The Mongoliad: Book One

by Neal Stephenson

  A hooded figure emerged from the tree line, guiding a small figure. The sentry’s name was Eilif, a blond-haired phantom of the woods, and his captive was a scrawny lad, yet lithe and active—this boy wasn’t like the typical urchins who seemed to spring out of the ruins like weeds growing in an unplowed field. “Said he has a message for Feronantus,” Eilif said as the group of Shield-Brethren gathered around.

  “Does he now?” Andreas said, appraising the boy. It was not lost on him that the boy seemed to know a little Latin; he tried to seem bored and without a care, but his eyes tracked them too well. He was listening intently to their words. “Was he alone?” he asked Eilif.

  “Been following him since the river.”

  Andreas nodded. Eilif took that as a dismissal and faded back into the trees, vanishing once again to his phantasmal role as the chapter house’s watchful eye.

  “Boy,” Andreas said, catching the youth’s attention, “what message do you bring?”

  “For the leader of the Red Rose,” the boy said, haltingly. He pointed to the standard flying over the ruined monastery.

  “I’m their leader,” Andreas said. “You can give it to me.”

  The boy screwed up his face and shook his head. “Feronantus,” he said, holding steady to his demand.

  Andreas squatted and looked the boy squarely in the face, intrigued by the youth’s persistence. The youth didn’t know Feronantus wasn’t here, but he knew enough of the Shield-Brethren master to know that Andreas wasn’t the man he was looking for. “Who sent you?” he asked, wondering whom the boy had been talking to. Haakon? The Mongol camp continued to rebuff their inquiries about the fate of their missing Brother. It had been more than two weeks since the young fighter had gone through the Red Veil, and no one had been able to discover what had happened. The mood among the Shield-Brethren was turning more and more murderous, and Rutger had his hands full with their tempers in check.

  “Flower Knight,” the boy said, and when that name failed to produce any response from Andreas, he performed an exaggerated pantomime—whirling his hands around.

  Like he is swinging a staff, Andreas realized. The boy had no real training, and the technique was raw and unformed, but clearly he had been watching someone whose skill had made a deep impression on him. “The Flower Knight sent you?” he asked.

  The boy stopped and nodded. “Feronantus.” Back to the beginning again.

  “You can tell me or not,” he said with a tiny shake of his head. “But you will come no closer to our camp.”

  The boy was shaken by this statement, and his tough mien threatened to break. He glanced at the woods behind him and then back at the standard again. When his gaze returned to Andreas’s face, his expression had softened, and some of the ferocity was gone from his eyes. “Protect…” He pointed at the standard and then made a circle with his fingers. He held it over his heart. “Protection?”

  The men muttered amongst themselves. “By the Virgin,” one of them swore, and Andreas kept his expression neutral as he glanced at the man next to him. “Go fetch Rutger,” he said, using the Northmen tongue the boy did not know. “And some food,” he added, noticing how the boy’s ribs pressed against his ragged shirt.

  “He said Kim—this Flower Knight—sent him?” Rutger continued to pore over both of the messages. They were both written by the same hand, and both were addressed and signed the same. The difference lay in what they actually said.

  Andreas nodded. “He” said there was only supposed to be one message. Kim told him to deliver both. One would be true, the other false, and we would know which was which.”

  Rutger looked up and glanced over to where the boy—Hans, as Andreas had managed to learn, finally—was still hungrily working on the wings and thighs of a grouse given to him. “Do you think he knows what the messages say?”

  “I don’t think so. He said something about a fight. Near the bridge. Between Kim and a couple of bodyguards.” He indicated his chest. “He said they were Livonian Knights, but when I asked him how he knew, he said they wore a red cross and sword on their surcoats.”

  “Shit,” Rutger said. “I thought they gave up the cross and sword after they merged with the Teutonic Order. Why are they wearing those colors?” He glanced at the message in his left hand—the note they had decided was the false one. “You think they wrote it?”

  “I do,” Andreas said. “Why would they be escorting a messenger unless they wanted to make sure we got this message?” Your Brother is dead, the message said. I saw the Mongols kill him, after his victory.

