Istvan had been waiting for them, chewing his mushrooms, timing it, perhaps, so that the ecstasy would come over him at just the right moment.
It had been a long day of odd and unforgettable sights, and now another presented itself: a Mongol backing away from the corner of a poultry hutch, slashing and thrusting with a short curved blade. He cared nothing for what lay behind his stumbling feet, but stared in horror and grunted like a whipped donkey—for the last second of his life.
From around the hutch, striking from on high like a silver bolt, a six-foot sword caught the Mongol where neck joins the shoulder, sliced down through his torso, and emerged from his opposite side, just above the hipbone. The two halves of him fell in opposite directions, intestines boiling out, as if they’d waited twenty years for an opportunity to leap free.
Not Istvan’s work—that huge sword.
Eleázar stepped into view, making no effort to break the sword’s momentum but letting it follow through, raising his hands above his head to keep its tip from plunging into the ground. He gracefully stepped around, with the sword’s point as the center of his arc, checking behind to make sure that no one else was creeping up.
Getting caught in this melee was not going to help Cnán, and might complicate matters for Eleázar and (assuming he was in there somewhere) Istvan, and so she drew back and spoke calmly to her mount, peeling off from her course and convincing the horse to adopt a judicious trotting gait.
Not a horse person, she’d been slow to understand the others’ fascination with spares. It made sense abstractly, of course. But it had taken the sight of the onrushing horde to really fix it in her mind. Several Mongol ponies were now wandering aimlessly about the perimeter of the farmstead, nosing about for forage. Thanks to Istvan, who had apparently shot some of their owners from cover—she recognized his shafts projecting from the Mongols’ bodies—they were now spares, and she reckoned she could do something useful by rounding them up. To her, they paid little heed, but they were social animals and not above joining a herd. So she devoted a little while to gathering up the ponies and leading them in a slow whorl around the farmstead while she counted dead Mongols and waited for the final few to be hunted down by Istvan and Eleázar. The ponies became used to her, and she began speaking to them in Turkic, with which they seemed familiar.
The two knights finally emerged from the warren, and at the same moment, Raphael and Percival came galloping in from the riverbank. Istvan, red with gore, led a few more spares, and Percival, nearly pristine, tugged at a balky string of four. They now had three or four mounts for each of their group.
Cnán joined them. An interesting conversation might now have passed between Istvan and the others, but of course, there was no time. Indeed, the first and most impetuous of the Mongol outriders was already cresting the bank, though this had to be guessed by sound rather than sight, as the sun was well down and the scene lit only by gray twilight.
“The woods?” Percival suggested, raising his clutch of reins. “It’s either brambles or arrows. I prefer brambles.”
“Follow,” said Istvan.
So they followed. And the Mongols followed them.
Cnán found a partly open path through a stand of older trees. Almost immediately after they entered the shelter of the woods, cursing as they plunged in and out of the dense, prickly shrubbery, it became obvious that the knights had no idea what they were doing. Nor did Cnán.
All were inclined to view Istvan’s actions with the utmost skepticism and argued among themselves whether their noisy movement was a mere feint; Eleázar reached the conclusion they were trying to draw the pursuing Mongols into a killing ground.
Percival said nothing. His plan was far from clear to the others—if he actually had a plan—and so the group spent several dangerous minutes reeling about, losing sight of each other, then regaining it, never knowing if the horseman approaching through the heavy brush was a lost member of their band or a Mongol scout.
“Nobody can fight in here,” Istvan muttered, his words slow and slurred. His head passed through a slanting moon-beam, and he looked up and gaped with half-lidded eyes. A finger swipe of blood marked his face. He was still half-possessed by his mushrooms.
Cnán asked Percival if this was the moment he had spoken of earlier, when they would sacrifice themselves so that Feronantus’s team might go on its way unmolested. If that were the case, she planned to disappear. At last, Raphael prevailed on Percival to explain his thinking and to please stop assuming that any of his companions had the faintest idea of what was in his mind.
Percival sidled away from brambles, then halted, only dimly visible. Cnán saw resolution in his posture. “We shall rejoin Feronantus,” he announced, as if this had always been obvious.
“If we can find him, which I doubt,” Eleázar said. “We shall be leading the Mongols directly to the others.”
“Yes,” Percival said, “and by the same token, we shall then have sufficient numbers to destroy them utterly.”
“It would be…polite, at the very least, to give Feronantus a bit of warning before leading a company of furious Mongols into his camp,” Raphael pointed out.
“I will ride ahead,” Istvan began, spinning about on his roan, crashing through the brush—but faltered, as even he saw the fallacy.
“Not in these woods,” Eleázar said dryly.
“Cnán shall go before us, swift and quiet as always,” Percival said, “and we shall trail behind, slowly and noisily. Go now!”
This was the moment at which she would have gladly abandoned them all to the fates they deserved had it not been for the startling detail of Percival staring straight and steady into her eyes as he gave her the order. And so, grumbling, she led her pony between the trees. She could no longer see where she was going, but her feet could tell which way was downhill. At some point, she would have to recross the river—in the dark. She reckoned the best time for that was now. The Mongol company had only just made it over to this side. All of their energies, for the last little while, had been directed to that goal. They had braved risks and worked hard to achieve it. It was a simple fact of human nature that they would be strongly disinclined now to turn around and cross back, particularly if the evidence of their senses told them that the enemy, or at least the slowest and noisiest part of it, was right here.
