The Mongoliad: Book Three

he not denied her the ability to defend herself by stealing the very dagger she now held in her hand? Had he not wanted to keep her as a slave? It didn’t matter how much she taught him about how to speak, how to dress, how to be civilized; he was still a barbarian, a dog with blood on his face and hands.

She gripped the dagger tight, the way Gansukh had taught her.

She looked at Luo’s sweat-slicked face, and her stomach twisted as she realized his expression was just as alien. His eager anticipation of Gansukh’s death sickened her.

But he was one of her own countrymen-her rescuer. He was going to help her get back to China. Back to her family. She was going to be free. All she had to do was kill one man. One Mongol.

“Kill him,” Luo barked. He jerked Gansukh back, leaning forward as he did so. His face was so close to Gansukh’s, his mouth nearly touching the Mongol’s ear. “Watch her,” he laughed in Gansukh’s ear. “I want you to see your death.”

Gansukh surged against Luo, but he had little strength and less leverage. The Chinese man held Gansukh tight, his knee in the middle of Gansukh’s back. Gansukh snorted, blowing blood and snot out of his impacted nose; his open eye staring wildly at Lian.

She licked her dry lips and stepped forward, swinging the dagger from left to right. Her swing was slow and weak, and Luo grimaced as he watched her halfhearted attack. She was too far away, and the blade missed Gansukh’s neck.

Luo was starting to say something, his lips curled in an ugly snarl, when he realized she wasn’t finished. Having come as close as she dared to the Chinese commander, she stabbed savagely upward, the way Gansukh had taught her, driving the dagger deep into Luo’s neck.

CHAPTER SIX

A Colorful Tongue

You are young to have gone through so much loss,” Lena said when Ocyrhoe finished telling her story. “I hope you know how strong you are.”

Ocyrhoe shook her head. “I am not strong. I am small and weak, and that is why they didn’t come for me. I don’t know anything. I was not worth hunting.”

“You were the only one left, dear child, and you managed not only to survive but to bring a message out,” Lena stared intently at Ocyrhoe. “You taught yourself to hear within the silence. While you lack an understanding of certain rituals and the signs we use to identify ourselves to one another, you have innate and remarkable skills.” She laughed gently. “They should be frightened of you. Not the other way around.”

Ocyrhoe should have been pleased by such compliments, but the only thing she felt was deep exhaustion. It seemed ironic now, how eager she’d been to tell her story to a kin-sister, but it was so tiring. She had wanted to find out what was going on in Rome, but she actually had more information than anyone else. The more she learned, it seemed, the less she understood.

Lena wasn’t finished with her questions. “What happened when it was only you?”

Ocyrhoe exhaled, letting the words run out of her in a tumbling rush to be done. She knew she was babbling, but she didn’t care. “I don’t even remember what happened next. I don’t know what I ate, or where I slept, or if it was too hot or cold. The days were a blur. The Bear-” she stopped, flustered at her use of the nickname. How would this woman know who she meant? “The Senator,” she corrected. “Senator Matteo Orsini. His men had a list, I knew it as plainly as I knew I was the last one, and I couldn’t go anywhere I had been before. All I could do was practice my lessons. Learn the faces. Listen to the city. Stay out of sight. Stay alive.

“I would visit the statue of Minerva, because I remembered that Varinia had said that she watched over us. I didn’t know what else to do; maybe if I prayed…” She shrugged, summarizing her frustration and helplessness in that simple motion. “But why did I do that?” she continued. “I don’t really know. One day there was a pigeon with a message that said, Where are my eyes in Rome? Had one of my other sisters made it to Palermo? I didn’t know. And so I kept watch. I kept waiting until-”

Until the priest and Ferenc had arrived, and in the few days since-how many days? One? Two? — everything had changed.

“Enough,” Lena said. “I have asked too much of you already, I can tell. Let me send in some food, and then I shall inquire about someone who speaks your friend’s language. I have questions for him.”

When Lena left, Ocyrhoe sat with Ferenc on the cool and dry ground. They leaned against one another, their fingers tapping on the other’s skin. She told him as much as she could: the woman was a friend, another like her, and they had been talking about what had happened to others like them; she had gone to fetch them food and someone who spoke his tongue; afterward, they would return to Rome, probably with armed soldiers, to rescue Father Rodrigo from the Septizodium. Ferenc was remarkably patient throughout the lengthy process of Ocyrhoe telling him all this. If he were a tracker or a hunter, she assumed he should have been more intent on knowing what the goal was, but he appeared quite placid. He only showed some urgency when the food arrived; he ate quickly, as if he feared the hovering page boys might try to snatch the plates away before he was finished. He kept a protective eye on her too; otherwise he may as well have been one of the camp stools, so quiet and still he was.

She realized her affection for him went deeper than the simple love one had for an attentive pet.

When they finished eating, the page boys took away all the dishes, and they were left alone with a guard standing outside the tent. Dimly Ocyrhoe could hear the joyless sounds of camp life going on around them, and the light outside the open tent flap finally softened to an amber tint. A page boy came in and lit the lantern, and a hint of cool air began to circulate through the tent.

“Lena?” Ferenc asked and Ocyrhoe almost jumped; he had been silent so long.

“She wanted to find a Magyar speaker,” she said, and then signed on his arm. “She wants to talk to you.”

“About my mother,” Ferenc signed back, and gave her a questioning look. When she nodded, he signed, “My mother is dead.”

Ocyrhoe grimaced and patted the back of his hand. “Mine too,” she sighed.

“She was killed by the invaders,” Ferenc added.

Ocyrhoe snapped out of her maudlin remembrance of Auntie coaching her on how to use the needle and thread. “The invaders,” she signed. “The invaders who also made your priest body-sick and mind-sick.”

Ferenc nodded.

Her life, her focus, had always been about the city of Rome. She knew there were lands beyond; Auntie had taken her to another woman’s house on occasion to look at maps, and Auntie had wanted her to memorize them, but she had always found it so hard to make sense of the jagged lines. She knew that Binders were sent to other places, like the ones named on these maps, but she was a child of Rome, and there was always so much happening there. Her attention had never had occasion to wander far, and recent events seemed so enormously significant: the death of the Pope, the incarceration of the Cardinals, the destruction of the Binder network, the Emperor’s blockade of the city. What could possibly be more significant? Even the worried murmurs in the marketplaces about vicious, keen-eyed invaders from the East seemed so distant and so… unimportant. The threat of these Mongols was only something that strangers visiting from far-off places concerned themselves with.

But the Mongols had destroyed Ferenc’s life, and Ferenc was not a stranger.

Ferenc touched her cheek, and she started. “You are staring at me,” he signed, a self-conscious, slightly lopsided smile tugging at his mouth.

“Sorry,” she signed hurriedly. “I am sad for you.”

At that moment, there was a movement by the tent flap, and they both scrambled to their feet. Ferenc looked embarrassed, and she thought it was not entirely because he hadn’t noticed the approach of all the people