  “You think they know something about Haakon?”

  “Perhaps,” Andreas shrugged. “Maybe not. They could just be stirring up trouble. We won’t know until we go down there and find out.”

  Rutger shook his head. “We can’t risk it. That may be exactly the sort of reaction they’re hoping to provoke. The boy came here looking for Feronantus, and he knew enough to know you were lying to him. We have to stay here; we have to protect the secret of Feronantus’s hunting party.”

  Andreas made a noncommittal noise in his throat. And when Rutger repeated his last statement, he roused himself as if from a trance. “Yes,” he said somewhat curtly, “I know. But these Livonians are another matter, especially if they are wearing the red cross and sword. They aren’t hiding in the Teutonic ranks. Who is leading them? Is it someone who truly knows Feronantus on sight? What if they decide to pay us a visit?” He waved a hand at the chapter house behind them. “And what of them? How long can we keep them here, pretending that a few more days of training is all they need to be ready?”

  Rutger crumpled up the false message. “I don’t know.”

  “The Khan is going to get bored, if he isn’t already,” Andreas said, “and he’s going to order his army to move on. We can’t keep hiding here, waiting for a miracle to happen.”

  Rutger whirled on him. “What would you have me do?” he snarled, his voice low and harsh. “Throw them all against the horde that outnumbers them ten to one? It’s going to happen eventually, so what is the point of waiting any longer, is that it?”

  “No,” Andreas said quietly. “It is always better to avoid a fight than rush into it. But that does not mean we sit idle.” He looked over at Hans. “Kim wants to meet us.” He smiled. “From the boy’s description, it sounds like he might be one of the Khan’s champions. We need to issue a challenge. There are still qualifying fights going on, even if the main arena is closed. We need to draw the Khan’s attention to those fights—offer some sort of exhibition bout, even. I’m sure it won’t take much to convince the Khan to try another of his fighters against us.”

  Andreas rolled his shoulders. “Besides, I want to meet this Flower Knight. He sounds like he might be a challenge. I’m getting tired of smacking your charges around.”

  When the guards threw him in the same cage with Zug, the Nipponese man hauled himself off his mat and came to inspect the bruises on Kim’s face. “You trusted the wrong man,” he grunted as he sat back on his haunches.

  Kim rolled onto his back and lay still, staring at the rusty ceiling of their cell. “Yes and no,” he said enigmatically. He worked his tongue around his mouth, checking his teeth. The Mongols hadn’t roughed him up too much—they had, after all, noticed and appreciated that he had downed two knights from one of Christendom’s fighting orders—but they had had to inflict some punishment on him for being so close to the river.

  “Was it worth it?” Zug asked.

  Kim shrugged. “I’m stuck in here with you now,” he said. “I should have given that more thought.”

  Zug grunted and kicked him lightly as he shuffled back to his mat. His strength was returning, albeit too slowly for his—or Kim’s—liking.

  Kim ignored Zug, closing his eyes and letting his breathing slow. He had some pain in his lower abdomen and would probably be pissing blood sometime in the next few days, but it would all pass. He could be patient for a while; he had waited long enough.
/>   “Two,” he murmured as he started to relax.

  “What?” Zug grunted.

  “I took down two armored Franks.” Kim smiled. “They never touched me. When you’re feeling strong enough, maybe I’ll show you how it’s done.” He drifted toward sleep as Zug unleashed an elaborate string of Nihongo curses.

  He’s definitely getting better…

  CHAPTER 25:

  THE SUBTLETIES OF WRESTLING

  Master Chucai left them, galloping back to Karakorum. Black robes streaming behind, he looked like a giant raven clinging to the horse, its talons digging into the animal’s flesh. Lian and Gansukh rode in silence, letting their horses pick their own pace. Neither felt any compelling desire to return to the bustling hive that was the Imperial Court.

  “Stop. Look,” Lian said as they came in view of the walls. She touched his arm, drawing him out of his maddeningly convoluted reverie, and pointed toward an expansive cluster of colorful tents clustered around the nearest gate. “The traders who have come for the festival. Let us think about something else for a little while.” Her lips parted, and Gansukh again caught a flash of her teeth. She snapped her horse’s reins. “If you are to face Ögedei, perhaps it would be best to find suitable clothes.”

