The Mongoliad: Book Three Read online

  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 Týrshammar 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 Fólkvangr 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 emotional armor.

  But it wasn’t her reticence that worried him, nor whether she believed that Percival had been granted spiritual guidance. It was the possibility of such guidance that continued to confound him. If Eptor’s madness had been the Virgin’s Grace, or Francis’s insistence that God had left a mark on his flesh was true, then Percival’s vision could be true. As could Istvan’s.

  Ragnarok, he thought. Yggdrasil.

  He thought of Damietta, and the zeal with which Pelagius, the legate, had seized upon the idea of having Eptor’s madness interpreted as prophecy. What were the Crusades but zealous men striving to realize some vision they thought they had been given? Pelagius had invented a myth to convince the army to march on Cairo; the Crusaders had been slaughtered because of his lie.

  Feronantus had been listening to Istvan, and Raphael wondered again what the old knight had heard in the other’s mad mutterings. Feronantus had been at Týrshammar a long time. What stories had he heard from the children of the Varangians?

  And had he come to believe those stories?

  CHAP
TER TWENTY-ONE

  Cantate Domino Canticum Novum

  The custom, as old as the Church herself, was that the names would be announced by the most senior Cardinal. He would draw the names from the chalice, one by one, and read each aloud to the assembled host of Cardinals. He would then hand the slip to his assistant, the second-oldest Cardinal, who would repeat the name. Finally, using a needle, the slip would be strung on a red thread that had been prepared by younger priests and left in the room the night before.

  Bundled together on the red threads, the first three had been inscribed with Bonaventura. This came as no surprise, although based on his unexpected standoff with Senator Orsini the day before, the collective assumption was that Castiglione would be getting most of the remaining votes.

  When Cardinal Torres read the name on the fourth strip—Father Rodrigo Bendrito—Fieschi noted the reaction of several of the Cardinals. Gloating quietly, they glanced around at the others as if to say, “Ha! Take that!” There was, briefly, an air of repressed amusement in the room.

  But when the fifth strip also contained Father Rodrigo’s name, the Cardinals looked startled, glancing almost guiltily at each other. Fieschi raised his hand casually to cover the smile he couldn’t quite suppress. Their expressions were only going to grow more pronounced over the next few minutes.

  Fieschi had been watching the faces of the others during the election process and had kept a dutiful count. He already knew that every remaining slip of paper in that chalice had Bendrito’s name on it. The crazy wayward stranger, the common priest lost in his own world of madness, was about to be elected as the next Bishop of Rome. Fieschi settled back in gilded anticipation.

  The sixth strip: Bendrito. The scores were now even. Alarm was exchanged between certain parties; astonishment from others. Colonna and Capocci, the eternal clowns, traded looks that bordered on perverse delight. They do not understand what they have done. It is all childishly unreal to them, Fieschi thought with contempt. All that matters is their petty satisfaction in watching Bonaventura lose.

  “Father Rodrigo Bendrito,” Cardinal Torres read aloud. His aged face showed no expression as he handed the seventh strip to Cardinal Colonna, who repeated the name and added it to the others. Every Cardinal in the room sat up in his seat, or shifted about, some with consternation, others relief. Since there were ten Cardinals voting, Bonaventura needed seven votes to win; Father Rodrigo, by having claimed four votes, now made that impossible.

  “That’s that, then,” Annibaldi ventured. “Another deadlock. Send up the black smoke.” He started to stand.

  “No,” Fieschi said sharply. “We cannot say there is a deadlock until all the votes have been read.”

  Every head in the room turned to look at him, all equally surprised at such a statement from Bonaventura’s most vocal supporter.

  “We must do this honorably,” Fieschi said with dripping condescension. “All the votes must be counted, even though we know there will be no success in it.”

  “It will be a deadlock,” said Torres in a tone of concession, clearly disliking ever having to agree with Fieschi. “Arithmetic gives us that.”

  “Count the votes,” Fieschi said. “We must have a record, amongst ourselves, of where we stand.”

  The eighth strip of paper: Father Rodrigo Bendrito. Again the return to darting glances.

  “We should annul the votes,” said de Segni. “If we stop now—”

  “And what is your precedent for breaking with this long-standing ritual?” Fieschi asked. “This is our tradition. We must remain firm of purpose and trust that God’s will be done.”

  The ninth strip of paper: Father Rodrigo Bendrito.

  “This is a terrible jest,” Bonaventura said nervously. “Six of you are making a mockery of this process!”

  Cardinal Torres reached in for the last slip of paper, looked at it, and with a dumbfounded expression, turned to Cardinal Colonna for aid.

  “Not six,” Colonna said, taking the slip from Torres. “Seven. This name is also Father Rodrigo Bendrito.” To Fieschi, Colonna seemed perversely delighted. “Fathers, we have our new Pontiff.”

  Immediate chaos overtook the chamber. Nine Cardinals leaped from their seats, a rainbow of different hues of amazement, from outrage (Bonaventura) to awe (da Capua) to delight (Capocci)...

