The Golden Horde

by Peter Morwood

  Ivan glowered at him. “You wouldn’t have said that to my father.”

  “I did, Majesty, as frequently as courtesy permitted. But your father the old Tsar – who I believe is spending the evening of his years in the company of those other sorcerers, your brothers-in-law – was a man well advanced in years, with his own idiosyncratic notions of right and wrong.”

  “A fine and well-turned speech, Eminence,” said Ivan in the low voice of real anger. “Well salted with long words. If you’re claiming my father’s judgments were in error because of his age …”

  “I didn’t say so, Majesty.”

  “Just as well for you, a man far older than he is. And… And had you ever shown the slightest talent for the Art, you wouldn’t be complaining about me. And what you didn’t tell my father to his face, I won’t hear from you behind his back. Thank you, Eminence. You may go.”

  “But Majesty —”

  “Go. Now!”

  The Archbishop went, rather faster than he’d come in.

  Ivan slumped back in his chair, blew out a gusty breath and regardless of the paperwork already there, swung his boots up onto the table. “I think,” he said to Mar’ya Morevna, “that I might have made an enemy.”

  “I doubt it. But you might have gained a little more respect.”

  “Maybe.” Ivan yawned, more from nervous reaction than from the weariness that had been creeping over him. “If this is the life of a Tsar, beloved, then I could easily wish for something to break the monotony. An adventure. Or is that only permitted to princes, like magic?”

  “Again, I doubt it.” Mar’ya Morevna crossed herself quickly, and made a little deflecting hand-gesture after it that had nothing to do with religion. “But avert, my dear. Be careful how you ask for things in such vague terms. Like the wishes in the old tales, you can easily get much more than you expect.”

  “What I expect right now,” said Ivan, halfway through another yawn, “is some sleep. The Kievans tomorrow, remember?” He stood up and stretched, then looked quizzically at Mar’ya Morevna. “Was I ever ‘youthful and headstrong’?”

  “The Archbishop was much more polite than me,” she said with a quick smile. “What he really meant was ‘young and stupid.’ And you were. Definitely. Now, my beloved Tsar, sorcerer, diplomat and doting parent, let’s get you and this pair of reprobates to bed before you’re all too asleep to care …”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Principality of Ryazan;

  November, 1237 A.D.

  “We can’t be any more ready than this,” said Mar’ya Morevna, snuggling deeper into the thick fur robe covering her armour as an errant breeze chilled the metal. She looked from side to side from her vantage point at the top of the hill, and nodded in satisfaction. “So now we wait.” Her voice had a decisive edge that sounded odd in someone commonly called the fairest Princess in all the Russias, but didn’t sound odd at all to those who knew she was a renowned commander of armies.

  One of those armies was drawn up in battle array, secure behind a barricade of ponderous wagons and a bristling fence of sharpened stakes driven into the snowy ground at just the proper angle to impale an oncoming horse. Such a barricade might have seemed hasty and makeshift, but there was nothing makeshift about this one. The wagons were fastened together with great chains of forged iron and their sides, with loopholes for archers, were built of timbers almost as thick as those of a kremlin wall. This gulyagorod, the ‘walking city’, had developed over time as defence against mounted enemies and had proved its worth time and again, when the Polovtsy and the Pechenegs and the Kipchaqs and the Tatars came raiding into the lands of the Rus.

  The right and left wings of the host were in extended order to either side, concealed in ambush by the thickly wooded hills as much as possible with seven thousand men in battle formation. The centre was exposed, an obvious target, but the men in the woods were well-hidden. Without knowing of their presence, an attacker would concentrate his assault on the gulyagorod fort and be caught in the jaws of a trap.

  Tsar Ivan breathed out a pale plume of breath that joined the accumulated frost bleaching his beard white and glanced dourly at his wife from under the brim of his helmet. “Waiting,” he said. “My favourite part of any battle.”

  Mar’ya Morevna gazed at him for a moment, then raised one eyebrow. “Any battle?” she echoed, teasing just ever so slightly. Ivan had seen precisely one battle before in all his life, not quite three years ago, and that was the famous victory over the Teutonic Knights on the frozen river Nemen. Not that he or she – or anyone but Prince Aleksandr Nevskiy – had really been there, of course. At least if one believed the official chronicle written by Prince Aleksandr Nevskiy’s official chronicler.

