“Then you were successful?” said the Tsar, bracing his son at arm’s length while he looked for damage.
“More than we expected.” Mar’ya Morevna held up the Firebird’s feather triumphantly, and a bloom of light brighter than ten thousand candles pushed the snow-shot darkness back. “More than we could have dreamed possible. And all thanks to your son. My husband.” The pride in her voice was worth more to Ivan in that moment than all the gold of Greek Byzantium.
Then he saw the head.
Time and cold had relaxed its features from whatever terror had come with impending death and now, freed from the box packed with tamped snow that had kept it fresh, its only expression was slack-lipped surprise.
Ivan stared at it, gazing into dead eyes like wet and milky pebbles, and for an instant saw not just this head but thousands, piled up in dreadful crow-haunted pyramids to mark the passage of their slayers. Whether he saw with the True Sight that was his father’s occasional curse, or only through the colouring of his own imagination, Prince Ivan looked at this solitary dead face and saw the face of War. A fuming of incense drifted across his vision as Archbishop Levon continued with the sonorous requiem prayers, and Ivan shivered as though awakened from an ugly dream.
“…It was flung at the gate by a rider whose horse never even slowed,” Akimov was saying to Mar’ya Morevna. “I can’t blame the guards, noble Tsarevna. They turned out as fast as they were able – I was there, I saw them – but no man can catch hoofbeats on the wind, and those were all that remained. Except for that.”
“Who and where?” Ivan cloaked his own feelings with the terse, forceful façade he had seen used by his own father. Such short sentences never lasted long enough to betray a tremor in the voice. It was the Tsar himself who answered, but not before he had gazed thoughtfully at his son as though recognizing and approving one of his own tricks of speech.
“He was a spy in Kiev. One of the best. And I would have sworn on the life-giving cross that no one there suspected him.”
The Archbishop finished his prayers and pronounced a general absolution, and all present signed themselves and said Amen. Then Ivan said, “Is this Great Prince Yuriy’s way of declaring war on Khorlov?”
“Hardly.” Mar’ya Morevna shook her head, denying the possibility. “He wouldn’t have been so blatant. As I read Yuriy Vladimirovich, he would only declare war when his armies were encamped around this kremlin and he had it under siege. It was meant to look like his work, and meant to provoke – but Kiev didn’t do this. It’s both too obvious, and not obvious enough.”
“The Princes of Novgorod have their own troubles,” said Captain Akimov thoughtfully. “But might they have done this, to gain advantage while shifting blame for it elsewhere?”
“Maybe. Or maybe not. We’re snatching at whatever straws the wind blows by.” Mar’ya Morevna looked at the Firebird’s feather again. “And we already have a problem to resolve.”
“Maybe all these matters are connected, somehow and somewhere.” Ivan forced a humourless laugh at his own ridiculous notion, then averted his eyes as the spy’s severed head was gathered up and looked instead at Mar’ya Morevna. “There’s no longer any chance of sleep, is there?”
“No, loved, there isn’t. I want to reach the library in my kremlin by morning. Have someone roust out the horses.”
“And explain the rude awakening to them.” Ivan grimaced at the thought of the complaints. A talking horse was a magical, marvellous thing, but a horse that never shut up was a bloody nuisance; in the wrong mood Sivka could be both. He traded a look and a sour, crooked smile with his father the Tsar, who had watched the exchange with grim good humour. “Papa, when we come back from… From wherever we’re going, we’ll stay a while longer. Just don’t declare war on Prince Yuriy till then…”
CHAPTER SIX
The Great Princely State of Kiev;
1234 A.D.
The kremlin of Kiev was at the centre of the city, and today it was also at the centre of an uproarious celebration. When Great Prince Yuriy Vladimirovich made merry on his naming-day, he didn’t restrict that merriment to within the walls of the palace. In one corner of the courtyard a consort of musicians played a lively dance-tune, and played it well though their efforts were almost drowned out by the dancers who leaped and whirled and stamped their boot-heels against the wooden boards laid on the pavement for just that purpose. In the other corner was an old storyteller whose audience listened quietly – although they cheered the exciting parts – as he strummed on a gusla psaltery of fine maple-wood and recited the old tale of “Il’ya Muromets and the Dragon”.
