“Here,” she said briskly, “put these on. Close them up as tightly as you can. The air would cut you this morning, even standing still, and we won’t be standing still for long. How are the horses; ready to go?”
“As soon as they’ve finished eating.”
“That’s always the way with horses,” said Mar’ya Morevna. “Everything is after they’ve finished eating.”
“It’s the way with husbands, too.” He extended his arms to let the servants help him into his travelling-clothes, wrapped the inner kaftan around himself and buckled its belt, then wriggled to settle the heavy outer coat on top. “Another thing. How was it that your man Sergey, or Stepan, or whichever name it was, said nothing in his report from Khorlov of what is troubling my father?”
“That, my dear, is a question he’ll answer. I don’t pay my people just to admire the scenery and pass on gossip. But right now, they can wait. You should eat, I should eat, and then we need to be on our way.”
They ate, they drank, then they collected the weapons and accoutrements for travelling even briefly in the hard lands beyond the kremlin walls. Servants carried most of them ahead, to be hung in the proper places from their horses’ saddles, but Mar’ya Morevna insisted that Ivan should also take the book Enciervanul Doamnisoar to Khorlov with them.
“Why?” he said, emboldened with mulled wine and hot honey-cakes to feel just a little bit rebellious.
“Because I ask you,” said Mar’ya Morevna in a voice as sweet as the little cakes but as sharp as the wine. “And because you should continue your studies when you can. And because it might be useful.”
It wasn’t a reason Ivan had wanted to hear, but he shrugged in what he hoped was an unconcerned manner and thrust the book deep into his saddlebags, wondering privately if the fresh shirts also in the bag would still be fresh, or even still be shirts, after keeping such unpleasant company.
The horses were waiting in the courtyard, saddled, bridled and from the set of Sivka’s ears at least, eager to go. Or perhaps the black horse was just amused at how his little master looked, this grey and chilly morning. Ivan and Mar’ya Morevna were both so well wrapped in furs that they resembled the bears who had originally owned those pelts, and they moved with the same fubsy clumsiness, forced by their thick, well-padded and extraordinarily awkward limbs to stand on mounting-blocks before they could clamber into their saddles.
Ivan, already pink to the ears from overheating, blushed redder still as he clambered on to Sivka’s back. He hadn’t needed to use such a block since he was six years old and granted permission for the first time to mount Guard-Captain Akimov’s great charger.
“If you laugh,” he hissed in the black horse’s ear, “if you so much as snicker…”
Then he laughed himself, and let the unfinished sentence die as he settled his boots in the high Cossack-style stirrups. He could think of no threat sufficiently horrible, and by now Sivka knew him well enough to believe none of it. He saw Mar’ya Morevna nod an amiable farewell to High Steward Fedor Konstantinovich, but as Ivan looked at the man and his staff of office, his laughter faltered as he wondered whether he would be as glad to see the other High Steward waiting for them when they came at last to Khorlov.
They set heels to their horses, and amid a clamour of hoofs that rolled like thunder, lightnings billowed out of nowhere to enfold them. Borne up by the wings of that enchanted storm, Ivan and Mar’ya Morevna went away.
*
It was a quiet journey in both senses of the word; without event, and for the most part without words. Ivan and Mar’ya Morevna spoke only when they stopped to rest the horses and let them eat, and by wordless mutual consent the conversation avoided touching matters of significance. It was enough that Ivan’s stomach rebelled after more than a couple of mouthfuls of the bread and sausage; that told Mar’ya Morevna all she needed to know about her husband’s state of mind. Ivan saw the way she was looking at him.
“I’m just not hungry,” he said. That was a lie, and they both knew it. There was all the world of difference between having no hunger and having no appetite, but standing in this white desolation was neither the time nor the place to argue over it. No snow fell from the sky; it had become too cold. Instead, driven by an unremitting wind, ice-spicules slid rustling across the frozen drifts and struck into exposed flesh like handfuls of needles.
