“— Or the armoury …” she murmured.
“— We’d best make sure that Nikita Pavlovich the goldsmith is with us. Just in case the Great Crown …”
“Or a helmet …”
“Needs to be repaired.”
“Or gilded, trimmed with fur and studded with fine gems …”
“And made to look like something else.”
*
The Khanate of the Golden Horde;
August, 1243 A.D.
Ivan stood up in his stirrups and shaded his eyes against the glare of the sun, but all he could see was a vague shadowy blot against the steppes, black against the brown and green of vegetation. He dropped back into his saddle and looked quizzically at Volk Volkovich.
“Chernigov,” said the Grey Wolf. That was all. Ivan flinched and stared again at the distant blot, then turned to Mar’ya Morevna.
“The children will stay in the wagon,” he said. “And with the curtains drawn, if we get any closer to… To that.” There were the beginnings of complaints from Nikolai and Anastasya, but those fell silent when he jerked his horse around and glared at them.
Both children knew they could take an excessive number of liberties with their father and survive, but there was a point past which it was wiser to sit still and be quiet. The expression on Ivan’s face told them that such a point had just been reached. Watching a swordfight – or an execution, if it came to that – could be justified as a part of the education of any Tsar’s children, if only to teach them that life wasn’t taken without good reason since it could never – usually – be returned. Looking at other gruesome scenes like those he suspected were waiting closer to Chernigov was simply unpleasant, thus unnecessary. If anyone, child, councillor or ally, needed to see rotting corpses before they understood what a war could do to the fragile creatures that they were and ruled, it was already too late to make an impression. Even so, there was always the possibility that time wasn’t wasted nor senses blasted quite in vain. But not those of children. Never the children…
It was small wonder they were restless, because the journey to Sarai had been uneventful. Boringly uneventful, and for almost three weeks on end. While Ivan was the first to admit that boredom was preferable to any amount of near-fatal excitement, there could always be too much of any good thing.
“You’re going to look?” asked Mar’ya Morevna. Ivan nodded. “What good will that do?”
“Satisfy my curiosity. And those two” – he indicated Count Danyil Fedorovich and the bogatyr Konstantin Il’yevich – “will come with me. For Konstantin, it should prove how right I was not to oppose the Tatars, and how right he was to support me. As for Danyil Fedorovich… Well, he might just have his mind changed.”
Mar’ya Morevna looked at the councillor dubiously. “So far as he and his kind are concerned, I sometimes wonder if they’ve got a mind to change. But yes. It might work. And if it works, it might shut up the opposition back in Khorlov.”
“The way you used on Aleksey Romanov is still the most effective,” said the Grey Wolf. He wasn’t smiling when he said it. “They’ll try to stab you in the back every chance they get, every chance you give them by being just and fair and forgiving. If one of your own council won’t agree with your decision, get rid of him. One way or another.”
“We had this debate before,” said Ivan. “How many times will we have it again?”
“As many times as need be,” said Volk Volkovich. “I’ve decided – for whatever reason I had at the time, I forget which – to help you, guard you, and defend you. And your family as well. That defence doesn’t always mean a sword and shield, Ivan Aleksandrovich, nor teeth in the night. It also means, or so your own father said, being ready and willing to say the things a high-born listener doesn’t like to hear or, by his or her rank,” he bowed slightly to Mar’ya Morevna, “expect to hear. So I alone am left to say them. And I do.”
“Constantly.”
“Thank you.” The Grey Wolf smiled, a quick gleam of that excessively white, excessively ragged and sharp array of teeth. “At least the effort doesn’t go unnoticed.”
“Volk Volkovich, you’re funny!” said Anastasya Ivanovna, leaning out of the wagon and as usual listening with more attention to things that weren’t her business than anything that was. “Have you ever thought of being a court jester?”
“No, my lady.” Again that elegant bow from the saddle, and the smile that this time had gone long-suffering, a wolf to the cub who was chewing on his tail for the hundredth time. “My jokes have too much bite in them.”
