This time there were no objections, either voiced or silent, from Metropolitan Archbishop Leo Popovich Volkhov. He agreed to the wedding at once, and his voice had the tone of a man growing used to all manner of strangeness, if repeated enough. He merely looked long and hard at the Tsar, and stroked his beard, and finally said: “Once is strange, twice is coincidence, but three times is becoming a habit – so Majesty, why should I differ from you?”
When once they were married, Tsarevna Yelena drove away across the snow with her husband the Raven, very splendid and fine in a troika sleigh that was all glossy black except for the small silver bells on the harness of its three black horses, and no more was said about it. At least, to them.
*
But a great deal was said to Ivan, for the very next day his last sister did indeed leave Ivan subject to marriage pressures. The very next day High Steward Strel’tsin arrived with a list of young ladies suitable for Tsar’s sons to marry. Ivan was more even-tempered than his eldest sister, but as he read the list of names, he came to understand more and more why Katya had flung paper in the High Steward’s face.
That winter proved to be one of the longest in his memory. It was filled not only with snow but with a seemingly endless succession of young women, blonde-haired and red-haired and mousey and black, all keen to be married and all with the same thing in common. When they looked at him they saw not a man, a husband and a lover, but a Tsar’s son, a title and a crown.
Anastasya Fedorovna Solov’ev was the worst of them. It was evident that her family reckoned femininity by weight, or height, or volume, because she qualified on all three counts. Ivan had long ago admitted to himself that he would never be particularly tall. In fact, he had grown to a comfortably average height of about two-and-a-half arshiniy, or a little less than six feet by the Western measure. To encounter a hopeful would-be bride who towered over him by that little less and a little more besides, and whose delight in the pleasures of the table matched his height with her circumference, was something of an experience.
Certainly it was a challenge; despite his personal opinions, Ivan Aleksandrovich was still a Tsar’s son and a gentleman. Extricating himself from Countess Anastasya’s optimistically enthusiastic embraces had been as much an exercise in diplomacy as escapology, for despite her size, her weight and the fact that she seemed to have more than the usual number of hands, her father was one of his father’s more important nobles. Hurting the lady’s feelings would have been worse than tactless and rude; it would have been downright impolitic.
That was the week when Ivan discovered a hitherto unknown talent: the writing of fiction. His letters to Anastasya, sent by hand from the kremlin to the Solov’ev town mansion, passed from originality through inventiveness to a soaring understated exaggeration.
Her father put an end to the one-sided romance when one of the letters was handed to him by mistake, because Count Fedor Solov’ev was a man with a better sense of humour than Ivan had credited. He saw not only that the Tsar’s son was growing increasingly harried by Anastasya’s attentions, but that she was using him just to pass the dull winter days. That a man’s daughter should risk offending the Tsar’s son and hence the Tsar to relieve her boredom, wasn’t something the Count wished to tolerate. Not when the potential for repercussions was increasing with the shrillness of Ivan’s letters.
There was a certain amount of well-feigned regret on both sides when Count Fedor decided it was time he and his family went visiting their estates near the city of Suzdal, but not so much that mock sincerity might have been mistaken for the real thing. Tsarevich Ivan, a gentleman to the last, waved the Solov’ev troyki out of sight from the ramparts of the kremlin.
Then went and got happily drunk.
*
Finally, the winter was over, the snow was gone, and so, for a blessed respite, were the swarms of high-born maidens with hungry eyes. That was when he was summoned once more to the Tsar’s Chamber of Audience, to give an account of himself.
“We had this discussion last year, Vanya,” said Tsar Aleksandr. “Indeed, more than a year ago, because I remember the snow was still deep when I first brought the subject before you. So, son of mine: your sisters are married. What about you, and the succession, and the security of the Tsardom?”
“I thought it was secure again, Father. You said so yourself.”
“Temporarily, because of the bride-gifts your brothers-in-law left in the treasury. That gave Yuriy of Kiev and the others some pause for thought, but in all this time they’ve seen none of the armies that so rich an ally might have… And no sign of a wife for you, much less a grandson for me.”
