The Mongoliad: Book Three

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Where are we?” Yasper squinted up at the sky, as if assessing the location of the sun might be of some assistance in an otherwise futile effort at divining their location. In all directions, the steppe went on forever, a flatness marred only by the scraggly knobs of wormwood.

The landscape was-though Cnan didn’t want to belabor the point-not much different from what it had been for the previous phase of the moon. “We’re getting close,” she said, catching Raphael’s eye and hiding a smile.

“Close to what?” the Dutch alchemist wanted to know. He idly scratched his jaw, an unconscious tic most of the men had adopted since they had shaved their beards as part of Feronantus’s initiative to blend in more readily.

Other than Raphael and Istvan, the men were very Western in appearance, and given their need to move quickly and effortlessly across the broad steppe they needed to be less conspicuous. With much grumbling, they had shaved their heads and beards, and with the assistance of a salve concocted by the alchemist and daily exposure to the sun, their skin tones had been darkened as well.

“We’re close to that bush over there,” Cnan said, pointing.

“Ah,” Yasper said, throwing up his hands. “Now I know exactly where we are.” He dropped his arms until he could look down one arm at the bush (which looked like every other bush for miles in any direction) and along the other at the route they had been following. “Yes,” he said, wrinkling his nose and peering down his arm, “it is a good thing I have the latest inventions from Arabia to guide us.” He wiggled one of his thumbs. “We are, and this measurement is exceptionally accurate-”

“To within one thumb width, at least,” R?dwulf interjected.

“Better mine than yours,” Yasper chortled. “As I was saying, yes, we are exactly halfway.” He raised his arms again and looked at the company, rather pleased with himself.

Istvan chewed on the end of his mustache and glowered. Both Percival and Feronantus dozed in their saddles, oblivious to the alchemist’s wit. Eleazar was a half mile ahead, riding point, and of the remaining quartet-Vera, Raphael, R?dwulf, and Cnan-only Cnan regularly engaged Yasper. She liked the quirky Dutchman’s company; he had a lively insouciance and an inquisitive eagerness that made the long days and nights of their journey palatable. When she had made this journey west before, she had ridden along for many, many months, and she could recall very little of the journey.

Cnan stole a glance at Feronantus and Percival. They were alike in many ways, even though many years separated them. Feronantus was, in fact, old enough to have fathered every member of the company and, in some cases, of such an age that he could be someone’s grandfather. Percival was younger than the other Shield-Brethren, but it was his bearing and his vision that lent the impression of gravid wisdom, the sort that usually comes with having survived many hard winters. In fact, she was starting to think that he was not much older than she, and this realization had caused her some distress a few days back.

“I am quite serious, though,” Yasper continued, dragging her from her thoughts. “Where are we?”

“It’s not far now,” she replied, enjoying the consternation her words wrought on the alchemist’s face.

“Weren’t we supposed to meet that trader, Benjamin?”

“We are.”

“When? We didn’t meet up with him after the river. You found a note that we were supposed to go somewhere else. A rock, wasn’t it? Some sort of landmark that would be obvious. How many days’ journey was that supposed to have been?”

“Six,” she said. “But we were chasing Alchiq, remember?”

“I thought we were looking for Istvan.”

Cnan shrugged as if to say those two things were one and the same. “We went north when we should have been going south.”

Yasper groaned. “I knew we should have stayed closer to the trade routes.”

“We’ll be there soon,” Cnan assured him.

“You still haven’t told me where there is.”

“Soon.” She nodded toward the horizon. “Can’t you see it?”

Yasper whirled in his saddle, leaning forward like a hunting dog catching a scent. He even quivered a bit in excitement. “Where?” he said, a tiny quaver in his voice.

R?dwulf pointed, and Cnan marveled at his eyesight. She knew the rock lay in that direction; she had felt the gentle tug in her belly earlier in her day that said she was going in the right direction, but she hadn’t spotted the lone finger of stone jutting up from the steppe yet. She had been looking for it, and even though the air was crystalline in its clarity, she couldn’t see it yet. But, apparently, R?dwulf could.

“A day’s ride,” the tall Englishman said.

Raphael glanced up from the tiny journal he was constantly scribbling in. “Only then will we be halfway,” he pointed out.

Yasper stood in his saddle, straining to see the tiny dot on the horizon that R?dwulf could see. “Next time,”-he sank back down-“can we pick a target closer to home?”

Cnan caught Raphael looking at her, an oddly gentle look in his eyes, and she gave him a wistful smile before ducking her head and kneeing her horse lightly to get it to trot a little faster. Home, she thought. Where is that for a lost little leaf like me?

