The door opened, and Gansukh, filled with both shame and revulsion, slipped out of the room. The guards closed the door and stood in front of it, their eyes forward, their postures saying quite plainly that they would never acknowledge any of the sounds coming through the portal. What happened behind them was a secret they would never reveal.
Gansukh’s hand slipped inside his deel, touching the tiny lacquered secret held therein. Ögedei’s voice chased him as he walked away from the Khagan’s private room, an echo that grew louder and louder in his head as the real sounds grew fainter: None of you understand what is truly important.
CHAPTER 20:
THE DEATH OF A FRIEND
A messenger does not kill; a Binder does not take life. But there was blood on her hands and on the knife.
“Do you need help?”
Cnán heard Raphael’s voice distantly, and for a moment she thought he was asking the question of her, but when she raised her head to reply, she saw he was speaking to Percival.
“I raised him from a foal,” Percival said. His face was a mask; his lips barely moved as he spoke. “I will do it alone. Help the others see to Taran.” The solemn knight turned and walked into the woods, following a trail of blood and crushed grass.
The silence of the field and forest closed around Cnán. Her knife still dripped blood into the hoof-trodden dirt and grass. She stared, seeing but not seeing the trees at the edge of the woods in their strangely placid beauty. Yasper’s lingering smoke rendered the sight eerie and ghostlike. The dagger in her hands felt light as air, and that seemed wrong. She wanted to be rid of it, but at the same time couldn’t make herself throw it away.
They had wrapped Taran in a cloak and taken him back to camp, where a grave would be dug. The Dutchman wandered the field, dousing the flames, and about him the remaining smoke wreathed and whirled. She stepped over the corpse of a Mongol, facedown in the dirt, the body positioned just as Taran’s had been. She suppressed a shudder and moved on, feeling as though she would be violently ill.
How far had she fallen, to permit herself to arrive here and to use this tool, a killing tool, as it was meant to be used? She wiped the blade clean with a clutch of dried leaves, shock wearing away slowly, like feeling coming back into a sleeping limb and, with it, the first prickles of returning conscience.
Not what she wanted to feel.
She took another step, planning to get away from the company and be by herself. Her feet took over. As she walked, she heard arguments behind her: Roger’s raised voice, Feronantus’s reply. The words were empty and distant, intrusions into an awful dream. Was this the penance for what she had done?
A strange, sad sound reached her, seeped into her mind, and pulled her along the direction in which she walked. Tall weeds brushed against her legs. She stopped at the edge of the wide open stretch through which Mongols had rushed only a short time ago, and her focus returned with a sickening lurch as she realized that she had not been wandering aimlessly, but following another’s footsteps across the field and back toward the woods.
Cnán stood still, watching as Percival knelt by his mount. Obeying some instinct that had told it to seek refuge, the horse had staggered into the shelter of the trees and then collapsed.
The knight’s frame caught the rays of sun falling through the canopy of high trees, mail over muscle moving with a deliberate, gentle softness so utterly at odds with his violent motion before. Cnán heard again the husking, ragged sound that had pulled her from her malaise—deep whimpers from Percival’s mortally wounded destrier.
His own breath seemed to blend with the slow panting of the large horse where it lay amidst the ferns.
Her stomach clenched, and a lump formed in her throat as he removed a mailed glove and ran a callused hand over the animal’s thick neck. A shaft jutted from the animal’s flank. The horse gave a louder moan, and its chest heaved. Percival stood back a few steps as it thrashed and then twisted in agony.
So often in her short life, she had witnessed horses and men fall, had absorbed the horror of the image and moved along—as was required of her. Yet this was different. Here and now, the sight stopped her, stilled her; she was suddenly unable or unwilling to move from where she crouched half concealed among the ferns that grew along the forest’s edge.
As Percival tried to soothe the beast that had borne him across the miles, it seemed as if she were watching an essential part of the great, noble man suffer and die.
What sort of world was this, she thought, that made such a man? A person for whom violence could be summoned like an obedient hound, then put away with the sheathing of a sword.
How immediate the violence had been for her, how utterly sudden and desperate. Was it the same for Percival every time he drew his sword? Did he feel the same shock as she did? If not, how easily a person might be pulled into a life where the hound of violence became a mad wolf, pulling at its chains, ready to come out whether its master wished it or not!
But now he knelt on one leg as if in prayer, and she saw in this stance that it was not just the destrier that drew forth his silent grief.
Her throat constricted. Her eyes grew wet. She was shaking. This aftermath, this horror and shock, was what Percival endured, what they all endured, every time they were called to fight.
Abruptly Percival’s voice broke through her gray misery, speaking to his horse. “I have asked so much of you, Tonnerre. You have crossed miles and endured hardships, many of them meant for me. Always, you have been loyal, patient, and kind. A man could not reasonably ask for a tiny share of what you gave.”
The horse’s tail twitched, as though in answer. Cnán saw its head rise, and she caught a look of sorrowful intelligence in its dark eyes. There was pain, but also a remnant of questioning innocence that brought Feronantus’s words back to her heart. The lot of their faithful mounts: food and burdens, suffering and death, for the sake of the men who raised and trained and rode them.
“You have traveled far and served us wonderfully well,” Percival said, his voice almost too low to hear. He moved beside the great head and leaned over, gently taking one ear and angling it toward his lips. “I cannot take away the pain, nor ask you to run again. And so I will not keep you here to suffer, Tonnerre.”
As Cnán watched, the knight drew his dagger with the reticence of a man who would sooner cut off his own hand than do what he was about to do.
Her view of him blurred, and she felt hot tears roll down her cheek.
Her knife, in desperation; Percival’s, in mercy.
“We are lessened by your departure,” Percival said, his voice breaking. Two companions lost, one at the hands of the enemy, one he must now release himself. Again, she had seen this last rite many times across the years and across the miles. Animals so grievously hurt that it was a mercy to put them down rather than leave them to suffer and die slowly.
But never before had it been like this. The truth of that was etched in the way he held the blade and in the quaver of his eternally calm voice. Cnán turned away and tightly closed her eyes. She couldn’t bear to look.
There came a spasmodic pounding of hooves, a brief, rustling flurry of violent shuddering, and then stillness.
The trembling and heaving of the Mongol she had killed flashed before Cnán’s closed eyes. She clenched her teeth. When she forced herself to look again, she found Percival standing alongside the unmoving animal. He turned toward her slowly.