somercotes couldn’t still be alive. The fire danced too merrily along his frame, and the crackling, sizzling sound of burning meat was so loud. And the smell... Capocci grabbed something—an elbow, perhaps—and clenched his teeth as the fire gnawed through the heavy leather of his gloves. He pulled, intending to drag the body out of the inferno, but there was no resistance and he fell back on the floor.

  Clutched in his hand, covered in writhing tendrils of fire, was a spitting piece of charred meat. The entire arm.

  Spitting out an oath that he would have to beg forgiveness for later, Capocci tried to hurl Somercotes’s arm away, but the fire had fused the meat to the leather of his glove. Orange tongues of flame licked at the cuff of his sleeve. Using his other hand, he stripped the glove off—both of them, in the end—and scrambling backward, he fled from the room and its grisly pyre.

  Capocci leaned against the hallway wall, coughing and choking as he tried to catch his breath without inhaling the fouled air. He knew he should check the other rooms. Hopefully they were empty, but what if they weren’t? Would their occupants be any more alive than Somercotes?

  He wanted to run away. He wasn’t such a prideful man that he couldn’t admit when he was afraid. Fear was a powerful emotion, and giving himself up to God meant letting go of the fear. But such a sacrifice did not make him invulnerable or fireproof.

  It made him cautious.

  He had to be sure, though. He had to be sure there was no one else. Only then could he listen to the voice in his head—the one that telling him that Somercotes’s death was not an accident.

  Rodrigo had dreamed of a dragon once. It was sinuous and long, and covered in red and brown scales. When it roared, a great billow of black smoke issued from its mouth. There were great furnaces in its belly, stoked by infernal spirits, and in the wake of that smoke came the fire. The brilliant, burning fire.

  He ran from that fire. To stand his ground would be to be burned, and while he had faith in God—while he believed that God watched over him and that God’s love was enough to protect him from any such foul denizen of Hell—another part of him was broken and fearful. That part of him fled, dragging the rest of his spirit with him. The rest of his body and mind. Running from the fire...

  Rodrigo bashed his hands against rough rock as he tripped. The smoke surrounded him—it was in his mouth, his nose, his eyes—but there was less of it down here next to the rock. He wanted to press his face against the rocky ground, and let the smoke pass over him. Let the dragon’s fire burn the sky overhead. Down here, nestled against the ground, he would escape notice. He could still breathe.

  “Get up.” Someone grabbed his robes and dragged him upright. He fought back, his body racked with heaving coughs, but he had no real strength in his arms. He let himself be dragged along until it became clear that whoever was carrying him would continue to do so—more roughly, in fact, he realized as his knees bounced painfully off the ground.

  When he had his feet beneath him again, the hand released its hold, and he was free to continue staggering down the endless passage.

  As if he was running up the dragon’s throat, trying to escape the burning churn of the infernal fires in its belly.

  Then, without warning, he was free. The smoke went upward, a curling black finger rising into the pure serenity of the blue sky, and the walls of the tunnel fell away. He had escaped.

  And with the freedom came a sudden rush of clarity, as if much more than smoke was wiped clear of his eyes and throat. He had been in the grips of the fever again, the persistent heat that plagued his soul. It was such a heavy weight to carry that the brief moments when he felt God’s eyes upon him were such a momentous blessing. He felt so... elevated.

  He looked behind him at the unadorned outer walls of the Septizodium. He stood in an alley, one of the many unmarked and unmemorable gaps between buildings in Rome. The door through which he had stumbled wasn’t a real door, but a clever panel of stone. Any other time, he would never have noticed it against the mottled background of the surrounding stone, but it hung open now and a column of black smoke spiraled up from it. There were other spires of smoke rising over the rooftop; clearly, there were other exits from the Septizodium. They might not have been plain to those who were sequestered inside, but smoke had a talent for finding a way out.

  The tall, elderly Cardinal—Colonna, Rodrigo could remember his name effortlessly now—stood nearby, his chest heaving with a great cough. He spat something foul on the ground, and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Are you all right?” he asked, and Rodrigo recognized his voice as the one that had kept shouting at him during his long exodus from the fire-laden darkness.

  “Yes,” Rodrigo replied. “Well enough.”

  Colonna nodded and made the sign of the cross. “Watch for others,” he said, “I am going to see if anyone... is waiting for us to... escape.” He took a step up the alley, and then seemed to realize he was still cradling a small earthenware jar in his hands. “Hold on to this,” he said, thrusting it toward Rodrigo.

  “What is it?”

  Colonna cocked his
head to one side. “Just... hold it.” Shaking his head, he headed up the alley, leaving Rodrigo to wonder what was on the Cardinal’s mind.

  Rodrigo peered at the jar, cradling it tentatively. The stopper was a thick wooden plug surrounded by a layer of wax, and the seal was so tight that if he turned it upside down—like so—the stopper did not come out. He held the jar close to his ear, cautiously listening, but he heard nothing over the groaning rumble of the fire burning deep within the Septizodium.

  I am being a fool, he thought. If it is the one thing that Colonna brought out of this prison, then it must be important. That is enough for me. He glanced in the direction the tall Cardinal had gone. We all have our secrets.

  Unburdened by the fever, he dispassionately recalled what he had seen at the abandoned farm near Mohi: the slaughtered horses in the barn; the children hiding in the hayloft; their mother, lying on the hearth in the house, her body burned and defiled; the old man pinned to the wall with arrows, forced to watch. He could remember it all clearly, unburdened by the horror and dread he had felt at the time. It was as if he was looking at the pages of an illuminated manuscript, and no matter how badly he desired to close this book and hide these pictures forever, he could not. They were an indelible part of him now, burned into his memory by the fever. By the vision.

  He could also remember what Brother Albertus had taught him many years prior. He had been so young, so eager to learn how to worship God, and the older monk had been equally eager to share his newfound knowledge with a bright student. The Ars Notoria, a means by which he would be able to more readily explore his relationship with God. By understanding the language of God, by learning how the tongue and the mind were connected.