And then he drew his great sword.
*
Tsarevich Ivan knew what it meant when the shriek of a storm-wind rose out of a clear, quiet sky. He wrenched back on Burka’s reins and, as the grey horse came to a skidding halt, threw one leg over the high-peaked saddle and dropped to the ground. By the time he straightened up again both the straight sword and the curved were drawn and gleaming in his hands. Koshchey the Undying would not take him unawares twice in a row.
For long seconds there was nothing but the wind and swirling shreds of grass. Ivan used that respite to slide his shield onto his arm, and more than once he wished for the mail-shirt his mother Tsaritsa Ludmyla had wanted him to carry on his travels. The chafing iron collar had become a comforting weight about his neck, wide and thick enough to turn the blade of any sword. But the weight of a good mail-shirt would have been more comfortable still.
Then Koshchey the Undying rode out of the evening mist.
The curved sword in his hand was no sabre or Cossack shashka but a butcher’s cleaver stretched to monstrous proportions, yet he wielded it as easily as his riding-whip of plaited leather. Ivan met the first stroke with his shield angled to deflect the cut, but its impact still drove him to his knees and left his arm shaking from a blow he had barely turned aside.
Koshchey dragged his black horse to a standstill with the brutal bit, and once it stood quivering and snorting at the end of long tracks torn by its hoofs in the soft earth he stared at his adversary. The stare was not the honourable gaze one opponent gives another; it was no more than a gardener regarding the wasp which has been a persistent nuisance, but whose time has come at last.
“Come down, Koshchey the Undying,” said Ivan. “Come down, come close, and show me how brave you are.”
“Braver than you,” said Koshchey with an unpleasant smile. “At least I do not tremble.” It was an ugly jest, and one uncalled-for, since the light flickering along Ivan’s blades came not from fear but from muscle-tremors born in the shock of the stroke he had warded from his head.
“Dead men don’t tremble,” said Tsarevich Ivan, and levelled both his swords to guard. “Come down and die, Koshchey the Undying.”
“It is true that dead men don’t tremble.” Koshchey swung from his saddle and stamped his boot-soles squarely onto the face of Mother Earth. “But neither do those who have no fear of death. Come here, trembling Prince, and find out what it means to be truly dead.”
“I don’t think you could tell me now.” Ivan poised the broadsword behind his head, the sabre near his hip. “But you can tell me after this!”
He sprang like a grey wolf leaping from a thicket, although no grey wolf ever had such fangs.
Thrust and cut came as a single motion, curved blade and straight scissoring together, and Koshchey was in the middle. The shrill ring of poisoned steel was lost in a thick wet sound that might be heard in any butcher’s shop, and Koshchey the Undying toppled backwards to the ground. Both swords were buried in his body, and with them enough envenomed sorcery to slay a Tatar horde ten thousand strong. He kicked and squirmed and clawed at the bright blades…
And then lay still.
“It worked,” said Ivan almost to himself. Whether it was the poison or the spells that had killed Koshchey, he didn’t know or want to know. He looked down at the long, lean body lying still in death at last, and shook his head. He had never killed anyone before and hoped never to do so again, either in combat or by legal process. It was so quick and so easy, but so impossible to reverse. That was why he sank briefly to one knee, signed himself and dead Koshchey with the life-giving cross, then silently commended the necromancer’s wicked soul to God. ‘Hell is there, as we believe, because God made it,’ Metropolitan Archbishop Levon Popovich had told him once, ‘but if God’s Mercy is, as we believe, unlimited by height or span or depth, then surely Hell is empty.’
Ivan glanced at Mar’ya Morevna, who held his mace in one hand as she stared at a sight she had never dreamt of seeing, then looked at Koshchey’s black horse. The poor beast was in ribbons, torn so grievously by whip and spur that each movement of its great muscles was as plain as an anatomist’s drawing.
“Poor,” he said softly, stroking its nose as it pushed towards his hand. “Poor, poor.” No matter that this horse could supposedly use the speech of men, there were times for only meaningless gentle noises, and it held true as much for men as beasts. He put one hand to the reins, meaning to bring it with him, but the horse wrenched back from his grasp and reared up on its hind legs, cutting the air with fore-hoofs shod like axes.
