Prince Ivan (20 page)

Which was ridiculous.

He was half inclined to retrace his steps, right up to the windblown ramparts, then go back into the kremlin by one of the entrances he knew. Only the thought of the distance already walked turned him against the idea. There were several doors along the right-hand wall ahead of him, and unless he’d lost all sense of direction, Ivan knew one of them would open onto either the rearmost part of the kremlin palace…

Or onto the whispering expanse of birch to the north.

And it couldn’t do that. He knew perfectly well there was no stone-walled corridor from the kremlin to the woods, or he would have seen it on the many occasions he’d strolled around the ramparts to enjoy the view. Ignoring the dreary sound of water dripping from a cistern in the wall into a wooden bucket beneath, he twisted the iron ring of the nearest door-handle.

It was locked.

Ivan swore and flapped his hand in the air, because the ring hadn’t turned but his wrist had, and it hurt. He glared at the door, then at its lock, crusted with months – no, more like years – of dirt and rust, and a feeling of unease crept over him.

Mar’ya Morevna hadn’t yet guided him all through her kremlin, and the more he thought about that, and about the way she had instructed him in the use and non-use of her keys, the more Ivan began to suspect that opening locked doors wasn’t something he was meant to do. Of course if the door turned out
not
to be locked, that was another matter, but to find one meant trying all the handles he could see…

His first inclination was to return to the ramparts by the way he had come. It would be a long walk back along the torch-lit passageway, but it was becoming all too apparent that this place was only warm when compared to outside, because the corridor’s wooden panelling had long ago given way to damp, raw stone. Like any sensible person Ivan merely tolerated cold. He preferred warmth and comfort, and one way or another he intended to find it as soon as he could.

The next door was locked, and the one after that. Another shiver racked through him and his teeth began to chatter. He didn’t care where he was any more. What he wanted was to be out of it and sitting in front of a well-stoked fire, waiting for his dear wife to return from her war.

Getting his wish would involve that long walk, for the last door was locked more thoroughly than the rest put together, with a mesh of chains and bars and padlocks criss-crossing its surface. Ivan looked at it with loathing, wondering why he had even tried its handle. He kicked it hard enough to relieve his feelings but not enough to put his toes at risk, then turned away.

But he stopped an instant later, frozen in his tracks by a tiny sound in the empty corridor, right behind his back where none should be. Ivan turned around with his heart hammering up inside his throat as it had done when the Tatars had taken him prisoner. Nothing was there; even the dripping water had stopped.

Ivan stared, his eyes narrowed. He
had
heard something, and it wasn’t a drip landing in the overflowing bucket. Anyway, the bucket had been in front of him and in plain sight when he heard… Whatever it was. He no longer wanted a chair by the fire, but several guards, or a sword, or even a knife, but had nothing—

Except a bunch of keys almost as heavy as the mace on his saddle.

Ivan fumbled with the key-ring and its chain, unhooked them at long last, and hefted the comforting weight in his right hand. Keys and chain rang together with a soft metallic clangour as ominous as any weapon. It was a more encouraging noise than the one which had caught him unawares, not least because he could see its source. Not so with the other sound he could hear again, and this time identify.

It was someone sobbing…

The hackles went up on the back of Ivan’s neck, and a flurry of conflicting images went flooding through his mind as he wondered about Mar’ya Morevna’s father, who had trained his daughter as a skilled and deadly commander of armies. He thought about that daughter, now his wife, a lady so gentle, so loving, and yet so ruthless with her enemies. He thought of thousands of Tatar corpses strewn like mown grass across the steppe, and the firm, decisive sound of Mar’ya Morevna’s own voice asking him a question he couldn’t answer:

How
else
does
one
deal
with
such
people
…?

And he thought of someone weeping behind a locked door.

