The Mongoliad: Book Two (The Foreworld Saga) (31 page)

He trudged on blindly, no idea where he was going. Despite the pain and the exhaustion, his soul was in such a panic that he needed to keep walking; he would have run, but the mud sucked at his feet and ankles.

A battlefield is never silent, even when the battle has been decided. The sounds of the dying men and horses, the cries of the carrion birds circling and then settling, and here, the sound of rain. But somehow, through all these noises, Rodrigo heard a single human voice cry out plaintively to him: “Holy man, help me.” That was all it said.

He stopped and turned automatically in the direction of the voice, as if compelled by an invisible force. Among the piles of corpses he did not see any sign of life.
Oh God, there was a boy, alive.
A local youth, not a soldier. He recognized him.
Ferenc
, that was his name. Ferenc. He was from Buda, survived as a hunter. His mother had been a wisewoman, an herbalist, a healer.

Just after the battle, two days or so ago, Rodrigo had held Ferenc back, with a strength now almost gone, and the boy had tried to fight him off, to throw himself at a group of six Mongols who were taking turns raping Ferenc’s bloodied, dying mother. Two eternal sunrises ago, Rodrigo had had the strength to wrestle with the boy and drag him away from the horror, into the shelter of some battered bushes and behind a wolf-chewed horse. Somehow Rodrigo had managed to pin the boy to the ground until the atrocities were over. The woman was dead; the attackers had moved on. Then he had allowed Ferenc to shove and kick him away, even punch him.
Fallen back on the mud and filth, he had watched the boy run to his mother’s corpse.

That was the last he’d seen of Ferenc until this moment.

The boy lay faceup, pinned between a layer of mangled dead and a single Mongol. One of the corpse’s eyes stared without interest at the wheeling birds above; the other was gone, gouged out by a knife. The boy was pale and still, his breathing labored.

Rodrigo stared at him for a moment, working idly through what he could do, what he could not do, making the gray, soulless calculations of a weary, overburdened man.

It would be best for the boy, he finally decided, to die now, to escape from current and future misery. Before the gates of Heaven slammed closed against this entire generation of human beings, perhaps young Ferenc would be allowed to enter. Even if those gates slammed in his face, and he spent eternity in Purgatory, that would be infinitely better than what awaited him here on Earth.

Rodrigo closed his eyes and began to turn away. But then he heard a whisper, cool and certain. He looked over his shoulder, wondering if the boy had spoken, but no, Ferenc was simply watching him, the fingers of one hand slowly opening and closing—listless, resigned.

A sensation at once warm and chill came next, and Rodrigo reached back to feel at his cloak and shirt, wondering if blood was seeping from an unknown wound, if his spine had been pierced. No, he was sound enough—no arrow, no unexpected gash.

He turned slowly again, eyes leveling with the distant horizon, words of impossible greeting frozen on his lips.

What came next staggered him. He lurched across the field and nearly fell over another tangle of corpses. The sky blinded him. The cascade of light was without color, without depth, but not without sound: in the middle of his searing vision, that unexpected blinding brightness, millions of unvoiced words hollered and echoed
through his mind, speaking of infinities, impossibilities, revealing all the truths in the forms of endlessly detailed wheels of entities, histories, implications, connections—sucking his soul up and out like whirlpools.

Rodrigo’s knees gave way, and he fell. For a time, he forgot everything and felt nothing, not the mud on his hands or knees, not the rain on his head and back, not the diminishing sounds of the battlefield. His relief was as intense as his confusion; here at last was divine rescue from all the gruesome realities around him, all the unsolvable dilemmas of his life.

Then, in the place of here and now, doors opened, and through those doors he saw vistas limned in infinite detail with grim and gorgeous details. The images rearranged and merged, and now he saw all too clearly how the world might end, all life and hope and sin and travail ground away by more spinning wheels of history, infinite clouds of implication and fiery storms of devilish conspiracy, and it was worse than anything any prophet of doom had ever uttered. He was being filled with awful, sublime, eternal thoughts and teachings—and
instruction
! With a horrible, paralyzing clarity, Rodrigo understood he was being forced to
absorb
these commands, brutally but masterfully stuffed like a sausage with all the things he needed to understand, all the places he needed to be and acts he needed to make flesh—all that he had to do.