  “I have—”

  But she was already ahead of him, and he sat on his horse, grinding his teeth. He would never understand her. Her mind was too foreign, too strange in the way it leapt from subject to subject. He couldn’t let go of things as readily as she did, and other matters that seemed nonsensical and pointless to him were of paramount importance to her.

  The wind, full of her laughter, swirled past him.

  He cursed, then wheeled the horse about and tapped it into a trot. Why not? he rationalized. If I’m going to be exiled for failure, I might as well have a clean shirt or two to take with me. He laughed as he rode after Lian, not sure how else to react to both this insight and the fact that he did understand courtly thinking more than he wanted to admit.

  The caravans hadn’t bothered to enter the city. The camels and pack animals had come to a stop outside the eastern gate, and the merchants had set up their shops in the middle of the road. Their manner of dress was not familiar to him, and he gawked openly at the men’s garish clothing: brightly colored silk pants with tops that didn’t match, shirts that billowed at the arms and waist, sweeping body-length coats with high collars. And the women! Some seemed to wear hardly anything, or what they wore was tight and dark or bright, translucent, and swirling. Many of the women were bare-footed and wore heavy ornamental rings or torques on wrists, necks, ankles. Coins like fish-scale mail armor lay in wreaths on their breasts. The men were more likely to dress in white than the women. Small silver bells hung from belts at their waists, and the high, step-rhythmic tinking of jewelry, coins, and bells added a melodic jangle to the raucous atmosphere of the bazaar.

  As Gansukh let his horse pick its way through the crowds, he found himself wondering if Lian would ever wear any such adornments.

  Somewhere up ahead, in the shadow of the wall, musicians were performing. The strange, loose music sounded an exotic backdrop to the cacophony of shouting and arguing and haggling. The scents were more foreign still, and Gansukh’s stomach grumbled as he picked out the greasy scents of boiled mutton and roasting chicken, along with the blood smell of dozens of recently slaughtered sheep—the heady, almost overwhelming miasma of a bazaar. Idly he wondered if his stomach could stand up to any food sold from the makeshift stalls. He had only just become accustomed to the rich food of the court.

  “They are Persians.” Lian was suddenly at Gansukh’s left elbow. She had wound her hair up in a ball at the back of her neck, held in place by a lacquered comb.

  “Persians,” he grunted. Persia was a vast place. “Where in Persia?”

  “From the Khwarezmian Empire,” Lian reminded him.

  “Ah, yes—the one Genghis defeated.”

  Lian pursed her lips, but there was laughter in her eyes. “Genghis Khan defeated many empires,” she said.

  “Yes,” he shot back, suddenly weary of her constant role of tutor. “And it is sometimes difficult to remember them all.” As soon as he said the words, he wanted to take them back.

  The humor went out of her eyes, and she spat something at him in her native tongue, a language she knew very well he did not understand. Before he could stop her, she kneed her horse into the crowd. He meant to follow her, but a resounding crash of metal on metal startled his own mount. By the time he worked through the crowd and got his horse under control, Lian had vanished.

  He stared glumly in the direction she had gone, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. Her people belonged to one of those empires. He sighed and glanced around for the source of the noise that had startled his horse. He needed a distraction; he needed time to let his mind untangle itself from the knots into which it had been tied.

  He got down from his horse and led the animal through the crowds, halfheartedly looking for Lian. Mostly he wandered, trying to lose himself in the bazaar—trying to let his mind go blank. Soon enough he was surrounded by dark, grinning faces, with long hooked noses and black desert eyes, offering up jewelry, meats, flagons of wine or beer or arkhi.

