Katabasis (The Mongoliad Cycle, Book 4) Read online

  She had made such a mistake once before and the Skjalddis’s response had been stinging and brusque. Are you jealous? Vera had asked.

  There was no mistaking the Chinese woman’s beauty. She was several inches taller than Cnán, with lustrous black hair and a delicately shaped face. She spoke none of the languages known by the Shield-Brethren, but via the light touch of her hand and a series of exaggerated expressions that annoyed Cnán endlessly—she acted like a tawdry village mummer—Lian found ways to communicate with the men. Cnán, whose unkempt hair and slender build had allowed her to be mistaken for a boy on more than one occasion, was all but invisible next to Lian. Vera’s northern heritage had been blunted by several generations of Ruthenian blood, but she was still pale and hard—shale to Haakon’s granite, if they were to be thought of as being carved from stone—the sort of woman who would appeal to these men purely out of admiration of who and what she was. Vera, however, had already chosen one of them as her companion, and so she was invisible to them for other reasons.

  Why am I even worrying about this? Cnán snapped a low branch from a scraggly fir, adding it to the pile in her arms. It wasn’t jealousy that she felt. She wasn’t trying to vie for the attention of the Shield-Brethren. The youngster, Haakon, had propositioned her once, and she had turned him down. Not because she hadn’t found him desirable, but merely because both knew such a liaison would have been a fleeting distraction. At the time, she had thought she would never see him again, more so when she had agreed to accompany the Shield-Brethren on their mad crusade to the heart of the Mongol empire. How strange it had been to journey all the way from Legnica in the West to the mountains north of Karakorum and find the pale-haired youth waiting for them.

  She liked Yasper, the nimble-fingered Dutchman who knew more about powders and reagents than the art of killing a man with a sword, but he was prone to talking of matters that made her head swim. The most innocent comment could launch him into an hour-long monologue about the alchemical mystery of snowfall. Raphael had become their leader, and the weight of such responsibility kept him removed from the rest of the company, but for those times when he sought Vera’s counsel.

  Which left Percival, the regal Frank who was the most beautiful and the most terrifying of the company. She had seen him crush the spine of a Mongol bankhar with a mace one moment and then calmly and attentively inquire as to her safety the next. Her childish infatuation with him had faded away during their long ride across the steppes, but once Lian had joined their company, she had found her feelings were not as dead as she had thought.

  Juggling her collection of branches into the crook of her left arm, she grabbed one of the broken branches jutting out from the round trunk at the top of a fir that had broken off during a wind storm. The trunk caught on every rock and root as she dragged it back toward the camp, and she cursed and yanked and pulled, pouring her frustration and annoyance into the task.

  Yasper spotted her first and trotted over to help. He tried to take the bundle of branches from her, and nearly tripped over the heavy branch when she shoved it at him. “Oh, of course,” he said cheerfully, dancing around the thick branch.

  Percival, she noticed, was showing Lian how to arrange kindling and moss in order to start a fire—a task Cnán was fairly certain he had shown her at least once before.

  Yasper yelped as she dropped the heavy branch onto his foot.

  She noisily dumped her armload of branches beside Percival and Lian. Lian jumped at the sound, reminding Cnán of a rabbit being spooked out of hiding by an owl, and Percival put out a hand to calm her as he glanced up at Cnán. “Ah,” he said, noticing the branches. “Just in time. Thank you, Cnán. Would you be so kind as to tell Lian—”

  “Tell her yourself,” Cnán snapped, and she stomped off before she said anything more.

  Yasper was huffing as he dragged the heavy branch up. He dropped it as unceremoniously as Cnán had her branches, but he had the grace to do so several yards away from the fire pit. “I’ll get a hatchet,” he said, out of breath. “We can cut this up into several pieces.”

  “I’ll get it,” Cnán said. As she turned toward the few remaining horses, she nearly bumped into Vera who had an armload of wood of her own.

