The Mongoliad: Book Two

15

Ferenc burrowed into the hay, pulling the old blanket over his body. First the sun and then the moon had faded, and the temperature in the squalid barn was cool. He had fallen into a stupor at once, indifferent to the heat and drifting dust; ironically, it was the quiet and the comfort of early morning that finally woke him.

When he’d first come to consciousness, he’d been terrified, disoriented; then in a dizzying flash, he remembered where he was and how he’d gotten here. Or he almost remembered it. Had he abandoned Father Rodrigo? After that horrible, endless journey, after the holy man’s feverish dreams and gibberish, had he stood by him through all of it, just to desert him in the end?

He had not deserted the priest. He could not have. He, Ferenc of Buda, son of Mareska, would not do such a thing. Someone on his father’s side might, perhaps, but even then, it took many years of constant moral degradation before one was capable of treachery. They were so strict, his people, so diligent in teaching their youth how things must be; it took years to outgrow the fear of disobedience. Only men of his grandfather’s age had achieved such indifference to conformity and duty that they could ever abandon someone they were honor bound to assist.

He hadn’t deserted Father Rodrigo, and having reminded himself of this fact, he allowed himself to relax. He had only listened to that bizarre girl. During that moment of utter chaos in the crowded, roiling marketplace, she had appeared on the back of his horse-awkwardly attaching herself to him like a leech. She had never ridden a horse before-that much was clear by the way she clung to him. And she had shouted in his ear, directing him after the running soldier.

His hands crept to the satchel still attached to his belt, exploring the rough outlines of objects within until he found the ring. After the girl had wrested it from the clamped fingers of the downed soldier, she’d given it to him.

Who was she? Did she understand the meaning of the ring? It had caused quite an uproar, and Ferenc still did not know why.

He lay listening to the horses in the stalls below: the steady crunch of the hay between strong teeth, the noisy exhalations, the tails whisking against the warped wood of the stalls, the occasional nickering to one another. The sounds made him feel safe; they were the closest things he had to memories of home.

Ferenc rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. Sunlight bled through a narrow window set high in the wall of the loft. He slid his hand through the dry hay until the tips of his fingers were lit by golden light. Despite the long sleep, he was worn out-the aches in his back and legs reminding him just how tired he was-and it was fine to lie here for a little while. Just a little while.

Especially since he had no idea what to do next. Just thinking about it was almost more exhausting than the actual chase had been yesterday.

His eyelids fluttered, and his breathing eased as he sank deeper into the hay. In a few hours, the light would fall directly on his face from the hatch used to let down hay. He’d wake then. He was sure of it. A few more hours, he thought drowsily. His hand jerked up, waving at an imaginary bug, and then his arm relaxed again, flopping against the hay. His head slid to the side, his breathing slow and regular.

Then he heard a sound that was not the horses, and he sat up abruptly, hand reaching for his knife. Someone was in the hayloft.

Right beside him.

“Hey!” he shouted and tried to get to his feet, the knife held out defensively before him. How could he, a hunter, allow someone to get that close to him?

“Shshshsh!” The whisper was distinctly feminine in tone. He huffed in relief and lowered the knife a little. It was the girl. In the morning light, he recognized her pale skin and narrow, bony shoulders.

“Ferenc,” she said, pointing to him, as if it were a code word.

“Ocyrhoe,” he said, almost apologetically, but still wary, nodding toward her and lowering the knife. But he did not sheathe it.

They had only gotten as far as each other’s name in being able to communicate with each other. When she began to jabber, gesticulating with quick, exaggerated movements, he had to shake his head to remind her that he had no idea what she was talking about.

“Father Rodrigo?” he interrupted, trying to slow down the torrent of words coming out of her mouth. “Rodrigo?”

She cocked her head like a dog hearing a strange sound, and frowned.

He repeated the priest’s name once more and then pointed to himself. “Ferenc.” Then to her, “Ocyrhoe.” Then, feeling apologetic for the caricature, he imitated Rodrigo bent over his horse, eyes rolling. “Father Rodrigo,” he said definitively.

“Ah,” said the girl. She crossed herself several times and hummed something like a Gregorian-style chant, her hands in a praying position. “Father Rodrigo?”

“Father Rodrigo,” Ferenc confirmed. Her emphasis was different than his, but clear enough. “Where? Where is he?”

She shook her head and shrugged. Ferenc grunted with frustration. Did that shrug mean I don’t know where he is? Or I don’t understand what you’re asking me? He couldn’t tell, and when she asked him a question, he could only shake his head and shrug in return.

A chill ran up his spine as he considered their inability to communicate. This was not an inconvenience; it was a catastrophe. He knew his own language, and what piecemeal Latin he had gleaned from Father Rodrigo during their long journey, but that was it. Nothing could have prepared him for the trek he’d just completed; never in his life, before the battle at Mohi, could he have imagined himself beyond the boundaries of his native tongue.

She sensed his anxiety, and rather than joining him in it, she very deliberately calmed herself with a gentle, long breath. She put a hand on his arm and repeated the breath, gesturing for him to do the same. He made a face but breathed with her. And he did feel calmer, although perhaps that was just her hand on his arm, a human touch.