  There was something to be said for bringing a court archivist on campaign, if you were absolutely sure he was going to be recording victory, not defeat. Mar’ya Morevna thought about that and then smiled inwardly. Nevskiy was thoroughly unlikable. No, she corrected herself, he was a detestable creature whose personal and political habits needed watching from a safe distance; but his chronicler’s presence at that battle on the river had anticipated success instead of failure and was as close to a compliment as he was likely to offer any of the other Princes whose presence his history omitted.

  There would be no such omission today. Khorlov’s own archivist was back with the baggage train, but if he didn’t present himself for duty very soon Mar’ya Morevna was going to have words about the man’s continued employment. It wasn’t as if he had much to do since except for Ivan and herself, there were no other persons of note. In the depths of winter, with nothing worth stealing beyond the walls of their kremlins and no way a mere raiding-party could breach those walls, not one of the Great Princes of the Rus had bothered to stir from beside his palace fire.

  That had never been Mar’ya Morevna’s way, nor was it Ivan’s. The harvest was in and safe, but the peasants who gathered it were far from safe. Most lived in villages not cities, and a Tatar raid that would never dare attack a kremlin-guarded town could stamp a village flat before its snug, safe Prince and his snug, safe army could do anything to help. If that happened often enough there would be no peasants left to sow the next harvest, never mind gather it. Better by far to bring a kremlin of armoured wagons out to meet the Tatars, and persuade them by force of arms to take their depredations somewhere else.

  Mar’ya Morevna watched her husband study the disposition of the army for a few seconds more, frowning slightly as she’d seen him do when playing chess, moving the pieces around inside his head to check possible moves against possible consequences. He was doing the same now, except that this time the pieces were human, and the moves and consequences worse than simply losing a game. “Last time I saw only the aftermath,” he said. “Just what did you do?”

  “To Manguyu Temir? Besides kill him? I’d have thought that was enough.”

  “Funny. You know what I mean. Tactics, strategies – which did you use? Or was it magic after all?”

  “Only the magic of defeating superior numbers in open battle, and you don’t need to be told to know what that feels like.” Mar’ya Morevna looked thoughtful. “It wasn’t much of an open battle. We drew the Tatars onto a prepared position like this one, and when they started to hammer the walls of the gulyagorod, we closed the wings of the host around them and shot them off their horses from three sides. And we kept shooting, because they kept coming, until there were no more left.”

  “Obliging of them.”

  “It was all their khan knew to do. Manguyu Temir wasn’t one of the Great Khan’s great generals, just a brigand commanding brigands.”

  Ivan laughed at that. “Did you see Manguyu Temir?” he said. “Meet him, even?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Because I did, at a banquet almost five years ago. In Khorlov.” Mar’ya Morevna raised her eyebrows, but Ivan shrugged dismissively. “It was a political thing and he was better invited than ignored. That way we knew where he wa
s. I remember my father said exactly the same thing: that he was a brigand. But I wonder about this present gang, because brigands don’t normally raid in winter.”

  The point was well made, and Mar’ya Morevna wondered why she hadn’t considered it before. A raid was a raid was a raid, and she’d given little thought to its background, just as someone confronted by a wasp didn’t pause to think before swatting. But it was true enough. Tatars and the various other tribes of nomadic bandits usually came raiding between late spring and early autumn, choosing their time carefully so that their horses and the livestock they hoped to drive away wouldn’t be wallowing in the mire created by thaw or rain at either end of summer, or wasting their time during the icy season when everything worth stealing was locked away from harm.

  Her mind jumped to the last enemy who attacked the Rus lands in winter. “The Teutonic Knights could have made some agreement with the Tatars, after what I did to Grand Master von Salza.” Ivan looked dubious, and after a moment she nodded agreement. “No indeed. Why wait? Even though he wouldn’t dare come back himself, an arrangement like this could have been made at any time …”

  When Hermann von Salza and the Knights of the Teutonic Order failed in their attempt to take possession of the rich border country, von Salza had been taken prisoner. Before releasing the German knight, Mar’ya Morevna laid a soul-rending on him, an enchantment that would strike the Grand Master painfully dead if he ever set foot in Russia again.

