The Mongoliad: Book Three

by Neal Stephenson

  But not in her presence.

  “What?” he said. “Oh, yes. The carriage.” He waved his other hand at the ostiarius. “Let her have it. Get her out of my sight. Out of Rome.”

  Léna curtsied, and the ostiarius hurried to assist her aboard the carriage. As the drover snapped his whip at the horses, Fieschi turned away and hurried up the steps. When he reached the top and passed into the shadow of the broad arch of the doorway, he opened his hand and looked at the ring.

  The sigil was two fasces—the staves carried by Roman legates in the time before the Church—but they had been bent so that they appeared to form halves of a sundered omega. The ring had been given to him and not to Castiglione. Gregory IX’s successor. The one who would truly carry on in the spirit of the previous Pope.

  Celestine IV will not rule long, Fieschi thought. The ring fit snugly on the small finger of his right hand. And then it will be my turn.

  He closed his hand and looked at the ring.

  My church.

  The sight of Father Rodrigo’s body was horrible, made more so by how his death had come to pass. His eyes remained open, and Ocyrhoe couldn’t bear passing in front of them. She felt like they were still watching her, like part of him was still aware inside the sprawled body. She didn’t know which part of him it was—the befuddled Father Rodrigo who had been kind to her, or the monster that had he had become in the end. She didn’t understand how the transformation had happened, and thus, wasn’t entirely sure that whatever it was that had possessed Father Rodrigo couldn’t animate his dead body.

  Ferenc rocked and forth on his knees, weeping profusely, and she didn’t know how to console him. What could she say to him? That the priest had left him no choice? She would have died if Ferenc hadn’t acted, and with each painful breath, she was glad he made the choice he had.

  The satchel lay nearby, forgotten, as did the cup. Using the satchel, she scooped up the lackluster cup and closed the bag tight around it. The cup no longer glowed, and she put the idea out of her mind that it had taken on a dull rose tint.

  The Emperor had only asked that the priest and the cup be separated, and they had in the most brutal way possible. But what was she supposed to do with it now? Take it back to the Emperor?

  The Cardinal would be sending men out to search for Ferenc and Father Rodrigo. She had had a few hours’ head start on the search parties, but the longer she stood here, the closer the men of Rome would get.

  I can’t go back, she realized. This is what Léna meant for her to do. The Binder had told her she was ready to leave the city, that she had the skills to survive outside the walls that had been her home. Ocyrhoe didn’t understand how Léna could have anticipated this series of events, but somehow the Binder had known.

  What had Léna called her when they had first met? An orba matre. Ocyrhoe didn’t know what that meant, but as she furiously thought about what she was supposed to do, she realized Léna had been speaking from personal experience. She and Léna were the same, albeit at different stages of their lives. With that insight came the understanding that Léna would have never asked anything of Ocyrhoe that she wouldn’t have been willing to do herself.

  Ocyrhoe wasn’t alone. There was an unassailable connection between her and the other woman. They were, in fact, bound to one another. “Unencumbered by all,” Ocyrhoe whispered, and shivered as she felt the words were being spoken elsewhere at the same moment.

  She knew what she had to do.

  She touched Ferenc lightly, and he spooked at her touch. He looked at her, his face puffy and his eyes red from crying, and her heart ached at the sight of his suffering. How she wished she could ease it. Using soothing words and a light touch, she talked to him, explaining what had to be done.

  They didn’t have the tools to bury the priest’s body, and Father Rodrigo deserved better than to be dragged into the hills by scavengers. His body needed to go back to Rome, and someone needed to go with it. Someone like Ferenc.

  Eventually, he nodded, understanding what she wasn’t telling him, and he rose from his kneeling position and set about taking care of the priest’s body. Moving dead weight was much harder than she imagined it could be, but between them they got Father Rodrigo’s body across the saddle of one of the two horses Frederick had given them.

  Ferenc helped her to mount her own horse, and once she was in the saddle she put the satchel carefully into one of her saddlebags and made sure the flap was securely tied down. She looked down at Ferenc. “My friend...” Her voice was but a whisper, the bruised muscles of her neck twitching with a new dismay. She didn’t want to say good-bye...

