Vasya saw then that the crowd was looking at her famous brother more than at her. She breathed again.
Dmitrii roared from a seat at a small dais, “Cousins! Come here, both of you.”
Kasyan bowed a fraction and indicated the way. The scrum of boyars pressed back against the walls, allowing them to pass.
Following her brother, Vasya crossed the room. A wave of talk rose in her wake. Vasya’s head swam with the shifting colors of jewels and kaftans and bright-painted walls. She made herself stalk stately after Sasha. A mad jumble of carpets and skins covered the floor. Attendants stood blank-faced in corners. Minute windows, mere slits, let in a little breathable air.
Dmitrii sat in the midst of the throng, in a carved and inlaid chair. He was newly bathed, pink and cheerful, at ease in the center of the boyars’ talk. But Vasya thought she saw turmoil in his eyes, something hard and flat in his expression.
Sasha stirred beside her; he’d seen it, too.
“I present my brother, Dmitrii Ivanovich,” said Sasha in clipped, formal tones that cut through the hall’s murmuring. His hands were thrust into his sleeves; Vasya could almost feel him vibrate with tension. “Vasilii Petrovich.”
Vasya bowed deeply, hoping not to lose her hat.
“You are welcome here,” said Dmitrii with equal formality. He proceeded to name her to a dazzling variety of first and second cousins. When her head was swimming from the march of names, the Grand Prince said abruptly, “Enough of introductions. Are you hungry, Vasya? Well—” He glanced at the scrum and said, “We will have a bite to ourselves, and a little talk among friends. This way.”
So saying, the Grand Prince rose, while all the staring folk bowed, and led the way into another room, blessedly empty of people. Vasya drew a relieved breath.
A table stood between stove and window, and at Dmitrii’s wave, a serving-man began to pile it with cakes and soup and platters. Vasya watched with unabashed longing. She had almost forgotten what it felt like to not be hungry. No matter what she had eaten the past fortnight, the cold always sapped the nourishment away. She had counted each of her ribs, in the bathhouse.
“Sit down,” Dmitrii said. His coat was shot with silver and stiff with gems and red gold; his hair and beard had been washed and oiled. In his fine clothes, he had acquired a new air of authority, sharp and precise and a little frightening, though he still concealed it beneath his round-cheeked smile. Vasya and Sasha took places at the narrow table. Cups of hot and sweet-smelling wine lay to hand. The center of the table was crowned with a great pie, studded with cabbage and egg and smoked fish.
“The boyars are coming tonight,” said the Grand Prince. “I must feast them all, piggish things, and send them home dazed with the meat. They must get their fill of flesh before the great fast begins.” Dmitrii’s glance took in Vasya, who hadn’t managed yet to peel her eyes from the platters. His face softened a little. “But I did not think our Vasya could wait for supper.”
Vasya nodded, swallowed, and managed, “I have been a bottomless pit, since the road, Dmitrii Ivanovich.”
“As it should be!” cried Dmitrii. “You haven’t nearly your growth yet. Come, eat and drink, both of you. Wine for my young cousin, and for the warrior-monk—or are you fasting already, brother?” He gave Sasha a look of wry affection and shoved the pie in Vasya’s direction. “A slice for Vasilii Petrovich,” Dmitrii told the servant.
The slice was cut, and Vasya started on it with delight. Sour cabbage, rich eggs, and the salt of the cheese on her tongue…She attacked wholeheartedly and began to relax with the weight of food inside her. Her pie inhaled, she fell like a dog upon stewed meat and baked milk.
But Dmitrii’s good-natured hospitality had not deceived Sasha. “What has happened, cousin?” he asked the Grand Prince, while Vasya ate.
“Good news and bad, as it happens,” said Dmitrii. He leaned back in his chair, clasped his ringed hands, and smiled with slow satisfaction. “I may forgive my foolish wife for weeping and imagining ghosts now. She is with child.”
Vasya’s head jerked up from her supper. “God protect them both,” said Sasha, clasping his cousin’s shoulder. Vasya stammered congratulations.
“God send she throws me an heir,” said Dmitrii, gulping at his cup. His air of buoyant carelessness slowly leached away as he drank, and when he glanced up again, Vasya felt she could see him for the first time: not the lighthearted cousin from the road but a man tempered and burdened beyond his years. A prince who held the lives of thousands in his steady grip.
