Firebird (Tales of Old Russia Book 2)

by Peter Morwood

  The only other thing that Ivan could remember clearly from that part was the heat. At first it had stemmed from the gentle teasing he suffered as one hauberk after another was rejected when it failed to fit, but by the end of it the weight of metal, and the padding such armour needed to protect its wearer from itself, was more than enough to make him sweat without embarrassment to fuel the flames. If the German knights were so ponderous, then small wonder they would never dare to invade Russia in the winter months. A single wrong move, a single over-heavy step on the ice of lake or river, and they would be through it and heading for the bottom.

  He drank a little more hot wine and stared at the candle-carved shadows across the room. All of that warmth was gone now, leached away by the chill of the night and his own apprehensions. Brave words in the full light of day seemed like foolish bravado in the lonely middle of the night. Ivan stood up – or rather, hauled himself to his feet against the downward drag of all that iron – and took a turn around the study. Metal scraped against itself, or tapped and rustled softly if it was mail. There was no other sound anywhere in the kremlin; even the clock in the Bell Tower had been stopped, by the Tsar’s command. If his son cried out for help, Tsar Aleksandr didn’t want that cry drowned out by the sound of an hour being struck.

  It was reassuring, yet at the same time the thought of what might prompt him to cry out sent a shiver down Ivan’s spine. Looking down from the window, he could see the pools of amber light as guards with torches moved to and fro, and wondered how quickly those distant figures could get up to a small room in a tall tower if his life should suddenly depend on them.

  He wondered if it was midnight yet, and wished the clock hadn’t been stopped after all. If nothing happened by then, that most appropriate hour for sorcery, then he could get out of the oppressive little room with his honour intact. But it might have been midnight long ago. Ivan circled the table again, looked at the grimoire again, drank wine again, and as he had done so many times before, wished it was vodka.

  There was a supply of fresh candles in a basket by his chair, to be used one by one as the old ones were consumed. If nothing else, the honey scent of beeswax was better than the smell in his memory of the room. He glanced at them and decided not to replace any more. When the present candles burnt out, he would leave.

  Ivan rubbed at his jaw through the mail hood that covered his face to the brows, relieving the sorcery-born itch a little but smearing the sweat on the hood’s leather lining into a clammy film on his skin. That was unfair; if he was going to sweat, then he might at least do it through being warm rather than because the oily leather kept sticking to him. It was no more than a casual grumble, like any other man whose rank required the wearing of armour now and again. The alternative to that leather lining was to have the mail in direct contact with his tender flesh, and leather was more forgiving than a mesh of interlocked iron rings so abrasive that when it was no longer of use as armour, it was chopped into sheets and sent to the kremlin kitchens to scrub pots.

  One of the candles drowned in molten wax, and another guttered, its flame fluttering between a dirty yellow bead and a golden spear-point during the last moments before it too died in a spiral of black smoke. The darkness began to close in at last. Ivan sat down again, reaching for the wine-jug one last time, to drain its contents into his cup and then the cup’s contents into himself.

  Then with shocking suddenness the darkness became light, and the wine went all over the floor.

  *

  Ivan had seen the heat-borne dust devils of summer, and the rustling columns of leaves that the wind made sport with in the dry days of autumn. What he saw now was like the wind and dust and leaves, but all made of motes of golden fire. It was a spindle of sparks dancing silently in mid-air, needing no floor to rest on or ceiling to hang from. Remembering his own dear sorcerous brothers-in-law and their preferred method of entry, Ivan glanced once at the ceiling to see if it had split apart, but the polished cedar planks were unharmed. There was no distant rumbling of thunder in the heavens, no gust of storm, nothing save that noiseless firefly glitter.

  Easing himself out of his seat with equal silence, he reached out behind him without taking his eyes from the whirl of glowing specks, and opened the door as wide as it would go. He was too fascinated to consider leaving right now, but if hasty departure became an option, Ivan didn’t want to waste valuable running time in wrestling with closed doors.

