The Mongoliad: Book One

Haakon caught sight of smooth brown skin at the corner of his jaw, where a man would have stubble or real hair.

He has no beard. A boy. A mere boy.

Zug’s hands snapped down. He had been holding on to his short sword as he adjusted his mask, and with the sudden flick of his wrist, he threw the weapon. The sword wasn’t a very good projectile, but his aim was true and he threw with considerable force. Haakon twisted the pole sword and managed to deflect the missile just enough that it clattered off his metal shoulder—but the maneuver took him off guard long enough that Zug was able to dart across the sand and scoop up the other unclaimed weapon.

Haakon’s greatsword.

Now the crowd went mad with frenzied glee. Their roar became a kind of devilish, porcine squeal, sharp and painful.

They squared off again, getting the other’s measure. Haakon kept his hands loose on the pole-arm as he stalked Zug, moving him around the arena floor.

Zug crab-walked at a right angle to Haakon’s blade, framing himself before the long column of red silk that obscured the southern tunnel—directly beneath where the Khan sat ensconced in his private pavilion. Sunlight reflecting off the silk made it shift and move as if it were a column of fire.

The Red Veil.

What lies on the other side?

Haakon had the longer weapon; his armor was stronger. He was up against a beardless boy, or perhaps a eunuch—but not a demon.

For the first time since the fight started, he began to like the odds.

CHAPTER 14: THE WAY OF THE LAPWING

Once Feronantus was awake, Cnan reported on the events of the previous day and what was coming. She finished the story with a suggestion: “If you were to strike your camp and disappear into the forest—which I could arrange, by the way—none would think the less of you.”

Feronantus screwed up his face. “How many Mongol riders did you say there were?”

“Perhaps four arban.” Seeing how this word meant nothing to him, she explained. “They ride in groups of ten,” she said. “Ten arbans—ten of ten—is called a jaghun.”

His face relaxed. “Then I don’t see any difficulty.”

Cnan barely restrained a snort—and then thought of Istvan’s handiwork. “You have very little time to get ready,” she warned.

“Getting ready is something best done before one’s camp has been overrun by horse archers. We have been getting ready ever since we arrived,” Feronantus pointed out. “Now…young Binder. Are you acquainted with the way of the lapwing?”

Cnan was.

“Then might I ask that you go back a ways and be flushed from cover, then flee in panic toward our camp…? Men on horses like to chase things, and Mongols are no exception.”

Cnan sniffed. “These last few years, I have become rather good at not being seen, much less flushed.”

“I understand,” Feronantus said. “Today we shall all be doing the unexpected.”

When Feronantus put it that way, Cnan found it difficult to refuse. She had been riding hard all night, fording rivers in the dark and taking risks that she never would have considered had she not been caught up with these Brethren and their insane quest.

Meanwhile, Feronantus had been taking his leisure in camp with the six others who had stayed behind: Taran, the big Irish oplo; R?dwulf, the English archer; Illarion, the Ruthenian nobleman; Roger, the Norman who carried too many sharp things; and two who were not actual members of the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae, Finn the hunter and Yasper the alchemist. Both were men of northwestern Europe and speakers of languages that troubled Cnan’s ear. Most in the camp had been asleep when Cnan had galloped in on her last surviving horse, but now they were awake, armed and armored with an alacrity that suggested they slept in steel.

Which Cnan would too, were she fool enough to pitch a camp and light a fire in this country.

She felt woolly headed. The light of the morning was flat and bleak in her tired eyes. Every instinct told her to get out, get rid of the noisy, smelly beast she had been riding, and use her formidable skills to simply disappear. Instead Feronantus wanted her to become, for a few moments, like a mother bird leading predators away from her nest—as conspicuous and vulnerable to enemies as she could possibly be. Had he made the request in the wrong tone of voice or with the wrong look in his eye, she would by now already be so thoroughly gone that only Finn, with luck, would have been able to find her again.

But Feronantus—damn him—had asked politely and in a way that made it clear he well knew what he was asking: for her to humiliate herself in front of foes and friends alike.

She pushed past Feronantus with an attempt at a swagger, made more ridiculous by her exhaustion. “Then get ready to greet my pursuers,” she said and mounted, with less grace than before. She wheeled her pony and rode in the direction whence she had just come.

Her brief pass through the camp enabled her to view the Shield-Brethren’s preparations, some of which (stringing ropes between trees at the level of a rider’s neck, planting sharpened poles in the ground) were obvious, others (Yasper lighting torches in broad daylight) baffling.

All through the hours of darkness, Cnan had been riding across open territory, substituting speed for wit and relying on the four behind her—Percival, Raphael, Eleazar, and Istvan—to draw the attention of the pursuing Mongols. The route she had taken into the camp only a few moments ago was still marked out by a gash of trampled grass crossing over a pasture that was perhaps a verst in breadth and notching the skyline of a grassy rise.

The pasture was bordered on its lower slope by a tumbledown stone wall. Purple-flowering thistles and pea vines had thrust their roots between the rocks and turned the old wall into a wild hedge that was far too high to be jumped. A gap in the wall—an old gate or stile—had been narrowed by the lush greenery to a sort of mouse hole through which only one rider could pass at a time. Beyond the wall spread an abandoned field of rye, now feral and losing a war against more potent weeds. Like most arable fields, it was much longer than it was wide so that the farmer would not need to turn his team around frequently while plowing. The hedge wall ran along one of its long sides. The opposite side, perhaps a hundred paces away, was not fenced, unless one counted a stubble of old stumps where the farmer had cut away some trees. Dense black alder and ash came up to that side of the field and extended down a gentle slope for perhaps half a verst before falling decisively into the endless marsh.

So much for the field’s long sides. The short ends were defined, at one end, by more forest. Pines lunged out into the grassland, forming a salient where the land’s former occupants had erected their hovels—deserted for a year or more—and, at the other, by a line of rubble trailing across the ground, scarcely knee-high. Perhaps the remnants of another stone wall that had been pulled apart by scavengers in need of building materials.

The knights had pitched their shelters a few days ago back in the pines behind the hovels. The place was not quite a clearing, for a few ash trees of some size were salted through it, but the undergrowth was sparse—a consequence, obviously to Cnan, of a fire that had hurried through earlier and destroyed the young trees, while not burning long or hot enough to kill the big ones. Farmers often set such fires, but this one had probably started from a lightning strike in dry weather.

As she passed from the rye field through the mouse hole and out into the big pasture beyond, her eye picked out a blasted snag, lonely and stark along the skyline over which the Mongols would soon be coming. Echoes of