The Mongoliad: Book Three tfs-3

by Neal Stephenson

  He had lost all sense of time and place, nor did he recognize any of those who raged across his vision. He did not know who belonged to what side, who was good or who was bad, who was in power and who was not, who was a Christian and who was not, who had done evil and who had done good. There were men fighting each other, nameless, faceless, faithless, one human being determined to kill another, with whatever means they had, each set on hearing the death-throes of their fellow human beings. No other living thing was of value to them-and no doubt they would turn and kill their allies when they had finished killing their enemies.

  To be alive and to be human meant to want to kill, maim, hurt, destroy. It did not matter what a man believed, or how he conducted his affairs, or where he lived. His merely being human meant he was the target of another’s wrath, another’s fury.

  The most base animals do not turn on their own kind so, Rodrigo thought miserably as he watched men slaughter men, and women, and children. It hardly mattered who fought, who defended, who died-no one was to be spared the wrath of the others, and the world tumbled on with terrifying disinterest.

  This was the past and the future, and Rodrigo was seeing all of it now.

  All of the Cardinals had voted except Cardinal Sinibaldo Fieschi. No doubt they assumed he was waiting until the end to make some kind of dramatic flourish, since it went without saying that he would vote for Bonaventura.

  But he could count as well as Castiglione, and read men’s faces better than anyone else in the room. If Somercotes were still alive, the Englishman would have translated Castiglione’s grandstanding into a guaranteed victory. But Somercotes, thank Heaven, had gone to his reward, and Fieschi had no illusions about the impact of Castiglione’s brief flare of leadership.

  He thought about the demented priest, wandering around somewhere inside the basilica. Somercotes had taken the man by the collar so easily. If I had gotten to him first, he thought, he would have been my puppet. I would have hidden the ring, passed him off for a Cardinal, told him who to vote for… and then that fortuitous accident with the scorpions would have made everything so much easier. Idiots like da Capua-so easily swayed by the most puerile of mummery-would have taken the priest’s word as gold, and voted as he told them-the candidate I would have already suggested to him! It would have been an easy victory for Bonaventura.

  Of course, Bonaventura had never been his favorite. He was a necessary tool, that was all. A mediocre instrument with which to accomplish a task of tremendous significance: to keep the Church away from the influence of Frederick, who was at best agnostic and quite possibly an atheist. Bonaventura was not especially smart, but he was doggedly good at keeping his eye on the prize: total emancipation from secular power. Beyond that, when it came to all the details of shepherding the masses, Bonaventura was not somebody Fieschi would have chosen to work with, in large part because he was too obstinate. Fieschi would have preferred somebody weak-willed, even feeble-minded, whom he could manipulate with the skill of a puppet master.

  That is why he wrote Father Rodrigo Bendrito on the piece of paper. He could read men’s faces, and he knew-he knew-that he was casting the seventh vote for the crazed priest; and he further knew that it had not occurred to any one of them that Rodrigo might actually be chosen.

  Fieschi finished writing the name, underlined it for emphasis, and rose. He walked to the altar, placed the piece of paper on the paten, tilted it so that it slid into the chalice, and returned to his seat.

  As Gil Torres and Colonna rose to count the votes, Fieschi relaxed in his seat. He reached for his satchel and took out the piece of paper he’d found in Rodrigo’s satchel. His eyes skimmed over the words, not for the first time, and he took pleasure in the inanity of Rodrigo’s prophecy.

  The high Cedar of Lebanon will be felled. The stars will tumble from the heaven, and within eleven years, there will be but one god and one king. The second son will vanish, and the children of God will be freed. Wanderers with come, bearing a head. Woe to the priests! A new order rises; if it falls, woe to the Church! Battle will be joined, many times over, and faith will be broken. Law will be lost, and kingdoms will fail. The land of the infidels will be destroyed.