  “We could use some more wood, little one,” the Shield-Maiden said. “Leave the blade work to others.” Behind her, Cnán saw Haakon and Raphael crouched around the body of the dead horse. The skin on one of the haunches had been pulled back already, and Haakon’s arm was moving vigorously as he cut the meat away from the bone. His forearms were stained red with blood.

  Flushing, both from the rioting emotions in her heart and from her stomach growling at the thought of real food, Cnán stormed off toward the tree line again. She could blame the weather for the way she was feeling—being cold and hungry always sapped one’s strength and lowered one’s defenses against mental confusion—but some of it ran deeper than that. She had been traveling with the Shield-Brethren for almost a year now, and in that time had come to be quite attached to many of the members of the company. Not necessarily in a romantic fashion—her lingering feelings for Percival, notwithstanding—but like family, for lack of a better word.

  Family.

  She was a Binder, and she had her family already, but they were scattered, and she felt their presence and read their thoughtful concern via marks carved in the boles of trees, in complicated sequences of knots shoved into narrow hiding places at trade markers, and in subtle arrangements of stones and twigs and leaves that weren’t accidental patterns left by the wind. Such love and community was affection at arm’s length, at best, and such satisfaction that she received from finding signs of her sisters in the wild paled in comparison to laughing at one of Yasper’s quirky jokes or finding an excuse to discuss the perpetually dismal weather with Percival.

  What gnawed at her with increasing savagery was a sense that her new family was falling apart. She was the only one who saw the end coming, and she didn’t know how to stop it.

  They’d crossed the empty steppe once already, surviving the mind-numbingly dull ride across the endless landscape. She knew the Shield-Brethren were liable to summarize their journey east as merely an interesting journey. They were not prone to hyperbolic talk of their deeds, and interesting barely started to cover what they had accomplished. Of the group, Yasper was the only one who was still prone to marvel that not only were they still alive, but they appeared to have managed to escape any sort of pursuit. Cnán, however, wasn’t as convinced; nor were Raphael and Vera, who found regular excuses to circle back on their trail to make sure no one was following them. As they had reached the mountains and traveled through the Zuungar Gap, the weather had grown more vicious and they had given little thought to anything more than maintaining westward motion. Cnán had hoped that the harsh weather would lessen after the Gap, but the storms had only gotten worse. Even after they came down from the mountains—Khan Tengri was nothing more than a thin finger of stone in the distance—the ground remained coated with a heavy layer of snow.

  It was difficult to find landmarks, and even more difficult to find food for the horses and shelter from the winds when they tried to rest. Her confidence at being able to find her way back to the rock—an isolated trading post that was their goal—lessened every day. She couldn’t even seek guidance from the stars—the persistent cloud cover hid them from her—and the sun was never much more than a diffuse glow behind the heavy layer of dark clouds. It should have taken only a few days to ride out the belly of the storm that hung over them, but the gray clouds seemed to move with them.

  It was winter on the steppe; she and the others were the fools who thought it would be anything less savage and miserable than it was. But they had had little choice, hadn’t they? The Khagan was dead. His sons and brothers and cousins and other relatives who thought they might have a chance at the throne were coming back to Karakorum. The Empire was no place for a handful of armed Westerners and a pair of refugees like herself and Lian
.

  More than once, shivering under her thin blanket, she had considered the idea that they would disappear. The wind would steal all the heat from their bodies, and then the snows would cover them. They might be found once the seasons turned, but more likely, they would die and thaw and be gnawed into pieces by the hungry beasts that roamed the empty steppe. How silly, she would chide herself, to save the West and then to die so ignobly.

  She had to find the rock. She had to get them home again.

  It was not the first time Raphael had eaten horse, and the meat was a heavy weight in his tight stomach. Like the company itself, the animal had been gaunt and under-nourished, and he was glad he had cautioned Haakon and Yasper to prepare less than they normally would have. No one ate much; they were all suffering from a lack of consistent meals. Raphael had hoped that a full belly and a warm fire would quiet his restless mind and allow him some much-needed sleep, but after an hour of fussing and twisting under his narrow blanket, he gave up. Even though the wound had healed well, the muscles in his lower back tended to twist themselves into knots.

