The Golden Horde (15 page)

Guard-Captain Akimov muttered under his breath and took a step forward with one hand going to the hilt of his sword, but Ivan hastily signalled him back, aware that allowing the realm’s Captain-of-Guards to do no more than his duty was also enough to lose him all that hard-won favour. But it prompted the young
bogatyr
to make his first mistake.

“If I had soldiers to protect me,” said Aleksey Mikhailovich to the world at large, “I too would have no fear about making unpopular decisions.”

“You’ve got soldiers,
boyar
’s son,” Ivan said. “I’ve seen them. I’ve reviewed them. I’ve fought beside them in battle, which is more than you or your worthy father ever did. Is that what makes you so very righteous, Aleksey
bogatyr
?” He put his head on one side in the old way and waited a long moment before sinking the barb deep. “What must it feel like, knowing you’ve got something to prove, and not knowing if you can? Yuriy of Vladimir left his city to be burned so he could meet the Tatars in open battle; but when it came to the push he ran away, and when he died it was his own men who killed him for leading them to ruin.”

“I’ll know soon enough, Ivan Aleksandrovich,” Aleksey snapped, controlling himself with an effort. “And better dead trying to be a hero, than alive knowing I’m a coward.”

“How many will you take with you down that road? Just yourself, or the household retinue who may not think your glory is worth dying for?”

“If I die alone, then at least the Tatars will know that Khorlov had one man left among the sheep!” He wrenched himself away from yet another restraining hand, turned his back without the customary bow, and made for the door.

“Stand
still
!” Ivan hadn’t guessed until that moment that he could match Akimov shout for shout. The guards at the doorway jumped to stop Aleksey from taking a single step further, grabbed him by the arms and swung him back to face his Tsar. “Explain that!” Ivan had an ugly feeling that he knew the explanation already, and he was right.

“I’ll wear my colours and carry my banner when I go into battle,” said the young
bogatyr
, his pride sickening to hear. This mad child had sat here for five hours and hadn’t heeded a single word.

The voice from the doorway wasn’t particularly loud, but it carried from one end of the chamber to the other and it was as cold as ice.

“Let him go.”

The two soldiers holding Aleksey’s arms knew that voice and its tone, and released him without needing to be told a second time. The young man did not. He went through a ridiculous performance of straightening his garments and brushing imaginary dust off his crumpled sleeves before turning to leave – then stopped in his tracks.

The Tsaritsa Mar’ya Morevna stood in his way. Her twin children were by her side, and a sheathed sword was in her hands. She stared at Aleksey Mikhailovich with the same look of hatred he had directed at the Tsar her husband, then wrenched the weapon from its scabbard and presented it to him hilt-foremost. “Here,” she snapped, her voice hoarse with emotion. “Take it.” The
bogatyr
stared as if he’d never seen a sword before. “Damn you, take it!”

Aleksey Mikhailovich closed his fingers on the grip, and as Mar’ya Morevna released the blade its point sagged forward as though taking aim at Princess Anastasya’s head.

“That’s right.” Mar’ya Morevna pushed the children forward. “Kill them.”

“What?”

“I said
kill
them
. That’s what you were going to do, wasn’t it?”

“No! Never!”

“I heard otherwise.”

“I don’t make war on children! I didn’t say anything like that. I was going to kill a Tatar …”

“A Tatar whose companions would kill you. And they would know from your accoutrements and banner where you came from. Well, what are you waiting for? Kill them both. You’ll be saving them from what the Tatars will do. Think of how much glory that will bring your name, since glory’s all you care about …”

The sword clashed against the floor of the Council Chamber as Aleksey let it fall, then dropped to his knees in front of Mar’ya Morevna and bowed his head. “Forgive me, Highness,” he whimpered. “I… I didn’t think.”

Mar’ya Morevna looked down at him with a strange expression that mingled sympathy and understanding in equal measure. All the hate was gone, as if it had never been there. “The men of Russia seldom do, these past years,” she said softly, putting out one hand to ruffle his hair as she might have done to her own small son. “And the women of Russia will long weep for it.”

