Rutger shook his head, trying not to let the small hope burning in his chest erupt into something larger. “No,” he said, his eyes flickering back and forth between the two men. “Such an action requires more men.”
The Hospitaller’s eyes glittered in the leaping firelight. “That is our thought as well,” he said. “Which is why we have come to join you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Long and Winding Road
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 Týrshammar 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 more snow. As it was, they had reached the snow line the day before, and by Cnán’s reckoning, it was another three days before they would be able to pass through the gap and start their descent to the Gurbantünggüt Desert.
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 truth of Percival’s vision? That the images the knight saw were, indeed, a message that issued from divine lip and hand.
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 Confessiones written by Augustine of Hippo when the Christian theologian was of a similar age. In many ways, the Confessiones was a preamble to Augustine’s truly revelatory work, De Civitate Dei, as if the theologian had to exorcise his own past before he could address the more complex philosophical inquiries of the later work.
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 having a purpose, but that self-knowledge only inflamed his desire.
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.
What is my purpose? How may I best serve God?
“It is a beautiful view, isn’t it?” Eleázar 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,” Rædwulf explained to Cnán. The pair of them were riding behind Yasper and Eleázar. “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?” Cnán asked, squinting up at Rædwulf. The tall Englishman smiled wolfishly. Glancing around, Cnán 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. Cnán 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.
Rigorous, dangerous, and quicker: those had been the magic words that had betrayed Benjamin. Feronantus had nodded with a gravid finality that the others knew well when Benjamin stressed them. Three reasons why you cannot
come with us, Feronantus had said. You place too little value on your life.
What of you and yours? Benjamin had retorted.
Each of our lives have no meaning, except that which we give them by our deeds, Feronantus had replied, and Cnán knew he was quoting some old dictum of the Shield-Brethren.
In the weeks since, Cnán had noticed how the weight of that saying—the burden of their journey—was starting to show on the old veteran from Týrshammar. He may have traveled to the far edges of Christendom, but the steppe was much broader than he could have imagined, and occasionally Cnán could read a crumbling despair in Feronantus’s eyes when he stared at the distant horizon. What had, in the beginning, seemed like a simple plan—ride east, passing over the Land of the Skulls and into the heartland of the Mongol Empire, and kill the Great Khan—was becoming such an extended odyssey that he was beginning to doubt they would reach their goal in time to save the West.
“That one over there is Khan Tengri,” Cnán said as the rest of the company reached the overlook, pointing to the white peak, blazing in the afternoon sun. “We are close to the Zuungar Gap.” The mountain floated above a layer of blue and gray clouds, a slab of flying marble like the mystical and unreachable home of foreboding gods. “When the sun sets,” Cnán finished, “the snow turns red.”
Istvan hawked and spat, and Cnán wasn’t sure if the Hungarian’s reaction was one of disbelief or if he was engaged in some manner of warding ritual. More and more, she had begun to see the Hungarian as a deeply superstitious man, one who was both haunted and hunted by some spirits only he could perceive. He hadn’t been completely taken by the influence of the freebutton mushrooms for many weeks, but she suspected he still had a secret cache of them on his person and that he would, from time to time, chew one.
“Tengri,” Yasper mused. “Isn’t that the name of the Mongol god?” The light from the distant mountain peak seemed to be reflecting from his face. “Does he live up there?”
Cnán shook her head. “No, the Mongols aren’t like that. They believe in spirits. Everything has a spirit—the rocks, the trees, all the animals—and these spirits are all part of the world that flowed from Tengri.”
“That is not dissimilar to the Christian view of the soul,” Raphael pointed out.
“Ah, but the Christian soul is unique and distinct,” Yasper countered. “Your soul inhabits your body, and when your body perishes, your soul goes to Heaven. It is still your soul. I suspect—and correct me if I am wrong, Cnán—when something dies, the Mongols believe its spirit flows back to Tengri where it is reabsorbed into the great expanse that is their god.”
Cnán shrugged, indicating that this conversation was already well beyond her.
“You are separate from God, good Raphael,” Yasper continued, “I suspect the Mongols and their world are not. In fact, I am sure we will find a shrine near the top of the gap that is dedicated to the rocks and the trees that manage to thrive at this height, so close to the realm of the Sky God.” Yasper seemed genuinely thrilled by the idea.
“I’m sure the Church will be delighted to send missionaries to endlessly debate this distinction,” Feronantus observed dryly.
“We could let these two debate it now,” Rædwulf said. “We have many days left in our journey.”
Feronantus smiled at the longbowman’s enthusiasm. “I am a fighting man,” he said. “Not a theologian or a philosopher. All of this talk is well beyond my simple understanding, and I fear such discourse will be meaningless to me.”
“I think your understanding is far from simple,” Raphael noted dryly.
“Perhaps,” Feronantus said. “But it is my understanding.” The old veteran tapped his horse with his reins, nudging it back to the sloping path. The others, sensing the time was over for scenic viewing and rhetorical discourse, followed until only Cnán and Raphael remained.
“There,” she said, pointing. “Do you see it?”
