The Mongoliad: Book One

to return. I can guide you deep into Rus.”

“What used to be Rus,” Cnan snarled. “Now it is the domain of the Great Khan. Four-fifths of which lies beyond your horizon. And how will you find your way across that?”

“That,” said Feronantus mildly, “is your job, Vaetha. Or whatever your name is.”

This silenced her long enough for them to get on with the planning of the expedition. Several names were mentioned of knights who, like Andreas, had not arrived yet but would be good to have along.

Feronantus cut off all such discussion with a pass of the hand. “No,” he said, “we leave tonight. The party will be chosen from around this table.”

Hands were lifted to lodge polite objections, but Feronantus was firm. “If we wait three days for Andreas, he’ll not get here for five, and then he’ll mention someone four days behind him who’ll be better yet. We will lose the Vor.”

Cnan had no idea what the Vor was, but the argument seemed decisive to everyone else. Some sort of gibberish from their oplomach, as they called their arts of fighting.

In the few days she had been a guest of the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae, she had learned everything she could about this Feronantus—save, apparently, for the most important thing, which was that he was not of sound mind.

She had learned he had been of a high rank within the Order, which meant that if he stayed alive and made no mistakes, he was likely to end up presiding over Petraathen itself one day. As a way of preparing him for that honor, they had sent him out to run Tyrshammar, the fortress/temple/monastery they had been maintaining in the North Sea for the last nine hundred years or so—an offshoot of the more ancient Petraathen and, by tradition, a place where future leaders of the Order were groomed.

Whether by accident or design, the Mongols had flanked Petraathen to the north and south. The southern branch, under Batu Khan, had advanced into Hungary and defeated most of Christendom’s armies at a place called Mohi. The northern branch, under Onghwe, had come here and defeated the rest of them. Among those who made a study of Khans, it was believed that Batu was the more important, and that the southern prong of the advance was therefore the real one, and that Onghwe’s efforts were more in the nature of a diversion. Accordingly, most of the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae who were actually based at Petraathen had gone south into Hungary, and those who had survived the battle along the Sajo River were there still. When Onghwe had sent out his challenge for the Circus of Swords, the responsibility had consequently fallen to Feronantus, who had come out from Tyrshammar with Taran and R?dwulf and a few others who had been on the island at the time.

“I will go into the East, with no expectation of returning,” Feronantus said. “The road will be long. We shall travel light. This means we shall have to feed ourselves by hunting for game along the way. I hope that Finn will come along to make up for our shortcomings in the chase.”

This was translated to Finn, who beamed and nodded and said something that was translated back into Latin as, “Yes, provided you make up for mine as a warrior.”

“R?dwulf complements Finn in the hunt, and we will need the power of his bow to penetrate Mongol armor from a distance,” Feronantus continued.

Cnan blushed in spite of herself, recalling how the two had tracked her through the woods. Yes, between Finn and R?dwulf, no deer between here and Mongolia would stand much of a chance.

“Illarion Illarionovitch has already done us the honor of volunteering,” Feronantus said, exchanging a nod with the Ruthenian. “Though we have little hope of outriding the Mongol hordes, we shall need the finest horseman at our disposal—the matamoros, Eleazar.”

The Spaniard looked pleased. Istvan, the Hungarian rider, did not.

“As much as I would like to believe that we could accomplish the journey without illness or injury, we shall require the services of a physician, and so I call upon Raphael, who may also be able to help us with the language of the Saracens.

“Percival has already spoken in a way that tells me of where his heart leads him, and so I summon him on this quest. I would not dare separate him from Roger, and so Roger joins the list, if he can bear our company.”

“And if you can bear mine,” Roger said.

“Though, like Finn, he is not a member of our Order and is but an honored visitor in our camp, Yasper and his knowledge of alchemical matters might serve us well, and so I invite him to come along with us.”

“I thought you would never get around to it!” Yasper said. Though in truth Cnan fancied he looked more nervous than any of the others, which only made her favor the man since it meant he was the least insane of any of them.

“Taran really ought to stay here, to be the oplo of the younger men who will have to fight in the stead of those who are going east. But with a broken heart he will be useless, and since it will break his heart to leave him behind, I summon him on the quest. Brother Rutger is more than ready to step into his place here.”

The range and intensity of emotion that had flashed across Taran’s face during this little speech had been almost frightening to Cnan, but he ended up red-faced and close to weeping, nodding his head vigorously. “Yes,” he muttered, “Rutger will serve brilliantly.”

“We have ten,” Feronantus said. “I hope and pray that the one who calls herself Vaetha will be our twelfth. Which means we need an eleventh. Any man here would serve well. But I am not oblivious to the gaze—perhaps ‘glare’ is a better word—of Istvan, who I think fancies himself as expert a horseman as Eleazar. Perhaps he is. But there is no doubting that he knows the ways of the Mongols better than any man from farther west, and so I offer to let him share our quest and our fate.”

“Accepted,” Istvan proclaimed before the sentence was even finished. He had been rocking back and forth on his chair as if it were a horse and he were even now riding it into battle.

All faces now turned again toward Cnan.

In no way did any of this make sense. They would ride hard and live like wild animals for as much as half a year before dying full of arrows on a frozen Mongolian steppe.

But she knew fate when she saw it—or rather, when it closed its grip around her throat.

“My name is Cnan,” she said, “and since it appears to be my doom, I shall, as soon as you have finished with all of your pompous words and grand gestures, get up from this chair and turn my back on the setting sun, whose warmth and beauty have been my only solace over many months’ striving, and hie to the sacred threshold of the Great Khan’s tent, as long as breath remains in my lungs. If you eleven choose to follow me, you shall find your road shorter and safer, and I may even be glad of your company from time to time.” She could not prevent her eyes from straying to Percival’s as she said this last. He was, finally, paying attention to her.

An hour later they were on the road.

Feronantus looked back on the clearing with an expression Cnan could not read. She stayed close to the leader of this group of madmen, hoping to riddle his reasons before he got them all killed.

The clearing, the old monastery, converted into a chapter house—the planks of half-rotten wood laid out to form tables and benches, the Order’s standard now flying from a pole mounted to a scalable edge of the ruined roof—the cemetery with its silent dead. Here she had come to be part of this group; here they had taken her in as an equal—mostly. She had guided a few of them across the dead lands to find Illarion, including the wise Raphael, with his Semitic countenance, and the young Haakon, with his awkward searching for whatever sort of manhood might be made available; she had watched them absorb the nastiness of Legnica and fend off Mongols with inspired trickery that, should it have been planned, would have utterly failed.

Here she had watched the beautiful Percival, and she had longed for something else, something other; trying, like the blundering Haakon, to find her way into an unobtainable embrace. A companionship she could never have.

She had listened to Illarion’s story. She had watched the knights train, and then had watched Feronantus devise a plan sure to fail. Sure to get them all killed.

Still, she would miss this place. And Feronantus? “Sorry to be leaving?” she asked.

He shook his head and smiled. “You wish to know my mind.”