Ivan flinched back from the hammering strokes, knowing them to be just threats. At least just threats for now. If he gave the black horse any further reason to suspect his motives, he had no doubt it would trample him.
“It wants to stay with its master,” said Mar’ya Morevna, and though her face was pale, her voice was steady. “Leave it to luck, or the wolves.”
Ivan heard yet again the edge of ruthlessness that could dismiss five thousand slain Tatars as the only thing to do. But he understood her now more than then. Every other time she had seen Koshchey’s black horse it had been bearing her away to a captivity longer than mortal lifetimes, so small wonder she had little affection for the beast.
“As you wish.”
“But bring your swords.” Ivan glanced at where the weapons nailed Koshchey’s corpse to the ground and shook his head.
“I like them better where they are, until you do something with your spell-books.”
“Still doubting?”
“Being careful. If what slew him was the spell on the steel, then I’d prefer it stayed in place.”
“I understand.” Mar’ya Morevna leaned the mace back against her shoulder and held out her other hand. “Then mount up. I’ve no wish to linger here.” Faint and far away, the melancholy howl of a wolf hung on the air, and both horses put their ears back. “The dinner-guests are gathering.”
Ivan’s mouth compressed to a tight, bloodless line as he stared at the rolling, terrified eyes of Koshchey’s black horse. “I’d as soon not leave the horse,” he said, an edge of stubbornness creeping into his voice. “Talking beast or dumb, it deserves better.” His hand was already reaching for the reins again, and this time the black horse didn’t back away. “Mar’yushka, beloved, if the sight of this creature offends you I’ll take off its harness and set it free. Just let me bring it clear of wolf country.”
“If you want a horse like that one, get your own,” said a thin, cold voice behind him. “But leave mine alone.”
Prince Ivan froze, unwilling to turn round despite Mar’ya Morevna’s tiny gasp of fear. Or perhaps because of it. The voice was that of someone whose life he had stilled, someone he had struck down and commended to God’s mercy. It wasn’t a voice he had thought to hear again except in his darkest nightmares.
But when he turned, all those nightmares yet undreamed came true at once.
Koshchey the Undying stared at him past the sword-blades criss-crossed in his chest, and hatred would have been easier for Ivan to bear in that icy gaze than the emotionless regard that raked across him like a razor. The necromancer sat upright very slowly, very carefully, made clumsy by the weight and length of steel he carried in his body. A good foot of it pinned him to the earth until he wrenched free of its poisonous embrace, and then Koshchey Bessmertny stood upright again.
“These,” he said, wrenching the swords from his cold flesh, “belong to you.” The two blades clashed together as they were flung casually to the ground, bright and clean in the evening light. Clean of blood, and clean of other, less honourable substances. That meant only one thing. The poisons that had coated them had washed from the swords’ edges and were pumping through the necromancer’s body – but apart from the first huge shock which laid him on the ground like something dead, they caused him no distress.
Ivan looked at the swords, and saw his death in the instant he picked them up.
He looked at Koshchey the U
ndying, and saw his death in the instant the necromancer chose.
He looked at Mar’ya Morevna, and saw her memory of him was the only future he had left.
The iron collar round his neck was no more now than surplus weight, the swords lying criss-cross at his feet no more than a symbol he could carry as he died, so that any who might speak of him in times to come could say that Tsarevich Ivan had fallen sword in hand. He had read that phrase often enough in the old tales, and he’d thought it little comfort to the ones who fell. How very small that comfort truly was, he hadn’t known till now.
On those few, few times when he had stood beside his father on the kremlin ramparts, looking down to witness some judgment or other, Ivan had wondered how those condemned to die could go to it with such ease of mind. He knew now. When nothing else remained, no hope of reprieve and no final chance of escape, then dignity became the final refuge and death itself was surely such an adventure that no one of courage would watch its approach except with boldness.
