The Golden Horde

by Peter Morwood

  The Turk sighed, evidently impatient with the stubbornness of this Rus for whom the simple word of the Khan was never enough. Ivan guessed that the man’s easiest solution was to have him rolled in a carpet and smothered, or stamped to death by his guards to avoid the spilling of royal blood, as so many other lords and rulers had been executed; but there was the matter of that granting of hospitality, the gift of bread and salt at the city gate. Amragan tarkhan had probably been insulted, defied, bowed to, even pleaded with, but it was almost certain he had never before received the simple courtesy of a stranger welcomed after a long journey.

  “Understand and remember, so you do not ask such foolish questions when you too come to the Golden Court at Sarai,” the envoy said briskly. “All other Rus lords are content to style themselves as knyaz, which is to say ‘prince.’ You of Khorlov have long styled yourselves tsar, and that is ‘Caesar.’ Emperor. ‘Khan’ is also emperor, and the Great Khan is emperor above all others. He, not you. From this day forward, call yourself a Prince like all the others, and be content.”

  “And why should we come to Sarai?” asked Mar’ya Morevna . “In your own words, ‘rulers of domains yet undisturbed may remain there.’”

  “Yes.” Amragan tarkhan tipped back his head in a haughty manner and studied her down the bridge of his long falcon’s-beak nose. “Yes indeed. Very like a woman of the Tatars. Even to the refusal to listen properly so as to make better space for her own observations.” Though she sizzled at that, Mar’ya Morevna kept quiet – which to Ivan’s mind, having seen his wife in this sort of mood before, was some sort of minor miracle and a considerable achievement on the Turk’s part. “Those rulers may remain in their domains, lady, once the Ilkhan Batu has given his approval for them to do so. But in token that they rule by his consent, they must leave the tokens of their right to rule in his keeping, at the Golden Court of the Golden Horde in Sarai.”

  Mar’ya Morevna made a small sound at that, a gasp three-quarters stifled so that it might as easily have been a sneeze. Ivan knew well enough that it was nothing of the sort but, not knowing what had provoked the gasp, didn’t react. “Tokens?” she said after a moment, carefully disinterested. “What sort of tokens would these be?”

  “Crowns, sceptres – the regalia that you of the Rus need to identify the lord of a domain.”

  Tsar Ivan glowered, thinking he knew now what was troubling his wife. The Tatars were rendering those they left to rule no more than puppets; literally so, since the right to govern resided more in crown and sceptre than in the man or woman who wore and wielded them. The bearer changed from generation to generation, either peacefully or through the many acts of violence that could befall a monarch, but the royal jewels that passed from hand to hand and head to head remained the same. For almost a hundred years after the founding of the realm – by an adventurer of the North people more successful than his fellows – the crown of Khorlov had been nothing more than a grim, functional helmet, worn complete with its iron nose-piece. Later it accumulated gold, jewels and all the other elaborate ornaments that made a crown more than just another hat; but even now, under all its decoration, Khorlov’s Great Crown was helmet-shaped in token of the Tsar’s power to rule and to protect what was ruled. Without it – Ivan thought of puppets again – he was no more than a scarecrow of sticks and rags, propped up on the throne to keep the place from someone better.

  Rubbing her hands together as though they were sticky, Mar’ya Morevna looked again at Amragan tarkhan. “And how many, let’s say crowns, yes, how many crowns have been gathered in Sarai so far?”

  The Turk thought for a moment, his lips moving as he went through the unfamiliar names of Rus Princely states in his head. “Twelve,” he said finally. “The crown of Khorlov will be thirteen.”

  When Mar’ya Morevna went white and carefully crossed herself, Ivan knew something more than just the loss of Khorlov’s crown was badly wrong. That she said nothing about it told him that it had something to do with the Tatars and their collection of crowns in Sarai, but though he racked his brains to think of whys and wherefores, he could dredge up nothing that might fit the facts. Amragan tarkhan was saying more, this time about Ivan’s own reputation and about Koshchey the Undying, but the Tsar – let the Tatars call him what they pleased, he was and would remain Tsar of Khorlov even if nowhere than inside his own head – paid the envoy no further heed.

