“I told him we wished to pay a visit on those who live above,” Illarion said. “He suggested we leave. He said that they would never open their gates to us and that they would kill us like the others or die trying.” Illarion’s puzzlement at these cryptic words was so plain on his face that the others—even Percival—could not avoid breaking into shocked laughter.
“Kill us like the other what?” Roger asked. “What does the codger take us for—Mongols?”
“Brigands, perhaps,” Percival suggested, “for we have an ill-favored look about us.”
“Brigands don’t ride up to the gate and knock!” Roger returned.
“Then let us go and do just that,” said Percival, “and show them that we are not brigands, but men used to plain dealings.”
“We would seem to have little choice,” Raphael pointed out, “since we have been spotted in any case.” He nodded up toward a corner of the priory, where a lookout was peering down at them from an onion-domed cupola.
Before they had reached Kiev, Cnán had privately despaired of finding anything of worth or use within the broken walls of the city. She had witnessed the ruinous landscape left in the wake of the Mongolian army, and she knew how the devastation worked its way into the hearts of the survivors, devouring them from within until they were nothing more than hollow shells. She had armored herself against what the sight of Kiev would stir in her—memories, not altogether pleasant, of her mother—but as she and Feronantus and the rest of the party picked their way through the ruins, she was surprised to find that Kiev was not as bereft as she had anticipated.
Not only were there survivors, but they appeared to be building new lives for themselves among the ashes and ruins. Resources were scarce, clearly; one could only build so much with broken timber and shattered stone. Already the people who remained had shifted away from the center of the old Kiev to the banks of the river. The Dnieper.
It flowed all the way to the Axeinos, the Unlit Sea, a great snake winding from the north to the south across Rus. In Kiev, the river coiled around the twin hills that housed the holy buildings where Percival and the others had gone. Penitents, making a pilgrimage to hallowed ground.
Feronantus led her, Eleázar, R?dwulf, Istvan, and two horses slowly through the rubble-strewn streets of Kiev. Finn had dismounted after they had passed through the wreckage of the Golden Gate and vanished into the maze of wrecked buildings. Occasionally she would catch a glimpse of him as he scouted their route through the ruins.
Yasper had eschewed his horse as well, though he wasn’t nearly as invisible. Or as silent. They could hear him knocking over the charred vestiges of walls, tossing chunks of stone around, and even the sporadic clatter of metal as he rifled through the rare cache of household wares that had not been pilfered.
Cnán was surprised he was finding anything of value at all, which spoke of either the lackadaisical efforts of the survivors or the tenacious inquisitiveness of the Dutchman.
A loud crash startled her horse, and the noise was followed by a chortling yell from Yasper. He danced out from behind a wall, holding a bent and twisted vessel over his head. As she calmed her horse, Cnán stared at the object the Dutchman was carrying, trying to identify what it had been once upon a time.
“It’s perfect,” he said, in answer to the question that must have been plainly writ on her face. He lashed the oblong vessel to his saddlebags and trotted back to continue his search.
Istvan nudged his horse past Cnán, angling toward Feronantus. “He is making too much noise,” the Hungarian bristled.
Feronantus nodded in the direction they had come. “We aren’t trying to hide,” he said.
On the ridge where they had stood a few scant hours before was a single horse and rider. They were too far to make out any details of the man or animal, but to Cnán’s eye, the man seemed too large for his mount, or the horse was too small. A Mongol, she thought, and then she realized who he must be. The one who got away.
Istvan had come to the same realization, and vituperating in his native language, he reached for his bow.
“Ho, Istvan,” R?dwulf said with a smile. “Do you think he will stand still while you ride close enough to put an arrow in his chest?”
“I can track him,” Istvan snarled. “Eventually he will stop—to eat or sleep or piss, it doesn’t matter. I will put an arrow through his eye while—”
Cnán laughed in spite of the fear that had laid icy fingers on the back of her neck. “Mongols piss from horseback,” she said. “They eat and sleep there too.”
“That would explain how he kept so close to us,” Feronantus noted.