The Mongoliad: Book Three

CHAPTER FIFTY

On the other side of the open field, the Mongols massed. They outnumbered the Shield-Brethren at the gate by no small number, but they appeared to be in no hurry to assault the gate again. Behind the roiling mob of infantry, horsemen rode, parading back and forth. Rallying the men, Rutger thought.

“That’s a lot of Mongols,” Knutr observed. The blocky Shield-Brethren had lost his helmet during the initial fracas and the right side of his head was sticky with blood. He grinned, and Rutger noticed one of his pupils was larger than the other. “They seem a bit… nervous.”

Knutr was correct in his assessment. The Mongol vanguard jeered and shouted at the Shield-Brethren, trying to goad the knights. Rutger didn’t understand any of the insults being shouted, but he was familiar with training-yard bullying. They were afraid, and all the bluster in the world couldn’t hide the fact that their superior numbers were not decisive enough an advantage for them to press the attack.

Rutger knew they would come eventually. The men on horseback were shouting at the infantry, whipping them into a frenzy. Calling them cowards, unworthy dogs that were an embarrassment to their Khan. How could they face their families, their fathers, if they ran from this meager band of nameless knights? Rutger knew what was being said. He had used the same words himself. Bolster their courage. Call upon their sense of duty. Inflame their rage.

The Mongols would come again. They had no choice in the end.

The cart had been hauled to one side of the gate, and the dead horses (along with a number of Mongol corpses) to the other, forming a definite channel around the gate. The Mongols would have to funnel into it in order to attack the Shield-Brethren; it was an ancient tactic that had been used successfully over and over again. Reduce the killing field so as to strip away the enemy’s advantage of numbers.

Rutger dimly remembered a siege in the Holy Land-he couldn’t even recall the name of the castle now-that had lasted six weeks. The Muslims breached the wall twice, but each time the defenders had managed to beat the invaders back, inflicting such grievous casualties that the Muslim morale quailed. It took the Muslim Sultan so long to reestablish control of his army that the Christian engineers had been able to reseal the breaches. Eventually reinforcements from Jerusalem had arrived, and the Sultan had fled.

Reinforcements. Nodding, Rutger looked over his shoulder, scanning the open ground outside the walls for signs of movement. Where were they?

With a ragged howl, the Mongols came again. Spears and arrows flew in advance of the angry mob, and Rutger heard a coughing gurgle off to his left as one of the hurled spears found a target. “Stand and hold,” he shouted, his voice ragged and hoarse. He forced his fingers to tighten around the hilt of his sword as he readied himself for the charge. It was only the boon of battle fervor that made the pain in his hands tolerable.

From the guard towers above him, his archers began to loose arrows into the front rank. He could only spare a few men for archery duty, and the six men he had chosen were known for their speed and accuracy. He couldn’t match the Mongols for numbers, but he could make each arrow count. As the Mongols charged, each arrow dropped its target, befouling the charging men who came after. In this way the Mongol line, instead of being a heavy wave that crashed over them, became a ragged and chaotic crowd, with men jostling one another as they tried to close the holes in their ranks.

The Shield-Brethren line stood firm, a waiting wall of sharp steel.

Rutger was consciously aware of the first man, a Mongol with yellow beads strung in his hair. He thrust his spear at Rutger, and Rutger sidestepped the attack, moving inside and driving his sword into the man’s open mouth. The Mongol with the yellow beads died, and that was the last man Rutger remembered as the bulk of the Mongol charge slammed into the Shield-Brethren line. His world became a chaotic blur-filled with spear points and curved swords, men shouting and screaming, and the distant awareness of his own arm, rising and falling.

He saw Knutr fall, run through by two spears, an arrow jutting from his right shoulder. Another brother went down, the front of his helmet cleaved by a Mongol sword. Rutger could not tell which of his men it was, and he felt a momentary spasm of regret as the press of bodies surged over the fallen knight. The Mongols kept coming, slowly forcing the Shield-Brethren back.

Rutger’s maille saved him from a sword stroke to his left side that nonetheless sent ripples of pain through his body. He clamped his arm down, trapping the blade against his body, and wrenched it out of his attacker’s hand. He buried a hand’s worth of blade into the man’s befuddled face.

