The Mongoliad: Book One

CHAPTER 16: THE MAN FROM ROME

Dietrich von Grüningen had officiated at a number of tournaments since becoming Heermeister—the military master of the Fratres Militiae Christi Livoniae, the Livonian Brothers of the Sword. He was no stranger to the tedium that surrounded such proceedings. But this gladiatorial spectacle, sponsored by one of the Khans of the invading Mongolian army, was not like the others. It was similar in the sense that crowds did gather to witness feats of arms between single combatants, but unlike other tournaments, which were typically over in one or two days, the duration of this one depended on its host’s willingness to continue watching.

The invitation, which he and the masters of other martial orders had responded to, spoke of a tournament to decide the fate of Europe. Representatives would meet in single combat, but it hadn’t been clear what would be the spoils of victory. The Khan—Onghwe, a son of the Khan of Khans, Ögedei—had suggested he would spare Europe if he lost. But he was only one of several generals—and not even the most powerful—who was threatening the West. What was the real purpose of these games?

Sport, His Most Holy Father had said when Dietrich had asked that question two months earlier, during his audience with the Pope in Rome. It is a distraction they can afford to entertain themselves with. It speaks of how little regard they have for us. After the devastation they visited upon good Christian soldiers at Legnica and Mohi, they do not fear our martial strength.

What is the purpose, then, of participating in this mockery at all? Dietrich had asked.

The Great Khan wishes to extend his dominion, Pope Gregory IX had finally replied. Like all conquerors before him—men of small vision who thought land and tribute were what defined an empire. These are matters that do not concern us.

What does? he had asked.

His answer was not to come from the pontiff himself, who had fallen senseless. His eyes remained open, and his chest still rose and fell, though the motion was difficult to discern beneath the voluminous robes and blankets that covered him. The room faced west, and the windows were wide and tall enough that the sun looked in on the room for most of the day. He had been standing there for but a few minutes, and his back was already warm. The Pope had been there much longer, and still his body shivered slightly.

Dietrich had not been able to shake a sense of foreboding at how frail the Bishop of Rome had become. The weight of the Church was immense, and it slowly crushed every man who took the office, but in the year since his last audience, Gregory IX looked as if the life were being wrung out of him like juice from a grape.

The persistence of the Church, Cardinal Fieschi had said as he led Dietrich back to the main hall of the Lateran Palace. To answer your question, we are concerned with the persistence of the Church, for it is the soul of the people. We are the rock to which they cling when everything around them is swept away.

What am I to do? Dietrich had asked, seeking the answer to why he had been summoned to Rome, an answer the frail Pope had failed to offer during the brief audience.

Make certain of our survival. It would be best if the Mongolian rabble does not encroach any farther into Christendom. Should that be impossible to avoid—and we realize such indolence on the part of this horde is, indeed, most unlikely—how do you reduce an army’s strength before it arrives at your gates?

By making the journey costly, Dietrich had replied. Every league they march is a league farther from their homes, a league farther into territory that they do not control. Ground they must earn.

Redirecting an unstoppable army and whittling away at its host of fighting men until the cost of conquest was too high was a seemingly impossible puzzle, one he pondered daily—nay, hourly—until his arrival at Legnica. The circus itself seemed like nothing more than a passing fancy, an idler’s summertime indolence. In the fall, the Mongol hosts would have finished resupplying and would be looking south for warmer climates to conquer. How was he to turn their attention away from Rome?

And then a solution presented itself. North of the killing fields and the recently erected arena—as well as the ram-shackle sprawl of the new city growing around it—was an old monastery. Abandoned by its previous residents, it housed new penitents now, more martial than spiritual in their inclinations. Their standard, raised above the old hall, was a red rose laid over a yellow thirteen-pointed star.

The Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae.

Gladiatorial fights were the sort of peasant entertainment that used to be the mainstay of the Colosseum in Rome; clearly the Mongolian Khan knew the best way to keep his troops from becoming disenchanted with the lack of opportunities for rapine and pillage. Mortal combat was held once a week. The other days were filled with nonlethal bouts, a slip-shod tourney through which combatants earned the right to fight before the dissolute Khan. As long as the venerable Shield-Brethren could provide ready fodder for the arena, Dietrich suspected that this circus could last a very long time.

Long enough that the impetus to march before winter might be lost.

It wasn’t much of a respite, but it was a start. Every season that passed without the Mongols encroaching any farther into Christendom was time his masters in Rome could use to negotiate a peace treaty. It wouldn’t last. The Mongols, much like the Arabs in the Levant, were heathens, and Rome knew they couldn’t be trusted. But a peace treaty might be enough to make them turn their attention elsewhere…

The crowd was on its feet, shrieking and howling at the spectacle in the arena. The Mongolian fighter, a man dressed in a garish costume, complete with a lurid mask with white whiskers, had lost his weapon; the Shield-Brethren knight had managed to take it, but clearly had no idea how to use it properly. The Mongolian fighter—someone named Zug, if he understood the audience’s chant correctly—had at least traded his pig sticker for something longer. Throwing his short sword at the knight was an ineffectual move at best—a blade like that had no chance of penetrating the knight’s armor—but it gave him the opportunity to seize the knight’s sword. Whether he knew how to wield it effectively was another question; Dietrich doubted the man had any experience with the Great Sword of War.