  She touched her waist and pointed to his, indicating that he should give her his knife. Blinking back tears, he complied, unsure of what she intended to do. She felt in her tangled hair for the braided piece, the one with the knots he had recognized when they had first met. She separated the strand, and cut it with a quick jerk of his knife.

  He accepted her gift, kissing the back of her hand as he did, and he did not try to stop the tears from streaming down his cheeks. He shook his head when she tried to give back the knife, offering her the sheath as well.

  “Okay,” she said, pressing the sheathed knife to her lips. “It will keep me safe.”

  Ferenc nodded, a brave expression on his face, and then he turned and leaped up onto the third mount with a nimbleness that amazed her. With a final sad smile, he leaned over and gathered the reins of the horse that carried Father Rodrigo. He clicked to the horses and they began a slow walk. Back toward the Emperor’s camp. Back toward Rome.

  She watched them for a moment, until the sight of them became too much to bear, and she turned her gaze in the opposite direction. She had absolutely no idea where the road led. That part of her mind that had, in Rome, been an exquisitely detailed, crowded map was now blank parchment. Fresh and unmarked, waiting to reveal itself to her.

  And she knew it would.

  She pressed her heels against her horse’s side, nudging him forward on the unknown road.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  The Death of a Boy

  The sky above Hünern was alight with purple, gold, red, and orange—the sort of sunset that would cause a bard to spontaneously break out into song. But the beauty of the sun was lost on Hans. He wandered through the ruins of the Mongol camp as if in a dream. The painted sky was as unreal to him as the whimpering cries of the wounded and dying.

  The scavengers of Hünern were beginning to converge, the bravest had already crept through the open gate and begun looting the bodies of the dead Mongols. Others would follow, timorous rodents that would strip the tents clean. In the wake of the battle, there would be a period of lawlessness as the people of Hünern came to pillage the Mongol camp. There was no reason to stand in the way of this restitution. The survivors had lost everything, and what wealth they could scavenge from the camp was poor compensation.

  He still felt nothing. In the brief instances when he blinked, he saw Tegusgal’s panicked face. The Mongol’s eyes large and round before Hans had driven the dagger into the left one. The sound the man had made as the steel point went through the eye and into his brain. The way his body had bucked and quivered as the life left him.

  Hans never wanted to close his eyes again.

  The knights of the various orders were collecting the bodies of their fallen comrades, and Hans saw a group of Shield-Brethren gathered around a row of supine figures. He didn’t know where else to go. The Rats, who had come to his aid, pelting the Mongol commander with rocks, had kept their distance after Tegusgal died, their dirty faces pinched and stretched with horrific expressions. Throwing rocks at a hated enemy was a childish act, the defiance of the innocent. Killing a man was something else entirely. Hans was no longer one of them, and they had fled when he had tried to reach out to them.

  He was covered in blood, very little of it his, and as he wandered toward the group of Shield-Brethren, he saw how he looked more like the battle-weary knights than l
ike the dirty urchins of Hünern.

  The Shield-Brethren dead were laid side by side, arranged as naturally as they could be, their longswords laid across the bodies. Hans counted them slowly—fifteen in all—marking each face in his mind, and when he looked upon the peaceful features of the body at the end of the row, his body shook and he started to cry.

  Several of the knights hovered awkwardly nearby, and one finally touched Hans lightly on the shoulder. “He was the best of us,” the man said gruffly. His own face was streaked with dried tears.

  The words made little sense to Hans. Had they not said the same of Andreas? Why did the best keep dying? Why were they—the worst, the unworthy, the frightened ones—why were they allowed to live? He drew in a long, shuddering breath and took a few tentative steps closer to Rutger’s body. The quartermaster’s hands, the right wrapped with a filthy cloth, were clasped over the hilt of a longsword, and his brow was slightly creased as if there were unspoken words still trapped inside his skull. Unlike the ones next to him, his body did not have an apparent fatal wound.

