This is the first of many blows owed you and yours. Kristaps smiled, and snapped his hips back, levering the Shield-Brethren with tremendous force and hurling him to the ground. He managed to roll, struggling to regain his feet as Kristaps watched, now holding his greatsword in his right hand and his enemy’s spear in his left. You are unarmed. You are wounded. You have already lost.
He hefted the shaft, and threw it back toward his foe. Goading him now. You are no threat to me.
The trap had been sprung, and Andreas had landed badly. When he struggled to his feet his breath was coming in difficult rasps, his head throbbing with pain. The stillness of his enemy was unnerving, absolute in its predatory, watchful confidence. Andreas had begun the fight in uncertainty, his resolve shaken. Now, feeling the agonizing fire in his chest, the only possible end to this confrontation was making itself clear. I am going to die.
The spear sailed toward him and he caught it reflexively. The motion of snapping his arm out to seize the shaft sent ripples of white-hot pain through his chest, shoulders, and back. He was losing the battle rush, and when the sword tip had struck him, something had broken. His legs were sluggish, and his maille and gambeson made it feel like he was carrying two or three full-grown men on his shoulders. The Livonian stood before him, his sword at the ready, watching with the contemptuous contemplation of a cat enjoying a game with a mouse before it has a meal. The sun was relentless in its attention, and what felt like rivers of sweat were coursing down his back and legs.
Behind the Livonian, the colorful flags atop the Khan’s box fluttered, calling to him.
All at once the fear was gone, and Andreas gasped at the sudden clarity that lay before him. The goal of this battle, whether the advantage had been his or not, had never been about survival. It would have been nice had the Virgin allowed him and his absent ally to walk away laughing with a grand tale to tell his brothers back in Petraathen when this was all done and past, but that had always been an indolent dream. Even Hans had known.
His hands tightened on the spear and he set his teeth against the pain. Andreas had heard stories from older brothers, speaking of the times when they had believed death upon them, how their senses became sharper. When fear fled, everything became serene and perfect. One last gift from the Virgin before she came to collect her brave warriors.
It was all he needed. One last gift. One last throw.
He sprang toward the Livonian, his spear flickering before him in a last flurry of thrusts. The Livonian defended himself, almost lazily, as if he could not quite believe that his opponent thought this assault would bear fruit. His enemy sidestepped the first thrust toward his midsection, swatted the spear tip aside as it came again at his helmet, and then—becoming bored with the same sequence being forced upon him once again—rushed in with a killing blow. It was exactly what Andreas had expected. He let the spear whirl around in his hands as the Livonian came at him, and smashed the butt of the weapon into the flat of the greatsword’s blade, sending it veering off its course and to the side. Control the motion, control the body.
The butt of the spear was now between the Livonian’s weapon and his body. Andreas slammed his weight into his enemy’s flank, and used the shaft of the spear to hook his foe’s neck. He dropped his hips, twisted all his weight against the pain, and sent the Livonian through the air, his body crashing into the ground. Get out of my way.
The crowds were roaring in his ears, expecting a finishing move. But Andreas ignored his opponent, continuing his mad dash across the sand. His legs cried out in pain; he ignored them. His chest was afire with the agony of each breath, but he would only need his lungs for a few moments longer.
The Khan’s box hung before him, a massive work of wood painted with red and gold and decorated with the stolen fineries of a thousand looted kingdoms. A pair of gleaming curtains shielded its occupants from the rays of the summer sun, stirring now in the wind. Andreas held one arm before him to steady his aim. You should have known better, he thought. Out of the reach of a sword, but not my spear. A gift, Onghwe Khan. I give you my life, so that I might take yours...
