The Mongoliad: Book Three

Father Rodrigo turned his attention back to the Emperor. “When they arrived at Saint Peter’s, Ferenc and Ocyrhoe were allowed to have a private audience with me. Ferenc has not seen the others since then. Ocyrhoe stayed behind after she helped us to escape.”

“Your story grows more fucking bizarre with each utterance,” Frederick said. “I’ll have to thank Fieschi for the entertainment next time I see him.”

“You’re not going to send me back to him, are you?” asked Father Rodrigo, worry darkening his face for the first time.

Frederick looked at him and thought about all the possible ways there were to answer that. “Of course not, Your Holiness,” he said at last. He turned and signaled to the boy standing by the entrance of his tent. “Before we discuss what is to happen to you, let’s eat, shall we?” He mimed eating to Ferenc, who perked up and nodded. “It is much easier to make important decisions with a full belly,” he said.

Father Rodrigo nodded absently, his empty hands resting lightly on his satchel.

CHAPTER FIFTY

Unexpected Allies

On the other side of the open field, the Mongols massed. They outnumbered the Shield-Brethren at the gate by no small number, but they appeared to be in no hurry to assault the gate again. Behind the roiling mob of infantry, horsemen rode, parading back and forth. Rallying the men, Rutger thought.

“That’s a lot of Mongols,” Knutr observed. The blocky Shield-Brethren had lost his helmet during the initial fracas and the right side of his head was sticky with blood. He grinned, and Rutger noticed one of his pupils was larger than the other. “They seem a bit… nervous.”

Knutr was correct in his assessment. The Mongol vanguard jeered and shouted at the Shield-Brethren, trying to goad the knights. Rutger didn’t understand any of the insults being shouted, but he was familiar with training- yard bullying. They were afraid, and all the bluster in the world couldn’t hide the fact that their superior numbers were not decisive enough an advantage for them to press the attack.

Rutger knew they would come eventually. The men on horseback were shouting at the infantry, whipping them into a frenzy. Calling them cowards, unworthy dogs that were an embarrassment to their Khan. How could they face their families, their fathers, if they ran from this meager band of nameless knights? Rutger knew what was being said. He had used the same words himself. Bolster their courage. Call upon their sense of duty. Inflame their rage.

The Mongols would come again. They had no choice in the end.

The cart had been hauled to one side of the gate, and the dead horses (along with a number of Mongol corpses) to the other, forming a definite channel around the gate. The Mongols would have to funnel into it in order to attack the Shield-Brethren; it was an ancient tactic that had been used successfully over and over again. Reduce the killing field so as to strip away the enemy’s advantage of numbers.

Rutger dimly remembered a siege in the Holy Land-he couldn’t even recall the name of the castle now-that had lasted six weeks. The Muslims breached the wall twice, but each time the defenders had managed to beat the invaders back, inflicting such grievous casualties that the Muslim morale quailed. It took the Muslim Sultan so long to reestablish control of his army that the Christian engineers had been able to reseal the breaches. Eventually reinforcements from Jerusalem had arrived, and the Sultan had fled.

Reinforcements. Nodding, Rutger looked over his shoulder, scanning the open ground outside the walls for signs of movement. Where were they?

With a ragged howl, the Mongols came again. Spears and arrows flew in advance of the angry mob, and Rutger heard a coughing gurgle off to his left as one of the hurled spears found a target. “Stand and hold,” he shouted, his voice ragged and hoarse. He forced his fingers to tighten around the hilt of his sword as he readied himself for the charge. It was only the boon of battle fervor that made the pain in his hands tolerable.

From the guard towers above him, his archers began to loose arrows into the front rank. He could only spare a few men for archery duty, and the six men he had chosen were known for their speed and accuracy. He couldn’t match the Mongols for numbers, but he could make each arrow count. As the Mongols charged, each arrow dropped its target, befouling the charging men who came after. In this way the Mongol line, instead of being a heavy wave that crashed over them, became a ragged and chaotic crowd, with men jostling one another as they tried to close the holes in their ranks.

The Shield-Brethren line stood firm, a waiting wall of sharp steel.

Rutger was consciously aware of the first man, a Mongol with yellow beads strung in his hair. He thrust his spear at Rutger, and Rutger sidestepped the attack, moving inside and driving his sword into the man’s open mouth. The Mongol with the yellow beads died, and that was the last man Rutger remembered as the bulk of the Mongol charge slammed into the Shield-Brethren line. His world became a chaotic blur-filled with spear points and curved swords, men shouting and screaming, and the distant awareness of his own arm, rising and falling.

He saw Knutr fall, run through by two spears, an arrow jutting from his right shoulder. Another brother went down, the front of his helmet cleaved by a Mongol sword. Rutger could not tell which of his men it was, and he felt a momentary spasm of regret as the press of bodies surged over the fallen knight. The Mongols kept coming, slowly forcing the Shield-Brethren back.

Rutger’s maille saved him from a sword stroke to his left side that nonetheless sent ripples of pain through his body. He clamped his arm down, trapping the blade against his body, and wrenched it out of his attacker’s hand. He buried a hand’s worth of blade into the man’s befuddled face.

That was when he heard the shouts, not from in front of him, but from behind. “Clear the way!”

Rutger grasped the shoulder of the man next to him and shoved him violently against the inside wall of the gate. The desperate move saved both of them as a thunder of horses stormed past. He caught sight of a moving banner of white and silver, the riders all dressed in gleaming white surcoats. The host of horsemen struck the Mongols like a battering ram, splintering them into a disorganized mob. Those who weren’t trampled outright fled before the onslaught of the freshly arrived knights.

As the tide of battle turned, one of the knights fought his way back to the gate. His sword was drenched with blood, and it matched the image stitched proudly across his blood-stained surcoat. The crimson sword. Above it was an equally red cross.

The sigil of the Fratres Militiae Christi Livoniae. The Sword Brothers.

The knight cleared his sword of blood, sheathed it, and pushed his helm up. Rutger stared in anger at the face revealed-the face of the man who brutally butchered one of their own in the Khan’s arena.

These were not the reinforcements he had expected.

When Heermeister Dietrich did not return from his fool’s errand, Kristaps had taken charge of the Livonian host in Hunern. He sent a quartet of men to investigate the Heermeister’s absence on the off chance that Dietrich had only been delayed, and the rest he set to dismantling their camp. Regardless of the success or failure of the Heermeister’s audience with the dissolute Khan, it was time to leave Hunern. The riots following his fight in the arena had upset the delicate balance in the tent city.

It was all an illusion anyway. The Mongols were wolves, and they looked upon the West as an unguarded flock of wooly sheep. Kristaps had seen the handiwork of the Mongol Empire in Kiev; he knew of its rapacious appetite. The West ran around in circles, bleating in foolish ignorance. They had been seduced by the Khan’s facile lure of martial combat, thinking that a single victory in the arena would save them.

He had shown them otherwise, hadn’t he? The death of one of the Shield-Brethren had brought their tenuous truce to a bloody end. And now they saw the true nature of the wolves from the East. Now they knew they had no choice but to fight.

Yet, Dietrich wanted to run away. The coward.