The Golden Horde (36 page)

Nevskiy broke off at the sound of raised voices from the other group of Russians nearer to the fires, looked for the cause of it, then swore under his breath. “May he be damned for a stubborn fool,” he snarled, “and doubly damned if he brings us down with him!”

The source and focus of the commotion was a man of about twice Ivan’s age, big and broad inside his rich garments, his features set in an obstinate grimace and framed by a black beard shot through with streaks of grey. He was pointing at the two fires, and from the few words that could be distinguished through the general babble of the man’s supporters, he was refusing to submit to the purification ritual. “Who is he?” Ivan asked Aleksandr Nevskiy, “and what’s biting him so hard?

“Don’t you know? I thought you and your lady wife knew everything about everyone in the wide white world.”

“Let be, Aleksandr Yaroslavich. You’ve set aside your sword. Set aside your sarcasm as well, and just give me an answer.”

“You make a better job of controlling your temper than I might have believed,” said Nevskiy with approval. “All right. The noisy one with the black beard is Mikhail Vsevolodovich, and he’s the sole surviving claimant to the principality of Chernigov —”

“I rode past Chernigov on the way here. There’s not much for him to claim.”

“There wasn’t much of Vladimir either,” snapped Nevskiy. “But backed by the Khan’s authority, Mikhail could have the city well on its way to reconstruction and prosperity within two years. Except that to get the backing of that authority he must first accept it, and from the look of things he’s balking at that jump. Face it, Khorlovskiy, the Tatars rule us now and the wise among us have come to terms with that. More or less. Yes?”

“I… Yes.”

“Then watch, and learn what happens to those who don’t.”

Ivan stared at him, then at the gaggle of men who had given up on persuasion and had reverted to shouting at one another again. There had been an undertone to Aleksandr Nevskiy’s words that raised the hair on his nape; not anticipation exactly, but a definite note of foreboding that promised little good for Mikhail the would-be Prince of Chernigov. Mar’ya Morevna had heard it too, because when Ivan turned to her, he could see apprehension bordering on fright in the darkly dilated pupils of her eyes. It was so uncommon for her to be afraid of anything that the sight of it scared him as much as anything yet to happen. “Get the children into the Pavilion,” he said sharply. “Do it now. And don’t let them out again until we all leave together. Move!”

He didn’t feel at ease until Mar’ya Morevna had shepherded Nikolai and Anastasya inside Khan Batu’s great tent. They went reluctantly, sensing that something was about to happen but neither of them quite old enough to know the difference between exciting and terrible. They would learn soon enough, but Ivan had no desire to hasten the process.

“I’ve come here at the Khan’s behest,” Mikhail Vsevolodovich was saying to his followers and to the world in general, “to bow before him as my overlord, and that I’ll do. But I won’t bow to the East like an infidel, and I won’t pass through fire as if I was a wizard!”

There was a flurry of activity as the shamans who had been feeding sweet-smelling wood onto the fires went inside the Golden Pavilion to report what they had heard to Batu Khan. After a few seconds a Tatar officer followed them.

“That one,” said Ivan quietly, “must have told Mikhail what all these rites are about, and been ignored.”

“Maybe he did, and maybe not.” Amragan
tarkhan
sauntered past Ivan, managing to look as though he’d overheard by accident rather than by deliberate eavesdropping. “You at least took the trouble to ask. This fat fool” – he gestured at Mikhail of Chernigov’s ample figure – “may have considered that asking anything was beneath his dignity.”

Ivan might have asked something, but at that moment the cloth-of-gold door curtain billowed open and the Tatar officer stepped out of the tent. The shamans weren’t with him; but there were six soldiers at his back. “Hear the words of Batu, Ilkhan of the Golden Horde,” he said, speaking in passable Russian. “The Khan says, why do you ignore his command as if you have the right to do so? Obey, and earn your Princedom. Refuse, and lose your life. Bow down, or be destroyed!”

“I told you already,” said Mikhail Vsevolodovich, sounded less bold and more desperate, “I’ll bow to the Khan, since he gained his status by conquest and by the glory given him by the Hand of God. But the rest… No. What shall it profit me to gain the sovereignty of all Russia, yet lose my own soul?”

