The Mongoliad: Book Three

This was the past and the future, and Rodrigo was seeing all of it now.

All of the Cardinals had voted except Cardinal Sinibaldo Fieschi. No doubt they assumed he was waiting until the end to make some kind of dramatic flourish, since it went without saying that he would vote for Bonaventura.

But he could count as well as Castiglione, and read men’s faces better than anyone else in the room. If Somercotes were still alive, the Englishman would have translated Castiglione’s grandstanding into a guaranteed victory. But Somercotes, thank Heaven, had gone to his reward, and Fieschi had no illusions about the impact of Castiglione’s brief flare of leadership.

He thought about the demented priest, wandering around somewhere inside the basilica. Somercotes had taken the man by the collar so easily. If I had gotten to him first, he thought, he would have been my puppet. I would have hidden the ring, passed him off for a Cardinal, told him who to vote for… and then that fortuitous accident with the scorpions would have made everything so much easier. Idiots like da Capua-so easily swayed by the most puerile of mummery-would have taken the priest’s word as gold, and voted as he told them-the candidate I would have already suggested to him! It would have been an easy victory for Bonaventura.

Of course, Bonaventura had never been his favorite. He was a necessary tool, that was all. A mediocre instrument with which to accomplish a task of tremendous significance: to keep the Church away from the influence of Frederick, who was at best agnostic and quite possibly an atheist. Bonaventura was not especially smart, but he was doggedly good at keeping his eye on the prize: total emancipation from secular power. Beyond that, when it came to all the details of shepherding the masses, Bonaventura was not somebody Fieschi would have chosen to work with, in large part because he was too obstinate. Fieschi would have preferred somebody weak-willed, even feeble-minded, whom he could manipulate with the skill of a puppet master.

That is why he wrote Father Rodrigo Bendrito on the piece of paper. He could read men’s faces, and he knew-he knew-that he was casting the seventh vote for the crazed priest; and he further knew that it had not occurred to any one of them that Rodrigo might actually be chosen.

Fieschi finished writing the name, underlined it for emphasis, and rose. He walked to the altar, placed the piece of paper on the paten, tilted it so that it slid into the chalice, and returned to his seat.

As Gil Torres and Colonna rose to count the votes, Fieschi relaxed in his seat. He reached for his satchel and took out the piece of paper he’d found in Rodrigo’s satchel. His eyes skimmed over the words, not for the first time, and he took pleasure in the inanity of Rodrigo’s prophecy.

The high Cedar of Lebanon will be felled. The stars will tumble from the heaven, and within eleven years, there will be but one god and one king. The second son will vanish, and the children of God will be freed. Wanderers with come, bearing a head. Woe to the priests! A new order rises; if it falls, woe to the Church! Battle will be joined, many times over, and faith will be broken. Law will be lost, and kingdoms will fail. The land of the infidels will be destroyed.

Yes, Fieschi thought, repressing a smile. Yes, this man will serve us very nicely.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Under the Night Sky

After reuniting with Istvan, Feronantus called for a kinyen. “For all of our company,” he said, “both present and fallen.” Cnan felt both honored and troubled by the elder knight’s words. Nor was she alone in her feelings, judging by the expressions on the faces of some of the others. But they all fell to preparations nonetheless, building the illusion of a communal feast hall on the open plain.

She found a shallow depression, deep enough to provide some shelter from the wind. From its center, she could almost pretend the horizon was hidden beyond a gentle ridge. It must have held water once, as there was more wormwood clustered within the bowl than the surrounding area. The brush would burn after a fashion, sticky and smoldering until it dried out, and then it would flash with heat and light. Eleazar set to cutting down a supply of fuel for the fire.

Two hunting parties ranged north and south from the depression, engaged in an unspoken contest to see who could provide the best meat for the evening meal. Cnan privately thought neither team would find much, and her stomach grumbled noisily when Vera and Percival returned a few hours later with a pair of scrawny rabbits. However, when she spotted R?dwulf and Yasper a while later, her excited shouts brought the rest of the company running.

R?dwulf was walking beside his horse, who had been conscripted into pulling a makeshift travois that had been assembled from cloaks, rope, and one of Finn’s hunting spears. Sprawled on the makeshift frame was a deer with a spread of velvet-covered antlers. Cnan’s mouth watered at the sight.

“There are more out there,” Yasper announced with a grin, “but figuring out how to carry one back to camp was hard enough.”

“One is more than sufficient to best our paltry rabbits,” Percival said.

“I like rabbit,” Istvan pointed out.

Everyone ignored the Hungarian. Very little of what he had said since he returned had made much sense, and they could all see that he was lost in the throes of a freebutton mushroom madness. Though, how he had found them on the plain was a mystery no one had been able to explain.

“There’s a herd about an hour north of here,” Yasper explained, “And water too, I think. We could smell it, but didn’t have a chance to find it. These deer spooked at the sight of us, but didn’t run far.”

Feronantus grunted slightly at the unspoken details of Yasper’s report. A wild herd that knew enough of mounted riders to be wary, but not so much that they would abandon the sanctuary offered by running water.

Yasper slapped the side of the dead animal. “Tarandos,” he pronounced, winking at Raphael. “Aristotle’s stag. We must be at the edge of the world when we start finding the beasts of legend.”

Cnan guffawed at the lunacy of this statement, but the alchemist’s mood was too infectious to be deterred.

Fresh vegetables were in short supply. Most of what the company carried was dried or salted-the meager rations a soldier ate without noticing taste or texture-but Yasper, once he had convinced Feronantus that he wasn’t going to make the deer burn with witchfire, managed to blend together a paste that he threw on the fire at regular intervals as the deer cooked. It should have been slow-roasted, cut steaks buried in a bed of white coals, but their stomachs all growled so loudly-and so constantly-as R?dwulf was skinning the deer, that they decided to erect a makeshift spit and cook the meat as quickly as possible.

The fire was going to be visible for many miles, and the smell of cooking meat would spread for a similar distance. They couldn’t hide on the steppes, and given everyone’s exhaustion, Raphael didn’t think such obscurity was high on anyone’s mind. Better to fight with a full belly than to be denied one final, solid meal.

They gathered around the fire as Feronantus cut heavy chunks of steaming meat from the cooked deer. Squatting, lying, standing, kneeling-none of them went far-they fell upon the meat with the appetites of doomed men. Even Cnan, who typically ate very sparingly, like a tiny bird pecking at seeds, attacked a piece of meat with both hands, eagerly licking at the juices as they ran down her arms.

We needed this, Raphael thought, his belly groaning as it stretched around the weight of deer meat. Yasper had produced a pair of skins filled with the Mongolian liquor- arkhi-and Raphael intercepted one as it came past him. He had not gotten any more used to the pale liquid, but he drank it readily enough. He coughed, his nose and eyes watering, and he passed the skin on to a laughing R?dwulf.

“Breathe in more slowly,” the big Welshman chuckled as he tipped back a portion nearly double the size