The Mongoliad: Book Two Page 31

  “Ignorance, you mean,” Fieschi spat back, regaining some of his composure. His blood pounded in his temples, and the edges of his vision wavered and shook. He had to be careful. Somercotes had a way of getting under his skin, making him irrational and prone to responding too quickly, too emotionally. Gregory warned you... He shoved the thought aside. “He will fall for whoever has the most charisma.”

  “And we both know that is Castiglione,” Somercotes said calmly. “Really, Sinibaldo, I do not see what it is that you needed to talk so urgently about. It is time for me to pray now; please let me do so.”

  “Do not assume,” Fieschi said through clenched teeth, “that I cannot persuade him of the wonders of Bonaventura’s character.”

  “If he casts his vote for Bonaventura, I will reveal him as the spy you think he is, and you will lose the vote,” Somercotes said with a sigh, sounding indulgently sympathetic.

  “Well then, if he casts his vote for Castiglione, I shall do likewise,” Fieschi retorted.

  “Will you? And how will you prove it?” Somercotes asked, as if catechizing a young child.

  “How will you prove he isn’t?” Fieschi replied, his ears burning like he was a young child, and loathing Somercotes all the more for it.

  “Well,” Somercotes said, drawing the word out, “I do have his ring. His cardinal’s ring. And you do not.” He smiled at Fieschi then, the smile of a man who thought he had been granted a decisive victory.

  “Which I do not have yet,” Fieschi argued and made a lunge for Somercotes.

  Somercotes was caught off guard by the sudden escalation from argument to action but only needed to take a half step back to avoid Fieschi’s somewhat spastic lunge. As he did so, he dropped his heavy book. Likewise, Fieschi—unprepared to have missed—stumbled forward and had to brace himself against the chamber’s wall to avoid falling on his face entirely.

  But then Somercotes was behind him and, now alert, wasted no time in leaping on Fieschi’s back. Reaching forward with his left arm, Somercotes began to choke him.

  The weight of the other man on his back made Fieschi lurch to one side, but his hands found the wall again and he pushed back, then reached up to grab the arm around his neck, before finishing the fall. The motion pulled Somercotes forward, off balance, and tumbled him over Fieschi and onto his back on the chamber’s cold stone floor.

  Not a trained brawler, Somercotes hadn’t braced himself against the throw, and even before his head hit the ground, he was confused about what was happening. He had lost his chokehold on Fieschi, and his arms hung limp. Fieschi cast about and, spotting Somercotes’s book, grabbed it up and struck the English cardinal in the head. The spine of the book gave under the impact, and Fieschi shifted his grip, using the stiff and stone-encrusted cover instead. He struck Somercotes several more times, until the boards shattered.

  “Frederick’s help will mean nothing to you now,” Fieschi said as he threw aside the ruined book. He was calm, for the first time since they’d entered the room, for the first time since he had been accosted by that churlish guard outside Orsini’s palazzo. He had no more doubt about what he had to do, about what must be done. There must be a vote; a Pope must be elected. The Church must prevail.

  Somercotes, his face bloodied from Fieschi’s blows, was still conscious. His eyes fluttered, and a sluggish moan slipped from his slack lips.

  Fieschi scrabbled at Somercotes’s robe, reaching for the braided rope the other man wore around his waist. A symbol of his austerity and piety, it was the sort of rope a sheepherder would use. Stout and strong. Fieschi gathered up the long strand that hung unencumbered and wrapped it once about Somercotes’s neck. Bracing his knee against the struggling cardinal’s shoulder, he leaned back, pulling the rope taut. The heavy weave burned in his hands as Somercotes thrashed.

  Somercotes got his hands on Fieschi’s robes and tried to pull himself closer, but Fieschi’s knee kept him at bay. The Englishman’s hands became more frantic—at first like talons and then like the wings of a frightened bird. He gurgled and spat, each breath shorter and more desperate than the last.

  Fieschi held on. He breathed evenly—in, out, again and again—and kept the rope tight.

  The Church must prevail. I must prevail.

