The Mongoliad: Book Three

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I am going the wrong way.

Percival’s words echoed in Raphael’s mind as they completed their widdershins circuit of the company’s camp. The night circle watch had been an excuse on Percival’s part to unburden himself of a portion of the mental weight that he carried, and Raphael struggled with the import of what the Frank had told him. Percival had said I, implying that the vision he had received was his alone. What did that mean for the company? Would Percival depart in the morning, heading back toward the West?

That was the direction he had looked when he had said those words to Raphael. The endless sky of the steppes was disorienting, and it was hard to gauge one’s facing, but Raphael knew-with a shivering realization that made him hug himself-that Percival could feel the Grail. He could point to it the way a lodestone pointed north. As the company continued to ride east, Percival got farther and farther away.

Would his visions become more chaotic-more distracting-the farther he got from the source? Would the wheels-the images that Percival feared were signs of impending death-become more forceful in their apparition? Was his continued presence dooming every member of the company on its quest?

Raphael’s mind fled back to Damietta, to Eptor’s anguish. The boy had suffered greatly, and to what end? Raphael had wondered, in the years since, what would have happened if Eptor had simply died during the assault on the stone tower in the Nile. Would the legate have realized sooner the futility of their crusade? Would Francis of Assisi been able to reach a better accord between Christian and Muslim? How many less would have died during the Fifth Crusade?

And Francis himself, sequestered in the ragged shack at the peak of La Verna, receiving the stigmata. It had happened soon after Raphael’s visit to the Franciscan hermitage, and the venerable priest had died a few years later. But had those marks-those symbols of being marked by God-given Francis any solace in his lifelong quest for compassion and unity?

What good had ever come from listening to visions?

The annals of the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae were filled with stories of men receiving divine insight. He had, himself, told more than one fable to eager trainees about the blessings offered to the devoted and the pure-hearted by their patron goddess in whatever guise she wore. Athena. Freya. Mary. The name did not matter as long as the men believed their prayers were heard. Those who asked for guidance would be given it. Their mission-as hard and as unforgiving as it was-was not a fool’s errand. They would be rewarded for their diligence. Their lives-and their deaths, especially-would have meaning.

But what of Finn? Of Roger? Of Taran? Of Eptor, and so many others? Victories were won upon the sacrifices of these men, but was the world ever changed for the better?

Cnan quietly listened as the men told their stories. When she had first joined the company, she had sat apart from them during the evening meals and had ignored the way their conversations stuttered to a halt when she wandered into earshot. After a few months, they had grudgingly accepted her presence and no longer treated her as a complete pariah. She was no longer a stranger at their gatherings, and, more often than not, they ignored her completely. She had become invisible, and she was not bothered by their idle dismissal; in fact, such camouflage was part of her Binder training, though she had not had much opportunity to practice it over the last few years. She was, unlike many of the other kin-sisters she had met, a wanderer.

She knew enough to know that she might never fully comprehend the vastness of her sisterhood, but she also realized that knowing was not required in order to fully participate. Wherever she went, she could find signs of other sisters, and that they would welcome her and whatever news she carried. It was comforting, in her isolation, to know that she was part of an extended family. Over time, in the company of these men, she had come to realize she and they had more in common than she had thought.

The men of the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae were both knights and vagabonds. Independent, fiercely loyal, and surprisingly intelligent, they were bound by a set of principles that remained unspoken and mysterious to her. Not like the tenets espoused by the zealous Christian missionaries or the mumbled riddles clung to by starved ascetics she had encountered in her travels. The Shield-Brethren, like her kin-sisters, appeared to believe in a grand design, even if each of them, singularly, did not know the full extent of its shape or plan.

They are messengers too, she realized.

