“These are worse,” Cnán said.
A sudden light breeze from the east carried an especially penetrating stench, one so strong that even Raphael gagged and drew up his scarf. He offered perfume to the others for their cloths, but Cnán, who wore none, noted that none other took it—not even Haakon, whose snot rag was a filthy wonder.
“The town?” Finn said softly, turning west, as if that might help.
Cnán nodded.
They pushed through the half-hanging door into the hovel. In the gloom, a man coughed and a knife blade tossed a dismal gleam.
“Who is it?” came a harsh, low voice.
“Friends, brought here by your messenger,” Finn said.
“The other girl,” the man husked. His skin was bright and slick with sweat. He tried to get up, but the effort was poor, and his legs failed him. Raphael went to his side…carefully. He was feverish and might strike at phantoms.
“We’re relieved you’re among the living,” Raphael said. “Feronantus cherishes you and sends greetings.”
“Feronantus,” the man said through another racking cough. “Master and monster, where was he, they bound her hands, they bound her feet, she cried and died…a hand’s breadth from my face. This far, no farther.” He twisted his hand, dark with old blood. Raphael gripped the hand and lowered it. Then he gently took hold of Illarion’s jaw and turned his head.
“Let me see that ear,” he murmured
“Gone,” Illarion said, his tongue heavy. He flinched in pain with each movement of his jaw, but the words forced themselves out. “I’m sure the bastard took it with him. Let’s all go to hell and find it, soak it in wine, sew it back on. Illarion of the purple ear. I’ll trade that Mongol lackey my ear for his guts. They smear my leggings even now.”
Raphael withdrew ointment and simples from his pouch. He looked up as a shadow darkened the single room.
A slight blonde girl in a frayed robe tied with a sash stood in the doorway. She did not flinch or cry out when she saw the big men. Hanging from her sash was a cloth bag filled with leaves. Green juice leaked from one corner of her lips. She had been chewing leaves when she came in the door—no doubt for a poultice.
“Brave lass,” Raphael said, rising from his knee. “Where be you from, and who protects you?”
The girl remained mute, eyes distant. She focused with an effort on Illarion and smiled. Her smile was simple, her face untouched by any other emotion.
Cnán was about to explain the arrangement—that the girl was hired to fetch herbs and tend Illarion, for food and jade—when another, an older boy, old as Haakon but as dark as she, appeared in the door and gently pushed the girl aside. He faced into the hut with dagger drawn, saw Cnán, and hesitated.
She took advantage of that moment. “We mean you no harm,” she said in Tocharian.
The boy considered her words, and then indicated the others with a thrust of his chin. “Are they taking him?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Good. He’s mad and makes noises in the night. There are still gleaners and ghouls out there. They will find him eventually. They’ll find us all if we stay.”
“You shouldn’t stay, then,” Cnán said.
The boy shrugged. “God protects,” he said. “We’ve survived this long.”
The mute girl smiled again. Cnán’s heart thudded. She had seen that smile too often around Mongol camps, decking the faces of the mindless and the broken—those kept alive to be used for lust. Men, women, and children…a smile worse than any mad leer.
Had Cnán felt free to speak her mind, she’d have cried out in protest about an arrangement that moved heaven and earth to get Illarion to safety while leaving this girl in a place where the Mongols could get to her again. But matters being as they were, she said no more.
Raphael took a clean cloth from his kit and wrapped it around Illarion’s head. “The flesh is mortifying,” he said. “But the maggots have trimmed it for you. And the girl’s chewed you a good green willow-bark mash. You’re a lucky man.”
“No,” Illarion said. He shut his eyes and crossed his mouth with a fingered X. “Take me. Empty me. I want to die.”
The boy touched the girl on the shoulder, and they turned and departed. Cnán went to the door to watch them. The boy ran from the devastated grounds without a backward glance, but the girl lingered, stooping on one knee as if bowing to a lord and looking one last time at the hovel. Then she fled. Watching from beside the door, Cnán tried not to think about where they would go. God protects, she thought.
It was difficult to move Illarion over rough territory. The journey back would take almost three days, Cnán estimated, and Raphael agreed. But once they retrieved their horses—for the woodsman proved honest—they made better time. Illarion seemed to improve. He said little now, but what he said made more sense.
He was tall, not especially heavy in build, but strong enough, Cnán sensed, to swing a plank with some abandon. His blond hair contrasted with a darker mustache and beard. His current troubles seemed traceable to the loss of his ear, the stump of which had suppurated, inflaming the side of his head and making it difficult to eat and talk. Sensing that pain was as much a problem as fever, Raphael dosed him with a bitter resinous gum and infusions of more willow bark. This gave the man some comfort and enabled him to stay on a horse for a few hours at a time.
They had hoped to push west quickly and return to the chapter house in the dense woods. However, Cnán spotted steady streams of refugees now moving along that route, harried by Mongol troops, and at her urging, they swung south for some miles before turning west again.
This brought them far too close to the Mongols’ encampment. Raphael told Cnán and Illarion that he, Feronantus, and Finn had sallied forth from the woods to reconnoiter, days before, and had seen, from the west, these very mud walls, almost Roman in style, forming a great square. “Ordu built here during the siege,” Raphael explained. “When Onghwe showed up, Ordu must have refused him permission to quarter his men, so Onghwe pitched a temporary camp on the field of battle—a terrible place. No love lost between them. When Ordu moved out, Onghwe returned to organize the gleaners and tax collectors, no fit duty for a true Mongol warrior.”
The ramparts were patrolled by regulars in pointed helmets, the forward positions occupied by troops of horsemen. They could not see the tents of the soldiers over these ramparts, but a huge hump of a felted pavilion, orange and green and brown, rose high at the center.
Finn drew their attention to a field beyond the ramparts. The area had been cleared, and what he thought might be a castle was under construction—crude gray logs forming a circle, with walkways and tiers of planks visible through the unfinished west-facing side.
“That wasn’t here a few days ago,” Raphael observed, frowning.
“Mongols don’t build castles,” Cnán said.
Raphael agreed. “It puts me in mind of one of the great arenas that the Romans built for their gladiators,” he said. “That may be where they plan to hold the competitions.”
A tall rectangular tower at the south end supported a wide viewing stand overlooking the arena and below that dropped in a sheer face to the straw-littered ground, bare but for a great reddish-purple curtain hung on the lower third.
“Feronantus read us the invitation,” Haakon said. “It spoke of a Red Veil through which victors are invited to pass.” Cnán cricked her neck and looked back at the young man. His countenance had brightened at the thought of clean battle between champions of honor. Despite all he had seen on this journey, he clung to a vision of battle as a pinnacle to be climbed, with glory or swift death at the summit. Clearly this boy was being groomed to die.