“How amusing.” Mar’ya Morevna stared at Volk Volkovich as he straightened up, and her frost-pale eyebrows drew together in a frown. For all his declarations of defending Ivan and his family, for all that she trusted him more now than she’d ever done before, she’d still grown up with too many tales where a meeting between wolves and children had only one ending.
The Tatar escort eyed Ivan’s party strangely as they rode out across the steppe towards the ruined city. He glanced at them and even though he was too far away for details, the thoughts crossing those weathered, slit-eyed faces were easily read. What was he doing? Why was he doing it? Doesn’t the idiot Rus know there’s no point in visiting a place after we finish with it? How many of the fur-hatted horsemen had been here the first time, Ivan didn’t want to know. He growled something inarticulate deep in his chest, a sound that drew a look of surprise from the Grey Wolf, and laid his whip across his horse’s flanks to make the stupid thing move faster than a trot.
Sivka wouldn’t have tolerated such treatment, but then Sivka wouldn’t have needed it. This bay gelding, however, was a dumb animal in every sense of the word and needed all the riding aids ever invented by the agile mind of man to make it do other than eat grass and look handsome. Ivan wondered whether spurs might work better than the more usual nagayka whip, but suspected that the dogmeat-with-hoofs under his saddle had too much mule in its ancestry even for that. It would look impressive stalking into Sarai, but that was all he could say in its favour.
And it had a rotten line in conversation, too.
Volk Volkovich drew level with him after a few minutes, when the bay slackened its gait and Ivan had grown tired of trying to encourage it to greater effort. The Grey Wolf had no such trouble. He had long since reached some sort of unspoken rapport with the rangy grey mare that was his usual mount in man’s shape. Ivan had never asked, but he suspected the arrangement ran along the lines of ‘do your best or be eaten.’
“Why in such a hurry, friend Ivan?” he said, reining the grey back to match Ivan’s pace. “And why so concerned with what the children will see? Chernigov fell four years ago, and the wolves —” He fell silent and had the decency to look ashamed of himself.
It was indeed a decency, a politeness, and nothing more than that, since shame about the completely natural doings of his real self and his relatives wasn’t something that the Grey Wolf ever felt. Ivan wondered how many hours Volk Volkovich had spent in front of a mirror to perfect the expression. He was glad that Mar’ya Morevna was still far enough away not to see it or hear the words which had caused it.
“I’m in no hurry to look at Tatar leftovers,” he said. “But any excuse to move faster than that damned amble is good enough for me.”
“It’s the way the Tatars march. And it’s taken them all the way from the high steppes to the gates of Vienna.”
“I know that. I don’t have to like it. And anyway, old friend,” Ivan slapped his horse’s neck and raised a little puff of the red dust of the steppes, “I’m just a little spoiled by Sivka. If it wasn’t for Amragan tarkhan, we could have been in Sarai and away again by now.”
“It’s the ‘away again’ that concerned him,” said Mar’ya Morevna, coming up to them in a cloud of russet dust. She brushed in a half-hearted way at the sleeve of her riding-coat, knowing it was a gesture matched only by mopping up an incoming tide with a sponge. “If he hadn’t known about the horses …” Then s
he shrugged. “Ah well. The price of fame.”
Ivan opened his mouth to speak, but what came out instead was an oath as his bay horse shied at something in the long, dry grass. He stared downward, then began to concentrate on calming the horse rather more gently than the others might have expected. His voice, when he spoke at last, had become hushed as it might have done in Khorlov’s cathedral, and he was still staring at the ground as he made the sign of the cross over his heart. “The price of defiance,” he said, “is higher.”
The skulls were everywhere.
It wasn’t as though Ivan was taken by surprise; he’d heard reports of Tatar sieges and their aftermath from Volk Volkovich and knew what to expect. Except that reports and forewarned expectations didn’t do justice to the reality, and the reality here was a field full of skulls stretching from where he sat for as far as he could see towards the blasted patch of land that had been Chernigov. There were so many that they looked at first glance like a harvest of turnips, and that rustic image was preferable to the alternative. His eyes and mind, which had in their time encompassed many more gruesome sights, couldn’t immediately accept that these, so many of these, had once been living heads attached to living bodies.
