The Mongoliad: Book Two

room-whose was that?

He raised his head in confusion, blinking as sweat from his scalp dripped into his eyes. Yes, he was in his own room, but in the hectic, unconscious thrash of his nightmare, he had actually dragged himself off his bed and into this cooler corner of the chamber. A wave of nausea overwhelmed him as he realized that scorpion could have been scuttling over him as he thrashed, and he would now be dying from the sting. Perhaps he had been stung, and that explained the memory of his vision. Perversely, he wanted to pull aside the plaster and stone and find that scorpion, poke it, taunt it to arch its awful dun-colored tail; death was welcome compared to the dread responsibility he’d been given by the furious, wheeling angels watching over him at Mohi.

He laid his head back on the stone floor. The scorpion was far less terrifying than the burden of his nightmare. Were there more scorpions in this room? In another? Did a scorpion’s bite always mean death? Would a scorpion attack a human on instinct, or did it need to be provoked?

An older voice inside him-it sounded like the Archbishop, though Rodrigo knew that it wasn’t-rebuked him. Quoniam iniquitates meae supergressae sunt caput meum. The burden of one’s sins was a heavy weight to bear. Grave gravatae, he thought, remembering the next line of the Psalm. He had come to believe, over the course of the journey to Rome, that if he delivered his message, his prophecy, to the Pope, then he himself would be relieved of it, and he would have earned a peaceful death, in the city of his youth. All he wanted was rest. Surely the furious angels would let him rest once he had turned over his fearsome message to Christ’s representative on Earth.

But Gregory was dead, and no one had been chosen to replace him, and that required Rodrigo to remain alive, the only soul who knew the future, the only one who knew what had to happen, what had to be done. God had killed Gregory to keep Rodrigo on the hook. He should have been honored and humbled that he was singled out for this momentous job, but he felt none of those emotions. He only felt hollow, as if Rodrigo the man was steadily being devoured by the burden.

All that remained was the burning fervor of the message.

20

A Simple Plan

During the night, Raphael feared that Vera-like Alena-was taking a turn for the worse. Her wounds seemed to be winning; her fever spiked, her skin grew pale and damp, and her eyes fluttered whenever she managed to come up out of a sleep very near to death itself. The change in Vera saddened Raphael greatly. He knew he should not allow himself to be so troubled by her condition. This was not the first bedside vigil he had kept, and he knew the danger of the bond that could be created between two people. Death was seldom just or predictable when it came to loved ones.

Still, he remained, renewing candles as they guttered and died, and fading in and out of his own napping reverie, but with a hand always on her wrist and another at her forehead. To his surprise, as night merged into early dawn, there came a scuffling noise before the door of the drafty old house-then, a mouse-gentle knock. Feronantus answered and led in a group of men and women-Khazars who lived in the neighborhood. They brought in two generous bowls draped with woven cloths and containing rich broth and gruel, which Raphael gratefully accepted. Feronantus thanked them for their help and led the curious group of five back to the door, managing to persuade them through signs that it was best if Vera was not disturbed.

Raphael found their visit remarkable. A much safer course would have been for the Khazars to turn them over to the Mongols, for Graymane’s jaghun would not have stopped at the Volga. They likely had crossed at the nearest convenient ford and even now were hunting them, or else preparing another ambush.

Raphael fed broth in measured spoonfuls to the Shield-Maiden. Her lips opened, and by slow degrees, she consumed a third of the bowl, but when he tried some gruel, she swung her head aside and almost knocked the bowl from his hand-a sign he found encouraging. He put aside both bowls and resumed his vigil, until a thin shaft of sun through a far window struck his eye-and simultaneously, the woman stirred and spoke.

“Graymane’s Mongols must have guessed our plan,” Vera said. With his aid, she sat up, looked around with half-focused eyes, and then motioned with a raised hand not for broth this time, he determined, but gruel. “They scouted the ground and laid their ambush well.” She ate sparingly of the pasty mixture, then turned her full attention to him. “I thought it was you. Always…”

Feronantus, straddling a stool beside the cot, folded his arms and looked at Raphael with a slight smile.

“It is my duty,” Raphael said, and immediately felt awkward. Both Vera and Feronantus knew otherwise; straightforward and direct, she possessed neither the guiles nor the protections of Raphael’s own civil manners.

“We changed course to avoid their first patrol and rode directly into a canyon with no exit,” she continued. “We should have seen it coming, but they had already slain Sister Sofiya, our forward scout…” Her voice trailed off, and she devoted a few moments to staring dully into empty space-something she did whenever she spoke of her sisters who had fallen in battle.

Which now meant all of them, for during the early hours of the night, the red lines creeping up Alena’s arm from her infected wound had reached her armpit and then, Raphael guessed, her heart. She had died in a series of backbreaking convulsions so terrible that Raphael knew he would replay them in nightmares for weeks to come. Lockjaw was not such a bad way to die if it affected only the muscles of the jaw; what horrified Raphael was its effect on the great sinews of the spine.

“The details are unimportant…I cannot recite them anyway without turning this conversation into a funeral mass…and that would last the whole day long,” Vera finally said.

Feronantus and Percival exchanged a look. Raphael knew what they were thinking: Good, the poor woman is coming around; she understands the danger and the need for haste.

Vera took more broth and a little more gruel. Her face recovered some of its color, and her hands took up the wooden spoon so she could feed herself, but Raphael leaned in close so that she did not have to raise her voice to be heard.

“Rather than let ourselves be cut to pieces at the Mongols’ leisure, we mounted a charge into what seemed the weakest part of their force,” she said.

Raphael found himself wishing he could have been there to witness the foolish and beautiful glory of that charge.

“Once we made contact,” she said, oblivious to his gaze, “we were able to cut our way through, killing perhaps a dozen. Escape to the west was impossible. They could retreat at will and shoot arrows at us. Only by confining them against the river could we fight at close quarters. So we continued making that way, losing Shield- Maidens one after another, and defeated all who stood between us and the water. It was an effective way-the only way-to inflict losses upon Mongols.

“But they were too many. In time, it became clear we would not be able to scatter them completely. The river, then, became our only hope. We broke through their line once more and made a leapfrogging retreat to a place where trees and shrubs grew dense along the bank. Toward the end…all became confused. There were six of us, then four…” Her eyes closed. “My Shield-Maidens submitted to the sword of a sister, who then cut her own throat, rather than be harried and tormented by prancing, grimacing Mongols.”

She lay back and stared up at the ceiling. Bowl and spoon clattered to the floor before Raphael could catch them. “At the end, it was just Alena and me, concealed in the bushes. We stripped off our armor. Darkness came, a mercy. We slipped quietly into the Volga and swam. The current carried us miles downstream before we could cross and fetched us up near a village. The adventure that brought us from there to here would make for another interesting story, but-”

“But the only part of it that matters,” Feronantus said, “is whether you were able to cover your traces. Graymane would have crossed the river at first light yesterday.” He glanced toward a rude hole in the wall where a window had once stood. The pink light of dawn was warming to gold. The Mongols had been on this bank of the Volga for twenty-four hours. “His blood is up, and having gained the Vor, he is not the