as riders and set up their tables as farmers harvested new crops, woodsmen harvested the forests to rebuild, lime kilns were restacked from old toppled bricks.
Her kind of leaf blew across the land until it too found the anonymity of mulch, but always in the wilderness, never in a field or a garden…never to help push up shoots or flowers.
They stayed away from the known routes, and after a few days they entered a dense forest of great oaks, oaks old enough to revive a deep sense of reverence in Cnan and keep the knights more than usually quiet. Cnan remembered these trees had been sacred to the Slavic war god, Perun, now fled (or tempered) by the Greek Christos. The high-arching green branches reduced what little sunlight passed through the thick, eastward- sweeping clouds to a few silvery shafts, and as the summer rains began, water dripped constantly from the leaves, leaving the litter boggy and the horses moody.
Cnan watched the riders, both as they traveled and as they pitched their spare camps in forest and field. She studied the knights’ interactions with their leader, Feronantus, and closely observed each member of the party, as her mother had taught her.
“We study all men as we would the beasts. Thus we know them better, and they learn nothing of us,” her mother had said. “No one has known our people, nor will they ever.”
The eleven travelers in turn paid her little attention. They now seemed to regard her as an irritating little sister, or perhaps a dog, if they thought of her at all. She liked being ignored, even by Percival, who had never shown her much interest anyway.
As they rode between the big oaks, at the prompting of Feronantus, the group spread out thirty or forty paces and assumed a loose double V, such that whatever foes they met could easily be drawn into a fork by simple sweeps one way or another.
Cnan often moved off from the main body, reconnoitering, scouting for war parties or any of the stray, crazed, bloody-minded fragments of dying armies—whatever might have scattered over this broad, flat portion of the Empire of the Great Khan. She also looked for the signals and cryptic marks left by other travelers—and in particular, Binders. Knotted cords and an array of marks had guided her from the East in the first place. When they weren’t tying knots, Binders left messages by looping sapling branches around thicker limbs, notching big trees near the base, or draping anonymous, cleverly torn shreds of bog-dyed brown cloth. On occasion, if the skeleton of an animal (or a human) presented itself, messages could be left in the apparent scatter of gnawed ribs. Larger marks scored in the dirt or arranged in rocks could be seen only from high up in trees; still others were obvious only in winter.
Travelers from other societies worked their own signs into the far-stretching earth. Along her paths east and west, traveling with her mother as a child and with other Binders or alone, she had noticed long lines of tight circles cleared with sticks from the litter and grass. Binders could not read them, and the lines couldn’t have lasted more than a few seasons, yet they were always there—as if magically renewed.
Together, travelers from all the societies were leaving their itineraries, and their maps, where no roads had yet been laid. Some of those marks had been maintained for thousands of years, not just by guilds and traveling societies, but also by loosely allied foragers and hunters who rarely met in person.
The knight who best understood the secret languages of stones and circles was Istvan, of the dour countenance and immense mustache. Cnan undertook several times to observe him as he too rode away from the party on private forays, despite Feronantus’s concern. She kept well away and took care not to fall under his eye, but, on occasion, found means to hide near a path she guessed he would take.
Istvan was moody, his usual expression a scowl of focused attention—or just a scowl. Like many who had survived the advance of the Mongol Horde, he had seen too much that he could not clear from his memory.
On the tenth day of their journey, Istvan caused her a deeper concern—for two reasons. Clearly the refugee knight of Mohi was less interested in traveling east at speed and more interested in old camps, old huts, deserted farms, and what few hamlets could still be found burrowed deep in the forests. Several times he stopped at these rude, threadbare communities, at no pains to conceal his identity or his character, and asked questions about Mongols. He seemed to understand many of the dialects here, occasionally Teutonic, more often variations on Slavic Ruthenian, and sometimes, in the deep woods and tall hills, a tongue very similar to his native Madjar.
Istvan also seemed to have more than a passing acquaintance with the pathways of goods, slaves, and money in conquered territories—and he knew much more about Mongols and their Eastern allies than he let on in camp, where he usually kept silent.
Istvan’s interest in old farms was not just a matter of military tactics, Cnan began to realize. He frequently paused to dismount in abandoned pastures choked by ivy and creepers, to part the overgrowth and dig his fingers into the soil beneath.
For Istvan’s other quest—and this fascinated Cnan—concerned mushrooms. Sometimes he collected the small mushrooms that grew in those soils, dropping them like gold coins, one by one, into a loose-woven linen bag. Cnan became convinced that Istvan—in contrast to Raphael, who sought out and preserved many herbal simples —was following the nearly invisible petroglyphs and tree arrangements of the ancients: goddess-worshippers, Orphics, Earth and sky mantics—signs of which Cnan, truth be told, knew very little. She had seen none of that sort of activity in her lifetime.
Binders, however, knew something about the mushrooms used by these ecstatics. At times, adept guides collected them on their travels and purveyed them to temples and priests throughout greater Asia, but she was not familiar with their use in these territories and wondered how and why Istvan had acquired his expertise.
He avoided the red-and-white amanitas, and well he might. Their use was often deadly. The smaller wavy- cap and freebuttons and other mushrooms were far more interesting and complex—or so Cnan had heard.
On the fifteenth day, she saw him emerge from a wet, grassy clearing. He paused, opened his bag, and popped a freshly harvested freebutton into his mouth, making a bitter face. He climbed back on his patient horse and sat mounted for a while, not moving, but looking left and right, up and down, before drawing in the slack of the reins and lightly kicking the horse’s girth. His path back to the main group did not waver, but he was unusually silent in camp that night, staying awake and looking up at the wet leaves as the others slept.
His scowl eased, his mustache drooped almost to his chest, and he seemed remarkably at peace.
Freebuttons and wavy-faces carried old demons with tricky ways. Swallowing them was not for the uninitiated and never for those suffering the way Istvan suffered. Sometimes the demons in the mushrooms would befriend internal devils and soothe them, but that, she guessed, was not his main reason for gathering them.
In the Far East, freebuttons were sometimes chewed by warriors intent on going into battle in a highly focused, emotionless, killing rage. Some called it putting on the Bear Skin. Feronantus would have called them Berserkers.
On the thirtieth day, on the night of a full moon, under a starry sky, Cnan stumbled over some of Istvan’s handiwork.
She had moved north nine verst, planning to head back to the main group that night. The woods and the undergrowth were thick enough that she was obliged to use established trails. Deep down one of these, she had been cut off by a band of Tartars escorting a man dressed in a coat thick with swaying sables. He wore a shining black helmet without a visor, and his features were darker, almost blue-black. He was long-nosed and sharp- chinned, handsome in his way, and she thought he might be from the southeast, the transmontane lands beyond Tufan, warm and humid places that Alexander had long ago thrust into, even now being stormed by the Mongols.
The presence of this sable-hung merchant alarmed her. Cnan had striven to guide the knights away from main-traveled roads, to avoid confrontations, speed them along, and let them keep their strength for their main purpose—crazy as that purpose might be. But now that might be impossible.
She tracked this orderly and quiet band and soon understood their purpose: collecting furs from itinerant trappers. Furs were coin of the realm in these parts, and Mongols had traded them for many centuries. Peoples on the fur routes often used cut-up pieces of sable and mink as earnest of additional reserves—like bills of exchange, only more representative and tangible. The whole, uncured furs were strung on cords like drying fish and hung off the backs of the sumpter horses or piled on top, or, as with this merchant, safely stitched to the owner’s coat.
Along the edge of a small lake, where the old oak forests had given way to meadows and young birch, the merchant and his guards approached a thin column of smoke, and there, beside a small, open campfire, they
