Prince Ivan

by Morwood, Peter

  “You can leave again.”

  “What does Mar’ya Morevna know about all this?”

  Yelena glanced at her husband, who shrugged expressively and shook his head. “Nothing,” she said. “All our arrangements were one-sided. Anything else would make us no better than Dmitriy Vasil’yevich Strel’tsin and his lists.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” Ivan swirled wine around the inside of his glass and watched the garnet spirals smooth and settle. “One last question on this subject. Where am I to meet her?” Of all the responses he had been expecting, the most unlikely was a repeat of Mikhail’s shrug.

  “Somewhere,” said the Raven, and this time he no longer sounded like someone being deliberately vague for dramatic effect.

  “You really don’t know?”

  “We’re not so well acquainted with Mar’ya Morevna that we keep track of her movements across the wide white world,” said Mikhail Voronov. He smiled again, a little smile with little humour. “She’s a person who would resent such tracking, and her resentment is nothing the wise would wish to attract.”

  Ivan wasn’t quite sure what to make of that, though he puzzled over its implications for several minutes while a fresh wine-flagon was opened, the cups were refilled and dishes of honey-cake were set out on the table. Still puzzling, Ivan took one of the little pastries and absently pulled it into pieces too small to eat, but too large to ignore – especially when the crumbs stuck to his fingers and made taking an inspirational swallow of wine something of an adventure.

  “Quite finished thinking it through?” asked Yelena, who had been watching the performance with the honey-cake and hiding a smile behind her hand.

  “Yes, as far as thinking makes any difference.” Ivan wiped his crumb-and-honey-coated fingers ineffectually on a linen napkin, then set dignity to one side and licked them clean while his sister rolled her eyes despairingly at his manners.

  Ivan muttered under his breath about that, but didn’t bother saying anything aloud. There was another matter on his mind than honeyed crumbs, and it wasn’t Mar’ya Morevna. He saved it until he was properly unsticky, then rinsed the sweetness from his mouth with a long draft of snow-chilled white wine and gave both Yelena and the Raven another of those long stares. There had been a lot of staring and gazing and considering during this dinner, one way and another, but this time he had another motive than simply proving how steady he might be under pressure. He wanted to fix their expressions in his mind’s eye, to see how they might change when he wiped his silver eating-spoon with the napkin and spun it on the table.

  Round and round it went, before he stopped its rotation with one finger and slid the spoon out towards Prince Mikhail and his sister. They looked at it, then at him, as he took one of the gold spoons from the table setting and dropped it into the case at his belt.

  “Have mine as a keepsake,” he said softly, “to help you remember me. And now I suppose I should beware of Koshchey the Undying…?”

  Ivan had been expecting a change so subtle that it would need all the sharpness of his eyes to see. Instead Yelena’s face went white, a shocking pallor against the rich black of her garments and surroundings, and she crossed herself three times so vehemently that Ivan wondered if he shouldn’t have kept the subject private between himself and Mikhail.

  For his own part, Prince Mikhail the Raven shifted not a finger, not a muscle, not an eyelash, but the dilation of his pupils turned his eyes into pits of darkness that reflected only the flames of the candles, and those small as though very far away. The flames didn’t gutter or dance in an unfelt wind or burn low and blue. It might have been better if they had, for the very unchanging ordinariness of his surroundings was sending chills down Ivan’s spine.

  “You’re too easy with what you know nothing about, Vanya my brother,” said the Raven, in a voice such as a dead man might use. “‘Speak the name, summon the named.’ True or not, be more careful.”

  Ivan felt foolish and guilty and scared all at once. “I spoke that same name to Vasiliy,” he began, reluctant as always to take refuge behind an excuse, and at the same time wanting to vindicate himself. “He told me things about it, but he wasn’t shocked.”