Then the flood slowed, became a trickle again, and vanished into the mud and ash of his physical body. He forced himself to open his eyes, forced himself to stand.

The wheels became dust motes, spinning up and away into the clouds. As if in exchange, a feather dropped from the sky, wafting back and forth before him, inches from his nose. Like a child, he reached up with filthy, callused fingers to grab it, study it—but it eluded him and landed at his feet.

The feather of a buzzard, not a dove.

Terrified, relieved, he was nevertheless grieving at a great loss—the loss of that connection, those truths, like the sudden damming of a great torrent. For a moment, he had been part of the timeless. Now, part of mastery and creation.

Once again, he was just a man, just mud and ash, no longer filled with lightning and sun.

But now he had things to do, and they lay before him in reasonably clear order, all decisions made. He turned back toward the boy. Rodrigo’s eye fell again on that slowly clasping hand, the skinny body pinned forever beneath the all-seeing dead Mongol.

Rodrigo now needed human company the way he needed air to breathe. To be alone would be to remember his loss, and that he could hardly bear. Ferenc was the only soul he knew still living in Mohi.

He reached a hand toward the boy. “My salvation,” he muttered, then looked away, face racked by a pained grimace, and tried to remember that this battlefield, these corpses, the boy himself, were all part of an extended dream, that he was not actually living it but merely being
reminded
of it—to sharpen his heretofore blunted purpose.

If he could look more closely at those wheels again, he might comprehend. But no matter. The wheels of vultures, the wheels of hungry swallows and bats, the fluttering, chanting wheels of angelic wings...

No different. No matter.

With all the empathy and sorrow and compassion and fury in the world printed on his soul, he understood how all of this must end. He understood, with a divine-wrought clarity that he thought was reserved only for saints, what needed to happen for this worldly evil to be stopped. He shuddered at the enormity of it. He wanted to hide from his own understanding. But there was no escape; he, Father Rodrigo Bendrito, a humble priest,
he
was the one assigned by the Lord to end this madness. He did not want this burden—his aversion to it was emotionally violent—but he had no choice but to surrender to it.

He would take the necessary wickedness, the awfulness, the blame, and the sin on his own shoulders, attempt however miserably to follow in the footsteps of the Lord; Rodrigo’s suffering would be great, but it would be nothing compared to the suffering of Christ, and ultimately, this would all be in service to Him, whose nature Rodrigo alone now truly understood. The world was ending in fire, and soon. He knew it in his soul; it was more vivid to him than waking life: he could feel the heat, smell the scorching, hear the roar of it. The world was ending in fire, and he, and only he, was responsible for what must happen.

He could never tell anyone else about his vision. They would mock him, imprison him, torture him for a heretic. The very thought of confessing this moment shifted his nightmare away from Mohi and turned it instead to an inquisitor’s dreaded chamber of smoke and heat and screws and steel. Implements of horrific construction surrounded him: some with ropes and pulleys, some with spikes, racks and presses and nooses and chains. A robed figure with long, bony hands reached for his arm, and as the stranger’s cold flesh touched his, he screamed fiercely.

Memory and the hideous nightmare of his past merged in a shuddering rush with a higher awareness, a waking awareness of life and being.
Praise God
. He raised his head painfully and looked around, awake and drenched in sweat, his breath loud and raspy. A scorpion scuttled across the empty bed on the far side of the room and vanished into a crack between stone wall and stone floor. There was only one bed in this room—whose was that?

He raised his head in confusion, blinking as sweat from his scalp dripped into his eyes. Yes, he was in his own room, but in the hectic, unconscious thrash of his nightmare, he had actually dragged himself off his bed and into this cooler corner of the chamber. A wave of nausea overwhelmed him as he realized that scorpion could have been scuttling over him as he thrashed, and he would now be dying from the sting. Perhaps he had been stung, and that explained the memory
of his vision. Perversely, he wanted to pull aside the plaster and stone and find that scorpion, poke it, taunt it to arch its awful dun-colored tail; death was welcome compared to the dread responsibility he’d been given by the furious, wheeling angels watching over him at Mohi.

