The Mongoliad: Book Two

of its obscurity.”

“A prison? Why?”

“To keep us focused, to keep our spirits and minds hungry. We are fed, as you can see, but many other comforts have been taken from us.” Somercotes smiled. “It stays hot. All this stone. The walls soak up the sun during the day, and it takes so very long for the heat to fade. Some of us have had some experience with fasting and prayer. Being sequestered isn’t that much of a hardship. But the heat? The heat will break all of our spirits eventually.” Somercotes shifted on his makeshift bench. “But as to why we are here, is that not self-evident to you?”

Rodrigo shook his head. “Self-evident? No. Such truth is obscured both by these walls and the darkness in which I find myself.”

Somercotes was silent for a moment, and when he spoke again, his voice was much softer. Almost conspiratorial. “Why have you come to Rome?”

“I have a message for the Pope,” Rodrigo said. “As well as news from the north.”

“Which Pope?”

“The Christian Pope. The only Pope there is-Gregory IX,” Rodrigo replied. “I don’t-”

“Gregory is dead,” Somercotes interrupted. “There is no Pope in the Vatican.” He indicated the room around them. “And we are imprisoned here until we elect a successor.”

6

An Affable Excursion

Andreas took three of the Shield-Brethren initiates and went overland, eschewing horses in favor of being able to move more stealthily through the wooded terrain. Eilif had previously scouted the river that rambled across the fields north of the ruins of Koischwitz, and he led the squad to a low spot in the fields where the stream was shallow. The water was warm, and with their boots and gear clutched in their arms, they waded across.

Squatting behind a scraggly hedge not far from a mound of burned timber, they dried off and donned their disguises. Over linen undershirts, they wore brigandines-sleeveless vests fitted with stiffened leather and thin plates of metal. They wouldn’t protect one’s vitals as well as a maille shirt, but they weren’t as bulky and made less noise. Over the armor, they wore loose gambesons and cloaks-the most threadbare and patchwork ones they could find among the brothers at the chapter house. Andreas opted for a fustian robe instead, one he had dragged through a fresh pile of horse shit before they had left, much to the dismay of the others. To further his disguise as a nomadic priest, he wore a wooden cross he had made earlier that morning from two pieces of wood, freshly cut from an ash branch, and a long leather cord.

Eilif, Styg, and Maks had bows in addition to their arming swords and knives; Andreas tucked a knife into the belt he wore under his robe, and since it would be difficult to draw the blade quickly should he need to protect himself, he also had a crooked walking stick. It was shorter and not as straight as he would have liked, but it was in keeping with his disguise.

Once dressed, Andreas put his hand over his heart and gave a quick nod of farewell to the others. With a jaunty spring in his step and whistling a half-remembered Genoan sailing song, he strode off toward the hazy smudge on the southern horizon that was the tent city of Hunern. He walked like a man who did not care what lay behind him, and should he have looked, there would have been no sign of the others.

They had vanished, like the morning mist under the gaze of the warm sun.

It is going to be a warm day, Andreas noted as he walked. He could smell the pungent effluvium of the makeshift city already-the miasma of unwashed bodies, offal, fermenting ale, and cook fires rolling across the fields like a slow-moving wave.

Moisture from the previous night’s rain darkened his robe as he walked through the weeds and brush, and the ground squelched here and there beneath his feet. The ground was only going to get muddier as he got closer, and he was reminded of the long walk up Mount Tabor more than a decade ago.

It had been in the fall, a turning of the season that had been ushered in by a week of torrential rain. They would have all drowned in the mud had they not gained the high ground and taken the citadel. Was the rain a gift or a warning from God? the more pious of them had wondered.

Andreas thought they worried too much about God’s design.

Rutger, the grizzled quartermaster who oversaw the Shield-Brethren chapter house outside of Legnica, was one of those earnest thinkers. He had argued with Andreas for several hours last night about sending a party to Hunern. Andreas understood the man’s position; after all, it was the same rhetoric he had heard many times from the Electi at Petraathen. It was our duty to guard and protect, to take no side in a conflict.

To be invisible.

To what end? Andreas had asked. The answer had been hollow, empty words that had been repeated so often they had lost their meaning. To Andreas, the true answer had been clear enough, and he had not stayed in Petraathen overlong after his return from his pilgrimage. Perhaps it was his own wanderlust that put his feet on the road again, his own inexperience and youthful exuberance that made him yearn for the company of more open-minded men, and perhaps what drove him out was his hubris as well-his dissatisfaction with the concept of hiding as a viable defensive strategy.

He had hoped that his northern brothers from Tyrshammar were different, and he had been disappointed when he had arrived at the Legnica chapter house to find those who might have been like-minded had already left, gone on some secret mission.

Rutger, to his credit, had shown that he could change his mind. Eventually.

The other day, a messenger had arrived from Hunern, a young boy with two letters from a man who claimed to be a Flower Knight-an order of knights whom none of the Shield-Brethren had any familiarity with. The letters were conflicting, and as they learned from the boy, very likely the result of some mischief by the Grandmaster of the Fratres Militiae Christi Livoniae. One stated that Haakon, the young Shield-Brethren who had disappeared through the Red Veil in the arena following his victory, had been slain by the Mongols; the other asked for a meeting between the Shield-Brethren and the Flower Knight. Andreas’s argument with Rutger was that the Shield-Brethren needed to discern which was the true message- though it was not hard to guess which one was most likely crafted by the Livonians.

Volquin, the last Heermeister of that order, had been an arrogant prick, and more than one flagon had been raised at Petraathen when they heard of the Livonian defeat at Schaulen. The death of any knight was a loss, but no one shed any tears when the Fratres Militiae Christi Livoniae were scattered. Andreas was no stranger to stupid brutality in leadership-he could list Cairo, Jerusalem, the assault on Mount Tabor, and at Cortenuova, even, as examples. In most cases, it was a wasteful tragedy when men were sent to their deaths by their ignoble commanders, but all of the knights serving Volquin had actually chosen to stay with the man. Their deaths were…just. And the Livonians, a blight upon the history of the martial fighting orders, had been dissolved.

Or so they had thought.

We cannot be blind, he had argued with Rutger. We have to know whom we face.

And Rutger had finally acquiesced. Take three men, he had said. Find out their intent. Do not engage them.

Of course not, Andreas had replied.

Shortly after wandering into the sprawling outskirts of the city that surrounded the Mongolian arena, Andreas spotted a grimy boy watching him. He was a scrawny lad, and he lacked a shirt-though, judging by the sun- darkened color of his skin, he was not concerned overmuch by its loss. Andreas first spotted him perched on a cracked rain barrel near a pair of tents that had once been blue; shortly thereafter, he saw the boy again, crouching behind a block of rubble next to a misshapen oven cobbled together from cracked brick and charred stone.