“Oh, my friends, I did not recognize you!” Benjamin leaped down from his horse and approached the Shield-Brethren’s horses. The trader offered them a wide smile and a wider embrace, hugging each one of them in turn, except for Istvan, who deigned to get down from his horse. “The steppe has changed you,” he observed. “Well, most of you.”

“Only on the outside,” Raphael quipped, disengaging himself from the trader’s hug.

“It is a very clever disguise.” Benjamin fingered Raphael’s plain cloak, and the gleam in his eye said he had felt the ridged texture of the maille beneath the simple homespun cloth. “From a distance, you look like Kipchaks or Cumans, not altogether unusual in this region, and this one”-he indicated Cnan-“always adds a bit of Eastern flair to your company. Up close, I would still think Cumans, what with your garb and your saddles. Most would not think twice about who you were.” He tapped his forehead. “But I have traded this route too long to not notice the little things.”

“We did not expect to confound you, Benjamin,” Feronantus explained. “We only hoped to become invisible to the dull-eyed so that our passage would not be remembered or hindered.”

“It is a good strategy,” the trader nodded. “When you did not arrive at the caravanserai as immediately as we had planned, I suspected your mission had waylaid you. When the survivors of your encounter with the jaghun started to limp through, I knew you would not dare to meet me there. Fortunately, knowing your companion,” he glanced at Cnan, “I suspected you might be able to find this place.

He slapped Raphael on the shoulder. “Oh, but I have been enjoying the wild tales that have preceded you. I have heard a number of stories about Western devils rising out of darkness, spitting fire, and walking across water.”

Raphael laughed. “I suspect the last may be overly embellished.”

“It was not my place to dissuade these people of the errors in their stories. I am but a humble trader,” Benjamin said. “I would not dream of interfering with the fabrication of local legends.”

“What of Graymane?” Feronantus asked. “The one called Alchiq.”

“An elusive ghost, that one.” Benjamin’s face lost some of its levity. “As I came east, I made inquiries and heard very little. The few who spoke of him tended to whisper their rumors, as if they were worried he might hear them. Though I cannot imagine how, as everyone agreed that he was hurrying east, leaving a trail of dead horses in his wake. He asked many questions too as he rode-too many, in my opinion. He heard few satisfactory answers, which have led others to wonder about the cause of his ferocious curiosity.”

“How many days ahead of us?” Feronantus asked.

“Enough.”

“Aye,” Feronantus sighed. He raised his eyes toward the impressive spire of the rock. “We will rest and resupply tonight; tomorrow, we will acquire fresh horses and ride on. Friend Benjamin, I would ask a boon of you. We had hoped to utilize your expertise on our journey, sheltering ourselves in the midst of your caravan, but I fear your need to stop and trade will only hinder our pace. Events, I am afraid to admit, have left us bereft of not only one of our numbers but also of time. We must get to the Khagan before Alchiq can reach and warn him. If we cannot beat him there, we must hope that his warning is delayed or otherwise ignored. Otherwise…”

“Yes,” Benjamin mused, resting a finger on his lips. “I see your predicament. My caravan can offer you more invisibility than you already possess, but it will, alas, move at a rate that will not be to your liking. If I were to abandon my cargo to one of my caravan masters, he would, most likely, rob me blind and leave my camels in Samarkand.” He shook his head. “Hardly a suitable end to a trade caravan that has gone back and forth along the Silk Road for nearly three generations.”

Feronantus said nothing, and Cnan leaned forward to scratch her horse along its mane. She-and the rest of the company-had become accustomed to their leader’s long silences. It was rarely due to an extended bout of thinking on Feronantus’s part, but more for the sake of others in the conversation. Feronantus had already considered, rejected, and postulated several possible solutions, and in his mind he had already settled on the most suitable answer. He was simply waiting for the rest of them to come to the same conclusion.

Cnan found her own readiness to follow Feronantus’s conclusions without convoluted mental peregrinations of her own both comforting and unsettling. She was allowing herself to become complacent with the company, letting them do her thinking for her.

“No decision need be made immediately,” Benjamin said. “Come. Let us eat and rest. We have much to discuss before the morning.” He beckoned to the company as he strode toward his camp.

Cnan grinned. Benjamin was a very adroit trader. He had neatly avoided Feronantus’s trap.

Raphael had never seen a land as flat and inhospitable as the steppe. Scoured clean by the wind, the landscape east of the river where they had fought Alchiq’s jaghun had been brutal in its emptiness, as if this were a land abandoned by God. There were animals and plants that thrived on the endless plain, enough that a desperate party could sustain itself, but such a life was spent being cold, miserable, and constantly hungry.

