“And where is Eleazar?”
“Likely visiting whoever is surrounded in that farm,” Raphael said, and he swiveled on deft toes, keeping as low as possible, to gaze in the opposite direction. “Judging from the number of dead and screaming Mongols in its vicinity, I wager it’s Istvan.”
To Cnan, this did not sound like a plan, or even the beginnings of one, but she knew better than to expect something fully thought out, and she approved of anything that would take her away from the forty or so horsemen coming for them across the floodplain.
Not far away, Raphael had tied his horse to a lance thrust into the ground. Trailing behind it on a lead, head down, pushing its nose through grass, was the pony Cnan had been riding. She unwound the taut lead from Raphael’s saddle and sprang onto the pony’s back with a confidence that surprised her. She was not above hoping that one of her companions might have witnessed her dexterity.
She pulled hard on the right rein and dug in her heels, then shouted in the way that the men did when they really wanted their mounts to sit up and take notice, and indeed, the pony reacted with a neck-arching start and broke into a gallop.
She was now riding hell-for-leather into the battle unfolding in the little farm. This was about half a verst away, on a weak rise that kept it above seasonal floods. From their former vantage point, they’d been able to make out very little of the stead, but now, closer, Cnan could see that it was an untidy warren of lean-tos, outbuildings, sheds, sties, smokehouses, coops, and stables. Not satisfied with that, the residents had added a haphazard assortment of peat ricks, haystacks, trellises, hutches, and beehives.
Cnan, in the last couple of years, had become a connoisseur of hiding places, shunning the open and gravitating toward the hidden, the complex, the knotted and gnarled—anyplace confusing and nasty for warriors and hunters. Had she been chased across the floodplain by Mongols—as, come to think of it, was now the case—she’d have gone straight to this farm. She’d have kindled a fire in the hearth, done all she could to make them think she was lodged in the main house, and then she’d have crept to its outskirts, buried herself in dung or straw, and peered out at them.
Waited them out. Watched and learned.
Istvan had likely done something similar. Cnan could not know this for certain—she had not yet reached the farm—but Raphael seemed to think Istvan was still alive, and it was simply not possible that he could have survived any other way.
Drawing closer, she saw evidence of a fray: Mongol bodies draped over split-rail fences, then what might have been a Russian noble in a black cape, sprawled and muddy in a hog wallow. More Mongols lay curled like fetuses around moldy bits of tossed haystack—along with one dead cow, its flank covered with arrows. Someone had cut the animal’s throat and taken shelter behind the dead bulk.
Istvan had done more than just hide and watch. Some of the dead lay where they had fallen, but others had been arranged in grotesque postures. At some point—and recently, since only a little while ago they had seen ten live Mongols surrounding this place—Istvan had crept from concealment and gone to work with fast, eager blades, at close quarters. For the Mongols, keen on killing their prey, had committed the error of dismounting and entering that filthy and tumbledown maze. Not understanding that the one they’d been hunting was no terrified fugitive. Not just another gleaner, run to ground, praying that he could find some way to slip out of the noose.
Istvan had been waiting for them, chewing his mushrooms, timing it, perhaps, so that the ecstasy would come over him at just the right moment.
It had been a long day of odd and unforgettable sights, and now another presented itself: a Mongol backing away from the corner of a poultry hutch, slashing and thrusting with a short curved blade. He cared nothing for what lay behind his stumbling feet, but stared in horror and grunted like a whipped donkey—for the last second of his life.
From around the hutch, striking from on high like a silver bolt, a six-foot sword caught the Mongol where neck joins the shoulder, sliced down through his torso, and emerged from his opposite side, just above the hipbone. The two halves of him fell in opposite directions, intestines boiling out, as if they’d waited twenty years for an opportunity to leap free.
Not Istvan’s work—that huge sword.
Eleazar stepped into view, making no effort to break the sword’s momentum but letting it follow through, raising his hands above his head to keep its tip from plunging into the ground. He gracefully stepped around, with the sword’s point as the center of his arc, checking behind to make sure that no one else was creeping up.
Getting caught in this melee was not going to help Cnan, and might complicate matters for Eleazar and (assuming he was in there somewhere) Istvan, and so she drew back and spoke calmly to her mount, peeling off from her course and convincing the horse to adopt a judicious trotting gait.
Not a horse person, she’d been slow to understand the others’ fascination with spares. It made sense abstractly, of course. But it had taken the sight of the onrushing horde to really fix it in her mind. Several Mongol ponies were now wandering aimlessly about the perimeter of the farmstead, nosing about for forage. Thanks to Istvan, who had apparently shot some of their owners from cover—she recognized his shafts projecting from the Mongols’ bodies—they were now spares, and she reckoned she could do something useful by rounding them up. To her, they paid little heed, but they were social animals and not above joining a herd. So she devoted a little while to gathering up the ponies and leading them in a slow whorl around the farmstead while she counted dead Mongols and waited for the final few to be hunted down by Istvan and Eleazar. The ponies became used to her, and she began speaking to them in Turkic, with which they seemed familiar.
The two knights finally emerged from the warren, and at the same moment, Raphael and Percival came galloping in from the riverbank. Istvan, red with gore, led a few more spares, and Percival, nearly pristine, tugged at a balky string of four. They now had three or four mounts for each of their group.
Cnan joined them. An interesting conversation might now have passed between Istvan and the others, but of course, there was no time. Indeed, the first and most impetuous of the Mongol outriders was already cresting the bank, though this had to be guessed by sound rather than sight, as the sun was well down and the scene lit only by gray twilight.
“The woods?” Percival suggested, raising his clutch of reins. “It’s either brambles or arrows. I prefer brambles.”
“Follow,” said Istvan.
So they followed. And the Mongols followed them.
Cnan found a partly open path through a stand of older trees. Almost immediately after they entered the shelter of the woods, cursing as they plunged in and out of the dense, prickly shrubbery, it became obvious that the knights had no idea what they were doing. Nor did Cnan.
All were inclined to view Istvan’s actions with the utmost skepticism and argued among themselves whether their noisy movement was a mere feint; Eleazar reached the conclusion they were trying to draw the pursuing Mongols into a killing ground.
Percival said nothing. His plan was far from clear to the others—if he actually had a plan—and so the group spent several dangerous minutes reeling about, losing sight of each other, then regaining it, never knowing if the horseman approaching through the heavy brush was a lost member of their band or a Mongol scout.
“Nobody can fight in here,” Istvan muttered, his words slow and slurred. His head passed through a slanting moon-beam, and he looked up and gaped with half-lidded eyes. A finger swipe of blood marked his face. He was still half-possessed by his mushrooms.
Cnan asked Percival if this was the moment he had spoken of earlier, when they would sacrifice themselves so that Feronantus’s team might go on its way unmolested. If that were the case, she planned to disappear. At last, Raphael prevailed on Percival to explain his thinking and to please stop assuming that any of his companions had the faintest idea of what was in his mind.
Percival sidled away from brambles, then halted, only dimly visible. Cnan saw resolution in his posture. “We shall rejoin Feronantus,” he announced, as if this had always been obvious.
“If we can find him, which I doubt,” Eleazar said. “We shall be leading the Mongols directly to the others.”
“Yes,” Percival said, “and by the same token, we shall then have sufficient numbers to destroy them
