Firebird (Tales of Old Russia Book 2)

by Peter Morwood

  “That spell? But it won’t take us back to Khorlov.”

  “The alternative was a Gating-circle, Vanya. We can be in Khorlov in less than a day from home. Anyway, there are things needing done in our own kremlin: Chyornyy and armour to collect, books,” she smiled wickedly, “to be put into the library for copying before I give them back, things like that. Come on, we should make our farewells.”

  Ivan got to his feet, slowly and cautiously but with a wince and a sharp intake of breath for all that. He looked at the Grey Wolf, who hadn’t moved, and said, “Shall I release you from my service now?”

  The Grey Wolf flattened his ears just a little. “Why? What service have I done you, besides a little carrying from place to place?” Ivan grinned; the Grey Wolf had shown poor manners for a servant, but the wit of a dangerous good friend had been as sharp as his own teeth.

  “Then you’ll come with us, after all?”

  “There was never any doubt. Now I’ve heard about this business and how it started,” the Grey Wolf glanced at the Firebird, who feigned not to notice, “I don’t want to learn the ending of it second-hand…”

  *

  The Independent Tsardom of Khorlov;

  1235 A.D.

  Tsar Aleksandr looked at the assembled Princes and sighed. They had been here in the small hall of his kremlin for almost a week now, and what had begun as discussion had escalated to argument within the first two days. Only the presence of Mar’ya Morevna’s Captain of Guards and a good hundred of her best troops was a moderating influence, and the Tsar wondered grimly how much longer that could last before someone agreed to differ long enough for a combining of forces. That afterwards they would still fall on each other would be meagre consolation, and just what some enemy had long been hoping for.

  He turned away from the beginning of yet another squabble and stared out of the window, feeling that it might be better for all concerned if he walked out of the room and locked the door behind him until they fought the matter to a conclusion. It would certainly simplify matters. The Tsar sighed again, his breath freezing as it touched the small panes of glass until he had to scrape the rime away with a thumbnail and the edge of his hand. The world outside was stark white from horizon to horizon beneath a cold blue sky and a pale winter sun, and the encampment beyond Khorlov’s walls looked more like a besieging army every time Aleksandr saw it. Men-at-arms from three hostile Principalities were out there; the bogatyri were of course within the walls. As the sound of accusing voices welled up again behind him, the reality of what was still only an appearance came home full force.

  Those tents had been shifted since they were set up six days ago, and now they truly were a siege-camp.

  The first flash of rage died down, and its place was taken by a cold, dignified anger. There was evidence out there right before his eyes of collusion between at least two of the Princes, and the best way to nip that in the bud was to draw it to everyone’s attention in public debate. Tsar Aleksandr peered through the thick, bubbled glass in hope of seeing some foolishly-raised banner, rubbed at the pane again, then gave up and opened the window. At the same time, he was listening for the first voice to falter when they saw what he was doing. He didn’t expect every voice to stop at once.

  “Father?” said a voice he hadn’t heard in nearly three weeks, “we’re back.”

  Ivan and Mar’ya Morevna were standing by the door. That in itself wasn’t enough to silence the bickering Princes, but the company they were keeping had proved more effective. A horse could never have climbed up the stairs to reach this room, but it was quite plain that a wolf the size of a horse was a great deal more nimble. The Grey Wolf might have been enough to calm any Princely quarrel, but the Firebird hovering by Ivan’s shoulder on the thermals of its own heat should have driven them in panic from the room, had the blazing spread of its wings not filled the doorway from one side to the other.

  Tsar Aleksandr looked with astonishment at his son and daughter-in-law and concluded that the hug they both deserved would be out of place right now. Both were in armour, but the Tsar could see that they were wearing not only iron but dignity as a shield against the scorn of the other Princes. Not that anyone was daring to be scornful; but dignity should be respected all the same.