Shortly after completing her first assignment as a Binder, she had given up on the idea of family, hurling herself completely into the roles offered to her as a roaming messenger. She made no attachments, avoided falling in love with any boy, and never let herself be drawn into local politics. She delivered her messages and kept moving. She had seen a great deal of the world, and every once in a while wondered if there was a Binder who had traveled farther than she. She had chosen this life, and had reveled in the freedom such a decision had granted her.

And yet, listening to the Shield-Brethren, she began to realize how lonely her life truly was. Few of these men knew each other well before they had begun this journey, but now, they were tightly bound. Even Istvan, as much as the others expressed a near constant dislike of the mad Hungarian. They were-for lack of a better word-family.

Yasper was telling the story of the fight in the tunnels at Kiev again, though no one seemed to mind. Cnan smiled as he pulled at his face and waved his arms, imitating the gibbering priest with the flaming staff. He was exaggerating, of course; the alchemist had a natural penchant for embellishing details that made even the most mundane aspect of an event seem exceptionally heroic. She recalled slipping in the corridor and nearly dropping her knife, but in Yasper’s version, her clumsiness became a clever tuck-and-roll that saved all of them.

And Finn. Yasper lingered long on Finn’s valiant spear work. The hunter, more terrified than any of being caught underground and burned alive, held off a dozen of the crazed and raggedy monks with graceful precision. His spear, a serpentine extension of his hand, darted back and forth-piercing throats, slashing cheeks and hands. The filthy monks were forced to climb over their dead, and for all their efforts, each man only added to the pile of bodies choking the narrow tunnel.

Somewhat drunkenly, his words disjointed and slurred, Istvan told them of Finn’s bloody work in the Mongol camp. The Hungarian was not as good a storyteller as Yasper, and his memory of the raid was spotty at best, but he spoke with some admiration of the hunter’s swift knife and sure hand among the sleeping Mongols. Six, Istvan claimed. Finn slew six, before any of the enemy even realized death was among them.

Feronantus told them the story of how he met Finn. Following the Livonian defeat at Schaulen, the commander of the Livonian presence on the island of Saaremaa sought to be named the new Heermeister. He thought the best way to rally support for his claim was to keep the island under Livonian rule, thereby enabling his decimated order a safe haven from which to rebuild. The islanders resisted, and since a fair number of sons of the island’s gentry were apprenticed at the Tyrshammar, the Shield-Brethren were pressed to take a side in the conflict. Feronantus resisted, stating such involvement was akin to allowing the Shield-Brethren to be nothing more than hired mercenaries. The men of Tyrshammar must remain aloof from this local conflict.

However, small raiding parties began to whittle down the Livonian ranks. These guerilla-style attacks were successful for two reasons: the islanders were intimately familiar with the local terrain; and, given the relatively wild nature of the landscape, a number of men used to such conditions proved to be exceptionally useful. They wore no insignia that could connect them to Tyrshammar, of course, and in the end, their presence was overshadowed by the exploits of a single man. A hunter, who was neither one of the Shield-Brethren nor a native of the island. His prowess and zeal were so great that his exploits were already immortalized in song and drunken tale-telling before the last Livonian had fled the island.

The hunter’s name was Finn, and he never spoke of why he had devoted himself to the islanders’ cause, and Feronantus never asked. When the Shield-Brethren longboat returned to Tyrshammer, Finn had been seated on the oar bench with the other men. He pulled an oar as an equal, stayed for a fortnight at the Rock as a guest, and then vanished one foggy night.

When Feronantus and the rest of the Shield-Brethren landed at Stralsund to come to Legnica, Finn had been waiting for them. Without a word, he had joined the company as if no time had passed.

“You always leave out the best parts,” Yasper groaned when Feronantus finished his story. “Who was the woman?”

Eleazar lowered the satchel of arkhi. “What woman?” he asked, wondering what part of the story he had missed.

“The whole reason he was on Saaremaa in the first place.” Yasper smacked his forehead with one hand. “You don’t think he was up there because the hunting was good!”

Cnan glanced at Feronantus, who met her gaze briefly, his lined face giving nothing away. Then he leaned back, and the firelight no longer reached his eyes.

