Ferenc nodded. “Like rabbits,” he signed.
She offered him a tiny smile. Perhaps it was better that he didn’t know the full extent of the task before him. He had a simple determination about him. It wasn’t that he was feeble or slow minded, but that he didn’t worry about anything else.
She led him out of the alley, back into the beating heat, and into another alley on the far side of the main road. She was sure it was from one of these two alleys that Fieschi must have escaped the maze of rooms and tunnels, but the actual egress remained a mystery.
Ferenc’s patience, she realized, was exactly the sort of trait required to find a hidden door in a featureless stone wall. The cracks, even under her careful prodding, would have seemed to be nothing but cracks to her. Ferenc’s hand somehow recognized them as something else. He pushed in one spot; nothing happened. He moved half a pace to his left and pushed another spot.
Suddenly, and with an eerie silence, an entire arm’s-width slab of the wall moved, pivoting under his touch; the musty smell of subterranean air hit her nose.
*
Some part of Rodrigo knew he had fallen into a nightmare again, that he had slipped away from the real world. He knew there was no hope in trying to run from what was to come, even though it was worse to relive it, over and over again, knowing what would come, than to have lived through it the first time. He knew he had to suffer the nightmare. That was part of his trial, part of his burden.
He sat on the mud-caked rim of an upended wagon wheel and looked out over what had been, just weeks before, a thriving village. The river had supplied fish; nearby fields had supplied corn; gardens around the farmsteads had brought in root vegetables of all sorts. Honey merchants had catered their sweet clay jars to mercenaries hired by King Béla massing on the drier margins of the muddy fields, excluded by their lowly status from Béla’s fortified camp, grumbling as they paid for food, mead, beer—grumbling more as they moved their own makeshift settlements away from the advancing river. The marshes had swarmed with biting gnats and flies, like white-hot lancets as they supped, as now they swarmed with carrion flies. Even before the battle, to Rodrigo, it seemed Hell itself held no match.
The battle had been another kind of flood, this one comprised of blood and disintegrating humanity. He could not recall all the logistics and the plans, the victorious sweep across the bridge, the later repulse and encirclement, the fleeing of selected units, followed by rains of stones, exploding pots, arrows. The screaming of the horses and men, confusion, escape, and then the endless press of the Mongols plowing into the roiling flocks of disheartened mercenaries, having already dispatched many of the main ranks of Teutonic Knights in their white riding coats emblazoned with black crosses—the flowing banners weaving back and forth through the slaughter, some ablaze, others leaning, vanishing to be trampled into the bloody muck as the standard bearers fell victim to an arrow or a saber. Mongol raiders plunging in and out, shouting and grinning and sweeping their sabers as the soldiers of Béla and Archbishop Csák tried to flee the burning, bombarded fortifications—dying by the hundreds on the ramparts, dozens of riders and horses at a time knocked over by flying, bouncing, cart-wheel-size stones. Or being caught in the fiery wash of those smoking, blazing, exploding jars that fell along with the stones.
So many dead. Vultures wheeling overhead were not the only beneficiaries. During the day, the fields of battle hosted thousands of darting, swooping swallows, feasting on the flies that, in turn, plagued both living and dead. And at night came the bats, leathery wings whispering through the fetid air, feasting on mosquitoes that had the grace to plague only the living.
Rodrigo remembered his own attempted flight as a series of vignettes, one horse after another dying beneath him of wounds or exhaustion, then on foot, wearily avoiding the clusters of fleeing knights—many having shed their armor and crosses, stumbling as fast as they could through the carnage, heading south and west, where they would loot farms and murder farmers and their families and servants in panicked desperation.
How different were the knights from the Mongols? Little different, in practice. Even before the battle, or in their brief days of victory, they had drunk deep and sallied forth from the fortress and their shifting lines of tent camps to rape villagers’ wives and daughters, even aging crones. In defeat, they returned to rape and then kill, loot and then burn, practicing the last desperation of destroying the land so that the Mongols themselves would have no benefit. The knights of the black cross had turned on their own with a ferocity that shook Rodrigo’s faith and overturned all his youthful views of righteous Crusades, Christian good, and Mongol evil.