  26

  Rædwulf’s Bow

  “IT IS a jaghun,” Cnán said, “which is to say a unit of one hundred, made up of ten arbans of ten men each. The man you call Graymane is named Alchiq. He is new to them. About a week ago, he rode in out of nowhere to a Mongol garrison west of the Volga, where this jaghun and two others were encamped, and simply commandeered it.”

  “So he is a man of high rank,” Feronantus said.

  Cnán shrugged. “They know little about him, other than what I have just told you.”

  As soon as Vera had been able to ride, they had moved beyond the eastern limit of the Khazars’ territory. A few hours before, Cnán had arrived at their camp—proving once again her extraordinary tracking skills.

  She had been absent for four days.

  Following a wash, a nap, and a bowl of antelope stew, she had gathered the others to convey all she had learned.

  She went on now to say a few words about where Alchiq’s jaghun had crossed the Volga and where they had subsequently gone, though as everyone understood, this information was no longer of much use; she had broken contact two days ago, and the Mongols could have covered much distance since then. “Alchiq dispatched an arban up into those hills where the Khazars live,” she said, nodding toward the dark crests rising from the steppe to the west.

  “Too small to perpetrate a massacre,” Raphael remarked. “This Alchiq has a light touch, when it suits his purposes.”

  Some around the council looked as if they were about to raise objections, but they were silenced by a look from Cnán. She has her own commanding presence, doesn’t she? Raphael thought.

  “The arban in question is made up of Turkoman recruits from Kiwa, not all that far from here as distances on the steppe go, and they speak a similar language. They were sent to parley, not to kill. They took no casualties during the action against the Shield-Maidens and do not hunger for revenge, as some of the others do.”

  “You have information about casualties?” Vera said. Unlike the others, she had not grown accustomed to Cnán’s ability to move about Mongol-held countryside and gather intelligence.

  If Cnán was offended by the skepticism in Vera’s voice, she hid it well. “The brunt of your charge was taken by an arban of men from Barchkenda, which was all but destroyed. Six were killed outright, two died later of wounds, one is permanently disabled, the last has been absorbed into another arban that also took casualties during the fight on the riverbank. The total strength of the jaghun has been reduced to a little more than eighty, now organized in eight arbans. Some of these are unchanged; others are thrown together from survivors.”

  “How does that work, in an army where arbans are recruited from specific clans and villages?” Percival asked. Perhaps not so much out of practical curiosity as because he enjoyed watching Cnán’s mind work.

  “It depends on everything—language, clan rivalries, customs. Sometimes it goes smoothly; in other cases, the arban is thrown into disarray or even outright conflict.”

  “Then, since we are outnumbered, let us make conflict our ally,” Feronantus said.

  This was one of these gnomic utterances that threw the group into silence as all waited for Feronantus to make himself clear. Raphael studied their leader during that silence, looking for clues as to the old warrior’s state of mind.

  Feronantus’s outburst of rage when Percival had revealed their plan to the Khazars had been replaced by a kind of sullen embarrassment when Percival’s gambit had worked. After that, for a day or two, he had been pensive and withdrawn, but the need to prepare for battle seemed to have focused his mind and pushed into the shadows of whatever was troubling him.

  “You said earlier,” Feronantus went on, “that Ba
rchkenda lost nine men to the Shield-Maidens. Now, I know nothing of Barchkenda, but I shall hazard a guess that it is not a large place.”

  To this, Cnán responded with a smirk.

  “I see from your face that it is even smaller than I imagined,” Feronantus said. “The loss of nine of its young men must be a disaster for them. The men in the surviving arbans, having seen the devastation wreaked upon these soldiers in a brief melee, will be thinking of their own homes and families. Let us so arrange our tactics as to give them even more to brood upon.”

  * * *

  Cnán was flat on her belly, making the most of a scraggly tuft of wormwood scarcely big enough to provide cover for a dog. She had learned that if she lay perfectly still and avoided raising her head from the ground, distant observers would read the silhouette of her rumpled, ragged clothes as a pile of leaves or a scattering of rocks. She might have found better concealment in the tall grass growing out of the lee slope below and to her right, but to go down that way would take her out of view of the small party of Mongols patiently following her trail across the grass to her left.

