The Mongoliad: Book Three

EPILOGUE

With Cnan’s help, Raphael dressed the knife wound on Haakon’s hip. Raphael moved stiffly, and Haakon eventually saw why. A tiny stub of a broken arrow protruded from Raphael’s back. When Raphael finished with Haakon, Cnan said something about the arrow.

“It’s fine,” Raphael said.

“It doesn’t look fine,” she argued.

“It’ll keep,” Raphael said, rolling up his medical kit. “I have to take my maille off to get to the rest of it, and there isn’t time.” He stood, trying to hide how stiff he was, and his gaze wandered down the narrow valley. “Where is Feronantus?” he asked.

Haakon, Cnan, and the Chinese woman all looked as well. All they could see was a single horse, cropping the tiny tufts of hardy grass, and a pair of bodies, still tangled together, but unmoving. Of the leader of the Shield-Brethren company there was no sign.

“God damn him,” Raphael swore. “He left us.”

“What?” Cnan said.

“He had a plan, remember?” Raphael said savagely. “It just didn’t include the rest of us.” He stalked back to his horse. “Haakon,” he called. “That horse over there. It’s yours.”

Haakon looked down at the still body of the Khagan. “What about him?” he said. “We can’t just leave him.”

“We can and will,” Raphael said as he swung painfully up into his saddle. He nodded toward the dead body of the Khagan’s horse. “It is a hunting accident. Nothing more. As long as we are not here when the Mongols come.” He snapped his reins and his horse trotted away.

Cnan and the other woman got back on their horse as well, and the Binder motioned for Haakon to follow them. He hesitated, looking back and forth between the dead body of the Khagan and his friends.

Haakon limped over to the body and pulled the Khagan’s knife free. No one was going to think hunting accident with the knife sticking out of his neck, he rationalized. He wiped the blade clean on his own ragged trousers and retrieved the sheath from Ogedei’s belt. He felt like he should cover the body or something, but there was no cloth available and so he settled for making sure the Khagan’s right eye was closed. The left had swollen shut.

He picked up his sword, even though the Khagan’s looked to be a finer blade. He was already keeping the knife. Taking the sword too was tantamount to robbing from the dead.

The knife, he told himself, was a spoil of war. A testament to what had been done.

Painfully, he jogged down the valley until he reached the bodies of Krasniy and the Torguud captain. There was a lot of blood on both men, and it was hard to tell who had died first, but neither had given up. He stopped a moment to offer a prayer to the Virgin for the red-haired giant who had been his only friend in this strange land.

He turned, whistling lightly at the Torguud captain’s pony. It pricked up its ears and regarded him warily. He limped toward it slowly, talking calmly to it. Assuring it he was friendly.

And then he stopped, casting around for something that should have been lying on the ground nearby. He raised his arm and called out to Raphael and Cnan, who circled back.

“It’s missing,” he said when they rode up.

“What is?” Raphael asked.

“The lance that the Torguud captain was carrying,” He said.

Cnan looked around too and nodded. “Haakon’s right. The Khagan’s bodyguard was carrying a banner. There were streamers attached to it, made from hair. Horsehair, I think.”

Lian spoke up from behind Cnan. “Spirit Banner,” she said in the Mongol tongue.

“What did she say?” Raphael demanded.

“She said it was a Spirit Banner,” Haakon translated.

“The symbol of the Mongol Empire,” Cnan supplied. “It belonged to Genghis Khan, Ogedei’s father.”

“Is he the one who first built the empire?” Raphael asked.

“Aye, he was. He united the clans.”

“Of course he did,” Raphael said with a heavy sigh. He shook his head. “Feronantus has it.”

“Why?” Cnan asked.

“You were there,” Raphael said. “At the Kinyen when Istvan spouted his nonsense about the All-Father.”

“All-Father?” Haakon asked. “The Norse All-Father? What are you talking about?”

“Yggdrasil,” Raphael said. “Ragnarok.” His eyes were bright, filled with tears. “Surely you know the stories, Haakon.”

They did not want to talk to him, but Kristaps was persistent. His mood and the alacrity with which his hand fell to the hilt of his sword helped, and finally he found a young Hospitaller who was willing to tell him what had happened at the bridge. He did not believe the story at first, but in the absence of any other evidence, it became the story he would tell.

