The Mongoliad: Book Two (The Foreworld Saga) (30 page)

At the top of the steps, two attendants held open the flaps on the
ger
, and he ducked through the opening. The attendants dropped the flaps behind him, and he paused to let his eyes adjust to the dim light inside. The heavy hide of the tent blocked the bulk of the cheering and shouting outside.

The
ger
had been arranged as a replica of his rooms in the palace. Half a dozen people waited to serve him. A fire crackled in a
large stone-lined pit, and Ögedei could hear and smell meat cooking. Animal furs lined the floor, and at the back of the
ger
stood his great chair from the main hall in the palace. Borakchin and Mukha lounged on low couches near his chair; they were dressed as if for a court dinner, and the gold threads in their gowns glittered in the candlelight. On his right, Mukha’s favorite entertainers, a troop of Chinese acrobats, were juggling a dizzying number of colored balls.

“This is not how my father hunted,” Ögedei sighed.

The floor lurched beneath him and then began to rock gently as the
ger
’s driver got the team of oxen moving.

F
ERENC HAD WILLINGLY
followed Ocyrhoe through the city, had even let her hold his hand as they walked, as if they were young lovers; in the passing throngs, they risked being separated, and she was concerned that the wide-eyed country boy could be carried away in the current of people. The initial fear he had expressed about standing out as clearly Other was soothed within a quarter hour, once she showed him that half the city was made of people from foreign lands: priests, pilgrims, merchants, and travelers of all hues and costumes.

Eventually, Ocyrhoe turned them from a major thoroughfare down a smaller, almost empty side street. They followed this, unpaved and dusty, for the length of a bowshot. The buildings to either side were stone and old; they were not decorated and had few, if any, windows. She turned again into a narrow alley to the right, between two high buildings with no windows at all. It was cool in here; the sun never peeked between those walls except perhaps at noon in high summer, and then briefly.

The alley dead-ended where the buildings did, against a third building. It was like being in a deep, deep canyon: a narrow slot of sky above, shadow below, and no escape except back the way they’d come. There were no doors, no smaller alleys, nothing. Ocyrhoe
approached the crumbling stone and brick of the dead-end wall and began to examine it, as if for cracks. After a few fruitless moments, she turned and faced Ferenc expectantly. He gave her a blank, confused look and shook his head.

Ocyrhoe was sure she had explained this to him in the outpouring of their first “conversation,” when they suddenly realized they could communicate through the silent language she had learned from her kin-sisters, and known to them in some ancient tongue as
Rankos Kalba
, or
Rankalba
. She was still confused that he, a male, could know this code, but there was no time to wonder about that now.

Perhaps he had not really understood what she’d said before. Admittedly, she had simplified it; it would be exhausting and very time-consuming to try to explain the Septizodium and the elections and Orsini and Fieschi and too many other things. She sent a silent prayer to the Bind-Mother.
Oh, please, let him understand me
.

She slapped the cool stone wall, then took Ferenc’s wrists and tapped her fingers on the bony flesh in alternating singles, pairs, threes, fours,
grip
, then three, then one, and so on—variations signing out the basic message, as if she were leaving notches in a long piece of wood or on a cornice, or tying knots in a cord or her own hair: “Father Rodrigo is inside. Prisoner.” Ferenc blinked, then nodded. “Many rooms, in many buildings,” she continued. “Different rooms with tunnels connecting all. We are close. We must get in.” She noticed confusion in Ferenc’s expression.
Too fast
, she thought.
Whoever taught him
Rankalba
didn’t finish the lesson.
“Understand?” she asked, signing more slowly against his inner arm and wrist.

He mused on that for a moment, then nodded, though his expression suggested he was still unsure. She chewed her lower lip, looked up, then down, then decided to try drawing a map on the dust of the ground. She held out her hand. “
Pugio
?” she asked, using the Latin word. At his blank look, she mimed holding the weapon and stabbing the air with it, then again held out her hand.

“
Pugio
,” he said, and he repeated it once more as he gave her his knife. He was, she realized, learning the Latin word.