  He pushed his blanket aside and sat up. The fire had dwindled to a warm orange glow, and he could make out Haakon’s slumped shape on the far side of the pit they had dug in the frozen ground. The boy was supposed to be on watch, and Raphael felt a momentary twinge of jealousy that Haakon was able to enjoy the rest that eluded him. Let him sleep, he thought as he reached for his saddlebags. Why berate the boy when he could readily take the watch? His stiff fingers found the leather shape of his journal, and he plucked it free of the bag and carried it with him as he got to his feet.

  He made a quick circuit of their camp, falling into the old habit of walking widdershins. There were those who considered walking in opposition to the sun’s route to be bad luck, but Raphael had learned long ago that luck—good or bad—had little to do with keeping a company safe. The night circle was one of many quirks that made the Shield-Brethren different from the other martial orders, though no one gave much thought to whether such differences made their order more or less successful than the others. The Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae had a lineage that went back more than fifteen hundred years. If a practice worked, you didn’t wonder overmuch as to its source or rationale.

  And yet, was this blind obedience to the old ways responsible for the situation he and the company found themselves in? How had he, whose tongue had gotten him into so much trouble over the years, kept his thoughts to himself during their journey east? Had it been the enormity of their task, the daunting impossibility of their mission, that had kept him silent?

  Raphael paused at the corpse of the dead horse. The body was already stiff and cold; he should have had Haakon cut more meat. The task was going to be more difficult in the morning. He hadn’t thought ahead. That’s the issue, isn’t it? he thought. Their mission to Karakorum had been a success. They had accomplished an impossible task, but their leader—the man who had convinced them that killing the Khagan was the only way to save Christendom—had abandoned them at the very moment of their success. Feronantus had taken the Spirit Banner of the Mongol empire and left them behind. Why?

  Raphael had pondered this question a great deal in the weeks since, and he had found no suitable answer. He had even found himself praying for divine guidance on several occasions, though he was terrified of receiving any response from his queries. I’m just going to have to ask him myself, he thought as he shook off the cloak of morbid thoughts that was settling about his shoulders.

  He recalled the dead horse they had found near the Zuungar Gap—the first sign that they were still following Feronantus. If it hadn’t been for the pair of skeletal wolves who had been trying to gnaw off a chunk of frozen meat, they wouldn’t have found the snow-covered corpse. After scouring the surrounding area for an hour or two, looking for incongruous humps covered in snow, they had found the shrine and signs that someone had built a fire there.

  Yasper had been fascinated by the ridged patterns of ice on one of the standing stones, and the inquisitive alchemist had had to be dragged away when they had gleaned the meager clues left by their erstwhile leader.

  During one of Raphael’s numerous visits to the court of the Holy Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Emperor, the brilliant and highly educated Holy Frederick II, had inquired as to what Raphael knew of the legendary Feronantus. Did Raphael know why Feronantus had been exiled to Týrshammar? How many of the stories coming out of England were true, and how many were bellicose fables? Had Feronantus been the companion of Richard Lionheart when the English king had been captured on his return from the crusade? Was it true that Feronantus was one of the few men who had beaten William Marshal? Over the years, Raphael had had the opportunity to answer many of Frederick’s constant questions, but on the subject of Feronantus, he had been able to offer little knowledge. It wasn’t that he sought to abstain from enlightening the Holy Roman Emperor; it was that the answers to his questions were maddeningly obscure. His own curiosity piqued by Frederick’s questions, Raphael had sought out those who could tell him of Feronantus’s history, and he had been stymied time and again. There were numerous stories about the Old Man of the Rock, and he had been surprised to learn that the more audacious stories were more likely to be true than not, which only compounded the confusion of Feronantus’s past. How could such an illustrious hero end up the master of the most remote stronghold in Christendom?