  As usual, she had gone to the Mongol camp before dawn to spy on them. But then she had gone against all her instincts—and not at all to her liking—by leaving an obvious trail for them to follow.

  Alchiq, or perhaps one of his commanders, had dispatched a group of seven warriors to investigate. For the last hour, they had been gaining on her. They could have caught her quickly, of course, had they chosen to ride hard. But they knew that they were following a mere pedestrian in wide-open country and that time was on their side, and so they had proceeded at a measured and cautious pace, scanning the country ahead for ambushes and other perils.

  Cnán would be in a terrible spot just now, were it not for the fact that, two hundred paces away and down the slope to her right, at the bottom of a dry gully, Rædwulf was patiently waiting in a scatter of stunted trees.

  Unaware of her scrutiny, the Briton stretched and let his eyes wander. The sun was warm; the late morning was comfortable. She hoped he wasn’t planning to take a nap.

  Cnán had spent most of her life in parts of the world that were not known for producing persons of large stature. She had long been vaguely aware that if one traveled north and west long enough, one would reach a part of the world inhabited by persons with pale skin and strangely colored hair, often taller than other peoples of the world.

  The men of the steppes were like their ponies: low to the ground, stocky, agile, hard to kill. Like any other human population, they would from time to time yield a man of unusual height. But this conferred no advantage in the Mongol way of war, which was all about mobility, quickness, and maneuvering. When hand-to-hand combat occurred, it was probably because something had gone awry. The Mongols did have formations of armored cavalry, employed in special circumstances. A big man might find a place in such a unit. But wrestling was the martial art that they held in the highest esteem, and since size, weight, and strength so often determined the outcome of wrestling matches, this was what big, strong Mongols tended to do for a living. The Khans used them as executioners.

  The Northmen did not know or practice the steppe way of war; instead, being ignorant of the art of maneuvering, they preferred to fight in big, lumbering formations that clashed head-on in open fields. It was to be expected that the largest men of such societies would cover themselves in armor and ride out on oversized horses to engage their foes in personal combat with heavy weapons. In this respect, Percival had met her expectations precisely.

  Percival, however, was not the biggest and strongest man in their party. That distinction fell to Rædwulf. He was two inches taller than Percival, with a rugged, homely face, and—as she’d come to notice—covered all over with muscles. Among the Mongols, he’d have been their greatest wrestler. Among the Franks, he’d have become a cataphract—a mounted soldier in full armor. But Rædwulf came from an island off the northwestern extremity of the world where the warriors were skilled at a peculiar form of archery.

  Compared to the bows of the Mongols, Rædwulf’s weapon was huge and primitive, far too unwieldy to be used on horseback. No other man in the party could draw it except for Percival, who could pull the taut, hempen, three-stranded bowstring only partway.

  Rædwulf drew his weapon in a peculiar style, not so much pulling the string back as shoving the bow forward. And when he practiced during warm weather, shirtless on the steppe, it was spectacularly obvious to Cnán that every muscle in his huge body was straining to the limit. This apparently was the highest and best use for a Briton of exceptional size and strength: not wrestling, not sword fighting, but drawing a crude bow of unbelievable stiffness, then holding it at full draw long enough to loose a massive arrow, tipped with an iron warhead, into the body of a foe.

  His warheads came in various shapes, some made for piercing armor, others with broad heads for slashing through vessels and organs as they passed through the victim’s body. All of them were heavy, which, as Cnán understood, gave them greater range than the lighter and more numerous shafts of the Mongols. But in order to take advantage of that range, it was necessary to shoot them from a bow that could only be handled by the likes of Rædwulf.

  The seven Mongols had drawn close enough to make Cnán worried about her choice of cover. Soon, she would have to move, lest some sharp-eyed rider spy her lying at the base of the wormwood shrubs. If she tarried, she might die here.

