The Mongoliad: Book One

shivered, suddenly cold.

The dead Kereyid, though he didn’t have much of a face left, seemed to be laughing at him. Ogedei tried to steady himself on his horse. So warm, he thought, and the tears started again. He didn’t try to hide them this time. He let them run. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, though there was no one there to hear him.

The Kereyid kept laughing. Ogedei could hear his voice—a roaring, rippling sound in his head, like a flash flood in the spring as it filled the dry riverbed. It wasn’t just the Kereyid; it was the dead on the battlefield. All of the spirits were laughing at him now.

Dark spots swam in his vision. He dug his fingers into the short hair of the horse and tried to remember what it was like to ride.

So much blood, he thought as he toppled over.

He was having trouble breathing. His mouth was clogged with sticky mud, and bristly hairs tickled at his nose. Sit up. His body seemed so far away. Ogedei tried to move his arms and felt nothing. I’ll try again soon, he thought. Maybe when the sun comes out. Until then he would lie still and listen to the faint rhythm of his heartbeat.

A muffled noise interrupted his reverie, and he realized it was coming from his throat. The sun had come out, and its light was burning a hole in his neck. The pain burned straight through to his throat, and his scream was escaping through the ragged hole.

Above him, there was nothing but blue sky. No dust, no clouds, only the endless expanse of the sunlit heavens. But for the intense pain in his neck, he would have thought he had gone into the next world. It shouldn’t hurt, he thought, not anymore.

It did, though, and the pain kept digging deeper into his belly. He kept trying to spit it out, but nothing came out of his mouth. Everything seemed to be coming out of his neck in crimson gouts.

A shadow passed between him and the sky, a dust-covered cloud. Its surface arranged itself as he focused on it: redrimmed eyes, a mustache flecked with dirt and blood, lips cracked and dry. The lips were moving far above him, but he could still only hear the sound of his own scream leaking through the hole in his neck. The face dipped down and the smell of sweat and oil from the man’s hair filled Ogedei’s nostrils. Underneath the stink of battle, he recognized the man’s scent. When the face raised itself up again and spat out a mouthful of black blood, a name came to Ogedei.

Boroghul. One of the orphans adopted by his grandmother. The tall one with the face like red stone. Family, yet not-family. Not-blood, and yet—Ogedei watched Boroghul spit out another mouthful of his blood—a blood-brother.

The sky grew dark, and Ogedei found the strength to move his hands. He grabbed on to the cloth and leather of Boroghul’s armor and held on. Stars came out, tiny eyes winking at him like animals hidden in the tall steppe grasses, and eventually he could hear the wind again. Stay with me, Ogedei, it said. Or maybe it was Boroghul, whispering in his ear.

It didn’t matter. He had been found.

CHAPTER 3: THE GHOST OF RUS

It was good that she did not have time to make herself comfortable in the chapter house, or else going back out into the Great Khan’s empire would have been unendurable.

She rode now, since it was impossible to move stealthily in such a large group. Finn, when he spoke at all, favored a guttural lowland tongue she could barely understand and had poor Latin. Still, he seemed to know the ground better than she, or perhaps he just sensed things more acutely. So she and Finn scouted ahead and signaled Haakon and Raphael when it was safe to move forward, and in that manner, they made good time until twilight and for half of the following day. After that, the forest grew so dense that the horses became more trouble than they were worth. They left them in the care of a local woodcutter whom they found by following the sound of his ax.

The woodcutter claimed to know nothing of Mongols, and cared little more.

Raphael said it was a toss of the coin as to whether the horses would still be there when they got back, but this was better than simply letting them go. They camped in a ravine that night, risking a fire, as the smoke and firelight would be lost in the ever-present fog.

Before midday on the next day, they came in view of the village of Czeszow, and Cnan was then able to use it as a guide star by which to find the hovel where Illarion had been surviving for the last fortnight. Raphael and Haakon caught up with them, and Finn showed with a smile and a gesture that he thought her tracking skills were impressive.

The hovel lay on the edge of a leveled estate. Houses and huts had been burned, livestock slaughtered and butchered where they lay, fields torched. Bones and half-rotted corpses lay in heaps. None of the corpses had two ears.

“Local nobility,” Finn opined, pinching his nose. “Dead, not so noble.”

Haakon had clearly never seen such devastation. His throat bobbed, and his face turned sickly green. His eyes wandered as if he sought a place to throw up. Cnan wondered that the others put up with him at all—he was so poor in life experience.

“Get used to it. Such is the way of Mongols,” she said.

“Of men in general,” Raphael said. “In Jerusalem they—”

“These are worse,” Cnan said.

A sudden light breeze from the east carried an especially penetrating stench, one so strong that even Raphael gagged and drew up his scarf. He offered perfume to the others for their cloths, but Cnan, who wore none, noted that none other took it—not even Haakon, whose snot rag was a filthy wonder.

“The town?” Finn said softly, turning west, as if that might help.

Cnan nodded.

They pushed through the half-hanging door into the hovel. In the gloom, a man coughed and a knife blade tossed a dismal gleam.

“Who is it?” came a harsh, low voice.

“Friends, brought here by your messenger,” Finn said.

“The other girl,” the man husked. His skin was bright and slick with sweat. He tried to get up, but the effort was poor, and his legs failed him. Raphael went to his side…carefully. He was feverish and might strike at phantoms.

“We’re relieved you’re among the living,” Raphael said. “Feronantus cherishes you and sends greetings.”

“Feronantus,” the man said through another racking cough. “Master and monster, where was he, they bound her hands, they bound her feet, she cried and died…a hand’s breadth from my face. This far, no farther.” He twisted his hand, dark with old blood. Raphael gripped the hand and lowered it. Then he gently took hold of Illarion’s jaw and turned his head.

“Let me see that ear,” he murmured

“Gone,” Illarion said, his tongue heavy. He flinched in pain with each movement of his jaw, but the words forced themselves out. “I’m sure the bastard took it with him. Let’s all go to hell and find it, soak it in wine, sew it back on. Illarion of the purple ear. I’ll trade that Mongol lackey my ear for his guts. They smear my leggings even now.”

Raphael withdrew ointment and simples from his pouch. He looked up as a shadow darkened the single room.