  “You did this!” Bonaventura shouted over the hubbub, crossing threateningly toward Fieschi, who alone remained sitting.

  “Did I?” Fieschi said archly. “I have only one vote. There are seven votes for the priest.”

  “If you had not changed your vote!” Bonaventura nearly screamed.

  “If any of us had not,” Fieschi agreed.

  “A common priest is not worthy to be Pope!” dei Conti snorted derisively.

  “Ah, now,” Fieschi warned with calm condescension. “The first Pope was a fisherman.”

  In response to the panicked commotion within, a guard outside the chapel had cautiously unbolted the door and opened it wide enough to look in with one eye. Seeing the commotion, he ventured to open it a little more.

  “Your Eminences?” he said, completely unheard beneath the squawking and arguing.

  But Fieschi saw the guard enter and, rising at last, strode comfortably past his upset fellows. He smiled paternally at the young man. “You may burn the wet straw,” he said. “We want white smoke—a new Bishop of Rome has been chosen.”

  The guard’s face relaxed into a smile. “At last,” he said. “Praise God.”

  He closed the door behind him without bolting it. Fieschi turned back to face the hubbub of his nine fellow Cardinals. Several voices were already demanding that they throw out the vote and try again.

  “Brothers,” Fieschi said calmly, raising his voice. He looked more feline than hawkish now. “Brothers, please calm yourselves. It is too late to throw out the votes. The world has been informed we have a new Pope. We must prepare to announce him.”

  Nine pairs of eyes stared dumbfounded at him.

  “What right had you to tell anyone?” demanded Rinaldo Conti de Segni.

  “Was there not a two-thirds majority cast?” Fieschi responded. “Is that not a deciding vote? We have been secreted away for far too long—this announcement frees us! Why are you not overjoyed at being liberated from our captivity?”

  “But the result...” said Annibaldi. He was seconded and thirded and fourthed by others in the room.

  “The result stands,” Fieschi said. “There are no grounds for repealing it.”

  “He’s not a bishop,” Gil Torres rebutted. “There has never been a man made Pope before he was a bishop.”

  “I don’t think there is a law about that,” Fieschi mused. “But perhaps there should be. Let’s ask the new Pope about it.” He put his hand on the door as if he would open it.

  “Wait, wait, wait!” shouted a number of voices from the circular chamber, as others demanded, “Let’s talk this through!”

  Fieschi turned his back to the door, his eyes flashing cold gray light. Everyone took a step away from him and fell silent. “What is there to discuss?” he said sharply. “We have voted in a leader of the Church. If we feel he is not up to the task, then we must assist him to it. Is that not our duty as Cardinals of the Holy Church? I certainly intend to do so. I hope you will all join me, but that is your choice.” He smiled coldly, enjoying the moment of drama immensely.

  The other nine regarded each other dismally, then stared down at their feet, shoulders slumping, subdued.

  “Well then,” said Fieschi after a triumphal moment, and threw up his hands to God. “Habemus Papam!”

  And then Father Rodrigo was back in the crypt of St. Peter, in this time and this place, this world—this universe. The vision had ravaged his mind, torn out his senses, retuned his perception of the world beyond insanity... but it was over. It had been a test, and he had survived.

  The message he had been given, in that feverish dream in the farmhouse near Mohi—the images and mystic
understandings he had scribbled feverishly onto a slip of paper, now lost along with his satchel—he had thought, all these long miserable months, that this prophetic vision contained a message he was meant to bring to the leader of all Christendom.

  Now he saw the fallacy of that. How arrogant of me, Rodrigo thought, to suppose I could prophesy the future of the world. There were only a few people who could understand anything as vast as what he had scribbled on the piece of paper. One of them, he sensed, was the kind Englishman, but he was dead.

  But understanding the vision meant very little. In the wide world’s larger scope, that vision counted for almost nothing. It was a password, or a hazing ritual, that was all: a means by which he was challenged to enter into a realm of mystical insight. The higher powers of the cosmos had asked his unconscious mind to demonstrate that it knew the secret code, and that secret code was no mere phrase of words, but a shattering prophetic vision, to live through with his entire being.

  His vision was not the fruits of a mystical initiation; it was merely the invitation to be initiated.

  Rodrigo was still trembling. He brought the cool metal of the communion cup to his temple and rolled it gently, side to side, across his forehead. He found the smoothness, and the rolling gesture itself, calming. The metal absorbed the fevered heat he was emitting, yet remained cool. Of course it did, he thought, of course it does. Now at last, he was purified. He was rational. He was sane. He could look back on his strange, fevered behavior since Mohi and see it for what it was, and know that he had come through it. He was challenged, and he had survived.

  Having proven he could survive a loss of sanity, at last sanity was restored to him.

  First, I must find Ferenc, he thought. The poor boy must be bewildered here without me—he doesn’t have the language, and no experience surviving in a city. And I will need him in what lies ahead. For there is to be no rest for the weary.