He lurched and cried out in abject misery. Such a fool he had been, riding that stupid pony over the edge of the known world! Why hadn’t he checked the stars? If he had put the Dvalinn, the sleeping deer, on his right, then he would have been heading west.
He looked away from the cage ceiling, trying blearily to recall the open night sky.
“Wake up, fool,” the voice said again. Something banged against the bars, and Haakon turned his head. One of the Mongolian short-legged ponies trotted alongside the slowly rolling cart. Its rider was leaning over and banging a bowl against the bars to get Haakon’s attention. White liquid slopped out, and Haakon scrambled up to the bars, his throat constricting in panic at the sight. The rider grinned and let his horse drift away from the cage so that Haakon had to squeeze himself against the bars and strain to reach the bowl.
The horseman finally relented, with a grunt. Haakon grabbed the bowl and tugged it into the cage, where he held it in wonder for a few seconds. The bowl contained thickened rice paste, a strip of meat, and a residue of sweet rice water. Using the piece of meat as a utensil, Haakon scooped the paste into his mouth. His belly, shrunken to almost nothing, filled quickly, so he chewed the piece of meat slowly, taking his time with it, and made sure to suck down every drop of rice water-and then to lick the bowl clean.
Gruel and meat. And the rider did not come back to take away the bowl. Something had changed. The caravan was going to halt soon.
The terrain had changed again. A few days ago, they had passed within sight of a small village nestled in the crook of a long and glittering track of river, and since then, isolated patches of pasture had started to break up the endless expanse of steppe grass.
During his long journey, Haakon had come to understand just how nomadic the Mongolian people were, and the familiar signs of civilization struck him as oddities on the steppes.
At first, they had passed through regions conquered by the Mongol Horde, savaged lands that had been stripped of any value by the voracious appetite of the raiders. And then came the desolate places, lands too sere or remote for any people to find hospitable.
His belly full, Haakon wedged his shoulder against the bars of his cage to brace against the motion of the cart, steadying his eyes to watch these strange scenes pass by. They had certainly gone off the edge of any map he knew, of any map anyone he had ever met might have known-with the exception of the Binder girl, perhaps.
He stared at the wandering clumps of herd animals-sheep, goats, camels, the occasional yipping dogs and shaggy cows-and the tiny clusters of ger that sprouted from the grasslands like gray mushrooms. He was the first of his brothers to come to this place, and for the first time in many days, he found himself looking forward to what lay beyond the horizon.
Does Zug’s home lie out there? he wondered.
When the rider returned for the bowl, Haakon asked him if this place had a name. The Mongol answered brusquely, and Haakon repeated the single word to himself for the rest of that day, trying to dispel the unease it left in his belly.
It sounded like the noise ravens made. Kara-kora-hoom. He couldn’t stop thinking about the black birds he had seen on the ruined walls of Legnica. Ominous harbingers.
The Shield-Brethren swore their oaths to the Virgin Defender, a warrior maiden whose face they would never truly see until they died. She was Skuld, and yet she was not. Some of the other boys from his tribe clung tenaciously to the stories they had absorbed from their mothers’ breasts, but Haakon had looked on the vastly different faces of the students at Tyrshammar and understood each knew the Virgin in his own way. When the priest in the Christian temple spoke of “Mary,” he was talking about the same goddess.
Even back then, before Haakon had learned how to hold a sword and how to carry a shield, he suspected the world was larger and more mysterious than he could ever truly imagine.
Hearing the raven-squawk name of the place where he was being taken, he found comfort in the idea that the world, in all its cruel vastness, was but a grain of sand in the Virgin’s palm. It did not matter where he died. As long as he died in the Virgin’s service, he would finally see her glorious face.
After his inevitable and bloody warrior’s death, the icy fingers of Hel would twitch empty, and the queen of the dead would scream in disappointment.
The Virgin herself would be waiting for Haakon. She would garland his neck with a wreath of cornflowers and clasp him to her spring-sweet bosom.
This he knew, and it gave him strength.
3
Before the battle of Legnica, Hunern was little more than a collection of farms clustered haphazardly around a blacksmith and a church. A small hamlet that grew, almost by accident, out of a desire for farmers to have a place where they could pray and drink without having to travel to the city of Legnica. When the Mongol army assembled to fight Duke Henry II of Silesia, Hunern was abandoned and then overrun. The church remained, its awkwardly tilted spire rising over a landscape of crooked and broken walls, like eggshells scattered across a chicken coop after a fox’s rampage.
When the Mongolian engineers began to build their arena, mercenaries, fighting men, traveling merchants, and other vagabonds summoned by Onghwe Khan’s challenge reclaimed the ruins of Hunern.
Invariably, the first structures rebuilt after the sacking of a city were one or more churches. The dead must receive absolution before they could be interred, and the survivors-in the absence of strong battlements and armed soldiers-had only their faith to protect them. A house of prayer meant they had not been abandoned; within the sanctuary of the church, they could open their hearts in prayer and hope to be sustained.
Inevitably, an assortment of dilapidated taverns followed, because laying stone and raising walls-especially those of a church-was thirsty work. In the absence of salvation, what else could a man do but drown the pernicious voices that whispered incessantly of one’s coming damnation? If God had abandoned you, what use was prayer? Drink was better.
In Dietrich’s opinion, the closest approximation of a real drinking house in Hunern was a battered, slant-roofed shanty with only two real walls, two tables, a few benches, and a handful of wobbly stools. Known as The Frogs-after the amphibians that hid in the cracked rubble and called to one another in high peeps and groans at dusk-the tavern was permanent enough to warrant a staff of three.
If God had abandoned his Church and his Faithful, at least He had left them a place that served real ale and not the horse’s piss the Mongols guzzled. A few hours in the afternoon at The Frogs quenched both thirst and burning soul.
Dominus custodiat introitum meum et exitum meum, he thought, hoisting his dented tankard. Foam slopped over his arm and onto the floor. Sanctuary is all we have ever sought. I will confess to this blasphemy, Dietrich assented after he quaffed half the contents of his flagon, the next time I am in Rome.
Dietrich had brought a full squad with him to The Frogs this afternoon. Usually he was only accompanied by Burchard and Sigeberht-he never left the Livonian compound without his bodyguards-but the incident at the bridge required the Livonian Order to show its strength. Rumors needed to be silenced; the people needed to see the power and presence of his knights. They needed to be reminded.
The man who ran the tavern, a Hungarian with a whistling voice and a tongue that he couldn’t keep fully in his mouth, had managed to acquire an oak chair-a heavy piece with a tall back, much like a lord’s seat at the head of the table. He allowed no one else to sit in it, and he always made a fuss when Dietrich showed up, running a rag over the seat and arms before letting the Livonian Grandmaster sit, asking him several times if he was comfortable enough, providing him a barrel on which to rest his tankard.