What the chroniclers’ refusal to answer or accept couldn’t conceal was the arrogant presence of Tatar couriers. These solitary men, on fast horses and lightly armed, were riding to and fro across the face of Moist-Mother-Earth as if they owned it. Which was of course untrue.
Wasn’t it…?
Those who had thought so were mostly dead now, their cities in ruins, their people either slaves or corpses, and their treasure in the possession of the most successful robbers that the world had ever seen.
“If the Tatars come to Khorlov, Majesty, what will you do?” asked Strel’tsin. The old man seemed slightly chastened, though Ivan knew from past experience of the chief councillor’s moods that it was no more than a temporary change in manner. Tsar Ivan glanced at Mar’ya Morevna, who nodded in silent approval, then poured himself a fresh cup of wine and sipped it in slow deliberation. He hoped that Strel’tsin hadn’t heard the cup clink against his teeth as he drank, for now the question had been asked, Ivan’s intended response was making his hands shake.
“When the Tatars come to Khorlov, I’ll submit.”
Dmitriy Vasil’yevich stared at his Tsar, then emitted a strangled sound of disbelief that could never have been described as a word. He controlled himself with an effort, though from the look on his face he would have preferred to tear his beard in a formal display of indignation. Ivan suspected it would have little formality left in it. “Majesty, you dare not—” Ivan’s eyebrows went up and Strel’tsin stuttered to a halt. “I, er, that is, the Council would never permit it.”
“The Council has already been summoned to attend me,” said Ivan. “Not that I intend to give them any choice in the matter.”
Strel’tsin took a deep breath. It did little to help his colour, which had gone pale except for two feverish spots of red below his eyes. “Tsar Aleksandr wouldn’t have done this,” he said finally, knowing that Ivan couldn’t deny such a statement without insult to his own father. Ivan didn’t give him even that much satisfaction.
“I know it,” he said. “And so did he. That was why he abdicated in my favour. So that when the time came, Khorlov would have a Tsar who could make such a decision.”
“He knew?”
“My father has the Sight, Dmitriy Vasil’yevich. You know that as well as I do, though conveniently you appear to have forgotten the fact.”
“I remember well enough—”
“So much for convenience.”
“—But he would never have used it to justify the action of a coward!”
“Old man,” said Mar’ya Morevna, “guard your tongue. You may be First Minister of this realm, its High Steward, Court Sorcerer, Castellan of Khorlov and sundry other things. But all those hats are worn by just one head, and heads can be removed.”
Shocked, Strel’tsin stared at Mar’ya Morevna, then turned to Ivan in the hope that he might take his wife to task for overstepping her authority outside her own domains. “Majesty, surely…”
“Surely not,” said Ivan coldly. “You presume too much on your age and long service, Dmitriy Vasil’yevich. Be more careful. I wouldn’t be faced with this decision if men so quick to voice opinions had been as quick to hear them.”
“After Ryazan was destroyed,” said Mar’ya Morevna, “we sent warnings to all the Princes of the Rus who rode with Khorlov against the Teutonic Knights.”
Ivan nodded gloomily. “My father said they might have better memories of that battle, and of me, than of other past dealings with this Tsardom. Except that they wouldn’t listen! They – or their First Ministers – were too busy looking for the catch, the trick, the advantage for Khorlov and the loss to themselves. We could have made Russia a single mouthful big enough to make the Tatars choke on it, and instead we let them chew us up one bite at a time! So don’t use the word ‘coward’ to me. I may not be able to restore Kiev and the rest, but if I’ve got enough courage to put my self-esteem aside, I can prevent my own city from suffering the same fate.”
He stood up abruptly, drained his wine-cup to the dregs, and slammed it back against the table’s surface hard enough for the little pigeon-borne scroll to leap off it. “The Council will be waiting,” he said, and bent to lift the parchment from the floor and tuck it into the pocket of his belt. “Your choice is a simple one, Dmitriy Vasil’yevich; support me, or oppose me. The time for standing to one side is past and gone.”
