The Mongoliad: Book Three tfs-3

by Neal Stephenson

“The womb of the spirits,” the shaman said. “The belly of Eternal Heaven.”

  “Is that where the banner came from? Is there a spirit in it?”

  The shaman wheezed and cackled, a nasty barking sound that was strange enough to spook the gelding, which raised its head and snorted noisily at the laughing pile of blankets. “There are spirits everywhere, bearded master,” the shaman explained when the stream of laughter dried up. “If you shatter a rock, do you shatter the spirit too, or does it live in every shard? When you cut down a stalk of grain, does the spirit pass into every seed?”

  “I do not know,” Chucai said.

  “If you cut off the head, does the body die?”

  “Yes,” Chucai admitted. He smoothed down his beard. “I had hoped to learn more about the Spirit Banner, wise one. I have not come to engage in riddles.”

  The shaman opened his other eye and stared fixedly at Chucai. “I am talking about the banner,” he croaked. “You are not listening.” A bony finger jabbed forth from the robes. “Why does the body die?” the shaman asked again. “Why? Is it because the spirit has abandoned it?”

  “I suspect it has more to do with the head being separated from the body,” Chucai replied, reluctant to play the shaman’s game.

  “But you could sew the head and body back together,” the shaman said.

  “It’s-” Chucai shook his head and sighed. “I confess the mystery of death is beyond my knowledge.”

  “It is not death you should concern yourself with,” the shaman snorted. “Life, bearded master. That is what you should be worrying about. Life.”

  “Is the banner alive? Is that what you are telling me in this maddening fashion?”

  “The banner is a piece of wood,” the shaman snapped, his voice suddenly harsh and dry. “It is the spirit that is alive.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Raphael’s Book

  Cnan started awake as Feronantus prodded her gently with his boot. She lurched upright, feeling the sky wheel around her, and she slapped her hands against the ground in an attempt to right herself. Blinking heavily, she tried to recall the last few moments of the previous night, yet there was nothing in her head but a hideous yowling sound. She tried to lick her lips, and found her tongue too dry to provide any moisture.

  The sky was shifting away from black, bands of purple and blue sliding into one another, each one lighter than the last, until they became a roseate glow over her left shoulder. A few bright stars still twinkled in defiance of the coming dawn-laughter light from the heavens.

  She raised her arms, no longer assailed by the vertigo of being suddenly awoken, and shook the sleep from her frame. She had not drunk as much as some of the others, but her mouth still felt like it was coated with sand. She peered at the misshapen lumps of the other members of the company as Feronantus moved among them, prodding and poking with his boot as he went. There was a great deal of groaning and complaining that rose in the old knight’s wake.

  “Up, you lazy dogs,” Feronantus barked. “You lie about like indolent princes, waiting for me to wipe your asses and prechew your food for you.”

  “Ach,” Yasper swore, cradling his head in his hands. “That sounds revolting.”

  “Which?” Raphael asked.

  “The latter,” Yasper shuddered. He put a hand over one eye, tilted his head to the side, and opened and closed his mouth several times. “I should not have slept on my side,” he groaned.

  “I’m glad you did,” Eleazar said. “Every time you rolled over, you started to make a horrible choking noise.”

  “I did not,” the alchemist said.

  “You did,” Vera noted. “I had a wolfhound once that made a noise like that when he was choking on a rabbit bone.”

  Yasper popped his lips a few times. “What happened to him?” he asked when his efforts appeared to have little effect on his internal condition.

  Vera stretched until something moved into its proper place in her back. “He ate one rabbit too many.”

  Cnan, who had been counting bodies, came up one short, and shifted her attention to the horses. “Where’s Istvan?” she asked, discerning a similar shortness in the number of horses.

  “Scouting,” Feronantus replied. He rocked R?dwulf with his foot. The Englishman hadn’t reacted to more subtle attempts to wake him.

  “In his condition?” Vera asked.