Once she had crossed the river, she traveled at a pace that she’d have been proud of on any other evening, but every time she paused to make water or to leave an exhausted pony behind came the rumble of hooves not far to her rear.
The Mongols were driving Percival and his company, or being dragged along in their wake; either way, both groups were moving at desperate speed, and since Cnán’s only responsibility was to arrive in advance of them, she had to do likewise.
In the hours before dawn, as the sky brightened, she found that she was able to ride at a quicker pace. Cnán’s remaining horses were fresher than the knights’, which had been embroiled in this running skirmish ever since nightfall. The hoofbeats behind fell away, caught up again, swung to the east, then back to the west. She half believed they would circle around her and reach Feronantus, all of them, in a furious, fighting mob.
But she galloped into the Shield-Brethren’s camp before the sound of the approaching combatants had grown loud enough to alert them. Rædwulf was on watch while the others slept. He recognized her from a distance and so greeted her with smiles and gestures rather than singing arrows.
“I hope you have finished darning your socks,” she said.
“We’re done with all that,” Taran said evenly, from a relaxed squat. Rædwulf came around from the opposite end of the camp, bow in hand. “Why are you alone?”
“Percival sends his fond regards,” Cnán said. “He’s leading a small army of Mongols directly toward you and hopes that this will prove no special inconvenience.”
Taran rose to his feet.
Rædwulf asked, “How far back?”
“You might have ti
me for a good piss,” Cnán said.
CHAPTER 12:
CHASING SHADOWS
Of the tumen who guarded the Khagan while he was in Karakorum, a minghan (one thousand men) was designated Khevtuul (the Night Guard). They patrolled the palace and the grounds after nightfall, and Gansukh knew there was a distinct difference between nocturnal patrols and hunting during the day. As the Khevtuul began to respond to Master Chucai’s alarm, Gansukh turned his attention to the buildings surrounding the palace. The Night Guard would surround the central building, and men with bows would be ready to fill the dark sky with arrows. Some of them might even start to search the surrounding area when they failed to find the assassin on the roof, but by then it would be too late.
The tile had given away the assassin’s location. Whatever his mission had been, it was no longer foremost in his mind. He was thinking about escape. Much like a deer once it is spooked—it forgets everything in its headlong rush to flee.
The square around the palace was filling with leather-clad figures brandishing bows and torches. Courtiers and concubines panicked, lifting up the hems of their robes and scattering like geese, the tassels on their hats and hairpins swinging wildly. Gansukh silently cursed the men with torches—the flicking light was spoiling everyone’s night vision. Already it was almost impossible to see where the roof of the palace stopped and the sky began. Too many shadows now. Too many places for a man to hide.
The first moments of the chase were critical. Prey, once spooked, would bolt—either for a hiding place or to put the most distance between itself and its hunter. A hunter had only a few seconds to judge his quarry; he had to either anticipate its flight and get in front of it somehow, or if the prey was faster, he had to have more stamina. And know how to track.
The Imperial Guard wasn’t comprised of hunters. Those who did go hunting with the Khagan simply spread out in a great circle, driving all the game before them. They weren’t hunting one animal; their tactic was to round up every living thing possible—useful for the Khagan’s sport, but a tactic that couldn’t catch a solitary quarry.
Some of the Night Guard was pointing now, and Gansukh looked up. A pair of guards had found the assassin’s route onto the roof and was giving chase. One slipped on the slanted tiles and fell, screaming. He clattered off the roof in a cascade of broken tiles and landed heavily on the courtyard stones. They were stupid to follow the assassin that way, Gansukh noted, but they were easy to spot, and they gave him a valuable hint as to the direction the assassin had gone.
The second guard trotted with more care, and when he raised his bow, he stopped. Before he could shoot, something hit him in the face and his arrow went wild. He slipped, but managed to catch the cap tiles and hang on. His bow slid part-way down the roof.
The assassin had to go to ground somewhere, and Gansukh tried to recall the location of all the buildings surrounding the palace. To his recollection, they were all too far away. But jumping was the only way—the only quick way—off the roof. The assassin had made a mistake, obviously, and had been spotted. Fleeing to the roof had been a desperate gamble, one that might have been successful had he not been betrayed by a loose tile.
Gansukh reached the southeastern corner of the palace and came to a halt. The southern courtyard was even more open, and the only structure that could possibly be a spot for a man to jump to was the enormous statue—the silver tree crowned by the four serpentine spouts that each spewed a different liquid. But the tree was barren other than its spouts and offered no place to hide, and the open ground surrounding it was rapidly filling up with a mob of agitated Khevtuul.
Men shouted to the west, and a clump of Night Guards raced toward the far side of the palace, drawn by a cacophonous crash of more tiles. Gansukh started to follow and then stopped. Behind him lay the garden. Its walls weren’t very tall; he could, if he stood on his toes, reach the top of the wall, but the trees were much taller.