“Failing to support the Tsar’s decision is treason,” said Strel’tsin. He spoke quickly, to forestall Mar’ya Morevna from saying the same thing, and bowed slightly in her direction. For all the hard words exchanged over the table, he was smiling, a small, dry curving of the lips but a smile nevertheless. “And I have never yet failed to support the decisions of any Tsar of Khorlov” – Ivan opened his mouth to protest such an outrageous lie – “when those decisions were wise, and worthy of support.”
Ivan shut his mouth again. He couldn’t dispute the truth.
*
Tsar Ivan stared at his High Council, turning that scrap of parchment over and over between his fingers, and waited for a pause in the babble of conversation. Then realized after a few minutes that if he was going to wait for that, he would wait a very long time. Instead he gestured to Guard-Captain Akimov.
“The Tsar! Silence for the Tsar!” roared the Cossack in the same voice Ivan had once heard carry clearly half-way across an engaged battle-front. It slapped through the Council Chamber and produced a sudden quiet not so much because that had been requested as because none of the councillors were capable of competing with that extraordinary bellow.
“Better,” said Ivan, and straightened his fur-trimmed crown to give his trembling hands something to do. “Lords and gentlemen, I called this meeting for reasons of safety and security.” If there had been discreet speculation beforehand, the Tsar’s use of such ominous words sent a ripple of dismay through every councillor, young or old.
“The Tatars,” he continued, “have passed though Russia like a storm sent by God as retribution for our sins – whatever those may be, to warrant such a severe punishment from so loving and merciful a deity.”
There was a flurry of moving hands as the entire Council crossed themselves, though Ivan wasn’t sure whether it was a reaction to his opinion of the Tatar invaders, or his faintly blasphemous view of God. Perhaps Archbishop Levon Popovich was right, he thought grimly, perhaps working with the Art Magic does have an effect on your faith. Or perhaps encounters with good Christian people like the Teutonic Knights and their pets from the Holy Order of the Inquisition has more effect than that. He gave them another chance to recover their composure before he went on; and took that opportunity to sit down himself, where the slight tremor of his fingers was less apparent.
“Spies and other trusted agents have kept a close watch on their progress across Moist-Mother-Earth. I can tell you now that with the exception of a few garrisons, the bulk of their host has passed beyond the borders of Russia, heading westward towards the lands of Hungary, Wallachia, Poland and the Holy Roman Empire. The cities of Buda-Pest, Krakov, Vienna and many others lie before them.”
Ivan paused, listening to the undercurrent of murmuring, and heard what he’d expected. Not one man in the Council Chamber cared a whit about what was happening or might happen further west. The foremost hope voiced was that the Tatars would find the lands of Europe enough to their taste that they would settle there for good. The Tsar of Khorlov closed his eyes briefly to shut in a spasm of disgust with his own people.
“Councillors, I believe they’ll find these western countries a far harder nut to crack than they found us.” There was a small hum of denial, but Ivan shook his head. “The Princes of the Rus have become so used to feud and private war, or at the very least so used to distrusting one another in anticipation of such wars, I doubt we could act together even in the face of Armageddon and the Judgment Day itself. The Kings and Dukes of Europe may have squabbled with each other just as much, but unlike us, they banded together in the common cause o
f their Crusades. What they did once, they may do again – though whether it will serve against the Tatars, I can’t say. But their cities and kremlins are walled with stone, not wood, and their lands are mountainous and thick with forests, a terrain less suited to the Tatar way of making war than our wide steppes.”
