Ogedei nodded absently as he looked out over the assembled caravan. Hundreds of carts and wagons and wheeled tents, thousands of horses, his Imperial Guard, many of his courtiers, and a host of merchants, craftsmen, and nomadic camp followers-all ready to chase after him to the place where the Blue Wolf had lain with the Fallow Doe, the sacred grove where the Mongol race had been born and where his father had been buried. Where he must go to face his destiny. This is my empire, he thought, and even though the sun was warm on his face and chest, he shivered slightly. They will follow me anywhere.
“Everything is prepared, my Khan,” Chucai reminded him. “We are ready to leave at your command.”
“It is time,” Ogedei said. Chucai nodded, but when no one else seemed to react to his words, he raised his voice to address the entire host. “I am Ogedei, son of Genghis, Khagan,” he bellowed, “and I go to Burqan-qaldun, the Place of the Cliff.”
He strode down the steps from the palace as the host cheered, and while the roaring sound stunned him, he kept moving. His gait faltered as he approached the seething press of bodies, but they parted before him, opening a path to the wooden steps that had been placed beside his mobile tent. He strode through the gap, buffeted by hands that grasped and pressed against him. He kept his gaze forward and his expression fixed in what he hoped was an appropriately grim scowl. The noise was overwhelming and showed no sign of weakening. He found himself wondering if this was akin to being buried in sand or what it was like to drown in a raging river.
At the top of the steps, two attendants held open the flaps on the ger, and he ducked through the opening. The attendants dropped the flaps behind him, and he paused to let his eyes adjust to the dim light inside. The heavy hide of the tent blocked the bulk of the cheering and shouting outside.
The ger had been arranged as a replica of his rooms in the palace. Half a dozen people waited to serve him. A fire crackled in a large stone-lined pit, and Ogedei could hear and smell meat cooking. Animal furs lined the floor, and at the back of the ger stood his great chair from the main hall in the palace. Borakchin and Mukha lounged on low couches near his chair; they were dressed as if for a court dinner, and the gold threads in their gowns glittered in the candlelight. On his right, Mukha’s favorite entertainers, a troop of Chinese acrobats, were juggling a dizzying number of colored balls.
“This is not how my father hunted,” Ogedei sighed.
The floor lurched beneath him and then began to rock gently as the ger’s driver got the team of oxen moving.
19
Ferenc had willingly followed Ocyrhoe through the city, had even let her hold his hand as they walked, as if they were young lovers; in the passing throngs, they risked being separated, and she was concerned that the wide-eyed country boy could be carried away in the current of people. The initial fear he had expressed about standing out as clearly Other was soothed within a quarter hour, once she showed him that half the city was made of people from foreign lands: priests, pilgrims, merchants, and travelers of all hues and costumes.
Eventually, Ocyrhoe turned them from a major thoroughfare down a smaller, almost empty side street. They followed this, unpaved and dusty, for the length of a bowshot. The buildings to either side were stone and old; they were not decorated and had few, if any, windows. She turned again into a narrow alley to the right, between two high buildings with no windows at all. It was cool in here; the sun never peeked between those walls except perhaps at noon in high summer, and then briefly.
The alley dead-ended where the buildings did, against a third building. It was like being in a deep, deep canyon: a narrow slot of sky above, shadow below, and no escape except back the way they’d come. There were no doors, no smaller alleys, nothing. Ocyrhoe approached the crumbling stone and brick of the dead-end wall and began to examine it, as if for cracks. After a few fruitless moments, she turned and faced Ferenc expectantly. He gave her a blank, confused look and shook his head.
Ocyrhoe was sure she had explained this to him in the outpouring of their first “conversation,” when they suddenly realized they could communicate through the silent language she had learned from her kin-sisters, and known to them in some ancient tongue as Rankos Kalba, or Rankalba. She was still confused that he, a male, could know this code, but there was no time to wonder about that now.
Perhaps he had not really understood what she’d said before. Admittedly, she had simplified it; it would be exhausting and very time-consuming to try to explain the Septizodium and the elections and Orsini and Fieschi and too many other things. She sent a silent prayer to the Bind-Mother. Oh, please, let him understand me.
She slapped the cool stone wall, then took Ferenc’s wrists and tapped her fingers on the bony flesh in alternating singles, pairs, threes, fours, grip, then three, then one, and so on-variations signing out the basic message, as if she were leaving notches in a long piece of wood or on a cornice, or tying knots in a cord or her own hair: “Father Rodrigo is inside. Prisoner.” Ferenc blinked, then nodded. “Many rooms, in many buildings,” she continued. “Different rooms with tunnels connecting all. We are close. We must get in.” She noticed confusion in Ferenc’s expression. Too fast, she thought. Whoever taught him Rankalba didn’t finish the lesson. “Understand?” she asked, signing more slowly against his inner arm and wrist.
He mused on that for a moment, then nodded, though his expression suggested he was still unsure. She chewed her lower lip, looked up, then down, then decided to try drawing a map on the dust of the ground. She held out her hand. “Pugio?” she asked, using the Latin word. At his blank look, she mimed holding the weapon and stabbing the air with it, then again held out her hand.
“Pugio,” he said, and he repeated it once more as he gave her his knife. He was, she realized, learning the Latin word.
In the dirt of the alley, Ocyrhoe crouched and drew a bird’s-eye view of this alley and the immediate surrounding streets and buildings. She placed the facade of the Septizodium in the center of it and then drew the surrounding structures; these she knew by rumor were connected via tunnels, but after she drew in the streets, she was not sure how to designate tunnels. When she was finished, she looked up at him. “Mappa?” she said, again using the Latin word.
He nodded agreeably as he squatted next to her. She made a little X on the map beside one of the scratched-in buildings. “FerencOcyrhoe,” she declared, pointing to it. She patted the stone wall again, then etched in deeper the line representing it on the map.
Ferenc nodded. He pointed, on the map, to the interior of the building. “Father Rodrigo?” he said.
Ocyrhoe touched his wrist. “Maybe,” she squeezed, then shook her head. It would take far too long to explain that the Septizodium was a temple that wasn’t really a temple, just an ornamental wall on an otherwise nondescript building. Instead, she pointed to various other buildings on the map, each time signing “maybe here,” until Ferenc nodded that he understood: the priest was somewhere nearby, and they had to find him.
“Hidden door,” Ocyrhoe added, and then he understood why she had been staring at the wall when they first came here. He stood up, anxious to continue their search, but she shook her head and pulled his arm to return his attention to her crude map.
“Priest,” she said, pointing to each of the smaller buildings in turn. “Priest, priest, priest, priest, priest.”