The Mongoliad: Book One

she—and a great deal of torn vegetation—all fell in a heap. Cnan scrabbled out from under and tried to leap back, a groan of fear and disgust rumbling from deep in her gut. The Mongol had an arrow in his right lung. Still he lashed out and grabbed Cnan’s ankle. With his other hand, he pawed at his belt, trying to reach the hilt of a dagger that had been knocked askew in the fall.

Cnan dropped to her knee, making sure that knee came down hard on the Mongol’s nose. She then grabbed the wayward dagger and buried it in his stomach. Leaves rattled from above and she jumped off the loudly dying man just in time to avoid being bowled over by another Mongol, this one sporting two deep-shot arrows.

She’d had the bad luck to hide at a banked spot on the hedge wall, easily scaled from the other side. Probably it was a good thing to be disabused of the foolish notion that there was any safe place in this melee, and so she ran to the middle of the field.

The smoke cloud slowly drifted her way, or perhaps it was just growing—and the battle came with it.

She glimpsed Illarion whirling a ten-foot spear, stopping only to jab one end or the other into a foe. Feronantus cruised with grim ease round the fight’s perimeter, wielding short sword and shield, striking down those who tried to escape.

Smoke peeled back to show Taran engaged in single combat with an impressive Mongol wearing good, thick armor, clearly a commander of an arban, if not the whole group. The two matched each other stroke for stroke, but the Mongol looked exhausted and unsure, while Taran was calm, implacable, and—for lack of a better word—curious. Taran used the opportunity of a raised sword to step off line and drive his own blade up the commander’s unprotected armpit.

Yasper seemed to have used up all of his alchemical supplies and was now walking about alertly, sword in hand, but showing no interest in going into the battle cloud. This struck Cnan as exceedingly prudent—an eye on the periphery of the battlefield meant they would not be surprised—and in fact, as she watched, Yasper pointed his sword up at the other end of the field. He shouted to the others, sharp words that Cnan did not quite catch but were clearly an alarm.

Raphael and R?dwulf and Istvan, preoccupied with picking off stray Mongols trying to climb the hedge, had been paying no attention to the end of the field by the forest salient and the old farm hovels. Another squadron of Mongols had found their way through by that route. They were slicing furiously at the neck-high ropes that had been strung from tree to tree. Four riders had passed through and gathered at the head of the field, waiting for several more comrades to join them.

But when they heard Yasper’s shout and saw the archers turn and aim their way, they mounted a direct charge rather than wait to be picked off.

Istvan loosed a single shaft and then spurred his stallion right at them, slinging his bow over his shoulder and drawing his curved sword; he and the foremost of the charging Mongols clashed in the center of the field, blade on blade. The Mongol rode away, upright, but with a dismayed, fading look, missing half of his sword arm.

Two others went down with arrows in neck and chest, but the fourth somehow managed to thread his way through Istvan, the archers, Yasper, and Cnan. He galloped straight for Taran, who had his back turned. In the Mongol’s wake followed half a dozen more who had found their way over the same path as the first four.

The fighters in the smoke cloud had heard the commotion and become aware of the danger. Illarion and Feronantus came running, leaving Percival and Roger to guard what had now become the battle’s rear.

Cnan was captivated for some moments by the sight of Feronantus, on foot, entering into single combat with a charging Mongol knight on a horse. Feronantus tossed his sword into the air as if playing with it, letting it spin lazily end over end, and caught it by the flat of its blade, which he pinched between the balls of his fingers and the heel of his hand. Stepping aside so that the Mongol’s blow whistled past his chin, close enough to sever whiskers, he brought his sword’s hilt up, swinging it like a pickax so that the sharp end of the crossguard jammed upward into the rider’s armpit and caught there, jerking him backward off his horse.

Pinning the downed man with a foot on his neck, Feronantus reversed the sword again and drove it up beneath his helmet.

That was the last of the Mongols to die. But it was not the last of the Mongols.

One remained at the head of the field, near the old hovel. He half squatted on his saddle, bent over, one foot out of its stirrup and raised behind the pommel, elbow on that knee, fist supporting his chin—defiantly casual, confident. Watching. A stocky man, even by Mongol standards, attired in armor that was good but not flashy. He rode an excellent horse but wore no helmet, and his gray hair hung loose beneath the shaved tonsure that all of the Mongol warriors affected.

When Cnan first noticed him, R?dwulf was in the act of shooting an arrow at him, but the gray-haired Mongol leaned back, deftly raised his shield, and caught the shaft just short of his face. He peered over the shield, eyes glinting, and seeing there was not another arrow coming, he held his curved sword high and shook it in what might have been anger, or a salute. Communicating with his horse with guttural shouts and knee-and-heel work, he spun it around and galloped into the woods.

Istvan wheeled as if to give chase, but Feronantus, standing nearby, reached over and grabbed the horse’s rein. “Stop,” he said. “You will never catch him. Your mount is half dead. And besides, for now your rage has accomplished more than enough.”

Istvan seemed proud to have received this compliment, until, noting a grim look on Feronantus’s face, he followed the older man’s gaze to a place about ten strides away, where Taran lay on the ground, facedown, motionless.

CHAPTER 15: A NOCTURNAL PURSUIT

Gansukh dozed, the rhythmic motion of his horse and the distant sound of the Orkhun River lulling him into a somnambulant state. His lower back and left shoulder still ached—the former having been bruised when he had leaped from the wall and used a ger to break his fall. The structure had collapsed under his weight, preventing him from serious injury, but he had sprawled into a bulky object inside the ger as everything had come tumbling down.

The jump had been the last in a litany of foolish actions undertaken in the last few hours, a list he had had ample time to relive in his mind as he tracked the assassin.

The assassin had fled Karakorum, as Gansukh had suspected he would, via the western gate, though he had opted for a much less traveled route—over the wall instead of through the market gate. A pile of timber and stone —building materials awaiting a location in which to be assembled—had afforded the assassin and Gansukh a shortcut to the outer wall. The assassin had—much more deftly—leaped from the pile of timbers to the crenellations of the wall, clambered up, and leaped again over the far side. When Gansukh—slamming himself against the battlement as if he were a boulder from a catapult—had managed to climb atop the wall, he had seen that the assassin had used a ger to break his fall.

There were many ger to choose from; the population of Karakorum always swelled to a density greater than the walls could hold when the Khagan was in residence. Many a clan pitched their tents in tiny villages along the outside of the walls. What had given Gansukh pause was the height.

He had stared down from a bird’s-eye view as tribespeople began to stir from their tents at the disturbance caused by the assassin landing on—and collapsing—a ger. His muscles had refused to move beyond the wall’s edge, his brain telling him it would be insane to follow, that the chase had to end here.

But he had forced his body to jump, and the rushing air had been exhilarating, so much so that he hadn’t noticed the ache in his back for several hours. Not until the excitement of the chase had given way to the endless drudgery of night tracking. And then his body had threatened to collapse from exhaustion.