“There was once a time when I thought you were putting a good deal of pressure on me,” said Ivan, smiling a bit wearily at his father. “I was wrong, wasn’t I?”
“You were, my son. Because now that the pressure isn’t divided four ways, you have it all to yourself.”
“Being the focus of attention isn’t as entertaining as it might be.”
“Perceptive of you to notice, Vanya. Now, answer the question. What are you going to do?”
Ivan thought desperately for an excuse that wouldn’t sound like one. “I thought,” he said, “that before I settle down I should travel. Go to visit Katya and Liza and Lena. Find out for myself what married life is like for people of my own age.”
Tsar Aleksandr Andreyevich nodded his head in agreement, trying not to laugh as he heard something he’d been expecting ever since the business with Anastasya Fedorovna. “That would be wise,” he said. “Many times I’ve seen you staring towards the horizon, when you think nobody is watching.” The Tsar smiled. “Even when you pour wine, my son, your face shows how you think of the lands the wine came from, and why if a simple barrel can journey across the face of Moist-Mother-Earth, a Tsar’s son can’t do the same. Go visit them: see how happy they are. And then,” the Tsar leaned forward in his throne, “come back and start behaving like an adult and the heir to my throne. Do you understand me, Ivan?”
“Clearly, Father. Quite clearly. However…” He hesitated, unsure how his next suggestion would be received.
“Come on, boy, speak. I won’t bite you,” Tsar Aleksandr grinned, and laughed the sort of laugh that turned the humour in it sour, “unless I don’t like what you say.”
“I want to travel alone.”
“What? You can’t do that! You’ll need a guard of honour, Ivan, and a druzhinya retinue! Don’t forget you’re my son and a Prince!”
“So you keep reminding me, Father. But I’m also supposed to act like an adult. Just this once, let me act like a bogatyr hero from the old tales and make my own way through the wide white world.”
“It doesn’t seem right,” muttered the Tsar, half to himself. “You shouldn’t be riding a solitary horse as if it was all you owned.”
The argument swayed this way and that for many minutes, but secretly Ivan was smiling. He knew from long experience that when his father reached the stage of grumbling in his beard, then willing or not he would grant whatever foolish request his children had troubled him with, and not grudge it to them till the next time.
Assuming there was ever a next time at all…
CHAPTER FOUR
How Prince Ivan went journeying across Moist-Mother-Earth, and how he learned something to his advantage
A journey like the one planned by Tsarevich Ivan wasn’t something begun lightly, carelessly or without thought. It required many preparations, and the first was when he brought the best of his horses, grey Burka, to a smith, so that its hooves could be trimmed and all the animal’s shoes replaced both for the horse’s comfort and his own. Ivan didn’t need to have experienced it to know that being far out on the empty desolation of the steppes, with a horse that has thrown a shoe, was one of the best places in all the Russias not to be.
Then he brought his bow to be re-strung and his arrows to be re-fletched and given new points, took several spare bowstrings and a lump of fresh beeswax from the kremlin armouries
, and while there had both of his swords newly sharpened. The heavy, straight shpaga went on one side of his saddle, under his knee; but the sabre he hung on his belt, to balance his bow-case and quiver.
Ivan took no armour, but his mother the Tsaritsa Ludmyla prevailed upon him to sling a long, teardrop-shaped shield across his back. When all was done, he put fresh clothing and several clean shirts into one of his saddle-sacks. Dried meat and smoked sausage, black bread and cheese, leather bottles of water, kvas and ale all went into the other, and then he was ready to take his leave.
High Steward Strel’tsin, excessively pleased with himself ever since Prince Fenist’s first appearance, gave him several letters of introduction to the abbots of monasteries that he might pass along his way. That familiarity with the route made Ivan look at Strel’tsin very hard; but the old man merely smiled, and said nothing. His mother wept over him, for it was the first time all her children had gone from Khorlov; but his father the Tsar gave him silver for his belt and then hugged him hard before he rode out on his first adventure.
