A slight blonde girl in a frayed robe tied with a sash stood in the doorway. She did not flinch or cry out when she saw the big men. Hanging from her sash was a cloth bag filled with leaves. Green juice leaked from one corner of her lips. She had been chewing leaves when she came in the door—no doubt for a poultice.
“Brave lass,” Raphael said, rising from his knee. “Where be you from, and who protects you?”
The girl remained mute, eyes distant. She focused with an effort on Illarion and smiled. Her smile was simple, her face untouched by any other emotion.
Cnan was about to explain the arrangement—that the girl was hired to fetch herbs and tend Illarion, for food and jade—when another, an older boy, old as Haakon but as dark as she, appeared in the door and gently pushed the girl aside. He faced into the hut with dagger drawn, saw Cnan, and hesitated.
She took advantage of that moment. “We mean you no harm,” she said in Tocharian.
The boy considered her words, and then indicated the others with a thrust of his chin. “Are
She nodded.
“Good. He’s mad and makes noises in the night. There are still gleaners and ghouls out there. They will find him eventually. They’ll find us all if we stay.”
“You shouldn’t stay, then,” Cnan said.
The boy shrugged. “God protects,” he said. “We’ve survived this long.”
The mute girl smiled again. Cnan’s heart thudded. She had seen that smile too often around Mongol camps, decking the faces of the mindless and the broken—those kept alive to be used for lust. Men, women, and children…a smile worse than any mad leer.
Had Cnan felt free to speak her mind, she’d have cried out in protest about an arrangement that moved heaven and earth to get Illarion to safety while leaving this girl in a place where the Mongols could get to her again. But matters being as they were, she said no more.
Raphael took a clean cloth from his kit and wrapped it around Illarion’s head. “The flesh is mortifying,” he said. “But the maggots have trimmed it for you. And the girl’s chewed you a good green willow-bark mash. You’re a lucky man.”
“No,” Illarion said. He shut his eyes and crossed his mouth with a fingered X. “Take me. Empty me. I want to die.”
The boy touched the girl on the shoulder, and they turned and departed. Cnan went to the door to watch them. The boy ran from the devastated grounds without a backward glance, but the girl lingered, stooping on one knee as if bowing to a lord and looking one last time at the hovel. Then she fled. Watching from beside the door, Cnan tried not to think about where they would go.
It was difficult to move Illarion over rough territory. The journey back would take almost three days, Cnan estimated, and Raphael agreed. But once they retrieved their horses—for the woodsman proved honest—they made better time. Illarion seemed to improve. He said little now, but what he said made more sense.
He was tall, not especially heavy in build, but strong enough, Cnan sensed, to swing a plank with some abandon. His blond hair contrasted with a darker mustache and beard. His current troubles seemed traceable to the loss of his ear, the stump of which had suppurated, inflaming the side of his head and making it difficult to eat and talk. Sensing that pain was as much a problem as fever, Raphael dosed him with a bitter resinous gum and infusions of more willow bark. This gave the man some comfort and enabled him to stay on a horse for a few hours at a time.
They had hoped to push west quickly and return to the chapter house in the dense woods. However, Cnan spotted steady streams of refugees now moving along that route, harried by Mongol troops, and at her urging, they swung south for some miles before turning west again.
This brought them far too close to the Mongols’ encampment. Raphael told Cnan and Illarion that he, Feronantus, and Finn had sallied forth from the woods to reconnoiter, days before, and had seen, from the west, these very mud walls, almost Roman in style, forming a great square. “Ordu built here during the siege,” Raphael explained. “When Onghwe showed up, Ordu must have refused him permission to quarter his men, so Onghwe pitched a temporary camp on the field of battle—a terrible place. No love lost between them. When Ordu moved out, Onghwe returned to organize the gleaners and tax collectors, no fit duty for a true Mongol warrior.”
The ramparts were patrolled by regulars in pointed helmets, the forward positions occupied by troops of horsemen. They could not see the tents of the soldiers over these ramparts, but a huge hump of a felted pavilion, orange and green and brown, rose high at the center.
Finn drew their attention to a field beyond the ramparts. The area had been cleared, and what he thought might be a castle was under construction—crude gray logs forming a circle, with walkways and tiers of planks visible through the unfinished west-facing side.
“That wasn’t here a few days ago,” Raphael observed, frowning.
“Mongols don’t build castles,” Cnan said.
Raphael agreed. “It puts me in mind of one of the great arenas that the Romans built for their gladiators,” he said. “That may be where they plan to hold the competitions.”
A tall rectangular tower at the south end supported a wide viewing stand overlooking the arena and below that dropped in a sheer face to the straw-littered ground, bare but for a great reddish-purple curtain hung on the lower third.
“Feronantus read us the invitation,” Haakon said. “It spoke of a Red Veil through which victors are invited to pass.” Cnan cricked her neck and looked back at the young man. His countenance had brightened at the thought of clean battle between champions of honor. Despite all he had seen on this journey, he clung to a vision of battle as a pinnacle to be climbed, with glory or swift death at the summit. Clearly this boy was being groomed to die.
She felt no pity, however. He was a tool, and tools had their uses. When they were gone, you found another one. Getting emotional over one was to develop an attachment to it, and that was not the Binder way. Emotions sapped energy.
Illarion raised his head. “Competitions?” he asked in a voice low and heavy. His ear had stopped bleeding, but his jaw had swollen to grotesque proportions, and his fever had clearly worsened. “You mean a contest of courage between champions, to save the Western lands.”
“Yes!” Haakon said.
“It is of this I must speak to Feronantus,” Illarion said. But he would not be drawn out, even by curious Raphael, who brought out more bark mash and stuffed it into the man’s thickened cheek to ease his pain.
Past the encampment, against both Raphael and Cnan’s better judgment, they turned north and west. Both knew this would take them past the ruins of Legnica, but daylight was fading and they needed to reach the woods before nightfall.
At first, blinded by haunted low mists and rain, the rescue party encountered only more burned farmhouses and piles of bones picked clean by dogs, crows, and vultures—or perhaps hungry villagers. Raphael spoke briefly of the habits of besieged populations, but Illarion glared, and the physician stopped.
The remains of the town proper surrounded a low hill on which had been erected a crude fortification of logs and partial stone walls, with square wooden towers capped with wide roofs. The interior buildings were made of stone ramparts, with higher walls of wattle and daub. The log enclosures had been knocked in and burned, the stones pulled down; the inner buildings still smoldered even in the drizzle. The village around the “castle” had also once been protected by several log walls, now breached in so many places they jutted up from the flat land like broken teeth. Few other structures survived.
Deep forest and sanctuary lay just a few miles from the ruins, but bands of Onghwe’s Mongols and gleaners roved the broad outlying farms and neighborhoods, having plundered the town over and over again.
Clouds parted and the rain slowed, then stopped. The rescue party was forced this time to merge along the roads with another general, coagulated flow of miserable and ruined people, scattered, stumbling, stalking, staring fixedly forward or heads hung low, wailing or silent—abandoned clumps of human detritus. Haakon stayed near Finn, casting dark looks about him—nothing in his experience had prepared him for such a place. Everywhere lay the bones and rotting bodies of men, women, children, horses. Cattle. The stench was almost unbearable. Dogs and vultures were few by now; they had been hunted, beaten down with sticks, eaten. The rats were more numerous, and some were defiant, fat, and sleek, eyes flashing as they dropped their shoulders and lifted their heads to squeal at the passing horsemen.
The gleaners hunted unarmed survivors for sport, but avoided any who showed resistance, for gleaners were,