He paused again, and looked at his hands. Now he was coming to the crunch, they’d stopped shaking and were as steady as those of any man with a clear conscience. The councillors were aware he’d called them here for more than a summary of what he hoped they all knew already; but Ivan knew the High Council of Khorlov well enough not to trust such optimistic assumptions. They all held their positions more by rank and inheritance than by ability, and though Ivan intended to change that situation, now wasn’t the time. Thus for the most part the older boyaryy were comfortable, indolent and disinclined to change, while the younger bogatyri were warriors who viewed war with the starry eyes of ignorance. Too few of them had been with Ivan in the Battle on the Ice, and despite the fondness of Rus Princes for making private war on one another, Khorlov’s Tsars had avoided such pointless and unprofitable activity for long enough that most of these blindly courageous blockheads had never drawn their swords in action.
“The Tatars are gone, and we in Khorlov haven’t seen them pass us by. Be grateful for that respite, my lords and gentlemen, because they’ll be back. If they’re defeated in the west, they’ll fall back to regroup as they’ve done for the past three years. Even if their downfall is so complete that they return to the high steppes of Asia, they’ll pass through Russia on the way. But if they conquer in the west they’ll still need the steppes to raise their horses, and they’ve conquered all the lands of Rus already.”
As Ivan expected, there was a rumbling of disapproval at that. He had guessed right: the High Council of Khorlov, advisors to the Tsar on affairs of government and policy, either didn’t know or didn’t care to know what had been happening to other cities and domains. It hadn’t happened to them, therefore it didn’t matter.
It hadn’t happened yet.
“Last month they laid siege to Kiev,” he said. “The siege lasted five days, before the city fell on the feast of St. Nikolai. Now do you begin to understand me?” Ivan watched the effect of such blunt words with a detached, cool interest. For a few minutes it was like watching a fox in a hen-house, and then one of the gabbling poultry thought to ask a sensible question at long last.
“Majesty, if the Tatars come to Khorlov, what can we do?”
In what sense do you mean ‘we’? Ivan didn’t voice the doubt aloud. He’d prepared his speech for this moment with an actor’s care, but now the moment had arrived, like many actors he found the lines had fled from memory. “If by that you mean resist, then we – the Tsar and the Council and the people of Khorlov – can do nothing. Kiev tried to resist. Ryazan, Vladimir – all the others, and what are they now but names? Those cities are gone. Destroyed. Wiped from the face of the earth. I won’t see that happen to Khorlov. So there’s something I can do. When the Tatar envoys come to the gates with their demand to bow down and submit or be destroyed, I—”
His hands were shaking again, and he clenched them so tightly that his fingernails cut crescent welts into the palms, pressing them so hard against the arms of the chair that they might have been tied in place.
“I will put my pride in the dust, and I will bow down to the Khan, and I will submit.”
During that long walk from the kremlin to the Council Chamber, Ivan had tried to imagine what the uproar would sound like when it came. None of those imagined noises were adequate to describe the pandemonium that greeted his announcement, a cacophony of denials, refusals, jeering and formless howls of outrage beyond even Captain Akimov’s ability to shout down. There were few words clear enough to distinguish from the general clamour, but Ivan heard some of them; words no ruler wants to hear from his loyal supporters.
“Renegade..! Coward..! Traitor..! Abdicate..!”
Warned in advance that there might be trouble at this Council meeting, Akimov had quadrupled the usual guard of honour and on his own authority had made sure that they were equipped not for parade, but for battle. It meant that by the time the shouting had begun to die down, the Tsar of Khorlov was flanked by two troops of armoured men, with a third ranged across the doors of the Council Chamber. The place became relatively quiet after that.
Ivan studied the rows of choleric faces, glistening with the sweat of righteous wrath, and despaired of seeing even one that might understand his appeal to reason. There was such a thing as being a High Councillor for too long. It was becoming all too obvious why some Princes flew into notable passions and had all their advisors slaughtered, then appointed completely new ones. Such behaviour wasn’t far removed from the Tatar approach to conquest: the fate of their predecessors would keep the next lot in order for fear of the same treatment. As long as they didn’t make a habit of it, those Princes were the ones with relatively stable reigns. It was the soft-hearted rulers who usually had trouble, because their nobility knew that taking liberties would never be punished as it deserved. Ivan could see that all the doors had been secured; every single councillor was here, and Guard-Captain Akimov’s men carried the only weapons.