Ivan had no map of where his sisters lived with their husbands, nor had anyone told him of which way to ride, but he knew it all the same. There were spells for that, small charms whose price was no more than a nagging headache between the brows and a weariness which occasionally kept him sleeping late of a morning. It was a strange sensation, as if there was an invisible guide riding on his shoulder, steering him this way and that. He heard no words, not even the small voice of thought or of conscience that everyone hears at the back of their mind sooner or later. Instead, he had no more than a sense of this road being right, or that track being wrong. It was a sense that served him well as he rode out across the face of Moist-Mother-Earth, keeping him from swamps or from brambles, leading him to the easier route up a hill or through a stand of trees.
There were few enough of those as he rode onward, for within a matter of days he left the birch forest and the hills of Khorlov far behind, and came to the wide white world. Prince Ivan Aleksandrovich stood by his horse’s side on the last hill before the Great Steppe began, the only place for miles or leagues all around him much higher than the rest, and looked out across the land to the east. It was a featureless plain of grass that rippled and whispered in the breeze, stretching out on all sides to the uttermost edge of the world. Ivan had good eyes, if not quite so sharp as the eyes of Prince Fenist the Falcon, but they saw nothing in every direction because there was nothing to see.
The steppe was empty of trees, empty of animals, empty of houses, empty even of a horizon to ride towards. Though the sky arched overhead clear and blue, there was no sharp-edged junction of earth and sky where it swept down to join with the world, only a soft blur where one haze dissolved into the other. Ivan patted Burka’s neck and swung into his saddle, then rode down from the hill and away east into the endless, eternal steppe.
*
Ivan rode one day, and two days, and three, and soon learned that appearances were not what they seemed. The steppe was less desolate than his first glance suggested, though its inhabitants were mostly not those whose conversation would relieve boredom. The occasional scuffling in the grass was more often followed by the brief sight of a hare sprinting for cover, or a quick flutter of apprehensive wings, than by the sound of a voice upraised in greeting.
There were a few of those, hunters for the most part, lean rangy men who watched Ivan – and his two swords and his bow and his shield – with the wariness of the wild animals they hunted until convinced that he meant them no harm. He shared more than one meal with a steppe hunter, if sharing was the proper word when the man he shared it with took pains to keep the fire between them.
As the days passed, even those contacts grew farther and farther apart. Ivan saw more wolves than ever before in his life, and was grateful he was making his journey during a time of the year when they had more than passing Princes to eat. He wondered when he would see the monasteries that Strel’tsin had mentioned, or perhaps a village owing allegiance to one or another of his brothers-in-law, yet for day upon day saw nothing but steppe. At least there were no brigands to worry about. Brigands, he decided, wouldn’t be so foolish as to come out here. There was little profit in robbing wolves and rabbits, and from the look of them not much more in robbing the hunters. He began to grow suspicious of the few birds flapping lazily across the sky, wondering which of them might be looking down at him and laughing; then even the wolves and the birds went away.
*
Ivan rode for some days more without even a wolf to look at, until at noon on one of those long, depressing, monotonous days, he saw something in the distance that wasn’t just haze. He reined in and stood up in his stirrups, the better to look at what it might be. There, far away yet not as far as it might be, stood a kremlin palace, built of grey stone, roofed with blue tiles and set square in the midst of the steppe.
Tsarevich Ivan set heels to his horse and rode closer, watching narrowly all the while. There was no town surrounding the kremlin, nor any roads leading into it or out again. It just sat there, huge and handsome, as if it had dropped from the sky overnight – and Ivan, already suspecting who owned it, wondered smiling to himself if he was meant to ride in at the gate or drop through the roof and the ceiling. How he was meant to do that with Burka beneath him, he hadn’t a notion.
To his relief there was a gate in the wall of the kremlin, its wood painted blue as the sky and its nails of polished silver, and standing alongside the gateway was a tall birch-tree. The kremlin and its palace was the first building Ivan had seen since leaving Khorlov, and the birch-tree was the first growing thing that stood taller than the grass, so he paused to rest his eyes on them both. That was when he saw he was being watched from a branch at the top of the tree, where a bright Falcon perched and gazed down with sharp eyes.
