As we proceeded down from the Sarmatian peaks into a low valley, home to a lazy and boggy bend in a well-frozen river, I could only assume that it was Katya who marked off hazards and left a clear trail for us to follow; her angry pace left her far ahead of our other scouts, and she did not return to camp for several nights. Yuri tried his best to keep me company, and Vitold started to talk to me again, but neither dog nor man was the same sort of company as Katya had been. I felt lonely in spite of spending none of my waking hours alone.
Scouts reported sighting strange mounds of earth on which trees did not grow, a mile off the track that Katya had marked as passable. Katya’s marked trail swung wide around the mounds, though it was not clear why she had chosen to do so; she had left no particular signs of explanation. More solid-seeming ground was likely; as it was, the frozen ground creaked alarmingly beneath our mechs and horses, and the worry that a singularly warm day would bog us down deeply in mud was ever-present.
The cavalry lieutenant seemed surprised at my enthusiastic reaction to the news of the mounds. To his nobly-bred sensibilities (bred, I rather suspected, on the wrong side of the sheets somewhere in Wallachia), unexplained mounds meant ancient barrows and ancient barrows meant unearthly haunts from half-remembered childhood stories. The wild forest was a frightening place, a setting for tales of woe, and by no means a popular travel destination.
My more humbly-bred instincts suggested that mounds meant people likely lived nearby, and people meant fuel we might be able to purchase. This was a great deal more important than fanciful stories. The simple fact, colder and harder than the creaking ground beneath us, was this: We were burning fuel far too quickly in our attempt to drive our way through the swamp before it thawed. We needed more fuel, and sooner rather than later.
I had a further suspicion (a glimmer of audacious hope, really) about the possible nature of the mounds, which I explained to him as we rode to the site.
“I have read that in bogs, peasants sometimes cut and burn the earth itself, after pressing and drying it. Something about the way the sediment forms makes it flammable; this type of earth, known as peat, burns hotly. Some older natural philosophers have theorized, on grounds of alchemical analysis, that it is the most raw form of coal; and that should peat be dried enough and compressed firmly enough, it might eventually form coal. A few alchemists have gone as far as to classify peat as the lowest grade of coal, below lignite.”
The lieutenant pretended to listen as I continued to outline the thermal characteristics of the various types of coal, talk about how peat compared in the grand scheme of things as a fuel, and some of the alternate theories about the formation of coal. It was helpful for me to say these things out loud, even the words passed in one ear of the lieutenant and out the other.
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When I arrived at the vanguard of the main force, I held onto my optimism. There were holes in the frozen earth; there were piles of earth; it looked very much of a piece with the illustrations I had seen of peat mounds in a book on the alchemy of fuel. As we drew even nearer, though, I had to guess a second time. While the mounds (there were three of them) looked very much like they were formed from pressed slabs of earth (stacked so as to drain), the lower parts of their sides showed brown grass growing on them, poking out through the layer of snow covering them. These stacks had been here quite some time, the lieutenant pointed out, and re-asserted his opinion that if they were the work of men at all, they were burial mounds, not some strangely burnable earth.
On closer inspection, I decided that my first impression was correct. They were stacks of peat, cut and pressed and stacked to dry years before; but whoever had done it had failed to collect them after all this time, long enough for vegetation to start reclaiming the peat, creeping up waist-high along the sides. I dismounted to get a good estimate of the quantity and condition of the fuel, and when I walked around to the back side of the hill, I found another hole at the base of the mound; this one a dark gape torn in the earth, rather carved into the geometric cut of the hill.
Interesting. Peering in, I could see the broken skeleton of a man below. Our mysterious peat collector, I thought to myself. It was obvious that he’d managed to find a cave the hard way, and had died either on impact or starved to death after. The lieutenant dismounted and joined me.
“See anything?” he asked.
“Nothing other than the obvious,” I said, pointing down at the hole. “My guess is it’s a natural cave system.”
