The Golden Horde

by Peter Morwood

  “Before these barbarians stamped our country flat.”

  “Yes. But what they did is past, and can’t be changed. Ogotai Khakhan might have succeeded anyway, but we should have made him pay more dearly for the victory. Except that you know as well as I that not one of the lords of the Rus could agree with any others for long enough to do anything worthwhile. So let it be, Mar’yushka. There may be something you, or I or all of us, can do before all this is over, but now isn’t the time. Now is the time for making the best of things.”

  “Like a woman being raped, you mean?” Mar’ya Morevna’s voice went suddenly harsh. “Just because you can’t change it, you might as well enjoy it?”

  “No. I didn’t say enjoy. Enduring is something different. If you endure, and live, then maybe you can do something to make a difference afterwards. But you can’t endure if you’re dead, like everyone in Ryazan, or Vladimir, or Chernigov, or Kiev, or… Do I need to go on? If you’re dead, there’s no afterwards. I’ve been saying that for years. Only the places that offered no resistance have survived – and now we’ve started to blame each other for surviving. That ought to amuse our new overlords.”

  “I…” Mar’ya Morevna stared at him for several seconds, then lowered her eyes. “Vanya, I’m sorry for what I said. I wasn’t thinking. I was sounding just like those stupid bogatyri heroes who still just want to fight. No matter what they’re told, no matter how many times they’re told, as soon as they’re confronted with an adventure they jump at it, no matter who they leave behind.”

  “But I was the one who asked for this adventure in the first place, remember? All those years ago, when I was bored with being just a Tsar… Now there’s a joke.”

  “You’re still Tsar, so don’t fret too much about your joke. Do you want to hear a better one? If they wanted to be really legendary heroes, and we could build them a big enough coffin, they could all play at being Svyatogor. I’d nail the lid down myself.”

  According to the old bylina tale, Svyatogor the Giant had never seen a bed, chair or anything else big enough to fit him until he found a coffin which was just the right size. Refusing all warnings in the face of such a strange adventure, he climbed into it, pulled down the lid which promptly locked… And that was the end of him, a pointless end which did nothing to aid his companions, and to Ivan, Mar’ya Morevna and others was a demonstration of nothing but stupidity and stubbornness on an epic scale. But to the bogatyri it was an example of perfect heroism even in the face of death, and they loved it.

  Ivan laughed out loud at the image her words conjured up. “You, sound like a bogatyr? I don’t think so! Not now – and not then. I thought you were sounding like the great commander, the woman whose army smashed Manguyu Temir’s horde. Like the woman I married. There’s a difference.”

  “Is there?”

  “Yes.” Ivan paused, then quirked one eyebrow at his wife. “I couldn’t marry a bogatyr on the longest day I lived. Archbishop Levon wouldn’t let me.” He smiled very slightly and lightly touched her face. “Besides, I don’t like my lovers to have hair on their faces.”

  “Neither do I.” Mar’ya Morevna reached out and stroked disapproving fingers through the carefully-trimmed beard that covered her husband’s chin. “I’ve said so often enough, if you remember. You do remember, don’t you?” She closed finger and thumb and tweaked hard enough to make Ivan wince. “Or weren’t you paying attention?”

  “Ouch! I was, I was!”

  “So when will you shave it off?” Mar’ya Morevna examined her fingertips, then blew lightly and watched as a few golden strands of hair drifted free.

  Ivan rubbed at the plucked place on his chin. “Soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “When I don’t need it.”

  “You’ve been saying that for years, too. When exactly?”

  “When that collection of old fools in the Council and the druzhinya are convinced I’m old enough to be their Tsar. A six year reign isn’t enough for them.”

  “Vanya, if you want to wait that long you might as well just wait until you’ve outlived them all. You’re the Tsar of Khorlov. You can do what you please!”

  “Can I? Or didn’t we already have this,” he considered his choice of word, “this discussion?”

  “That was about the throne.”

  “Not the throne, Mar’yushka, the Chair of State.”

  “No matter. Crown regalia is one thing – your choice whether or not to wear a beard is something else entirely! Well, isn’t it?”