  Writhing on her belly like a snake, keeping her head low to the ground, she crawled down the slope until the top of the rise came between her and the Mongols. Then she pushed herself up and brought her knees below her chin, rising to a squat. Rædwulf, pacing slowly back and forth along a row of ten arrows that he had shoved into the ground, didn’t notice her dark head pop above the ripe seed heads of the grass. But he did hear the whistle of a marmot, or something like it, from farther back in the gully. Finn had been amusing himself by learning to mimic the sounds of the (to him) exotic creatures that lived in these parts. Cnán watched in amusement as the huge Briton’s head swiveled toward Finn, then turned back a moment later, finally seeing Cnán on the slope above him. Moving quickly, for she did not know how long they had before the Mongols came in view, she held up a hand with all five fingers splayed, then made a fist of it, then extended only the thumb and index finger.

  Rædwulf nodded and unslung his bow from his shoulder. Then he glanced up past Cnán. Something drew his eyes to the ridgeline behind her.

  She rotated on her haunches and followed his line of sight to the Mongols, lance tips and helmets bobbing slowly as they came, their ponies at a walk. Cnán rolled and pressed herself flat against the earth, nestling in the grass. She could hear the soft tread of hooves on turf, Mongol voices calling out to one another.

  The trackers were spreading apart, some following her visible trail, others moving to the sides to block any escape and drive her into the center.

  She risked pushing up on her elbows and raised her head to look down the slope and watch Rædwulf. She was certain she had brought the Mongols within his range; they had paced it out yesterday when reconnoitering. But this would not save her if his aim was bad.

  The archer was breathing deeply, expanding his great chest, flexing his arms. He glanced down at the ten arrows lined up before him, points embedded in the soft soil, ready to grab.

  He reached for one, and Cnán tensed, but rather than pulling it up and nocking it, he merely brushed the fletches, smoothing out some irregularity in the alignment of the goose feathers. His eyes flashed white, rolling up in their sockets to peer at the approaching Mongols. The closest was perhaps thirty paces from Cnán.

  She sank back down into the cover of the grass and peered at his face through the golden stalks.

  The Mongol leader’s eyes wandered over the landscape that had just come into their view, following Cnán’s trail down toward the little copse of trees in the gully. And there his attention locked.

  In the open s
pace of the steppes, the Mongols could ride circles around maille-clad Westerners, to either escape or pepper them with arrows. A gully choked with gnarled trees was precisely where he would expect his quarry to hide.

  Satisfied, the Mongol muttered to his pony and began to ride ahead at a walking gait along the broken and trampled grass of Cnán’s trail. His men took his cue and followed in a loose gaggle, with the exception of two outriders dividing into parallel courses that would eventually bracket the gully.

  Their faces were alert, but it was the alertness of hunters pursuing birds or other innocuous prey. Even had they suspected an ambush waiting in the trees, all their training and experience would tell them they were safe at such a distance.

  The waiting made her twitch, then sweat, and finally, knot up all over. Cnán had never imagined that Rædwulf would allow them to come so close to her. She remembered, as a child, sneaking up on a marmot she had spied gathering seeds among a jumble of stones. By the time the marmot had realized that Cnán was stalking her, Cnán had drawn so close that the animal’s instinctive reaction was to freeze rather than run away, and yet freezing only made it possible for Cnán to draw closer.

  At some point, the only thing for it was to turn and run. But she didn’t dare stretch her cramping leg.

  The riders were within twenty paces, then ten. The only thing that kept them from spotting her was the intent fix of their gazes on the trees below, and the only thing that prevented Cnán from jumping to her feet and bolting like a terrified marmot was the knowledge that it would only earn her a Mongol arrow, or several, in her back.

  One of the riders trotted forward to draw abreast of their leader, and the breeze brought her his casual remark, words that at first made no sense to Cnán—a reference, perhaps, to some place they had visited that reminded him of this one, years past.

  Without taking his eyes off the trees, the leader smiled and nodded, and in that moment, he looked almost identical to the one who was speaking. They were brothers, she realized—brothers or cousins, reminiscing about past hunts back in their home territories, still far to the east.