Raphael saw now a faint gleam of firelight reflected from the walls of that passageway. Kristaps was making good his escape—leaving his dead and dying fellows behind.
They all reacted at once, and in the same way, but Finn happened to be closest and entered the tunnel first, hefting his lance onto his shoulder as if he might hurl it at the retreating Kristaps. He planted his foot on the collapsed and wounded Livonian’s back and slammed him down onto the ground, then trod up and over him.
“Finn!” Percival called. “Hold!”
Had he said it in anger, or in a voice of stern command, Finn might not have heeded him. But Percival spoke in the pleading tones of a man whose heart was breaking, and this was so shocking that it spun the hunter around. He, and all the others, gazed in astonishment at Percival’s face, which was streaming with tears.
“Were it our purpose to seek revenge,” Percival said, “none would burn for it nor pursue it more ardently than I. Perhaps I shall have it one day. But duty calls us upward into the sunlight. Even now, the Shield-Maidens may be under assault. We must go to stand by them in the defense of their hospice.”
The whole struggle had lasted but a few moments. Raphael’s impressions of it were now as dim and blurred as one of last night’s dreams. And yet, a month later, he was still unable to purge it from his mind.
For many days now, they had been riding over the steppe, surrounded by a sameness of grass and low hills, topped by swifting clouds, or by nothing but eye-draining blue sky. Raphael’s mind, seeking stimulation, rooted around in his memories, perversely hunting out those that were freshest and most troubling—the circumstances surrounding Roger’s death.
There had been no fixed boundary, no moment when they had crossed over a river or a ridge and seen the steppe stretching before them. Rather, during the weeks that they had ridden east in the company of Vera and a dozen other Shield-Maidens, the land had insensibly grown flatter, the rivers more widely spaced, the patches of forest smaller and sparser. Cultivated fields, which earlier in the journey had been packed up against one another like stones in a rubble wall, spread apart, dwindled to isolated farmsteads like islands in a sea, and then vanished altogether.
One day, it occurred to Raphael that he had not seen a farm or a forest in nearly a week, just the occasional lonely tree or dugout shack, swallowed up in grass—endless grass, creeping up over the horizon, then falling back behind them.
Out here, only the grass had a voice. Human sounds seemed to fade to whispers, and the whispers were swallowed in turn by the rustle and hiss of the grass in the steady, slight winds. The thought of months of this steady, low hiss depressed him, drove him back again and again to the awful memories...until, in desperation, Raphael finally decided that he would listen closely to the hiss and study the voice of the grass as he might a foreign language.
He became sensitive to different varieties and listened to what they said about the weather and the soil. Closer to Kiev, where the climate had been moist enough to support farms, the wild places had been dominated by feather grass, a robust and luxuriant species that, at this time of year, was topped by silky blond fibers that purred in the wind. Mixed in with it was a good deal of wild rye, wheat, and barley—not such as could sustain human life, but enough to give Raphael an idea of how the descendants of Adam had first come to cultivate such plants and learn the art of making bread. As they went on, making their course a bit south of true east, the climate became more arid and the fur of grass became mangy, with patches of bare earth showing through. The grass here was stunted, with finer shafts and less luxuriant tops, growing in stiff clumps instead of a carpet. Rising above these spiky tufts from place to place were fragrant shrubs, thigh high, which elicited some interest from Yasper at first: he identified them as wormwood and seemed to know something of their properties. After he had seen a thousand, then ten thousand of these go by, he no longer found them remarkable and stopped taking samples.