“It’s not always about a woman, Yasper,” Raphael observed as he returned to the circle, Percival not far behind him.

“Is that so?” Yasper retorted, making a big show of leaning forward and glancing in Vera’s direction. He had drunk more arkhi than the rest of them, and even though he wasn’t standing, he nearly toppled over. Eleazar reached out a large hand to steady the slight alchemist. When Yasper had recovered, Eleazar shoved him, knocking the Dutchman sprawling on his ass.

“Excuse the wretch,” Eleazar said to the circle at large. “His tongue has come loose in his head. Hopefully, he’ll get it tightened before he joins us again.”

From his supine position, Yasper raised a hand and made a rude gesture in the Spaniard’s general direction. The company laughed, forgiving the Dutchman’s momentary enthusiasm; and as Raphael and Percival sat back down, Cnan caught the glance that went back and forth between Raphael and Vera.

Vera noticed her watching, and suddenly embarrassed to have been caught spying on a private exchange, Cnan leaped to her feet. Waving everyone to silence, she launched into her own story about Finn. She was flustered at first, stumbling over the tale, but after a few seconds, she stopped thinking about Vera and Raphael-and Percival too; how had he managed to get in her thoughts like that? — and sank into her role as bard.

It was a simple story. One that had little room for embellishment the way Yasper would have told it, and none of the romantic gravitas of Feronantus’s, but it was her story. She prided herself on her woodcraft: on her ability to read the trails; to know where water and fruit-bearing plants could be found; to move so silently through the woods that the birds never betrayed her position with warning calls to another. Yet, compared to Finn, she was a large cow, blundering through the heavy brush.

No matter how far she ranged ahead or behind the company during their journey, she invariably found sign that Finn had already been there. At first, she thought he was clumsy in how he hid his passage, and then she allowed herself to think she was actually sharp-eyed enough to notice the tiny marks of the hunter’s trail. When they had been traveling in the forests of Poland and Rus, she would find tufts of hair from the pelts he wore caught on the unruly bark of the black alders. She would find the occasional boot print-usually only a partial print, at that-on boggy ground. His marks, tiny chips cut out of tree bark high above ground, indicated the presence of water, wildlife, and possible ambush sites; over time, she deciphered them all.

“I thought I was being clever,” she admitted to the company, “but I was only learning to see the signs Finn was leaving for me. I know he understood Latin better than he ever admitted, but out in the woods, it didn’t matter. He told me everything I needed to know without saying a word.”

One day, a few weeks after they had left Legnica, she had spotted Finn near a tiny stream and had decided to shadow him. Moving as carefully as she knew how, she tried to keep the wary hunter in sight. Several times she thought she had lost him, only to have him reappear in a different direction from where she had thought he had been traveling. After a few hours of this cat-and-mouse game, she realized he knew she was behind him. He had known all along, and when he vanished again, she gave up, feeling very foolish for having indulged in such a whimsical distraction.

When she turned around, Finn jumped back. He had been standing right behind her. Grinning wildly, he had scampered off as she had chased him, only to vanish in thick woods again. “He was a ghost,” she said. “I would catch a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye, but when I looked, he was gone. The only sign that I wasn’t imagining things was how the branches shook, as if the trees were laughing at me. They knew where he was, but they would never tell me.”

They were smiling at her story, and she felt a warmth suffuse her that had little to do with the fire. She sat down quickly, suddenly very self-conscious, leaving her story somewhat unfinished. But she had said enough.

Feronantus had called this gathering a kinyen, and she suddenly recalled what that meant. This was the private mess of the fully initiated members of the order. She had stood up and spoken about one of their fallen companions as an equal, and none of them had objected on the grounds that neither she nor Finn were sworn members of the order.

They accepted her. She was part of the family now.

