CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Now I understand why the Silk Road runs along the edge of a desert,” Yasper groused, slapping his arms against his body in a futile effort to keep his body warm. He wore a fur hat, pulled down as far as his eyebrows, and he had let his beard grow out again. Wild and uncombed, it resembled a weaver’s nest, and his voice issued from somewhere inside the bramble of wiry hair. “What I wouldn’t do for a handful of hot sand. Doesn’t that sound like paradise?” he said wistfully. “Just one handful of hot sand.”
Raphael nodded, though the motion was hard to distinguish with all the frantic shivering he was doing. Even with woolen strips wrapping his arms and legs and an extra layer of foul-smelling furs the company had traded for a week prior, the cold air still managed to worm its way down his back. He was doubly glad he had stopped wearing his maille several days ago. The chain seemed to absorb the chill in the air, and more than once he had found his hands sticking to the metal links.
Of all the company, Feronantus seemed the least affected by the weather. He wore extra layers, like everyone else, but Raphael had yet to see the old veteran shiver. If anything, he seemed to find the frigid air bracing.
Raphael had only ever been to Tyrshammar during the long summer months, when the nights were short and the sky never fully darkened. Over the last few days, he started to get a sense of what the winters in the northern stronghold must be like.
Of their own journey, there was one more pass to ascend before they reached the long valley where Boreas blew constantly. Raphael couldn’t even imagine attempting this route if there was
Like Yasper, Raphael had been having dreams-when he was able to fall asleep-about deserts. Along with dreams of the sun and fire, vast pinwheels of raging flame spinning across the sky.
As the horses slowly picked their way up the narrow mountain path, Raphael tried not to let his thoughts dwell on the significance of the pinwheels. It was unsettling to think they might be the same spoked wheels that Percival saw in his visions; if they were, did that mean he was gradually being won over by the persistent
Raphael had seen too much of what men did in the grip of visions. From the atrocities perpetrated in the Levant and in Egypt, to the mad works of that unholy inquisitor Konrad in his zealous pursuit of heretics in Thuringia, to the mystical zeal that was the source of constant torment and conflict within Percival.
It was not fair of him to judge Percival so, but over the last few months Raphael had begun to lay the blame of Roger’s death on the Frankish knight. If Percival had not insisted on visiting the caves beneath Kiev in pursuit of the illicit artifact he had imagined he knew to be there, then Roger might not have been killed.
He was spending too much time reliving the past. It was an unfortunate aspect of his fascination with keeping a record of their journey. At first, his tiny marks in the journal had been a means of passing the time during the endless days of riding; later, when he started to look back upon earlier entries and find them lacking in detail, he began to write more earnestly, thinking of Herodotus and Thucydides and their histories of the ancient Greek world. During the long nights on the steppe, when he could not sleep and lie, staring up at the endless spray of stars across the heavens, he began to think of the
Vera said he thought too much, and while she did not intend her words to be mean-spirited, there was more than a hint of truth to them. Raphael would not deny that he thought a great deal about an endless panoply of ideas; it was his boundless curiosity about God’s creation, about his role within it, and how he was supposed to understand his purpose. Many never gave much thought to their ultimate purpose on the earth, and he knew that it was by God’s grace that he was able to even conceive of
Yasper and his alchemical recipes had not helped either. The scrawny Dutchman had his own codex, though the alchemist’s was not nearly as well constructed as Raphael’s, being an olio of parchment, cloth, hide, and a few scraps of what looked suspiciously like tattooed skin. Yasper kept the loose collection in an oilskin satchel, and he referenced it, annotated it, and fussed with it on a daily basis. Raphael’s curiosity had led him to inquire about the alchemist’s notes, and he had been intrigued by some of the Arabic passages Yasper had in his collection. Written by a Persian named Jabir ibn Hayyan, the material was not-as he had anticipated-a babble of mystical nonsense disguised as a treatise on philosophical medicine, but a well-reasoned discourse on the immutable nature of the soul. Jabir sought answers to the same questions as Augustine; it was only his rhetoric and his practical methods that were different.
“It is a beautiful view, isn’t it?” Eleazar spread his arms to encompass the vista of snow-capped mountains. “Almost worth the trip for this alone, yes?”
Yasper shook his head, and nudged his shivering horse back onto the path.
“You must not take umbrage with Yasper,” R?dwulf explained to Cnan. The pair of them were riding behind Yasper and Eleazar. “He was born in a place that has nothing but dikes and low hills that barely come up to here.” He held his hand out, level with his horse’s shoulder. “The first time he saw the Alps, he fell off his horse. He claimed he was struck dumb in awe and terror at the majesty of God’s work. The other riders he was with thought otherwise and, on many subsequent occasions, performed entertaining pantomimes of what came to be known as the Low-Lander’s Abasement before God.”
“Does it happen often when he is talking to you?” Cnan asked, squinting up at R?dwulf. The tall Englishman smiled wolfishly. Glancing around, Cnan saw smiles on the faces of a few of the others who had paused at the scenic overlook.
There had been few opportunities for jovial camaraderie since they had left Benjamin at the rock. The trader had argued strenuously about joining the company, even after his detailed account of why such a decision was financially disastrous for him. Cnan had not understood the merchant’s interest in the hard ride that the Shield- Brethren had before them, but as she listened to the trader’s cogent argument, she grew to see that Benjamin thought he was in the company’s debt.
A debt that, ultimately, Feronantus refused.
The route through the Zuungar Gap was not well traveled, Benjamin argued, and the villages and clans that dotted the route were not as open to strangers as many who lived more closely to the Silk Road. The company would need a guide and an interpreter if they were going to reach the far side of the gap.
It was Benjamin’s informed guess that Alchiq would be keeping to the trade routes, where he could readily acquire fresh horses. Benjamin’s proposed route along the Tien Shan and through the gap would be rigorous and more dangerous, but it would be quicker.
