The Mongoliad: Book One

So often in her short life, she had witnessed horses and men fall, had absorbed the horror of the image and moved along—as was required of her. Yet this was different. Here and now, the sight stopped her, stilled her; she was suddenly unable or unwilling to move from where she crouched half concealed among the ferns that grew along the forest’s edge.

As Percival tried to soothe the beast that had borne him across the miles, it seemed as if she were watching an essential part of the great, noble man suffer and die.

What sort of world was this, she thought, that made such a man? A person for whom violence could be summoned like an obedient hound, then put away with the sheathing of a sword.

How immediate the violence had been for her, how utterly sudden and desperate. Was it the same for Percival every time he drew his sword? Did he feel the same shock as she did? If not, how easily a person might be pulled into a life where the hound of violence became a mad wolf, pulling at its chains, ready to come out whether its master wished it or not!

But now he knelt on one leg as if in prayer, and she saw in this stance that it was not just the destrier that drew forth his silent grief.

Her throat constricted. Her eyes grew wet. She was shaking. This aftermath, this horror and shock, was what Percival endured, what they all endured, every time they were called to fight.

Abruptly Percival’s voice broke through her gray misery, speaking to his horse. “I have asked so much of you, Tonnerre. You have crossed miles and endured hardships, many of them meant for me. Always, you have been loyal, patient, and kind. A man could not reasonably ask for a tiny share of what you gave.”

The horse’s tail twitched, as though in answer. Cnan saw its head rise, and she caught a look of sorrowful intelligence in its dark eyes. There was pain, but also a remnant of questioning innocence that brought Feronantus’s words back to her heart. The lot of their faithful mounts: food and burdens, suffering and death, for the sake of the men who raised and trained and rode them.

“You have traveled far and served us wonderfully well,” Percival said, his voice almost too low to hear. He moved beside the great head and leaned over, gently taking one ear and angling it toward his lips. “I cannot take away the pain, nor ask you to run again. And so I will not keep you here to suffer, Tonnerre.”

As Cnan watched, the knight drew his dagger with the reticence of a man who would sooner cut off his own hand than do what he was about to do.

Her view of him blurred, and she felt hot tears roll down her cheek.

Her knife, in desperation; Percival’s, in mercy.

“We are lessened by your departure,” Percival said, his voice breaking. Two companions lost, one at the hands of the enemy, one he must now release himself. Again, she had seen this last rite many times across the years and across the miles. Animals so grievously hurt that it was a mercy to put them down rather than leave them to suffer and die slowly.

But never before had it been like this. The truth of that was etched in the way he held the blade and in the quaver of his eternally calm voice. Cnan turned away and tightly closed her eyes. She couldn’t bear to look.

There came a spasmodic pounding of hooves, a brief, rustling flurry of violent shuddering, and then stillness.

The trembling and heaving of the Mongol she had killed flashed before Cnan’s closed eyes. She clenched her teeth. When she forced herself to look again, she found Percival standing alongside the unmoving animal. He turned toward her slowly.

In the shadows of the woods beyond, she also saw Raphael, arms crossed, watching with that analytical expression she sometimes found so irritating. How could the physician not be moved?

Percival, however, saw only Cnan. He opened his mouth to speak. His cheeks were slick with tears. But he said nothing. He faltered. Slowly his body turned sideways to her, and his eyes rose up in his head until only the whites showed. He sagged to both knees and dropped his chin to his chest. He might have been sleeping, but his head moved slowly from side to side, as if he were listening to secret music. Then, impossibly, he smiled, as if at the sight of a long-absent friend. He raised his eyes to the branches and sky overhead and stretched out both arms, palms upward, as if catching a warm rain. From the former rigidity of grief, she saw the knight’s body loosen, and then he jerked once, twice, at some inner paroxysm.

He began to murmur in Latin, and she strained to hear his words. “Ego audio Domine. Animus humilis igitur sub ptoenti manu Dei est. Mundus sum ego, et absque delicto immaculatus. Verbum vester in me caro et ferrum erit.”

The glow upon his face—impossible in the morning light, in the woods! He looked around, seeing nothing earthly, but beaming like a small child, and the light of his expression seemed to flash through the forest.

Light without shadows.

Stifling a cry, Cnan fled. Her feet carried her out of the ferns and into the open field, wonder, guilt, and memory hot on her heels. At twenty paces, she paused, stood with shoulders stiff as stone, then—she could not help herself—she turned and looked back.

Percival had not moved. Raphael, who had witnessed this moment as well, was walking away—not toward Percival, she noted—a bemused look on his sun-browned face.

Cnan ran once more, slipping through the mouse hole in the hedge wall, getting out into the large field beyond, where she could have some privacy. The old snag that she had climbed earlier was a short distance away. She ran to it, circled around to the other side where no one could see her, and sank shuddering to the tangle of roots at its base. Pressing her fingers against the ancient bark, she wept until her entire body ached, for the pain, the grief, and in the middle of grief, the unexpected, impossible beauty of Percival’s illumination.

Sometime later, chest still full and cheeks tight with dried tears, she made her way back to the camp. The voices of the Shield-Brethren, less ghostly now, seemed to be handed from tree to tree across the field before Cnan caught sight of them. Yasper’s smoke had long since faded, and the air was clear. In the aftermath of the battle, silence had given way to anger. The Shield-Brethren were at odds now, and the former battleground resounded with the din.

“Roger, stop!” The shout rose over all as the camp came back in view. Raphael had interposed himself between the Norman and Istvan. The former held a drawn hatchet and arming sword.

“Stand aside,” Roger said. “He’ll be the death of us all, one by one. He doesn’t deserve your protection, much less your faith.”

“We are not barbarians,” Raphael said sternly, “to cut down one of our own when the enemy is yet near. Lower your weapons. For God’s and all our sakes, be reasonable.”

“Reasonable?” Roger snarled. “Taran is dead, and that man”—he leveled his sword in the direction of the Hungarian—“as good as drew down upon us all the Mongols who killed him. It is madness to keep him—and his insanity—in the company; reason demands he be put down before he gets us all killed. It would be a mercy to him—and to us all!”

“Enough,” Feronantus said, rising from where Taran lay. Illarion still sat on the opposite side of the body, and the two had been speaking in low voices. As she drew closer, she saw that the Brethren’s leader wore an expression between grief and grim determination. There was a calm hardness there that would brook no argument. “His foolishness has cost one life; let it not cost us more. Break camp and round up the spares we have found; we set out as soon as we have properly seen Taran to his rest.”

Roger, his weapons poised, did not move. Istvan’s hand rested on the hilt of his curved blade, his eyes set on the Norman’s with a hard glare bespeaking a ready willingness to do more violence, even to take joy in it.

The blood and dust in the Hungarian’s beard had caked to muddy black. He looked more demon than man.

Raphael remained between the two, eyes leveled steadily on Roger’s. The others waited, hardly daring to draw breath, none wishing to make the move that would provoke their brother into retaliation.

Roger broke his stance first. “So be it, then,” he said as both sword and hatchet dropped. He half bowed and stepped back, moving his attention toward Feronantus. “On your head be this, Ferhonanths. God and the Virgin