  Nimbly avoiding an angry swipe of R?dwulf ’s hand, Feronantus let the big archer’s body slump back against the ground. “His condition roused him before dawn. At which time, he and I had a discussion about Graymane and our route.” He glowered at the Shield-Maiden. “Unlike the rest of you, Istvan can handle his drink, and woke this morning with a clear head and a willing spirit. Which is why I gave him the easiest of the tasks that we will undertake today.”

  The last elicited a groan from Yasper.

  “What news of Graymane?” Raphael asked quietly, and Cnan recalled the circumstances under which they had found Istvan: ahead of them, bewildered, and lost in a haze of freebutton madness.

  “He did not tarry at Saray-Juk. Whoever he is, he no longer concerns himself with trying to stop us. I doubt he understands our true mission, but we did not flee back to the West after our assault on his camp. He must suspect our goal lies in the East. He hopes to beat us there.”

  Eleazar shook his head as he folded his blanket. “And raise the entire Mongol Empire against us,” he said.

  “We’re doomed,” Yasper sighed.

  “This changes nothing,” Feronantus reminded him. He swept his gaze across the whole company. “He does not know whom we mean to strike, or when, or where. He knows nothing of import, and the sheer… impossibility of what he suspects means it will take some time before he can convince anyone to listen to him. Even then, he must mobilize a response, and still find us. By then, it will be too late.”

  “Aye,” Percival nodded. “We must be swift and true.”

  “We will still meet Benjamin at the rock, and we may still travel with him along the trade route, but speed matters. More so than ever.” Feronantus nodded toward the cluster of hobbled horses. “This will be our last full camp. From here on, we must become like them. We must eat, sleep, and piss from the saddle. Kiss the ground, my brothers and sisters, for you will not rest upon its breast for some time.”

  R?dwulf, who had propped himself up on one elbow, lay back down, his arms splayed out.

  Feronantus looked down at the archer for a moment, and something akin to a smile tugged at the corner of his stern mouth. “Yasper,” he called. “We are in need of your potions.”

  The alchemist, who had been routing around in his saddlebags, paused, his expression suddenly wary. “How so?” he asked.

  “R?dwulf-” Feronantus prodded the archer gently with his foot-“will be bringing down several more deer this morning. The meat will need to be cured.”

  “That-that’ll take a week,” Yasper complained. “Even if I had the supplies.”

  “You have until first light tomorrow,” Feronantus countered. He shoved R?dwulf again. “Get your bow and knife. I suspect the Dutchman will find a way, but he’ll need as much of the day and night as your swiftest arrow can provide.”

  R?dwulf grunted and rolled to his feet, his lackadaisical attitude vanishing like a wisp of smoke.

  “Percival, Eleazar,” Feronantus continued, his voice the flat and hard tone of command. “Go with R?dwulf. He will need strong backs. Vera and Raphael: find their water source. Cnan-” he paused, and this time the smile did actually quirk his lips-“help the alchemist find his elusive salt.”

  They rode in comfortable silence: Vera, as if she could read the multitude of thoughts whirling through his brain, led their effort to find the stream R?dwulf and Yasper had seen the other day; Raphael let his horse follow hers, while his mind churned. More than once his hand strayed to his saddlebag, where he kept his private journal.

  The book was a treasure he had picked up some time ago when he had passed t
hrough Burgundy. He and several other Shield-Brethren had provided protection for a group of Cistercians returning to their abbey at Clairvaux, and while one of the brothers recovered from an arrow wound received on the journey, he had explored the abbey. The monks had been pleased to discover a like-minded soul in one of the martial orders, and the abbot had personally given him a tour of the abbey’s substantial library.

  He was drawn to the Cistercians’ collection of illustrated manuscripts like a magpie to a piece of shiny brass, and he spent numerous afternoons with the scribes, endlessly asking questions like a curious child and watching-with rapt attention-as they painstakingly copied text from aged scrolls that were in danger of crumbling from the slightest touch. The chief scribe, so amused by Raphael’s guileless enthusiasm, had a book made for the inquisitive knight-a sheaf of blank pages bound between two unadorned boards. The book lacked the extravagance (and weight) of the tomes commissioned by Burgundian nobility, but it was also of a size that fit easily into a saddlebag.