Tsarevich Ivan stared at the chains and padlocks for a long minute while honour and conscience, sympathy, horror and morbid curiosity all fought for precedence. He hadn’t promised not to open locked doors and, even if he had, some promises were more honourably breached than observed. But Mar’ya Morevna might not see it that way. The alternative was to disregard a sound he would never have ignored at any other time or place. Ivan closed his eyes and muttered viciously for several seconds, using all the filthy language he knew in the hope it would make him feel better. It didn’t, and at last he looked for the keys.

They were easily found, almost as if his fingers moved more nimbly once his mind was made up, and just as easily turned. Ivan discovered that the rusty iron padlocks opened far more readily than he had expected, flinging back their hasps at the merest touch. Very soon only the lock of the door itself remained. That was when he hesitated. The other locks, the bars and the chains now strewn across the paving could be replaced and no one the wiser, but opening this lock and then the door was a last step he couldn’t deny having taken.

Despite the thickness of the oaken timbers Ivan heard a tiny, feeble moan, and there were no more second thoughts. He turned the key – its wards lifted the lock’s tumblers with slick, oily ease – and when he pulled the handle there was only an instant’s resistance before the door groaned open. A breath of chill air rolled out of the room beyond. Ivan grabbed one of the torches from the wall and looked inside. At first there was only darkness, the long black sweep of his own shadow, and the dance of light and shade cast by the guttering torch-flame. Then something turned over in the pit of his stomach, and there was a buzzing like a swarm of bees inside his head that drove out every other thought but shock and pity.

Because a prisoner was chained to the wall.

*

He was little, and shrivelled by privation. His nose was like a blade, his eyes were sunk in his head, there wasn’t flesh enough on his bones to feed a louse, and he was very, very old. His hair was white, and hung down past his shoulders; his moustache was white, and hung down past his chin; his beard was white, and hung down past his knees almost to the floor, for he was fettered upright, shackled to a beam and the wall of his cell with twelve iron chains. Two were at each wrist, and two were at each ankle; two were at his waist and two were at his neck; and they all ran to a hook in the beam and through a padlock bigger than his head.

Ivan stared while the buzzing in his head grew louder, not wanting to believe the evidence of his own eyes. That Mar’ya Morevna was more than she seemed was something he accepted willingly, and that she was a Tsarevna who ruled her own realm and fought her own wars was something he’d grown used to. But learning she had a secret like this, whether it was hers or her sorcerer father’s, was more than Ivan could bear. Any claim that she knew nothing, that her father had locked doors before he died and she had just kept them that way, was no more than a weak excuse easily disproved. If this door had remained shut since her father’s time, the prisoner inside would have died from thirst or starvation long ago. Someone knew he was here, and that someone had kept him alive.

It wasn’t a discovery to encourage any husband, and especially the husband of such a wife.

Then the old man raised his drooping head and opened his eyes, blinking as they began to water in the torch-light. He looked towards the doorway, even though Ivan felt sure that just now he could see no more than a great brightness invading his dark cell. “Pity me,” said the old man into his bright darkness, in a voice weak and quavering. “Give me a drink, for I have been given none these ten years and I am parched!”

Ivan cringed to think the old man’s jailers were so cruel that he needed such desperate exaggeration to arouse pity. More and more he was determined there would be words between Mar’ya Morevna and himself when she came home, and the bee-buzzing in his head took on the sharper sound of rage. He looked around, and his eye fell on the brimming bucket. Wine would be better to restore the old man’s spirits, but the water was closer and at least it was cold and clean, the better to quench thirst. There was only one problem: there no drinking-vessel other than the bucket either in the cell or out of it. Need prevailed over nicety and after tipping some out so it wouldn’t spill too much, he hefted the bucket and held it to the prisoner’s mouth—

Who drank its contents down in a single draught.

Ivan stared for a moment, his head so filled with buzzing that he felt no more than a brief, dull surprise that the old man should have been so thirsty. Then he set the bucket aside, but the ancient prisoner looked at it as he might on the life-giving cross and said, “One is not enough to quench a thirst like mine. Good sir, of your charity, give me another.”