Give thanks to the good God, said the old story, that in His wisdom he set death at the end of life, and not at the beginning…
Ivan stooped as swiftly as he had ever moved, closing his hand on the hilt of his sabre, and as he came up again he swung its razor edge at the centre of the grin half-hidden in the midst of Koshchey’s beard. He felt the grooved wood of the sabre’s grip against his closing fingers, and he felt the weight of its blade tug forward as the weapon left the ground.
And then he heard Mar’ya Morevna scream, no sound his brave, beloved wife should make, and he heard a shrill hissing as something heavy moved swiftly through the air, and he heard a ringing sound like cold iron cut through by steel, and he heard…
…nothing more.
*
Koshchey the Undying waved his hands in the air and blew on his fingers to relieve their sting. His huge curved sword was sunk for half its length into the ground, still thrumming from buried point to blurring pommel with the force of its cut, one that had sliced through an unsuspected iron collar and the neck it was meant to guard.
“Almost, little Prince,” said Koshchey. “You were very, very close. But not quite close enough.”
Ivan Aleksandrovich lay in two pieces at his feet, head parted from shoulders by that sharp-edged sword. There was very little blood. Some had soaked into the fabric of a crimson coat trimmed with sable, and some more had beaded among the strands of the dead man’s pale-blond hair. The rest had drained into the yielding earth, leaving no more than a trace of steam on the cool evening air.
Tsarevich Ivan stared up through the bitter-scented steam. His eyes and mouth were open and his expression was surprised, as if he had put more trust in the collar at his neck than it deserved, for it had been sheared clean through from back to front and side to side. Even halfway would have been enough.
Koshchey looked down at the head and body, separated by the blade of that long, sharp sword, and by a yard of dark, wet earth, and by all the gulf between the living and the dead. Then he looked up at Mar’ya Morevna and smiled a cruel smile.
She was still sitting astride the ordinary grey horse that had given him so much trouble, and there was a mace in her hand. The horse was sidling and stamping at the heavy smell of blood, and Mar’ya Morevna had let the mace hang slack and useless. Instead she chewed at the knuckles of the fist thrust into her mouth, shocked by the sight of a dead husband as if there had never before been widows in Russia. The good God knew there had been many and more than enough each time the Tatars came from the east and the Teutons came from the west, and there would doubtless be many more again.
Koshchey Bessmertny stared at both horse and rider for a short while, then wrenched his great cleaver of a sword out of the blood-warmed earth. He wiped it between his fingers, flicked the spatters aside and thrust it back into its man-skin scabbard.
“Mar’ya Morevna,” he said, paying no heed to the silent tears that ran slowly down her cheeks, “you know where my kremlin is. Go to it, go to the chambers set aside for you, and stay there.”
Mar’ya Morevna didn’t move. “And if I don’t?” she said, “will you cut my head off too?”
“Cut off the head of the fairest Princess in all the Russias?” said Koshchey the Undying, grinning with all his teeth. “No, I will not. That would be a waste, Mar’ya Morevna, and besides, if I cut off your head, you would forget how much I grow displeased with thieves.”
“So why send me away,” said Mar’ya Morevna, “knowing you could catch me any time you please?”
He shrugged. “I would have sent you away, foolish woman, so you might not witness the full extent of my displeasure. But since you choose to remain, then watching what I do is not my choice, but yours.”
Koshchey took an axe from the saddle strapped to his black and bloody horse, and then drew his sword once more out of its sheath made of the skins of men. Holding one weapon in each hand, he raised them before Mar’ya Morevna’s eyes and said, “This is your final chance. Either you leave now, or you stay until I am done.”
Mar’ya Morevna looked at the axe, and at the sword, knowing what he intended, and bowed her head. “Do as you wish, Koshchey,” she said. “But no matter what you do, know this: for all the days of your long life, you’ll be compared to the memory of my beloved husband and always be found wanting.” Then she straightened her back, and stared straight before her, and her eyes saw only the Ivan of her memory, smiling and bold, laughing and merry, courageous and stern.