  For the first time he began to hear something, and even though his mind insisted that the sound was a familiar one he took several seconds to identify it. The reason was simple enough: he knew the faint, high hissing of an armourer’s smelting-furnace with its bellows working hard, but it wasn’t the sort of sound his ears were expecting to hear in a tower room eighty feet above the ground.

  And then the Firebird appeared.

  Ivan’s first thought was that whoever had sketched it in the grimoire as a pheasant with golden tailfeathers had neither seen it first-hand nor heard it described by anyone who had. His second thought, as the elemental took shape, was that he didn’t blame either the artist or his informant for wanting to keep their distance. Had he known even slightly what to expect, he would never have volunteered to wait for the creature either.

  This was no pheasant, golden or otherwise. With its curved beak and hooked talons and maniacal sparrowhawk’s eyes, it looked far too predatory for that. The wings that bated like an angry falcon’s were wider than Ivan stood tall, even in his best red-heeled boots; eight feet or more from tip to tip, plumaged not in gold but in the harsh yellow-white of a midsummer sun and just as hard to look at. As the Firebird settled onto its previous perch – the carved chair-back spurted grey smoke as those great talons dug into the wood – he could feel the heat washing off it.

  Prince Ivan had been cold before; he was cold no longer.

  He pressed his mailed back against the wall and stared, squinting and dazzled, filled with a wonder that was well-mingled with dread. Even iron armour was meagre protection against something like this, for if the Firebird’s wings burnt like the sun then its head and body burnt hotter still, the searing white of an over-pumped forge. The shadows all across the study were so black against the glare that they seemed almost solid, as sharply defined as something cut from the air with a razor. Mar’ya Morevna could say what she pleased about the ancient laws of sorcery; there was heat enough here to melt any metal be it bronze or silver or the coldest iron in all the world.

  Ivan edged towards the door, but the instant he moved, the Firebird’s head snapped round and it stared at him over one blazing feathered shoulder. It was a bird-of-prey stare, both eyes at once sighting down the scimitar beak as though down the stock of a crossbow. Ivan met the glare of those crazy killer’s eyes, and knew in one fearful instant what a mouse must feel when a shadow slides across it in the meadow and it looks up at the plummeting kestrel-hawk. Like the mouse, Ivan froze; but unlike the kestrel, the Firebird didn’t strike. Instead the wicked beak parted in what looked uncomfortably like a laugh, and it opened its wings wide, mantling its prey.

  The grimoire.

  Sickle claws flashed out and struck, driving into the book’s metal cover and then through it as the talons flexed and closed their gripe. Uncut jewels popped from their settings with the pressure and spun rattling across the table-top, and the silver-inlaid bronze sheet that clad Enciervanul Doamnisoar lost its embossing as it softened and flowed sluggishly like honey in winter. The Firebird’s beak gaped wide as the grimoire lifted from the charring table, but if it uttered some triumphant cry as it began to fade away, Prince Ivan couldn’t hear it.

  Nor could he hear the warnings inside his own head, otherwise he would have stood still and watched the elemental return to where it had come from, then afterwards thanked God for the adventure and his own surviving of it. Instead, as the Firebird became no more than a sketch outlined in fiery ink, Ivan lunged forward and grabbed at the streaming feathers of its tail. The bird screech
ed, its first and only sound and one which drove needles of anguish through his ears. Then the darkness came back with a rush as the Firebird vanished; but not completely. It was kept at bay by the tail-feather gripped in his left hand, a feather that though it was by no means as bright as the Firebird itself, still glowed with the fierce light molten gold.

  Pain struck into Ivan’s hand an instant later. The cold iron of his gauntlet was undamaged by the sorcerous heat of the Firebird but it was cold iron no longer, transmitting that heat as easily as any common poker left too long in the fire. With a silent prayer of thanks that his mother had tied such a simple knot he tugged frantically at the lace securing it to his wrist, but acrid smoke was already curling from the bullhide glove within the gauntlet’s plates, and by the time Ivan wrenched his fingers free those plates were glowing.