Limbs burning, chest screaming, Andreas set his weight, and threw his weapon, as hard and as far as he had ever done. As he watched it sail through the air, white-hot agony seared through his body—from his shoulder to his hip—and all feeling went out of his legs and his right arm. The world spun and he was no longer looking up at the Khan’s box. A shadow passed overhead, and all he could see was the red and wet sand of the arena. He tried to lift his head, tried to find the Khan’s box. Had his spear found its mark? Virgin, into thy hands I place my—
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Into Hyperborea
Where are we?” Yasper squinted up at the sky, as if assessing the location of the sun might be of some assistance in an otherwise futile effort at divining their location. In all directions, the steppe went on forever, a flatness marred only by the scraggly knobs of wormwood.
The landscape was—though Cnán didn’t want to belabor the point—not much different from what it had been for the previous phase of the moon. “We’re getting close,” she said, catching Raphael’s eye and hiding a smile.
“Close to what?” the Dutch alchemist wanted to know. He idly scratched his jaw, an unconscious tic most of the men had adopted since they had shaved their beards as part of Feronantus’s initiative to blend in more readily.
Other than Raphael and Istvan, the men were very Western in appearance, and given their need to move quickly and effortlessly across the broad steppe they needed to be less conspicuous. With much grumbling, they had shaved their heads and beards, and with the assistance of a salve concocted by the alchemist and daily exposure to the sun, their skin tones had been darkened as well.
“We’re close to that bush over there,” Cnán said, pointing.
“Ah,” Yasper said, throwing up his hands. “Now I know exactly where we are.” He dropped his arms until he could look down one arm at the bush (which looked like every other bush for miles in any direction) and along the other at the route they had been following. “Yes,” he said, wrinkling his nose and peering down his arm, “it is a good thing I have the latest inventions from Arabia to guide us.” He wiggled one of his thumbs. “We are, and this measurement is exceptionally accurate—”
“To within one thumb width, at least,” Rædwulf interjected.
“Better mine than yours,” Yasper chortled. “As I was saying, yes, we are exactly halfway.” He raised his arms again and looked at the company, rather pleased with himself.
Istvan chewed on the end of his mustache and glowered. Both Percival and Feronantus dozed in their saddles, oblivious to the alchemist’s wit. Eleázar was a half mile ahead, riding point, and of the remaining quartet—Vera, Raphael, Rædwulf, and Cnán—only Cnán regularly engaged Yasper. She liked the quirky Dutchman’s company; he had a lively insouciance and an inquisitive eagerness that made the long days and nights of their journey palatable. When she had made this journey west before, she had ridden along for many, many months, and she could recall very little of the journey.
Cnán stole a glance at Feronantus and Percival. They were alike in many ways, even though many years separated them. Feronantus was, in fact, old enough to have fathered every member of the company and, in some cases, of such an age that he could be someone’s grandfather. Percival was younger than the other Shield-Brethren, but it was his bearing and his vision that lent the impression of gravid wisdom, the sort that usually comes with having survived many hard winters. In fact, she was starting to think that he was not much older than she, and this realization had caused her some distress a few days back.
“I am quite serious, though,” Yasper continued, dragging her from her thoughts. “Where are we?”
“It’s not far now,” she replied, enjoying the consternation her words wrought on the alchemist’s face.
“Weren’t we supposed to meet that trader, Benjamin?”
“We are.”
>
“When? We didn’t meet up with him after the river. You found a note that we were supposed to go somewhere else. A rock, wasn’t it? Some sort of landmark that would be obvious. How many days’ journey was that supposed to have been?”
“Six,” she said. “But we were chasing Alchiq, remember?”
“I thought we were looking for Istvan.”
Cnán shrugged as if to say those two things were one and the same. “We went north when we should have been going south.”
Yasper groaned. “I knew we should have stayed closer to the trade routes.”
“We’ll be there soon,” Cnán assured him.
“You still haven’t told me where there is.”
“Soon.” She nodded toward the horizon. “Can’t you see it?”
Yasper whirled in his saddle, leaning forward like a hunting dog catching a scent. He even quivered a bit in excitement. “Where?” he said, a tiny quaver in his voice.
