The Last Crusaders: Ivan the Terrible (26 page)

42

A minute later they pulled open a gap between the wagons and the six rode out in file at the gallop. Smith and Stanley, Nicholas and Hodge, Andriushko and Chvedar, as all had sworn. All six were already wounded.

Vorotinsky looked down and saw them ride out, and ordered his men to suspend all fire at the wagons. Concentrate now on the mass of horsemen in the valley.

They cantered straight into the shallows of the nearby river, not even looking back to see if they were pursued. Stenka and his men had them covered with a last few working muskets. A couple of Tatar horsemen thought they might yet achieve something if they followed, but Stenka dropped his arm and the Cossack muskets rang out and one horseman fell in the shallows and the second turned and galloped away.

The river was alternately gravel shallows and deep channels with strong currents, treacherous going, and they slipped from their horses and swam alongside holding onto the pommels. At last, shaking with exhaustion, they hauled themselves out on the far side, soaked and muddied, and crawled back onto their mounts, streaming with water. The horses were reluctant to do more than walk, let alone gallop. They heeled them furiously.

Their one hope lay in Devlet Giray’s attack having been so rapid, so impatient, their rearguard camp would be no more than a cluster of hastily erected tents, perhaps some rough barricades, loose knots of guards. What did the Tatars think they had to fear?

‘At the gallop!’ cried Stanley. ‘In and out like lightning is our way!’

As soon as they came in sight of the sprawling camp, with its slave pens the size of fields, Nicholas picked out a cluster of eight white conical tents, and one taller than the rest, finely embroidered around the doorway. They galloped straight for it. Some Tatar footguards were as much puzzled as anything else by this absurdly small raiding party, and still unaware of the disaster unfolding across the river, though the roar of the muskets from the heights had made them anxious. Now they stepped towards the six riders and cried out a challenge.

They galloped in and cut them down. More guards came running. Smith unslung his jezail.

They slewed to a halt before the most handsome tent and Nicholas slipped from his horse, the others remaining mounted, forming a ring. The tent flap was tied closed with a rope and some complex knotting, as if some treasure lay within. Nicholas wrenched at it in frustration, and shouted out. All around them, clamorous cries giving the alarm.

Inside, a beautiful dark-haired girl sat tied to a stool, blindfolded, but beneath the blindfold her eyes flared open wide at the sound of that voice, her lips parted. A fat woman glared around with tiny porcine eyes and drew a dagger, so small and so sharp it was like something used by a carver in wood.

Nicholas laid hold of the rope and hacked at it with his sword, but his sword was badly blunted from the fighting. Men were running towards them now. Stanley let off a packed arquebus, and then a pistol, and rode forward boldly at the oncoming guards. More yells, jabbering. The thump of a man hitting the ground. Nicholas hacked desperately at the rope but it would not give. And then in a blur so fast he hardly saw it, a tiny knife in a tiny fist shot out between the lashings of the rope and sliced across his arm and he cursed and leapt backwards. The knife in the fist vanished again.

Then Chvedar the renegade priest was at the door of the tent with a brand snatched from a cookfire, and hurling some flagon at the ground. Grain spirit, soaking the tent. He put the brand to the soaked tentskin and it roared up fiercely. Moments later Nicholas could slash the burnt skin to blackened ribbons, and drove on in with sword held flat and straight before him.

Rebecca now stood, blindfolded, hands bound, and at her throat was the tiny little knife, its blade already crimson with Nicholas’s blood. Behind her, almost hidden, stood a plump little Tatar woman. Then the woman, eyes almost lost in her rolls of cheekfat, peeped round from behind Rebecca, and she gave Nicholas an unearthly smile.

He knew at once that she was very dangerous. And she was not holding Rebecca to ransom, not merely threatening to kill her if he stepped any closer. She was just about to kill her anyway.

Everything happened at once. He was running towards them, throwing himself at them … and there was Smith’s shout, and the roar of his jezail deafening in Nicholas’s ear, a shot with barely an inch of safety to it. But the ball caught Babash in her right shoulder and spun her round and away from Rebecca, the knife still in her fist. Rebecca sank to the ground and Nicholas fell on her.