  “Why are you gone?” Hans whispered as he collapsed next to Rutger’s body.

  “It happens,” the gruff one said. “Sometimes she claims them even though they have not suffered grievous wounds.”

  Hans looked over his shoulder at the knight. “That isn’t fair,” he said.

  “Little is, boy,” the man said. “That is why we grieve. Later, we will celebrate that it wasn’t our turn.” He shrugged as if that was all the explanation anyone would ever require.

  Beyond the knight, Hans spotted a group of men approaching. One of the other knights saw the approaching men as well, and his hand fell to his sword for a moment. Of the approaching group, two were wearing the colors of the Shield-Brethren, and Hans recognized them: Styg and Eilif. With them were Kim, Zug, and another freed prisoner.

  “There you are,” Styg said as he reached the row of bodies. “When we heard Maks had fallen in battle, we did not know what happened to you. Where have you been?”

  Hans shook his head. He did not want to say the Mongol commander’s name out loud.

  Kim pushed past the others and rushed to Hans’s side. He knelt and put his hands on the young boy’s shoulders. Kim’s face was dirty and bloody, and Hans flinched as he looked in the Flower Knight’s eyes and saw a flickering reminder of what he had done.

  “It’s okay,” Kim said, nodding slowly. “Did you have any choice?”

  Hans shook his head.

  “Then you did the right thing,” Kim said.

  “Te... Tegusgal,” Hans stammered. He started to cry again.

  Kim wrapped his arms around the boy and squeezed him tight. “You most certainly did the right thing,” he said. There was a note of pride in his voice, and Hans clung to that sentiment as firmly as he held on to the Flower Knight.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  Ögedei’s Legacy

  They reached a rocky spur that sliced through the forest like a ragged cut left by a dull sword. Over the years, a stream had dug a track along the base of the rocky shelf, and it held water now, though it was little more than a trickle. On their right, the forest was dense, filled with grassy hillocks and tightly bunched clumps of alder trees. It wasn’t the easiest terrain for their single horse (weighed down with both Cnán and the Chinese woman, Lian), though the lack of trees made it easier to see and avoid the crevasses and gaps in the rock.

  They moved quickly across the open terrain, and Cnán kept her horse close to the tree line where the ground was safer.

  Sound carried well along the shelf, caught between the trees and the rocks, and they heard the horses coming a while before they spotted them. Haakon and Krasniy made no move to hide themselves. Cnán’s heart beat faster, and she tried to not let her apprehension pass to her horse. The echoes tripped over each other, confounding the number of animals approaching, and Cnán doubted the riders approaching were friendly.

  Haakon and Krasniy each had a sword, and Krasniy had managed to pick up a spear as well on their way out of the camp, but neither wore any armor. They weren’t very well equipped to stand against a host of any size.

  The riders came into view, and both parties paused, catching sight of one another. Cnán peered at the pair facing them, noting they were Mongolian and that one—the broader one—appeared to be injured. The other she recognized after a moment as the Khagan himself.

  “Ögedei,” Haakon called out, having recognized the man in plum too. He raised his hand and beckoned, waving the Khagan toward him.

  The broad Mongol kneed his horse forward, lowering the tall pole he carried until it was pointed at the pair of Westerners like a lance. The horsehair braids danced as his horse charged.

  Krasniy laughed, a rolling sound that came deep from his belly. He motioned Haakon to stand aside as he stepped forward, raising his spear.

  At the mouth of the valley, Ögedei and Namkhai had stopped for fresher mounts, taking them from the scattered Torguud who appeared to have been ambushed. Namkhai urged Ögedei to keep riding, and while a part of him was angered by the idea of fleeing, prudence won out and he followed Namkhai. The Torguud’s responsibility was to protect him, and leaving them behind to fight the assassins who had sprung out of the woods was the right thing to do.

  Ögedei followed Namkhai through the woods, retracing the route they had taken the day before. The clearing near the river where they had camped flashed past, and then Namkhai turned north, heading up a slow incline toward rockier terrain. For a while, he simply focused on Namkhai’s broad back and the fluttering horsehair braids of the Spirit Banner, letting his horse run at its own pace.

