“Enough.”
“Aye,” Feronantus sighed. He raised his eyes toward the impressive spire of the rock. “We will rest and resupply tonight; tomorrow, we will acquire fresh horses and ride on. Friend Benjamin, I would ask a boon of you. We had hoped to utilize your expertise on our journey, sheltering ourselves in the midst of your caravan, but I fear your need to stop and trade will only hinder our pace. Events, I am afraid to admit, have left us bereft of not only one of our numbers but also of time. We must get to the Khagan before Alchiq can reach and warn him. If we cannot beat him there, we must hope that his warning is delayed or otherwise ignored. Otherwise...”
“Yes,” Benjamin mused, resting a finger on his lips. “I see your predicament. My caravan can offer you more invisibility than you already possess, but it will, alas, move at a rate that will not be to your liking. If I were to abandon my cargo to one of my caravan masters, he would, most likely, rob me blind and leave my camels in Samarkand.” He shook his head. “Hardly a suitable end to a trade caravan that has gone back and forth along the Silk Road for nearly three generations.”
Feronantus said nothing, and Cnán leaned forward to scratch her horse along its mane. She—and the rest of the company—had become accustomed to their leader’s long silences. It was rarely due to an extended bout of thinking on Feronantus’s part, but more for the sake of others in the conversation. Feronantus had already considered, rejected, and postulated several possible solutions, and in his mind he had already settled on the most suitable answer. He was simply waiting for the rest of them to come to the same conclusion.
Cnán found her own readiness to follow Feronantus’s conclusions without convoluted mental peregrinations of her own both comforting and unsettling. She was allowing herself to become complacent with the company, letting them do her thinking for her.
“No decision need be made immediately,” Benjamin said. “Come. Let us eat and rest. We have much to discuss before the morning.” He beckoned to the company as he strode toward his camp.
Cnán grinned. Benjamin was a very adroit trader. He had neatly avoided Feronantus’s trap.
Raphael had never seen a land as flat and inhospitable as the steppe. Scoured clean by the wind, the landscape east of the river where they had fought Alchiq’s jaghun had been brutal in its emptiness, as if this were a land abandoned by God. There were animals and plants that thrived on the endless plain, enough that a desperate party could sustain itself, but such a life was spent being cold, miserable, and constantly hungry.
According to Cnán, it was only going to get worse until they reached the Mongolian Plateau on the other side of several mountain ranges.
Raphael doubted the rest of the company were familiar with Herodotus and Pliny, ancient historians who had tried to make sense of the myriad of travelers’ tales that described the distant edges of the known world. Alexander had used Herodotus’s Histories as his map of the East, and the Macedonian conqueror redrew all of the known maps by the time of his death. Pliny, hundreds of years later, tried to make further sense of the tangled histories of the peoples encompassed by Alexander’s reach, but he never traveled to all of the places that he wrote about.
It struck him Raphael as both strange and marvelous that he, a bastard born in the Levant and raised in Al-Andalus, was seeing more of the world than either Herodotus or Pliny. Both had written of a land called Hyperborea, where the north wind lived in a vast cave. They repeated stories of one-eyed giants and gryphons, forever at war with one another, though it was difficult to see what was worth fighting about on these barren steppes.
As the company settled itself following a simple feast (one that was mouth-wateringly delicious in comparison with their diet of salted meat and dried berries over the last few weeks), Raphael took it upon himself to investigate the rock. Perhaps, he reasoned, I might find some gryphon feathers.