The Mongoliad: Book One

onslaught.”

“Did you truly believe it?” asked a voice.

Cnan and several others turned to find its source: Roger, the Norman who had come up from Sicily with Percival.

“When you were training in the square before your cathedral, did you believe that Onghwe Khan would honor his word?” His voice was skeptical. He was irritated by Illarion’s tone.

Illarion bristled at first, but then looked away, conceding the point. “Of course I asked myself that question every day,” he said. “But what choice did we have?”

“Exactly,” Roger said. “And do you keep in mind that, during those months of delay, it is not only the Mongols who are maneuvering their armies and preparing their supply lines.”

“Would that it were true!” Taran barked. “But Christendom has nothing like the Mongol’s unity of purpose. Frederick and the Pope are at war over the Italian peninsula. They don’t care what happens farther north.”

“It is still better to be attacked later than now,” Roger said.

“Not if the outcome is foreordained,” said Raphael. “It seems that nothing will stop these Khans except the waves of the western ocean lapping against their ponies’ hooves.”

And here the conversation shattered into at least half a dozen fragments as groups of three or four men fell to disputing one detail or another. But as far as Cnan could make out, all they were doing was finding new ways to agree on the utter hopelessness of the situation.

“How do they do it?” Feronantus demanded, silencing the table. He groped about with his eyes until his gaze found and fastened upon Cnan. “We know so little about them. Only you, Vaetha, have traveled into the eastern lands from which the Mongols issued. At first, there was only the one—the great one—Genghis. Now there are several. His son Ogedei in the center. Ogedei’s son Onghwe. His nephew Batu. Others, I suppose, whose names I do not know. How do they coordinate their movements? How can Ogedei control subordinates who are thousands of leagues away?”

Cnan was impressed by how much Feronantus had already learned. Other Binders may have brought him messages before her, but more likely he had bartered information with traders or captives sent to the Roman Emperor Frederick—perhaps the envoys of the Ismaelis, poor pagan bastards that they were. The Ismaelis, broken remnants of the assassins who had plagued Saladin, Caliphs, and Seljuks alike, had also hired Binders to guide them west.

“The answers to your questions could fill days,” she pointed out. Perhaps she did have information they needed, after all—information that might suit the purposes of the Bindings, as well as of the Skjaldbr??ur.

“Is there nothing else in the minds of these Khans,” Feronantus asked, “other than to go on conquering until, as Raphael put it, the ocean washes their ponies’ hooves?”

“In large part, they have a free hand, as must be obvious to you,” Cnan said, “but they obey commands from the center, and they compete against each other.”

“What sort of competition worthy of the name can exist between one Khan and another who is on the other side of the world? Their domains seem to be clearly marked out; one never sees two Khans trying to conquer the same place.”

“You misunderstand,” Cnan said. “When I speak of competition, I do not mean to say that they compete for the same spoils. For a man of such wealth and power, there is only one prize remaining that is worth attending to, and that is to become the next Khagan—the Khan of Khans.”

A silence fell around the table as this was considered. “The wisdom of this messenger boots us nothing of consequence,” someone complained. “What good does it do us to know that several Khans dream of succeeding Ogedei upon his death?”

“I would hear more,” Feronantus demurred. “How is this Khagan chosen? Does he select his own successor? Or is it determined by a law of succession? And if there is any such fixed procedure, do they respect it? Or ignore its dictates and fight amongst themselves?”

“The Khagan makes his successor known, and upon his death, the choice is ratified by the kuriltai.”

“And what is that? Some sort of high priest?”

Cnan shook her head. “They do not have priests like you are accustomed to, much less high ones. The kuriltai is a high council of Khans. They all come together in one place to decide some important issue—in this case, the identity of the next Khagan.”

“Does the kuriltai happen according to some regular schedule?”

“No. It happens when the Khagan wills it.”

Feronantus looked disappointed. “So we cannot predict when the next one might happen?”

“No.”

“I beg your pardon, but I’ve a question,” said a new voice. It was Yasper, the Dutchman whom Cnan had seen drinking with Raphael on the day of her arrival. Not a member of the Shield-Brethren, he was respected nonetheless as some sort of alchemist.

Feronantus nodded assent, and so Yasper went on. “You say that the kuriltai ratifies the successor to the Khag—this Khan of Khans.”

“Yes.”

“But you have also said that he is the only one who can summon a kuriltai.”

“Yes.”

“Do you see the contradiction?”

Cnan smiled in spite of herself. “There is another rule I neglected to mention,” she admitted, “which is that the death of the Khagan causes a kuriltai to be called immediately.”

Yasper nodded, satisfied by the answer. Which seemed to settle the matter for everyone, save Feronantus. He mulled it over and held up a hand to silence the next person who tried to speak.

“And a kuriltai means that all of the Khans must go without delay to the same place?”

“That is what a kuriltai is.”

“And can it be convened anywhere, or—”

“Unthinkable,” Cnan said. “They have a superstitious reverence for certain magic places in their homeland. Only there could a kuriltai be convened.”

“So you are telling me,” Feronantus said, now staring at her intently in a way that made her not altogether comfortable, “that if Ogedei, the Khan of Khans, were to die, then all of the other Khans—Onghwe, here in Legnica, and Batu, down in Hungary, and all of the others wherever they are—they would all have to drop what they were doing immediately and travel back to Mongolia?”

“That is correct,” said Cnan, uncertain why Feronantus seemed to be so fascinated by this hypothetical punctilio of Mongol tribal law. “If they wished to become the Khagan. And they all do.”

Feronantus seemed enormously relieved all of a sudden. A piercing glint came into his eyes, and he clasped his hands in front of his knees. He looked around the room at his smartest tacticians: Raphael, Finn, R?dwulf, Taran. “Well, our path is perfectly obvious, then!” he announced. “We will no longer become one, but two. We will split our group, and our efforts, and teach these Devil’s horsemen to respect the butt as well as the blade.”

The silence in the room, and the expressions of all who stared at him, made it clear that she was not the only one who failed to see his plan. He threw up his hands, exasperated by their inability to see what, to him, was so obvious.

“Some will fight in the circus. That will give us cover and diversion.”

Cnan gaped, but turned her gaze immediately to Haakon, who seemed oblivious. She felt ill again, as if looking at Raphael’s bloody pincers—or smelling the rot around Legnica.

Feronantus, she knew, had just sealed the young Viking’s doom—Haakon would die first, along with his younger and least experienced brethren.