  Bring it back to us, the chief scribe had told him. When it is filled with your words.

  It was a strange request, and for many months, Raphael had been reluctant to besmirch the virgin parchment of his book. Such hubris to think that his words would be worthy enough to be placed on the same shelf as the evangelion, the horae, and the psalters he had seen in the library at Clairvaux! When he needed to meditate, to empty his mind before battle, he would look at the blank pages and lose himself in the striations in the parchment. Over time, each page took on its own character, the lines and whorls suggesting images that were hidden in the parchment; and one day, he had taken a piece of charcoal to a page in an effort to manifest the ghostly image.

  Other images followed; eventually, he added annotations. His awkward scrawl looped around the heads of his portraits like textual halos. Cryptic references piled atop one another, creating striated layers of history that charted both the passage of the seasons and his route across Christendom. The early text was Latin, but gradually he started to default to whatever language was most relevant to the event he was trying to capture. Doing so, he discovered, helped keep the tongue fresh in his head. The few notations he had scribbled down about Benjamin were in Hebrew, for example, while his record of the visit to the tomb of St. Ilya were a combination of the Ruthenian script and Greek, the closest approximation of the Slavic alphabet that he knew.

  Eventually, the urge to look through its pages became too great, and he tugged the book out of his saddlebag. He wasn’t sure what he hoped to find in the pages of his journal, though much like the horae-the Book of Hours-that Burgundian nobles had commissioned for their wives, perhaps what he sought was not illumination but comfort. His recollection of the past, the faces he drew so that he would not forget them, the names and deeds of those who died: these were subjective records, his attempt to mark the passage of time.

  Raphael was unsettled by the events of the previous night, both Percival’s admission of despair and Istvan’s erratic interjections. He was not overly superstitious-among his brethren, he had a reputation for healthy skepticism-but he could not shake a sense of foreboding. Too many visions, he reflected as he turned the pages. Our path is occluded by this confusion.

  “You remind me of the hesychasmos.”

  Raphael looked up from his examination of his journal. “Who?” he asked.

  “The priests of Pechersk Lavra,” Vera said. “They would stand for hours in the cathedral, meditating.” She raised a hand and rubbed several fingers together. “Worrying their chotki-their prayer ropes.”

  Suddenly self-conscious, Raphael closed the journal and absently slipped it back into his saddlebag. “Saying their prayers,” he nodded. Seeking comfort in their rituals, he thought. Is that what my book has become?

  “They called it the Scala, a ladder they were trying to climb.” She shrugged. “A mental exercise, I suppose, and not unlike some of our own drills, but I never did understand what purpose a ladder served. You cannot climb up to Heaven.”

  “No, of course not,” Raphael said thoughtfully, recalling the aerie of Francis of Assisi at the top of La Verna. The closest you can get to God and still have your feet upon the ground.

  He shifted in his saddle, setting aside the memory of the nearly blind friar and his scarred hands. “Do the skjalddis offer tribute to the Virgin?” he asked.

  “Mary?” Vera asked, a cautious note in her voice. “Or are you referring to the older traditions?”

  “I have seen so many ways of worshipping God that I don’t care to judge any,” Raphael offered, a wry smile tugging at his lips. “The Shield-Brethren heritage goes back a long way; most of those in Petraathen have forgotten our origins, and those in Tyrshammar have been under the sway of the Northmen for many years. The old ways linger, though: the glory offered by battle, the sanctuary of the sword, the visions offered to those who are worthy…”

  “The Christian worship of Mary does not include visionary practices,” Vera pointed out. She spoke bluntly, as always, but Raphael had learned to read some of her subtle mannerisms. Lately, he had begun to detect an austere wit in her words.

  “Does she not offer guidance then?”

  “Little has been offered, of late.” Vera nudged her horse closer to his, as if to make their conversation more confidential, even though they were surrounded by miles of open terrain. “Your brother, Percival, for all his Christian trappings, appears to still believe in these older traditions…”

  “Yes,” Raphael said. “As does Istvan, I fear.”