  “Sirs,” he said, keeping his voice calm with an effort, “this is my son Prince Ivan, and the Firebird of which I told you.” Then, unable to resist the chance to sink a pin in several noble hides, “His wife Mar’ya Morevna you must know already, if only by the reputation of her armies…”

  After their shock wore off and the Firebird’s perch was set formally in the centre of the table so it had a chance to speak, the Princes surpassed all previous levels of noise that five noble gentlemen could make without actually shouting at the tops of their voices. As the Firebird told them of its involvement in what had happened, their responses swung like a pendulum between outrage and sympathy. Tsar Aleksandr noted with silent annoyance that when he’d told them almost the same things, such sympathy had been noticeably lacking.

  “Can anyone,” said Pavel Mikhaylovich of Novgorod, avoiding his brother’s gaze and managing to sound even more full of his own importance than usual, “be so stupid as to attack us in the deeps of winter?”

  “You were all quite prepared to attack each other,” said Mar’ya Morevna, producing an awkward little silence for which the Tsar wanted to kiss her. “But stupidity has nothing to do with this. The Grand Master’s hand has been forced, but he knows how we make war and that we don’t dare raise the levies at this time of year. It makes parity of numbers much easier to achieve.”

  “Noble Lady.” Great Prince Yaroslav rose fractionally from his seat and gave her the ghost of a bow. His son Aleksandr Nevskiy didn’t trouble even with that, sitting with his arms folded and a look of discontent or perhaps constipation on his face. “There are a hundred men from each of our three realms encamped beyond the walls of this kremlin, gathered against…” Mar’ya Morevna and Prince Ivan both gave him a hard stare at that, and the Grey Wolf rumbled a growl deep in his chest. Yaroslav had the good grace to stumble over his words and hurriedly alter what he’d been about to say. “…Er, that is, one hundred each. Yes. Er, how many do the Teutons have?”

  “About four hundred sergeants, certainly no more than that, and perhaps thirty knights,” said the Firebird.

  “That means we outnumber them by three hundred men,” began Mar’ya Morevna, but stopped abruptly when Ivan tugged her sleeve.

  “Sixty,” he said.

  “What?”

  “When the worthy Great Prince Yaroslav said ‘each’, he meant only ‘from each domain’, not ‘from each Prince here’. Our forces total only five hundred men, not seven.” He glanced quickly at the Princes. “We outnumber the Knights by only sixty men, if that.”

  Guard-Captain Fedorov had brought one hundred soldiers from Mar’ya Morevna’s kremlin; Khorlov could spare the same number, stiffened with a sprinkling of Akimov’s guards, and Yuriy of Kiev had his full hundred soldiers; but Boris and Pavel Mikhaylovich had only their hundred between them, as had Yaroslav of Vladimir and his son.

  “Four hundred men-at-arms and thirty knights,” said Yuriy Vladimirovich. “They took…was it Prussia or Livonia? with only half that number.”

  “Kulm, Kürland and Livonia,” said Mar’ya Morevna bleakly. “Not Prussia. But the Livonians weren’t expecting them.”

  “Neither were we, until your little bird sang to us,” said Aleksandr Nevskiy, and if he’d taken a week to think of it, he couldn’t have chosen a worse phrase. The Firebird had told the assembly how everything had happened, and all but the dullest of them had seen how the death of that other little bird Vasilisa Kurbit’yevna was still a raw place in Ivan’s mind. His hands clenched into white-knuckled fists, then relaxed again. Nevskiy was just thoughtless, tactless, undiplomatic…

  Ivan didn’t want to believe the sullen prince had said what had been said on purpose.

  Tsar Aleksan
dr breathed a small sigh of relief at his son’s restraint though mixed just a little with regret that Ivan hadn’t done something sudden to Nevskiy, something to take the smug look off his face and the curl out of his beard. All the other Princes would have understood, and said nothing. The Tsar knew that if any of his three daughters had been there, they would have resorted without further ado to the punishment visited on Ivan so many times before, dragging Aleksandr Nevskiy out to the kremlin’s moat and flinging him in even if they had to break the ice to do it. He hid a thin smile at the thought. At this time of year, that wouldn’t so much take the curl from Nevskiy’s beard as fix it permanently.