Babash, though a burning hot lead ball had just gone straight through her shoulder and out of her back, was not finished. Something flashed out from her left hand and thumped into Smith behind, and he grunted and went quiet. Then Babash closed her left hand across the wound in her right shoulder, seemingly not weakened, and advanced once more upon Nicholas and Rebecca to cut their throats.

It was Chvedar who saved them. He came running with a knife in his hand and fell into her. They stood there for a moment locked together, for all the world like some couple in a loving embrace, perhaps about to dance. But Chvedar’s knife was deep in Babash’s back, and her little knife had cut deeply across his belly. Then they fell together.

Nicholas tore the blindfold from Rebecca’s eyes, and drove his sword in between her wrists and wrenched, and it was enough to cut her thin bonds. He held her freed hands and rubbed them and they kissed and wept. But the tent was burning, and they had had enough of burning. He crawled over to Chvedar, the woman lying in a mound across him. She was dead. Chvedar still breathed. Nicholas began to roll her off him but Chvedar whispered, ‘No, do not, little brother.’ Blood dribbled from his mouth. The dead woman on his belly was all that was keeping his guts in. And besides, he was going now. He could still see the young English
gallant and his beautiful girl blurrily through the clouds and the smoke. The lucky devil. He smiled.

‘And I, Chvedar,’ he whispered. ‘Dying like this in the arms of a fat Tatar wench. My life was always strange.’ His bloody mouth creased in a faint smile, and he said still more quietly, ‘Receive my wicked soul, O Lord.’ And then he was gone.

Outside, Smith was still slumped, something horrible and gleaming embedded in his neck. Stanley hauled him up, shouting.

‘On your feet, man!’

Even Smith, that great, indestructible Knight Commander of St John, seemed near finished. But Stanley shook him and roared in his face.

‘Then get it out,’ mumbled Smith, ‘get it out.’

Stanley glanced at the wound. It wasn’t a knife, more like some kind of metallic star with evil sharpened points. He shook his head. ‘Later. Leave it in.’

‘It’s not artery?’

‘Of course not, man!’ cried Stanley with a certain pitiless scorn. ‘Just blood. Later. Bind it up. To horse!’

Smith crawled into his saddle, while Stanley turned and loosed another wild pistol shot, a huge dag-pistol loaded with slivers and nails and chips of stone that spattered horribly into the enemy pressing in on them. There were horses screaming, men, the burning tent, savage close-quarter fighting, and then Andriushko was shouting at them ‘Go! Go! Or you will not make it!’ and riding straight at a much larger party of Tatar horseman coming towards them.

Stanley knew this moment. He dragged Smith’s horse by the reins and pulled him away, and lashed out and booted Nicholas’s horse savagely in the rump and he in turn pulled the horse Rebecca now rode. They turned and fled. They could not even look back, but they knew the scene. There would be Andriushko galloping, sword swinging, towards that troop of twenty enraged horsemen. They would break around him, slowing to cut him down, and he would duck and weave and might take one or two with him. And then he too, like Chvedar, would be gone.

And those he had died to save would already have two or three
hundred yards’ advantage on their pursuers, and be making for the river and their own camp.

They came back across the river clinging to their horses. Stenka was ready and gave them covering fire again, and the pursuing party halted on the opposite bank. Some leaned and spat. They had lost. But they could see from the carnage among their own main army that there was far more lost this day.

By way of counter-attack, more Tatar horsemen tried to ride up the shoulder of the hills, the way Ivan Koltzo had taken, so they might attack the Streltsy lines.

No!’ cried Devlet Giray. ‘Do not pursue that way! Pull back, right back now! Save yourselves!’

But again all discipline was lost. The horsemen streamed up the shoulder in their hundreds, and were cut down by the massed ranks of the Streltsy left horn.

More panic ensued when the main body of Yakublev’s Cossack horse, three thousand men fresh for battle, sliced in on the jostling, chaotic Tatar horse from the north and picked off more and more, before wheeling free again across the plain: the Tatars’ own tactics. Then they came in again – and again … Like a huge wheel bound with sharpened scythes.