  “Your pardon, tarkhan,” Ivan came out of his seat at once, moving hurriedly to help his wife to her feet, “but my lady is unwell.” Or pretending so to get us out of here, at any rate. “There’ll be a banquet in your honour later today. We can talk about public matters of less importance then.”

  The Turkic tarkhan didn’t get up; instead he waved an indolent hand as though he owned the great Hall and the kremlin around it, and was granting Ivan permission to leave. A small snarl pulled at the corners of Ivan’s mouth, though that might have been mistaken for effort when supporting Mar’ya Morevna’s weight. Handing her over to Volk Volkovich, who had kept remarkably quiet during the entire conversation, Ivan nodded to one of Guard-Captain Akimov’s lieutenants near the doorway of the hall.

  “My guards will see you and your companions safely to the gates of the city,” he said and, whether the envoy liked it or not, his tone was that of regal dismissal. “And so you know for later,” he added, “armour isn’t usually worn at my table.” Amragan tarkhan was silent for a few seconds while he puzzled through the levels of what had just been said, then his laughter followed Ivan all the way out of the hall.

  *

  As soon as they were in the courtyard beyond the Hall of Audience and out of sight and sound of its menacing occupant, Ivan grabbed Mar’ya Morevna by the arms and shook her with the desperate violence that betrays real fear. “Hell and damnation, Mar’yushka! What’s the matter with you?”

  She stared back at him with huge-pupilled blue eyes, terror barely concealed in their depths, but her voice was back under complete control. “Hell and damnation,” she echoed, “is a very real possibility.”

  “Would someone mind explaining to me what I’m so obviously missing?” demanded Dmitriy Vasil’yevich Strel’tsin pettishly. “After what that accursed Turk was saying, I think that —” As a large hand came down heavily on his shoulder, Strel’tsin abruptly shut up.

  “And I think, First Minister,” said the Grey Wolf in a voice that was much less human than Volk Volkovich usually sounded, “it would be a kindness if you found something to drink. And four cups.”

  Strel’tsin gave the big man an odd look for, along with lying, alcohol was a human failing which Volk Volkovich didn’t indulge. This time however there was a troubled look about his tanned, ruthless face suggesting he was more than willing to break his own rule. It was a look that said the Grey Wolf knew only too well what was troubling Mar’ya Morevna. “Yes,” the First Minister said, “something to drink. Yes, at once …”

  There was a wooden bench on the sunny side of the courtyard, a pretty thing fretted with silhouettes of birds and beasts from old tales, and while Strel’tsin was off about his mission of mercy, which in Tsar Ivan’s Khorlov wouldn’t take him very long, Ivan and the Grey Wolf helped Mar’ya Morevna to sit down. She was trembling, a fine muscle tremor as if she’d been doing hard physical work rather than the sort of racking shudder Ivan had expected. It was only after a few minutes with Ivan on the bench beside her and Volk Volkovich squatting nearby on his haunches, that he realized the tremor came less from the terror in her eyes than from a frantically suppressed desire to grab Amragan tarkhan and his shaman companions and beat some sort of sense into them one at a time and all together.

  Dmitriy Vasil’yevich returned bare minutes later, a rather chipped stoneware flagon in one hand and four turned-wood drinking bowls in the other. “Honey vodka,” he said by way of explanation. “From one of the guards.” The old councillor smiled one of his rare, withered, but strangely sweet smiles. Dmitriy Vasil’yevich had outlived both his w
ives and all seven of his children, and smiling wasn’t something that came easily to his lips any more. “He was on duty and wasn’t supposed to have it, and I agreed not to see it. Provided he let me take it with me.”

  The herb and honey vodka wasn’t chilled as it should have been, and it wasn’t even a particularly good blend, but the alcohol slammed into their throats with all the heat that anyone could have desired. Except possibly Volk Volkovich, who coughed rackingly after the first swallow and wiped those wolf’s eyes of his, whose dull yellow glow had been dimmed somewhat by a sudden overflow of tears. “I don’t know what you see in this snake-venom,” he said wheezily. But he held out his empty bowl for a refill nevertheless.