Dmitrii wiped his mouth and said, “Now for the bad news. A new ambassador has come from Sarai, from the court of the Khan, with horses and archers in his train. He is installed in the emissary’s palace and demanding all taxes owed forthwith, and more. The Khan is finished with delays, he says. He also says, quite openly, that if we do not pay, General Mamai will lead an army up from the lower Volga.”
The words fell like a hammer.
“It might be just bluster,” Sasha said, after a pause.
“I am not sure,” said Dmitrii. He had mauled his food about more than eating it; now he put his knife aside. “Mamai has a rival in the south, I hear, a warlord called Tokhtamysh. This man is also putting forth a claimant for the throne. If Mamai must go to war to put down this rival—”
A pause. They all looked at each other. “Then Mamai must have our taxes first,” finished Vasya suddenly, surprising even herself. She’d been so caught up in the conversation that she had forgotten her shyness. “For money to fight Tokhtamysh.”
Sasha shot her a very hard look. Be silent. Vasya made her face innocent.
“Clever boy,” said Dmitrii, distractedly. He grimaced. “I have not sent tribute for two years, and no one noticed. I did not expect them to. They are too busy poisoning each other, so that they or their fat sons may have the throne. But the generals are not so foolish as the pretenders.” A pause. Dmitrii’s glance met Sasha’s. “And even if I decide to pay, where am I to get the money now? How many villages burned this winter, before Vasya tracked those bastards to their lair? How are the people to feed themselves, much less muster up a tax for another war?”
“The people have done it before,” Sasha pointed out, blackly. The atmosphere around the table made a strange counterpoint to the cheerful shrieks of the city outside.
“Yes, but with the Tatars divided between two warlords, we have a chance to worm free of the yoke—to make a stand—and every wagon that goes south weakens us. Why should our taxes go to enrich the court at Sarai?”
The monk did not speak.
“One smashing victory,” Dmitrii said, “would put an end to all this.”
It sounded to Vasya as though they were continuing an old argument.
“No,” retorted Sasha. “It wouldn’t. The Tatars could not let a defeat stand; there is still too much pride there, even if the Horde is not what it was. A victory would buy us time, but then whoever takes control of the Horde would come back for us. And they would not want to simply subdue us, but to punish.”
“If I am to raise the money,” the Grand Prince said slowly, “we will have to starve some of those peasants you rescued, Vasya. Truly, Sasha,” he added to the monk, “I value your advice. Let all know it. For I am weary of being these pagans’ dog.” The last syllable came out sharp as broken ice, and Vasya flinched. “But”—Dmitrii paused, and added, lower—“I would not leave my son a burnt city.”
“You are wise, Dmitrii Ivanovich,” said Sasha.
Vasya thought of hundreds of Katyas in villages across Muscovy, going hungry because the Grand Prince must pay a tax to the lord of the same people that had burned their homes in the first place.
She made to speak again, but Sasha shot her a vicious glance across the table and this time she bit the words back.
“Well, we must greet this ambassador in any case,” said the Grand Prince. “Let it not be said that I failed in hospitality. Finish your supper, Vasya. You are both coming with me.
And our Kasyan Lutovich, with his fine looks and fine clothes. If I must placate a Tatar lord, I may as well do it properly.”
A PALACE SMALL AND FINELY MADE stood a little by itself, near the southeast corner of the kremlin. Its walls were higher than those of the other palaces, and something in its shape or situation breathed out an indefinable sense of distance.
Vasya and Sasha and Kasyan and Dmitrii, with several of the chief members of the latter’s household, all walked there from the Grand Prince’s palace, with guards to deter the curious.
“Humility,” said Dmitrii to Vasya with black humor. “Only a proud man rides. One is not proud to the lords from Sarai, or you will be dead, your city burned, your sons disinherited.”
His eyes filled with bitter memory, older than he. It was nearly two hundred years since the Great Khan’s warriors first came to Rus’, and threw down her churches, and raped and slaughtered her people into acquiescence.
