His horse was still alive. It lay on its side, kicking and convulsing around the Kereyid’s spear. Ögedei coughed and spat up sand. His legs trembled as he bent and picked up the Kereyid’s sword. It was heavier than his, and the cross-guard wider and thicker than he was used to. It will do. He squeezed the hilt tightly as he staggered toward his dying horse.
It had been a good steed, sure-footed and responsive to his guidance. It had carried his uncle for several months before Jochi gave it to him. There was blood smeared on the horse’s nose and its eyes were wide and frenzied. Incredibly, it was trying to stand as Ögedei approached, but its front right leg failed to hold its weight.
“Run,” Ögedei croaked. “Run to the Eternal Blue Sky.” His stroke was clumsy, but the blade was sharp enough. The horse’s back legs kicked twice as it died, and Ögedei ground the heel of his hand against his face, fighting the sting of sand and salt in his eyes.
An arrow landed in the side of the dead horse, and Ögedei looked at it dumbly. It was a short Mongol arrow, but the fletching was unfamiliar. A Kereyid arrow. He was still on the battlefield. He couldn’t stay here; he had to find his way out of the sand cloud. He didn’t know whether to advance or fall back, wouldn’t even know where to advance or fall back to. Perhaps he would never see the sky again. He was being buried underground. He wrapped his scarf over his face to keep out the dust, still tasting grit on his tongue.
Something bumped into him, and he fell back against the corpse of his pony. Wildly he looked around, trying to spot a shadow or a shape in the dust. Who is there? Horses charged past on his right. Their hooves pounded against the sand, kicking up swirling clouds of dust. He brought up a hand to shield his face, and pain lanced his neck and shoulder. Glancing down, he saw the bloody tip of an arrow protruding from beneath his chin.
His scarf was tangled in the arrow, and he couldn’t reach over his shoulder to pull it out. His fingers brushed the shaft, and pain shot through his neck. Screaming, he fell to his knees.
There was blood inside his armor. His scarf was turning red, and what wasn’t absorbed by the cloth was running down his chest. His hands were red too, and he realized he was kneeling in the bloody mud of his horse. He shivered, suddenly cold.
The dead Kereyid, though he didn’t have much of a face left, seemed to be laughing at him. Ögedei tried to steady himself on his horse. So warm, he thought, and the tears started again. He didn’t try to hide them this time. He let them run. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, though there was no one there to hear him.
The Kereyid kept laughing. Ögedei could hear his voice—a roaring, rippling sound in his head, like a flash flood in the spring as it filled the dry riverbed. It wasn’t just the Kereyid; it was the dead on the battlefield. All of the spirits were laughing at him now.
Dark spots swam in his vision. He dug his fingers into the short hair of the horse and tried to remember what it was like to ride.
So much blood, he thought as he toppled over.
He was having trouble breathing. His mouth was clogged with sticky mud, and bristly hairs tickled at his nose. Sit up. His body seemed so far away. Ögedei tried to move his arms and felt nothing. I’ll try again soon, he thought. Maybe when the sun comes out. Until then he would lie still and listen to the faint rhythm of his heartbeat.
A muffled noise interrupted his reverie, and he realized it was coming from his throat. The sun had come out, and its light was burning a hole in his neck. The pain burned straight through to his throat, and his scream was escaping through the ragged hole.
Above him, there was nothing but blue sky. No dust, no clouds, only the endless expanse of the sunlit heavens. But for the intense pain in his neck, he would have thought he had gone into the next world. It shouldn’t hurt, he thought, not anymore.
It did, though, and the pain kept digging deeper into his belly. He kept trying to spit it out, but nothing came out of his mouth. Everything seemed to be coming out of his neck in crimson gouts.
A shadow passed between him and the sky, a dust-covered cloud. Its surface arranged itself as he focused on it: redrimmed eyes, a mustache flecked with dirt and blood, lips cracked and dry. The lips were moving far above him, but he could still only hear the sound of his own scream leaking through the hole in his neck. The face dipped down and the smell of sweat and oil from the man’s hair filled Ögedei’s nostrils. Underneath the stink of battle, he recognized the man’s scent. When the face raised itself up again and spat out a mouthful of black blood, a name came to Ögedei.
Boroghul. One of the orphans adopted by his grandmother. The tall one with the face like red stone. Family, yet not-family. Not-blood, and yet—Ögedei watched Boroghul spit out another mouthful of his blood—a blood-brother.
The sky grew dark, and Ögedei found the strength to move his hands. He grabbed on to the cloth and leather of Boroghul’s armor and held on. Stars came out, tiny eyes winking at him like animals hidden in the tall steppe grasses, and eventually he could hear the wind again. Stay with me, Ögedei, it said. Or maybe it was Boroghul, whispering in his ear.
It didn’t matter. He had been found.
CHAPTER 3:
THE GHOST OF RUS
It was good that she did not have time to make herself comfortable in the chapter house, or else going back out into the Great Khan’s empire would have been unendurable.
She rode now, since it was impossible to move stealthily in such a large group. Finn, when he spoke at all, favored a guttural lowland tongue she could barely understand and had poor Latin. Still, he seemed to know the ground better than she, or perhaps he just sensed things more acutely. So she and Finn scouted ahead and signaled Haakon and Raphael when it was safe to move forward, and in that manner, they made good time until twilight and for half of the following day. After that, the forest grew so dense that the horses became more trouble than they were worth. They left them in the care of a local woodcutter whom they found by following the sound of his ax.
The woodcutter claimed to know nothing of Mongols, and cared little more.
Raphael said it was a toss of the coin as to whether the horses would still be there when they got back, but this was better than simply letting them go. They camped in a ravine that night, risking a fire, as the smoke and firelight would be lost in the ever-present fog.
Before midday on the next day, they came in view of the village of Czeszow, and Cnán was then able to use it as a guide star by which to find the hovel where Illarion had been surviving for the last fortnight. Raphael and Haakon caught up with them, and Finn showed with a smile and a gesture that he thought her tracking skills were impressive.
The hovel lay on the edge of a leveled estate. Houses and huts had been burned, livestock slaughtered and butchered where they lay, fields torched. Bones and half-rotted corpses lay in heaps. None of the corpses had two ears.
“Local nobility,” Finn opined, pinching his nose. “Dead, not so noble.”
Haakon had clearly never seen such devastation. His throat bobbed, and his face turned sickly green. His eyes wandered as if he sought a place to throw up. Cnán wondered that the others put up with him at all—he was so poor in life experience.
“Get used to it. Such is the way of Mongols,” she said.
“Of men in general,” Raphael said. “In Jerusalem they—”