One day, a few weeks after they had left Legnica, she had spotted Finn near a tiny stream and had decided to shadow him. Moving as carefully as she knew how, she tried to keep the wary hunter in sight. Several times she thought she had lost him, only to have him reappear in a different direction from where she had thought he had been traveling. After a few hours of this cat-and-mouse game, she realized he knew she was behind him. He had known all along, and when he vanished again, she gave up, feeling very foolish for having indulged in such a whimsical distraction.
When she turned around, Finn jumped back. He had been standing right behind her. Grinning wildly, he had scampered off as she had chased him, only to vanish in thick woods again. “He was a ghost,” she said. “I would catch a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye, but when I looked, he was gone. The only sign that I wasn’t imagining things was how the branches shook, as if the trees were laughing at me. They knew where he was, but they would never tell me.”
They were smiling at her story, and she felt a warmth suffuse her that had little to do with the fire. She sat down quickly, suddenly very self-conscious, leaving her story somewhat unfinished. But she had said enough.
Feronantus had called this gathering a kinyen, and she suddenly recalled what that meant. This was the private mess of the fully initiated members of the order. She had stood up and spoken about one of their fallen companions as an equal, and none of them had objected on the grounds that neither she nor Finn were sworn members of the order.
They accepted her. She was part of the family now.
As the night wore on, the Shield-Brethren honored their fallen comrades. After they spoke of Finn, they remembered Roger: his perpetual scowl, the endless supply of hand axes, knives, and other sharp implements that seemed to grow on him like fruit; his steadfastness in battle, regardless of his disgruntlement at being forced to fight. They talked of Taran as well-their eternal oplo-who, even in death, still reminded them of their bad form when holding a sword, of how often they failed to close the line, and how they consistently neglected to ready themselves for their next opponent as their first was still dying. Even Istvan joined in, though his tales were intermittently interrupted by disjointed conversations held with phantoms only he could see. After awhile, the others would take these asides as opportunities to pass the arkhi or to wander off to relieve themselves, confident they would miss little of the Hungarian’s story.
Feronantus, however, listened intently to Istvan’s ramblings.
What secrets do you hope to hear? Raphael wondered, his curiosity aroused. His interest lay, partially, in having something to distract him from Percival’s confession, but their leader’s enigmatic relationship with the Hungarian had always puzzled the others. His eyes half-closed, Raphael watched Feronantus, trying to read something in the older man’s features.
Life on Tyrshammar had changed the elder knight. The wind and rain of the north left their mark on a man’s features, but Feronantus had been more than weathered by his exile. His face had become like rough stone, making it very difficult to ascertain his thoughts and emotions.
One of the failings of the Shield-Brethren’s hidden fortress was its very inaccessibility; too often, in the absence of real news, the boys of Petraathen would turn to embellishing stories of older members of the order to entertain themselves. It was a habit that he was not entirely free of himself. The story of the Electi’s displeasure with Feronantus and his exile was one of the more widely whispered tales.
Raphael had heard enough legends and tall tales in his travels to know that each contained a kernel of truth. In the case of stories about Feronantus, the reoccurring motif was that the Master of the Rock was a strategist of unparalleled depth.
Istvan was staring up at the sky again, babbling to one of his recurring ghosts, and this digression had become lengthy enough that the others seemed less inclined to wait him out. Yasper and Eleazar were bickering about who should get the last dregs of the arkhi, playing up their mock outrage to their captive audience, and no one paid much attention to the Hungarian’s mutterings.
Except Feronantus, who was unmoved by the theatrics of the Spaniard and Dutchman.
Raphael leaned forward, his eyes on the bickering pair, but straining to hear what Istvan was saying.
“… can’t go to the sea… can’t see the sky… yes, it hurts… the head… don’t let it look at me… I don’t care about your pain… I didn’t-no, it wasn’t my fault… there is no-no, let me go… I didn’t want… I didn’t!.. who cut him down? Who did it? Who cut it down?” Istvan shuddered suddenly, his legs bouncing against the ground. “The staff,” he growled, “Where is the All-Father’s staff? She lost it, didn’t she?… When her favorite son… I don’t know… no… no, no, no-” He shook his head. “Not my fault that they lost it. Not my-I don’t want… so many horses… don’t let it look-”
His voice was getting louder now, and his motions were more agitated. “The bitch lost it,” he said. “It’s not my fault. I never-fuck you! I will cut off your balls. The crows will eat your guts. Whoreson. Turd-eating cur. Stop looking at me!”
This last was delivered to the company as Istvan leaped to his feet-his eyes wild, his face straining and purpled with rage. His chest heaving, he gulped in great draughts of the night air. He stared around the circle, and whatever haze had obscured his vision gradually cleared. His mouth snapped shut, and he scuffed sand at the fire before he stalked off into the darkness.
Raphael cleared his throat. “That was my fault,” he apologized. “I was the one who was staring.”
“You do that a lot,” Cnan offered, giving his polite lie some credence.
Yasper snorted with laughter. “Who wouldn’t?” he asked. “That horse-lover is crazy.”
“Perhaps he has cause,” Raphael mused. His eyes strayed to Feronantus, who was staring at the fire as if nothing had happened.
You know who he was talking to, don’t you? he silently asked the old knight.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Afterward they lay together in each other’s arms. Gansukh’s hands, dry and rough as the leather they handled, gently abraded her smooth skin as they brushed over it. That porcelain pale surface had yielded gently in his grasp and the warm pulse beneath traveled from her heart to his fingertips, the rhythms of her body ebbing and flowing, rising and falling. She touched her head to his tanned chest and her breath fell upon him like spring wind, warm with the promise of life. Outside the ger the watch fires still burned, and they made the walls of the ger glow. Her hair was sleek as a midnight stream. Under the thick fur blanket her hand clasped his, and he felt how tender it was, how untouched by work or war.
She was of a different world, a soft world, and here she was in his harsh land. It was shaping her as surely as wind and rain carved the rock. There was the faintest ochre tinge to her shoulders where the sun had begun to tan her as it did him. There was a callus on her finger, just between the knuckles, where the bowstring was held. This hand once had never touched a weapon, this heart once believed violence unthinkable. Now his world had marred her.
And her world had affected him too. She brought him alien customs and manners, philosophy, polite civilization. The ways of the Mongols were ancient, customs passed down through seasons beyond count: births in the spring; nomadic grazing throughout the summer months; harvesting during the fall; surviving through the cold winters. It was an endless hardship, but it was what made a man a Mongol. These men now, who swaddled themselves in silk, sat on jeweled thrones, and never lifted a hand to tend livestock, what were they?