Vasya could not think of a worthy reply, but perhaps her face conveyed sympathy, for the Grand Prince said gruffly, “Never mind, boy. There are worse things one must do to be Grand Prince, and worse still to be Grand Prince of a vassal-state.”
He looked uncharacteristically thoughtful. Vasya remembered his laughter during the long days, when the snow fell in the trackless wood. On sudden impulse, Vasya said, “I will serve you in any way I can, Dmitrii Ivanovich.”
Dmitrii paused in his walking; Sasha stiffened. Dmitrii said, “I may call upon it, cousin,” with the unassuming ease of a man who had been crowned at sixteen years old. “God be with you.” He laid a brief hand on Vasya’s hooded head.
Then they were walking again. Dmitrii added, low, to Sasha, “I may grovel all I like, but it won’t grow my coffers a jot. I hear your counsel, but—”
“Humility may postpone the reckoning in any case,” Sasha murmured back. “Tokhtamysh may strike Mamai sooner than we expect; every delay may buy you time.”
Vasya, keen-eared and walking just behind her brother, thought, No wonder Sasha never came home to our father’s house. How could he, when the Grand Prince needs him so? Then she thought, with foreboding, But Sasha lied. For me, he lied. Where will that leave him with his prince when I am gone?
They came to the gates, were admitted, stripped of their guards, and shown to the finest room Vasya had ever seen.
Vasya had no notion of luxury—she barely had a word for it. Mere warmth was luxury to her, and clean skin and dry stockings and not being hungry. But this—this room gave her an inkling of what luxury might mean, and she stared about her, delighted.
The wooden floor had been laid down with care and polished. Spread upon it were figured carpets, free of dust, of a kind she did not know, vivid with snarling cats.
The stove in the corner had been tiled and painted with trees and scarlet birds, and its fire burned hotly. In an instant, Vasya was too warm; a bead of sweat rolled down her spine. Men stood arrayed like statues against the walls, wearing cerise coats and strange hats.
I will see this city, Sarai, Vasya thought, feeling her gorgeous kaftan a gaudy, ill-made thing in all this elegance. I will go far, with Solovey, and he and I will see it.
She breathed a scent (myrrh, though she did not know it) that made her nose itch; frantically she suppressed a sneeze and almost ran into Sasha when the party halted a few paces from a carpeted dais. Dmitrii knelt and bent his head to the floor.
Her eyes watering, Vasya could not see the ambassador clearly. She heard a quiet voice bidding the Grand Prince of Moscow to rise. She listened in silence while Dmitrii conveyed his greetings to the Khan.
She hardly recognized the bold prince in this lord who murmured his apologies, bowing, and handed off his gifts to the attendants. The greetings went on—“on all your sons, your wives, may God protect”—Vasya snapped back to attention only when Dmitrii’s voice shifted. “Village after village,” Dmitrii said in respectful but ringing tones, “robbed, left in flames. My people will have enough to do to survive the winter, and there is no more money. Not until next fall’s harvest. I mean no disrespect, but we are men of the world, and you understand—”
The Tatar replied in his own tongue, voice sharp. Vasya frowned. She had not raised her eyes yet beyond the interpreter at the foot of the platform. But something in the voice drew her glance upward.
And then she stood transfixed, appalled.
For Vasya recognized the ambassador. She had last seen him in the dark, behind the vicious downstroke of a curving sword, while that same voice summoned his men with a war-cry.
He glittered now in silk velvet and sable, but she could not mistake the broad shoulders, the hard jaw and hard eye. He was speaking to the translator with a steady voice. But for an instant the Tatar ambassador—the bandit-captain—turned his eyes to hers, and his lip curled in an expression of half-laughing hatred.
VASYA LEFT THE AUDIENCE-HALL ANGRY, afraid, and doubting her own senses. No. It cannot be he. That man was a brigand. Not a highborn Tatar, not a servant of the Khan. You are mistaken. You saw him once by firelight, and again in the dark. You cannot be sure.
Was she? Could she really forget the face she had seen behind the stroke of a sword, the face of a man who had almost killed her?
That this man would mouth oily things about alliance and Dmitrii’s ingratitude while Russian blood still stained his hands…
No. It wasn’t he. How could it be? And yet…Could a man be a lord and a bandit? Was he an impostor?
