The Mongoliad: Book One tfs-1

by Neal Stephenson

  Gansukh let his tongue lie quietly in his mouth, and he acknowledged Lian’s point with a gentle inclination of his head.

  She appeared to not notice, or perhaps she was feigning ignorance of his gesture. Her attention returned to the scroll and she unrolled it again, searching for the place where she had left off. “Let us continue then,” she said. “‘A man should not ascend a height, nor approach the verge of a depth; he should not indulge—’”

  Gansukh slipped under the surface of the pool, letting his legs collapse until he was sitting down. Lian’s image wavered through a layer of water and steam, and her pale skin seemed to glow as if she were a ghost. He closed and opened his eyes a few times, but she didn’t vanish. Finally, his lungs burning, he pushed up and emerged from the water.

  Lian stood like a statue—one eyebrow raised, one finger poised on the scroll—waiting for him to catch his breath. When he finished wiping the water from his eyes, she continued. “‘He should not indulge in reckless reviling or derisive laughing.’”

  Gansukh let one of those laughs fly, and he slapped the water. “This is nothing but a book of rules telling me how to live my life!” he complained. “I already know how to live! Are the Chinese so stupid that they need instructions telling them how to do everything?”

  “Are the Mongols so stupid they do not recognize the value of moral rectitude?”

  Gansukh raised his gaze toward the ceiling. “Put the scroll aside,” he said. “This is wearying and useless. Come join me in the water instead.”

  “Master Chucai instructed me to teach you how to behave in polite society.” She lowered the scroll and gave him a dismissive look—the sort an aristocratic lady might have given to an ignorant servant. “Behavior that includes learning how to respect women.”

  “I respect fighters. I respect those—men and women—who prove their worth to their clan. You Chinese women sit around in gardens all day reading books and eating… I don’t know what you eat. Flowers, I suppose. Mongol women ride and hunt and fight until their skin is rough and tanned. What good is ‘culture’ if it makes you weak?”

  “Were I a less cultured woman, I would not have fared so well when I was captured,” Lian pointed out. “Master Chucai recognized my value, at least, even if the Mongols never appreciate the things I have to teach.”

  “And if you were a stronger woman, perhaps you wouldn’t have been captured at all.”

  She looked away, and Gansukh felt a strange thrill in his belly. It wasn’t the same sensation he got on the battlefield when he killed a man, but it was similar—close enough that he felt both elation and confusion. But we aren’t fighting. Glancing down, he realized his body was also reacting to this commingling of emotions, and he pawed the water, disturbing the pool.

  Her robe still clung to her body. It was distracting.

  “How long have you been in Karakorum?” she asked.

  “Not even a day,” he admitted, glad to talk about something else.

  “You have much to learn,” she said, and her tone had none of the brittleness he would have expected from such a statement. “There is more to life than fighting.” She swallowed heavily and went to hug the scroll to her body, but demurred at the last second, sparing the scroll contact with her wet clothing. “Yes, I will admit there is value in knowing how to fight, but not all combat is with spear and arrow. The court can be as dangerous as the battlefield, if you don’t know how to conduct yourself.” She plucked at her robe, pulling it away from her skin.

  Gansukh mulled this over, ignoring a twinge of disappointment at her ministrations to her clothing. Master Chucai had said that he had had to teach both Ögedei and his father how to conduct themselves. Did he respect them any less because they knew how to behave at court? Would he not follow them into battle without reservation? “Yes,” he said, nodding slightly. He walked backward until the edge of the pool pressed against his back. “So I am naked at court.” He raised his arms and rested them on the edge. “I have no armor. I have no weapons. I am like you were, once upon a time. Teach me how to survive. Teach me what I need to know to be strong.”

  Lian regarded him, her head cocked to one side. She bit her lower lip as she lowered the scroll and let it fall to the ground. She walked forward and, to Gansukh’s surprise, didn’t stop at the edge of the pool. She disappeared under the water with a small splash, and he watched her slim shape glide through the water toward him. She surfaced not far from him, and he held himself still as she floated closer. She stopped when she was close enough to reach up and put her hand on his forearm. He felt her legs, constricted by the wet drapery of her robe, caressing his. Her breath was on his face, and he found himself staring at her mouth.

