Prince Ivan (14 page)

Soon enough it was time to ride away from the kremlin palace, and his hosts fussed around him on the morning of his departure. Ivan tolerated it with good grace, but watched with interest as Prince Mikhail inspected his swords.

“Should I anticipate trouble?” he asked.

“Just be cautious. There’s nothing wrong with that.” Mikhail put one hand to the silvered hilt of Ivan’s
shashka
sabre and drew, resting it on his sleeve as he turned the blade this way and that to admire the play of light and shade along its subtle curve of ridged and polished steel. “And nothing wrong with this, either. Just mind your fingers.”

The
shashka
made a thin metallic whispering as Mikhail re-sheathed it, then clashed and rattled in its silver-mounted scabbard as he tossed it towards Ivan, who gave him a crooked grin as he hooked the sabre to his belt. “I haven’t cut my fingers yet,” he said, “mainly because I pay attention to warnings.”

“Make sure you keep doing that,” said Mikhail, “and you’ll stay healthy.” He lifted the broad, heavy
shpaga
from where it lived under the flap at the left side of Ivan’s saddle, and studied its hilt and pommel for several long, thoughtful moments before drawing out two handspans of the blade and no more. That was when he whistled, long and low between his teeth, and said, “Old, and very pretty.”

Ivan had always thought the sword an outdated antique, and carried it for no other reason than it had been in the Khorlov family since Ryurik the Northman. “That thing?”

“Yes, this thing! Look, it has ‘ULFBEHRT’ written on the blade.”

“Is that what it says? I sometimes wondered.” Ivan sounded anything but interested, and managed to suggest those times of wondering had been few and far between. “I never learned to read the rune letters.”

Prince Mikhail the Raven shook his head, perhaps in despair, or regret, or even as a dismissal of some mild annoyance at Ivan’s lack of concern over his own family’s heirloom. “These letters aren’t runic, they’re Roman.”

Tsarevich Ivan continued packing a saddle-sack with tightly folded clothes and merely raised an eyebrow. “Does it mean something important?”

“It means this sword was made by the North people before their longships came down the rivers of the wide white world.”

Ivan’s only reply was the brief smile of someone who didn’t share another person’s pastime but had suffered its chatter too often for any objections. Mikhail was like Captain Akimov, fond of sharp steel in all its manifestations, but Ivan couldn’t see the beauty. The function kept intruding, and especially with swords. Bows and spears at least had the excuse that they might be used for hunting; axes could cut down trees, to build a house or a fire; knives could carve meat for food, or wood for use or ornament. But a sword was made only for the killing of people, and even over-jewelled swords of state held their authority as a reminder of what their plainer brethren could do. For all his hopes of proving himself a worthy
bogatyr
, Ivan was secretly glad that though he’d sometimes drawn a blade in anger or in fright, he’d never had to use one.

“May they both stay sheathed,” said the Raven as he returned the
shpaga
to its place, and Ivan wondered how many of his own private thoughts had been visible on his face. “With luck you’ll not need weapons on this adventure.”

“Except for his own pretty smile,” said Tsarevna Yelena, stepping out of the kremlin’s tall double doorway on the tag-end of her husband’s words. When she came down the black basalt steps and put her hands on his shoulders, Lena looked at his face as Mikhail Voronov had looked at the swords. Whatever she saw there pleased her, for she hugged her brother tightly, kissing him on the forehead and on both cheeks before releasing him. “Go with care,” she said. “Go with God. And remember us, as we remember you.”

Ivan grinned at her, as his sister; then bowed to her as the noble lady she became when she sat on the black throne in the black hall of her husband’s black kremlin palace. He bowed also to the Raven, for though he was brother-in-law Misha, friend, drinking-companion and most recently advisor, he was also Mikhail Charodeyevich Voronov, Prince of the Dark Forests and a very great Prince indeed.