In the dirt of the alley, Ocyrhoe crouched and drew a bird’s-eye view of this alley and the immediate surrounding streets and buildings. She placed the facade of the Septizodium in the center of it and then drew the surrounding structures; these she knew by rumor were connected via tunnels, but after she drew in the streets, she was not sure how to designate tunnels. When she was finished, she looked up at him. “
Mappa
?” she said, again using the Latin word.

He nodded agreeably as he squatted next to her. She made a little
X
on the map beside one of the scratched-in buildings. “FerencOcyrhoe,” she declared, pointing to it. She patted the stone wall again, then etched in deeper the line representing it on the map.

Ferenc nodded. He pointed, on the map, to the interior of the building. “Father Rodrigo?” he said.

Ocyrhoe touched his wrist. “Maybe,” she squeezed, then shook her head. It would take far too long to explain that the Septizodium was a temple that wasn’t really a temple, just an ornamental wall on an otherwise nondescript building. Instead, she pointed to various other buildings on the map, each time signing “maybe here,” until Ferenc nodded that he understood: the priest was somewhere nearby, and they had to find him.

“Hidden door,” Ocyrhoe added, and then he understood why she had been staring at the wall when they first came here. He stood up, anxious to continue their search, but she shook her head and pulled his arm to return his attention to her crude map.

“Priest,” she said, pointing to each of the smaller buildings in turn. “Priest, priest, priest, priest, priest.”

Ferenc’s eyes popped wide open. He babbled something in his native tongue and then, grabbing her wrist, hesitatingly fingered out, “More. More. And more.” He frowned, then firmly amended, “
Many.
Prisoners?” Rendering a question in
Rankalba
was not easy.
She took his point by the lifting of his brows and general plaintive expression.

Ocyrhoe nodded. “Many prisoners,” she signed. It wasn’t quite accurate, but at least it gave him a vague understanding of what they were up against. He blinked and held his hands out wide, shrugging—a universal gesture of confusion, wanting to understand, not knowing. Ocyrhoe winced. There was no time to explain to him who Senator Orsini was or that he was keeping the cardinals captive until they voted in a new Pope. Even if she could somehow find a simple way to tell him, it would not help him understand her plan to reach his companion.

Not that she really had a plan to reach Father Rodrigo. Just an idea. And probably a very feeble one.

Ferenc patted her arm to get her attention and made a brushing-aside gesture; the bevy of imprisoned priests could await explanation. “Father Rodrigo,” he said gently.

She nodded, relieved that he was willing to stay focused on the task at hand, without a lot of explanation. When he stood this time, she let him.

Ferenc patted the wall and imitated what she had been doing earlier: searching out a secret door. He glanced at her; she nodded. He began to scan the wall himself, one cheek pressed against it as he pressed the opposite hand in front of him against the stone, examining. He did this for about as long as it might take to cross through the green market at midday. Then he shook his head and stepped away from the wall.

He held his hand out, and Ocyrhoe offered her wrist. “Not here. Look other walls,” he signaled. It was slow and awkward; he lacked her fluidity in gesture and movement, but he clearly understood what had to happen. “Where look now?” he asked.

She pursed her lips and, after a moment, pointed toward two other places on the map. He sat beside her again and followed her
finger. “Underground,” she signed, trying to communicate the idea that all these buildings were connected by underground tunnels.

Ferenc nodded. “Like rabbits,” he signed.

She offered him a tiny smile. Perhaps it was better that he didn’t know the full extent of the task before him. He had a simple determination about him. It wasn’t that he was feeble or slow minded, but that he didn’t worry about anything else.

She led him out of the alley, back into the beating heat, and into another alley on the far side of the main road. She was sure it was from one of these two alleys that Fieschi must have escaped the maze of rooms and tunnels, but the actual egress remained a mystery.

Ferenc’s patience, she realized, was exactly the sort of trait required to find a hidden door in a featureless stone wall. The cracks, even under her careful prodding, would have seemed to be nothing but cracks to her. Ferenc’s hand somehow recognized them as something else. He pushed in one spot; nothing happened. He moved half a pace to his left and pushed another spot.

Suddenly, and with an eerie silence, an entire arm’s-width slab of the wall moved, pivoting under his touch; the musty smell of subterranean air hit her nose.