  “The Tsars of Khorlov have always been bearded …”

  “If you’re teasing me, it’s not funny. And if you’re not teasing me, it’s even less funny. Ivan, this isn’t just about your beard, or about the throne, or the chair, or the crown. You’ve been Tsar for six years, and in that six years you’ve been fair, and just, and passed good laws, and kept Khorlov from being destroyed by” – she gestured expressively towards the Tatars, still far away among their dust and their fierce music – “by our… visitors. Yet in the little things, the things that matter just to you – and to me – you still let the councillors from your father’s time tell you what to do. Even how to look!”

  “Nobody ever told me to wear a beard!”

  “No? But when your wife asks you to shave it off, you don’t. It’s not even as if you like it. I could understand that. But you don’t. You wear it because you’re expected to, just as you’re expected to sit on carved chairs without cushions to make that sitting comfortable. Just as you were expected to wear the old, heavy crown.”

  “Not any more.”

  “You see? That changed. Other things can change. You don’t need to change the world, or the laws, or the traditions that have some point to them. But after six years it’s time you started to tell, not ask. Do you rule Khorlov and the people in it – or do its old men rule you?”

  Mar’ya Morevna often made her views known on all manner of subjects, but seldom on this one. She had been lord of her own wide domains before ever she met and married Ivan, but seemed to feel it wasn’t her place, or that of anyone else except ministers and stewards appointed for the purpose, to tell any Tsar how to govern his realm. Ivan knew her well enough to understand it was no feminine reticence but courtesy from one prince to another. Where Mar’ya Morevna was concerned, if reticence was nourishment she would starve. She had given advice to Ivan, and to Tsar Aleksandr before him, but only when asked. Even though she never raised her voice above the level of ordinary conversation, this intense and unsolicited outburst impressed itself on Ivan more than if she had screamed at him and slapped his face.

  He stared silently at her with an expression glittering in his pale eyes that wasn’t reflected sunlight. It might have been amusement, or resignation, or the beginning of anger, or a mingling of all three. Tsar or Prince, few things abraded Ivan’s temper more thoroughly than the feeling of being pushed into a decision against his will. Then he blinked and the ominous glitter was gone, replaced by a much more wholesome squint as he peered out across the dry expanse of steppe at the approaching Tatars.

  “How long before they reach the gates?”

  Mar’ya Morevna narrowed her eyes, studied the specks wavering in a haze of heat, then at the noon sun overhead. “If they keep to their present pace, twenty minutes. Maybe half an hour.” She looked at Ivan, and raised an eyebrow. “Long enough to get rid of that beard, if you’ve made up your mind to do it.”

  “Not long enough for a six-years-delayed razor burn to fade,” said Ivan, and smiled ruefully. “The Tatars will think I’m a picture of pink-cheeked health.”

  Mar’ya Morevna flexed her fingers so that their jewelled rings sparkled, and there were more sparks clinging to her fingers than light reflecting from faceted gemstones. “I didn’t say anything about razors.”

  “If I spend the rest of the day smelling of burnt whiskers …”

  “I doubt you’ll even notice,” said Mar’ya Morevna, and gestured at Ivan as though to cup his f
ace in her two hands.

  Ivan did notice. His face stopped itching and began to tingle, then a sensation like a splash of impossibly icy water, water so chill that it felt scalding hot, rushed from throat to cheekbones. There was no mirror to see what was happening, and probably nothing to see in any case, but in his mind’s eye he could visualize that carefully trimmed beard and lovingly cultivated sweep of golden moustache go flaring past his nose and ears in streamers of cold blue fire.

  After a few seconds of silence while he got his breath back and considered – then prudently abandoned – several scathing comments, Ivan ran the tips of his fingers warily over skin that hadn’t been so smooth since before he’d ever started to shave at all. The skin stung as though it had been mildly sunburned, so that with every wince away from a tender place he felt, and probably looked, more like a man probing himself for unsuspected wounds than one examining the work of his barber. “You might at least have given me enough time to say whether I preferred a razor,” he said accusingly. “It was my beard, after all.”