That was when he heard the shouts, not from in front of him, but from behind. “Clear the way!”

Rutger grasped the shoulder of the man next to him and shoved him violently against the inside wall of the gate. The desperate move saved both of them as a thunder of horses stormed past. He caught sight of a moving banner of white and silver, the riders all dressed in gleaming white surcoats. The host of horsemen struck the Mongols like a battering ram, splintering them into a disorganized mob. Those who weren’t trampled outright fled before the onslaught of the freshly arrived knights.

As the tide of battle turned, one of the knights fought his way back to the gate. His sword was drenched with blood, and it matched the image stitched proudly across his blood-stained surcoat. The crimson sword. Above it was an equally red cross.

The sigil of the Fratres Militiae Christi Livoniae. The Sword Brothers.

The knight cleared his sword of blood, sheathed it, and pushed his helm up. Rutger stared in anger at the face revealed-the face of the man who brutally butchered one of their own in the Khan’s arena.

These were not the reinforcements he had expected.

When Heermeister Dietrich did not return from his fool’s errand, Kristaps had taken charge of the Livonian host in Hunern. He sent a quartet of men to investigate the Heermeister’s absence on the off chance that Dietrich had only been delayed, and the rest he set to dismantling their camp. Regardless of the success or failure of the Heermeister’s audience with the dissolute Khan, it was time to leave Hunern. The riots following his fight in the arena had upset the delicate balance in the tent city.

It was all an illusion anyway. The Mongols were wolves, and they looked upon the West as an unguarded flock of wooly sheep. Kristaps had seen the handiwork of the Mongol Empire in Kiev; he knew of its rapacious appetite. The West ran around in circles, bleating in foolish ignorance. They had been seduced by the Khan’s facile lure of martial combat, thinking that a single victory in the arena would save them.

He had shown them otherwise, hadn’t he? The death of one of the Shield-Brethren had brought their tenuous truce to a bloody end. And now they saw the true nature of the wolves from the East. Now they knew they had no choice but to fight.

Yet, Dietrich wanted to run away. The coward.

As his men loaded their horses, taking way too long to accomplish such a simple thing as striking camp, his scouts returned. They found Dietrich’s bodyguards, dead in the streets, and of the Heermeister there was no sign.

It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened.

Regardless of his disappointment in Dietrich’s leadership, the Heermeister’s disappearance provided a useful incentive to the remaining Livonians. It was better if Dietrich was dead and not captured, as the murder of the Heermeister was an insult that could not be ignored. Kristaps was the First Sword of Fellin, a legend within the Livonian Order. He had survived the battle of Schaulen, and he had slain one of the famed Shield-Brethren in single combat. When he addressed the Livonians in a voice that quaked with rage, they listened.

Kristaps was tired of running, tired of hiding in the marshes and the forests. He wore the white, not the black, and the sword on his surcoat was red. Why was the sword in his hand not that same color? Why was it always sheathed when there were so many enemies of God close at hand? Why were the Sword Brothers not fighting for the glory of God?

The men had raised their voices in response to his questions. They too wanted glory. They wanted to scatter their enemies. They wanted to save the West. It was not difficult to whip them into a frenzy. The Sword Brothers would not sit idly by as their Heermeister was tortured and killed by unclean heathens. They would not flee; they would fight.

Kristaps’s plan was neither complicated nor subtle. They knew the location of the enemy camp. They would ride into the heart of it and claim reprisal for the crimes inflicted both upon their order and upon Christendom. They would show the West that the Shield-Brethren were not the only order capable of demolishing the enemies of God.

The ride through the city had been exhilarating, and when they found the gate of the Mongol compound wide open, Kristaps had not hesitated to give the order to charge. Galloping through the gate and scattering the Mongol host clustered there had been nearly as cathartic as cleaving the Shield-Brethren knight’s corpse in the arena. The motion of his sword about him as Kristaps rode was a rhythmic expulsion of his frustration. He laid about him with powerful strokes, cleaving helms and severing arms, venting all of his anger. His horse, goaded into a frenzy by his fury, ferociously trampled the wounded and dying. This was his true purpose, that for which God had given him his strength. That the Shield-Brethren had failed long ago to harness it was a sign of their foolishness, of their weakness.

