The last time Kim had ventured out here, there had been a few yards of open space remaining between the edge of the slum and the old temple of the Christians, which had fared surprisingly well during the initial Mongolian advance. But now the warren of tents and lean-tos was washing around the building’s foundations, with only a small clear space around its entrance so that people could go in and come out.
When Kim went into the temple, a priest was standing at the front of its largest room with his back turned, holding a cup above his head and chanting some sort of mystic incantation. Arrayed round him in a semicircle were three other priests, all raising their empty hands as if in sympathy. Scattered around the main floor were perhaps a dozen Christians all down on their knees. Kim, of course, could make no sense whatsoever of the rite, but this suited his purposes since the man he sought, Father Pius, was one of the three lesser priests standing at the front. He was tempted to go tug on Pius’s sleeve and draw him aside, but something about the way the people in the temple were behaving gave him the idea that this would be considered impolite, and so he stood there quietly and waited until the head priest stopped chanting and began handing out food and drink to the assortment of wretches who had been kneeling and waiting. The amount of food given out seemed extremely small and scarcely worth the trouble. Moreover, the priest laid it directly onto the congregants’ tongues, apparently to make sure they didn’t grab too much of it. Kim thought that if they were a bit more generous, they would not have to husband the stuff so carefully.
But that was neither here nor there. When the serving of the food was finished, Kim approached the one named Pius and made it known that he wished to talk to him. All of the priests gave him dirty looks, and Kim belatedly understood that the ceremony was not actually finished yet. Nevertheless, Pius—once he had seen Kim’s face in the light of a candle and recognized him—assented to break away from the rite and led Kim out a side exit into a little room in the back of the temple that was illuminated by slats of daylight shining in between charred roof planks.
“I require your help in writing a letter to the Monks of the Red Plum Blossom,” Kim began, speaking in Mongol, “and in delivering it to the master of their order. In exchange for your assistance, I offer to give you money, or to make myself useful to you in some other way.”
Father Pius seemed too dumbfounded by all of this to say anything in return. While waiting for the priest to collect his wits, Kim supplied a description of the sigil, or mon, that Two Dogs had earlier scratched on the floor of his cage.
Eventually the priest began to nod. “It is not a plum blossom,” he said, “but a red rose.”
“Very well. The Monks of the Red Rose, then,” Kim said, shrugging to indicate that he did not really care what sort of flower it was or what this order called itself.
But Pius would not let go of the topic. “The rose is a symbol, in the heraldry of the Franks, for the Virgin.”
“Fine. They are celibate monks. We have them too. Or at least we have ones who claim to be celibate.”
“All monks are celibate,” Pius said. “That is not what the rose symbolizes. It means, rather, the Virgin Mary, Mother of God.”
A number of questions came immediately to Kim’s mind, but he forced himself not to utter them, since the conversation had already dwelled on this topic much longer than he had any use for.
Pius was unstoppable, though. “They are the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae,” he said, switching briefly into some other language that made no sense at all to Kim, “which means, the Order of Knights of the Virgin Defender.”
“They are defenders of virgins?”
“No. Well, yes. Of course they defend virgins. But that’s not what it means. The Virgin Defender is a sort of manifestation of the Virgin Mary that once appeared above a battlefield, holding a shield and a lance, inspiring the founders of this order to extraordinary feats of arms.”
“Can you get a message to them or not?”
“Yes. By all means.” Father Pius had begun rummaging in a chest socked away in the corner of the little room. All of its furniture had been burned or looted; this chest had been put in place after the battle. As Kim now saw, it contained the stuff that Franks used to write: dried animal skin, quills, and small clay jars that, judging from the stains around their necks, contained ink. A bit of time was lost now to fussing about with this gear, trimming quills and mixing mysterious fluids into the jars to get the ink to the proper consistency. Kim could see clearly enough that this was a little show that Father Pius was putting on to remind Kim of all the trouble and expense he was going to—trouble and expense for which he would expect to be compensated later. But in due time he got himself situated on the flat lid of the chest with all in readiness: candle, ink, quill, parchment, and Father Pius himself.
Kim cleared his throat. “Kim Alcheon, Last of the Flower Knights, to…” He paused. “What is the name of the master of the order?”