The Mongoliad: Book One

Istvan nudged his horse past Cnan, angling toward Feronantus. “He is making too much noise,” the Hungarian bristled.

Feronantus nodded in the direction they had come. “We aren’t trying to hide,” he said.

On the ridge where they had stood a few scant hours before was a single horse and rider. They were too far to make out any details of the man or animal, but to Cnan’s eye, the man seemed too large for his mount, or the horse was too small. A Mongol, she thought, and then she realized who he must be. The one who got away.

Istvan had come to the same realization, and vituperating in his native language, he reached for his bow.

“Ho, Istvan,” R?dwulf said with a smile. “Do you think he will stand still while you ride close enough to put an arrow in his chest?”

“I can track him,” Istvan snarled. “Eventually he will stop—to eat or sleep or piss, it doesn’t matter. I will put an arrow through his eye while—”

Cnan laughed in spite of the fear that had laid icy fingers on the back of her neck. “Mongols piss from horseback,” she said. “They eat and sleep there too.”

“That would explain how he kept so close to us,” Feronantus noted.

“Who?” Yasper asked, wandering up with a pair of stoppered jugs. He craned his neck to see what they were looking at. “Oh shit,” he said as he caught sight of the Mongolian tracker. With surprisingly alacrity, he leaped onto his horse, without losing grip on either jug. “What are we waiting for?” he said.

“You,” Feronantus pointed out, with a touch of dry humor. He tapped his horse lightly in the ribs, and in no particular hurry, the animal began to amble toward the river. “He’s seen us,” he remarked over his shoulder. “My guess is that he knows this area better than we do, so there is nothing to be gained by appearing fearful. The best we can hope to accomplish is to convince him this is our destination. After nightfall, when the others return, we can slip across the river and put some hard distance between us. Let us hope that will be enough.”

The route to the hilltop became more challenging. Not only because the ground was steeper, but because the path was blocked in some places by heaps of rubble that had tumbled down from damaged sections of wall. In other places, the gaps in the wall were large enough to provide new avenues for their passage, though they had to dismount and lead their horses forward gingerly over difficult footing.

During the increasingly rare stretches when the going was level and easy, Raphael looked up to see that the lookout in the tower had spread news of their coming to several others and that the defenses of the outer wall were becoming crowded with gleaming helmets and spearpoints.

“There may be more knights than monks in this house of God,” Illarion remarked.

“Some monks are knights,” Raphael pointed out, with a glance at Percival.

“You are right and wrong at the same time,” Percival said obliquely, “for what you see are not monks.”

This game of riddles was interrupted by an exclamation from Roger, who was currently leading the way. The others saw that he had stopped in his tracks to examine, from a wary distance, a form lying full length on the ground in the middle of the path.

During their travels they had crossed many battlefields. To see an actual corpse, lying on the ground fully armored, was unusual. Most armies buried the dead, or burned them, if for no other reasons than to mitigate the stink, prevent disease, and frustrate ravens and carrion dogs. Even in those unusual cases where an army marched on before accomplishing that chore, surviving locals might tend to it once the coast was clear. Any who were so degraded as to leave human bodies lying out in the open would be inclined to strip the corpses for useful or salable loot.

Strange, then, to find a fully armored knight lying dead on the ground, out in the open. That he had been dead for some little while was proved by the number of flies teeming around him. His shirt of mail, and the shape of his helmet and of his shield, identified him as a knight of Christendom—this was no Mongol. He had gone down on his belly, his shield lying flat beneath him. But his head was turned awkwardly to one side and the neck bent back. As they drew closer—though only a little closer, given the stink and the number of flies—they got a clue as to why: he had taken a single arrow through the T-slot of his helmet, right into the cheekbone below the right eye, and its nock had struck the ground as he had fallen and wrenched his head around.

Their first instinct, of course, was to look up at the top of the wall and judge the range. They were certainly within bowshot, but far enough away that the archer who had loosed this shaft must have been lucky, or exceptionally good. Several bows were visible along the top of the wall now, and distant creaking noises indicated that some of them were being drawn. Raphael’s instinct was to seek cover, but Percival reacted in the opposite manner, turning toward the defenders and holding his hands up, palms out.

“Hold!” he called. “We are knights of Christendom and no enemies of yours.”

Raphael winced at the Frank’s naivete. Could it really be that a man of his upbringing would not know of the Fourth Crusade and the atrocities inflicted by Christian knights of the West against their brethren in Zara and Constantinople?

“Before you try our patience with any more such foolish remarks,” called back a voice—the voice, Raphael realized, of a woman, speaking in Latin, “pray satisfy your curiosity about the Christian knight who lies at your feet. Ask yourself how he ended up in that estate if he was not our enemy, and then consider the wisdom of drawing any closer to our battlements.”

Illarion and Raphael exchanged glances, both having heard the woman’s stress of the word “our.”

“Percival was right,” Roger said, “they’re not monks.” He was staring up at the woman who had been shouting at them. Her femininity was obvious, since she had removed her helmet and tucked it under her arm, but there was something in the postures and the movements of the mailed and helmeted warriors around her suggesting that the priory contained not a single man.

Raphael nodded, somewhat distantly, as he recalled an old story—lore from many centuries past, before the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae had become Christian. Their first outpost had been Petraathen, high in the mountains between the Danube and the Baltic. Their second was on the island called Tyrshammar, and many were the Nordic warriors—Vikings, as some called them—who had learned the way of the sword in that place. Those Northern peoples harbored ancient tales and myths of shieldmaidens— skjalddis—which happened to mesh perfectly with the tradition of the virgin warrior that had been promulgated on the crag of Petraathen since ancient days. The women who had become Shield-Maidens at Tyrshammar were few compared to the men who became Shield-Brethren, and yet some of them had been present on the Viking ships that, in the later days of the Northmen, had ranged across Rus and down the Dnieper to the Black Sea. Some of them had put down roots here in Kiev, creating a third outpost. According to rumor, they had maintained their traditions, including the peculiar habit of teaching women to fight, even across the religious schism that had later arisen between the churches of the East and the West.

No wonder Percival had wanted to come here so badly.

The Frank had responded to the Shield-Maiden’s taunt with a respectful bow and, as directed, turned his attention to the corpse on the trail. The mystery of its lying here, unburied and unlooted, had now been solved: the Shield-Maidens had left it here as a warning. Percival took a step toward it, then another, and then another, each pace slower and shorter than the last. The detail was noticed by the Shield-Maidens, who serenaded him with derisive laughter.

“Why do they hate us so much?” Raphael wondered. “And for that matter, why is she addressing us in Latin?”

“I have no idea,” Illarion said, “though I suspect yonder corpse could tell us much if it could speak.”

Before going any closer to the dead man, Percival went through a little ceremony of crossing himself and saying a prayer.

Roger, exasperated, cursed and elbowed past Percival and strode directly toward the dead knight, drawing in a deep breath and holding it. He planted a foot on the helmet and spun it around, making the arrow swing up into the air like the hand of a clock. “A face,” he announced, “like any other—any other that has been got to by flies and ants, that is.”

“Take your foot away,” said Raphael, stepping closer in spite of himself, “that we may read the escutcheon on his brow.”