Still the Streltsy musketeer poured down fire from above, and the Tatars were being attacked on two fronts, still pressed back against the muddy river’s edge, hardly able to move. The carnage all along that bankside was terrible, the earth itself a sodden brown mash of mud and blood.

At last, all order gone, the Tatar horsemen by some strange uniformity of will simply stopped fighting and fled. Many did not even make it back across the river to their own camp, but simply broke and rode east. Horror-stricken, heartbroken, disbelieving the disaster of this day, longing only for home and for peace. Already the burning of Moscow seemed to many of them a hollow and bitter kind of victory, without honour and without glory.

Devlet Giray himself still wanted to press back over the river, and slaughter all the Russian slaves in their pens. But it was impossible now. Even for him, still with so many men under his command. The Cossacks of Yakublev pressed hard upon them. All spirit was gone. At last he too, with a roar of anger, spurred his horse and rode east.

The vast pens across the river were left silent and unguarded, the enslaved themselves staring out across the plains, blinking the dust from their eyes, hardly believing. Still enslaved in their minds, but free men.

43

They re-sited the camp on the heights in case of counter-attack – and well above the vast heaps of the slain. The Streltsy stayed with them, the horsemen of Yakublev. There was exhaustion and quiet conversation among the tents, and slow, weary, victorious smiles.

The evil star embedded in Smith’s neck made a horrible sucking sound as Stanley pulled it free and then bound the streaming wound tight.

Smith closed his eyes. ‘I’m getting too old for this.’

Stenka passed a flask. He alone seemed unwearied, eyes sparkling with delight. Nothing tasted as sweet as victory, nothing. And what a victory.

‘And it was Petlin’s treachery,’ he said, ‘which made it possible, which brought the Tatars back to us, swearing vengeance on you Inglisz. What a tale. And then got themselves caught up in the one thing they hate: set battle.’

‘Petlin’s treachery,’ said Ivan Koltzo, ‘and my own great heroism.’

Stenka laughed and thumped him, and they drank. Then they drank more solemnly to their dead comrades, the hulking Andriushko, and Chvedar the renegade priest.

‘I tell you truly,’ said Stanley, ‘not one of our own high-born, oath-sworn Knights of St John ever died more nobly than these.’

Stenka smiled with tears in his eyes.

Besides them, he had lost another hundred men at the wagon circle, out of all his three hundred. It was a desperate trick, though it had worked. And all Cossacks longed to die in battle. It was the way. Not one of the Streltsy had died. Not one. And Yakublev had lost perhaps another hundred men. As for the Tatars, on the other hand – of Devlet Giray’s army, perhaps five thousand lay dead, another ten thousand wounded.

‘Ten thousand dead,’ said Stenka.

Smith said, ‘Maybe. Their losses were terrible.’

‘They will not return to attack Russia,’ said Stenka.

‘Not any time soon, no.’

‘Then it worked.’

‘Indeed it did. God was with us. He must have been. It was the craziest plan I ever heard.’

There was abandoned loot at the Tatar camp, wagonloads of it, quickly requisitioned and divided by Yakublev and Stenka. The slaves were guarded overnight, to be brought across the river tomorrow by rafts. Many thousands of them. The greatest challenge might yet be keeping them fed and watered on the long walk back to Moscow. Had their mad dash to find Rebecca all been a waste anyway, had Chvedar and Andriushko died for nothing? Would they have found her at the camp eventually, safe and sound?

Stanley said, ‘We did not know that. And even now, I do not think so. I think that obese woman who was guarding her was itching to kill her anyway. I think it was timely we went when we did. It was some deep prompting.’

‘Why did she want to kill her?’ said Nicholas.

Stanley sighed. Smith put in, ‘Women. Don’t ask me to explain. I understand the ways of whales better than I do women.’

‘And we did not even find Mistress Southam,’ said Nicholas.

Rebecca herself came quietly and sat with them. Nicholas was amazed at her composure. Would she not have nightmares?

