Cnán barely restrained a snort—and then thought of Istvan’s handiwork. “You have very little time to get ready,” she warned.
“Getting ready is something best done before one’s camp has been overrun by horse archers. We have been getting ready ever since we arrived,” Feronantus pointed out. “Now…young Binder. Are you acquainted with the way of the lapwing?”
Cnán was.
“Then might I ask that you go back a ways and be flushed from cover, then flee in panic toward our camp…? Men on horses like to chase things, and Mongols are no exception.”
Cnán sniffed. “These last few years, I have become rather good at not being seen, much less flushed.”
“I understand,” Feronantus said. “Today we shall all be doing the unexpected.”
When Feronantus put it that way, Cnán found it difficult to refuse. She had been riding hard all night, fording rivers in the dark and taking risks that she never would have considered had she not been caught up with these Brethren and their insane quest.
Meanwhile, Feronantus had been taking his leisure in camp with the six others who had stayed behind: Taran, the big Irish oplo; R?dwulf, the English archer; Illarion, the Ruthenian nobleman; Roger, the Norman who carried too many sharp things; and two who were not actual members of the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae, Finn the hunter and Yasper the alchemist. Both were men of northwestern Europe and speakers of languages that troubled Cnán’s ear. Most in the camp had been asleep when Cnán had galloped in on her last surviving horse, but now they were awake, armed and armored with an alacrity that suggested they slept in steel.
Which Cnán would too, were she fool enough to pitch a camp and light a fire in this country.
She felt woolly headed. The light of the morning was flat and bleak in her tired eyes. Every instinct told her to get out, get rid of the noisy, smelly beast she had been riding, and use her formidable skills to simply disappear. Instead Feronantus wanted her to become, for a few moments, like a mother bird leading predators away from her nest—as conspicuous and vulnerable to enemies as she could possibly be. Had he made the request in the wrong tone of voice or with the wrong look in his eye, she would by now already be so thoroughly gone that only Finn, with luck, would have been able to find her again.
But Feronantus—damn him—had asked politely and in a way that made it clear he well knew what he was asking: for her to humiliate herself in front of foes and friends alike.
She pushed past Feronantus with an attempt at a swagger, made more ridiculous by her exhaustion. “Then get ready to greet my pursuers,” she said and mounted, with less grace than before. She wheeled her pony and rode in the direction whence she had just come.
Her brief pass through the camp enabled her to view the Shield-Brethren’s preparations, some of which (stringing ropes between trees at the level of a rider’s neck, planting sharpened poles in the ground) were obvious, others (Yasper lighting torches in broad daylight) baffling.
All through the hours of darkness, Cnán had been riding across open territory, substituting speed for wit and relying on the four behind her—Percival, Raphael, Eleázar, and Istvan—to draw the attention of the pursuing Mongols. The route she had taken into the camp only a few moments ago was still marked out by a gash of trampled grass crossing over a pasture that was perhaps a verst in breadth and notching the skyline of a grassy rise.
The pasture was bordered on its lower slope by a tumbledown stone wall. Purple-flowering thistles and pea vines had thrust their roots between the rocks and turned the old wall into a wild hedge that was far too high to be jumped. A gap in the wall—an old gate or stile—had been narrowed by the lush greenery to a sort of mouse hole through which only one rider could pass at a time. Beyond the wall spread an abandoned field of rye, now feral and losing a war against more potent weeds. Like most arable fields, it was much longer than it was wide so that the farmer would not need to turn his team around frequently while plowing. The hedge wall ran along one of its long sides. The opposite side, perhaps a hundred paces away, was not fenced, unless one counted a stubble of old stumps where the farmer had cut away some trees. Dense black alder and ash came up to that side of the field and extended down a gentle slope for perhaps half a verst before falling decisively into the endless marsh.