“No ribs or arms or legs,” said Mar’ya Morevna, crossing herself in turn. “Someone made themselves a victory monument.” Her voice was as quiet as Ivan’s had become, but it had retreated into a familiar coolness. Not quite unconcern, not quite lacking grief for the dead, but certainly not his own level of awestruck shock.
Mar’ya Morevna had looked upon such scenes before, and caused some of them herself – Ivan could still remember three thousand dead Tatars strewn from one horizon to the other. But that had been a battle. These skulls had been pulled free of one of the ghastly pyramids of severed heads that Tatar commanders made to indicate displeasure at a too-stubborn defence, a too-reluctant surrender, or whatever else had vexed them on that particular day. As Ivan rode slowly closer to the bare ground which had once been a city of forty thousand souls, he discovered that even four years of being washed by the rain and bleached by the sun, of being picked at by birds and gnawed by – he glanced at Volk Volkovich – other creatures, hadn’t been time enough to completely flatten out this monument to savagery.
It had been too big.
Cawing wildly, crows erupted from the pile of skulls that even after so long still rose as high as Ivan’s saddle. He reined in with a soft oath and blessed himself again with a hand that shook, though whether with anguish or anger he didn’t know. The scattered skulls were long since clean and smooth, scoured to the colour of ivory. These were not.
Heaped and tumbled together as though still trying to protect each other from the weather and the scavengers, the remainder were a hideous reminder of the mortality of man. Patches of hair and shreds of dried and blackened flesh disfigured them, and untouched by sun or rain or beak or fang they had become instead a banquet for the smallest vermin of the steppe. The hot, still air was heavy with the buzz of carrion flies, and a stench had soaked into the ground so that it seemed the place would never be truly free of it again. At least it was old, faded like the skulls themselves. Ivan had smelt the sickly-sweet gagging reek of fresh putrescence before, and this was more tolerable. Just.
He jabbed his heels into the bay gelding’s flanks, but had to put his whip to it again before the shuddering beast would move. That reaction at least he understood. He would have preferred to turn back himself, but there were two reasons why he didn’t, and they were riding up behind him now. Ivan heard the stifled cries of horror and disgust from his two councillors as they came close enough to see the more repulsive details of the skull-mound, and he suspected that they too would have chosen not to go any further. Only the presence of their Tsar in front, and Mar’ya Morevna and Volk Volkovich behind, kept them in their place.
He tugged a rein, dug in a knee, and walked his horse slowly all the way around the mound, not looking at the thousands of eyesockets that seemed to stare at him, but at four eyes reluctant to meet his own. The young bogatyr Konstantin was signing himself with the cross over and over again and muttering some litany of prayer under his breath, but his companion wasn’t giving way to any such display.
Count Danyil Fedorovich had flouted Ivan’s authority once before and had been slapped down for his trouble. The boyar had never forgotten it, and had made it his business to oppose Tsar Ivan thereafter for no reason other than the attainment of some obscure satisfaction. His had sometimes been the sole voice of dissent in matters where Khorlov’s Council was otherwise unanimous, but his reasoned arguments in those matters – as well as his position and the support it commanded – had meant there was no way to accuse him of simple obstruction. As a token of displeasure, Ivan had removed him from his place as a member of the druzhinya, the Tsar’s personal retinue, but it hadn’t deterred Danyil Fedorovich.
Even when Ivan made the scandalous announcement of unconditional surrender to the Tatars and almost provoked swordplay in the Council Chamber, Fedorovich’s objection was so smoothly worded that the Tsar could do nothing about it. By that time unanimity less one had become so much an expected part of any agreement that the boyar’s words hadn’t swayed the ultimate decision; but it hadn’t made the man any less aggravating, and there were times when the Grey Wolf’s advice regarding badly-behaved councillors seemed as practical as any. The only problem was that if Tsar Ivan killed off every councillor who disagreed he would soon have no Council left, and the standard response of ‘then kill them all and have some peace for once’ seemed less coarsely funny since the Tatars came.