Then he stamped such thoughts into the back of his mind before they could become a command that from the look of him Akimov would obey without hesitation. If he was going to act like a Tatar, he might as well join forces with them rather than merely capitulate, something to justify the cries of ‘Traitor’ more than anything else could do. It would have to be reason after all, though talking sense into heads that had no room for it wasn’t a task he relished.
*
The High Councillors of Khorlov conceded his point at last, though Ivan’s throat was dry and hoarse by the time he was done. They’d finally agreed that resistance wasn’t just futile but suicidal, as witnessed by the ruins of so many cities. Those same ruins, and the death or flight of the Princes who had once ruled them, prevented any scornful fingers being pointed at Khorlov in later times. And men in chains could plan to get rid of their fetters, but dead men could never climb out of their graves.
It had taken almost five hours, and in all that time – he was proud of it – he hadn’t once resorted to the simple declaration of his rank and title as a reason for obedience. Dmitriy Vasil’yevich Strel’tsin had been equally proud, though Ivan was sure success here had condemned Tsarevich Nikolai to the same wearisome tuition in rhetoric and oratory he’d suffered as a boy. If it worked then it worked and the Prince would probably thank him for it later, though Ivan was honest enough to concede that thanking his own father was the last thing in his mind when the lessons began.
What had made Ivan’s task more delicate than almost anything else was the realization that any consent had to be unanimous, otherwise there would always be at least one loudly righteous council member who could make the others question their decision whenever he chose. But there had been no protests, no objections, and if the final murmur of compliance had been less than enthusiastic, at least it had been consistent.
Mar’ya Morevna had come into the chamber at some time during that five hours of debate, slipping quietly into an unoccupied chair near the door, and had brought the children with her. They had slept for most of the time, but Ivan had been grateful for her presence both then and now everything was settled, because as the day dragged on an expression of friendly support had come to count for more than those of stern or scholarly approval worn by Akimov and Strel’tsin. But it was done at last, and hopefully Khorlov was safe. If the Tatars didn’t offer their usual terms he would be the first to make them pay in blood for every span of ground they gained; but if that ground could be bought more cheaply then he wouldn’t examine the bill too much. That had provoked a weak laugh, but at least it could be recognized as such.
Unlike the young bogatyr who got to his feet near the back of the chamber. Ivan didn’t know him by sight, except that he wasn’t one of th
e warrior-heroes who had fought the Teutonic Knights and now made up the core of the new Tsar’s druzhinya retinue. With the discussion over and everyone shifting about to relieve cramped arms and legs and especially backsides kept immobile for too long, someone standing wasn’t be out of the ordinary. But this young man was moving too deliberately to be merely stretching his limbs, and those sitting near him were visibly attempting to pull him back. He wasn’t heading for the privy, then; anyway, he was going in the wrong direction. And if he was leaving the Council Chamber for any other reason, then he was gravely out of order to the point of open discourtesy. The Tsar left such meetings first, and only after they had been formally concluded.
“You, sir! Where are you going?” First Minister Strel’tsin was also on his feet and pointing with one finger so there could be no mistake about the subject of his question. Even so the bogatyr, already halfway to the door, turned around and gestured to himself as though he wasn’t alone. There was something insulting about it, and Strel’tsin seethed with all the affronted dignity of his rank. “Yes, noble sir, I mean you. This meeting isn’t over yet.”
“It is,” said the warrior. “For me at least.”
Ivan stood up with a single smooth movement that betrayed nothing of his own stiff joints and stared at the bogatyr through narrowed eyes. The man was no older than himself, and that meant he was a deal too young for such dramatic posturing, and quite possibly too young to have a place on the Council at all, unless…
“Your name, sir,” he said.
The young man looked at him with unconcealed contempt. “Aleksey Mikhailovich Romanov,” he replied and then, a deliberate afterthought, “Majesty.”
The Golden Horde Page 10
