The Mongoliad: Book Two

by Neal Stephenson

  Clutching both the ring and the reins of Father Rodrigo’s horse, Ferenc began to ride slowly through the square. He owed the priest his life, and his debt would only be repaid when they reached their destination. The chaos of the market frightened him, and he’d faltered. He had turned to the priest for aid, and even in his fevered state, the priest had responded with a message, a sign. This was how his God worked, after all. When you lose your way, you prayed to Him for guidance and He would send you aid. He would tell you what to do and where to go.

  Ferenc made the magic sign—forehead, sternum, left shoulder, right shoulder—and behind him, swaying drunkenly on his horse, Father Rodrigo did the same.

  * * *

  They were clearly foreigners, and not just because they were stones in the natural flow of the market. It was closing in on midday. The blockade surrounding the city had reduced most of the itinerant vendors to barely a trickle, and those farmers who were able to set up their stalls had already come and gone, their wagons picked clean by the early morning residents. The pair stood out, not by virtue of their ragged appearances or because they were on horseback but because they didn’t have a clear destination in mind. They wandered aimlessly, moving at odds with the rest of the people in the square. One of them, the elder, appeared to be drunk. The other was not a local youth. Nor was he a simple farmer, though he had that wide-eyed, skittish, wondering look Ocyrhoe had seen on many a lad the first time they came to Rome. She sensed he was only a few years into manhood, but his beard and hair were thick and long, his face dark and lined from exposure.

  She had been watching them since they came in through the Porta Tiburtina. The Via Tiburtina wasn’t a major thoroughfare like Via Appia, but it was the only open road into Rome for those coming from the east.

  Each morning, she climbed one of the churches on one of the seven hills of Rome and took stock of the city. There was too much of it for one person to cover; she couldn’t hope to watch over it all, and so each morning she had to make a choice. Which gate? Which district? Which road? Where would she go? This morning, what little wind there was at dawn had been from the east, and so she had come to the market square next to the Porta Tiburtina to watch and to wait.

  She was the only one left. She had to be careful.

  Rome was caught in the throes of two crises. There were those who were still mourning the loss of the Bishop of Rome; others stood in the shadow of the walls and looked for signs that Frederick, the Holy Roman Emperor, was losing his taste for the blockade. Ocyrhoe wasn’t privy to most of the political and religious machinations, nor did she profess to understand all of them, but she understood the rhythm and the pulse of the people, and in it she sensed a great deal of unease and danger.

  And this had been true even before her kin-sisters had begun to disappear.

  Two weeks ago, she had spotted the white pigeon on the statue of Minerva. When it had still been there the next morning, she had dared to climb up and retrieve it. The message on its leg had been written in the secret language, and without her sisters to help her, Ocyrhoe had spent most of the day deciphering it. The message was nothing more than a simple question, and she knew instinctively that it was meant for her: Where are my eyes in Rome?

  The others were gone, taken—or driven off—by the Bear’s men, or they had fled before the Emperor’s armies had set up their camps outside the city. She was the only one left—too small to be noticed, too young to flee the city that had reared her—and so the task fell to her: to watch, to wait, to learn what was happening. And when the time came—when another bird appeared on Minerva’s shoulder, as she knew in time it would—Ocyrhoe would be ready to report on everything she knew, on everything she had seen.

  Today had brought these two: the drunken priest and the wild man-child.

  The younger one wasn’t very tall or broad, but he was more square than round in the chest. His shaggy hair had been bleached blond by the sun a long time ago, and what was left of his natural brown persisted as shadows and stripes through his beard. A rustic, homemade bow and quiver were slung across the withers of his horse. A small knife was thrust through his belt. The older man was trying to be a nondescript traveler, but Ocyrhoe sensed he was a priest. His hooded robe—stained and worn from travel—was a simple garment and gave no hint as to what sort of priest he might be. But the thin cord wrapped around his waist—from which a plain satchel was hung—was a rosary. He had cut off most of the long tail, but the short stem still had a few knots.