  Yes, Fieschi thought, repressing a smile. Yes, this man will serve us very nicely.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Under the Night Sky

  After reuniting with Istvan, Feronantus called for a kinyen. “For all of our company,” he said, “both present and fallen.” Cnan felt both honored and troubled by the elder knight’s words. Nor was she alone in her feelings, judging by the expressions on the faces of some of the others. But they all fell to preparations nonetheless, building the illusion of a communal feast hall on the open plain.

  She found a shallow depression, deep enough to provide some shelter from the wind. From its center, she could almost pretend the horizon was hidden beyond a gentle ridge. It must have held water once, as there was more wormwood clustered within the bowl than the surrounding area. The brush would burn after a fashion, sticky and smoldering until it dried out, and then it would flash with heat and light. Eleazar set to cutting down a supply of fuel for the fire.

  Two hunting parties ranged north and south from the depression, engaged in an unspoken contest to see who could provide the best meat for the evening meal. Cnan privately thought neither team would find much, and her stomach grumbled noisily when Vera and Percival returned a few hours later with a pair of scrawny rabbits. However, when she spotted R?dwulf and Yasper a while later, her excited shouts brought the rest of the company running.

  R?dwulf was walking beside his horse, who had been conscripted into pulling a makeshift travois that had been assembled from cloaks, rope, and one of Finn’s hunting spears. Sprawled on the makeshift frame was a deer with a spread of velvet-covered antlers. Cnan’s mouth watered at the sight.

  “There are more out there,” Yasper announced with a grin, “but figuring out how to carry one back to camp was hard enough.”

  “One is more than sufficient to best our paltry rabbits,” Percival said.

  “I like rabbit,” Istvan pointed out.

  Everyone ignored the Hungarian. Very little of what he had said since he returned had made much sense, and they could all see that he was lost in the throes of a freebutton mushroom madness. Though, how he had found them on the plain was a mystery no one had been able to explain.

  “There’s a herd about an hour north of here,” Yasper explained, “And water too, I think. We could smell it, but didn’t have a chance to find it. These deer spooked at the sight of us, but didn’t run far.”

  Feronantus grunted slightly at the unspoken details of Yasper’s report. A wild herd that knew enough of mounted riders to be wary, but not so much that they would abandon the sanctuary offered by running water.

  Yasper slapped the side of the dead animal. “Tarandos,” he pronounced, winking at Raphael. “Aristotle’s stag. We must be at the edge of the world when we start finding the beasts of legend.”

  Cnan guffawed at the lunacy of this statement, but the alchemist’s mood was too infectious to be deterred.

  Fresh vegetables were in short supply. Most of what the company carried was dried or salted-the meager rations a soldier ate without noticing taste or texture-but Yasper, once he had convinced Feronantus that he wasn’t going to make the deer burn with witchfire, managed to blend together a paste that he threw on the fire at regular intervals as the deer cooked. It should have been slow-roasted, cut steaks buried in a bed of white coals, but their stomachs all growled so loudly-and so constantly-as R?dwulf was skinning the deer, that they decided to erect a makeshift spit and cook the meat as quickly as possible.

  The fire was going to be visible for many miles, and the smell of cooking meat would spread for a similar distance. They couldn’t hide on the steppes, and given everyone’s exhaustion, Raphael didn’t think such obscurity was high on anyone’s mind. Better to fight with a full belly than to be denied one final, solid meal.
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  They gathered around the fire as Feronantus cut heavy chunks of steaming meat from the cooked deer. Squatting, lying, standing, kneeling-none of them went far-they fell upon the meat with the appetites of doomed men. Even Cnan, who typically ate very sparingly, like a tiny bird pecking at seeds, attacked a piece of meat with both hands, eagerly licking at the juices as they ran down her arms.

  We needed this, Raphael thought, his belly groaning as it stretched around the weight of deer meat. Yasper had produced a pair of skins filled with the Mongolian liquor-arkhi-and Raphael intercepted one as it came past him. He had not gotten any more used to the pale liquid, but he drank it readily enough. He coughed, his nose and eyes watering, and he passed the skin on to a laughing R?dwulf.