  “You prefer your women strong, don’t you?” she whispered.

  “Yes,” he muttered, the word getting caught in his throat.

  “But you don’t think I am strong.”

  It wasn’t a question, but Gansukh felt like he should answer anyway. He shook his head, not trusting that he could form the word.

  “Teach me,” Lian said. “Teach me to be like your Mongolian women. In return, I can teach you how to survive here at court.” She moved closer to him. “A warrior does not learn from reading; a warrior learns from action, from using his hands and his heart. Can you show me that?”

  Gansukh stared at her slender neck. Her pulse was visible under her pale skin. She was frail, and he wondered if she’d ever had a violent thought in her life. There was little chance this delicate Chinese flower could become the equal of a Mongolian woman, but it would certainly be amusing to watch her try. She and Master Chucai were right, though: he did not understand the ways of court, and if he had any hope of succeeding at his mission, he needed Lian’s help. It was better to submit to the offer of this strange and alluring Chinese woman than run back to Chagatai like a whipped dog.

  Gansukh nodded. “I will teach you how to fight.”

  She nodded curtly and pushed away from him. He grabbed for her, but his hands found nothing in the warm water. She swam to the edge of the pool, and in a smooth motion that suggested she was more fish than woman, she levered herself to the platform. He caught a quick glimpse of her breasts, outlined quite distinctly against her wet robe, and then she swiveled around, curling her legs around her like a flower closing for the night. Her back to him, she picked up the heavy robe that lay on the platform and slipped it over her wet clothing.

  She retrieved her discarded scroll. “We will begin our lessons tomorrow,” she said with a final appraising glance over her shoulder.

  It was only after she left that Gansukh realized she had taken the robe the servants had meant for him.

  CHAPTER 5:

  THE KINYEN

  Despite Raphael’s ministrations, two more days passed before Illarion’s fever broke and the Ruthenian recovered strength enough to sit up and speak coherently.

  Cnán did not begrudge him the time, since she herself spent most of it sleeping and eating. Afternoons she sat in the middle of the clearing, well beyond the graveyard wall, out in the summer sun, mending her travel clothes and watching the Shield-Brethren train. More arrived every day from all over Christendom. As her body regained strength, her mood also improved—and she began to take a more sanguine view of their prowess as fighters.

  They fought in pairs over and over, pausing in the middle of the fracas to pick apart each move into smaller elements that they then practiced again and again. She could not fit their halting exercises into any sensible program. How would they ever put the fragments of action together again—learn to face the chaos of a true battle, where nobody pauses, nobody has a second chance? It all seemed like a silly game.

  But when they actually sparred, swinging and moving for long minutes at a stretch, strength against strength, they proved capable of feats that astonished Cnán. And studying their determination and their skill, she saw more clearly the weakness in her own training. She had been taught to travel under all manner of cloaks, nev
er to reveal her true self, to bear messages while hiding in plain sight of enemies and friends alike. And always to cross back and forth over the wide, endless, ravaged land, never staying long in one place—like a bird doomed never to nest, never to understand the wisdom of sitting still.

  Watching these men, these warriors, assemble into a team, under the constant tutelage of Taran and the watchful eye of Feronantus, made her feel a new kind of loneliness and, with it, a sort of bereavement.

  After noon of the second day, Feronantus put out word that, tomorrow, the junior Brethren would stand sentry around their encampment while Kinyen—the Order’s communal mess—was held at the great table of the chapter house. Cnán knew that Kinyen was an ancient tradition, one they took most seriously. The camp grew busy with preparations: A wild sow was spitted and splayed over a bed of banked coals to slow cook. The beams were stripped from the monastery and hewn and pegged into makeshift benches so that there would be room for all of the warrior monks—a full two dozen now, even when ten or so initiates were left outside to stand guard—to sit around the edges of the hall.