In between the two were acrobats, jugglers, conjurers, whose tricks were nothing to do with the true Art Magic, and every variation between respectful silence and disrespectful uproar. The kremlin’s frozen fountains had been melted clear by cunning placement of the fires roasting a large variety of livestock to tasty perfection; Yuriy Vladimirovich was no miser, but he didn’t burn two lots of firewood if one was enough. Now the fountains not running with wine ran with beer instead, except for one allowed to freeze again so it could spray a stream of icy vodka though the air.
Even without those fountains there was a fair amount of alcohol around the kremlin of Kiev. The Great Prince’s nephew-in-law, Oleg Vasil’yevich, had just become the father of a fine son, and though Prince Yuriy had little time for lesser members of his family, seeing them as hangers-on for what his rank and position could provide, he had been happy to add Oleg’s celebration to his own. Not only did he pay just once for both festivals, it stopped people counting back from the birth to the marriage and coming up with an unfortunate discrepancy.
The man in the heavy bearskin cloak drifted gently through the crowd, looking about him with a benevolent smile for any who met his inquisitive gaze. He carried a roasted rib of beef in his left hand, and a knife in the right with which he cut off small slivers of meat to nibble on. Now and again he stopped, his attention drawn by a pretty girl or a particularly agile acrobat, but for the most part he simply ambled about, enjoying the festival atmosphere. If he had a tendency to stare and gape, that was hardly unusual, since there were plenty of people in from the country who had never seen the magnificence of Kiev’s great kremlin before – although his staring was less at its magnificence, and more at the defences of towers, walls and moat.
Dieter Balke sliced himself another strip of beef, his knife gliding through the meat with an ease that showed it was lethally sharper than the average eating-knife, and chewed it thoughtfully. It would be best, he decided, if he left Kiev in the next day or so. His guise as a seller of poultry, with a good supply of chickens, geese, ducks and squab, had been successful enough until this damned party, announced without any prior warning.
It had literally eaten up almost his entire stock, because after a week of becoming known as a man who drove a hard but fair bargain, any sudden refusal to sell would have been suspicious. But now, instead of a poultry butcher who had made a killing from the Great Prince’s kitchens – well, the butcher part was accurate enough and the killing would come later – Balke was very obviously a man who kept pigeons, birds known for messaging as well as eating.
Yes, leaving Kiev would be sensible, but not just yet. Gnawing at the savoury crisp shreds on the back curve of the beef bone, he began easing his way through the crowds towards the kremlin steps where Great Prince Yuriy would accept the homage of his vassals and the gifts of his retainers. There was one gift in particular that Dieter Balke wanted to see opened before he left the city. A similar token of esteem should have arrived at Khorlov by now…
Sending severed heads would certainly encourage the dislike each Rus Prince held for all the others, but Balke didn’t expect immediate success, because the Rus had drawn too much of their culture from Greek Byzantium. Instead of precipitate action, there would be talking; heated protestations of ignorance and innocence and demands for proof. All those words would seem no more than lies when the next head a
rrived in its packing of snow. Or the next head; or the one after that.
Dieter Balke had his orders, and he was ready to obey them for as long as necessary.
If those Princes and Tsars had been French or English it would have been another matter. He had encountered Frankish knights in the Holy Land, and whether they belonged to the other military Orders or owed their allegiance to the Kingdom of Outremer, they all been alike in their pride and impatient hot temper that would send them riding over their own foot-soldiers and headlong into whatever trap had been laid for them.
As for the English, even though that maniac King Richard Löwenherz was long in his grave, his barons remained just as passionate and hot-headed. His brother and successor John, though a cold fish and not given to open battle, would doubtless find some means of revenging himself by stealth on a supposed enemy, something just as effective at provoking war as what Balke himself was doing.