As the night wore on, the Shield-Brethren honored their fallen comrades. After they spoke of Finn, they remembered Roger: his perpetual scowl, the endless supply of hand axes, knives, and other sharp implements that seemed to grow on him like fruit; his steadfastness in battle, regardless of his disgruntlement at being forced to fight. They talked of Taran as well-their eternal oplo-who, even in death, still reminded them of their bad form when holding a sword, of how often they failed to close the line, and how they consistently neglected to ready themselves for their next opponent as their first was still dying. Even Istvan joined in, though his tales were intermittently interrupted by disjointed conversations held with phantoms only he could see. After awhile, the others would take these asides as opportunities to pass the arkhi or to wander off to relieve themselves, confident they would miss little of the Hungarian’s story.

Feronantus, however, listened intently to Istvan’s ramblings.

What secrets do you hope to hear? Raphael wondered, his curiosity aroused. His interest lay, partially, in having something to distract him from Percival’s confession, but their leader’s enigmatic relationship with the Hungarian had always puzzled the others. His eyes half-closed, Raphael watched Feronantus, trying to read something in the older man’s features.

Life on Tyrshammar had changed the elder knight. The wind and rain of the north left their mark on a man’s features, but Feronantus had been more than weathered by his exile. His face had become like rough stone, making it very difficult to ascertain his thoughts and emotions.

One of the failings of the Shield-Brethren’s hidden fortress was its very inaccessibility; too often, in the absence of real news, the boys of Petraathen would turn to embellishing stories of older members of the order to entertain themselves. It was a habit that he was not entirely free of himself. The story of the Electi’s displeasure with Feronantus and his exile was one of the more widely whispered tales.

Raphael had heard enough legends and tall tales in his travels to know that each contained a kernel of truth. In the case of stories about Feronantus, the reoccurring motif was that the Master of the Rock was a strategist of unparalleled depth.

Istvan was staring up at the sky again, babbling to one of his recurring ghosts, and this digression had become lengthy enough that the others seemed less inclined to wait him out. Yasper and Eleazar were bickering about who should get the last dregs of the arkhi, playing up their mock outrage to their captive audience, and no one paid much attention to the Hungarian’s mutterings.

Except Feronantus, who was unmoved by the theatrics of the Spaniard and Dutchman.

Raphael leaned forward, his eyes on the bickering pair, but straining to hear what Istvan was saying.

“… can’t go to the sea… can’t see the sky… yes, it hurts… the head… don’t let it look at me… I don’t care about your pain… I didn’t-no, it wasn’t my fault… there is no-no, let me go… I didn’t want… I didn’t!.. who cut him down? Who did it? Who cut it down?” Istvan shuddered suddenly, his legs bouncing against the ground. “The staff,” he growled, “Where is the All-Father’s staff? She lost it, didn’t she?… When her favorite son… I don’t know… no… no, no, no-” He shook his head. “Not my fault that they lost it. Not my-I don’t want… so many horses… don’t let it look-”

His voice was getting louder now, and his motions were more agitated. “The bitch lost it,” he said. “It’s not my fault. I never-fuck you! I will cut off your balls. The crows will eat your guts. Whoreson. Turd-eating cur. Stop looking at me!”

This last was delivered to the company as Istvan leaped to his feet-his eyes wild, his face straining and purpled with rage. His chest heaving, he gulped in great draughts of the night air. He stared around the circle, and whatever haze had obscured his vision gradually cleared. His mouth snapped shut, and he scuffed sand at the fire before he stalked off into the darkness.

Raphael cleared his throat. “That was my fault,” he apologized. “I was the one who was staring.”

“You do that a lot,” Cnan offered, giving his polite lie some credence.

Yasper snorted with laughter. “Who wouldn’t?” he asked. “That horse-lover is crazy.”

“Perhaps he has cause,” Raphael mused. His eyes strayed to Feronantus, who was staring at the fire as if nothing had happened.

You know who he was talking to, don’t you? he silently asked the old knight.