  Raphael suspected the answer to that question would reveal a great deal about the sort of man who would abandon his faithful companions. At first, Feronantus’s decision had felt like boldfaced betrayal; in time, however, Raphael had come to realize it was an act of cold calculation. If there were to be reprisals for what the Shield-Brethren had done in the forest near Burqan-qaldun, the company—minus Feronantus—would be an easier target to track than a single man, riding alone.

  Raphael shivered as a breath of cold air slithered into his cloak and down the collar of his tunic. He pulled the worn cloak tighter and hunched his shoulders to try to block the wind from trying again. His hair was shaggy and unkempt, and he had given up trying to keep his beard trimmed months ago. It wasn’t as untamed as Yasper’s, who looked as if he was trying to cover the lower half of his face with a bird’s nest, but it was almost long enough that he could start braiding the ends in the northern style. He was grateful for the warmth all the hair afforded, though, and the beard no longer itched as fiercely as it had a month ago.

  He began walking again, mainly to keep warm more than from any concern about the security of their camp. Once they had passed through the mountains and reached the central steppes, he had stopped looking over his shoulder multiple times during the day. The Mongols wouldn’t stop hunting them, if they knew where the company had gone, but the farther they got from the heart of the empire, the more certain he was that they had escaped. As soon as they reached the rock, they could resupply from the cache that had been left for them by a friendly trader. With a little luck, they could even manage to pass as mercenaries along the trade routes with no one the wiser.

  He ran his thumb along the edge of his journal, playing with the leather cover. Part of him wanted to hunt down the old man; part of him reminded him that the company was his responsibility. They looked to him for guidance and leadership. Was abandoning them to pursue Feronantus any different than what had been done to them? He had put off making this decision, figuring that Feronantus would, at least, be making for the rock as well.

  His fingers let the wind tug the journal open, the pages fluttering as the wind explored his rough sketches and scattered entries. Could the wind read the variety of languages he wrote in? At first, making notes had been an opportunity for him to practice whatever the local tongue had been during his travels—it allowed him to fix the words more firmly in his mind. It was a trick he had learned from Frederick. After they had left Kiev, he had stuck with Latin, figuring that there were only a handful of people in the east who could possibly read it—and most of those were
men in his own company.

  The last entry he had written before his world had been turned upside down had been the record of a statement made by Feronantus. He put his thumb down, holding the pages still, as the wind reached that page. He had been angry when he wrote the words; the letters were thick slashes of charcoal on the parchment. Our lives have no meaning, Feronantus had said, except that which is given to them by our deeds, and by how our comrades remember us.

  The wind shifted, blowing against his face and nearly tearing the journal out of his grip. He raised his hands and shielded his eyes; he could see little and hear nothing but the noisy cry of the wind, but he sensed a storm was coming.

  The wind slapped the felt tent, and Lian couldn’t tell if it was going to collapse the whole structure or tear the stakes out of the ground and whisk the tiny shelter away. She felt like a tiny animal, and she tried to quell the shivering in her legs. Beside her, Cnán lay stiffly, trying to be as far away as possible from Lian while simultaneously cuddling close to share body heat. Cnán didn’t like her, a reaction Lian had seen time and again at Karakorum and to which she gave little thought. Jealously between women, especially the concubines and other unattached servants, was an undeniable facet of court life. Everyone wanted what someone else had, and the luxuries and comforts afforded the prettier ones were always a source of ire.

  She doubted any of the concubines at the Khagan’s palace would recognize her; months ago, she might have been shocked at such a possibility, but such concerns—along with many others—were behind her now. She wasn’t a captive in the company of these knights from the West; while they were too noble to slit her throat and leave her for the wolves, they weren’t entirely trusting of her either. Cnán was the only one who spoke any Chinese—though the woman’s accent was odd, even to Lian’s ear—and she spent as much time as she could with the pale lad, Haakon, who had a rudimentary understanding of the Mongol tongue. From him she had learned enough of the western trade tongue to start with the others, even though the brutal weather made idle talk infrequent. Still, she knew something about talking to strange men; she had been useful to Master Chucai in that she knew how to appear attentive, flatter when necessary, and coax all manner of information out of a man without him being aware that he was telling her anything.