Some of his knights used such a weapon, but it was much too big and clumsy for his liking. It was a weapon for a man who liked to wear armor, who preferred to be in the thick of battle. In Dietrich’s experience, being that close to one’s enemies meant a mistake in tactics had been made, and such mistakes were invariably costly.

He had heard reports about the Mongolian general, Subutai, from the survivors of the battle at the Sajó River. He used horse archers, incredibly fast and mobile fighters who remained out of reach of the sword and spear. By the time you could get close to them, they could empty an entire quiver of arrows into your ranks.

Costly mistakes.

Burchard, one of his two bodyguards, nudged Dietrich, drawing his attention toward a rippling movement in the crowd. Dietrich came away from his reverie and looked for what had caught his fellow Livonian’s eye.

“A heckler,” Burchard pointed. “He threw something.” The tall German had been a scout for years before he became one of Dietrich’s bodyguards, and his eyesight was well known among the Livonian Sword Brothers.

Dietrich squinted at the tiny object rolling around on the sand and then gave up trying to ascertain what it was. The reaction in the stands was much more interesting anyway.

Some sort of thrill was running through the crowd like a gust of wind across a field of rye, a rippling of bodies as heads were turned toward the enormous pavilion that housed the Khan and his retinue. Some signal passed from within the shade of the tent, and the motion through the throng reversed itself, splitting the audience apart. The crowd drew away from a single man as if he had burst into flames. A Saracen, judging from his clothes. His terror was abject, and he scuttled toward the rim of the growing circle as if to escape notice, but half a dozen hands lashed out and shoved him back. He slid across the floor, and as he passed through the center of the open space, he jerked to a stop, suddenly transfixed by three arrows that sprouted from his body.

Dietrich noticed the fletchings pointed outward in very different directions. Reflexively he glanced around the arena in an effort to note the locations of the snipers. He spotted two readily enough—positioned on fixed platforms around the periphery of the arena. Burchard indicated the third, a Mongol standing just under the edge of the Khan’s pavilion. A fourth stood on the opposite side, though he had not shot his bow.

The Saracen writhed and screamed, and the crowd remained at a distance until two burly Mongols pushed their way through the cordon of bodies. One whipped a roundheaded mace down on the dying man until he stopped screaming, and then they roughly dragged his corpse away.

“A costly mistake,” Dietrich murmured. Burchard raised an eyebrow, and Dietrich waved the Sword Brother’s unspoken question away.

The mood was starting to turn. The audience was getting restless. The Khan was showing signs of boredom. This did not bode well for a continuance of the tournament. Dietrich glared down at the two men on the sand as if to invoke a change in their behavior through the force of his gaze. This game of switching weapons and grappling like drunk peasants is not going to keep the Khan’s interest.

The Shield-Brethren should be more adept than what was currently on display. It had been a number of years since he had actually seen them fight, but he found it hard to believe they had fallen so far from the paragons of martial expertise he knew. Even though the Order had withdrawn from nearly all of their existing commissions, they still held a few citadels of their own, and he had not heard any rumors that their ranks had been decimated in battle. Even at Mohi.

Keeping this competition alive was critical, and he couldn’t risk the safety of his own Order by putting his men into the tournament. Whenever the tournament did finally end, the Mongolian army would return its attention to Europe, and it would serve his Order and his masters in Rome little if the Livonian Brothers of the Sword had earned a reputation as fierce fighters. He needed the Mongols to feel threatened by someone else, but if all that remained of the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae was old men and children, then it would be very difficult to focus the dissolute Khan’s attention on the Shield-Brethren.

Haakon’s first instinct upon gripping Zug’s pole-arm had been to adopt what Taran referred to as the Scared Little Boy Pose, which was to say an extended position, aiming the tip of the blade straight out before him. To the extent that his mind was working at all, this was probably an attempt—which any scared little boy would certainly understand—to keep the bogeyman as far away as possible. He began to come to his senses, though, during the pause for hilarity that ran through the arena in the moments after Zug had picked up Haakon’s longsword and thereby effected a complete weapons swap.

Haakon felt instinctively uneasy whenever he stood with his blade held straight out for more than a few moments. Was this experienced fighter going to rush forward and impale himself on its tip? Unlikely. Besides which, he’d seen enough to understand that this blade was made for long, sweeping attacks, and from this position, he couldn’t deliver one.