Rædwulf pointed, and Cnán marveled at his eyesight. She knew the rock lay in that direction; she had felt the gentle tug in her belly earlier in her day that said she was going in the right direction, but she hadn’t spotted the lone finger of stone jutting up from the steppe yet. She had been looking for it, and even though the air was crystalline in its clarity, she couldn’t see it yet. But, apparently, Rædwulf could.
“A day’s ride,” the tall Englishman said.
Raphael glanced up from the tiny journal he was constantly scribbling in. “Only then will we be halfway,” he pointed out.
Yasper stood in his saddle, straining to see the tiny dot on the horizon that Rædwulf could see. “Next time,”—he sank back down—“can we pick a target closer to home?”
Cnán caught Raphael looking at her, an oddly gentle look in his eyes, and she gave him a wistful smile before ducking her head and kneeing her horse lightly to get it to trot a little faster. Home, she thought. Where is that for a lost little leaf like me?
“Oh, my friends, I did not recognize you!” Benjamin leaped down from his horse and approached the Shield-Brethren’s horses. The trader offered them a wide smile and a wider embrace, hugging each one of them in turn, except for Istvan, who deigned to get down from his horse. “The steppe has changed you,” he observed. “Well, most of you.”
“Only on the outside,” Raphael quipped, disengaging himself from the trader’s hug.
“It is a very clever disguise.” Benjamin fingered Raphael’s plain cloak, and the gleam in his eye said he had felt the ridged texture of the maille beneath the simple homespun cloth. “From a distance, you look like Kipchaks or Cumans, not altogether unusual in this region, and this one”—he indicated Cnán—“always adds a bit of Eastern flair to your company. Up close, I would still think Cumans, what with your garb and your saddles. Most would not think twice about who you were.” He tapped his forehead. “But I have traded this route too long to not notice the little things.”
“We did not expect to confound you, Benjamin,” Feronantus explained. “We only hoped to become invisible to the dull-eyed so that our passage would not be remembered or hindered.”
“It is a good strategy,” the trader nodded. “When you did not arrive at the caravanserai as immediately as we had planned, I suspected your mission had waylaid you. When the survivors of your encounter with the jaghun started to limp through, I knew you would not dare to meet me there. Fortunately, knowing your companion,” he glanced at Cnán, “I suspected you might be able to find this place.
He slapped Raphael on the shoulder. “Oh, but I have been enjoying the wild tales that have preceded you. I have heard a number of stories about Western devils rising out of darkness, spitting fire, and walking across water.”
Raphael laughed. “I suspect the last may be overly embellished.”
“It was not my place to dissuade these people of the errors in their stories. I am but a humble trader,” Benjamin said. “I would not dream of interfering with the fabrication of local legends.”
“What of Graymane?” Feronantus asked. “The one called Alchiq.”
“An elusive ghost, that one.” Benjamin’s face lost some of its levity. “As I came east, I made inquiries and heard very little. The few who spoke of him tended to whisper their rumors, as if they were worried he might hear them. Though I cannot imagine how, as everyone agreed that he was hurrying east, leaving a trail of dead horses in his wake. He asked many questions too as he rode—too many, in my opinion. He heard few satisfactory answers, which have led others to wonder about the cause of his ferocious curiosity.”
“How many days ahead of us?” Feronantus asked.
“Enough.”
“Aye,” Feronantus sighed. He raised his eyes toward the impressive spire of the rock. “We will rest and resupply tonight; tomorrow, we will acquire fresh horses and ride on. Friend Benjamin, I would ask a boon of you. We had hoped to utilize your expertise on our journey, sheltering ourselves in the midst of your caravan, but I fear your need to stop and trade will only hinder our pace. Events, I am afraid to admit, have left us bereft of not only one of our numbers but also of time. We must get to the Khagan before Alchiq can reach and warn him. If we cannot beat him there, we must hope that his warning is delayed or otherwise ignored. Otherwise...”