It wasn’t long before they were back in the saddle again, and regardless of whether they struck on snow or ice or wind-scoured naked ground – or even a river still unfrozen with the black water like a naked blade – the sound of hoofbeats didn’t vary from the muffled drumbeat that more usually went with running on the open plain. Despite the speed with which the landscape rolled by there was no longer any wind, and that was a mercy. Ivan didn’t want to think about riding at such speed into the ice-laden gale that flayed the real world.
Sivka and Chyornyy did their riders proud. Leaving Mar’ya Morevna’s kremlin in mid-morning, later than intended because of one thing and another, they still came to the gates of Khorlov before the last light of the short winter day had faded from the sky. They were unexpected, and thus no one greeted them as they blurred through the kremlin’s walls, but there was no disguising the sight or sound of their arrival.
The horses broke through the barriers that separated place from place and world from world in a coruscation of jewelled fragments and a great rending boom as empty air was hammered from their path, slackening their headlong sorcerous gallop to come dropping back into the reality that was Mother Russia with a skid and a clatter of hoofs on the chill flagstones of the courtyard. The noise came reverberating back from the towers of Khorlov’s kremlin with a sound that was thunder indeed, and within minutes the empty courtyard began to fill with people.
Among the first to arrive was Dmitriy Vasil’yevich Strel’tsin, and at a pace suggesting he had flung his close-garnered dignity to the four winds of the world and run. He slowed immediately to the stately stride that was his more usual gait, stalking along in time to the measured taps of his tall staff of office, and when he reached the customary five paces from the son of his Tsar and the heir to the realm, he bowed low.
Ivan lifted one eyebrow in the old coolly disdainful look and responded with no more than a slight inclination of his head. He gave the haughty old man a close, hard look when he straightened up again, but Strel’tsin’s face betrayed nothing save honest concern for the realm and what seemed sincere pleasure at seeing the Tsarevich back in his old home.
What did you expect to see? The word ‘guilt’ printed in big letters on his forehead?
Nonetheless Ivan was relieved, certain he would have sensed something out of place if Strel’tsin genuinely had something to hide, even though as High Steward, First Minister, Tutor to the Tsarevich and Tsarevnas, Chancellor, Castellan and Court Sorcerer, besides other lesser posts, Dmitriy Vasil’yevich almost certainly had an appropriate expression to go with each.
Strel’tsin snapped his fingers and gestured to one of the servants, and the man came forward with a plate on which was a round loaf of black rye bread with a wooden dish of white sea-salt set into a recess in its centre, the traditional offerings of hospitality to a guest. Ivan felt the tautness of control and concealed emotion go out of his face at that. Neither fire nor foe nor storm would keep the High Steward from observing the proprieties.
If that trust was foolish, so be it; but he had known Dmitriy Vasil’yevich since he was old enough to know anyone and anything, and trust was more wholesome than unproven suspicion. Ivan took his knife and cut two slices from the bread, dipped them in the salt, and gave one to Mar’ya Morevna. When those were eaten, token that even this simplest of foods was gladly received, they scrambled awkwardly from their saddles and dropped to the snow-powdered stone of the courtyard.
The kremlin palace looked unchanged from the last time they had seen it, except for one thing. Hands innocently busy with removing the outermost layer of her clumsy travelling clothes, Mar’y
a Morevna jerked with her chin towards the walls, where three times the usual number of sentries patrolled the ramparts. Most of them carried heavy recurved Tatar bows in cases at their belts.
“More guards,” she said softly. “Too many for a peaceful place like this.”
“Far too many.” Ivan kept the scowl from his face with an effort, and more for something to do than any other purpose, he began tugging at his own heavy fur coat. “They wouldn’t be there unless they were needed.”
“So do we ask, or wait to be told…?”
“Wait.” He said it reluctantly, confused by the confliction of information between what he saw here and now and the worries gathered like black crows in his own head. “Apart from the guards, there’s nothing… Well, nothing wrong. Nobody looks afraid. I don’t want to say something aloud to change that, because my father—”
“—Is here.” Mar’ya Morevna touched Ivan’s arm and turned him towards the great stairway that led up and into the kremlin palace. Flanked to either side by guards, and with Captain Akimov in full armour at his back, the Tsar of Khorlov stood in the doorway. He looked down into the courtyard and began to smile.