“Idiot,” said Aleksandr Nevskiy under his breath. But he crossed himself for all that, and Ivan followed suit.

The Tatar officer stared at Mikhail for a second or two, and whether there was pity, or contempt, or any expression in his eyes at all, Ivan was too far away to see.

“Mikhail Vsevolodovich of Chernigov,” he said, “you are a dead man.” He clapped his hands and gestured the six guards forward, watching as they seized Mikhail and flung him to the ground on his back, held flat by wrists and ankles with his face looking up towards the Everlasting Blue Sky, grey now with clouds and the promise of more rain. “But take comfort from this in your dying: the Khan of the Golden Horde compliments you thus, saying your blood is royal enough that it shall not be poured out for the black earth to drink.”

The officer made another little gesture and the two guards not holding Mikhail down began to stamp on the Russian’s chest with their booted heels. The Tatar soldiers were well practiced at this work, and they were finished with their victim in a matter of minutes, but it seemed to Ivan’s ears that the thudding flurry of blows went on for a long time. The man who would have been Prince of Chernigov went black in the face and uttered a hideous gurgling noise, convulsing up like a gaffed salmon against the grip of the men who held him. It mattered not at all whether something burst within him or whether his heart was shocked to stillness by the stamping, but when he sagged back from that huge spasm, he was dead.

The threatened rain began to fall, drizzling from a heavy sky onto the living and the newly dead while Ivan swore a soft oath that was more like a benediction, and signed himself with the cross again. His hand was shaking as he did so, and he wasn’t ashamed of it. Aleksandr Nevskiy’s hand was shaking just as hard. The Prince of Vladimir stared at his own trembling fingers, then clenched them into a fist so tight that the knucklebones showed white through the tautly-drawn skin.

“In case you think it might have been,” said Nevskiy, “that wasn’t a demonstration for anyone’s benefit. Batu Khan has no need of demonstrations.”

*

Inside the Golden Pavilion, Mar’ya Morevna was standing as near to the doorway as a groups of guards in full lamellar armour would allow. She watched in silence as Ivan and Aleksandr Nevskiy came in, having passed between the fires beyond. Those fires were hissing as rain fell on them, but neither that nor the buzz of voices within the warm, stuffy, tapestry-hung vault of the Khan’s court had been enough to drown out the sound of stamping feet. Ivan looked at his wife and saw she knew what the rhythmic noise had meant. He only hoped the children were still ignorant of it.

A shaman took him by the arm and swung him around to face the direction in which the Great Khan’s palace of Karakorum lay, countless hundreds of miles away in the blue distance of the high steppes of Central Asia. Ivan bowed, but he still had enough pride that it wasn’t the deep obeisance he’d seen before. Instead he gave the proper salute of a Russian nobleman doing honour to a superior, bending forward from the waist with his right hand extended towards the ground. He stayed like that while silently counting up to three, then straightened up again, his shoulders itching the whole time in anticipation of a spear-shaft slamming into them to encourage him to bow still lower.

It didn’t happen, and Ivan could only presume that the Khan, or whoever acted for him in matters of protocol, was content. When the shaman swung him in another direction, he therefore gave the same bow to the stocky, middle-aged Mongol who sat on a pile of silken cushions underneath a scarlet canopy; but this time he counted to ten.

Whilst his head was lowered, Ivan took the opportunity to glance from side to side, rather than stare when he was supposed to be paying full attention to the Khan. It was an enlightening ten seconds, for the Golden Pavilion was an awesome place. Not so much in terms of size, for while it was remarkably large when considered as a tent, once inside where the tapestries and hangings disguised the fact that it was a tent at all, it felt more like any room in any kremlin. There were rooms in Khorlov’s kremlin palace that were four times as tall, six times as wide, ten times as long, but none of the rooms in Khorlov were so filled with drifts of bric-a-brac and trinkets.