‘No,’ said Stanley. ‘We did not find Mistress Southam. We only half succeeded. God have mercy upon her.’

Rebecca was looking at them, a small frown upon her forehead. And then she held her hand to her mouth to hide her smile.

‘I’m not sure it becomes you to smile at the fate of poor Ann Southam,’ said Nicholas, sounding rather pompous even to himself as he did so.

‘The fate of poor Ann Southam,’ said Rebecca, and then sighed exaggeratedly. They were all looking at her now. Even Stanley could not help thinking she was damnably pretty. There in the firelight opposite him, in first bloom, her skin lustrous in the firelight, hair long and shining dark, her big dark eyes … Good God. Remember your vows, man. And you are old enough to be her father, very comfortably.

She said, ‘It is tragic. Most tragical and melancholy.’ Like an actress.

They were missing something. Nicholas said, ‘What do you mean?’

Stanley said, ‘Are you hinting …?’

She smiled, girlish, impish. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it may seem very tragic for poor Mistress Ann Southam, who was after all widowed barely a week or two since. But though I am sure her heart is ­broken with grief, from shallow appearances at least, she hid her grief very bravely.’

‘In what way?’

‘Why, as she lounged comfortably in the tent of the Khan Zamurz, one of the greatest khans under Devlet Giray. The one who fought us at the walls of the Kremlin, you remember.’

They remembered.

‘Well,’ said Rebecca. ‘It seems Mistress Ann Southam pleased him very much. They like their womenfolk fair-haired, of course, and though she is older than some, they liked her full figure too. I imagine in only a few more weeks’ journeying, she will be reclining again quite comfortably on soft cushions, dressed in Chinese silks, eating sweetmeats and drinking sherbet, waited upon by no fewer than six maidservants.’

‘Good God,’ said Smith.

‘And at evening,’ said Nicholas, ‘I suppose she and this Zamurz Khan have friendly and agreeable conversation until late into the night?’

She flushed. ‘Quite so.’

‘Well,’ said Stanley, and he raised his cup. ‘To the happy future together of Zamurz Khan and his good lady wife, Mistress Ann. A triumph of Anglo-Tatar relations.’

Smith growled an uncouthness.

They came back to Moscow and camped some safe few miles outside and sent communication to Ivan. He was delighted with his own glorious victory over the Tatars. The bells of the city rang out – what bells still survived.

Moscow was already being rebuilt. Nicholas and Hodge crept in one evening, anonymous, and saw great activity, and knew that this grim place would rise again swiftly, perhaps more strongly, for all its troubles.

And they heard some extraordinary news, racing back to tell the knights.

‘He has disbanded the Oprichnina!’

Smith stared. ‘He has?’

‘He was disgusted with the way they took no part in the victory over the Tatars.’

‘But he didn’t allow them to!’

Nicholas shrugged. ‘Even so. Many have been executed – in the usual ways, publicly. And among them, Maliuta Skuratov himself.’

They digested this. Then Stanley said, ‘Sup with the Devil, you should use a long spoon,’ and they grieved no more over the fate of the Oprichnina.

‘You are not returning to Moscow to bid formal farewell to His Excellency the Czar?’ asked Prince Michael Vorotinsky.

‘We are not,’ said Stanley. Vorotinsky eyed him shrewdly. Stanley considered and then said, ‘Perhaps you would bid farewell to His Excellency on our behalf ? Bid long life to Czar Ivan, Beloved Father of his People, Great Leader in Battle, Hero of Rus, who watches over them as tenderly as a mother hen over her chicks.’

Smith said, ‘You don’t think he’ll smell a rat?’

Vorotinsky said, ‘All rulers love praise.’

Nicholas added, ‘Say too that the services of his most excellent physician, Dr Elysius Bomelius, were much appreciated by his English guests in their hour of intestine distress. A remarkable healer of men. We trust that the good doctor is in perfect health himself, and did not meet with any unpleasant mishap in the Great Fire of Moscow.’

They were enjoying themselves now.

Stanley said, ‘And we have no doubt that to posterity, Ivan will be known by a great name, like that of our own great Anglo-Saxon king of England, Alfred. All ages after will know him as – Ivan the Great!’