  That should have kept him and the Teutonic Knights out of the Rus lands for the rest of von Salza’s life, because the Order, still busily conquering – they called it crusading – along the Baltic coast, required their leaders to lead from the front. Any leader who deputized such a responsibility, never mind handed it over to dubious outsiders like the heathen Tatars, would find himself replaced as Grand Master by whichever ambitious deputy acted first and lucky to avoid an accusation of heresy for working with the enemies of Christendom. There had – so far – been no further incursions under von Salza. But rumour had him ailing, and there was no reason for the soon-to-be Grand Master Konrad von Thuringia to hire Tatars for his dirty work when he could do it himself.

  “This is nothing to do with the Teutons,” said Ivan. He sounded almost sorry to grant the German knights that much back-handed innocence. “It’s the damned Tatars, trying to catch us off guard. I said so when we first heard about the raid.”

  “I still wonder how much of what we heard was true, and how much was exaggeration.”

  “About the Kipchaqs and the Volga Bulgars?” Ivan snorted. “What I heard sounded like men trying to justify why they ran away.” He turned his head and spat into the snow, more for punctuation than anything else. “They resisted, the resistance didn’t work, so they took to their heels and made up tales of an overwhelming enemy so they wouldn’t look like cowards.”

  Mar’ya Morevna looked at him sideways with a crooked smile. “My husband the hero, armed with a hero’s hard words. Tsar for exactly one year and nine months, and already so practiced and cynical. Well, my hero, no matter what happened, here we are, here we stay and as I said before, here we wait. But we might as well be comfortable while we do it.” She muttered under her breath and made an elaborate gesture with her fingers that still managed to be graceful despite the padding of her heavy gauntlets.

  Ivan felt a glow of warmth spread through him, as though someone had been warming his blood over a fire before running it back into his veins. It was comfortable indeed, but he still grimaced at the prospect of waiting. No matter what he might say, he hated waiting; here, outside the Council Chamber, inside a barrel floating on the Azov Sea. He had always hated it. There was usually something nasty at the end.

  *

  They waited, and time passed, and nothing happened. An hour went by, and the army held its formation while the Russian winter gnawed even the Russian soldiers who had grown up enduring it as a dog gnaws a bone, slowly wearing them away. As a second hour crawled to its weary conclusion, Ivan and Mar’ya Morevna could see the formations were beginning to lose their integrity. Even the thickest mantling of furs and a lifetime’s acquaintance with such weather, was no preparation for this. Standing with shield and spear at the ready in the closed ranks of an army expecting imminent attack, even the smallest movement of the air chilled weapons and armour and penetrated fur and leather with blades of ice that bled heat instead of blood.

  “What are those damned scouts doing?” snapped Mar’ya Morevna, staring at the empty horizon where white ground met grey sky. More than an hour ago, and then again twenty minutes after that, the silhouettes of first two and then five horsemen had skylined briefly, paused, presumably stared hard, then wheeled and ridden away. The silhouettes, stocky men on stocky ponies, were unmistakeably Tatars, the outriders of the raiding party whose main body was somewhere beyond that misty line where earth and sky came together. She had sent a party of Kipchaq mercenaries out to shadow the outriders, but there had been no further sign of hunters or hunted.

  “Our last report said the Tatars were half an hour away and we’ve seen their outriders twice since then. They know we’re here, so why aren’t they advancing? If they’re not, I want to know it. And why not, too. The bait’s tempting enough.”

  “Maybe they’re waiting for the cold to cut us up before they come in to finish the job,” said Ivan. “It’s already working. Look at that.” He pointed to where yet another soldier had fallen over in the snow and was now being helped from the battle-line back to where braziers of charcoal were set amongst the wagons.

  Mar’ya Morevna opened her mouth to say something then shut it again with a snap. She’d fought the Tatars before, it was true, but that had been in summertime where waiting a few hours before the onset made little difference. A raid in winter was different, and different enough that no Rus commander had any experience of Tatar tactics in cold weather.