“Yes,” Benjamin mused, resting a finger on his lips. “I see your predicament. My caravan can offer you more invisibility than you already possess, but it will, alas, move at a rate that will not be to your liking. If I were to abandon my cargo to one of my caravan masters, he would, most likely, rob me blind and leave my camels in Samarkand.” He shook his head. “Hardly a suitable end to a trade caravan that has gone back and forth along the Silk Road for nearly three generations.”
Feronantus said nothing, and Cnán leaned forward to scratch her horse along its mane. She—and the rest of the company—had become accustomed to their leader’s long silences. It was rarely due to an extended bout of thinking on Feronantus’s part, but more for the sake of others in the conversation. Feronantus had already considered, rejected, and postulated several possible solutions, and in his mind he had already settled on the most suitable answer. He was simply waiting for the rest of them to come to the same conclusion.
Cnán found her own readiness to follow Feronantus’s conclusions without convoluted mental peregrinations of her own both comforting and unsettling. She was allowing herself to become complacent with the company, letting them do her thinking for her.
“No decision need be made immediately,” Benjamin said. “Come. Let us eat and rest. We have much to discuss before the morning.” He beckoned to the company as he strode toward his camp.
Cnán grinned. Benjamin was a very adroit trader. He had neatly avoided Feronantus’s trap.
Raphael had never seen a land as flat and inhospitable as the steppe. Scoured clean by the wind, the landscape east of the river where they had fought Alchiq’s jaghun had been brutal in its emptiness, as if this were a land abandoned by God. There were animals and plants that thrived on the endless plain, enough that a desperate party could sustain itself, but such a life was spent being cold, miserable, and constantly hungry.
According to Cnán, it was only going to get worse until they reached the Mongolian Plateau on the other side of several mountain ranges.
Raphael doubted the rest of the company were familiar with Herodotus and Pliny, ancient historians who had tried to make sense of the myriad of travelers’ tales that described the distant edges of the known world. Alexander had used Herodotus’s Histories as his map of the East, and the Macedonian conqueror redrew all of the known maps by the time of his death. Pliny, hundreds of years later, tried to make further sense of the tangled histories of the peoples encompassed by Alexander’s reach, but he never traveled to all of the places that he wrote about.
It struck him Raphael as both strange and marvelous that he, a bastard born in the Levant and raised in Al-Andalus, was seeing more of the world than either Herodotus or Pliny. Both had written
of a land called Hyperborea, where the north wind lived in a vast cave. They repeated stories of one-eyed giants and gryphons, forever at war with one another, though it was difficult to see what was worth fighting about on these barren steppes.
As the company settled itself following a simple feast (one that was mouth-wateringly delicious in comparison with their diet of salted meat and dried berries over the last few weeks), Raphael took it upon himself to investigate the rock. Perhaps, he reasoned, I might find some gryphon feathers.
The rock was a mystery, a prominent landmark in a land that had none. It was shaped like a sundial’s gnomon, oriented east to west with the higher end in the east. It cast a significant shadow, and were they staying a day or two more, Raphael would have wanted to scale it. He was intrigued by the allure of the view from its pointed peak. How far could he see from the prow of this rocky ship? Who else had been up there, and had they left any markings for later travelers to decipher?
Boreas may have smoothed the sharp edges of the rock, but there were still narrow channels cut in the limestone as if from water (leading Raphael to speculate that the weather had been vastly different in this region once) as well as pockets and divots filled with twigs and down from generations of nesting birds. Much like an oasis in the desert, the rock offered shelter and solace, providing a place where men and animals could pretend the surrounding land was not intolerably harsh.
Benjamin’s camp was situated on the southern side, and Raphael hiked around the thicker end of the rock, mainly to see the other side. It was the same as the other, though at this time of year, the shadows were longer. He clambered across the rough scree and laid his hands on the rock directly, marveling at how cool the stone was to the touch. Letting his right hand rest on the rock, he walked east, idly wondering if he could circumnavigate the rock before nightfall. He chided himself on such frivolous thinking. As the day cooled, there might be beasts that would come out of hiding to hunt, and he was out of earshot of the camp.