The Mongoliad: Book Two

topped by swifting clouds, or by nothing but eye-draining blue sky. Raphael’s mind, seeking stimulation, rooted around in his memories, perversely hunting out those that were freshest and most troubling-the circumstances surrounding Roger’s death.

There had been no fixed boundary, no moment when they had crossed over a river or a ridge and seen the steppe stretching before them. Rather, during the weeks that they had ridden east in the company of Vera and a dozen other Shield-Maidens, the land had insensibly grown flatter, the rivers more widely spaced, the patches of forest smaller and sparser. Cultivated fields, which earlier in the journey had been packed up against one another like stones in a rubble wall, spread apart, dwindled to isolated farmsteads like islands in a sea, and then vanished altogether.

One day, it occurred to Raphael that he had not seen a farm or a forest in nearly a week, just the occasional lonely tree or dugout shack, swallowed up in grass-endless grass, creeping up over the horizon, then falling back behind them.

Out here, only the grass had a voice. Human sounds seemed to fade to whispers, and the whispers were swallowed in turn by the rustle and hiss of the grass in the steady, slight winds. The thought of months of this steady, low hiss depressed him, drove him back again and again to the awful memories…until, in desperation, Raphael finally decided that he would listen closely to the hiss and study the voice of the grass as he might a foreign language.

He became sensitive to different varieties and listened to what they said about the weather and the soil. Closer to Kiev, where the climate had been moist enough to support farms, the wild places had been dominated by feather grass, a robust and luxuriant species that, at this time of year, was topped by silky blond fibers that purred in the wind. Mixed in with it was a good deal of wild rye, wheat, and barley-not such as could sustain human life, but enough to give Raphael an idea of how the descendants of Adam had first come to cultivate such plants and learn the art of making bread. As they went on, making their course a bit south of true east, the climate became more arid and the fur of grass became mangy, with patches of bare earth showing through. The grass here was stunted, with finer shafts and less luxuriant tops, growing in stiff clumps instead of a carpet. Rising above these spiky tufts from place to place were fragrant shrubs, thigh high, which elicited some interest from Yasper at first: he identified them as wormwood and seemed to know something of their properties. After he had seen a thousand, then ten thousand of these go by, he no longer found them remarkable and stopped taking samples.

Vera was their guide. She had traveled in these parts before. Her order maintained old maps and manuscripts, compiled by travelers of yore, which she had studied since the nuns had first taught her to read. Many of them told tales of a great empire, the Khazars, who had once controlled this territory, holding at bay the Mahometans and Persians in the south, the Turks in the east, and the Slavs in the west, until the great Sviatoslav, at the head of an army bolstered in part by Vera’s predecessors, had broken their power. Now surprisingly little trace of them remained. Or perhaps the landscape was actually dotted with ruined cities, which Vera was taking care to avoid. Some days the only signs that humans had ever inhabited these places were the occasional kurgans, the burial mounds left by the steppe people as monuments to kings, heroes, and-to judge from the size of some of them-fallen armies. It was these, more than anything, that troubled Raphael’s mind. For the last thing they had done before riding out of the gates of Kiev had been to bury Roger in the churchyard at the top of the hill, and like all fresh graves, this one had looked like a long, low mound-a small kurgan that would, in time, sink into the earth like all the others.

When he thought of this, his hand would sometimes stray to the dagger in his belt. Not to its hilt, but to the blade, which he could feel through the leather scabbard. His fingers would trace its outlines and he would wonder whether this steel had been responsible for Roger’s death. For there had been a moment, during the fight in the dark, when Raphael had collided with someone-someone armed and moving with a purpose-and his arm had lashed out unthinkingly and driven this blade home in a body. He was sure of that. He had not struck a limb, but a torso. He could remember how the grip had twisted slightly in his hand as the blade found its way between ribs. Raphael’s fist had thumped against the torso as the blade had gone in to its hilt. And that torso, he was quite certain, had not been protected by maille.

During this endless ride across the ruins of the Khazars’ empire, it happened a hundred times that, while ostensibly thinking of something else, he would glance down to find his fingers tracing the outline of that blade and realize that some part of his mind was reliving the fight in the tunnels yet again. When this happened, he would always tell himself the same thing: it meant nothing. Not all of the Livonians had worn maille. They had been accompanied by local monks, who, of course, didn’t even own maille.

Had they not been so worried that the Shield-Maidens above were being attacked, they might have stayed down there and sorted through the bodies, and Raphael would have found one, unarmored, with a small but fatal dagger wound in the ribs. But it had not happened that way. They had rushed up through the cellars of the priory to find nothing amiss and Feronantus and the other members of the party awaiting their return. Others had gone down later to retrieve the bodies. The thought that he might have slain Roger in the dark had not fully entered Raphael’s mind until late that night, when he’d seen it in a nightmare, and by that point, all of the corpses had been put under the ground except for that of Roger, who was allowed to lie in state in the church while they prepared a proper burial. Raphael had succumbed to what he freely admitted was a species of moral cowardice: he had not inspected the body, not looked for the wound that had done his friend in, because he was afraid of what he would find. The image of that hypothetical dagger wound was now burnt into his mind like a stigma.

8

Naked Upon the Steppe

Nothing but a vast emptiness, as if he lay naked on the steppes and the stars had all gone out…

Ogedei sat up with a gasp and then immediately fell onto his side, retching and puking. His head was caught in the grip of a horrid demon, squeezing his brain like it was wringing juice from a piece of fruit. His skin was hard and brittle over bones that seemed to smolder. Breathing was both painful and thrilling, as if he were stealing each inhalation, past the number he had been allotted for his life. He gasped and spat, trying to rid himself of the sour- tasting bile on the back of his tongue. His cheeks ached, and his vision was filled with dancing motes.

“You’re awake.” A voice from Heaven, proclaiming a great truth that he now had to live up to. Ogedei managed a guttural groan and rolled onto his back, fighting a wave of nausea that threatened to send him to the edge of the bed again.

“I have died,” Ogedei whispered.

“Not quite,” the voice replied. “Though, for a while, I was not certain you would ever wake.”

Ogedei turned his head slightly and peered around for the source of the voice. The speaker had admitted uncertainty, a lack of all-seeing knowledge. The voice could not be divine in origin; it came from a man’s throat.

He lay in a ger, the air around him heavy with smoke. A censer hung from the ceiling, seeping a hazy fog from a smoldering patch of herbs. The fog made the air fragrant and pleasing, but harder to breathe. Other braziers glowed, dull red splotches that cast dull shadows on the rough hide of the ger walls.

Sitting on a low stool near his bed was the young whelp of Chagatai’s.

Ogedei’s eyes drooped, suddenly heavy, and with a great effort, he forced them open again, forced himself to focus on the face of Gansukh.

“Where am I?” he demanded.

Gansukh roused himself at Ogedei’s question, sitting more upright. “My Khan,” he said, “you were not yourself last night. I had to escort you away…to someplace safe. Where you would not be disturbed. While you recovered from the-”

Ogedei squeezed his eyes shut and winced as sharp jabs of pain lanced back through his head. He dimly recalled a dancer-no, he had been the one dancing-and let out a long sigh as he realized there could be any number of indignities that Gansukh was not telling him.