  They were strangers, and she only had to watch them clumsily navigate the flow of people, carts, and draft animals through the market to know that, but there was something else about them that drew her attention. She had been training with Varinia—before her kin-sisters started to vanish—and the older girl had marveled at Ocyrhoe’s instincts. You read patterns too readily for an orphan, she had told Ocyrhoe. Ocyrhoe hadn’t understood what she meant and only shrugged. There was nothing that mysterious about her ability; she kept her eyes open, watching, and just knew when something wasn’t right.

  She tagged along after the pair, staying two horse-lengths back in the crowd. She knew the local cutpurses well enough to avoid their closeness, and little else distracted her focused attention.

  The priest swayed on his horse, dependent on his companion’s guidance. His head rolled loosely on his shoulders, and his pale, greasy hair stuck damp and matted to his forehead. His cheeks were flushed, and his eyes couldn’t stay still. As Ocyrhoe slipped closer, she revised her assessment of the man’s condition. He wasn’t drunk; he was sick.

  She kept at arm’s length to one side of the young man’s mount, not to be kicked, as they navigated the tangle of stalls and carts. The youth had a purpose but didn’t know his destination. Ocyrhoe read the frustration on his face as he pulled his elder into an impassable clump of vegetable sellers. She feigned interest in some apples as the youth confusedly turned the horses around—eliciting shouts of derision and annoyance from the surrounding merchants—and pushed back toward the center of the square.

  The gimlet-eyed merchant whose apples she was appraising regarded her with suspicion; she raised her left fist and shook it as if clenching a coin tightly between her fingers. The man crossed his arms over an ample belly and continued to stare, wordlessly calling her bluff. She actually did have a few coins in a tiny leather pouch that hung from a strap around her neck, but she wasn’t about to waste one here.

  As the two horses passed behind her, she made a display of mock outrage that this peasant would think she’d deign to steal from him.

  “Run along, rat.” He laughed at her.

  She did, falling in behind the pair, ducking her head slightly to use the horses themselves as cover from the riders. As the youth nudged his horse, directing it to their left, the priest’s horse—caught off guard by the sudden change in direction—stopped and pawed the ground. Ocyrhoe came to an abrupt halt as well, close enough to touch the priest’s horse. The urge to reach out and put her hand on the animal’s flank was strong, and she wrestled with the desire. As the priest’s horse tossed its head and stepped after the young foreigner’s horse, she let out the breath she had been holding. She stood still and let them get some distance.

  Too close. Before she could castigate herself further, the priest twisted around and looked straight back at her, as if he knew she was there. As if he knew what she had almost done.

  She panicked and did exactly what she shouldn’t have: stood rooted to the spot by the intensity of his gaze. There was a light in his eyes, a glitter of some fire beyond the burning distress of fever. She shivered despite the hot sun beating down heavily on the square. Her skin turned cold, gooseflesh racing up her arms and chest. A procession of images flickered in her head like bits of a half-remembered dream. The two men had traveled a great distance, she knew this instinctively: through a dense forest, across the stark terrain of a high mountain pass, over a trampled and bloody field.

  When she blinked, it was as
if a cloud flew in front of the sun, and when it was gone, so was the priest’s attention.

  She swallowed thickly, the back of her tongue tingling. As she tried to make sense of the flash of insight, she noticed a squad of the local militia, rough stock sporting the white and purple of the Bear. Their path was going to intersect that of the riders. The leader was a thick-necked man with a round face and tiny eyes—he reminded Ocyrhoe of a hungry pig—and the confusion sown by the pair of riders had caught his attention.

  The squad leader raised his hand, open palm directed at the horsemen, and his men-at-arms slapped their bracers against their leather jerkins. The sound broke the cacophony of the market, as the market-goers instinctively pulled back. A bubble opened up around the soldiers and the foreign horsemen, and a hush fell over the square.

  “What is your business in Rome?” the squad leader asked, his eyes flicking back and forth between the two newcomers. He stood in front of the youth’s horse, feet planted apart, looking like a dun-colored boulder.

  The young man said something in a foreign tongue, pointing at the priest, who was swaying in his saddle, his focus elsewhere. Ocyrhoe stepped behind a vendor’s cart, out of the priest’s line of sight. She didn’t think he was looking for her, but she was still spooked by that prior moment of clairvoyant connection. She wanted to slip away into the crowd and vanish. But she stayed, dropping to a squat so that she could still see what was going on from beneath the cart.