The Livonians left Hunern at dawn, Kristaps at their head. They had lost half of their knights in the final battle with the Mongols-their losses were commensurate with the losses suffered by the other orders-and the company that rode south, following the river, was somber. They had survived, but the cost of their survival had been great.

It was nothing compared to Schaulen, he wanted to tell them. What had been accomplished at Hunern was a victory that the West would celebrate for generations. The battles at Legnica and Mohi had been disastrous blows to the West, and the blight of those tragedies would never truly be wiped away from the history of Christendom, but the fight at Hunern was a victory against all odds. It was a rallying cry for the rest of Christendom. The Mongol host was still on the verge of the West, and their numbers were undiminished by the loss of men at Hunern, but the horde had been bloodied.

The victory at Hunern was a symbol of hope. Evil could be vanquished by Good.

But for Kristaps, when he and his men discovered Dietrich’s horse calmly grazing along the river bank, some miles downstream from the shantytown, he knew Hunern was nothing more than a betrayal.

At Schaulen, they had been destroyed by Volquin’s hubris. He would never say as much to his men, but Kristaps knew the fault lay with the previous Heermeister. Volquin had led the men to the river; he had failed to recognize the danger of the terrain. He had been overconfident and had thought the pagans were too frightened of the Livonian Sword Brothers to band together effectively. He had underestimated what fear could make men do.

Dietrich had made that same mistake, but it was the other orders who had betrayed him.

“We ride for Rome,” he told his men after Dietrich’s horse had been retrieved.

I will destroy all of them, he vowed.

The warm sun slanted brightly through the opened face of the tent; the other three walls were drawn down, both to block the wind and to dampen the constant noise of the tent city being dismantled around them. Already half of the troops were on their way back to Germany. Frederick had ordered his pavilion to be the last one struck. He was engaged in a favorite pastime: playing chess.

It would be more fun, of course, if he actually had an opponent, but Cardinal Fieschi hadn’t responded yet to his latest request for a visit. Sadly enough, he doubted the Cardinal would be responding to any request from the Holy Roman Empire in the near future.

Frederick fingered a ginger curl near his temple, squinting at the board. He had never played against himself before, and the game had taken on an interesting perspective when he knew all the moves he was going to make.

A shadow crossed the board and he looked up, hoping that the Cardinal had decided to visit after all. A broad smile creased his face when he saw who it was instead. “Good afternoon, Lena,” he said. “You have arrived in the nick of time. I have not been able to figure out how to lure myself into exposing my queen.”

The Binder approached the table and sat down on the camp stool opposite him. “Good afternoon, Your Majesty,” she responded. She put her hand over the queen on her side-the black one-and the links of a silver chain spilled out of her palm, draping around the shoulders of the chess piece.

Frederick stared at the silver chain. Its links had been separated in one spot. “You delivered your message,” he said somewhat curtly.

“I did,” she said.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t.”

She put her head to one side, gazing with a look normally reserved for recalcitrant children. Frederick sighed. “I don’t understand why you had to actually help the Cardinal. It’s only going to give him an incentive to act outrageously, which is only going to make him more dangerous. Especially if he decides to follow through with his threat of becoming Pope.”

“He will,” Lena said. She moved a black rook, taking one of the white pawns. “Besides, would you have trusted me, as a Binder, if I failed to deliver that message?”

Frederick grunted in reply, staring at the board. He fingered a knight, debating whether he should take the rook that Lena had just exposed. It was a trap, he suspected, and he tried to extrapolate the possible responses.

“You should have more faith,” Lena said with a smile.

Frederick snorted. “That is easy for you to say.” He decided against moving his knight and shoved a pawn forward instead. It wasn’t threatening her rook directly, but in another move, it could.

“You sent the girl after the priest,” Lena pointed out.

“I did, though it ran counter to every fiber of my being.”

“Such is the nature of faith,” Lena countered.

“It isn’t something I wish to make a habit of,” he said.

“I shall try not to ask Your Majesty to make such sacrifices too often,” she demurred, moving a pawn to protect her rook.

“She’ll be hunted,” Frederick said, sounding regretful. He moved one of his bishops. “By everyone, from champions to madmen, saints to villains. And once your kin-sisters find out she went rogue, they won’t shelter her. She’s going to be entirely on her own.”