Killing them all had happened far too many times already. He had only to look around him to see that.
“Do you still think Khorlov should have fought?” asked Ivan.
Fedorovich blinked like a man awakened from an ugly dream and looked his Tsar in the face for the first time. That look wasn’t the hatred Ivan had been expecting. It was contempt. “This is an uncouth way of driving home a point,” the boyar said. “I had expected better of your father’s son.”
“My father’s son,” said Ivan wearily, “has spent six years and more trying genteel methods, and none of them worked. Well, Danyil Fedorovich? Have they? Explanation, logic, even appeals to what in any other man would be common sense. At least now you’ve admitted there is a point I’m trying to drive home. That’s an improvement of sorts.”
The nobleman uttered a disdainful grunt, but it sounded less sincere than other such grunts that Ivan had heard down the years. Certainly it was nothing like as heartfelt as the noise of Konstantin Il’yevich leaning from his saddle to be sick. Ivan did him the courtesy of turning away until he recovered his composure, wishing that he too could give way to the churning in his guts. Or the stinging in his eyes. But while Count Danyil’s cold gaze was on him he had to maintain a dispassionate façade and be a Tsar.
Mar’ya Morevna stopped her own horse beside his, and the look on her face was plain. She was ready to support any decision he might make, whether it was to go on or return, and ram any clever observations or objections from the count back past his so-white teeth with the butt of her riding-whip. Not that it would do any good; but Ivan felt certain it would make her feel much better.
“We go on,” he said. “I’ve come this far, and seen this much. I might as well see the rest. And you,” he didn’t trouble to more than glance at Count Danyil Fedorovich, “will come too.” There was no answer and Ivan had expected none, but the presence of Volk Volkovich to enforce his will was assurance enough.
The city, or what had been the city, was both less ghastly and more distressing than the scattered pyramid of skulls. Ivan had been in Chernigov only three times in his life, twice of those since becoming Tsar. The place had struck him with its similarity to Khorlov; not just in the usual way that one walled city with a kremlin resembles any other, but in many small ways that made it comfortingly familiar. That meant it was easy to visualize the same destruction visited
upon Khorlov, and only that familiar layout of walls and streets and buildings made it possible to know where the parts of the city had ever been.
Because they were gone.
Nothing remained except the empty ground where the city had once stood. Ivan had expected ruined houses, burned-out wooden shells with the grass of the steppes a second invader now the Tatars had left, and the full weight of what it meant for a place to be so destroyed that its site was ripe for plough and planting had never really struck home. Not until now. There wasn’t even grass; the soil was so soured with ash and shreds of charred timber that no plant could survive in it.
One image kept creeping back into his head, a childhood memory and not one to be proud of. Ivan, ten years old, had found a nest of red ants busily doing whatever ants do, and had squatted down to watch them. He learned within minutes that one of the things these particular ants did was to bite, and bite hard.
After the usual interval of squealing and running to his mother to have it all made better, Prince Ivan had come back. With a flask of lamp-oil and a taper stolen from the kremlin kitchens, he’d slowly and carefully burned the ant-nest, pouring the oil in ever-decreasing concentric circles to better enjoy how the little creatures ran frantically about, and thrashed, and crisped, and died. Then he’d ground even the site of the nest out of existence with the heels of his boots, and had later been smacked for scraping the gold-work from the leather. But the smacking had been worth it, because that burnt, smashed patch of ground remained until the next winter as a reminder of his mighty power to deal destruction on those who had offended him.
Was what had happened here a demonstration of power and nothing more? Was this how the Khan of the Golden Horde saw Russia and all the rest of the world that his horsemen could wrest from its rightful owners? Mere nests of insects to crush beneath his feet?
Tsar Ivan Aleksandrovich of Khorlov sat in the midst of desolation on his stupid, stubborn horse, and wept silently for the stupid, stubborn people of Chernigov.
The Golden Horde Page 20