  When the squad leader repeated his question, his men punctuated it by loosening their swords in their scabbards. The rattle of metal made the foreigner talk more rapidly, his strange words tripping over one another like the chorus of a child’s chant. Ocyrhoe picked out the one familiar word before the soldiers, but finally it dawned on them too: “Peter,” he was saying. “St. Peter.”

  “St. Peter. The basilica? Do you wish to see a priest?” the squad leader asked. “There are many priests—many churches—in Rome.”

  Ocyrhoe crept forward to get a better angle. She couldn’t see the young foreigner’s face—but she could see the reaction of the soldiers as the boy held something up. In unison, their eyes widened and their brows furrowed.

  “St. Peter,” he repeated and pointed at the priest on the other horse. Ocyrhoe saw he was holding a ring. He hadn’t understood the squad leader’s words, but the gist of the man’s question had been plain. Likewise, the visual aid of the ring and the swaying priest were enough to make his response clear.

  The priest gasped like a fish, finding a moment of lucidity, but his voice was so ragged and strained that Ocyrhoe could barely hear it. “The Pope,” the priest rasped. “I have urgent news for His Eminence.”

  “What news?” the squad leader demanded.

  The priest shook his head, lapsing into the babbling cant of his scripture. “Quod perierat requiram,” he sighed. “Et...et quod abjectum erat reducam, et quod confractum fuerat alligabo, et quod infirmum fuerat consolidabo, et quod pingue et forte custodiam...”

  The squad leader crossed himself, then stepped closer to them, gesturing for the ring. The young stranger leaned back in his saddle, the metal ring clutched desperately in his hand. The squad leader grimaced as he closed his own hand and raised his fist toward his men, who quickly responded with another noisy rattle of their swords. Instantly terrified, the youth tossed the ring to the leader.

  The squad leader caught the ring and brought it close to his face so he could squint at it. Without turning his head, he called to his men, and one of the taller ones leaped forward. A hushed conversation followed. Ocyrhoe strained to catch their words, then took a few steps forward, just in time to see the leader drop the ring into the open hand of the tall soldier, who saluted, spun around, and trotted off through the crowd.

  The foreigner had spotted the transfer too, and he cried out in protest. The priest was so startled by the sound he fell off his horse and landed with a thump on the stone paving and dirt. As the crowd surged forward, the youth pulled hard on the reins of his own horse and leaned forward, signaling—accidentally? wondered Ocyrhoe—the animal to rear up and paw at the air. One hoof struck the squad leader with a glancing blow to the head. The soldier flinched and ducked, crying out in pain, and behind him, his men drew their swords.

  For Ocyrhoe, the world unraveled in that instant. The crowd became an undulating mass of bodies: some resisting being shoved forward, faces contorted with fear at the sight of weapons and flailing hooves; others pulling back, arms raised to protect their heads.

  The priest lay sprawled on his back in a cloud of dust—slack-jawed, eyes flicking left and right, hands twitching—caught in the grip of fever-born phantoms. The squad leader gawped, the open cavern of his mouth making him seem like a dull-witted buffoon; his men flanked him, staunch-shouldered, arms flexed for a fight, their expressions a mix of ferocity and fear.

  The foreign youth’s horse pulled back its lips and flared its nostrils; the wild boy himself was the only one who appeared calm in the sudden fracas. It was now clear to Ocyrhoe that he had perfect command of his mount and had deliberately set off this chaos. She made her decision in that instant.

  With an ease that belied the confusion and tumult of the marketplace around her, she fixed her eye on a spot on the young man’s horse. As she moved, the noise of the crowd faded to a distant growl, like thunder dying across the hills. Her feet hardly touched the stones as she sprang up and dashed forward, and she barely registered the presence of the semiprone merchant whom she used as a vault to achieve a place on the foreigner’s horse—right behind him, so close she pressed against his back.

  Her arm, around his shoulder. He tensed.

  Her mouth, next to his ear. “Ride,” she whispered, then pointed, her finger tracking the tall soldier with the ring as he neared the edge of the square.

  “Peter,” she said, knowing it was the only word he would understand. He did.