There was no harm in it. Ivan took the bucket, filled it full, and brought it back to where the old man hung helpless in his chains. Again it was drunk to the dregs, this time not in one gulp, but more slowly as the first fierce edge of that cruel thirst abated.

“One more, and one only,” the old man said, “and I will be restored.”

Ivan could see that although there was water in his beard he looked better already, and was pleased that so small an act of kindness could do so much good. Bringing the bucket for a third time, he took care to hold it with more care, and watched contentedly as the old prisoner savoured every drop.

“Ah,” he said, sighing deeply, “Now I am myself again. Many thanks to you, Prince Ivan.”

The bucket dropped with a crash from Ivan’s hand at the sound of his name, and his mouth shaped questions that were never voiced, for at that self-same same instant the buzzing vanished from his mind, his memory gave him the answers – and he realized just what he had done.

“‘
Who
am
I
when
I
am
myself
,
and
how
do
I
know
your
name
?’” said the old man, uttering Ivan’s own unspoken questions in a voice no longer frail and tremulous, but harsh and bleak as winter. “I know because of who I am – and who I am is Koshchey the Undying!”

He stood up straight, as though the twelve chains no longer weighed him down, and a moment later he drew a deep breath and burst the forged and welded links of his fetters so they fell away like rotten rope. While the harsh clangour of iron chains falling to the stone floor died away he combed his fingers through his beard and smiled a smile that never reached his old, cold eyes.

Ivan met that smile with a stare of horror – then plunged out through the door, slammed it shut and shot every lock and bolt he could reach then leaned back against the wall, panting as if he had just run a race. His breath caught in his chest when the passage filled with the smoke and smell of burning timber, and with the blacksmith stench of heated metal. The bars and bolts glowed red, then pink, then white, then ran like wax; the lock’s inner workings oozed in searing streams out of the keyhole, leaving tracks of scorch all down its wood; then the hinges melted from their sockets and the useless door fell down.

Koshchey walked out as if the fallen door was a bridge between his cell and the wide white world outside, and beneath his tread the heavy oak turned black then crumbled into dust and ashes.

“Again I give you thanks, Prince Ivan,” said Koshchey
Bessmertny
, though he glowered beneath his brows, “and your kindness brings you safety. Three times you gave me water when I was a prisoner, so three times I will forgive a wrong. You tried to lock me in my cell again, and that was one. Guard the second and the third, for they guard your life. If you are wise, you will not see me again.” Koshchey laughed like the grinding of ice on a frozen river. “Nor will you see Mar’ya Morevna. She owes me thrice three years of liberty for each one her father stole from me, and you will not live so long. Farewell.”

The old man turned from Ivan and began to walk away along the corridor that led to Mar’ya Morevna’s kremlin palace. Despite the threats Ivan knew he couldn’t stand helpless while such a necromancer escaped into the world, to steal away his wife and do the good God knew what other harm. If he had only thought to wear a sword…

But there were other things.

Ignored by Koshchey as beneath his notice, Ivan stepped lightly, back into the cell and when he came out again the wooden bucket hung from his right hand. He swung it once, twice, and three times as he ran towards Koshchey the Undying, and on the third he brought it down with all his strength across the necromancer’s skull. The bucket flew to shards and staves, and Koshchey was hurled to the floor, slack-limbed and sprawling like a dead man.

Then he rolled over, rose, and seized Ivan by the shirt.

“That was two,” he said, and lifted Ivan until the prince’s boots were inches off the ground. “Understand my name, young fool. It took many years and many lives for me to become what I have become. I cannot be slain, not by such as you, nor by any man. Remember that, but forget Mar’ya Morevna. I need but hold her in my kremlin until the dark of the moon, and she will be mine until I decide to let her go. By then, Prince Ivan, you will be long dead. Find yourself another wife, make yourself another life, because you will sooner see your ears without a mirror than set eyes on Mar’ya Morevna again!”