Until their mother ushered them away, the two children stared curiously at the young
bogatyr
. They’d never seen a grown-up cry before.

Ivan released the breath he’d been holding in a long hiss through his teeth, and indicated that Captain Akimov could lower his bow. If Aleksey Mikhailovich had been as mad as he seemed and tried to use the sword, the Cossack would have put an arrow through him before any harm was done. Ivan’s hand was resting on his own sword-hilt because it wasn’t unknown for a Tsar to defend his decisions by right of combat, and he would have been defending more than a decision. The lives of everyone in his domains rested on not fighting the Tatars when they appeared, and if he had to kill a member of his Council to make that point, he would do it. But it had to be in combat; an execution or, worse, a simple disappearance of the sort other Great Princes arranged for their opponents, wouldn’t improve his already dubious standing.

Then he saw Mar’ya Morevna’s clenched fist, and the hot blue sparks that drizzled from between her fingers, and wondered if either his sword or Akimov’s arrow would have been needed at all. A mother defending her children had no need of due process of law, or of fearing loss of status, and he half-wished she’d gone ahead and blown Romanov’s head off. That young man and his ambitious family might yet prove troublesome to Russia. But not, at least, today.

*

The
Independent
Tsardom
of
Khorlov
;

July
,
1243
A
.
D
.

The bells of Khorlov’s cathedral were striking noon when the first spear-points glittered through a haze of dust and distance, and the nervous watchers on the ramparts got their first view of an enemy expected for almost two years. Why the Tatars had taken so long before coming to Khorlov not even Volk Volkovich the Grey Wolf had been able to learn, but they were here now. The bells stuttered to silence at once, halfway through the ringing of a complex change, and that elaborate tumble of notes from every bell in the cathedral tower became the single, sonorous tolling of the alarm tocsin.

The arrival of the Tatars was no surprise. Khorlov had been on a war footing for three days, ever since the first courier reined his lathered horse to a skidding halt on the cobblestone paving outside the kremlin. Once the alarm had been raised, Tsar Ivan’s first response had been to send out a screen of mounted scouts, Mar’ya Morevna’s most trusted Kipchaq mercenaries for the most part, all of them men who understood the Tatar way of making war from horseback. They had reported back assiduously ever since and the first, most gratifying news had been the small size of the approaching column.

Yet there were many more in that column than the customary few envoys with their customary demand for surrender, so it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that another warlord like the late and unlamented Manguyu Temir had decided to turn some private profit. Ivan couldn’t shake the uneasy suspicion that it was all a little too easy. There was a doubt nagging at the back of his mind, a suggestion that had the Tatars meant real mischief, there would have been a deal less warning and fewer messengers left alive to bring the information back.

And then there were the musicians…

Though Ivan had said nothing one way or the other, Mar’ya Morevna had been openly sceptical – at least until the next two reports brought confirmation. This column of Tatars, though heavily armed and armoured, was nothing like the great host they had watched marching along the ice of the River Okya. It was far too small to pose a threat to a fortified city like Khorlov; and at least one-third of its men were in truth a mounted band.

One of the Kipchaqs, shaggier and more disreputable than the others, claimed he’d actually heard them playing and that he had – at great risk to himself – sneaked close enough to be sure what he was hearing was actually music, not just the usual military signalling of kettledrum and trumpet.

The band was real enough, but without witnesses to corroborate the Kipchaq’s familiar claim of courage above and beyond the call of duty Ivan was half-inclined to regard it as bragging in hope of a bonus. The other half of that inclination made him pay the man some extra silver to encourage similar devotion among the other scouts. Assuming, of course, that it
was
devotion, and not just inventive lying.

“You,” said Mar’ya Morevna, when the Kipchaq had bowed himself out backwards and they were briefly alone, “are getting soft.”

“I was exercising the Tsar’s prerogative of rewarding virtue,” said Ivan, aware even as he spoke that the words sounded a touch stuffy. “He might have been telling the truth.”