They stood by the great gate to watch him ride away, dwindling smaller and smaller each time he looked back until at last their small dark shapes were lost against the great black bulk of the kremlin at their backs. A little after that, when the kremlin itself had become dimmed in the haze of distance across the steppe, Ivan glanced back one final time.

This time he wrenched on the reins to bring Burka from a canter to a skidding stop.

There was a cloud on the far horizon where the kremlin had been, like the smoke of a great burning. But instead of rising in a column towards the sky, it spread out from side to side across the meagre horizon of the steppe like the wings of some vast bird. The black wings of a raven. Ivan watched the cloud rise up from the horizon-haze and sweep away to the southwest. And when the cloud was gone, so was Prince Mikhail’s kremlin.

*

Ivan rode as he had done before, towards the east. There had been a few minutes on that first day when he’d said elaborate things in a very loud voice about his brother-in-law the Raven, most of which had to do with not offering relatives a ride to their destination. But Ivan soon laughed at his own outrage. There wasn’t much adventure in the comfortable seat of a magic castle that wafted its occupants to and fro. As well not have the adventure at all. The
bogatyri
in the old tales would have laughed at him.

Besides, the Raven’s kremlin palace hadn’t been going his way.

He stopped laughing and began to swear again shortly afterwards, when it started to rain. Fortunately, it wasn’t yet
rasputitsa
, the season of mud, so instead of settling into a solid drenching downpour the rain merely sprinkled Ivan with enough water to leave him damp, uncomfortable and out of sorts, then cleared away so he steamed in the sun instead.

As if Moist-Mother-Earth was proving the truth of her title, it rained on Ivan the next day as well. And the day after. By that time, he, and his horse, and his gear, and his food, and his clothes, were all as damp as they were likely to be without spending a week in the Dnepr – or perhaps the Volga, since that was much closer but equally wet.

Ivan Aleksandrovich soon ran out of energy to keep the rain at bay and ran out of original oaths a few minutes later. He was reduced to repeating himself with as many elaborations as his somewhat damp mind could create until even those ran short of inventiveness. “This weather stinks,” he muttered as the last raindrop from the last shower dribbled miserably and ticklishly down his nose. Burka, just as wet, snorted approval of the sentiment.

Then Ivan reined in, sniffed, and realized, despite the aroma of wet horse and wet self, that more than the weather was stinking. Literally stinking, too. He knew well enough that it was neither Burka nor himself; his noble steed smelt very much like all noble steeds left out in the rain, and he had bathed in a small stream only that morning. Neither the weather nor the stream had seemed too cold until he’d undressed beyond the point where it made any difference, and then the rain had started again. What had become a shower-bath was another tooth-chattering affair, but it still left him a lot fresher than what he was smelling now.

And then he heard the hoofbeats.

They came out of the drizzle like a storm, ten Tatars too close to evade and too many to fight. Ivan’s sabre was lost somewhere inside the clinging, sodden folds of his supposedly weatherproof cloak, and it was only when he reached for the sword by his saddle that he learned how far it had slipped down its rain-greased straps. By the time he found the weapon’s hilt and straightened with the blade halfway from its scabbard, he also found he was looking at six Tatar arrows already on the strings of six Tatar bows, three hooked Tatar spearheads and a drawn scimitar that might once have been Turkish. That at least rested on its owner’s shoulder, because pointing yet another weapon at him in the present circumstance would have seemed excessive even for a Tatar.

The ten grinning, droopy-moustached faces would perhaps have been worst of all except for the miasma of stench that hung around them like a cloud. Despite the stillness of the rain-washed, misty air, the Tatars and their scruffy horses were upwind of him, and Ivan got the full aromatic benefit of their well-known lack of cleanliness. The raiders looked at him, and when he let go of the hilt of his sword so that it slid with a click back into its scabbard they grinned even wider. The one with the sword grinned widest of all, and uttered a laugh like the barking of a dog. He sniffed loudly then said in clumsy but quite understandable Rus, “
Huu
! Before, the steppes were clean, but now I smell a Russian smell!”