  His stomach had finally decided it could stand a bit of meat, and as Gansukh paused to get his bearings, surrounded by a thick cloud of savory meat smells and spices that now made his mouth water, a vendor caught his eye and waved him over. This one was a more sedentary man, sticking close to his cooking station, also dark-skinned but broad of nose and bushy of beard, and he jabbered at Gansukh, punctuating his words with rapid gestures. The fact that Gansukh had no idea what the man was saying made no difference. Beside him, on a squat stand, was a stone basin filled with fiery coals. Suspended above on a makeshift wire grate were a dozen or so wooden skewers laden with meat, and the entire time he was gabbling—haggling, Gansukh realized—he flipped and rotated the sticks without glancing at them.

  The vendor threw up his hand in disgust and waved him off when he tried to purchase only one skewer. His stomach rumbled in disappointment, so Gansukh settled for two. Perhaps he could make himself sick in some sort of penance. Chicken, he thought as he plucked off one of the chunks of meat with his fingers, popped it into his mouth, and chewed. A bit gamey, he decided. But the spices soon took his thoughts away from the age and toughness of the old bird.

  The tingling started on the tip of his tongue, and before he could finish swallowing the first piece, the back of his throat was on fire. When he raised his fingers to his face to wipe his streaming eyes, he realized they had plucked the meat from the stick to begin with—too late. He had spread spice to his lids and cheek, and now he could barely see.

  The vendor laughed at him, a wide-mouthed braying that went on and on. Gansukh bared his teeth, wiped his eyes with his sleeve, and boldly tossed another chunk of meat into his mouth. His throat constricted at the sudden shock of more long pepper, but he tightened the muscles in his jaw, chewing and swallowing with the frantic determination of a madman. He was not about to spit it out.

  As he led his mount away from the meat vendor, one hand clutching reins, the other the skewer, he turned down a narrow alley and discovered a small square filled with stalls selling all manner of housewares—rugs, cooking utensils, dishes. The materials ranged from reeds used for weaving intricate baskets to brightly polished brass fashioned into all manner of cups and bowls.

  His mouth still burning, Gansukh wrapped the reins around his forearm, then bent over to pick up a ridiculously large cup with exotic stones set in the sides. “Water,” he gasped, and the slender merchant smiled at the stick of meat held in his left hand and produced a leather skin from beneath his table.

  When Gansukh had diluted the fire in his mouth, he tried to return the cup, but the merchant waved him off. Speaking in heavily inflected Mongol, the merchant informed him that the cup belonged to him now. He had drunk from it, had he not? Who would want to buy a used cup? When G
ansukh tried to ignore this and again place the cup on the spread cloth, the merchant’s tone grew angry, and his gestures became more animated. Did Gansukh think that just because the Mongols had conquered the known world, they could take what they wanted, whenever they wanted—and not pay? Why didn’t Gansukh just kill him now and save him the humiliation of being robbed of his life’s work? And again, louder still.

  Gansukh sighed and dug out a few coins from his pouch. He was out of his depth amongst these shameless hawkers. All at once he was reminded of the vast gulf between life at court and in the towns and life on the steppes, and how he would never truly fit in with the former. Still, this merchant is no worse than our horse traders…

  Depressed, convinced he should have known better—and now burdened with an enormous metal cup, as well as a stick and a half of spiced meat for which, literally, he might have no further stomach—he tugged with his arm on his horse’s reins and headed for the gate to Karakorum.

  Passing the pavilion beneath the walls where the musicians were playing, he slowed to watch. Half a dozen men played instruments roughly similar to ones he knew, but these were rounder and taller and had more strings or more pipes than he was accustomed to. Their songs were sinuous and rhythmic, filled with serpentine melodies that reminded him of the wind’s song out on the plain. He found himself rooted to the spot and didn’t even notice the young woman in light-blue silk pants until she planted her feet boldly, with arms crossed, right in front of his horse. The horse blew out its breath and stopped short, then shook out its mane in irritation.

  Having caught Gansukh’s attention, the girl now rushed a few steps to stand before him, brought her hands together above her head, bent her arms akimbo, and began to move her hips to the music. The belt around her waist was fitted with silver bells, and Gansukh noted with pleasure that they were the sort of bells he had heard earlier. The musicians, in response to the flick of her hips, quickened the tempo, and she responded in kind, flexing her body and twirling around Gansukh in a flurry of colored silk.