After noon of the second day, Feronantus put out word that, tomorrow, the junior Brethren would stand sentry around their encampment while Kinyen—the Order’s communal mess—was held at the great table of the chapter house. Cnán knew that Kinyen was an ancient tradition, one they took most seriously. The camp grew busy with preparations: A wild sow was spitted and splayed over a bed of banked coals to slow cook. The beams were stripped from the monastery and hewn and pegged into makeshift benches so that there would be room for all of the warrior monks—a full two dozen now, even when ten or so initiates were left outside to stand guard—to sit around the edges of the hall.
The Shield-Brethren stayed up late that night drinking and singing and telling long stories of their exploits and adventures in various parts of the West. Cnán mostly stayed outside, in her tent—ignored, she hoped; unwanted, she suspected.
It was during a particularly long tale told by Raphael, about sewing up Crusaders and Moors alike, that she heard a solitary man emerge from the chapter house. An unevenness in his gait told Cnán that he was reeling slightly. The wind came from behind him and she smelled several horns of mead on his shuddering, belching exhale.
“Why alone?” he called. It was Haakon.
“Why so loud?” she countered, in as low a voice as she thought might be heard. The knights, wise though they might be in hand-to-hand, were less than cautious about alerting gleaners to their presence. Perhaps they felt they lived under the charms of their Christian God, or their warrior gods—whichever commanded the daylight of Feronantus’s faith. Or perhaps they just believed they now had sufficient numbers to kill anyone short of a Mongol army.
She heard him stumbling over the leaves and the beaten dirt of the fighting field. His moon shadow loomed across the canvas of her tent, leaning one way, then another.
“It isn’t natural,” he said. “A woman…a man…about to die. You think I’m going to die, don’t you?”
Indeed, Haakon seemed the one having the greatest difficulty duplicating Taran’s exacting moves. He hesitated, as if thinking everything through twice—and then he swung, or parried, taking sharp, bruising blows as a result. Taran afforded him neither pity nor time to recover.
“You have the best trainer I’ve seen,” Cnán said, surprising herself by this admission. “You’ll live if you listen and learn.”
“Easy for you to say. You aren’t fighting.” Haakon dropped to a cross-legged squat beside her tent. He seemed content to talk through the canvas, like a Christian giving his confession through a screen. “I’m brave. I’m good in battle. Steadfast. The greatsword—my weapon. I know it like a friend. Yet whatever I do…whatever I do…” He stopped; slapped a few bugs. “Tell me about yourself.”
“I’d rather sleep,” she said, truthfully enough.
“I could keep you company. Warm you.”
“The nights are warm enough,” Cnán said.
She considered it a victory of sorts that she did not actually laugh. She was not above lying with a man now and then, when it pleased her to do so, but she hadn’t come here to be wooed—and certainly not by one who was supposed to be a celibate monk!
Suddenly she felt a pang of both sympathy and suspicion. Perhaps the youth wasn’t as stupid as she thought. Haakon must have caught her out, seen something in her face that she had been trying to hide from herself and the others…
“Go away,” she said.
If she were going to break any man’s celibacy, it would be Percival’s, but Percival did not look on her that way.
Haakon got up, then bent to brush a few fallen leaves and twigs from her tent—as if conveying some clumsy affection to her shell, her hiding place. “All right,” he said. “No harm. A marvelous night. I feel ready…for…for anything. Just thought…”
He left his words hanging and wove his way back to the chapter house, leaving Cnán sadder and lonelier than ever.
What was it a man and a woman were supposed to do, when they weren’t in constant flight, running on the leading edge of the voracious Mongolian army? Haakon’s clumsy words were as close to a kind of courtship as she had ever experienced—and she had bluntly sent him on his way, no thanks, no sympathy.
Haakon was the first that night, but not the last, to approach her refuge and try to make loose conversation. All celibate, all clumsy, all drunk—and not one was Percival. Nor Raphael, of course, who seemed steeped in other, more urbane techniques; the Syrian did not bother her either.
She stayed out of the embrace of any and all drunken monks that night and woke late the following morning, arrayed herself in tunic and doeskin, and when summoned, walked to the chapter house to attend the Kinyen.
The knights, after an hour or two of sleep, had recovered enough from their drunken feats of bravado to open another barrel and resume.
In the gloom of the old monastery’s refectory, lit by a dusty shaft of daylight through the broken roof and a scatter of short candles, she saw Feronantus sitting at the head of a large table, with Illarion on his right. The shaft of light fell between the two, highlighting their shoulders and hands and brimming cups. The rest of the knights sat in degrees of candlelight and shadow, murmuring to each other and passing bread and slopping flagons. They drank like fish. Most knights drank heavily, now that Cnán thought of it. Likely all that celibacy weighed on them.
The table had originally been rectangular, but they had enlarged it by throwing rough-sawn planks over its top and, in the process, made it somewhat round. The shape surprised her, and she wondered at its significance.
Illarion was almost unrecognizable, so dramatically had the swelling of his face gone down. He had shaved off the dark beard. Food and ale had put color back into his face, and when he spoke, his thoughts were clear and his voice firm. But for the missing ear and the perpetually gloomy mien, one might never guess all that he had gone through in the last few months.
Cnán looked around at the room full of Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae and again felt that disturbingly unfamiliar sense of safety. She shook this off and spited herself as a fool, certain that these knights could not hold out against a storm cloud of Mongols for more than a few minutes. Barring ghostly luck, of course.
Feronantus introduced the Kinyen to the one-eared Ruthenian ghost himself and motioned for him to speak.
“What I will say now, I said to Feronantus when I arrived,” Illarion began, “but at his request, I now tell you directly: all of you have come to this place on a fool’s errand.”
Feronantus, a little taken aback, rested an affectionate hand on Illarion’s shoulder and explained, “I had hoped you might supply a fuller explanation.”
“The arena that the Mongols are building at Legnica, on the outskirts of their tent warren, is but a prefiguring of a thing I have seen before, near the gates of Lodomeria, my own city,” Illarion said. “A city that no longer exists. Only I survived. Consider that as you prepare for the competition to which Onghwe Khan has summoned you and the other great warriors of Christendom.”
Having got their attention, Illarion whetted his whistle with a long, foaming swallow of ale before going on, in a less plangent tone. For a moment he’d seem to fear his counsel might not be respected. But something in Feronantus’s face and in the attentive manner of the assembled monks gave him heart.
“The armies of Onghwe Khan laid siege with cannon and towers, pushed down our sunrise walls, and then captured the eastern quarter and laid it to waste—a story no different from thousands of others ranging from our very doorstep to the eastern ocean. The rest of the city expected to die, and we were ready for it. But then, at the end of the seventh month, as our serfs were starving, as disease coursed through our streets and the barrows went from door to door, something unexpected happened: a magnanimous gesture from Onghwe himself. He summoned me to the south wall, our strongest wall. He knew my name and those of my generals. He had spies in our midst—fur traders, I suspect. Need I say what his offer was?