“Ivan!” cried Tsar Aleksandr Andreyevich, and had it not been for the dignity of his royal station and the many eyes who would have seen him put it aside, he would have run at once down the stairs to embrace his son. Instead he remained quite still until Ivan and Mar’ya Morevna had done him courtesy. And then, no longer a Tsar but still very much a father, he began to run.
“You got my letter,” said the Tsar when all the hugging and kissing and back-slapping was done. “When? Three days, four days ago?”
Ivan grinned. “You forget about the horses that we ride, Papa. If just after midnight counts for something in your calculations, then the letter reached my hands this morning. And here we are tonight.” His face became more serious and he lowered his voice. “What was wrong, to make you write such a cryptic thing and send it by such a messenger?”
“Because I’ve come to doubt the security of my letters this past few weeks, and as for the wolf-woman, that was an opportune crossing of paths and purposes, no more. I would have asked the Devil himself to be my messenger if he’d been going the right way.”
Shocked, Mar’ya Morevna crossed herself, and after a moment’s pause when his mouth opened and then shut with a click of teeth, Ivan did likewise. Unlike his wife, he knew that the Tsar meant exactly what he said.
“Have you eaten yet?” There was an odd sound to the way that Tsar Aleksandr asked his question that made it unlike his usual invitation to the table.
“Not since a little after noon,” said Mar’ya Morevna. “I thank Dmitriy Vasil’yevich for his bread and salt, but that was greeting, not dinner.”
“Just as well.” The Tsar’s expression turned grim. “It might have been wasted. Strel’tsin, Akimov and the guards who can be trusted to keep their mouths shut know about this matter, but not the rest, and certainly not the other servants. Both of you, follow me.”
Ivan’s mouth quirked as though he had tasted something sour, and he glanced sidelong at his wife. Neither of them spoke a word, but if his own expression was like hers then their faces said all that was required. Both could form at least a rough idea of what this oblique preamble meant, and both were too experienced in the more brutal forms of death to have other than a vague idea of what they were about to see.
They followed Tsar Aleksandr into the kremlin and up the spiral stair of one of the towers. The sullen rhythmic tramp of the soldiers’ boots and the oppressive shadows thrown by the lanterns they carried threw a brooding presence over everyone, and the sweat on Prince Ivan’s hands and forehead didn’t come from the heat of the furs he still wore. They came to a door, ordinary enough though locked and bolted, with the key still in the lock and guards standing at either side. But they were standing as far away from that ordinary door as their duties would allow.
Prince Ivan Aleksandrovich hesitated, staring, scared, and not overmuch concerned about who knew it. The last time he had opened a locked door his death had been waiting inside it. And there were worse things even than death. He recognized this door, and the room beyond it. Dmitriy Vasil’yevich Strel’tsin had tutored three generations of royal children in there, teaching them in his dry voice how to rule a kingdom or a husband. Had Ivan not already seen the old man down in the courtyard, he might have begun to worry about him; as it was, there were worries enough.
“Father,” he said at last, reluctant to ask but needing to know, “did something dreadful happen? And was it… Did it happen to someone that I knew?” The Tsar looked at him, laid one heavy, kindly hand on his son’s shoulder, and smiled a solemn, reassuring smile.
“No,” he said. “No one that you knew.” Then the smile died and his lips compressed in recollection until they resembled a bloodless scar across his silver beard. “But something dreadful did happen. Yes. Something very dreadful.” He opened the door.
*
Inside was a room with bookshelves along the walls, like a library. It was a small place, not so much a room where books were kept in great numbers as a small, comfortable, private chamber where one could bring things from the great library in the kremlin’s main building, to read or teach from them in quiet comfort. A few volumes were shelved against the walls, there were cushioned chairs instead of benches, a wine-flagon rested in the centre of a small table, there was a faint smell of burnt meat…
And a stained horse-blanket lay in the middle of the floor, made lumpy and irregular by whatever was beneath it.