  “Breathe in more slowly,” the big Welshman chuckled as he tipped back a portion nearly double the size Raphael had taken. R?dwulf grimaced and belched, eliciting a cheer from Eleazar on the other side of the fire. The Spaniard raised the other skin of arkhi in salute.

  “I have drunk many strange things in my travels,” Raphael admitted, “but this drink of the Mongols is difficult to acquire a taste for.”

  “I’ve had worse.” R?dwulf offered the skin, but Raphael begged off. “That tree sap in Greece, for instance.”

  “Retsina,” Yasper moaned. “Oh, the Greeks know many things, but it is a pity that they could not apply the same rigor to the crafting of wines as they do to the natural sciences and philosophy.”

  “Philosophy cannot solve every riddle, my friend,” R?dwulf said.

  “Making a decent spirit is not that hard of a riddle,” Yasper countered. He received the second skin from Eleazar. “Do you know how the Mongols make this? They prepare the ingredients and attach it to their saddles. As they ride, the heat of the sun and the movement of their horse create a perfect environment for the spirits to arise.”

  “It sounds like you admire them,” Istvan slurred from his semi-supine position next to R?dwulf.

  Yasper shrugged. “Each of them is entirely self-reliant. They carry food and drink. Tools to mend their clothes and their weapons. Furs to sleep on. They can shoot from horseback, without any care as to the direction they face. A single Mongol could ride from one edge of the world to the other, and never suffer from any want. One man is dangerous, but when you field thousands of men like this, they become unstoppable.”

  Raphael glanced around the fire, and based on the expressions on the faces of the others, judged that few of the company shared the alchemist’s admiration. Yasper, becoming aware of the silence in which the crackling shift of fire-glazed wood was overloud, lowered his eyes and struggled to find the words to repair the damage he had done to the mood.

  “A woman’s touch,” Istvan croaked.

  “I beg your pardon?” Raphael asked, eager to welcome the distraction.

  “That’s what they’re missing.” The Hungarian waved a hand toward the shadowy shapes of their hobbled horses. “Where would you put a whore?” He shrugged, the answer seemingly self-evident-even in his demented state. “They can’t ride forever,” he said. “A man can eat and sleep in his saddle, take a piss, and shit, even. Eventually he’s going to have to stop.” His head lolled back and he stared, unseeingly, at the night sky.

  Eleazar guffawed, and when Raphael realized the Spaniard was looking at him, he felt his face redden. He tried very hard not to steal a glance at Vera, who sat between Yasper and Percival. Separate from him, but not that far away.

  “Finally, something you and I agree on,” Eleazar said, nodding toward Istvan. “What is the point of riding across the world if you don’t get to enjoy the array of riches it has to offer you?”

  Vera spat a hunk of gristle into the fire where it snapped and sizzled. Percival shifted awkwardly and leaned forward as if to come to her aid in the conversation, but Vera stilled him with a steely glance. “No,” she said, “the man with the huge sword speaks true. Were I as well-endowed as he, I would make sure to sheath such a weapon in every town I conquered. ’Tis only the basic rule of rapine, is it not? Take what isn’t yours. At sword point no less.”

  “Eh,” Eleazar blanched, refusing to meet Vera’s intense gaze. “That is not what I meant. I only-”

  “My Shield-Maidens and I were in Kiev when the Mongols came,” Vera snapped. “It had been more than ten years since rumors of this invincible army had reached the city-ten years of waiting, of living in fear that the stories we had heard from the Cumans about the battle at the Kalka River were true. The Ruthenian nobility dismissed these stories, lying to themselves that they had been victorious at Kalka, that they had driven the horde away. They fought among themselves, ignorant children squabbling over lies of their own making, and when the horde came back-and it most certainly did-none of them were prepared.

  “Refugees from the cities conquered by the Mongols streamed into Kiev. Our wards filled with wounded, women and children who had not been so badly maimed that they couldn’t still walk tens and hundreds of miles to our citadel. These were the lucky ones, and though we did what we could for their physical wounds, each was deeply scarred by what they had seen, by what had been done to them. We could not help them. We could only offer prayers that their suffering would be eased.”