  There were times when Tsar Aleksandr had to track ideas through the undergrowth of words in a council meeting as though they were elusive small animals. And there were times when they sprang full-grown into his head. One did so now, a way to offset the Teutons’ near-equality of men without emptying his kremlin garrison. Not that he would have dreamed of doing it anyway; professed unity against the invaders was one thing, but he still didn’t trust the other Princes. Allies had taken advantage of such situations before, and they would do it again.

  But not this time, not to him.

  “Dmitriy Vasil’yevich,” he said to the High Steward, “write me a letter. Defy these Teutonic Knights in language they’ll understand. Flay them with words. Then offer them battle in…” The Tsar hesitated. “A time and place we’ll decide later.” He glanced at Mar’ya Morevna for assistance; it had been a long time since he’d learned how to recognize a favourable battlefield, and almost as long since he’d last used the skill himself.

  Mar’ya Morevna, however, was famed for it.

  “The plain of the River Nemen west of Grodno,” she said after a few moments. “Fourteen days from now.”

  *

  The Battlefield of the River Nemen

  “These Rus,” said Albrecht von Düsberg. “How do they fight?”

  The Grand Master looked up yet again from the tactical diagram he was drawing in the snow with a twig as stylus. “Horse and foot,” he said laconically. “Like us, but without mailed knights.”

  “Kuno said they fight like the Mongols.”

  “Oh, did he? Then you’ll know what to expect.”

  “But I’ve never fought the Mongols.”

  “You’ve fought the Saracens,” said von Salza. “I saw you. Horse-archers are much the same wherever you go. It’s just that’s more of them when they’re Mongols.” He gestured at the tangle of lines in the snow, warming to his subject. “But these Rus haven’t faced heavy cavalry before, or they would never have chosen to meet us on this ground. Forested hills here and here, to conceal our preparations. The rest is flat and open, even the river’s frozen so hard that we need have no fear of the ice giving way beneath us.

  “We’ll stand fast on the hills, among the trees so their light horse can’t come at us, and hold until our crossbows persuade their horse and foot to advance or be cut down at a distance. They’ll close in to mass their forces, and that’s when a single charge at the proper point of weakness will crack them like a nut. Once the line is broken, we can pursue and slay at leisure.” Von Salza smiled. “They’ve demonstrated their heresy by offering resistance, so no need for prisoners. Put out the word.”

  Von Düsberg nodded sagely and wandered away, bundled like everyone else against the cold. The Grand Master watched him go, then breathed a sigh of relief and cast about for his twig. His advance scouts had brought him reports and drawings of the River Nemen, and now he scraped another couple of lines into the snow and tried again to work out the best place for his crossbowmen; dealing with von Düsberg’s chatter at the same time hadn’t helped his concentration.

  Since he knew both the public and the private reasons for it, the Grand Master didn’t have the heart to shoo his Treasurer away. What most of the other knights and sergeants thought was that von Düsberg knew nothing but numbers and the counting of them, and on the eve of his first major battle was trying to find out what would happen. That wasn’t strictly true; Albrecht had seen service in the Holy Land.

  The anonymous comment from someone that the Treasurer was scared of combat and trying to hide it with a smokescreen of babble was more accurate, but not where the coming battle was concerned. Von Düsberg’s prattling and the Grand Master’s curtness performed the same function, but what they concealed was more complex than fear. They shared the secret of how Dieter Balke had died, and if details came out of how the Rus had killed the best and strongest of his knights by sorcery, von Salza knew the invasion would fall apart. Kuno von Buxhövden had guessed a little of it, but would say nothing. Besides, he hadn’t been there. He hadn’t seen.

  Necessity made von Salza’s battle-plan a simple one. Knowing the Rus were undamaged by any hoped-for internal war and aware by now of what threatened them, he’d been forced to act much sooner than intended. The winter weather was too severe for a protracted campaign, and because he’d moved in a hurry in case the Rus turned out their peasant levies after all, his forces were limited to those from Burg Thorn, less than four hundred sergeants and a paltry thirty knights. Though he missed the ten and two escorting Father Arnald back to Rome, what was done was done.

