The Mongol understood perfectly well what was about to happen. He leapt up and ran, zig-zagging along the bank, feet sending up silver spray. Like a million terrified victims who had been caught out in the open by the riders of the Khagan’s hordes, he was now presented with a nasty choice: be trampled into the muck, spine and ribs crushed like so many crusts of bread, or have an eight-foot-long lance skewer his guts.
The Mongol spun about at the last instant, screaming his rage, and chose the lance. Percival gave it to him, hefted until the man’s feet dangled, then rode on, torquing the corpse through the reeds until it slid off like a knotted rag. Glittering tails of spray from the horse’s hooves almost hid the gore.
Cnán turned away with a sick sensation in her stomach, then climbed into a cleft on the northern bank, where she suspected that Raphael was hiding in some gnarly scrub. And that was where she found him, though he had already turned his back to her and was clambering through loose soil toward the crest. As he neared the top, he slowed, crouched, and held out a cautioning hand, warning her not to pop her head up. Then he seemed to change his mind. He’d seen something from the crest that let him know they were all right. He vaulted onto flat ground, resumed his squat, and gave Cnán a hand up. From any of the others—with, as always, the exception of Percival—she would not have taken kindly to this gesture. She was perfectly capable…but something in Raphael’s manner always let her know that—between her and him—things were simple and fine, and so she slapped her hand into his and kicked against the bank with both feet until he’d hauled her over the top.
Below and behind them, Percival was collecting the Mongols’ horses, stringing them out on a line so that they could be led.
“Spares,” Cnán said.
“Good,” Raphael answered and nodded across the river: not along the main channel, but to the south bank, which Cnán, trapped in the low reeds, had not been able to see until now. The first thing she noticed was the reed-hung corpse of the Mongol whom Percival had run down and slain during his foray over the bank’s top. But then her eyes were drawn by movement farther off.
The hilltop where the main body of the Mongol force had gathered a while ago was now bare, but something like an avalanche or mudslide seemed to be flowing down its near side, throwing up a dusty plume that glowed like fire in the light of the setting sun.
They had been seen. The Mongols were coming for them.
“Gorgeous, in its way,” Raphael remarked dryly, “but I don’t recommend we marvel much longer. You, at any rate, are unlikely to take in any new or useful impressions.”
“What the hell are you doing then?” she snapped.
“I believe I shall tarry, in case Percival needs assistance. I may be able to help him manage the spares or slow the Mongols when they reach the bank’s edge.”
“Did you have anything in mind for me?”
“Look in on Eleázar.”
“And where is Eleázar?”
“Likely visiting whoever is surrounded in that farm,” Raphael said, and he swiveled on deft toes, keeping as low as possible, to gaze in the opposite direction. “Judging from the number of dead and screaming Mongols in its vicinity, I wager it’s Istvan.”
To Cnán, this did not sound like a plan, or even the beginnings of one, but she knew better than to expect something fully thought out, and she approved of anything that would take her away from the forty or so horsemen coming for them across the floodplain.
Not far away, Raphael had tied his horse to a lance thrust into the ground. Trailing behind it on a lead, head down, pushing its nose through grass, was the pony Cnán had been riding. She unwound the taut lead from Raphael’s saddle and sprang onto the pony’s back with a confidence that surprised her. She was not above hoping that one of her companions might have witnessed her dexterity.
She pulled hard on the right rein and dug in her heels, then shouted in the way that the men did when they really wanted their mounts to sit up and take notice, and indeed, the pony reacted with a neck-arching start and broke into a gallop.
She was now riding hell-for-leather into the battle unfolding in the little farm. This was about half a verst away, on a weak rise that kept it above seasonal floods. From their former vantage point, they’d been able to make out very little of the stead, but now, closer, Cnán could see that it was an untidy warren of lean-tos, outbuildings, sheds, sties, smokehouses, coops, and stables. Not satisfied with that, the residents had added a haphazard assortment of peat ricks, haystacks, trellises, hutches, and beehives.
Cnán, in the last couple of years, had become a connoisseur of hiding places, shunning the open and gravitating toward the hidden, the complex, the knotted and gnarled—anyplace confusing and nasty for warriors and hunters. Had she been chased across the floodplain by Mongols—as, come to think of it, was now the case—she’d have gone straight to this farm. She’d have kindled a fire in the hearth, done all she could to make them think she was lodged in the main house, and then she’d have crept to its outskirts, buried herself in dung or straw, and peered out at them.