  Tossing her gnawed bone into the fire, Vera got to her feet. “By the time the Mongol army actually appeared outside the gates of Kiev, we were numb from the stories we had heard. From our citadel, we can see beyond each of the gates, and we watched the plains fill with enemy soldiers. Kiev had been besieged before; it was a jewel each of the Ruthenian princes longed to possess. But this army was different. The Khan-Batu-did not want to take Kiev as a treasure; he wanted to destroy it. Utterly.”

  Tears streamed down her face, and she angrily swiped them off her cheeks. Her eyes were bright with firelight. “I would submit that Kiev was one of the grandest cities in the world. I had watched it welcome all of the lost refugees from the surrounding principalities. It clasped all of these frightened people to its bosom and found places for them within its walls. It was a haven. It was home. And the Mongols burned it all, simply because they could.”

  After a long silence, Eleazar shifted awkwardly and opened his mouth to speak, but Vera cut him off with a savage slash of her hand. “They are monsters,” she said, her voice hard. “Just as the men of the West have been monsters as well to those who they strive to subjugate, and I am not such a fool to think that all men are monsters, but by the blood of the Virgin, I will not ride with men who cannot remember the sanctity of their oaths or how to honor those whom they have sworn to protect.”

  Eleazar lowered his gaze. “I have erred greatly by insulting you, lady of the skjalddis,” he said. His face was flushed, ruddy even, in the firelight. “It burdens my heart greatly to think that you might remember me by the ill-formed speech, and I hope that the words I have spoken this evening may, someday, be erased from your memory.”

  A wry smile tugged at the corner of Vera’s mouth as she nodded, her hands unclenching. “I have heard tales from some of my more traveled sisters of the sweet-tongued men from Iberia,” she said. “Though your speech is rough-hewn, Eleazar, I know it to be from your heart, unlike the words you spoke earlier, and for that I am thankful.”

  She turned her attention to the other side of the fire where Istvan lay, his head still thrown back. His mouth was open, and he shuddered and gurgled when R?dwulf kicked his leg. The Hungarian raised his head, closing his mouth and working his tongue against his teeth. “What?” he asked, blinking like a surprised doe.

  “The lady finds you offensive,” Percival said quietly.

  Istvan stared up at Vera for a second, and then idly waved a hand in her direction. “Of course she does,” he muttered. “She’s one of you.” He let his head slip back, and his attention wandered back up to the scattered stars across the wide night sky.

  Yasper was the first to laugh, a dry chuckle that slowly worked its way around the fire, increasing in volume as each member of the
company joined in, allowing a little levity to escape.

  Vera threw a small stone at Istvan, who flinched as it bounced off his chest, flapping a hand as if he was brushing away a fly. She sat back down, and as she did so she met Raphael’s gaze.

  He returned it, having gotten much better about not looking away when she looked at him, and he found himself inordinately pleased that she appeared to be comforted by his presence.

  While R?dwulf was telling a war story that seemed as if it would last longer than it would take for a man to fetch back one of the Englishman’s longest arrow flights, Raphael excused himself and wandered off to piss. He walked downwind until he was at the edge of the fire’s light, and after kicking the scraggly bush in front of him to make sure there was no nocturnal creature hiding in it, he stood and watered the plant.

  As he finished, he heard the soft slap of a leather boot against the hard ground, and a hand fell on his shoulder. “A moment, brother,” Percival said. Raphael nodded, and kept his gaze directed outward as Percival watered the next bush over.

  “Tarry with me a while,” the tall knight suggested as he finished. He pointed to his left. “Let us make the night circle,” he said, referring to an old technique of nighttime patrolling. Two men would walk widdershins around a camp-one directing his attention to the ground before them, the other keeping his eyes trained outward. The outward-looking man would not have his vision spoiled by firelight from the camp, knowing that his companion was keeping him on the correct path.