  The Shield-Brethren stayed up late that night drinking and singing and telling long stories of their exploits and adventures in various parts of the West. Cnán mostly stayed outside, in her tent—ignored, she hoped; unwanted, she suspected.

  It was during a particularly long tale told by Raphael, about sewing up Crusaders and Moors alike, that she heard a solitary man emerge from the chapter house. An unevenness in his gait told Cnán that he was reeling slightly. The wind came from behind him and she smelled several horns of mead on his shuddering, belching exhale.

  “Why alone?” he called. It was Haakon.

  “Why so loud?” she countered, in as low a voice as she thought might be heard. The knights, wise though they might be in hand-to-hand, were less than cautious about alerting gleaners to their presence. Perhaps they felt they lived under the charms of their Christian God, or their warrior gods—whichever commanded the daylight of Feronantus’s faith. Or perhaps they just believed they now had sufficient numbers to kill anyone short of a Mongol army.

  She heard him stumbling over the leaves and the beaten dirt of the fighting field. His moon shadow loomed across the canvas of her tent, leaning one way, then another.

  “It isn’t natural,” he said. “A woman…a man…about to die. You think I’m going to die, don’t you?”

  Indeed, Haakon seemed the one having the greatest difficulty duplicating Taran’s exacting moves. He hesitated, as if thinking everything through twice—and then he swung, or parried, taking sharp, bruising blows as a result. Taran afforded him neither pity nor time to recover.

  “You have the best trainer I’ve seen,” Cnán said, surprising herself by this admission. “You’ll live if you listen and learn.”

  “Easy for you to say. You aren’t fighting.” Haakon dropped to a cross-legged squat beside her tent. He seemed content to talk through the canvas, like a Christian giving his confession through a screen. “I’m brave. I’m good in battle. Steadfast. The greatsword—my weapon. I know it like a friend. Yet whatever I do…whatever I do…” He stopped; slapped a few bugs. “Tell me about yourself.”

  “I’d rather sleep,” she said, truthfully enough.

  “I could keep you company. Warm you.”

  “The nights are warm enough,” Cnán said.

  She considered it a victory of sorts that she did not actually laugh. She was not above lying with a man now and then, when it pleased her to do so, but she hadn’t come here to be wooed—and certainly not by one who was supposed to be a celibate monk!

  Suddenly she felt a pang of both sympathy and suspicion. Perhaps the youth wasn’t as stupid as she thought. Haakon must have caught her out, seen something in her face that she had been trying to hide from herself and the others…

  “Go away,” she said.

  If she were going to break any man’s celibacy, it would be Percival’s, but Percival did not look on her that way.

  Haakon got up, then bent to brush a few fallen leaves and twigs from her tent—as if conveying some clumsy affection to her shell, her hiding place. “All right,” he said. “No harm. A marvelous night. I feel ready…for…for anything. Just thought…”

  He left his words hanging and wove his way back to the chapter house, leaving Cnán sadder and lonelier than ever.

  What was it a man and a woman were supposed to do, when they weren’t in constant flight, running on the leading edge of the voracious Mongolian army? Haakon’s clumsy words were as close to a kind of courtship as she had ever experienced—and she had bluntly sent him on his way, no thanks, no sympathy.

  Haakon was the first that night, but not the last, to approach her refuge and try to make loose conversation. All celibate, all clumsy, all drunk—and not one was Percival. Nor Raphael, of course, who seemed steeped in other, more urbane techniques; the Syrian did not bother her either.

  She stayed out of the embrace of any and all drunken monks that night and woke late the following morning, arrayed herself in tunic and doeskin, and when summoned, walked to the chapter house to attend the Kinyen.

  The knights, after an hour or two of sleep, had recovered enough from their drunken feats of bravado to open another barrel and resume.

  In the gloom of the old monastery’s refectory, lit by a dusty shaft of daylight through the broken roof and a scatter of short candles, she saw Feronantus sitting at the head of a large table, with Illarion on his right. The shaft of light fell between the two, highlighting their shoulders and hands and brimming cups. The rest of the knights sat in degrees of candlelight and shadow, murmuring to each other and passing bread and slopping flagons. They drank like fish. Most knights drank heavily, now that Cnán thought of it. Likely all that celibacy weighed on them.