Raphael nodded. There were winds blowing at the top of the mountain, and a gauzy curtain of white mist fluttered at the tip as if it were caught upon that high spire. Below the slope of the mountain was changing color—gold to crimson.
“I have heard stories about the Shield-Brethren, though I have little faith they contain but the merest morsel of truth to them. They are like many fanciful tales one hears along the trade routes,” Cnán said as the others moved out of earshot. “You pretend to fight for the Christian God, but you swear your oaths to someone else, don’t you?”
“Does it matter?” Raphael countered. “If the oath I am swearing is to protect people like you and other innocents?”
“Do you all swear the same oath?” she asked.
“We do,” Raphael said.
“But it means something different to some of you, doesn’t it?” she pressed.
“Aye,” he said softly. “I fear that it might.”
Ahead of them, Khan Tengri became drenched with blood.
The wind howled so vociferously and with such zeal that, for the rest of the day after they breached the gap and began their rapid descent down the other side, Raphael’s ears were blocked. His head was filled with the shrieking echo of Boreas, the angry north wind that had attempted to drive them back with the sheer volume of its outrage.
But they had doggedly kept moving, hauling their horses by the reins when the beasts balked at going any farther. He had taken part in the crusade in Egypt, and the disastrous march on Cairo had tested him vigorously; others in the company had been in similar campaigns, and they knew their wills were stronger than any temporary pain. They knew the only way to complete any journey was to focus on the ground in front of them. Place one foot, and then the next. Do not look at the unmoving horizon or the immobile sun. One step at a time. The Shield-Brethren can always take one more step.
The Gap was a narrow slit, as if God—or Tengri—had cut a notch in the shoulder of the mountain, and the wind shrieked with near physical violence as they dragged their terrified horses through the rocky defile. On the eastern side of the gap, the land dropped away rapidly. By nightfall, which came so quickly that Raphael wondered if God had snuffed out the sun as soon as it had passed beyond the notch of the gap, they were already below the snow line.
The route descended into an endless forest filled with tall and narrow trees, unlike any evergreen that Raphael had seen before. The needles were like the trees in the West, long and pointed, but the trees held their branches close to their trunks. In the West, the evergreens spread their branches wide, as if they were offering shelter to any weary traveler; the trees on the eastern slopes of the Tien Shan struck him as being wary of strangers.
He felt as if he was constantly being watched as the company made their way down into the long valley. This land knew they were invaders and regarded them with a great deal of suspicion.
He slept poorly that night.
Shortly before midday, the evergreens began to thin out, invaded by squat, broad-crowned leafy trees. Rædwulf recognized them as walnut trees, and he and Yasper dismounted from their horses to fill several bags with the hard-shelled nuts. Istvan enjoyed cracking the nuts with his bare hands.
Raphael suspected the walnuts signified the presence of water, and an hour later, the company discovered a crystalline tarn nestled in the basin of the valley. A rocky moraine at the southern end formed a natural dam, and the water was bluer than the pale, cloud-dappled sky.
And much colder.
Feronantus called a halt and announced they would overnight on the bank of the lake. They had been traveling hard for several weeks, and the strain of the journey was clearly etched on everyone’s face. The sun was warm on the rocks, there was little wind (especially in comparison to the howling gale of the gap), and there was food and water in ready supply. It was a good camp.
Yasper broached the lake first. With some effort, he pried his stiff clothing off. Venting a shrill battle cry, he dashed for the water. His voice became more agitated as his pale legs entered the lake, and h
is words turned blasphemous. But he kept going, and eventually his head disappeared beneath the surface. He reemerged almost immediately—shuddering, his lips blue and teeth chattering—but his mood was irrepressibly jubilant. “It’s warmer than it looks,” he shouted to the rest of the company, all of whom wore doubtful expressions. He splashed water at Istvan, who danced back from the spray as if it were hot coals.
“You first,” Vera said to Raphael in response to his raised eyebrow. Her expression brooked no argument.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
In the Shadow of Burqan-qaldun
As the terrain became rockier, the caravan folded itself into a narrow formation and wound its way along a more circuitous route. To Gansukh, perched on the flat, sun-warmed crown of a rocky promontory, the elongated caravan looked like a serpent, fat and swollen with a recent meal. Sluggishly, it slithered around uprisings of crumbling rock. Beyond, a day’s ride back, lay the grasslands. They had found the edge of that endless sea and left it behind.
Now was the time for an ambush. There were numerous tactical advantages in this terrain: how the narrow track forced the caravan to spread itself out, making it more difficult for the patrols to guard it well; the rocks offered so many more hiding places from which to launch an assault; these same rocks provided cover for a retreat. Why had the Chinese attacked them in the lowlands? They had had inferior numbers, and the caravan had been stationary with a defensive perimeter established.
Gansukh shaded his eyes and peered at the tiny shapes darting around the bulky midsection of the serpentine caravan. The Torguud and their endless patrols, eternally vigilant and restless since the attack. Like an anthill after it had been probed with a stick.
His horse nickered softly. His mount had spotted another horse, one that it knew, and Gansukh caught himself hoping the approaching rider was Lian. He knew it couldn’t be, and as he glanced over his shoulder, he squashed the momentary thrill of the idea.