  And then Namkhai slowed his horse, cutting to the side, and Ögedei looked ahead. He saw a horse carrying two riders and a pair of men, standing in the open. He squinted at them, knowing he knew who the men were, but unable to comprehend why he was meeting them on this trackless rock. “Who—?” he began, and then one of the pair called out his name.

  With a shout, Namkhai urged his horse forward, couching the Spirit Banner like a long spear, leaving Ögedei to puzzle out the presence of men whom he thought were caged back at the camp. How had they gotten out? he wondered. Why were they here?

  The giant, the red-haired one who had fought like a crazed bear in the gladiatorial matches, carried a spear, and as Namkhai charged, the giant trotted forward, his arm moving back for a long throw. Namkhai suddenly changed his tactic, realizing the giant’s target, and he swept the Spirit Banner to the side. With a final spurt of speed, the giant lunged forward, releasing the spear in an overhanded throw. A second later, the shaft of the Spirit Banner slammed into his chest and hurled him off his feet.

  Ögedei’s attention snapped to the flying spear. The giant hadn’t thrown it at Namkhai. He had hurled it, like it weighed not much more than an arrow, past Namkhai.

  Ögedei was the target.

  He jerked his horse’s head to the side, pounding his feet against its barrel to get it to move. It jerked its head back, snorting at the biting pain he was inflicting by pulling so hard on the reins, and it danced angrily, refusing to obey. The spear arced down, and Ögedei hurled himself out of the saddle, and as he hit the ground hard, painfully scrapping his palms on the rock, he heard the heavy sound of impact. His horse screamed, and he rolled away as it collapsed, thrashing in agony.

  The other man, the young Northerner who had stood in the gladiator ring with the fish gutter—the boy who had eyeballed him fiercely, thinking quite seriously about throwing the knife—was running at him. He had a sword, and that same look was plain on his face.

  He wasn’t going to stop this time.

  As soon as Krasniy released the spear, Haakon realized the sacrifice the giant had made for him. He started sprinting, sword in hand.

  The thrown spear hit the Khagan’s horse and the Khagan fell from his saddle as the horse went down, its legs thrashing. The Khagan hit the ground roughly, but got to his feet—sword drawn—in time to meet Haak
on’s first attack.

  He launched a two-handed downward stroke at the Khagan’s head. Ögedei was dazed from his fall, and he did get his sword up in time, but only just. Haakon’s blow bent Ögedei’s arm, and the Khagan threw his head back, to keep from getting hit by his own blade.

  Ögedei surged forward, pushing against Haakon’s blade, and Haakon batted the underpowered swing aside. He was fighting with one of the curved Mongolian swords, and they didn’t have the same point as a Western longsword. The curved end of his blade slid off the Khagan’s jacket, slicing through the fur-lined material but failing to penetrate the leather jerkin underneath. He turned his wrists, rotating the sharp edge of the blade toward the Khagan’s bare neck, and pulled the weapon back in a cutting motion.

  Ögedei jerked his head aside and got his blade underneath Haakon’s enough to keep his throat from getting cut. He lashed out with an attack of his own, his blade twisting like an angry serpent, and Haakon caught it between quillons and blade. Ögedei lifted his hands, shoving his blade, and Haakon gasped as the curved edge slid over the base of his hand, slicing his flesh.

  Haakon retreated, berating himself for neglecting to remember the differences—once again—between the blade he was fighting with and the one he had trained with. It doesn’t have a point, he castigated himself. It is the edge I have to think about.

  Ögedei, seeing the blood running across Haakon’s hand, came at him again, swinging his sword in looping, whirling attacks. Ögedei was swinging his sword hard too; each time Haakon rebuffed his attack, he felt the shock of contact in his hand.

  His grip was getting slippery.

  Ögedei wasn’t trying to hit him. The Khagan was trying to overtax his wounded hand. If there was enough blood, Haakon might lose control of his weapon.