‘Or perhaps even,’ said Nicholas, ‘given his intense piety and gentle sanctity, like that of St Francis of Assisi himself … Saint Ivan the Gentle.’

Vorotinsky said, ‘This is your English humour, is it not? When you say one thing and mean another?’

Stanley smiled. ‘Prince Michael Vorotinsky, do you doubt our sincerity?’

Vorotinsky smiled a rare, wintry smile. Then he held out his hand and they shook hard, with deep respect and affection.

‘God bless Russia,’ they said.

‘Pray He does,’ said Prince Michael. ‘Russia needs it.’

And he was gone.

It was time to bid farewell to the Cossacks too. Stenka and Yakublev and Ivan Koltzo and the others wept freely and embraced them and called them brothers and swore them to return one day.

And it was with deep feeling that the four bid farewell likewise. Though this war in Russia had hardly seemed a crusade, yet Nicholas knew he would never forget or regret his time among the wild brethren of the Dnieper and the Don. Of all the men he had ever known, they seemed the most lawless and alive and free, riding the vast and windy steppes without fences or owners, without kings or governments, a brotherhood to be envied by any man burdened and settled.

Stenka wiped his eyes at last and sniffed and spat and put his hands on his hips and regained his pride.

‘How do you like this?’ he said. ‘Ivan has sent word to us Cossacks, giving heartfelt thanks, and offering us five hundred Streltsy to join us in an army of exploration.’

‘Exploration?’ Smith grunted. ‘All the world’s at it these days.’

‘Where?’ said Stanley.

Stenka waved his arm with the grandest of gestures. ‘Eastwards. The wild frontier. The land of Sibir, the Land that Lies Asleep.’

‘You will go?’

Stenka sighed. ‘Though we love the steppes and this is our homeland, yet we are promised many rewards. There is a whole new world to the east – the size of a hundred Russias! It makes my head spin. But what an adventure! Broad-faced Finnish hunters, grease-coated Lapps, Karelians, Chuvash, Mordvinians, the White Sheep Turkomans who hold the strategic corridor of Azerbaijan, and in the broad valley of Perm the Bashkirs herding their fat-tailed sheep; and beyond that, forest people who dwell in trees and worship the reindeer as their ancestors …’

Stanley smiled. ‘You paint quite a picture, Stenka.’

‘Well.’ Stenka returned to the here and now. ‘We will consider this expedition over good brandy. And now, here, see – I give you gifts, from the wagons we captured.’

And Stenka brought forth the most expensive cloaks they had ever seen: four immaculate, gleaming and glossy fur cloaks of black sable.

They gasped. Then the knights shook their heads.

Stenka looked angered. It was a deep offence to refuse a gift.

‘Understand, we are monks sworn to poverty,’ explained Stanley gently. ‘Our obedience to God must be higher than our obedience even to you, Brother Stenka.’

Stenka stared, then suddenly the stormclouds passed and he grinned, and prodded Smith.

‘You mean you do not even own that fabled rifled musket of yours?’

‘Though it pains me to say so,’ said Smith, ‘no, I do not. It belongs to my Order, not me.’

‘Tch. I do not understand how any man could not wish for possessions. Stenka wishes for every pot of gold, every fine jewelled sword, and every woman in the world! Hah! But be that way, holy knights. You two younger brothers, you will have your cloaks at least.’

Still Nicholas and Hodge hesitated. Such a gift.

‘Especially when,’ said Stenka, ‘you see their origin!’ And he turned them inside out with a flourish. Inside, upon the soft skin, was branded the Russian Imperial Eagle. Stenka saw their expressions and doubled up, nearly choking with laughter. ‘Aye, what a joker God is, after all! These were stolen from the Czar’s own treasury somehow by the Tatars, then stolen back off the Tatars by us – and shall we take them back to the Czar? Shit on his mother’s grave, shall we! Here, little English brothers. Take and wear these in happy remembrance of your good friend Czar Ivan IV of Russia!’

They could not resist. It was too good a joke.