Then all ten leaned forward in their saddles, weapons poised, to see how he would react.

For all he was deadly scared, Ivan’s first thought was doubt that the Tatars could smell anything but their own filthy selves; his second thought was that such a response was what they expected, a good insult so they could kill him. And his third thought was to wonder, after what he’d heard of these ruthless horsemen, why they needed an excuse. If they’d been part of an invading army he would have been dead already, knocked from his saddle by a storm of arrows before he ever saw or smelt them.

So what was happening?

Ivan’s brain was racing faster than it had ever done when playing chess, for this time there was a higher forfeit than simply toppling a king of carven ivory. The arrows and the spears told him as much with tongues of rain-misted steel. He had to say something, make some reply so they wouldn’t simply kill him on the grounds of insult by dumb insolence, yet at the same time a cringing acceptance of what had been said stuck in his throat more than any blade.

Quite probably they would kill him for agreeing with them anyway, for what man of the Golden Horde would ever respect a coward? Ivan could feel the beat of his own racing pulse, so loud and fast it was a wonder the Tatars hadn’t already noticed and done something to still it. Only the soft dripping of raindrops from the furred rim of his hat concealed the beads of icy sweat that had sprung up all along his forehead.

Finally he bowed, not so suddenly as to make the Tatars start something only they would finish, and when he straightened again he grinned as openly and honestly as he could manage. The Tatars glanced at one another, then at their captain-of-ten, as confused as his troop but covering better.

“Greetings to you,
bahadur
,” said Ivan, taking care to give the captain’s rank its proper name and not the Rus one of
bogatyr
. “I salute the Sky-Blue Wolves, whose nostrils must be keen indeed to scent a Rus across so many miles and leagues.” He took a quick, shallow breath. What he said next would determine how long he would live, and he had to be bold rather than craven but not so bold that the Tatars would think him better dead. “If your coats and hats are made from the hides and fleece of Russian sheep, you all must smell as bad as I…”

There was a protracted silence whilst the
bahadur
captain digested this, then translated for his men. Ivan made sure he could reach a weapon. If he had to die, he would make sure the Tatars who survived would regret having met him; but the making sure was only with his eyes, and he took care not to move until there was no other choice. The sudden chorus of barking Tatar laughter was almost too much for his stretched and jangling nerves, and he recognized it a bare instant before ripping the old Northern sword out from under his knee.

“Who are you, brave Rus?” said the captain, and the laughter of his men cut off like a snuffed candle so their leader would not have to shout.

Ivan thought fast, then faster still. Having avoided the risk of death, he now faced the risk of ransom – yet if he lied, he was heading for death once again, this time as a deceitful and untrustworthy person. It always seemed peculiar that the Tatars, who lied and cheated as a form of military art, should place such value on the truth of those they dealt with.

Finally he shrugged. It wasn’t the being killed, but that it might happen because of a lie. Ivan was a Tsar’s son, and though that Tsar’s realm was small when set against some others, yet its honour was something of more value than the purest gold.

“Ivan Aleksandrovich, Prince of Khorlov,” he said, and his bow this time was a haughty nod of the head that would have done credit to the Great Khan himself.

“
Huu
,” grunted the Tatar captain approvingly, and translated. Ivan could see the glint of anticipated gold and silver growing in their narrowed eyes, so the captain’s next words came as no surprise. “Good enough,” he said. “You are now a guest. What else, we decide later.”

His next short phrases were in the Tatar language, and though the men with bows put them back in the cases at their belts, two of the riders with spears kneed their horses forward, turned them around at Burka’s flanks and braced their spears so the hooks were in Ivan’s armpits. Even through the heavy coat, they stung.

“You ride along with us,” the Tatar said and then, with an elaboration that Ivan thought was unnecessary, “or be carried in a way you do not like.”

Ivan looked over each shoulder, at the long spears and at the flat, implacable faces of the men who carried them, shrugged as much as the upward pressure of sharp metal would permit, and did as he was told.