Lena sobered. “I am aware of that, and I regret it. There was no other way.”

“Your kin-sisters won’t be pleased if they learn of your hand in this, either.”

Lena stiffened very slightly, but recovered quickly enough. She reached for the pawn in front of her queen, advancing it toward Frederick’s side of the board. “He freed me,” she said. “When I gave him the ring.”

“What do you mean?” Frederick asked.

“In return for the ring, I asked him to set me free. Unencumbered by all.”

Frederick shook his head. “You are out of your fucking mind, woman,” he said.

She got up from her stool and came around to his side of the table, kneeling beside him so that her head was slightly lower than his. “I had to if I am going to help you.” She dipped her head slightly. “You won’t tell my sisters, will you?”

Frederick looked at her and grinned. “Not I. My lips are sealed.”

Lena smiled. “I know,” she said, and leaned forward to kiss him.

At night, when the sky was filled with stars, she would be tempted to unwrap the bundle in her satchel. But, more often than not, she resisted the urge.

Instead, she would wrap her thin blankets more tightly around her narrow shoulders and try to make herself more comfortable on the hard ground. It had taken some time for her to get used to sleeping out in the open, but she was making the adjustment. It was a matter of practice.

Like so many things she had been forced to learn since she had fled Rome.

Ocyrhoe didn’t know where she was going. That much had been true when she had said good-bye to Ferenc. She had never been outside the walls of the city that had raised her. The world was a vast blankness to her, an empty map that had only one landmark, and she was moving farther and farther away from that spot on the map.

When the nights were especially cold and when the sky was too vast and bright with stars, she would relent and retrieve the cup from her satchel. She would hug it against her chest, the gold slowly warming against her body. The idea of selling it or throwing it into a crevice or a river never crossed her mind.

If she spit in it, it would catch the light of the stars. She would wrap her blankets over her head, blocking out all the light except for the glow coming from the cup.

She tried very hard not to rely on the cup’s light or warmth to feel safe, but the nights when she feel asleep hugging the Grail were the nights she was without fear or anxiety. Those were the nights when she knew what she had to do.

From a vantage point near the top of a narrow ridge, Gansukh watched the Skjaldbr??ur ride west. There were seven of them, including the young Northerner. There were three women in the group, one of whom was Lian.

He didn’t know why she was with them, though a number of ugly reasons had flitted through his head more than once since they had picked up the Skjaldbr??ur trail.

The black-haired man who had been one of the two archers on the day the Khagan died was not among the seven, and Gansukh continued to puzzle over that man’s absence-as well as the absence of the other one, the grizzled veteran who led them. His body had not been accounted for either.

They had left two behind: the tall archer whom he and Alchiq had brought down, and another one-the wielder of the immense sword. Gansukh couldn’t believe such a blade could actually be swung, but the presence of several legless ponies near the man’s body had suggested otherwise.

The Skjaldbr??ur made little effort to hide themselves as they rode, and Gansukh wondered if it was arrogance that allowed them to think themselves invisible and invincible to any roving group of Mongol tribesmen or simply that they did not know where they were going. West was easy enough; they followed the track of the sun across the sky, reorienting themselves in the afternoon.

They were going home. They had accomplished what they came to do.

Having satisfied his curiosity as to the location and condition of the Skjaldbr??ur party, he climbed over the ridge and returned to his horse. He had shot several rabbits, and his stomach grumbled noisily at the thought of fresh meat for dinner. He rode north, losing himself in the endless grasslands of the steppe, until he reached the narrow stream. He followed it awhile, fording it at a place where it bent back on itself.

The camp was on the lee of a small rise, sheltered from the wind. His horse nickered as he approached, and he heard an answering call from the other horse.

Alchiq looked up from where he sat beside the fire, his leather jerkin in his lap, needle and thread in his hand.

Gansukh tossed the rabbits on the ground. “Still heading west,” he reported as he slid off his horse and went about taking off the saddle.

Alchiq nodded as he tied his thread, biting it off, and packed up his sewing kit. “Is she still with them?”

Gansukh began brushing his horse down. “She is.”

“Still think she didn’t betray us?”

And when Gansukh didn’t reply, Alchiq chuckled and began dressing the rabbits. “They’ll lead us to it,” he said. “And when we find the Spirit Banner, you can do whatever you like.”