He laid his head back on the stone floor. The scorpion was far less terrifying than the burden of his nightmare. Were there more scorpions in this room? In another? Did a scorpion’s bite always mean death? Would a scorpion attack a human on instinct, or did it need to be provoked?

An older voice inside him—it sounded like the Archbishop, though Rodrigo knew that it wasn’t—rebuked him.
Quoniam iniquitates meae supergressae sunt caput meum.
The burden of one’s sins was a heavy weight to bear.
Grave gravatae
, he thought, remembering the next line of the Psalm. He had come to believe, over the course of the journey to Rome, that if he delivered his message, his prophecy, to the Pope, then he himself would be relieved of it, and he would have earned a peaceful death, in the city of his youth. All he wanted was rest. Surely the furious angels would let him rest once he had turned over his fearsome message to Christ’s representative on Earth.

But Gregory was dead, and no one had been chosen to replace him, and that required Rodrigo to remain alive, the only soul who knew the future, the only one who knew what had to happen, what had to be done. God had killed Gregory to keep Rodrigo on the hook. He should have been honored and humbled that he was singled out for this momentous job, but he felt none of those emotions. He only felt hollow, as if Rodrigo the man was steadily being devoured by the burden.

All that remained was the burning fervor of the message.

D
URING THE NIGHT
, Raphael feared that Vera—like Alena—was taking a turn for the worse. Her wounds seemed to be winning; her fever spiked, her skin grew pale and damp, and her eyes fluttered whenever she managed to come up out of a sleep very near to death itself. The change in Vera saddened Raphael greatly. He knew he should not allow himself to be so troubled by her condition. This was not the first bedside vigil he had kept, and he knew the danger of the bond that could be created between two people. Death was seldom just or predictable when it came to loved ones.

Still, he remained, renewing candles as they guttered and died, and fading in and out of his own napping reverie, but with a hand always on her wrist and another at her forehead. To his surprise, as night merged into early dawn, there came a scuffling noise before the door of the drafty old house—then, a mouse-gentle knock. Feronantus answered and led in a group of men and women—Khazars who lived in the neighborhood. They brought in two generous bowls draped with woven cloths and containing rich broth and gruel, which Raphael gratefully accepted. Feronantus thanked them for their help and led the curious group of five back to the
door, managing to persuade them through signs that it was best if Vera was not disturbed.

Raphael found their visit remarkable. A much safer course would have been for the Khazars to turn them over to the Mongols, for Graymane’s
jaghun
would not have stopped at the Volga. They likely had crossed at the nearest convenient ford and even now were hunting them, or else preparing another ambush.

Raphael fed broth in measured spoonfuls to the Shield-Maiden. Her lips opened, and by slow degrees, she consumed a third of the bowl, but when he tried some gruel, she swung her head aside and almost knocked the bowl from his hand—a sign he found encouraging. He put aside both bowls and resumed his vigil, until a thin shaft of sun through a far window struck his eye—and simultaneously, the woman stirred and spoke.

“Graymane’s Mongols must have guessed our plan,” Vera said. With his aid, she sat up, looked around with half-focused eyes, and then motioned with a raised hand not for broth this time, he determined, but gruel. “They scouted the ground and laid their ambush well.” She ate sparingly of the pasty mixture, then turned her full attention to him. “I
thought
it was you. Always...”

Feronantus, straddling a stool beside the cot, folded his arms and looked at Raphael with a slight smile.

“It is my duty,” Raphael said, and immediately felt awkward. Both Vera and Feronantus knew otherwise; straightforward and direct, she possessed neither the guiles nor the protections of Raphael’s own civil manners.

“We changed course to avoid their first patrol and rode directly into a canyon with no exit,” she continued. “We should have seen it coming, but they had already slain Sister Sofiya, our forward scout...” Her voice trailed off, and she devoted a few moments to staring dully into empty space—something she did whenever she spoke of her sisters who had fallen in battle.