His answer was not to come from the pontiff himself, who had fallen senseless. His eyes remained open, and his chest still rose and fell, though the motion was difficult to discern beneath the voluminous robes and blankets that covered him. The room faced west, and the windows were wide and tall enough that the sun looked in on the room for most of the day. He had been standing there for but a few minutes, and his back was already warm. The Pope had been there much longer, and still his body shivered slightly.
Dietrich had not been able to shake a sense of foreboding at how frail the Bishop of Rome had become. The weight of the Church was immense, and it slowly crushed every man who took the office, but in the year since his last audience, Gregory IX looked as if the life were being wrung out of him like juice from a grape.
The persistence of the Church, Cardinal Fieschi had said as he led Dietrich back to the main hall of the Lateran Palace. To answer your question, we are concerned with the persistence of the Church, for it is the soul of the people. We are the rock to which they cling when everything around them is swept away.
What am I to do? Dietrich had asked, seeking the answer to why he had been summoned to Rome, an answer the frail Pope had failed to offer during the brief audience.
Make certain of our survival. It would be best if the Mongolian rabble does not encroach any farther into Christendom. Should that be impossible to avoid—and we realize such indolence on the part of this horde is, indeed, most unlikely—how do you reduce an army’s strength before it arrives at your gates?
By making the journey costly, Dietrich had replied. Every league they march is a league farther from their homes, a league farther into territory that they do not control. Ground they must earn.
Redirecting an unstoppable army and whittling away at its host of fighting men until the cost of conquest was too high was a seemingly impossible puzzle, one he pondered daily—nay, hourly—until his arrival at Legnica. The circus itself seemed like nothing more than a passing fancy, an idler’s summertime indolence. In the fall, the Mongol hosts would have finished resupplying and would be looking south for warmer climates to conquer. How was he to turn their attention away from Rome?
And then a solution presented itself. North of the killing fields and the recently erected arena—as well as the ram-shackle sprawl of the new city growing around it—was an old monastery. Abandoned by its previous residents, it housed new penitents now, more martial than spiritual in their inclinations. Their standard, raised above the old hall, was a red rose laid over a yellow thirteen-pointed star.
The Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae.
Gladiatorial fights were the sort of peasant entertainment that used to be the mainstay of the Colosseum in Rome; clearly the Mongolian Khan knew the best way to keep his troops from becoming disenchanted with the lack of opportunities for rapine and pillage. Mortal combat was held once a week. The other days were filled with nonlethal bouts, a slip-shod tourney through which combatants earned the right to fight before the dissolute Khan. As long as the venerable Shield-Brethren could provide ready fodder for the arena, Dietrich suspected that this circus could last a very long time.
Long enough that the impetus to march before winter might be lost.
It wasn’t much of a respite, but it was a start. Every season that passed without the Mongols encroaching any farther into Christendom was time his masters in Rome could use to negotiate a peace treaty. It wouldn’t last. The Mongols, much like the Arabs in the Levant, were heathens, and Rome knew they couldn’t be trusted. But a peace treaty might be enough to make them turn their attention elsewhere…
The crowd was on its feet, shrieking and howling at the spectacle in the arena. The Mongolian fighter, a man dressed in a garish costume, complete with a lurid mask with white whiskers, had lost his weapon; the Shield-Brethren knight had managed to take it, but clearly had no idea how to use it properly. The Mongolian fighter—someone named Zug, if he understood the audience’s chant correctly—had at least traded his pig sticker for something longer. Throwing his short sword at the knight was an ineffectual move at best—a blade like that had no chance of penetrating the knight’s armor—but it gave him the opportunity to seize the knight’s sword. Whether he knew how to wield it effectively was another question; Dietrich doubted the man had any experience with the Great Sword of War.
Some of his knights used such a weapon, but it was much too big and clumsy for his liking. It was a weapon for a man who liked to wear armor, who preferred to be in the thick of battle. In Dietrich’s experience, being that close to one’s enemies meant a mistake in tactics had been made, and such mistakes were invariably costly.
He had heard reports about the Mongolian general, Subutai, from the survivors of the battle at the Sajó River. He used horse archers, incredibly fast and mobile fighters who remained out of reach of the sword and spear. By the time you could get close to them, they could empty an entire quiver of arrows into your ranks.
Costly mistakes.