There were two other men in Kiev that he wanted to meet. Neither of them knew him as the Landmeister of Livonia and Hermann von Salza’s right-hand man or as a seller of poultry for the table; instead, after meetings that Balke had kept carefully separate and concealed from each other, they had been led to believe he had been sent from their respective cities as an additional pair of eyes and ears.
Such persons had indeed been sent, from Novgorod and from Aleksandr Nevskiy’s domain of Vladimir, but with the aid of spells taught by Baba Yaga, Balke had already met them both. There had been no spells involved in the way he had taken their secrets from them, only the ancient, cunning use of blade and fire that he had learned from a Saracen master of the art. Dieter Balke gained no pleasure from such un-knightly actions. He had extracted the information from each spy as carefully and as dispassionately as he would have crushed juice from an orange, and afterwards, though their useless pulp had been left in the snow to nourish wolves and bears, he had first made sure to say the proper prayers for the dead.
The shrill notes of trumpets cut through the babble in the courtyard, and a murmurous stillness had fallen by the time Great Prince Yuriy came to the top of the steps. Cheering began again, more in thanks for free food and drink than because anyone truly liked the man, and Yuriy acknowledged the outcry with one hand waved regally in the air.
Dieter Balke cheered just as hard, revelling in the hazards of his situation more than anything since leading the Teutonic Knights on their holy crusade into the forests of Prussia. He hadn’t been expected to succeed or even to survive. How could he, commanding the twenty knights and two hundred sergeants that were all the Order could spare? But Balke had survived, succeeded and ultimately prospered, learning in that long bloody process the value of real rather than token ruthlessness.
His force built fortresses as they advanced, simple ramparts and ditches topped with timber palisades cut from the over-abundant forest. They were primitive, but the heathen Prusiskai were more primitive still and had nothing to match them. From the safety of their wooden walls, the knights could strike at leisure, to burn every village they encountered and massacre every man, woman and child who refused conversion to the True Faith.
Pacifying the pagans had taken two years, with the constant risk of having one’s living guts pulled out and wrapped round a holy tree to please the gods of the forest. In that wilderness of bog and heathland, forest and wind-torn dunes, death came quickly to the careless, and slowly to the weak or wounded. It had been an exciting time, a time when every knight and sergeant not dead already knew what it was to be strong and whole and truly alive, and Dieter Balke had found nothing in the rank of Landmeister that could match it.
Until now.
*
The trumpets sounded again, and the cheers faded to an expectant silence, but Grand Prince Yuriy didn’t waste a speech on the common people. Instead he waved once more, plainly a dismissal, and turned his attention to the richly dressed nobility standing off to one side.
Merchants, townsfolk and peasants returned their attention to the more important business of the holiday: selling and buying, eating and drinking, entertaining and being entertained. There was beer and wine in the fountains and meat on the slowly turning joints of beef, pork and mutton, and those were of more immediate interest than any gift their Prince received. Those gifts were so expensive that simple people couldn’t relate their value to anything they understood, like the size of a field or the numbers of a flock. A leg of chicken and a pot of ale were easier to grasp.
Dieter Balke knew the value of one gift with absolute certainty: it was both the cheapest and the dearest thing the Great Prince would receive today, costing Balke little effort but the original owner his life. Ensuring that the head in its fine wooden casket would be presented in public had required the spending of some gold; but it had been a temporary expense, recovered before adding his late helper’s corpse to the other holiday flotsam bumping under the ice of the River Dnepr.
Baba Yaga had taught him words to speak aloud and a symbol to draw in the air and, an inquisitive man, Balke had tried them instead of his knife. The kremlin servant’s head had exploded like an egg hit with a hammer, to such effect that Balke privately resolved not to use the spell indoors again and certainly not on either of the spies he was meeting.
