The Mongoliad: Book One

water. She swam to the edge of the pool, and in a smooth motion that suggested she was more fish than woman, she levered herself to the platform. He caught a quick glimpse of her breasts, outlined quite distinctly against her wet robe, and then she swiveled around, curling her legs around her like a flower closing for the night. Her back to him, she picked up the heavy robe that lay on the platform and slipped it over her wet clothing.

She retrieved her discarded scroll. “We will begin our lessons tomorrow,” she said with a final appraising glance over her shoulder.

It was only after she left that Gansukh realized she had taken the robe the servants had meant for him.

CHAPTER 5: THE KINYEN

Despite Raphael’s ministrations, two more days passed before Illarion’s fever broke and the Ruthenian recovered strength enough to sit up and speak coherently.

Cnan did not begrudge him the time, since she herself spent most of it sleeping and eating. Afternoons she sat in the middle of the clearing, well beyond the graveyard wall, out in the summer sun, mending her travel clothes and watching the Shield-Brethren train. More arrived every day from all over Christendom. As her body regained strength, her mood also improved—and she began to take a more sanguine view of their prowess as fighters.

They fought in pairs over and over, pausing in the middle of the fracas to pick apart each move into smaller elements that they then practiced again and again. She could not fit their halting exercises into any sensible program. How would they ever put the fragments of action together again—learn to face the chaos of a true battle, where nobody pauses, nobody has a second chance? It all seemed like a silly game.

But when they actually sparred, swinging and moving for long minutes at a stretch, strength against strength, they proved capable of feats that astonished Cnan. And studying their determination and their skill, she saw more clearly the weakness in her own training. She had been taught to travel under all manner of cloaks, never to reveal her true self, to bear messages while hiding in plain sight of enemies and friends alike. And always to cross back and forth over the wide, endless, ravaged land, never staying long in one place—like a bird doomed never to nest, never to understand the wisdom of sitting still.

Watching these men, these warriors, assemble into a team, under the constant tutelage of Taran and the watchful eye of Feronantus, made her feel a new kind of loneliness and, with it, a sort of bereavement.

After noon of the second day, Feronantus put out word that, tomorrow, the junior Brethren would stand sentry around their encampment while Kinyen—the Order’s communal mess—was held at the great table of the chapter house. Cnan knew that Kinyen was an ancient tradition, one they took most seriously. The camp grew busy with preparations: A wild sow was spitted and splayed over a bed of banked coals to slow cook. The beams were stripped from the monastery and hewn and pegged into makeshift benches so that there would be room for all of the warrior monks—a full two dozen now, even when ten or so initiates were left outside to stand guard—to sit around the edges of the hall.

The Shield-Brethren stayed up late that night drinking and singing and telling long stories of their exploits and adventures in various parts of the West. Cnan mostly stayed outside, in her tent—ignored, she hoped; unwanted, she suspected.

It was during a particularly long tale told by Raphael, about sewing up Crusaders and Moors alike, that she heard a solitary man emerge from the chapter house. An unevenness in his gait told Cnan that he was reeling slightly. The wind came from behind him and she smelled several horns of mead on his shuddering, belching exhale.

“Why alone?” he called. It was Haakon.

“Why so loud?” she countered, in as low a voice as she thought might be heard. The knights, wise though they might be in hand-to-hand, were less than cautious about alerting gleaners to their presence. Perhaps they felt they lived under the charms of their Christian God, or their warrior gods—whichever commanded the daylight of Feronantus’s faith. Or perhaps they just believed they now had sufficient numbers to kill anyone short of a Mongol army.

She heard him stumbling over the leaves and the beaten dirt of the fighting field. His moon shadow loomed across the canvas of her tent, leaning one way, then another.

“It isn’t natural,” he said. “A woman…a man…about to die. You think I’m going to die, don’t you?”

Indeed, Haakon seemed the one having the greatest difficulty duplicating Taran’s exacting moves. He hesitated, as if thinking everything through twice—and then he swung, or parried, taking sharp, bruising blows as a result. Taran afforded him neither pity nor time to recover.

“You have the best trainer I’ve seen,” Cnan said, surprising herself by this admission. “You’ll live if you listen and learn.”

“Easy for you to say. You aren’t fighting.” Haakon dropped to a cross-legged squat beside her tent. He seemed content to talk through the canvas, like a Christian giving his confession through a screen. “I’m brave. I’m good in battle. Steadfast. The greatsword—my weapon. I know it like a friend. Yet whatever I do…whatever I do…” He stopped; slapped a few bugs. “Tell me about yourself.”

“I’d rather sleep,” she said, truthfully enough.

“I could keep you company. Warm you.”

“The nights are warm enough,” Cnan said.

She considered it a victory of sorts that she did not actually laugh. She was not above lying with a man now and then, when it pleased her to do so, but she hadn’t come here to be wooed—and certainly not by one who was supposed to be a celibate monk!

Suddenly she felt a pang of both sympathy and suspicion. Perhaps the youth wasn’t as stupid as she thought. Haakon must have caught her out, seen something in her face that she had been trying to hide from herself and the others…

“Go away,” she said.

If she were going to break any man’s celibacy, it would be Percival’s, but Percival did not look on her that way.

Haakon got up, then bent to brush a few fallen leaves and twigs from her tent—as if conveying some clumsy affection to her shell, her hiding place. “All right,” he said. “No harm. A marvelous night. I feel ready…for…for anything. Just thought…”

He left his words hanging and wove his way back to the chapter house, leaving Cnan sadder and lonelier than ever.

What was it a man and a woman were supposed to do, when they weren’t in constant flight, running on the leading edge of the voracious Mongolian army? Haakon’s clumsy words were as close to a kind of courtship as she had ever experienced—and she had bluntly sent him on his way, no thanks, no sympathy.

Haakon was the first that night, but not the last, to approach her refuge and try to make loose conversation. All celibate, all clumsy, all drunk—and not one was Percival. Nor Raphael, of course, who seemed steeped in other, more urbane techniques; the Syrian did not bother her either.

She stayed out of the embrace of any and all drunken monks that night and woke late the following morning, arrayed herself in tunic and doeskin, and when summoned, walked to the chapter house to attend the Kinyen.

The knights, after an hour or two of sleep, had recovered enough from their drunken feats of bravado to open another barrel and resume.

In the gloom of the old monastery’s refectory, lit by a dusty shaft of daylight through the broken roof and a scatter of short candles, she saw Feronantus sitting at the head of a large table, with Illarion on his right. The shaft of light fell between the two, highlighting their shoulders and hands and brimming cups. The rest of the knights sat in degrees of candlelight and shadow, murmuring to each other and passing bread and slopping flagons. They drank