Burchard, one of his two bodyguards, nudged Dietrich, drawing his attention toward a rippling movement in the crowd. Dietrich came away from his reverie and looked for what had caught his fellow Livonian’s eye.
“A heckler,” Burchard pointed. “He threw something.” The tall German had been a scout for years before he became one of Dietrich’s bodyguards, and his eyesight was well known among the Livonian Sword Brothers.
Dietrich squinted at the tiny object rolling around on the sand and then gave up trying to ascertain what it was. The reaction in the stands was much more interesting anyway.
Some sort of thrill was running through the crowd like a gust of wind across a field of rye, a rippling of bodies as heads were turned toward the enormous pavilion that housed the Khan and his retinue. Some signal passed from within the shade of the tent, and the motion through the throng reversed itself, splitting the audience apart. The crowd drew away from a single man as if he had burst into flames. A Saracen, judging from his clothes. His terror was abject, and he scuttled toward the rim of the growing circle as if to escape notice, but half a dozen hands lashed out and shoved him back. He slid across the floor, and as he passed through the center of the open space, he jerked to a stop, suddenly transfixed by three arrows that sprouted from his body.
Dietrich noticed the fletchings pointed outward in very different directions. Reflexively he glanced around the arena in an effort to note the locations of the snipers. He spotted two readily enough—positioned on fixed platforms around the periphery of the arena. Burchard indicated the third, a Mongol standing just under the edge of the Khan’s pavilion. A fourth stood on the opposite side, though he had not shot his bow.
The Saracen writhed and screamed, and the crowd remained at a distance until two burly Mongols pushed their way through the cordon of bodies. One whipped a roundheaded mace down on the dying man until he stopped screaming, and then they roughly dragged his corpse away.
“A costly mistake,” Dietrich murmured. Burchard raised an eyebrow, and Dietrich waved the Sword Brother’s unspoken question away.
The mood was starting to turn. The audience was getting restless. The Khan was showing signs of boredom. This did not bode well for a continuance of the tournament. Dietrich glared down at the two men on the sand as if to invoke a change in their behavior through the force of his gaze. This game of switching weapons and grappling like drunk peasants is not going to keep the Khan’s interest.
The Shield-Brethren should be more adept than what was currently on display. It had been a number of years since he had actually seen them fight, but he found it hard to believe they had fallen so far from the paragons of martial expertise he knew. Even though the Order had withdrawn from nearly all of their existing commissions, they still held a few citadels of their own, and he had not heard any rumors that their ranks had been decimated in battle. Even at Mohi.
Keeping this competition alive was critical, and he couldn’t risk the safety of his own Order by putting his men into the tournament. Whenever the tournament did finally end, the Mongolian army would return its attention to Europe, and it would serve his Order and his masters in Rome little if the Livonian Brothers of the Sword had earned a reputation as fierce fighters. He needed the Mongols to feel threatened by someone else, but if all that remained of the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae was old men and children, then it would be very difficult to focus the dissolute Khan’s attention on the Shield-Brethren.
Haakon’s first instinct upon gripping Zug’s pole-arm had been to adopt what Taran referred to as the Scared Little Boy Pose, which was to say an extended position, aiming the tip of the blade straight out before him. To the extent that his mind was working at all, this was probably an attempt—which any scared little boy would certainly understand—to keep the bogeyman as far away as possible. He began to come to his senses, though, during the pause for hilarity that ran through the arena in the moments after Zug had picked up Haakon’s longsword and thereby effected a complete weapons swap.
Haakon felt instinctively uneasy whenever he stood with his blade held straight out for more than a few moments. Was this experienced fighter going to rush forward and impale himself on its tip? Unlikely. Besides which, he’d seen enough to understand that this blade was made for long, sweeping attacks, and from this position, he couldn’t deliver one.