Dmitrii’s party was going back the way it had come, crossing the kremlin at a quick pace. All about them dinned the careless noise of a city on the cusp of festival: laughter, shouting, a snatch of song. The people gave way when the Grand Prince passed, and shouted his name.
“I need to speak with you,” Vasya said to Sasha with quick decision. Her urgent hand closed about her brother’s wrist. “Now.”
The gates of Dmitrii’s palace materialized before them; the first torches were lighting. Kasyan shot them a curious glance; brother and sister walked with their heads close together.
“Very well,” said Sasha, after an instant’s hesitation. “Come, back to the palace of Serpukhov. There are too many ears here.”
Chewing her lip, Vasya waited while her brother made a swift excuse to a frowning Dmitrii. Then she followed her brother.
The day was drawing on; golden light made torches of Moscow’s towers, and shadows pooled in the space around the palaces’ feet. A bone-cracking breeze whistled between the buildings. Vasya could barely keep her feet in the tumult of the streets now: so many folk charged to and fro laughing or frowning or merely hunched against the chill. Lamps and hot irons smoothed the snow-slides; hot cakes sizzled in fat. Vasya turned her head once, smiling despite herself, at the splat and howl of flung snowballs, all beneath a sky turning fast to fire as the day waned.
By the time they came to Solovey’s paddock, in a quiet corner of Olga’s dooryard, Vasya was hungry again. Solovey’s white-starred head jerked up when he caught sight of her. Vasya clambered over the fence and went to him. She felt him over, combed his mane with her fingers, let him nuzzle her hands, all the while searching for words to make her brother understand.
Sasha leaned against the fence. “Solovey does well enough. Now what do you mean to say to me?”
The first stars had kindled in a sky gone royally violet, and the moon heaved a faint silver curve over the ragged line of palaces.
Vasya took a deep breath. “You said,” she began, “when we were chasing the bandits—you said it was strange that the bandits had good swords, finely forged, that they had strong horses. Odd, you said, that they had mead and beer and salt in their encampment.”
“I remember.”
“I know why,” said Vasya, speaking faster still. “The bandit captain—the one who stole Katya and Anyushka and Lenochka—he is the one they are calling Chelubey, the emissary from General Mamai. They are one and the same man. I am sure of it. The emissary is a bandit—”
> She paused, a little breathless.
Sasha’s brows drew together. “Impossible, Vasya.”
“I am sure of it,” she said again. “When last I saw him, he was swinging a sword at my face. Do you doubt me?”
Slowly Sasha said, “It was dark. You were frightened. You cannot be sure.”
She leaned forward. Her voice came grinding out with her intensity of feeling. “Would I speak if I were not sure? I am sure.”
Her brother tugged his beard.
She burst out, “He is mouthing things about the Grand Prince’s ingratitude while he profits from Russian girls. That means—”
“What does it mean?” Sasha retorted with sudden and cutting sarcasm. “Great lords have others to do their dirty work; why should an emissary be riding about the countryside with a pack of bandits?”
“I know what I saw,” said Vasya. “Perhaps he is not a lord at all. Does anyone in Moscow know him?”
“Do I know you?” retorted Sasha. He dropped like a cat from the fence. Solovey threw his head up when the monk’s booted feet struck the snow. “Do you always tell the truth?”
“I—”
“Tell me,” said her brother. “Whence came this horse, this vaunted bay stallion that you ride? Was it Father’s?”
“Solovey? No—he—”
“Or tell me this,” said Sasha. “How did your stepmother die?”
She drew in a soft breath. “You have been talking to Father Konstantin. But that has nothing to do with this.”
“Doesn’t it? We are talking about truth, Vasya. Father Konstantin told me the whole tale of Father’s death. A death you caused, he says. Unfortunately, he is lying to me. But so are you. The priest will not say why he hates you. You have not said why he thinks you a witch. You have not said whence came your horse. And you have not said why you were mad enough to stray into a bear’s cave in winter, nor why Father was foolish enough to follow you. I would never have believed it of Father, and after a week’s riding, I do not believe it of you, Vasya. It is all a pack of lies. I will have the truth now.”
The Girl in the Tower Page 18