And such trinkets! Rolls and bales of costly fabric, raw and worked gold and silver, gemstones cut and uncut, small casks overflowing with discs of precious metals stamped that Ivan recognized as coined money, rather than the scraps of silver-by-weight that Russians had used as currency since the days of Ryurik the Norseman. The choicest plunder of the Western Empire had passed through Batu Khan’s fingers at some time or another, before being given out as praise-gifts when the Khan thought that such things had been earned. It was a sight to take the breath away.

Having just witnessed another way for a man to have his breath taken away, Ivan kept his thoughts to himself, and his face without expression.

It was just as well. The brief glimpse of Batu as he ducked his head had given him the impression that the Khan of the Golden Horde was nothing more than a short, fat and ridiculously overdressed man looking foolish in silks and satins rather than furs and steel and leather. He was wrong. Ilkhan Batu was of clan Borjigun, descended in right line from the Great Ancestor Chinghis-Khan Temujin. It meant that while he was stout enough, the fleshiness of good living was overlaid on solid muscle. Instead of being rotund, his body looked almost rectangular, like a statue roughly carved from a block of timber with a hatchet. On such a body, the silks and satins looked anything but foolish.

What if he had gout brought on by the Chingisid family vice of drinking too much? His swollen feet were clad in Persian slippers of purple velvet, glittering with small jewels. When he drank now,
kumys
and wine and all the other liquid trophies of endless campaigns, he did so from cups of hammered gold, and pipes and cymbals sounded when he raised those brimming cups to his mouth. What if his hair was turning grey instead of the ruddy black that characterized his clan? He still wore it in the strange Mongol tonsure that shaved the crown of the head down to the skin, but left a lock of hair hanging down between the eyebrows and enough at the back to braid into a long, looped plait behind each ear. Gemstones and gold thread were in those plaits as well as hair, and the skullcap covering his naked crown, bald now as much as shaved, was quilted satin sewn with seed-pearls. His title was well deserved, for he was a Splendid Khan indeed.

Amragan
tarkhan
was beside him, muttering and pointing, and Ivan suspected he had just reached the part of his narrative where the Firebird dropped out of a clear morning sky to exchange pleasantries. Khan Batu’s pouched eyes opened as wide as they could likely go, then went narrow and speculative so that they were no more than two seams in the Mongol’s weatherbeaten face. Batu waved the
tarkhan
back to another cushioned seat, studied Ivan, Mar’ya Morevna, Nikolai and Anastasya once more, then crooked one finger at Aleksandr Nevskiy.

The Prince of Vladimir moved closer to the Khan, most likely to reduce the chance of his words being overheard, and went down on one knee in a way that Ivan noted. It was halfway to the subservience of the Eastern bow, and thus more likely to keep the Tatars happy, but except for an initial inclination of the head it otherwise preserved enough straight-backed dignity to content
boyar
and
bogatyr
observers. But if Nevskiy had hoped to preserve the secrecy of whatever reason had brought him here by whispering it to the Khan in private, he was mistaken. Batu clapped his hands and another Tatar came up from the gaggle of dignitaries to either side of the tasselled canopy, bowed, then began to translate the Khan’s words into Russian.

Loudly.

Had he not just seen a man killed, and had that death not awakened frightened second and third thoughts on certain matters in his own mind, Ivan would have found the situation funny. Instead he found it merely interesting, since in Aleksandr Nevskiy’s doings he could see the precursors of what he himself might be reporting to the Khan next year.

Prince Aleksandr Yaroslavich Nevskiy wasn’t simply paying a courtesy call on his overlord, no matter what he’d tried to make Ivan believe. He was here in order to discuss the matter of the latest tax-census, and to intercede with the Khan for his vassals in the domain of Vladimir, who had risen against the head-counters and the assessors yet again.

Again
? thought Ivan.
How
many
times
before
?

Nevskiy himself had quelled the rising, by persuasion and in places where that had failed, by force. It was an admission that shocked Ivan to the core, until he realized that it had been done to keep the local
daru
-
gashi
governor responsible for the Vladimir tax-area from sending in Tatar horsemen to do it themselves. Now Nevskiy had to apologize not only for his own Russian people, but also for his having taken military action against them without first asking permission…