She felt no pity, however. He was a tool, and tools had their uses. When they were gone, you found another one. Getting emotional over one was to develop an attachment to it, and that was not the Binder way. Emotions sapped energy.
Illarion raised his head. “Competitions?” he asked in a voice low and heavy. His ear had stopped bleeding, but his jaw had swollen to grotesque proportions, and his fever had clearly worsened. “You mean a contest of courage between champions, to save the Western lands.”
“Yes!” Haakon said.
“It is of this I must speak to Feronantus,” Illarion said. But he would not be drawn out, even by curious Raphael, who brought out more bark mash and stuffed it into the man’s thickened cheek to ease his pain.
Past the encampment, against both Raphael and Cnán’s better judgment, they turned north and west. Both knew this would take them past the ruins of Legnica, but daylight was fading and they needed to reach the woods before nightfall.
At first, blinded by haunted low mists and rain, the rescue party encountered only more burned farmhouses and piles of bones picked clean by dogs, crows, and vultures—or perhaps hungry villagers. Raphael spoke briefly of the habits of besieged populations, but Illarion glared, and the physician stopped.
The remains of the town proper surrounded a low hill on which had been erected a crude fortification of logs and partial stone walls, with square wooden towers capped with wide roofs. The interior buildings were made of stone ramparts, with higher walls of wattle and daub. The log enclosures had been knocked in and burned, the stones pulled down; the inner buildings still smoldered even in the drizzle. The village around the “castle” had also once been protected by several log walls, now breached in so many places they jutted up from the flat land like broken teeth. Few other structures survived.
Deep forest and sanctuary lay just a few miles from the ruins, but bands of Onghwe’s Mongols and gleaners roved the broad outlying farms and neighborhoods, having plundered the town over and over again.
Clouds parted and the rain slowed, then stopped. The rescue party was forced this time to merge along the roads with another general, coagulated flow of miserable and ruined people, scattered, stumbling, stalking, staring fixedly forward or heads hung low, wailing or silent—abandoned clumps of human detritus. Haakon stayed near Finn, casting dark looks about him—nothing in his experience had prepared him for such a place. Everywhere lay the bones and rotting bodies of men, women, children, horses. Cattle. The stench was almost unbearable. Dogs and vultures were few by now; they had been hunted, beaten down with sticks, eaten. The rats were more numerous, and some were defiant, fat, and sleek, eyes flashing as they dropped their shoulders and lifted their heads to squeal at the passing horsemen.
The gleaners hunted unarmed survivors for sport, but avoided any who showed resistance, for gleaners were, in fact, the worst of cowards, brave only around the dead and dying. Spying a gleaner stripping a half-dead woman of her upper garments, Finn rode out over the mud and burned straw and slew the wretch with a single downstroke of his sword. Then, swinging his horse about, with a sharp cry and another stroke, he dispatched the woman. Cursing, he returned to the group, his cheeks streaked with tears.
Raphael was about to chide him for this foolishness, but instead clamped his jaw tight and looked away. “Worse to come,” he warned.
Cnán knew these gleaners and their types well enough that she could pick them out even in a healthy city. Not always were they the furtive criminals or crazed drunks. Indeed, within her short life, she had seen drunks rise to glorious battle and city fathers turn into ghouls. War did not just level, it plowed the field, raising the muck and sinking the stubble.
The general flow of misery lurched westward. They were forsaking lands that would not be productive for generations, avoiding paths and farm roads patrolled by regular Mongol troops.
Mounted and armed, the rescue party was as kings and princes compared to this rabble and so felt no need to act furtive. Someone might be hungry and desperate enough to attack them, but Raphael felt that it was best to continue to boldly ride straight through and then, once in the woods, proceed directly to the chapter house.
The style of movement that Cnán preferred, which Raphael called “sneaking,” made her uneasy with this course. Surprisingly, Finn was also unhappy—unnerved by the monstrous depredation and this endless spectacle of cruelty.
Near the western limits of the town, part of a stone perimeter wall still stood, built to withstand invasions coming out of the setting sun. Moving into the lee of this wall, they slowed as their horses skittishly avoided a rag-ribboned, sinew-strung litter of bones and moldering heads. Even in this carnage, the pitiful remains did not look or feel proper. They were too small…skulls crushed by a single blow…their garb not the undergarments of warriors or townspeople, but light, like nightwear.
Haakon pulled on the reins of his horse, eyes wild, until he fastened his look on Finn, then on Raphael—then on Cnán, who wrinkled her features. “Don’t look,” she said, “if you can’t bear it.”
Adam’s apple bobbing, Haakon lifted his eyes to the gray, misting clouds. Illarion did the same, touching his huge cheek and missing ear, as if to listen to faraway music.
These were the bones of children, from infants to toddlers to adolescents, and they stretched all along the wall, mounding near the base. Scores of children. An entire town’s future, crushed, broken, rotting in the mud.
Cnán knew what had happened here. She had heard stories out of the Far East, at the limits of her ranging. With the hilltop fort broken and the other walls breached, the citizens had brought the infants and youth of Legnica to this final and strongest wall, in the last days. Near the end, as the Mongols swept in from behind and then all around, torturing and killing all in their path, the soldiers and the last of the parents had sacrificed the young that they might not suffer a worse fate. Their crowns had been bashed by hammers or hilts, then their throats cut clean like so many shoats, ten or twenty at a time, the bodies then heaved from the rampart.
Possibly the townspeople had harbored a faint hope of arousing pity within the Mongols or their lackeys, but that was impossible, Cnán knew. The tiger would pity the fawn, the wolf would weep over its lamb before Mongol would cringe at the corpse of a child.
Haakon made small sounds deep in his throat. Surely hell itself lay not far below this stinking ossuary, bubbling up toward the world’s incomprehensible evil. None of the rescue party wanted to tarry among these dead. The vengeance of their young, unshaped ghosts might be worse than that of any Mongol.
They rode away from the wall and the bones as quickly as they could—corrupt mud spattering from the hooves of the horses and flecking their faces and armor—to reach the shelter of the thick woods before nightfall.
Cnán wiped a dollop of ooze from her cheek. It was tinted red with blood.
Dusk and more mist stole over them as they crossed the glacis of cleared land. The refugees had flowed south, and the old field of battle seemed deserted of all but the scattered bones of Legnica’s defenders. Their path was clear.
Cnán was about to release the breath in her tight chest when, directly ahead of her, pale and vivid in the twilight, Finn’s hand flew up like a falcon ready to swoop down on prey. She had learned to respect that gesture; it meant that his ears had picked up a trace of something so faint that he risked losing it by shushing them.
The party drew to a halt to let him listen.
Finn’s hand descended and made the prancing gesture that meant horses. Then, thumb pinching quick against two raised fingers: small. He was hearing ponies. A great many ponies.