  “This way was quicker,” said Mar’ya Morevna. “And I don’t have much opportunity to work the smaller spells any more. Or the larger ones, if it comes to that.”

  “Oh, indeed?” Ivan felt a little spasm jolt him in the stomach, a reaction that was close kin to the feeling he might get at any small accident barely avoided. He didn’t know whether to smile or frown, and settled for neutral annoyance instead. “So you could have scorched my eyebrows off for want of practice… Well, madam, I find that most reassuring!”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  Motherhood has definitely done things to your vocabulary, thought Ivan, and this time the smile came easier to his mouth. You’d never have settled for something as weak as silly before.

  “I’m a better sorceress than that,” Mar’ya Morevna continued, massaging one hand against the other to ease where the force of the spell had shocked her finger-joints. “And what if I had scorched your eyebrows off? I could always have conjured them back. Or maintained an illusion of eyebrows, anyway. At least until the Tatars left.”

  “If that was intended to reassure me, my dear, then you need to try a good deal harder. I think I’ll let the court barber use his razors next time. He might cut my throat by accident, but he won’t make me look ridiculous.”

  “I don’t think you look ridiculous,” said Mar’ya Morevna. She gave him a look that was at once sleepily heavy-lidded and speculative, the sort of look that was commonly described as smouldering. Mar’ya Morevna smouldered very well. “I think you look like the energetic young Prince who spent so long in my tent all those years ago. I should have taken your beard off when the thought first crossed my mind to do it, but I was so patient, so restrained, and now I don’t need to be either any more …”

  Her voice had dropped to a soft murmur like the purr of a big, lazy cat, and as the mouse under scrutiny, Tsar Ivan was more than willing to be played with.

  “You —” No purr there; Ivan discovered that his own voice had developed a slight tendency to squeak. Appropriate for a mouse, perhaps, but not a Tsar. He cleared his throat and tried again. “You do, at least until the Tatars are dealt with. If one of them is some sort of envoy from Batu Khan, he’ll have to be formally received at the gates, and after that, given an equally formal banquet tonight.”

  “Good. Formal banquets take time to prepare.” Mar’ya Morevna favoured her husband with another hot stare, then turned her head and gazed irritably at the Tatar horsemen. “What’s taking them so long to get here?”

  “They’ve halted to make formal ablutions,” said a voice from the rampart stairway, so unexpectedly that the sound of it made both Ivan and Mar’ya Morevna jump. “To go with all the other formality that’s being prepared in Khorlov.”

  Volk Volkovich the Grey Wolf stood there in man’s shape, grinning a white grin in his brown, cruelly handsome face, and the human grin was no improvement on the wolf’s. Neither of them had heard him climb the stairs or knew how long he’d been there. From the gleam of wicked amusement in the wolf’s eyes that never changed from his true wolf’s shape, long enough to see and hear anything and everything that could be pleasant in private but embarrassing with a witness.

  “Don’t do that!” snapped Ivan. “Must you always sneak everywhere you go?”

  “No,” said the Grey Wolf, sauntering up from the wooden stairs to the wooden walkway without so much as a creak from a plank or a click from his grey leather boots to betray his passage. “I move quietly.”

  Ivan couldn’t help but smile at such monstrous self-assurance. He shook his head, and let the breath he’d gathered for a lecture on the proprieties go hissing out between his teeth. Grumbling at the Grey Wolf about anything at all was less productive than beating smoke with a stick, and he’d long since giving up wasting his time.

  “And you’ve been moving quietly around the Tatars, I presume?” said Mar’ya Morevna. “Why didn’t you report before now – or were you just too busy moving quietly around us?”

  “Now, now, Lady,” said Volk Volkovich reprovingly, “I’m more than just another Kipchaq. For one thing, I’m doing this for amusement and as a favour, not because I’m in anyone’s service.” Mar’ya Morevna had the good grace to look slightly abashed, and it was enough to restore the Grey Wolf’s good humour at once.