  “Perhaps because at his closest, he lives nine days’ hard ride away,” said Yelena. She had regained some colour, and some of the chilly majesty which had been laid aside once she became his sister again as well as the wife of a sorcerer Prince. It was obvious she was using that grandeur as a shield so Ivan couldn’t see how she truly felt behind it. To find his own sister had to hide her true feelings from him was as unpleasant as any of the other abrupt revelations of the past few minutes. “Koshchey the Undying was said to live close to where we are now. Our kremlin wouldn’t be here except to meet you, but when we heard you were travelling in this direction…”

  Already recovering from his initial embarrassed discomfort, Ivan noted two important things in what Yelena said: firstly, and as he had suspected ever since he set eyes on the palace of Fenist the Falcon, the kremlins of the three brothers were no more fixed in one place than a Falcon or an Eagle or a Raven would choose to be. Secondly, and more to the point, Koshchey the Undying was for one reason or another, no longer a near neighbour.

  “He was said to live? Then where is he now?”

  “Only the good God knows,” said Mikhail. “There’s been no mention of Old Rattlebones for half a lifetime now, but just because you don’t hear the wolf howl doesn’t mean he’s left the forest. That’s why I’d prefer you guard your tongue when speaking his name, at least until you become aware of what you might be summoning.”

  “A necromancer,” said Ivan flatly, not wanting the conversation to go spiralling off into aphorisms again. “So Vasiliy the Eagle told me, unless he was wrong about that as well.”

  “He was right, but less than complete.” Mikhail the Raven leaned his elbows on the table and made a steeple of his fingers, gazing for a long time at their interwoven tips before he began to speak. “Koshchey can’t die. He is Evil. Do you understand what I mean? Not merely evil in the way that someone may be wicked, but as a source of that wickedness. He’s as evil as you are human, and,” he unlinked his fingers and stroked one hand across the lustrous blue-black feathers that trimmed his robe, “much less likely to change. Remember it, Vanya. Yelena tells me your memory was never of the best, but I would strongly advise you not to forget the words you spoke yourself. Beware of Koshchey the Undying…”

  Even the remark about his memory wasn’t enough to provoke a reaction from Ivan, for it seemed to him that the fires in the hall were no longer as warm as they’d been when dinner began, nor the candles as bright. He shivered and, even when the conversation shifted to more pleasant things, drank rather more than was good for him.

  *

  That was why he had no memory at all of being helped to bed. Not that there was any room for memory inside his skull next morning, or even space for a coherent thought, because a headache filled it from nape to crown to temples until his brain was a hot cinder pressed against the backs of his closed eyes. First he was spectacularly sick. Then he took an hour of strong steam and a long drink of water, and was sick again. But after more water he began to feel better, enough to admit that there might be life before death after all.

  “Well, that was a waste of good food,” said Prince Mikhail the Raven while Ivan crawled back into bed, moving as if the quilts were stuffed with lead. “Here,” he poured clear liquid from a silver flask into the small silver cup of its lid, and held it out. “Try a hair from the dog that bit you.”

  Ivan looked at the brimming cup with a jaundiced eye and made a sound like a cat with a hairball, but took his medicine in a single wincing gulp and shuddered all over. “I think I need the pelts of the whole damn pack,” he said in a voice that despite the steam was still raw at the edges. “Never again.”

  “Everyone says that till the next time.”

  Ivan made another cat-strangling noise, gulped a little more vodka and
lay back very gently on the wonderful coolness of his pillows. “If there’s a next time,” he mumbled, “I don’t want to know.”

  A small smile crossed Mikhail’s face like the beat of a bird’s wing, but not so small and fast that Ivan failed to see it. His brother-in-law was wondering what the fairest Princess in all the Russias would think of this candidate for her prospective husband if she could see him now. To Ivan’s relief Mikhail didn’t say it aloud. Instead he left the flask of vodka and its cup where Ivan could reach it without moving too much, and went to tell Tsarevna Yelena that her little brother wasn’t really dead.

  Tsarevich Ivan closed his eyes and tried to be sure.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  How Prince Ivan met an old drinking-companion, and what happened afterwards

  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 t
he 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.