The craggy face of the lord of Tyrshammar had taken on a more haunted look since Taran’s death, and Raphael could not blame him. The loss of their brother was a knife wound that continued to bleed even days after the blade had been withdrawn. Taran had taught several who were numbered among their greatest. His departure was a bitter draught to choke down upon waking each morning—particularly for Feronantus.
And now…another, perhaps even more unexpected disappointment had beset their leader.
“Come,” Illarion said, resuming his course in the wake of the wagon. “Pointless dawdling will draw attention.”
Illarion had made an impressive recovery, but the absence of his ear impaired his hearing on that side, and the bruising his body had taken under the planks still slowed his movements. Nevertheless, he was a better and more alert guide than Raphael had anticipated. No doubt the Ruthenian, as he looked around him, saw other days, another city—the Kiev of old, in its fabled glory.
Percival rode to Raphael’s right, and Roger guarded the rear. The Frank and the Norman made odd friends, Raphael thought, but good ones. Every true heart needed a pragmatic counterweight, and every cynic an idealist to lift his spirits. It was easy to think that Percival was naive if one had just met him, but Raphael had long ago learned that no man was easy or simple, and he had heard enough of the knight’s conversations with Taran to know that there was more to him than what first appeared. There was a reason behind every vow, a driving goal and belief behind every action.
The possibility that Percival had received divine grace—or thought he had—made the situation unusually complex, but Raphael found himself strangely untroubled by this. The brute facts of their situation, taken alone, were disheartening. Strange visions might make their way more tortuous but gave Raphael welcome respite from thinking all the time about food, warmth, and rest. In truth, epiphanic episodes fascinated him. How, after all, could something as powerful as God touch so lightly but firmly upon a human frame? Curious circumstance, indeed. Of course, God might be capable of any sort of subtlety…but why Percival? Or, for that matter, Feronantus?
As Raphael mused on these puzzlements, the quartet picked their way into the city’s interior, following paths that wound through ruined neighborhoods like the trails of wild game. Hard memories of the Siege of Damietta and other catastrophes in the Holy Land now tugged at Raphael, shouldering aside his loftier speculations about gods and men.
His horse shivered as the ascent became more demanding. He wants my complete attention here, Raphael thought, and reluctantly came back to the here and now. The priory at the top of the hill, environed by ascending slopes and tiers of toppled lane walls and burned orchards and vineyards, seemed almost to lean out over them in the wan light of the cloudy day, as if the buildings themselves kept vigil.
Though they were now in the heart of the city, the hillside that rose between them and the foundations of the priory had a wide-open, rural character. Or at least that was the way it seemed to Raphael, accustomed to the densely built cities of the Levant. Blessed with vast lands, the Ruthenians had learned to build in a more expansive style, enclosing broad plots of open ground with rambling fences, growing vegetables and raising livestock close to where they would be consumed. Closer to the summit, the fences were replaced by stone walls, which grew higher and thicker as they circumscribed narrower and narrower rings of territory around the summit. The ones at the top bore the unmistakable look of fortress walls and seemed to have suffered accordingly during the siege.
But they would have to wind their way up several switch-backs and pass through many stiles and gates before they need concern themselves with actual fortifications. The first part of the ascent felt, to Raphael the urbanite, more like a ride through a rural estate than passage through a city.
Riding through the torn-up and burnt remnants of a small vineyard, they encountered a single old man in filthy rags, seemingly the only remaining inhabitant of these heights. He sat in the shade of a small, open-sided, decrepit prayer station, clutching a stem of tiny, moldering grapes and looking blankly at the outer world.
Illarion stopped to address the man in the Ruthenian tongue. The old man regarded them all in silence, as if judging their solidity, their reality, then nodded to himself and replied. Even in his ignorance of the language, Raphael perceived an educated tone and bearing. The man must have once been proud and useful enough to receive some training in speech and letters—a yeoman or vassal, perhaps, who tended the vines and helped supply the priory.
The conversation ended abruptly when the stranger decided enough was enough, brushed his torn kecks, and wandered off down the hill, turning back once to look at them almost in dread.