So he lowered his right arm, dropping the glaive’s tip until it was only a hand’s breadth above the ground. By moving it to one side or the other, he could now block a blow, or deflect a thrust from the longsword at any height. From here, he could swing it to either side as needed to shut out the enemy’s onslaught. And yet, by making a push-pull motion with his hands, he could snap the cutting edge upward, to send it carving into whatever part of Zug’s anatomy might present itself. At the moment, the obvious target was the right leg, which was planted out in front of the left and not especially well armored.

In the moment when they stared at each other, an object had come hurtling into the arena. It had bounced off Zug’s helmet with a clang, and while it hadn’t caused any injury, they were both momentarily surprised.

Haakon had been trained relentlessly in the importance of seizing the initiative. According to Feronantus, fate bestowed blessings upon him who had the courage to act first. Taran’s voice cut through the mysticism: Make him react to you, damn it!

Haakon stepped forward, feinting a low cut (an obvious strike, given the starting position of the blade), then drew back and whirled the glaive end-for-end, bringing its edge all the way back and around and up over his head and finally striking downward.

Zug had been holding the longsword out in front of him, a pose not dissimilar to his own stance. As a guard, however, it was only useful against quick strikes to the hand or forearm. Further evidence that the man was drunk and not thinking clearly. Haakon’s only opportunity lay in taking advantage of Zug’s sluggish reactions.

Zug didn’t fall for Haakon’s feint, and he quickly raised his sword, catching the glaive on the crossguard. The guard—nothing more than a steel bar—stopped Haakon’s blow, but the force of his strike collapsed Zug’s arms, and the blade of the glaive glanced off the side of Zug’s helmet.

Haakon had been trained to expect that his first attack would invariably not succeed, and so he took advantage of the rebuff of his weapon by sweeping it back and around again, coming up from his lower left. No feint this time. A hard strike, aiming for Zug’s right leg.

Zug, making a much smaller movement, was able to snap the tip of his sword downward and get it in the way of the strike. Again he could not hope to withstand the glaive’s momentum, but this time he had the ground to act as a brace. When their blades crashed together, the tip of the greatsword was driven into the sand, where it came to a dead stop. As did the glaive.

But the tip of the glaive was now pointed directly at Zug’s thigh. Haakon shoved it forward. Zug, sensing such a thrust, flexed his knee, allowing the blade to pass between his legs. The best Haakon could do was to give the weapon’s handle a sharp right push, levering over the longsword’s planted blade, to buckle Zug’s leg and send him toppling to the ground.

Which, to judge from the crowd’s reaction, was the most sensational thing that had ever happened in this arena.

A pair of drunk Slavs were jumping up and down in front of him, and in their excitement, they were not handling well the skin of fermented horse milk they were sharing. The third time they slopped arkhi over their shoulders, spattering Dietrich’s gambeson, he intercepted the skin as it passed between them, and when one of the two men tried to follow where his liquor had gone, Dietrich backhanded him in the face.

The second Slav, his face screwed up in confusion, gave a muffled cry as Burchard slammed a meaty fist into one of his kidneys and shoved him forward, where he slammed into the bodies below them. The crowd parted, swallowing the lurching and moaning drunk like a lake swallows a stone.

The first man—clutching his broken and bleeding nose—stared dumbly at the wall of bodies below him, trying to understand what had just happened. Dietrich raised his hand again, but his motion was stayed by his other bodyguard, Sigeberht.

“My lord,” the tall Frank said. “We are only three.”

Dietrich grunted, acknowledging his bodyguard’s words, and hurled the arkhi skin into the crowd after the man Burchard had forcibly moved. The bloody-faced man fled too, more to retrieve his liquor than to aid his companion.

We are only three. He had twenty-one more in their camp. Fully equipped Livonian Brothers of the Sword. There were more than a thousand Mongols scattered across the countryside around the ruins of Legnica, and God only knew the population of the sprawling tent city that had sprung up around the arena. Most of them would flee at the first sign of battle, but of those who remained, how many would side with him in any useful way?

This was nothing compared to the main Mongolian army that, having won at the battle of Mohi, was gradually spreading farther into Hungary.

How am I supposed to stop them?

It was easy for the Cardinals to tell him to put his trust in God. They were safe in Rome. Here, surrounded by a shrieking horde of bloodthirsty savages, he found a wide gulf between belief and action. Even though he often prayed to God for counsel and succor, Dietrich preferred to rely on the steel and skill of his men.

But they were too few for this present task. He needed an army.

It was all well and good that the current competitors were thrilling the audience with their shenanigans, but he knew this wouldn’t last. Even the most experienced court jester eventually ran out of means to entertain his increasingly jaded audience.

Dietrich fumed silently, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides, as he watched the Shield-Brethren knight try to spear the Mongolian champion to the red sand with the pole-arm.