  He snapped his whole arm sideways and the glove flew across the room like a shooting star. It struck the wall in a spray of incandescent sparks that left gouges and char in the white pine panel, then clattered onto the floor and lay there, cooling.

  The Firebird’s feather cooled more slowly. It lay where he had dropped it on the patterned tiles, no longer noonday bright but still enough to pain the eye that stared at it too long. Beneath its sullen sunset glow the tile’s coloured glaze melted and reformed into strange new patterns, and the ceramic tile itself blackened, baked and cracked across.

  Ivan leaned against the wall again, unsteady on his legs and not sure whether he wanted to cheer, or be sick from the reaction of delayed fright and a stupidity that could have cost his left hand. Smoke from the burnt gauntlet rolled out into the corridor, and he felt the itching inside his skin stop abruptly as Mar’ya Morevna cancelled her warding-spells. She had constructed the patterns for the magic in another of the tower rooms, far enough away for safety, but also far enough that Ivan wondered vaguely how she knew the spells were no longer needed.

  He was standing by the open window when she came bursting white-faced through the doorway, threw both arms around him and held him tight, and when Ivan could see her face again, two great tears were glistening in her eyes. He brushed them away gently with a blistered finger, unsure what had made his stern lady weep until he took in a breath to replace what she had hugged from his lungs. The stench of scorched leather told him everything. Why she was crying, why she had cancelled the spells, why she had come running in pale with a terror that she hadn’t dared speak aloud.

  She had smelt the smoke.

  “It didn’t burn me, loved,” he said, cuddling her close. “Only the gauntlet lining. Only the gauntlet.”

  Drawing in a long breath that brought back something of her composure, Mar’ya Morevna put out one hand and touched his cheek. “Are you hurt?” she said.

  “Grievously.” Ivan held up his left hand for inspection. He had been soothing his fingers with a wad of snow scraped off the outside windowsill, and the rising blisters were much less impressive than they might have been. “I’ve done worse pinching out a candle. Hush now…”

  Mar’ya Morevna ignored the blisters. She looked instead at the Firebird’s feather sizzling gently on the floor and realized what he had done. She snuggled her head against his neck, heedless of the rough coldness of the armour, then released herself carefully from his embrace. Ivan watched her; not the sorceress, not the commander of armies, not the fairest Princess in all the Russias, just the wife who loved him and had been terrified beyond all measure that through his own courage she had lost him.

  “Never again,” she said. “Not alone. Whatever happens, whatever needs to happen, we go or stay together.”

  “But you don’t have the grimoire any more.”

  “I don’t need a book about demons when what we’re hunting is no demon. Enciervanul Doamnisoar was bait, and it worked. You, my bold, brave, foolish one, you confirmed what I needed to know: that it was indeed a Firebird. This,” she nodded at the feather, “is even more proof than I expected. Now I know which books to study.” She bent down, dabbed cautiously with outstretched fingers at the feather, then to Ivan’s shock she picked it up.

  “Quite cool,” she said, bouncing the plume lightly on the palm of her hand while light and shadow played tag with one another across the walls and ceiling. “I wonder if the light will fade or not…”

  Ivan stared at it with his head cocked on one side like a sparrow; then he reached out and touched it with his bare hand, the same hand that this same feather had blistered through a layer of iron and a layer of leather not three minutes past.

  It felt…strange. He had expected something like a strip of silk, something with some weight to it. Instead there was a sensation more like the sleek and pleasant promise of fresh linen sheets on a hot summer night. If I could touch smoke, Ivan thought, it would be like this. Smoke that shines like burnished brass.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said softly, his terror all but forgotten after taking no harm from the experience. “All of it was beautiful.”

  “Beauty can be dangerous. You said that about me, once. Whether it was the spells, or the iron, or just your own good luck, you got off lightly. You might not be so fortunate next time.”

  “I’d rather there wasn’t a next time,” Ivan began, then saw the expression on his wife’s face and raised one eyebrow. “But there might be. Or should I say, there will be?”

  “That depends. Someone’s summoning this Firebird and sending it to steal things from your father’s kremlin.”