Something flickered across the sky, and a tall ash tree inside the wall of the garden swayed violently as if buffeted by the wind. The trees on either side barely moved.
Marveling at the assassin’s agility and daring—such a leap was clearly the sign of a desperate man—Gansukh reversed his course and raced for the garden. With a grunt, he hauled himself up and over the wall. He landed easily and pushed his way through the hedges toward the vibrating ash tree.
Stones rattled on the path beyond the cluster of trees, and Gansukh tried to remember the route the path took through the manicured maze of trees and bushes. As he remembered it, the track wound haphazardly through the long rectangular space of the garden—clearly not a tactical route. More often than not, he had been distracted when he had been in the garden during the day. Gansukh dashed beneath a willow, its long branches whipping his face and shoulders, and found himself at one end of the long central clearing.
Not far, in fact, from where the deer he had shot earlier that day had been standing.
Ahead—to the north, he thought as he oriented himself—he spotted movement. A figure in dark clothes, nearly invisible in the shadows of the garden, but betrayed by spears of moonlight. Gansukh sprinted after him, trying to close the gap.
There was a gate in the northern wall of the garden and a guardhouse as well. Perhaps the assassin was running blindly and didn’t know what lay ahead of him, but Gansukh couldn’t rely on that chance. The man had gotten all the way into the palace. Surely he knew enough of the buildings and the Khevtuul’s routines to plan both his assault and his escape. And if he didn’t…
At Kozelsk, their plan had gone awry almost immediately, and he had to improvise a solution. He could still remember that feeling, that panic that gave way to a singular focus. Choices became easier. Survival became all-important. Nothing else mattered.
The assassin veered right, disappearing from the path, and Gansukh waited until he was past a large clump of cedar trees before dodging right as well. The eastern wall. While taller than the wall between the garden and the main compound, the outer wall of the palace wasn’t intended to repel intruders so much as it was meant to separate the Khagan and his court from the sprawl of Karakorum. It wasn’t wide enough to post guards on, but it was higher than a man could jump—even from horseback.
Behind him, Gansukh heard voices shouting, and when he spared a glance over his shoulder, he saw some of the trees outlined with orange light. Torches. The Khevtuul had figured out the assassin’s ploy too, and were now charging into the garden. He thought he could make out the word “two,” and then an arrow rushed by, nearly clipping his head.
In the confusion, they had mistaken him for another intruder.
Lian had finished brushing her long hair when she heard the faint cry of alarm. Within moments the corridor outside her room was filled with the sound of running feet. She threw a long jacket over her light silk robe and went to investigate the commotion. As she left the narrow confines of her room, she was immediately swept up in the flood of similarly half-clad bodies. She tried to piece together a coherent story from the snatches of conversation she heard in the tumultuous rush toward the building’s exit. A fire in the storehouses, an attack by the Khagan’s enemies, an assassin sent by the Chinese to kill the Khagan as he sat for his evening meal, a dozen assassins, each trained in a different manner of swift and silent execution—there was no coherence in the stories, she realized; they were all equally true and false. Panic was the only constant.
Outside was no less chaotic, and the concubines and courtly ladies huddled together like clusters of clucking chickens while the Khevtuul swarmed like an outraged hive of bees. Their attention was directed toward the palace, and Lian drifted like a ghost through the confusion until she reached the edge of the wide avenue around the central building. Ahead, on the western side of the palace, a flurry of Khevtuul boiled around a pair of lumps on the ground, and as Lian wandered closer, she realized the bodies were wearing the same garb as the guards around them.
She let out the breath s
he had been holding as she realized she had been worried that one of the bodies might have been Gansukh. Chiding herself for her reaction—as well as acting like a simple country girl where the young warrior was concerned—she turned to return to her quarters, but she paused when she heard Master Chucai’s voice.
He was striding toward her, a black cloud that eclipsed the play of torchlight behind him. “What are you doing?” he demanded.
She clutched her jacket closed and dropped her gaze toward the ground. “There was a great deal of excitement amongst the ladies of the court,” she said. “Like them, I was concerned for my safety.”
Chucai growled in his chest, a noise not unlike distant thunder. “Go back to your room,” he snapped. “Gather up the—” He flapped a long sleeve at the cluster of women. “Take them with you. It isn’t safe. You should be inside.”
Lian bowed. “Yes, Master Chucai.” She brushed past him, hurrying to be out of his presence.
He caught her arm as she passed and brought her up short. His stare was indomitable, and she looked away, trying to hide from his gaze. “I’m sure young Gansukh is in no danger,” he said, and when she blushed at having her heart read so plainly, he released her.
She fled back to her room, neglecting to bring any of the other ladies with her. All she wanted was to hide from the fact that he might be right: that Gansukh was safe and that she cared at all.
There was no time to stop and explain. Gansukh slowed as he came to the outer wall of the palace, and he tried to quiet his breathing and listen for some sign of where the assassin had gone. The effort seemed futile, as the shouting and thrashing of the Khevtuul in the garden made it nearly impossible to hear any subtle sound, but he was rewarded with a scraping noise, followed by a grunt.
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