  She felt his legs clamp around his horse. The animal snorted and charged, diving toward the shining blades of the approaching soldiers. Her heart leaped into her throat, her skin flushed and heated at the thought that she had made a terrible mistake. But the foreigner had given his horse the freedom to run, and run it did, scattering soldiers and commoners alike.

  Ocyrhoe held tight as the market became a blur. The soldier with the metal ring had disappeared around a corner; he did not know they were chasing him, and even if he did, he couldn’t outrun this horse. She had never ridden a horse before, and the powerful thump and heave of the animal beneath her was both terrifying and exhilarating.

  2

  Boy Meets Gruel

  EVERY DAY IN the cage was another day of freedom. Haakon’s prison was a rough enclosure of wood and bone and metal, too small to allow him to stand upright, and if he lay down and stretched his arms over his head, he could just touch the metal bars with both his fingers and his toes. The roof was made from long planks, mismatched and warped. The cage sat in the back of a weather-beaten cart. A pair of stolid oxen pulled the cart—one brown, one black—at a pace always too slow for the liking of their handler. At first, Haakon was inclined to agree—the scenery passed with agonizing slowness—but in time, he realized every day they traveled was another day he would not have to face whatever fate the Virgin had in store for him. Another day of life. Another day of freedom.

  The caravan was heading east. It had left Legnica the morning after his bout in the arena against the “demon” Zug. Haakon had walked into the tunnel of the Red Veil, expecting—naively, he now realized—some manner of reward ceremony, perhaps even an audience with Onghwe Khan himself. Instead, he had been accosted by a dozen Mongol warriors wielding pole-arms with weighted ends. He had instinctively blocked the first guard’s jab and had soon realized that defending himself was only going to increase how much they would hurt him when they finally knocked away his sword (and he did not suffer the illusion that he could best twelve men with pole-arms).

  They had driven him into a tent beyond the
arena, and once inside the tent, they had forced him to strip out of his armor. As long as he complied with their gestures, they only prodded him with the weighted staves; they did not want to hurt him, and Haakon—biding his time—did not relish the idea of trying to escape with a broken arm or leg. Once he had removed his armor, his arms and legs were bound. A crude leather sack was forced over his head. Only then had he panicked.

  Some creature had perished in the bag; he could smell—and taste—the taint of its blood. He tried to shake the bag off his head, but as he thrashed about, he only managed to force the rough hide more firmly against his mouth and nose. He could hear their laughter, and as he struggled against a black tide that threatened to overwhelm him, their laughter became the last thing he remembered.

  When he came to his senses, he was in a cage, buffeted by the cart as it bounced over muddy ruts of a wide track through the Polish forest. Since then, the only thing that had changed was the landscape. The trees, shorter and fewer in number, gave way to rocky terrain and then gently rolling plains covered with silky, tall grass.

  The caravan was long, though much of his immediate view was blocked by similar cages on the carts in front and behind him—other prizes from Christendom.

  The man in the cart just behind Haakon’s was huge. His red hair and beard overflowed his tiny head, and his body—wedged against the cage’s bars and in the cramped corners—was covered with a layer of fine red hair. A wrestler, Haakon thought. He fervently hoped their destination was not another gladiator-style arena. He did not wish to fight this man.

  The captive in the next cart forward lay on his back and did not move overmuch; Haakon suspected he would not survive their journey.

  And so Haakon waited. In time, his body grew accustomed to the shifting motion of the wooden cart; he listened to the Mongols as they shouted at the oxen, slowly absorbing the sounds of their language; he could tell when the cooks shifted from green wood to dried dung for their fires; when it rained, he would roll against the bars of his cage and let the bitter water sluice down his grimy face and into his mouth. He slept as often as the rattling motion of the cart allowed. At night, he studied the sky, trying to find the shapes he knew: the eyes of Thiassi, thrown into the heavens by Odin after the All-Father plucked them from the jötunn’s head; the deer (Duneyrr, Duraþrór, Dvalinn, and Dáinn) who cavorted in the branches of the World Tree; and the trio of bright stars that represented the distaff of Frigg. Below the horizon, he watched the passage of the caravan guards, memorizing the schedule of their shifts. Even if an opportunity presented itself to escape, he was not inclined to take it. Where would he run?