At the same moment, Percival’s foe collapsed to the ground, snuffing out the only torch in the chamber. The left tunnel went dark as well. Raphael’s thrown sword seemed to have found its mark.
“Vera! It’s me,” he called, groping through the dark until he felt her hair beneath his hand. She spun toward him and he felt a momentary apprehension that she would put her blade into his heart-but instead, she gripped his elbow, patted his chest with a strong hand, and said, “You aim well, sir.”
“I stand here,” Percival called from off to their right. But Roger’s plight they knew only from his war cry, as he went into combat with one who had, it seemed, emerged silently from the tunnel-a more formidable foe than the others, since Roger was unable to instantly dispatch him. The combat was turning into what sounded like a grappling duel, both men going to the ground, gasping and grunting as they struggled to achieve dominance. Raphael scarcely had time to wonder what sort of man could challenge Roger in that kind of fight when he felt Vera’s grip shift on his arm, and a moment later, she spun about and slammed up against his back. Other Livonians were entering the dark chamber. A voice-not one Raphael recognized-let out an unearthly shriek as Percival did something terrible to him. Perhaps warned off by that sound, other foes shied away, instinctively seeking the silence around Raphael and Vera-a quiet space, but hardly empty, as they quickly discovered.
A long, exquisite confusion followed-a shifting scrum of bodies, flick after flick of Raphael’s dagger blade, the press of Vera defending his rear as they circled around each other, the clang and spark of swords striking the roof of the cave, shouts of pain, pig-like grunts as blades struck home-finally broken by a light bursting into the chamber. Raphael and Vera looked up to see Yasper holding a torch and Finn brandishing a lance, and in the dimness behind them, Cnan darting left and right, trying to peer around their shoulders.
“They are with us,” Raphael said, laying a steadying hand on Vera’s knife arm, which was covered with blood to the elbow. He looked up into her face, fearing she might have been wounded during the struggle in the dark. She was blood-spattered but seemed unhurt and resolute. She gazed curiously at the newcomers, but Yasper and Finn were staring aghast at something on the other side of the chamber. Following their gaze, Raphael saw Percival-but there was no sign of Roger.
Percival was kneeling, intent on a body slumped on the floor, and there was no aggression in his posture. In that moment, Raphael understood whose body Percival knelt over. Roger was dead.
Raphael, unwilling for the moment to accept such a loss, turned his attention to the scene. Dead or dying Livonian knights almost covered the stony floor. One of the latter managed to push himself to his feet, but his leg gave way immediately, and he collapsed against the wall. Frantic, he tried to roll along the wall and feel his way toward the entrance of a narrow side tunnel.
For a moment, he glared at them from stark white eyes set in a bloody face. Then he toppled into the passageway, pushed himself up onto all fours, and began to crawl. “Kristaps!” he called. “Kristaps! Take me with you!”
Raphael saw now a faint gleam of firelight reflected from the walls of that passageway. Kristaps was making good his escape-leaving his dead and dying fellows behind.
They all reacted at once, and in the same way, but Finn happened to be closest and entered the tunnel first, hefting his lance onto his shoulder as if he might hurl it at the retreating Kristaps. He planted his foot on the collapsed and wounded Livonian’s back and slammed him down onto the ground, then trod up and over him.
“Finn!” Percival called. “Hold!”
Had he said it in anger, or in a voice of stern command, Finn might not have heeded him. But Percival spoke in the pleading tones of a man whose heart was breaking, and this was so shocking that it spun the hunter around. He, and all the others, gazed in astonishment at Percival’s face, which was streaming with tears.
“Were it our purpose to seek revenge,” Percival said, “none would burn for it nor pursue it more ardently than I. Perhaps I shall have it one day. But duty calls us upward into the sunlight. Even now, the Shield-Maidens may be under assault. We must go to stand by them in the defense of their hospice.”
The whole struggle had lasted but a few moments. Raphael’s impressions of it were now as dim and blurred as one of last night’s dreams. And yet, a month later, he was still unable to purge it from his mind.
For many days now, they had been riding over the steppe, surrounded by a sameness of grass and low hills, topped by swifting clouds, or by nothing but eye-draining blue sky. Raphael’s mind, seeking stimulation, rooted around in his memories, perversely hunting out those that were freshest and most troubling-the circumstances surrounding Roger’s death.
There had been no fixed boundary, no moment when they had crossed over a river or a ridge and seen the steppe stretching before them. Rather, during the weeks that they had ridden east in the company of Vera and a dozen other Shield-Maidens, the land had insensibly grown flatter, the rivers more widely spaced, the patches of forest smaller and sparser. Cultivated fields, which earlier in the journey had been packed up against one another like stones in a rubble wall, spread apart, dwindled to isolated farmsteads like islands in a sea, and then vanished altogether.
One day, it occurred to Raphael that he had not seen a farm or a forest in nearly a week, just the occasional lonely tree or dugout shack, swallowed up in grass-endless grass, creeping up over the horizon, then falling back behind them.
Out here, only the grass had a voice. Human sounds seemed to fade to whispers, and the whispers were swallowed in turn by the rustle and hiss of the grass in the steady, slight winds. The thought of months of this steady, low hiss depressed him, drove him back again and again to the awful memories…until, in desperation, Raphael finally decided that he would listen closely to the hiss and study the voice of the grass as he might a foreign language.
He became sensitive to different varieties and listened to what they said about the weather and the soil. Closer to Kiev, where the climate had been moist enough to support farms, the wild places had been dominated by feather grass, a robust and luxuriant species that, at this time of year, was topped by silky blond fibers that purred in the wind. Mixed in with it was a good deal of wild rye, wheat, and barley-not such as could sustain human life, but enough to give Raphael an idea of how the descendants of Adam had first come to cultivate such plants and learn the art of making bread. As they went on, making their course a bit south of true east, the climate became more arid and the fur of grass became mangy, with patches of bare earth showing through. The grass here was stunted, with finer shafts and less luxuriant tops, growing in stiff clumps instead of a carpet. Rising above these spiky tufts from place to place were fragrant shrubs, thigh high, which elicited some interest from Yasper at first: he identified them as wormwood and seemed to know something of their properties. After he had seen a thousand, then ten thousand of these go by, he no longer found them remarkable and stopped taking samples.
Vera was their guide. She had traveled in these parts before. Her order maintained old maps and manuscripts, compiled by travelers of yore, which she had studied since the nuns had first taught her to read. Many of them told tales of a great empire, the Khazars, who had once controlled this territory, holding at bay the Mahometans and Persians in the south, the Turks in the east, and the Slavs in the west, until the great Sviatoslav, at the head of an army bolstered in part by Vera’s predecessors, had broken their power. Now surprisingly little trace of them remained. Or perhaps the landscape was actually dotted with ruined cities, which Vera was taking care to avoid. Some days the only signs that humans had ever inhabited these places were the occasional kurgans, the burial mounds left by the steppe people as monuments to kings, heroes, and-to judge from the size of some of them-fallen armies. It was these, more than anything, that troubled Raphael’s mind. For the last thing they had done before riding out of the gates of Kiev had been to bury Roger in the churchyard at the top of the hill, and like all fresh graves, this one had looked like a long, low mound-a small kurgan that would, in time, sink into the earth like all the others.