“We don’t need to go in, do we?” The lieutenant’s apprehension was visible.
I made a snap decision. The lieutenant was afraid of going into the cave; this was an opportunity to impress him with my own courage and build his trust in my judgement as a consequence. I asked him to fetch me a rope, told him I would go down and take a look to see how large it was, and how stable the hill looked from the underside. It wouldn’t do, I told him, for us to lose a wagon-load of peat by collapsing half the hill as soon as we brought more weight on top of it.
As he fetched the rope, I realized that my excuse was a good one on geological grounds – cave-ins are chancy dangerous events for anyone above a cave as well as anyone inside of it. I may have been fishing for an excuse, but I had hooked a sound reason. We tied off the rope to a tree, and I climbed down the hole with a lit lantern hanging off my shoulder.
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It wasn’t really dark enough down there to require a lantern, but I appreciated the way the lieutenant had rigged up a carrying sling for the lantern so I could readily climb down the rope with both hands, and felt it would be undiplomatic for me to refuse his helpful addition to my gear. The girlish shriek from above as the lantern swung sideways and briefly illuminated the ground directly below me reminded me of two things: First, the lieutenant was worried about finding barrows. Second, that the poor unfortunate peat-cutter at the bottom of the hole was in a skeletal condition.
I planted my feet on the ground, then peered up. The lieutenant had disappeared. Fortunately, he hadn’t taken the rope with him. I took a deep breath to calm myself, and then another one to prepare myself to yell at him to come back with the appropriate amount of dignity.
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What actually came out of my mouth was a little bit different, an inarticulate scream only marginally more masculine sounding than the lieutenant’s. The reason for this difference between my original intentions and final shouted explanation was simple: A bony hand was grabbing my ankle. And by ‘bony,’ I do not mean merely slender; I mean completely devoid of flesh.
The lieutenant’s reaction seemed now much more reasonable, if not particularly valiant. As I jerked my leg forcefully to try to get it away from the grasping limb of the departed peat-cutter, I saw no signs that this hill was undermined by a natural cave system; but rather, proof positive that it was built up around a barrow mound of great antiquity.
“You have come to rob the wrong king,” rasped the barrow’s original occupant. It took me a minute to realize what was being said; his Latin sounded different from how I expected Latin to sound. Perhaps modern scholars get the language subtly wrong; perhaps it was simply that he lacked flesh and blood lips; perhaps it was not his native language to begin with.
My first reaction, on being accused of being a grave robber, was to deny the criminal charge. As I started to do so, I realized that I had every intention of robbing the dead – that is, I meant to rob the dead peat-cutter of the produce of his labor, sitting up on the hill above. Then I started to deny I had any intentions of disturbing a grave and realized as I did so that would be false as well. Having seen the skeleton below, I had every intention of disturbing what I thought to be an accidental grave by descending down into the hill.
In retrospect, my first reaction should have been to start climbing; I was outnumbered and surrounded by hostile forces. Whether or not the occupant’s claim to royalty was overblown, he was clearly important enough to have been buried with a number of servants; and I had the space of about a dozen heartbeats between the moment the peat-cutter grabbed my ankle and the moment several of his servants laid hands on me. Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to climb quite fast enough to escape them; it’s hard to say. My heart was beating at a lively enough rate that those dozen heartbeats were not overly long in measure; and while I am by no means in poor physical condition, climbing up a rope is one of the slower ways of escaping a dangerous situation.
The traditional heroic reaction from the stories I’d read would have been to pull out my sword and cut my way free, shouting out battle cries involving God, Christ, various saints, the Christian god, some pagan god or goddess, my Emperor, some lesser liege lord, or at the very least my own glorious heritage. However, I came from a humble background, which left me well-versed neither in bladework nor in suicidal folly.