  And Feronantus too? He wondered silently.

  Vera snorted. “Istvan is addled by his mushrooms. His mind is too broken.”

  “Did you hear what he said last night?”

  “Madness and nonsense,” she said, her eyes flashing. “That is all I heard.”

  “He spoke of the All-Father. And of a staff. And-”

  “Odin carried a spear. Not a staff.”

  “Odin?”

  “The All-Father.” Seeing Raphael’s expression, Vera laughed. “You are a child of Christendom, my friend, regardless of how enlightened you strive to appear. We may appear Christian-like yourselves-but the skjalddis remember our roots too. Our grandmothers and their mothers before them were Varangian, and we remember the stories of the cold sea, of the war between the giants and the Aesir, and the tales of Yggdrasil.”

  “Egg-?”

  “Yggdrasil,” Vera repeated. “The World Tree.”

  Raphael shivered. “What happened to it?”

  “Nothing. It stands at the center of the world. The fields of Folkvangr are supported by its branches, and Hel lies beneath its roots.”

  “He said it was cut down.”

  “Who? Istvan? He is mad, Raphael. You cannot believe anything he says. If Yggdrasil were to be cut down, Ragnarok would be upon us.” Vera shook her head. “The Mongols are a scourge upon the world, but they are not the end of it. They are just men. They are not…” She trailed off, unwilling to speak of a greater terror. She raised an arm to indicate the open steppes. “This place inspires fear in its endlessness. You cannot let its emptiness rule your mind, Raphael. We all seek guidance, but we cannot invent it where it does not truly exist.”

  “What about Percival and his vision?” Raphael asked. “Do you think he is mad as well, or has he been granted guidance?”

  Vera lowered her arm and pointed. “Look,” she said. “I see a shadow. A gully. I suspect we’ll find our water source there.” She snapped her reins, and her horse snorted as it began to trot toward the shadow snaking across the plain.

  Raphael gathered his reins, but did not immediately follow. She hadn’t answered his question, and he suspected she would pretend to have forgotten he had asked it. She had welcomed his attention, even going so far as to allow him to think that he knew her, but he wasn’t that naive. Like all of them, she wore a great deal of emotional armor.

  But it wasn’t her reticence that worried him, nor whether she believ
ed that Percival had been granted spiritual guidance. It was the possibility of such guidance that continued to confound him. If Eptor’s madness had been the Virgin’s Grace, or Francis’s insistence that God had left a mark on his flesh was true, then Percival’s vision could be true. As could Istvan’s.

  Ragnarok, he thought. Yggdrasil.

  He thought of Damietta, and the zeal with which Pelagius, the legate, had seized upon the idea of having Eptor’s madness interpreted as prophecy. What were the Crusades but zealous men striving to realize some vision they thought they had been given? Pelagius had invented a myth to convince the army to march on Cairo; the Crusaders had been slaughtered because of his lie.

  Feronantus had been listening to Istvan, and Raphael wondered again what the old knight had heard in the other’s mad mutterings. Feronantus had been at Tyrshammar a long time. What stories had he heard from the children of the Varangians?

  And had he come to believe those stories?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Cantate Domino Canticum Novum

  The custom, as old as the Church herself, was that the names would be announced by the most senior Cardinal. He would draw the names from the chalice, one by one, and read each aloud to the assembled host of Cardinals. He would then hand the slip to his assistant, the second-oldest Cardinal, who would repeat the name. Finally, using a needle, the slip would be strung on a red thread that had been prepared by younger priests and left in the room the night before.

  Bundled together on the red threads, the first three had been inscribed with Bonaventura. This came as no surprise, although based on his unexpected standoff with Senator Orsini the day before, the collective assumption was that Castiglione would be getting most of the remaining votes.

  When Cardinal Torres read the name on the fourth strip-Father Rodrigo Bendrito-Fieschi noted the reaction of several of the Cardinals. Gloating quietly, they glanced around at the others as if to say, “Ha! Take that!” There was, briefly, an air of repressed amusement in the room.