On the fifteenth day, she saw him emerge from a wet, grassy clearing. He paused, opened his bag, and popped a freshly harvested freebutton into his mouth, making a bitter face. He climbed back on his patient horse and sat mounted for a while, not moving, but looking left and right, up and down, before drawing in the slack of the reins and lightly kicking the horse’s girth. His path back to the main group did not waver, but he was unusually silent in camp that night, staying awake and looking up at the wet leaves as the others slept.
His scowl eased, his mustache drooped almost to his chest, and he seemed remarkably at peace.
Freebuttons and wavy-faces carried old demons with tricky ways. Swallowing them was not for the uninitiated and never for those suffering the way Istvan suffered. Sometimes the demons in the mushrooms would befriend internal devils and soothe them, but that, she guessed, was not his main reason for gathering them.
In the Far East, freebuttons were sometimes chewed by warriors intent on going into battle in a highly focused, emotionless, killing rage. Some called it putting on the Bear Skin. Feronantus would have called them Berserkers.
On the thirtieth day, on the night of a full moon, under a starry sky, Cnán stumbled over some of Istvan’s handiwork.
She had moved north nine verst, planning to head back to the main group that night. The woods and the undergrowth were thick enough that she was obliged to use established trails. Deep down one of these, she had been cut off by a band of Tartars escorting a man dressed in a coat thick with swaying sables. He wore a shining black helmet without a visor, and his features were darker, almost blue-black. He was long-nosed and sharp-chinned, handsome in his way, and she thought he might be from the southeast, the transmontane lands beyond Tufan, warm and humid places that Alexander had long ago thrust into, even now being stormed by the Mongols.
The presence of this sable-hung merchant alarmed her. Cnán had striven to guide the knights away from main-traveled roads, to avoid confrontations, speed them along, and let them keep their strength for their main purpose—crazy as that purpose might be. But now that might be impossible.
She tracked this orderly and quiet band and soon understood their purpose: collecting furs from itinerant trappers. Furs were coin of the realm in these parts, and Mongols had traded them for many centuries. Peoples on the fur routes often used cut-up pieces of sable and mink as earnest of additional reserves—like bills of exchange, only more representative and tangible. The whole, uncured furs were strung on cords like drying fish and hung off the backs of the sumpter horses or piled on top, or, as with this merchant, safely stitched to the owner’s coat.
Along the edge of a small lake, where the old oak forests had given way to meadows and young birch, the merchant and his guards approached a thin column of smoke, and there, beside a small, open campfire, they bargained with the eldest of a small band of trappers—a wizened brown man who spoke Georgic and Slav, but no Mongol. He was closely attended by three swart, thick-bodied boys, possibly his sons.
After taking his pick of their finest furs, the sable-coated Southerner ordered that some of his own goods be removed from the pack animals and disbursed to the trappers—dried venison and several ceramic jugs.
There followed a round of toasts, and then the merchant and his guards departed. Soon the trappers were happily drunk, and as dusk settled, they curled up on the lakeshore, letting their fire go out.
Cnán hoped to follow the merchant until the last of the daylight, at which point she would build a lean-to and sleep until dawn. But before that time arrived, from her grassy cover, she heard a single, awful scream. Then shouts, rising to cries, each snuffed out in its turn.
The fur trader and his company heard the commotion as well. As she watched from her cover, they bunched together on the periphery of a grassy meadow, murmuring among themselves. Soon they decided it was best to move along—no doubt making note that bandits were about.
But Cnán suspected this was no bandit. She doubled back to the trappers’ camp and found the entire group pieced out along the lakeshore. Two of the younger men sprawled on the ground, a hundred paces or more from the cinders of the campfire, each at the end of a long trail of blood. Both had been shot with arrows that had since been collected, presumably by the assassin who had shot them. Closer to the camp, the third young man had taken an arrow up through his neck, passing into his skull, where it had lodged so deeply that its owner had snapped it in half in a furious effort to worry it loose. Its bloody empennage lay discarded on the ground nearby, and Cnán recognized the fletches of gray goose feathers that Istvan liked to use.
The elder’s death had been quick—a single slice across his throat had nearly severed his head—but he had then been hacked and kicked about, limbs and chunks of flesh mixed with the reeking shards of the jugs. The entire camp smelled of old man’s blood and thick, sweet Georgian wine.
Abomination, she thought.
She knew the hoof marks of the horse that had wandered down to the lakeshore to drink while her master did his filthy work. It was Istvan’s blue roan stallion.
That horse and his rider were now moving northwest, hunting the fur traders.
CHAPTER 8:
THIS IS HOW MY FATHER HUNTED