According to Cnan, it was only going to get worse until they reached the Mongolian Plateau on the other side of several mountain ranges.

Raphael doubted the rest of the company were familiar with Herodotus and Pliny, ancient historians who had tried to make sense of the myriad of travelers’ tales that described the distant edges of the known world. Alexander had used Herodotus’s Histories as his map of the East, and the Macedonian conqueror redrew all of the known maps by the time of his death. Pliny, hundreds of years later, tried to make further sense of the tangled histories of the peoples encompassed by Alexander’s reach, but he never traveled to all of the places that he wrote about.

It struck him Raphael as both strange and marvelous that he, a bastard born in the Levant and raised in Al-Andalus, was seeing more of the world than either Herodotus or Pliny. Both had written of a land called Hyperborea, where the north wind lived in a vast cave. They repeated stories of one-eyed giants and gryphons, forever at war with one another, though it was difficult to see what was worth fighting about on these barren steppes.

As the company settled itself following a simple feast (one that was mouth-wateringly delicious in comparison with their diet of salted meat and dried berries over the last few weeks), Raphael took it upon himself to investigate the rock. Perhaps, he reasoned, I might find some gryphon feathers.

The rock was a mystery, a prominent landmark in a land that had none. It was shaped like a sundial’s gnomon, oriented east to west with the higher end in the east. It cast a significant shadow, and were they staying a day or two more, Raphael would have wanted to scale it. He was intrigued by the allure of the view from its pointed peak. How far could he see from the prow of this rocky ship? Who else had been up there, and had they left any markings for later travelers to decipher?

Boreas may have smoothed the sharp edges of the rock, but there were still narrow channels cut in the limestone as if from water (leading Raphael to speculate that the weather had been vastly different in this region once) as well as pockets and divots filled with twigs and down from generations of nesting birds. Much like an oasis in the desert, the rock offered shelter and solace, providing a place where men and animals could pretend the surrounding land was not intolerably harsh.

Benjamin’s camp was situated on the southern side, and Raphael hiked around the thicker end of the rock, mainly to see the other side. It was the same as the other, though at this time of year, the shadows were longer. He clambered across the rough scree and laid his hands on the rock directly, marveling at how cool the stone was to the touch. Letting his right hand rest on the rock, he walked east, idly wondering if he could circumnavigate the rock before nightfall. He chided himself on such frivolous thinking. As the day cooled, there might be beasts that would come out of hiding to hunt, and he was out of earshot of the camp.

He paused, his hand dropping to the hilt of his sword as he caught sight of movement ahead of him. He relaxed as he recognized Cnan’s shape, but his curiosity was immediately piqued as he wondered what she was doing. Her posture suggested she was looking for something.

His foot dislodged a rock, which clattered noisily as it rolled, and the Binder whirled in his direction. So as to not spook her further, he raised an arm and called out a greeting. He slid down from the rocky sill and strode toward her, making no pretense at having been spying on her. “Ho, Cnan. I see you have been curious about the spire as well.”

Her face was guarded, and she was clearly wrestling with deciding how to reply, if at all.

Raphael beamed, opting to appear as nonthreatening as possible. “Do you know who Herodotus was? He was a Greek scholar, and he wrote this wonderful book called The Histories. He attempted to collate the stories of the known world into a comprehensive narrative-it is very impressive.” He knew he was babbling, but he wanted her to be at ease. “He wrote of a people known as the Arimaspoi. They had one eye in the center of their foreheads. Very warlike.”

“I am not familiar with them,” Cnan said slowly, peering at Raphael with thinly veiled unease.

“Their mortal enemies were gryphons. Do you know what a gryphon is?”

Cnan shook her head.

“It is an enormous bird that has the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. Many cultures regarded it as a sacred creature, a symbol of the divine power of their gods. To adapt the gryphon as your symbol was to harness the magic of the gods, and I imagine the Arimaspoi hunted them, for their feathers among other things.”

“I have seen no feathers,” Cnan said, shifting from one leg to the other.

“Nor have I,” said Raphael sadly “Can I ask what it is you are looking for?”

His question caught Cnan off guard, and she blinked owlishly. She sighed heavily when he said nothing more, waiting for her to offer some explanation. Beckoning him to follow her, she started walking east.

Raphael followed, wisely keeping his mouth shut.

After a few minutes of walking, Cnan spotted something that was indiscernible to Raphael. She led him up to a crack in the rock face that stretched far above their heads, and Raphael was surprised to realize the crack was both wider and deeper than he had first thought. One slab of the rock overlapped the other, hiding the true depth of the crevice from casual examination. Cnan squeezed through the narrow gap, and Raphael stopped, eyeing the tight space with some trepidation. He might fit, but he wasn’t so sure he wanted to find out. Especially if he managed to force himself through and then couldn’t get back.