  “Your, ah, ordinary spies bring ordinary information, and if I’d come running back with them you wouldn’t know anything more than what you know already. But from me you’ve learned the Tatars have enough respect for the Tsar of Khorlov to pause and wash away the dust of their journey. Maybe even the top few layers of their personal grime as well – although I suspect they don’t respect even the Great Khan that much.”

  He pointedly ignored the second part of her question, and, remembering the chilly glitter in his eyes which had been answer enough, Mar’ya Morevna didn’t bother repeating it.

  “Do you know why they’re here?” asked Ivan. “We expected an envoy of some sort, but there are too many for just… just the usual.”

  The Grey Wolf made himself comfortable, leaning back against the battlements with his long legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles. It looked completely natural, but to Ivan and Mar’ya Morevna who knew his true form and nature, even that gesture had the studied air of a role being played for effect.

  “Several times I was close enough to hear them talking,” he said, “but they never spoke Farsi.” His voice managed to suggest just how disobliging that had been to a hard-working spy. “Indeed, they never spoke anything other than Uighur and some other one of those Turku-Mongol dialects the tribes use to understand each other. Which I don’t.” He saw or sensed some shift in Mar’ya Morevna’s expression, and shrugged.

  “Noble Lady, I recognize the sound of the language, but even when I’m close to a Tatar I’ve never asked what he was saying to me.” His grin displayed teeth suddenly more pointed and less human than they had been before. “Mother always told me it’s not good manners to talk with my mouth full.”

  No matter how many times Volk Volkovich said things like that, Ivan had never grown used to them. It mattered little that the Grey Wolf had ceased to be a servant – his original service had been only for a year and a day, and that had expired long ago – because he’d remained a friend ever since. Of a sort, anyway. ‘Friend’ often seemed too… friendly… for some of the attitudes that the Grey Wolf took roguish pleasure in displaying, but ‘acquaintance’ was too cold and distant.

  Ignorant of their Tsar’s struggle with the niceties of definition as they were ignorant of a great deal else, neither the Council nor the druzhinya knew Volk Volkovich as anything more than a somewhat sinister henchman who came and went as he pleased. In that ignorance, thought Ivan, lay not only a certain amount of advantage but a good deal of truth.

  The shrill sound of children’s voices drifted up from the courtyard, mingling with small feet on the stairway that were moving anything but q
uietly. Nikolai and Anastasya bounded onto the ramparts and flung themselves at their parents, babbling gratitude for being summoned to see the parade.

  “Parade?” said Mar’ya Morevna, her arms full of a seven-year-old daughter who was struggling to see over the battlements and quite possibly fall from them in an excess of enthusiasm.

  “Summoned?” said Ivan, picking up Nikolai and tucking the boy under one arm for want of anything better to do with him.

  Both of them looked at Volk Volkovich, who spread hands and shoulders wide in an eloquent shrug. “If you had sent for them already, what of it?” he said. “And if you hadn’t, then I was merely pre-empting your decision.”

  “Oh, were you?” There was a definite edge to Mar’ya Morevna’s voice, though the Grey Wolf pretended not to hear it.

  Having met Volk Volkovich for the first time in his true form, she’d been slightly uneasy about him since the twins were born and he’d begun – without invitation or encouragement – to act like an indulgent uncle. Mar’ya Morevna had pointed out rather sharply to Ivan that every one of their uncles was a shape-shifter, but this one, the one most frequently seen, was also the only one whose natural shape was a beast, rather than the reverse. It had taken Ivan several weeks to cajole the reason for her concern out of his wife. In the process he’d learned some disturbing things, and guessed at others.

  Chief of them was that ‘uncles’ sometimes had an unhealthy taste for the children they visited – Mar’ya Morevna would say no more than that, though Ivan suspected he could deduce the rest – and that an ‘uncle’ whose true shape was a wolf might display a taste for children in the worst and most literal way. There had never been any sign of it, but as Mar’ya Morevna said, the first sign would already be too late.

  Toughened perhaps by having to speak and repeat distasteful truths about policy to his councillors and retinue, Ivan had summoned up the courage to ask some equally unpalatable questions of the man – when he was a man – who best qualified as his friend.