The Mongoliad: Book Three

The book was a treasure he had picked up some time ago when he had passed through Burgundy. He and several other Shield-Brethren had provided protection for a group of Cistercians returning to their abbey at Clairvaux, and while one of the brothers recovered from an arrow wound received on the journey, he had explored the abbey. The monks had been pleased to discover a like-minded soul in one of the martial orders, and the abbot had personally given him a tour of the abbey’s substantial library.

He was drawn to the Cistercians’ collection of illustrated manuscripts like a magpie to a piece of shiny brass, and he spent numerous afternoons with the scribes, endlessly asking questions like a curious child and watching- with rapt attention-as they painstakingly copied text from aged scrolls that were in danger of crumbling from the slightest touch. The chief scribe, so amused by Raphael’s guileless enthusiasm, had a book made for the inquisitive knight-a sheaf of blank pages bound between two unadorned boards. The book lacked the extravagance (and weight) of the tomes commissioned by Burgundian nobility, but it was also of a size that fit easily into a saddlebag.

Bring it back to us, the chief scribe had told him. When it is filled with your words.

It was a strange request, and for many months, Raphael had been reluctant to besmirch the virgin parchment of his book. Such hubris to think that his words would be worthy enough to be placed on the same shelf as the evangelion, the horae, and the psalters he had seen in the library at Clairvaux! When he needed to meditate, to empty his mind before battle, he would look at the blank pages and lose himself in the striations in the parchment. Over time, each page took on its own character, the lines and whorls suggesting images that were hidden in the parchment; and one day, he had taken a piece of charcoal to a page in an effort to manifest the ghostly image.

Other images followed; eventually, he added annotations. His awkward scrawl looped around the heads of his portraits like textual halos. Cryptic references piled atop one another, creating striated layers of history that charted both the passage of the seasons and his route across Christendom. The early text was Latin, but gradually he started to default to whatever language was most relevant to the event he was trying to capture. Doing so, he discovered, helped keep the tongue fresh in his head. The few notations he had scribbled down about Benjamin were in Hebrew, for example, while his record of the visit to the tomb of St. Ilya were a combination of the Ruthenian script and Greek, the closest approximation of the Slavic alphabet that he knew.

Eventually, the urge to look through its pages became too great, and he tugged the book out of his saddlebag. He wasn’t sure what he hoped to find in the pages of his journal, though much like the horae-the Book of Hours-that Burgundian nobles had commissioned for their wives, perhaps what he sought was not illumination but comfort. His recollection of the past, the faces he drew so that he would not forget them, the names and deeds of those who died: these were subjective records, his attempt to mark the passage of time.

Raphael was unsettled by the events of the previous night, both Percival’s admission of despair and Istvan’s erratic interjections. He was not overly superstitious-among his brethren, he had a reputation for healthy skepticism-but he could not shake a sense of foreboding. Too many visions, he reflected as he turned the pages. Our path is occluded by this confusion.

“You remind me of the hesychasmos.”

Raphael looked up from his examination of his journal. “Who?” he asked.

“The priests of Pechersk Lavra,” Vera said. “They would stand for hours in the cathedral, meditating.” She raised a hand and rubbed several fingers together. “Worrying their chotki-their prayer ropes.”

Suddenly self-conscious, Raphael closed the journal and absently slipped it back into his saddlebag. “Saying their prayers,” he nodded. Seeking comfort in their rituals, he thought. Is that what my book has become?

“They called it the Scala, a ladder they were trying to climb.” She shrugged. “A mental exercise, I suppose, and not unlike some of our own drills, but I never did understand what purpose a ladder served. You cannot climb up to Heaven.”

“No, of course not,” Raphael said thoughtfully, recalling the aerie of Francis of Assisi at the top of La Verna. The closest you can get to God and still have your feet upon the ground.

He shifted in his saddle, setting aside the memory of the nearly blind friar and his scarred hands. “Do the skjalddis offer tribute to the Virgin?” he asked.

“Mary?” Vera asked, a cautious note in her voice. “Or are you referring to the older traditions?”

“I have seen so many ways of worshipping God that I don’t care to judge any,” Raphael offered, a wry smile tugging at his lips. “The Shield-Brethren heritage goes back a long way; most of those in Petraathen have forgotten our origins, and those in Tyrshammar have been under the sway of the Northmen for many years. The old ways linger, though: the glory offered by battle, the sanctuary of the sword, the visions offered to those who are worthy…”

“The Christian worship of Mary does not include visionary practices,” Vera pointed out. She spoke bluntly, as always, but Raphael had learned to read some of her subtle mannerisms. Lately, he had begun to detect an austere wit in her words.

“Does she not offer guidance then?”

“Little has been offered, of late.” Vera nudged her horse closer to his, as if to make their conversation more confidential, even though they were surrounded by miles of open terrain. “Your brother, Percival, for all his Christian trappings, appears to still believe in these older traditions…”

“Yes,” Raphael said. “As does Istvan, I fear.”

And Feronantus too? He wondered silently.

Vera snorted. “Istvan is addled by his mushrooms. His mind is too broken.”

“Did you hear what he said last night?”

“Madness and nonsense,” she said, her eyes flashing. “That is all I heard.”

“He spoke of the All-Father. And of a staff. And-”

“Odin carried a spear. Not a staff.”

“Odin?”

“The All-Father.” Seeing Raphael’s expression, Vera laughed. “You are a child of Christendom, my friend, regardless of how enlightened you strive to appear. We may appear Christian-like yourselves-but the skjalddis remember our roots too. Our grandmothers and their mothers before them were Varangian, and we remember the stories of the cold sea, of the war between the giants and the Aesir, and the tales of Yggdrasil.”

“Egg-?”

“Yggdrasil,” Vera repeated. “The World Tree.”

Raphael shivered. “What happened to it?”

“Nothing. It stands at the center of the world. The fields of Folkvangr are supported by its branches, and Hel lies beneath its roots.”

“He said it was cut down.”

“Who? Istvan? He is mad, Raphael. You cannot believe anything he says. If Yggdrasil were to be cut down, Ragnarok would be upon us.” Vera shook her head. “The Mongols are a scourge upon the world, but they are not the end of it. They are just men. They are not…” She trailed off, unwilling to speak of a greater terror. She raised an arm to indicate the open steppes. “This place inspires fear in its endlessness. You cannot let its emptiness rule your mind, Raphael. We all seek guidance, but we cannot invent it where it does not truly exist.”

“What about Percival and his vision?” Raphael asked. “Do you think he is mad as well, or has he been granted guidance?”

Vera lowered her arm and pointed. “Look,” she said. “I see a shadow. A gully. I suspect we’ll find our water source there.” She snapped her reins, and her horse snorted as it began to trot toward the shadow snaking across the plain.

Raphael gathered his reins, but did not immediately follow. She hadn’t answered his question, and he suspected she would pretend to have forgotten he had asked it. She had welcomed his attention, even going so far as to allow him to think that he knew her, but he wasn’t that naive. Like all of them, she wore a great deal of