Ocyrhoe released him and grabbed a few strands of hay. She twisted them, carefully tying the dry straw into a loose knot. “Father Rodrigo,” she said, presenting the twisted strand to him. Glancing around the loft, she spotted a short-handled pitchfork leaning against the wall and scooted across the loft to grab it. Indicating that he should put down the Rodrigo straw man, she put the pitchfork between Ferenc and the knotted strand, and then gazed at him solemnly.

It made no sense to him: if this was meant to graphically display the problem, why didn’t Father Rodrigo just slip through the openings of whatever was keeping him, like stray straw between the tines of a pitchfork? She saw the expression on his face, rolled her eyes, and grabbed the piece of straw, which broke under her angry touch.

She moved the pitchfork aside and squatted opposite Ferenc. “Father Rodrigo,” she tried again, now pointing to herself, and this time did a very good imitation of a person with hands bound, trying to break free. She pretended she was being dragged away across the loft, her leather sandals dragging a path through the strewn hay. Ferenc gasped, and when Ocyrhoe patted his arm, he let her drag him over to the loft window. She pointed to the right, and when Ferenc looked, he was shocked to realize they were still in the middle of the city, surrounded by far more urbanity than he was used to. There was little to be seen but a spreading sea of other rooftops, russet and brown and gray in the wan morning light.

“What do we do?” he demanded in frustration. If she knew he had been captured-which was obvious to him now, in retrospect-did she know where he had been taken? And if she did, then how was she going to communicate that location to him? “Can you take me there?” he asked.

She gave him an impatient frown, her meaning clear: Why do you talk to me with words you know I can’t understand? She pointed to herself and to him, clasped her hands together, and said their names rapidly: “FerencOcyrhoe.” Us.

Which was the best news he had heard yet. She wasn’t planning on abandoning him, which, of course, meant his course of action was clear as well. He nodded and echoed her compound word. FerencOcyrhoe. Together. A tiny laugh slipped out of him, spurred by an image in his mind. A cool winter’s night a dozen years from now, him telling the story of his incredible adventures around the fire pit to his awestruck children and neighbors.

She pointed out the window again, straight in the direction she’d said Father Rodrigo was. Then she indicated both of them-FerencOcyrhoe-and then pointed again, looking expectantly at him the entire time.

He blinked, his head snapping backward on his neck like a turtle retreating into its shell. “What?” he said. “Are you crazy? How can we possibly get him? What kind of place is he in? Even if we find him, where will we take him? We can’t stay in this loft. We can’t-I can’t-stay in this city-”

He was cut off by a loud, piercing whistle, courtesy of Ocyrhoe’s tongue and teeth. A moment of unnatural thunder shook the building as the horses collectively spooked at the sound and thrashed against their ropes. She waited for them to settle, and then began talking again. He held up his hands to slow her down, but she ignored him, and after a few seconds, he realized it wasn’t all gibberish. Some of it sounded like Latin; he could understand certain words but had no context for them-bona, he recognized, and malus as well, and ecclesiam and sacerdos and Summus Pontifex.

The Bishop of Rome. Yes, Father Rodrigo’s message. The one he hoped to deliver to the Pope.

He watched her face as she spoke. She was a scrappy little thing, younger than he, but he could not guess by how much. She was too bony and petite to have noticeable breasts, even if she was mature. Her hair was a color common enough in these parts, but her skin was at least as pale as a Northerner. In the hazy morning light, she looked like a tunder, a fairy of his homeland. Not a szepasszony, of course-a fair woman, the most beautiful of supernatural beings-but even the woodland fairies, although prone to mischief, treated you right if you stuck with them.

And this one had certainly already proven her good intentions-as well as, arguably, magic powers. He was not frightened of fairies. If she was, indeed, a tunder, she would eventually reveal that she knew a language he understood-the proper language of fairies.

She stopped talking and looked at him with a far-too-patient sigh. He realized, sheepishly, that he had been staring at her with a stupidly vacant expression.

She glanced up toward the heavens and muttered something; it struck him as an apology to someone absent. Perhaps someone on high. Her own gods? Then she sighed once more and firmly pressed her small, bony right hand against his sternum. Her fingers were dirty and pale and her nails ragged-more ragged than his own, which was saying something.

He was distracted by her hair. He shook his head as she started to speak, and reached out for a gnarled knot of hair. He had thought it was simply dirty and matted, much like his after weeks of traveling, but that wasn’t the case. Her hair had been knotted very specifically, in a way that seemed familiar.

Gasping, he glanced around at the straw, looking vainly for the straw Rodrigo, until he remembered it had fallen apart. He bent and scooped up another long stick of straw and tried to remember the knot she had tied in the hay. It was familiar, of course, because he had seen his mother tie it. It was a basic hitch, used for horses and sacks-the sort of knot one tied unconsciously, when wanting to restrain something momentarily.

Ocyrhoe watched his clumsy fingers with a pitched expression, and as he finished, her eyes widened. She grabbed his hands, holding his wrists tight, and held the knotted straw between them. She squeezed his wrists, several times, her fingers moving in a complex pattern against his skin.

“Yes,” he cried when he realized he understood the rhythm of her pressure. It was tunder magic. “Yes,” he said. “Kin-knot.”

She smiled like sun breaking through a cloud, showing healthy ivory teeth. Just hearing his tone, she understood that he understood. She laughed and squeezed his wrists again.

I know you.