  “Then summon it yourself and make inquiries.”

  “No. That would show our hand.” She smiled briefly. “Blisters and all. And I’d as soon keep what we know a secret from…” Mar’ya Morevna frowned, annoyed at not having a name. “Whoever it is.”

  “Then where do we go? Your library?”

  “There first. And after that, beloved, further than you think. East of the Sun, and West of the Moon, to the land where the Firebirds live. Then maybe we’ll find out who’s been sending it here, and why. And maybe, just maybe, we can return all that stolen property to its rightful owners.”

  Ivan swung the other gauntlet by its straps, then dropped it onto the scorched table. “Wonderful,” he said. “After Koshchey the Undying, I thought we’d have some peace and quiet. Apparently not.”

  “Peace and quiet means helping Fedor Konstantinovich collate my vassals’ tax returns for last year,” said Mar’ya Morevna with a wicked smile. “Your choice. What do you think?”

  “I think we should find the Firebird,” said Ivan. He had been taking off the armour and now he threw out his arms and stretched; it was as if all that weight of metal was suddenly replaced by an equal weight of weariness. “Almost anything’s preferable, including some sleep if there’s enough of the night to make it worthwhile.”

  “There’s enough. It lacks a few minutes of the first hour of morning, and I think you could be justified in rising late.”

  Then the door opened again, Guard-Captain Akimov came in and one look at his face told them both that whatever had happened tonight wasn’t over. He bowed to Mar’ya Morevna and saluted Ivan, but when his eyes fell on the Firebird’s feather they went wide, driving the rest of his message momentarily from his head.

  “You did it,” the Cossack breathed in delight before he remembered who he was speaking to and saluted again. Ivan’s success could only reflect well on the man who had taught him how to be brave, or at least how to conceal fear so nobody knew it was there. Akimov reached out and gripped Ivan’s hand in both of his own big paws, beaming all over his bushy-bearded face.

  “Well done, Highness.” The Cherkassy accent was very thick. “Well done indeed!” Then his pleasure faded as the duty which had brought him here reasserted itself. “Highness, I apologize, but if you and the noble Lady could follow me at once? The Tsar awaits you both.”

  Ivan and Mar’ya Morevna exchanged glances then fell into step behind the Captain. “Petr Mikhailovich, I thought my father would have been in his bed by now,” said Ivan. “At least
, he told me so much earlier tonight.”

  “That’s what he intended you to believe, Highness,” said Akimov, not slackening his pace either for the conversation or the spiral stairs of the tower. “He and the Tsaritsa your mother have been at prayers in the Great Basilica since you entered that room. Prayers for your safety.”

  “Ah.” Ivan crossed himself, and from the corner of his eye saw Mar’ya Morevna do likewise. “Either they were heeded, or they weren’t needed.”

  “Whichever pleases you, Highness.”

  “But I’m glad of them all the same.”

  “Captain Akimov,” said Mar’ya Morevna, “just where are we going? The Basilica? The Tsar’s chambers?”

  “Neither, noble Tsarevna. He awaits you at the main gate of the kremlin, with a…” For the first time Akimov faltered slightly. “There’s been a message. Of sorts.”

  *

  The scene by the gate was a familiar one to them both, so much so that Ivan almost expected to see the dark-haired woman in the long black cloak standing haughtily in the midst of the knot of guards. Instead they saw his father the Tsar, and Levon Popovich the Metropolitan Archbishop of Khorlov, and instead of Mother Wolf’s husky voice, they heard the prayers for the dead.

  Tsar Aleksandr turned, saw his son approaching, and gathered him into an embrace like that of an affectionate bear. “Forgive an old man’s fears, my son,” he said in a voice lowered for privacy. “I should never have doubted you.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive, Papa.” Ivan returned the powerful hug, burying his face in the heavy fur of his father’s collar as he remembered how scared he had been. He realized how much worse it must have been for those who loved him and had to stand idle on the sidelines while he lived or died. “It would have been worse if nobody had cared.”