  “You may be right,” she said, unbuckling her helmet and taking refuge instead within the deep hood of her fur robe. Mar’ya Morevna didn’t suffer fools gladly, but she was a good enough general that she would accept advice and even criticism if it was justified. “Boris Petrovich, to me!”

  Guard-Captain Fedorov saluted, responding to the summons at a jog-trot and glad to have a reason to move. He and the other captains and commanders were standing a short distance away, with an air of enforced idleness that sat uncomfortably on their mailed shoulders as they eyed the brazier hauled up here for their liege lords. But since those same lords had been ignoring it, none wanted to be the first to weaken and move nearer the heat.

  Mar’ya Morevna issued rapid orders, speaking briskly enough that ordering others to action seemed enough to keep her warm. “Detach a troop of light horse. Send them beyond the skirmish-line where we last saw the Tatars – they’ll know to proceed with caution from that point onwards, at least they’d better. When they make any contact at all, they’re to break off and get back here. They’re not to engage, on pain of my extreme displeasure.”

  “And on pain of pain,” said Ivan, while the small, hard smile that was only a stretching of his lips leached any humour from the words. “Meanwhile pull every fourth man out of the line and back to the wagons to get enough hot soup, bread and wine for himself and the other three.” He looked at Fedorov and raised his eyebrows a fraction. “All those things are ready, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, Majesty,” said Captain Fedorov. “The soup’s in kettles on the braziers, the rest is with the baggage train.”

  “Good. Do it. If there’s still no sign of the Tatars after they’ve eaten, bring them back to the braziers by squads, at whatever interval seems good to you and your sergeants. We won’t weaken the formations any more by keeping the men warm than by letting them drop at their posts.”

  “By your command. Majesty, Highness.” Fedorov saluted and jogged away again in a rattle of armour and a spatter of snow.

  “Smartly done, Vanya,” said Mar’ya Morevna. “You may be only a Tsar
, but you’ve got the potential to be a good officer.” She grinned briefly. “I may well make one of you yet. Now, what are you going to eat?”

  Ivan gave her another of those humourless smiles, but this time it simply made him look wretched. “Not until my insides stop fluttering. This is worse than waiting for the Teutonic Knights.” He unhitched his own helmet and dropped it with a metallic crunch into the snow, then pulled up his hood and stared at Mar’ya Morevna from the refuge of its shadows. “How long did it take before you got used to the waiting? How many battles?”

  “Not enough. I’m still not used to it. Just better than you at hiding it.” She peeled off one glove and touched his face, frowned, shivered, and made haste to pull the big fur-lined glove back on again. “The charm is wearing thin. You’re beginning to get cold. Take my advice and have some hot soup at least.”

  Ivan’s mouth quirked in distaste. “There’s no guarantee it would stay down,” he said. “I’ll take my own advice and have some hot wine instead.”

  “I had a feeling you might say that.” There was disapproval in her voice. “Don’t you think that something other than wine – or ale, or mead, or vodka – might make a pleasant change?”

  “Not now.” Whether Ivan was referring to her suggestion or a plea he was hearing more and more frequently, the answer was the same. “After the battle. But not now.”

  He watched her sigh and turn away, relieved she hadn’t persisted. What if he drank a little too much, or a little too often? The Great Khan Ogotai was well known for enjoying a cup or three, and Prince Vladimir of Kiev had said it for all Russians three hundred years ago, when rejecting the Moslem religion because of its strictures on wine. ‘Drinking,’ he had said, ‘is the joy of the Rus.’ Joy maybe, and sometimes a necessary buffer against the realities of life, but Ivan knew better than to quote the old Prince’s words to Mar’ya Morevna.

  Then all thought of wine or arguments concerning it fled from his mind as a badly-blown trumpet blared from the distant horizon. Ivan swung about and shaded his eyes to see better. The troop of cavalry newly dispatched by Captain Fedorov had barely passed the wooden ramparts of the gulyagorod and now they were reining back in confusion, uncertain whether to continue or return.