  The table had originally been rectangular, but they had enlarged it by throwing rough-sawn planks over its top and, in the process, made it somewhat round. The shape surprised her, and she wondered at its significance.

  Illarion was almost unrecognizable, so dramatically had the swelling of his face gone down. He had shaved off the dark beard. Food and ale had put color back into his face, and when he spoke, his thoughts were clear and his voice firm. But for the missing ear and the perpetually gloomy mien, one might never guess all that he had gone through in the last few months.

  Cnán looked around at the room full of Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae and again felt that disturbingly unfamiliar sense of safety. She shook this off and spited herself as a fool, certain that these knights could not hold out against a storm cloud of Mongols for more than a few minutes. Barring ghostly luck, of course.

  Feronantus introduced the Kinyen to the one-eared Ruthenian ghost himself and motioned for him to speak.

  “What I will say now, I said to Feronantus when I arrived,” Illarion began, “but at his request, I now tell you directly: all of you have come to this place on a fool’s errand.”

  Feronantus, a little taken aback, rested an affectionate hand on Illarion’s shoulder and explained, “I had hoped you might supply a fuller explanation.”

  “The arena that the Mongols are building at Legnica, on the outskirts of their tent warren, is but a prefiguring of a thing I have seen before, near the gates of Lodomeria, my own city,” Illarion said. “A city that no longer exists. Only I survived. Consider that as you prepare for the competition to which Onghwe Khan has summoned you and the other great warriors of Christendom.”

  Having got their attention, Illarion whetted his whistle with a long, foaming swallow of ale before going on, in a less plangent tone. For a moment he’d seem to fear his counsel might not be respected. But something in Feronantus’s face and in the attentive manner of the assembled monks gave him heart.

  “The armies of Onghwe Khan laid siege with cannon and towers, pushed down our sunrise walls, and then captured the eastern quarter and laid it to waste—a story no different from thousands of others ranging from our very doorstep to th
e eastern ocean. The rest of the city expected to die, and we were ready for it. But then, at the end of the seventh month, as our serfs were starving, as disease coursed through our streets and the barrows went from door to door, something unexpected happened: a magnanimous gesture from Onghwe himself. He summoned me to the south wall, our strongest wall. He knew my name and those of my generals. He had spies in our midst—fur traders, I suspect. Need I say what his offer was?

  “He reminded us that our city was at his mercy and that with a wave of his hand he could destroy us like the others.

  “He claimed that, contrary to the terrifying rumors that went before him, he was no monster, but a proud warrior of an old and honorable line.

  “As such, he was presenting us with a choice. Of course, there is always the choice to surrender or fight. But he could see with his own eyes that we had already chosen the latter, for which he respected us. And rather than defeat us and put us all to the sword, he called us to send forth our greatest warriors to do battle in single combat against his own champions, in an arena that he would build before our city gates. If our champions prevailed, his armies would depart and leave us in peace, with one caveat, which I shall explain. If our champions went down in defeat, we would surrender the city to plunder, but the people would be suffered to live.

  “Seeing no alternative, we accepted his offer. I caused a training ground to be cleared in the square before our cathedral. I and the other leading knights of the city spent every day training there—conferring our skills, as best as we were able, on the younger men-at-arms who volunteered to fight in Onghwe Khan’s arena.

  “During the evenings, we would go to the watchtower above the city’s main gate and watch the arena a-building, so close that we could throw stones down into it. A tunnel was dug, leading from our gate directly to the arena’s western entrance. On the other side, a similar entrance was prepared, leading in from the camp of the besieging host, and it did not require great shrewdness to see that Onghwe Khan’s champions would be entering from that direction. There was, however, a third entrance to—or rather, exit from—the arena. It was on the southern side, below a high platform that was prepared for the Khan to sit upon. As we now understood, these competitions were for him a kind of sport, like bear baiting or falconry, and their entire purpose was to give him pleasure. The exit tunnel beneath the Khan’s platform was cloaked by a scarlet veil.