“I’ll be right back,” Cnan said, and before he could argue otherwise-and what would be the point of telling her to stop, really? — she slid farther into the crack and turned a corner he hadn’t realized was there. He stood beside the crack, somewhat at a loss as to what he should be doing while he waited, and just as he was starting to think he could squeeze through the gap, Cnan returned.

She slipped back out of the crack and showed him a strip of braided horsehair. It had been tied in an intricate series of double and triple knots, and he knew there was some purpose to the order of them, but he couldn’t discern it. “You found something from your kin-sisters,” he said.

“Aye,” Cnan said. “A weather report.” She tucked the horsehair braid into her a pocket of her jacket.

“Is that all?” Raphael asked.

“No,” she said tersely, but after staring at him for a moment, chewing her lower lip, she relented. “Some of us are firmly rooted in the soil of our birth. Others, like myself, travel endlessly. The ones who put down roots know everything there is to know about where they live. The wanderers know less about their destination, but they know how to get from one place to another. Spots like this one are where we leave messages for each other. Some of them”-she patted her pocket-“are as simple as notes about the weather, about local warlords and who is fighting whom in the region, or about the location of caches of food and money. Others are…”

Raphael looked at the crack once more, suddenly desirous to try to squeeze past the lip of stone. Maybe without my armor…

“Come,” Cnan said, grabbing his arm, not altogether gently. “Let us return to the camp.” She tugged him. “Even if you could squeeze through,” she said softly, “you would not be able to read any of the messages.” She pulled the horsehair braid from her pocket and waggled it in front of his face. “‘There is no snow in the gap,’” she quoted. “Can you decipher these knots?”

Raphael shook his head.

“Let it remain a mystery then,” she said. “Like your gryphons.”

After dinner, by the light of a roaring fire, Benjamin laid down a large piece of cowhide and unrolled his map of the trade routes. The company clustered around the worn palimpsest, trying to make sense of the marks and letters that had been written and rewritten over many years.

“This is the Yaik,” Benjamin explained, tracing a thin line that ran along one edge of the map. “This is Saray-Juk, not far from where we had planned to meet, but wisely, you bypassed that caravanserai and came here”-his finger traced to a small triangle-“instead.”

“The middle of nowhere,” Yasper quipped.

Benjamin smiled, and dropped his finger to the closest line on the map. “We are north of the Silk Roads, and as you can see, they tend to run much farther south. There are two, primarily. One runs north along the Tien Shan Mountains, through Urumqui and Turfan, and the other runs much farther south, beyond the Taklamakan Desert. Both take you to the heart of China, which is not where you want to go.” His finger had been moving across the map as he spoke, highlighting each of the places as he mentioned them, and when he finished, he moved his finger up into a large blank spot where, seemingly at random, he spotted and tapped the map. “Karakorum, the imperial palace of Ogedei Khan, Khagan of the Mongol Empire, is here.”

The members of the company examined the map for a few minutes, silently considering the information that Benjamin had given them.

Percival cleared his throat and leaned forward, his finger gliding across the map to a point that almost seemed to summon his finger, an X that was the result of two mountain ranges coming together. “What of this place?” he asked.

Benjamin glanced at Feronantus and Cnan briefly before he answered. “It is a pass called the Zuungar Gap,” he said.

“What do you know of this gap?” Feronantus asked.

“It’s a high pass,” Benjamin said. “A long and narrow course through the mountains. If there is, indeed, not much snow, it will be an easy route.” He traced a finger along the map. “You stay on the western side of the Tien Shan until here, cut over through the gap, and you will find yourself on the edge of a place known as the Gurbantunggut. As deserts go, it is not as bad as some, and travel across it will be fairly easy until you reach the Altai Mountains, which are not as imposing as the Tien Shan-the Celestial Mountains-but they have other dangers.” He paused to draw breath, and he glanced at Cnan, a flicker of a smile touching his lips. “Once you have crossed those mountains, you will be on the Mongolian Plateau. From there, it is only a week or so hard ride to Karakorum.”

“Is that all?” Yasper asked.

“It is a dangerous route,” Benjamin continued, “and one I would not attempt if I was not certain about the weather.”

Feronantus looked carefully at Raphael, Percival, and then Cnan, and then spoke for all of them. “I think we are,” he said.

Percival beamed, and Raphael wanted to run away from the firelight, out in the darkness around the rock, where he could berate God and no one would hear his blasphemy.