* * *

Some part of Rodrigo knew he had fallen into a nightmare again, that he had slipped away from the real world. He knew there was no hope in trying to run from what was to come, even though it was worse to relive it, over and over again, knowing what would come, than to have lived through it the first time. He knew he had to suffer the nightmare. That was part of his trial, part of his burden.

He sat on the mud-caked rim of an upended wagon wheel and looked out over what had been, just weeks before, a thriving village. The river had supplied fish; nearby fields had supplied corn; gardens
around the farmsteads had brought in root vegetables of all sorts. Honey merchants had catered their sweet clay jars to mercenaries hired by King Béla massing on the drier margins of the muddy fields, excluded by their lowly status from Béla’s fortified camp, grumbling as they paid for food, mead, beer—grumbling more as they moved their own makeshift settlements away from the advancing river. The marshes had swarmed with biting gnats and flies, like white-hot lancets as they supped, as now they swarmed with carrion flies. Even before the battle, to Rodrigo, it seemed Hell itself held no match.

The battle had been another kind of flood, this one comprised of blood and disintegrating humanity. He could not recall all the logistics and the plans, the victorious sweep across the bridge, the later repulse and encirclement, the fleeing of selected units, followed by rains of stones, exploding pots, arrows. The screaming of the horses and men, confusion, escape, and then the endless press of the Mongols plowing into the roiling flocks of disheartened mercenaries, having already dispatched many of the main ranks of Teutonic Knights in their white riding coats emblazoned with black crosses—the flowing banners weaving back and forth through the slaughter, some ablaze, others leaning, vanishing to be trampled into the bloody muck as the standard bearers fell victim to an arrow or a saber. Mongol raiders plunging in and out, shouting and grinning and sweeping their sabers as the soldiers of Béla and Archbishop Csák tried to flee the burning, bombarded fortifications—dying by the hundreds on the ramparts, dozens of riders and horses at a time knocked over by flying, bouncing, cart-wheel-size stones. Or being caught in the fiery wash of those smoking, blazing, exploding jars that fell along with the stones.

So many dead. Vultures wheeling overhead were not the only beneficiaries. During the day, the fields of battle hosted thousands of darting, swooping swallows, feasting on the flies that, in turn, plagued both living and dead. And at night came the bats, leathery
wings whispering through the fetid air, feasting on mosquitoes that had the grace to plague only the living.

Rodrigo remembered his own attempted flight as a series of vignettes, one horse after another dying beneath him of wounds or exhaustion, then on foot, wearily avoiding the clusters of fleeing knights—many having shed their armor and crosses, stumbling as fast as they could through the carnage, heading south and west, where they would loot farms and murder farmers and their families and servants in panicked desperation.

How different were the knights from the Mongols? Little different, in practice. Even before the battle, or in their brief days of victory, they had drunk deep and sallied forth from the fortress and their shifting lines of tent camps to rape villagers’ wives and daughters, even aging crones. In defeat, they returned to rape and then kill, loot and then burn, practicing the last desperation of destroying the land so that the Mongols themselves would have no benefit. The knights of the black cross had turned on their own with a ferocity that shook Rodrigo’s faith and overturned all his youthful views of righteous Crusades, Christian good, and Mongol evil.

The savagery proved, to Rodrigo, the end of human civilization. No emotion, no interaction between two living people, could ever mean anything real now; it was all a feint, a gauzy veil of deceitful civility over the true color and timbre of mankind, which was becoming unadulterated evil. There was nothing decent or good or truly Christian left under the sun. The stink of hellfire spewed up from narrow fissures in the earth. Even if he could have died, Hell would not have taken him; there were worse torments, and they would come seeking him.

He rose from the wagon wheel now and stumbled through the mud, retching, trying to tear away his clothes, which sickened him with their filth, but he was too weak even to manage that. The rain was torrential. If he could inhale mud, that might quench the fire
of his lungs, his heart, his liver. The mud was the only simple thing left, and now even that was running with the blood of infidels and Christians alike. No, it was all the blood of infidels; there were no Christians left. He was the only Christian left at Mohi, and if he did not turn the tides of fate, he would be the only Christian left anywhere on earth.