He broke them, these strange-faced killers from a far-off land, who fancied themselves conquerors and subjugators. He shattered them, rode them down, and trampled them into a bloody paste in the dirt where they fell. It was only when the Mongols were fleeing the field that he pulled himself free of the blood fury and took stock of the circumstances he and his Livonian brothers had altered.

The gate had been open when his host had arrived, and the Mongols had been engaged with a small force guarding it. Men wearing Western armor.

He pulled his horse away from the fighting and returned to the gate. Pushing up his visor, he examined the puny force that had been holding the gate. They wore the Red Rose.

One of the Shield-Brethren detached himself from the group and Kristaps marked his face. Kristaps recognized him from the stands at the arena. He had been the one holding the young one back. The other Shield-Brethren stared at him with faces clotted with anger and suspicion, like dogs staring at a master from whom they received only kicks and curses.

He chuckled as he shook his blade, freeing it of cloying blood. He was going to enjoy what came next.

Rutger became acutely aware that he was holding Andreas’s sword, and part of his mind clamored for him to raise it against the man who had killed Andreas. He held his ground, though, knowing such an assault was exactly what the mounted Livonian wanted.

Andreas’s killer sat astride his horse with the demeanor of a king-untouchable and in absolute control of his surroundings-a tiny smile on his face. His blue eyes were so cold their gaze seemed to knife right through Rutger’s maille, more readily than any Mongol sword. He wore maille with solid steel upon his shoulders, his surcoat soaked with Mongol blood. He carried a shield upon his left arm; his single-handed sword, having been cleared of blood, was back in its scabbard, and strapped to his saddle was the great two-handed sword he had used to kill Andreas. He sat utterly still, like a cat watching his terrified prey.

He won’t give me the satisfaction, Rutger realized. The Livonian’s rage was clear in his bright blue eyes, but there was also an unmistakable intelligence. Whatever hatred he bore for the Shield-Brethren, he kept it in tight control. Now is not the right time. Rutger lowered his sword and carefully walked toward the waiting knight.

When they were close enough that shouting was not needed, the blue-eyed knight spoke. “Your men owe me their lives,” he said in an offhand way.

“We owe you nothing,” Rutger spat.

The Livonian looked around the blood-spattered field. “My men broke their advance. They would have overwhelmed you otherwise.”

“We did not call for your support,” Rutger said.

“We came, nonetheless,” the Livonian smiled.

“This does not assuage you of the blood debt between us,” Rutger said.

The blue-eyed knight laughed. His posture was relaxed, unperturbed, as if this were a casual training-yard discussion taking place rather than words exchanged hastily in the midst of a battlefield. “Of course not, old man. I would be disappointed otherwise.” He gestured, drawing Rutger’s attention to his scattered riders. “You will not claim it today, Virgin-defender. There is much still not done here.”

“Where is your master?” Rutger demanded.

The knight leaned forward. “I would ask the same of you. Where has Feronantus gone? Why do I not see that old war hound here today?”

In a flash, Rutger finally recognized the Livonian knight. It had been many years since he had seen the other man, and he had been so much younger. “You,” he gasped. “I know you.”

The Livonian laughed again. “Do you remember me now?” He pulled his helm down, hiding his face from Rutger’s accusatory gaze. He drew his sword, causing Rutger to take a step back in alarm.

“I kill only Mongols today, old man. My men will follow my lead. Pray to God that your fellow Brethren follow yours.”

“Kristaps,” Rutger spat. “This isn’t finished.”

“No,” Kristaps replied. “It is far from over.” He spurred his horse away from Rutger, returning to the assembling host of his bloodied men.

Rutger shuddered, his hands aching fiercely. He shouted over his shoulder, summoning the surviving Shield-Brethren. As much as he yearned for it to be otherwise, he knew Kristaps was right.

Old feuds would have to wait. There was other killing to be done first.