“Show me,” said Mar’ya Morevna, her voice held steady only by the same effort that had driven her nails into the palms of her hands. One of the guards who flanked the Tsar stepped forward and carefully, with a terrible, useless gentleness, drew back the blanket.
Ivan looked, and flinched, and thought that it would have been far better to have eaten something after all, and have been honestly sick at the sight and smell of what lay before his appalled gaze. The corpse was like nothing human, and that was just as well. The blanket was too generous a shroud for the shrivelled, flaking charcoal doll it had covered. He had been a man once, wearing mail and plate and studded leather that had been no protection. The bronze plates of his arm-defences had slumped and run like wax, the brass studs of his leather tunic rested at the bottoms of the burrows they had seared down into his body, and only the iron mesh of the mail held the crisped and blackened corpse together. Of cloth and leather, there was no trace left.
Candles burned in sconces set around the room, their flames almost immobile in the still air, golden spears pointing the way to Heaven through the miasma of burning and corruption, and the wax wept hot tears. Mar’ya Morevna gestured for the dead man to be covered, and stared at the candles. Her brows came together in a frown.
“Father, we have to talk,” she said to the Tsar. “First Minister Strel’tsin and Guard-Captain Akimov as well.”
“But for the love of God,” said Prince Ivan behind her, “can we please do it somewhere else…?”
Mar’ya Morevna glanced sympathetically at him. “Commanding armies in the field inures you to certain things. I forgot I have that, that advantage.” She took a flask from where it hung from the belt of her travelling clothes, gestured quickly at it with one hand, and held it out to Ivan. “Here, beloved, drink this.”
Ivan took it gratefully, pulled out the stopper, and drank as though the contents were water and he had been long lost in a desert. The flask contained vodka, he knew that already having seen it filled. But at the time of filling it had been ‘Tsar’s vodka’, a clear, herbal-flavoured spirit suitable for the drink-flask of a Princess. Now, changed by that small movement of Mar’ya Morevna’s hand, it had become the raw, harsh, oily stuff that the peasants drank, especially those peasants whose lords were less than kind. They called it forgetfulness in a bottle.
Forgetfulness was exactly what Prince Ivan needed.
CHAPTER FIVE
&
nbsp; Castle Thorn of the Teutonic Order;
1234 A.D.
“You, witch! I’ve been looking for you. What are you doing in here?” demanded Hermann von Salza from the doorway of Castle Thorn’s library.
Baba Yaga was curled up on one of the seats beside the windows, hunched over a massive leather-bound book half-hidden in her lap. When she finally deigned to notice his angry presence and turned to look at him, she waved the volume in the air as though greeting a friend – though from the size and weight of the book she might as easily have been threatening an enemy.
“Reading, if it please your fine worthiness,” she said in the whining voice that had begun to grate raw on the Grand Master’s nerves. “What else would a poor old woman be doing in a library?”
“An ordinary woman could do little enough except set me wondering why she was in the fortress of a monastic Order sworn to chastity.”
“As those two magpie friars are sworn, eh?” sneered Baba Yaga. “Or do pretty boys not count?”
The Grand Master’s face went hot. Whether it was with embarrassment that this foul creature had seen what he ignored and thus his own omission of censure, or that she was daring to tell him his duties, von Salza didn’t know. What he did know was that he disliked either possibility.
“The Dominicans aren’t of our Order, and what they do is between themselves and God.”
Baba Yaga tittered. “Does he also take part in their unnatural embraces?”
The heat in Hermann von Salza’s face flooded his eyes, so that for an instant before he regained control of himself, the old witch shimmered red, as though she had been dipped in burning blood. “Righteous Lord God!” he growled low in his throat, and then his voice rose to a parade-ground bellow that slapped across the room. “Shut your filthy mouth!”
Firebird (Tales of Old Russia Book 2) Page 12