Prince Ivan laughed as he saluted the bird, because he was glad to have reached the right place. There was a look about this Falcon, a brightness of the eye and a brilliance of the plumage, that told him plainly it was more than just another of the hawks he’d seen quartering the grassland in search of some unsuspecting mouse. The Falcon took wing, and when it had flown down, it struck three times on the ground before him and became a fine young man. “Health to you, brother-in-law Ivan,” said Prince Fenist Sokolov. “How does God favour you?”
“Well enough,” said Ivan, dismounting. “But the rest of the world wants me married.”
Fenist laughed, and clapped him on the shoulders, and when servants had come to take care of Ivan’s horse, they went together into the kremlin and up to the palace. Yekaterina was there, waiting as though expecting company. She ran down the great stairs and threw her arms around Ivan to welcome him, then immediately began asking about his life, and his health, and her sisters, and their parents.
Married life agrees with her, thought Ivan. There had been no mention of lakes or cold water in an entire conversation, and that was something of note; of course, the conversation had been rather one-sided since Katya had asked question after question without once giving him the opportunity to answer any of them. At length Fenist the Falcon extracted him from Katya’s grasp and showed him to the rooms in the tower that had been made ready for his visit.
After that, and rather pointedly, Fenist took him to where the bathhouse was. Ivan wasn’t surprised. After long, weary days in the saddle, his clothes were so dusty and muddy and sweaty that they could have walked back to Khorlov all by themselves, and despite his attempts at washing himself in rivers so cold they made the teeth ache in his head, the body inside the garments wasn’t much better. The thought of hot water and steam was a pleasant one, and so was soap and razors, because besides feeling dirtier than any Tsar’s son should do, his beard was making him itch.
*
“Dry heat first, to start a good sweat,” said Fenist a few minutes later, waving a wooden water-dipper. “Then thin steam, very hot.” He was sitting with Ivan in the steam-bath, no longer two Princes but just
two young men wrapped in towels on either side of an iron basket of red-hot stones, flicking each other with water and amiably discussing the strength of the steam.
“Not too hot,” said Ivan, scrubbing the back of his hand across a jaw lined with pale blond bristles, “and make the steam thick. These whiskers need softened before I put a razor anywhere near them.” He laughed. “None of the bogatyri in the tales ever have this trouble. They always get from one place to the other in fine robes and bright armour, and never a hair out of place.”
“When you’re a bogatyr you pay your chroniclers well enough that they don’t mention the dirt or discomfort,” said Fenist the Falcon, carefully pouring water onto the stones until the air in the bathhouse was transformed into thick fog.
Ivan sighed with pleasure and lay back on the slatted bench, feeling the heat soak into his bones and begin to draw drain the ache out of his tired muscles. For the next half hour, he decided, he would forget about the needs of the Tsardom and the requirements of the succession, about Strel’tsin and his lists, and about all the eager young women who wanted to be the Tsar’s wife once his father died. It was unfortunate that he failed to warn Fenist the Falcon of his decision, for the Prince of the High Mountains had been asked for advice, and he was going to give it.
“Have you ever asked yourself the same question that you asked your sister?”
Ivan opened one eye, saw nothing but a wall of white steam, and closed it again. “What question was that?” he mumbled drowsily.
“The one about ‘who would you marry if left to yourself?’ She told me you asked it that day in the garden, just before I arrived.”
“I’ve never given it a thought.”
“Don’t you think you should? Or are you riding across the wide white world for the good of your health?”
Though the fog was too dense to see the look on his brother-in-law’s face, Ivan could imagine it well enough. The tone of Fenist’s voice had already told him that the Falcon Prince was learning certain tricks of speech from Yekaterina. He had probably learnt the expressions to go with them – and maybe other things as well. A streak of mischief, for one, and its association with cold water…
Prince Ivan Page 7