  Ivan saw the first hint of a smile at his antics flicker across Mar’ya Morevna’s face, and felt as warmly disposed to the Grey Wolf as he had been for a long time. She took a deep breath and glanced from side to side as that small sound drew all eyes to her.

  “The crowns,” she said. “The Crown regalia. You know, don’t you?” Volk Volkovich nodded, but Ivan and Strel’tsin waited silently for further elaboration.

  Mar’ya Morevna stared at the vodka in the wooden bowl, swirling it slowly as if the patterns were telling her something. And perhaps they were. “It isn’t just the taking of your crown,” she said to Ivan, “though God knows that’s bad enough. But if they gather all the crowns and sceptres of the wide white world together in one place, all that potential force contained in gold and jewels and centuries of belief, then something has to give way. We’ve been between the worlds and beyond the world and into the Summer Country, Vanya, but we’ve always done so carefully, closing the doors we open. What might – could – will happen in Sarai, is that all that accumulated weight of power is going to tear through into… somewhere else, and there’ll be nothing to plug the hole it makes.”

  The vodka seemed to have lost its strength to burn his throat the way it had done before, but Ivan gulped it down anyway. “And then what?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody can know, not until it happens. Maybe our world will drain away into that somewhere else. Or it might flow from there to here. Or there might be something out there that will be attracted to here like a moth to a flame.”

  “Like a shark to bloody water,” said the Grey Wolf sombrely. He was no more specific than that, and didn’t need to be.

  “Those imbecile shamans are behind this,” Mar’ya Morevna snapped. “They planted the idea in the Khan’s head. I’m sure of it.” She swore for several seconds with hair-curling ferocity, then rinsed her mouth out with vodka as if it might do some good. “No,” she said to Ivan before he could ask the obvious question, “that didn’t make me feel any better. Not at all. It’s been said before, it’ll be said again: they’re playing with forces they don’t understand. All they can see is a reservoir of power that they’ve taken out of the hands of a conquered but still-dangerous people, not what will happen when that reservoir finally overflows its banks!”

  “What can be done?” Dmitriy Vasil’yevich Strel’tsin, Court Sorcerer amongst all his other posts, looked from face to face with the uneasy awareness that he should have been able to suggest instead of just ask. But like the shamans, he was so far removed from Mar’ya Morevna’s proficiency at the Art Magic that he was of no more use than…

  Than Tsar Ivan Aleksandrovich himself.

  It was a situation not too far removed from Ivan’s long-ago decision to submit to the Tatars if such a submission was necessary. Both were much harder to explain or understand than the bogatyr philosophy of finding an adversary that could be cut with a sword, then cutting until you were either defeated or victorious. From Koshchey Bessmertny to Baba Yaga to the Tatars, Ivan reflected grimly, he seemed to have a talent for attracting the sort of enemy unaffected by even the finest edge.

  “All this takes away any choice we might have had,” he said at last.

  “About what?”

  “Going to Sarai at the Khan’s ‘invitation’, or staying here.”

  Mar’ya Morevna squeezed her husband’s hand gently. “There was never any choice about that any way, Vanyushka,” she said. “You heard Amragan tarkhan as clearly as I did. If you want to remain Tsar, or Prince —”

  “Tsar!”

  “— Then you do it with the Khan’s authority, or not at all.”

  “Um. And how likely is it that the Turk and his escort will let me leave Khorlov for Sarai without bringing the Great Crown with me?”

  “Not very,” said Dmitriy Vasil’yevich. “He looks like the sort of man who’ll check the baggage train as each item is loaded.”

  “There it is, then.” Ivan held out his drinking bowl. “Is there any more of that foul muck left? I need another drink!”

  *

  The feast had been under preparation for most of the day when Ivan and Mar’ya Morevna finally emerged from the kremlin to examine what was being done. Both had shared steam and then a long, leisurely bath before changing their clothes for something better than mere work garb, but if anyone thought their choice of colours somewhat out of season, there was no breath of it.