He was rather taken with his new-found skill at sorcery, but quite apart from the mess – which didn’t concern him, a simple mace-blow did that to a pagan if its skull was small enough – it left the remnant unrecognizable. Since his plan required knowing whose the head had been, where it had come from and therefore who had probably sent it, the useful spell was useless.
That was why he bought his beef on the bone. Balke might expect to be searched, even to surrender his knife, but nobody could be suspect him of meaning mischief with his dinner. Their error would last right up to the moment when it slammed with killing force against brow or temple or nape of neck. If only Samson had known, thought Balke; a ox’s rib was well shaped for a focused strike, and much handier than the jawbone of an ass.
He nibbled at it even though the surface was scraped clean, a small and pointless activity that served to cover his intense interest in the doings of his betters at the top of the steps. Yuriy Vladimirovich Kievskiy was admiring a handsome robe, gold-figured blue velvet lined with Siberian sable. Balke admired it too, but rather critically, finding it just that bit ostentatious for a knight in an austere and holy Christian Order. He was more interested in the young servant standing next in line of presentation who carried a rosewood box, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and just the right size to store a furred winter hat.
Prince Yuriy evidently thought so, for after a few seconds spent fruitlessly looking for the donor of this fine gift, he said something that made everyone laugh then took off his own hat and opened the box. The laughter stopped as if cut with a knife, but of all the commoners milling about in the kremlin courtyard only the most uncommon of them noticed. Dieter Balke snorted, turned it into an aborted sneeze, then clamped his teeth on the beef-bone to hide his satisfaction. Yuriy’s abruptly salt-white face made it clear he didn’t appreciate the kindness of a box to put his hat in…
And something inside to put it on…
*
The Independent Principality of Koldunov
Prince Ivan and Mar’ya Morevna returned to their own kremlin with even greater speed than they left it, arriving in the courtyard at the core of a thunderous blast of light, sound and displaced air that shattered several of the kremlin’s expensive glass windows. Reining Chornyy back almost onto his haunches when he skidded on the ice-crusted snow, Mar’ya Morevna cocked her head to listen to the distant, almost musical clash of falling shards, and gave Ivan a tight smile.
“Oops!” she said, more amused than guilty. “Fedor Konstantinovich will have words with me about that. He warned me before: I can make a dramatic entrance, or I can have glass in my palace windows, but not both at once.”
The High Steward, although he arrived at a scamper that looked most peculiar on one o
f his venerable appearance, didn’t mention the broken windows, nor pass any comment on their sudden return from Khorlov. Having served Mar’ya Morevna for twelve years, and her father Koldun the enchanter for the fifty years before that, Fedor Konstantinovich had long learned when to speak and when to keep silent. He merely bowed low as his liege lady and her husband hurried past him into the kremlin palace, and watched them long enough to make sure they were not only heading as he suspected for the library, but that once there they would be consulting books rather than doing any of the married-couple things that were better not interrupted. Once certain of both, he clapped his hands and set about the business of having food and drink prepared and sent up to them.
“…All that, without a word being spoken to him?” said Prince Ivan, marvelling. He had paused at the head of the stairs to glance back down at the High Steward, and Mar’ya Morevna had given him a terse explanation of what the old gentleman was thinking. Unfortunately, she hadn’t paused at all, so that when he turned to follow her, Ivan found himself forced into a less than dignified trot in order to keep up with her raking stride. Mar’ya Morevna was, in the opinion of many, the most beautiful Princess in all the Russias; in her husband’s opinion, she had also the longest legs, and when she was in a hurry they could propel her along at a startling rate. His trotting, perforce, got faster and faster, until finally he gave up, and ran.
He was out of breath by the time he reached the kremlin library and flopped down into one of its heavily padded reading chairs. Ivan was as padded as the chair; neither he nor Mar’ya Morevna had paused to take off their thick travelling furs when they dismounted, and while such garments were ideal to keep the cold out while riding through a Russian winter, they were much less suited to running through a kremlin’s corridors and up and down its stairs.
Firebird (Tales of Old Russia Book 2) Page 17