The Mongoliad Book Three

 

Now I understand why the Silk Road runs along the edge of a desert,” Yasper groused, slapping his arms against his body in a futile effort to keep his body warm. He wore a fur hat, pulled down as far as his eyebrows, and he had let his beard grow out again. Wild and uncombed, it resembled a weaver’s nest, and his voice issued from somewhere inside the bramble of wiry hair. “What I wouldn’t do for a handful of hot sand. Doesn’t that sound like paradise?” he said wistfully. “Just one handful of hot sand.”

 

Raphael nodded, though the motion was hard to distinguish with all the frantic shivering he was doing. Even with woolen strips wrapping his arms and legs and an extra layer of foul-smelling furs the company had traded for a week prior, the cold air still managed to worm its way down his back. He was doubly glad he had stopped wearing his maille several days ago. The chain seemed to absorb the chill in the air, and more than once he had found his hands sticking to the metal links.

 

Of all the company, Feronantus seemed the least affected by the weather. He wore extra layers, like everyone else, but Raphael had yet to see the old veteran shiver. If anything, he seemed to find the frigid air bracing.

 

Raphael had only ever been to Tyrshammar during the long summer months, when the nights were short and the sky never fully darkened. Over the last few days, he started to get a sense of what the winters in the northern stronghold must be like.

 

Of their own journey, there was one more pass to ascend before they reached the long valley where Boreas blew constantly. Raphael couldn’t even imagine attempting this route if there was more snow. As it was, they had reached the snow line the day before, and by Cnán’s reckoning, it was another three days before they would be able to pass through the gap and start their descent to the Gurbantünggüt Desert.

 

Like Yasper, Raphael had been having dreams—when he was able to fall asleep—about deserts. Along with dreams of the sun and fire, vast pinwheels of raging flame spinning across the sky.

 

As the horses slowly picked their way up the narrow mountain path, Raphael tried not to let his thoughts dwell on the significance of the pinwheels. It was unsettling to think they might be the same spoked wheels that Percival saw in his visions; if they were, did that mean he was gradually being won over by the persistent truth of Percival’s vision? That the images the knight saw were, indeed, a message that issued from divine lip and hand.

 

Raphael had seen too much of what men did in the grip of visions. From the atrocities perpetrated in the Levant and in Egypt, to the mad works of that unholy inquisitor Konrad in his zealous pursuit of heretics in Thuringia, to the mystical zeal that was the source of constant torment and conflict within Percival.

 

It was not fair of him to judge Percival so, but over the last few months Raphael had begun to lay the blame of Roger’s death on the Frankish knight. If Percival had not insisted on visiting the caves beneath Kiev in pursuit of the illicit artifact he had imagined he knew to be there, then Roger might not have been killed.

 

He was spending too much time reliving the past. It was an unfortunate aspect of his fascination with keeping a record of their journey. At first, his tiny marks in the journal had been a means of passing the time during the endless days of riding; later, when he started to look back upon earlier entries and find them lacking in detail, he began to write more earnestly, thinking of Herodotus and Thucydides and their histories of the ancient Greek world. During the long nights on the steppe, when he could not sleep and lie, staring up at the endless spray of stars across the heavens, he began to think of the Confessiones written by Augustine of Hippo when the Christian theologian was of a similar age. In many ways, the Confessiones was a preamble to Augustine’s truly revelatory work, De Civitate Dei, as if the theologian had to exorcise his own past before he could address the more complex philosophical inquiries of the later work.

 

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