  Ivan’s kaftan was figured velvet, high-collared and reaching to below his knees; his breeches, wide and silken, were tucked into heeled boots of glove-soft leather; he had a high-crowned velvet hat over all, fronted with a panache of egret feathers in a brooch of pearls and silver, and there was a single pearl drop glinting at the lobe of his right ear.

  Mar’ya Morevna wore her kaftan to the ankles, her slippers encrusted with patterns in pearl and small cut diamonds, and her tall filigree headdress with its pendant rows of jewels framing her face was that of a Tsar’s consort rather than a ruling Princess. Ivan had insisted on it, and Amragan tarkhan could make of that what he liked. All the embellishment was either milk-white leather or embroidery in cobweb-fine threads of solid silver, all the gemstones were white diamond or translucent pearl, and everything else was black, from the figured velvet of their garments to the Sibir’yan sable that trimmed it. Though it was still high summer, they were dressed in the sombre formal garments worn for the day of first snowfall, for the dying of the year, and if it looked as if they wore mourning, to Tsar Ivan’s mind that was appropriate enough.

  He had examined the weather – warm and sunny, with only the slightest breeze – and with that as a pretext, had issued instructions that the greater part of the banquet wouldn’t take place indoors, nor indeed within the walls of the city at all. To have Amragan tarkhan under his roof alone was unnerving enough; to invite the Tatar lieutenants of his guard as well, as custom dictated, was an experience the Tsar would as soon avoid. The other experience, that of the banquet itself, was one he planned to enjoy to the full, and among his string of instructions was an authorization to Yuriy Oblomov the Chief Cook that gave him a free hand both with the kremlin pantry and the domain’s exchequer. If the Tatars were intending to plunder one or the other, and probably both, Ivan meant to imitate his old reaver ancestors and get there first.

  That was why a dozen huge fires of oak logs glowed and spat in the cleared space beyond Khorlov’s gate, why sweating kitchen servants not just from the kremlin but from several noble households within the city were scurrying to and fro with long-handled ladles – in fact, small saucepans lashed to broom shafts – and why the slowly drifting hot air trapped against the walls seemed like a meal in itself, with nourishment in every breath.

  Whole pigs, whole sheep, and a single massive ox rotated glistening on thick wooden spits above the fires, turned from a safe distance by eager hands, basted with salted fat and their own drippings by the bucketful. They were watched and sniffed and tentatively prodded every now and again by the Firemasters of seven kitchens, each one with his and her own opinion of how to get the best result from a roasted joint. The joints – Ivan couldn’t help smile at how they could use such an insignificant word for five thousand pounds of meat, the ox itself weighing two thousand pounds or more – had been revolving slowly for hours, and each
cook was growing passionate about what should be done in the last period of cooking to bring out the finest flavour.

  As far as the Tsar of Khorlov was concerned, if the aroma was an indication of how they would taste then taking them down, letting them cool and standing out of his way was the best thing they could do.

  There were fish on grills, and capons and squab on skewers, looking insignificant beside the vast bulk of beef and pork and mutton no longer quite on the hoof, but adding their own piquancy to the afternoon as they were smeared with lard or oil or butter in which onions and garlic had been crushed, then sprinkled with delicately fragrant herbs. Marjoram and rosemary, basil and thyme and dill all added their tang to the air, mingling with the more pungent scents of horseradish or sour-pickled cabbage, mushrooms and cucumbers.

  Ivan wandered about as the Tsar was supposed to do on such occasions, smelling and tasting and complimenting this cook or that on some new masterwork of the culinary art. Here the simple, a pot of buckwheat kasha, simmered in meat stock and buttered to perfection; there the elaborate, chicken tabaka style, boned and fried flat under a weighted lid with a fierce seasoning of garlic, walnuts and the brutally hot, brutally expensive red pepper flakes of Si-Chüan. It was food for the fingers; Ivan didn’t even need to draw his eating-knife and spoon from their case at his belt, but simply ripped off a piece, dunked it in tkemali sour plum sauce, munched it up – and then drank a lot of cold wine very fast as the red pepper set fire to his throat.

  “Make sure the envoy Amragan tarkhan has plenty of this,” he said to the headscarfed little woman who was tending the pans. “It might thaw him out.”