“And he might have been secure in the knowledge that since he was alone, you wouldn’t know one way or the other.”

“Whatever.” Ivan shrugged. “Truth or lie, it’s not as if it cost the Exchequer very much.” He leaned back in the great Chair of State that did duty as an informal throne, squirming slightly in yet another unsuccessful attempt to find some sitting position that was free of carvings poking him in the spine. Khorlov’s throne was plated with gold and ornamented with enamel and precious stones while the Chair of State was plain oak; otherwise there was little to choose between them where discomfort was concerned. Ivan suspected it was deliberate, intended to enforce a regal posture. Certainly a relaxed slouch was impossible in either.

“Shall we go and watch our” – Mar’ya Morevna hesitated delicately on the choice of words – “visitors?”

Ivan winced and sat bolt upright again. “We might as well.” He twisted to give the carved warriors marching across the seat-back a glare of disapproval. “The only other choice is to sit in this thing until they’re brought into the Presence.”

“You always complain about the formal thrones, yet you never do anything about them,” said Mar’ya Morevna sweetly. “Why not exercise your Tsar’s prerogative and use a cushion?”

“I couldn’t do that,” said Ivan, shocked – how much of that shock was genuine and how much was feigned for good-humoured mockery, not even he could have said without thinking about it first. “The Tsars of Khorlov have always sat on —”

“Uncomfortable chairs?”

“— Elaborately carved thrones.”

“So if a bruised backbone was good enough for your father and his father before him, it’s good enough for you. Vanya, I’m all for maintaining tradition, but do you ever listen to yourself? There are times when you sound so much like First Minister Strel’tsin that I wonder where you keep the long grey beard.”

“Very amusing,” said Ivan, not amused at all. He hadn’t forgotten the trouble over the Lesser Crown just after his coronation, and he wasn’t up to another round of discussion over whether the Tsar’s chair could be cushioned without causing the collapse of the realm. At least, not until the Tatars had been and gone.

“You wanted to watch the visitors arrive?” he said, placing both hands on the arms of the Chair of State to lever himself gratefully away from the damned carvings. “Then let’s go do it.”

*

The Tatars were in no great haste to reach Khorlov’s gates, for even though Ivan and Mar’ya Morevna took their own leisurely time walking from the Presence Chamber at the heart of the kremlin, when they reached the outer ramparts the riders were still far distant. Summer dust raised by their horses’ hoofs hung on the still, hot air like a silken scarf, and the bright metal of armour and weapons twinkled through it as if that scarf was sewn with sequins.

Ivan leaned on the wooden battlements of the kremlin and gazed out without much enthusiasm across grassland that had once been lush and green. Not any more. A fierce summer had come early to suck the steppe dry of moisture then scorch it biscuit-brown, and he didn’t relish the thought of the autumn rains. One good downpour would turn most of the land he ruled into a single vast mire until the winter came and froze it solid. Ah, Russia. He stared at the distant sparks of steel. “Two hundred men, the Kipchaq said. It seems like more.”

“It always looks like more,” said Mar’ya Morevna. “But he told the truth. About their numbers and …” She cocked her head as the rattle of kettledrums and the drone of deep-voiced trumpets blended with a high, melodic scream of shawms. “And about the band as well. They’ve been in Khwarizmid Persia, this lot. Reeds and kettledrums. Listen.”

“It sounds like a pig being roasted,” said Ivan, after a few seconds while the thin shrieking of reed instruments came floating faint but clear across the steppe. “Several pigs. And not dead, either.”

“But you can hear it, can’t you?”

“Unfortunately, yes.” The young Tsar grimaced and scrubbed his knuckles into his beard. It made him look wiser and more regal, but he’d been clean-shaven for most of his life and the damned thing itched in hot weather. Weather like this. If it hadn’t been for his wife insisting he shave it off, he decided, he
would
shave it off. “I presume there’s some significance about that remark which temporarily eludes me?”