The Mongoliad: Book Three

“God damn him,” Raphael swore. “He left us.”

“What?” Cnan said.

“He had a plan, remember?” Raphael said savagely. “It just didn’t include the rest of us.” He stalked back to his horse. “Haakon,” he called. “That horse over there. It’s yours.”

Haakon looked down at the still body of the Khagan. “What about him?” he said. “We can’t just leave him.”

“We can and will,” Raphael said as he swung painfully up into his saddle. He nodded toward the dead body of the Khagan’s horse. “It is a hunting accident. Nothing more. As long as we are not here when the Mongols come.” He snapped his reins and his horse trotted away.

Cnan and the other woman got back on their horse as well, and the Binder motioned for Haakon to follow them. He hesitated, looking back and forth between the dead body of the Khagan and his friends.

Haakon limped over to the body and pulled the Khagan’s knife free. No one was going to think hunting accident with the knife sticking out of his neck, he rationalized. He wiped the blade clean on his own ragged trousers and retrieved the sheath from Ogedei’s belt. He felt like he should cover the body or something, but there was no cloth available and so he settled for making sure the Khagan’s right eye was closed. The left had swollen shut.

He picked up his sword, even though the Khagan’s looked to be a finer blade. He was already keeping the knife. Taking the sword too was tantamount to robbing from the dead.

The knife, he told himself, was a spoil of war. A testament to what had been done.

Painfully, he jogged down the valley until he reached the bodies of Krasniy and the Torguud captain. There was a lot of blood on both men, and it was hard to tell who had died first, but neither had given up. He stopped a moment to offer a prayer to the Virgin for the red-haired giant who had been his only friend in this strange land.

He turned, whistling lightly at the Torguud captain’s pony. It pricked up its ears and regarded him warily. He limped toward it slowly, talking calmly to it. Assuring it he was friendly.

And then he stopped, casting around for something that should have been lying on the ground nearby. He raised his arm and called out to Raphael and Cnan, who circled back.

“It’s missing,” he said when they rode up.

“What is?” Raphael asked.

“The lance that the Torguud captain was carrying,” He said.

Cnan looked around too and nodded. “Haakon’s right. The Khagan’s bodyguard was carrying a banner. There were streamers attached to it, made from hair. Horsehair, I think.”

Lian spoke up from behind Cnan. “Spirit Banner,” she said in the Mongol tongue.

“What did she say?” Raphael demanded.

“She said it was a Spirit Banner,” Haakon translated.

“The symbol of the Mongol Empire,” Cnan supplied. “It belonged to Genghis Khan, Ogedei’s father.”

“Is he the one who first built the empire?” Raphael asked.

“Aye, he was. He united the clans.”

“Of course he did,” Raphael said with a heavy sigh. He shook his head. “Feronantus has it.”

“Why?” Cnan asked.

“You were there,” Raphael said. “At the Kinyen when Istvan spouted his nonsense about the All-Father.”

“All-Father?” Haakon asked. “The Norse All-Father? What are you talking about?”

“Yggdrasil,” Raphael said. “Ragnarok.” His eyes were bright, filled with tears. “Surely you know the stories, Haakon.”

They did not want to talk to him, but Kristaps was persistent. His mood and the alacrity with which his hand fell to the hilt of his sword helped, and finally he found a young Hospitaller who was willing to tell him what had happened at the bridge. He did not believe the story at first, but in the absence of any other evidence, it became the story he would tell.

The Livonians left Hunern at dawn, Kristaps at their head. They had lost half of their knights in the final battle with the Mongols-their losses were commensurate with the losses suffered by the other orders-and the company that rode south, following the river, was somber. They had survived, but the cost of their survival had been great.

It was nothing compared to Schaulen, he wanted to tell them. What had been accomplished at Hunern was a victory that the West would celebrate for generations. The battles at Legnica and Mohi had been disastrous blows to the West, and the blight of those tragedies would never truly be wiped away from the history of Christendom, but the fight at Hunern was a victory against all odds. It was a rallying cry for the rest of Christendom. The Mongol host was still on the verge of the West, and their numbers were undiminished by the loss of men at Hunern, but the horde had been bloodied.

The victory at Hunern was a symbol of hope. Evil could be vanquished by Good.

But for Kristaps, when he and his men discovered Dietrich’s horse calmly grazing along the river bank, some miles downstream from the shantytown, he knew Hunern was nothing more than a betrayal.

At Schaulen, they had been destroyed by Volquin’s hubris. He would never say as much to his men, but Kristaps knew the fault lay with the previous Heermeister. Volquin had led the men to the river; he had failed to recognize the danger of the terrain. He had been overconfident and had thought the pagans were too frightened of the Livonian Sword Brothers to band together effectively. He had underestimated what fear could make men do.

Dietrich had made that same mistake, but it was the other orders who had betrayed him.

“We ride for Rome,” he told his men after Dietrich’s horse had been retrieved.

I will destroy all of them, he vowed.

The warm sun slanted brightly through the opened face of the tent; the other three walls were drawn down, both to block the wind and to dampen the constant noise of the tent city being dismantled around them. Already half of the troops were on their way back to Germany. Frederick had ordered his pavilion to be the last one struck. He was engaged in a favorite pastime: playing chess.

It would be more fun, of course, if he actually had an opponent, but Cardinal Fieschi hadn’t responded yet to his latest request for a visit. Sadly enough, he doubted the Cardinal would be responding to any request from the Holy Roman Empire in the near future.

Frederick fingered a ginger curl near his temple, squinting at the board. He had never played against himself before, and the game had taken on an interesting perspective when he knew all the moves he was going to make.

A shadow crossed the board and he looked up, hoping that the Cardinal had decided to visit after all. A broad smile creased his face when he saw who it was instead. “Good afternoon, Lena,” he said. “You have arrived in the nick of time. I have not been able to figure out how to lure myself into exposing my queen.”

The Binder approached the table and sat down on the camp stool opposite him. “Good afternoon, Your Majesty,” she responded. She put her hand over the queen on her side-the black one-and the links of a silver chain spilled out of her palm, draping around the shoulders of the chess piece.

Frederick stared at the silver chain. Its links had been separated in one spot. “You delivered your message,” he said somewhat curtly.

“I did,” she said.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t.”

She put her head to one side, gazing with a look normally reserved for recalcitrant children. Frederick sighed. “I don’t understand why you had to actually help the Cardinal. It’s only going to give him an incentive to act outrageously, which is only going to make him more dangerous. Especially if he decides to follow through with his threat of becoming Pope.”

“He will,” Lena said. She moved a black rook, taking one of the white pawns. “Besides, would you have