in fact, the worst of cowards, brave only around the dead and dying. Spying a gleaner stripping a half-dead woman of her upper garments, Finn rode out over the mud and burned straw and slew the wretch with a single downstroke of his sword. Then, swinging his horse about, with a sharp cry and another stroke, he dispatched the woman. Cursing, he returned to the group, his cheeks streaked with tears.
Raphael was about to chide him for this foolishness, but instead clamped his jaw tight and looked away. “Worse to come,” he warned.
Cnan knew these gleaners and their types well enough that she could pick them out even in a healthy city. Not always were they the furtive criminals or crazed drunks. Indeed, within her short life, she had seen drunks rise to glorious battle and city fathers turn into ghouls. War did not just level, it plowed the field, raising the muck and sinking the stubble.
The general flow of misery lurched westward. They were forsaking lands that would not be productive for generations, avoiding paths and farm roads patrolled by regular Mongol troops.
Mounted and armed, the rescue party was as kings and princes compared to this rabble and so felt no need to act furtive. Someone might be hungry and desperate enough to attack them, but Raphael felt that it was best to continue to boldly ride straight through and then, once in the woods, proceed directly to the chapter house.
The style of movement that Cnan preferred, which Raphael called “sneaking,” made her uneasy with this course. Surprisingly, Finn was also unhappy—unnerved by the monstrous depredation and this endless spectacle of cruelty.
Near the western limits of the town, part of a stone perimeter wall still stood, built to withstand invasions coming out of the setting sun. Moving into the lee of this wall, they slowed as their horses skittishly avoided a rag- ribboned, sinew-strung litter of bones and moldering heads. Even in this carnage, the pitiful remains did not look or feel proper. They were too small…skulls crushed by a single blow…their garb not the undergarments of warriors or townspeople, but light, like nightwear.
Haakon pulled on the reins of his horse, eyes wild, until he fastened his look on Finn, then on Raphael—then on Cnan, who wrinkled her features. “Don’t look,” she said, “if you can’t bear it.”
Adam’s apple bobbing, Haakon lifted his eyes to the gray, misting clouds. Illarion did the same, touching his huge cheek and missing ear, as if to listen to faraway music.
These were the bones of children, from infants to toddlers to adolescents, and they stretched all along the wall, mounding near the base. Scores of children. An entire town’s future, crushed, broken, rotting in the mud.
Cnan knew what had happened here. She had heard stories out of the Far East, at the limits of her ranging. With the hilltop fort broken and the other walls breached, the citizens had brought the infants and youth of Legnica to this final and strongest wall, in the last days. Near the end, as the Mongols swept in from behind and then all around, torturing and killing all in their path, the soldiers and the last of the parents had sacrificed the young that they might not suffer a worse fate. Their crowns had been bashed by hammers or hilts, then their throats cut clean like so many shoats, ten or twenty at a time, the bodies then heaved from the rampart.
Possibly the townspeople had harbored a faint hope of arousing pity within the Mongols or their lackeys, but that was impossible, Cnan knew. The tiger would pity the fawn, the wolf would weep over its lamb before Mongol would cringe at the corpse of a child.
Haakon made small sounds deep in his throat. Surely hell itself lay not far below this stinking ossuary, bubbling up toward the world’s incomprehensible evil. None of the rescue party wanted to tarry among these dead. The vengeance of their young, unshaped ghosts might be worse than that of any Mongol.
They rode away from the wall and the bones as quickly as they could—corrupt mud spattering from the hooves of the horses and flecking their faces and armor—to reach the shelter of the thick woods before nightfall.
Cnan wiped a dollop of ooze from her cheek. It was tinted red with blood.
Dusk and more mist stole over them as they crossed the glacis of cleared land. The refugees had flowed south, and the old field of battle seemed deserted of all but the scattered bones of Legnica’s defenders. Their path was clear.
Cnan was about to release the breath in her tight chest when, directly ahead of her, pale and vivid in the twilight, Finn’s hand flew up like a falcon ready to swoop down on prey. She had learned to respect that gesture; it meant that his ears had picked up a trace of something so faint that he risked losing it by shushing them.
The party drew to a halt to let him listen.
Finn’s hand descended and made the prancing gesture that meant
Cnan dismounted. She knew better than to try to outride what was coming. Haakon drew his greatsword.
Finn’s hands now told them by darts and swoops that the ponies were not in one place, but all around. Cnan could finally hear their hooves, then the low voices of the men who had been quietly riding to surround their party. She bent her knees, dropping to a squat, and then to all fours, pulling her dark cape around her. They had drawn the attention of a scouting party. Perhaps a sentry had sighted them or some scavenger had ratted them out, hoping to purloin some small item of value once the Mongols were finished. Or perhaps someone had reported Finn’s attack on the gleaner.
No matter. Cnan could see it clearly. Her companions would end up like hedgehogs, bristling with arrows, but she would hide among their corpses, then scurry to the woods before the sentinels caught her.
Raphael nudged his mount forward and laid his hand on Haakon’s forearm. The boy’s drawn sword, shining like an icicle in the twilight, would make him the first target of the archers. Haakon lowered the blade, nodding.
A little squadron of Mongols filed into position between the rescue party and the trees. Cnan reckoned she might still be able to steal past them during the confusion of the fight, but some troubled part of her soul was telling her to stay with her comrades.
“The second one, in the armor that looks like fish scales,” she said in low tones. “He is rich. Their leader.”
“We charge him, then,” Haakon proposed.
“And die in a cloud of arrows before we get halfway,” Raphael said.
“On
They did as Illarion instructed. The Ruthenian rode stiffly, steadily, at a plodding pace, his great hollow eyes staring straight ahead.
A single armored Mongol rode ahead of the band, grinning, striped bow held out in one hand, as if signaling peace, friendship. A chief, no doubt. Cnan counted their opponents. Fifteen horse-mounted bowmen.
Less than a hundred paces now separated the groups.
To bar the Ruthenian’s path, the chief crabbed his pony sideways.
Illarion continued straight on, his horse snorting and tossing his head.
She thought she understood Illarion’s strategy: by moving so, he projected dogged purpose, hopefully slowing the Mongols from making a pincered feint to scatter their smaller party. If the Ruthenian turned or rode too quickly, the Mongols would instinctively rush in and give chase like dogs coursing a hind.
The chief twitched his bow left, right, then up. He dropped back. The Mongol squadron finally split to the right and left, then began to draw in like a slow snare or a purse string against their flanks and rear, fifty paces, thirty paces… close enough that their first arrows would be certain to strike home, yet not close enough to bring them within range of Haakon’s bright sword.
The chief deftly spun his pony, as if daring them to chase after and catch him,
Cnan did not understand what Illarion proposed to do when he reached the chief. Perhaps swing on him and die, giving the others some chance of reaching the woods?
Less than five paces now separated Illarion and the chief.
With a sweep of his arm, Illarion drew back the cloak that had swathed him for much of the last two days