I know that given my decision to climb down in the first place, you may have doubts about the latter, but I would argue that was simple folly on my part; and not even much of that. How many ancient haunted barrows are there in that wild bit of land between Avaria, Lithuania, and the empire ruled from Oenipons that referred to itself as “sacred” and “Roman.” Finding this one was a stroke of exceptionally poor luck.
So instead of playing the hero, I did exactly what those of us of less lofty birth have been doing when confronted with a noble (or in this case, royal) temper tantrum: Apologize and beg for mercy. While, of course, trying to underline the utility of my continued survival.
I had a large number of things I could apologize for: My ignorance of his name and dominion. Disturbing his rest. Stepping on his subject while panicking about being grabbed. Being of low and base birth. My atrocious accent in Latin. It was not, I am ashamed to admit, difficult to bring myself to the point of tears welling up in my eyes as I asked him how the humble soldier Mikolai Stepanovich could be of service to his most royal highness. I think I may be allergic to grave dust.
But I am getting ahead of myself; let me tell you what I learned while prostrating myself, apologizing profusely, and letting the man talk. On the subject of his dominion, he proudly proclaimed that in life, he had ruled over ten thousand subjects and lands so vast that you could ride all day on a fast horse without seeing the end of them.
A patriotic hero would have scoffed and called him a kinglet with pretensions to grandiose titles, told the dead king that his long-vanished kingdom would barely merit marking on a map, and boasted of serving an Emperor who ruled hundreds of times as many people and lands that would take a year to ride across. I expressed astonishment that I had not heard of his reign or his kingdom, and after a little more conversational maneuvering, determined that he had never heard of the Mongols.
“Christ’s mercy,” I exclaimed, fishing for a little more information. “Your most royal highness, I beg again for your forgiveness. I should have realized you were one of the revered great lords of the days before the Mongols. Only such a lord would have such a marvelously shiny crown.”
“You’re one of those Christ-cultists?” he asked, curiously biting the hook I had trawled in front of him.
This dated his last exposure to the outside world a little more precisely, and allowed me to play for more time while I explained that Christ-worship had become quite fashionable, first in the Roman Empire and then later spreading to many of the surrounding peoples after Rome fell.
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There’s something daunting about trying to trick someone in the neighborhood of a hundred times your own age; how can you come up with something they haven’t thought of? I could just hope he hadn’t spent much of his idle time in the tomb making contingency plans. What does a dead king do while he sits in a tomb for a couple thousand years? Do the undead sleep? Do they play knucklebones for decades on end?
I know that if I were stuck in a barrow, conscious but dead, I’d spend some time coming up with detailed contingency plans. That, or start digging.
A dark shadow flitted in through the hole, and a raven landed on top of a skeletal servant, perching on its collarbone. Ravens, as you might expect from their role on the battlefield after the fighting is over, are not particularly frightened of dead humans.
“You’re right,” said the raven, cocking its head and peering through the gloom. “It is a very shiny crown.”
“Ah,” said the king. “I see the birds are eager for your flesh to become carrion. As interesting as the stories you tell me are, I really should get on with having you killed. Kneel. I will grant you the boon of being killed by my own hand; it will be mercifully quick.”
He rose up from his throne, rings glittering on his fingers as they wrapped around a hammer, made of a silvery-white metal and accented with precious gems. No workman’s tool, that hammer; but the weapon of a proud noble with a strong arm.
As the king walked forward, I could see out of the corner of my eye the raven’s head, nodding in time with the king’s step as it turned its head, eyes tracking the bright gold circlet perched on top of the ancient skull.
I knelt in seeming obedience, hoping to surprise him when I dodged out of the way. As merciful as a quick death might be compared to the alternatives, I was hoping for mercy that spared me from execution entirely; I would rather have a painful chance at life than a brief death. I was hoping to surprise him.
Can the dead be surprised, or is that a biological reaction of some sort? There was much I didn’t know about ancient undead creatures living under hills. Maybe I should have asked the lieutenant to tell me his old bedtime stories.