But Koshchey the Undying took both axe and sword and worked for half an hour, until he was in perspiration with his labour, and all that remained of Tsarevich Ivan Aleksandrovich Khorlovskiy was a heap of scattered fragments that glistened in the light of the newly-risen moon. He took a barrel from his saddle, such as holds small-beer for riders who grow thirsty, and drank it dry. Then he opened it and stuffed the bloody shreds and bones inside, without even such prayers as dead Prince Ivan had spoken in his kindness over Koshchey’s corpse. After that, with no more shriving than a spit and curse, he flung the barrel into a nearby river leading over many miles to the bitter Sea of Azov, and dragged Mar’ya Morevna weeping back to his dark kremlin.
*
It had been close on a quarter-year since Ivan’s sisters had heard any news of their brother, apart from an occasional dull letter to remind them of what they knew already: except when trying to divert the attention of Anastasya Solov’ev, Prince Ivan had little talent for writing. The sorcerers Fenist and Vasiliy and Mikhail made many comforting excuses concerning that long silence. Chief among them was – with a smile – that since Ivan had recently married the fairest Princess in all the Russias, he had much more to do than write letters.
It was a reasoning which Yekaterina and Yelizaveta and Yelena laughed to the proper degree of scorn, and then several degrees beyond. They, they pointed out, once or twice with the cold kremlin moats as an emphasis, had remained in contact with their parents the Tsar and Tsaritsa of Khorlov, and why should their brother the Tsarevich be any different? They said so with sufficient frequency that at last their husbands went to certain well-locked drawers and cabinets, the better to assure their wives…
And there found the things left by Ivan as keepsakes which they, being wise, hadn’t mentioned. They didn’t mention them now.
In that part of the wide white world where the heretics lived and spoke Latin rather than good Church Slavonic, the things would have been called memento mori, memories of death. A reminder of what comes to all, in God’s good time. In Holy Mother Russia they were warnings instead of memories. After being asked and perhaps a little persuaded, Ivan had left a knife, a fork and a spoon, all from the pouch at his belt, all of them silver and all as personal as his own fingers.
Mikhail Voronov the Raven, Prince of the Dark Forests, looked at the spoon left him by Tsarevich Ivan. It had been bright when it was given, polished enough to challenge the stars and the waning moon in the night sky overhead.
Now it was tarn
ished black, and stank like something dead.
Prince Mikhail sat for many hours that night, leafing through his books of lore in hope of learning what misfortune had befallen Ivan. They told him nothing more than what was already far too plain. It became somewhat more than nothing when thunder from a clear sky rang out over Prince Mikhail’s kremlin, and suddenly his brother Vasiliy was sitting in a chair at the far side of the book-heaped table. Perhaps it was typical of Prince Vasiliy, and perhaps it was typical only of his youth, but the Eagle’s feet were already crossed at the ankles and propped up on the table.
“These books,” said Mikhail the Raven reprovingly, rescuing them from beneath the heels of Vasiliy’s boots, “are far older than you.”
“And probably more boring,” said Vasiliy the Eagle. He folded his arms with a movement that suggested a small, slight fluttering of wings, and glanced without much interest at the leather-bound volumes stacked across the wide library desk. Then he held up a blackened fork that had once been polished silver. “Brother Ivan is in trouble,” he said.
“Brother Ivan is dead,” said Mikhail. “And Koshchey the Undying is loose upon the wide white world once more.”
Prince Vasiliy Orlov raised his fur-brimmed hat a little and signed himself with the cross. “Poor young fool,” he said, even though Ivan had been no more than four years his junior. “I didn’t know things had come to that. Though from the way you say it, I can guess at something else. He was the one who loosed Koshchey.”
“Vanya was never one for remembering what he was told.” Mikhail opened one of his books of magic and thumbed through it. “But bad memory isn’t punished by death in any realm I know. So I intend, with your and Fenik’s help, to set matters to rights.”
“And just where is our sharp-eyed brother on this fine, clear night?”
“Using those sharp eyes of his, at my request.”
“Looking for…?”
“Ivan.” Mikhail Voronov’s dark eyes glittered in the golden lamplight; it was impossible to read what thoughts swam in their depths, but his voice was edged with faint disgust. “Or whatever Koshchey has left of him.”
Prince Ivan Page 18