  Dieter Balke had taken Livonia with a respective twenty and two hundred, but Balke was dead. He had felled trees and built timber Balkenburgen – the pun had amused von Salza at the time – as defensive strongholds all along his route, but never faced a set-piece battle no matter how small. Lacking the leisure to build even those small, primitive fortresses, what the Grand Master had intended was to capture one or two towns, scour them empty then hold their kremlin citadels until reinforcements came up in spring from other castles of the Order. That was how it was done in the Holy Land, and it worked – at least, so long as the towns could be captured and their populations slaughtered without much opposition. The Rus opposition was here already, or would be by the morning, and this damned country was too wide open to sidestep by a forced countermarch.

  In the best traditions of chivalry they had sent him formal defiance and a challenge to meet in battle on the banks of the Nemen, but directly he saw the scroll, prepared in both Russian and Latin, he realized it was also intended as a warning. The document looked impressive, with seal-impressions and accompanying marks or signs-manual from every Prince who had suffered Balke’s and Baba Yaga’s interference, but after scouts brought information that despite all those names the Rus host was as tiny as his own, von Salza had laughed at their audacity.

  Compulsion worked both ways; he’d been forced to move quickly after Balke’s plan fell to pieces – just like Dieter himself, thought von Salza with brutal, compassion-blunting humour – but had compelled the Rus to an equally-swift response with only the household troops they maintained during the winter. The numbers of each small army were nearly equal, and since the scouts had seen no Rus skirmish-line it was possible the enemy hadn’t enough spare men to post one. Von Salza drew in the snow again, smiling to himself at the advantages of advance warning. Knowing what was over the next hill was the key to battle, just as much as men and weapons.

  A wolf howled somewhere up in those next hills, making horses stamp and whinny throughout the Order’s camp, and Hermann von Salza glanced up from his map-making. If there had been time and safety to do it, he would have organized another sort of hunt than the brief daily forays which augmented their rations with fresh meat. He didn’t like wolves: the brutes seemed to sense battle, just like the vultures in Outremer, but at least the carrion birds didn’t revel in it.

  Von Salza listened, frowning, sure he’d heard this wolf before because the howl was noticeably deeper and the animal probably bigger in proportion. A pack leader, most likely. He entertained brief notions of a new fur lining for his cloak, but would forgo that luxury if the accursed beast would just stop shadowing his army…

  *

  “…And they have crossbows,” the Grey Wolf concluded. He glanced back towards the s
now-covered ridge along which his tracks were still plainly visible. “Perhaps a hundred, maybe a few less. I didn’t wait to count each one.”

  “That shows what they think of us,” said Great Prince Yuriy of Kiev. The observation drew blank looks from those who didn’t understand, and world-weary, cynical smiles from those who did. “Their last Pope,” he explained for the benefit mostly of the brothers Mikhaylovich, “declared in full council session that because of the severe wounds it caused, using crossbows against Christians was prohibited. But it was still considered suitable against pagans and the heretical.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said Mar’ya Morevna.

  “Glad?” Aleksandr Nevskiy laughed, an unpleasant, deliberately grating sound that had nothing to do with humour. “Then for all your reputation as a commander of armies, noble Lady, it’s plain you haven’t seen a crossbow in action.”

  “Have I not?” said Mar’ya Morevna in tones of such innocent surprise that it drew smiles from the other Princes and left Nevskiy floundering. “Tell me then, what makes it so different from our own bows?”

  “Well… Well, there’s the penetration, for a start.”

  Mar’ya Morevna glanced quickly at Prince Ivan in case he disapproved, received the imperceptible nod and smile that let her go ahead, then leaned back in her camp chair, lowered her eyelids and shot that hooded, loaded look at Aleksandr Nevskiy. “I’m happily married,” she purred. “You don’t need to tell me anything about penetration.” This time there was such a crash of laughter from the others that it drew curious glances from the common soldiers nearest their commanders’ tents, and Nevskiy wattled purple with embarrassment.

  “Madam, that was—”

  “Unladylike?” said Ivan coolly. “Well, Aleksandr Yaroslavich, perhaps it was. My wife best knows her own mind on such matters. If when commanding soldiers and thinking like a soldier she needs to talk like a soldier, then that’s her privilege. You, however, don’t talk like a gentleman, and for that you have no excuse.”