The Golden Horde

by Peter Morwood

  Seeing only hesitation where Mar’ya Morevna had already seen terrified reluctance, one of the eldest shamans who stood in the shadow of the Khan’s throne walked forward and lifted the crown from its box, held it up before the Khan of the Golden Horde, and made to put it down at Batu’s feet. Then the shaman snatched up the crown again and stared at it; turned it over and over in his thin, age-shrivelled hands; stroked it with his fingertips; and finally gave a piercing screech of rage.

  The skilfully-made but imitation Great Crown of Khorlov clanked loudly as it was flung into a heap of other golden things, then rolled down onto the floor amid a small avalanche of brooches, arm-rings and the like. Those sliding metallic noises were lost in the shaman’s shrill voice as the old wizard-priest danced with fury and delivered a stream of vituperation at Ivan’s impassive face.

  When they had made up the fake crown in the armoury, it had seemed like such a good idea. It would have kept the real one out of Tatar hands, kept it from adding its unstable source of power to the already dangerous accumulation of energy that was locked away somewhere in Sarai, and it would still have been convincing enough that Batu Khan would have accepted it as the proper token of submission and given Khorlov back to Ivan. Neither of them had suspected that the power in the real crown might be so intense that any lack of it could be detected simply by picking up the forgery. And now they knew, and it had all been a waste of time, and Ivan might as well have died heroically in the burning ruins of his city in the way that all the heroes of the druzhinya would have preferred. At least his reputation would have stayed intact, instead of losing it first, and everything else now.

  The six guards he remembered all too clearly were advancing on him, and for one wild moment, with his sabre on his belt, Ivan realized he could go down fighting after all. That would leave Mar’ya Morevna and the children to fend for themselves, but if he made a good enough show the Khan might be moved to clemency, and if not, they would be no worse off than the wife and children of a treacherous Russian prince who had tried to pass off a fake crown as a real one. Then, before he could lay hand to hilt, Batu said something in Mongol and the six guards stopped.

  Ivan felt short of breath, as if he’d been running. It was too early to be certain, but he had a feeling Batu’s words were a stay of execution and he couldn’t understand why.

  Batu Khan looked at him thoughtfully, then waved back the soldiers and had them sheathe their sabres. “That was a brave gesture, Ivan of Khorlov,” he said, and in token of great honour and respect, he spoke Farsi so that Ivan could understand without need of an interpreter. “I love brave men. But I love wise men better. They live longer.” The Khan laughed at that, and his court joined in the joke whether they caught the humour of their lord’s words or not. Ivan didn’t laugh. Instead he smiled in pure relief, as though he was the one who had made a sly observation of wonderful subtlety and Batu Khan was the one over-reacting to it.

  Batu’s laughter trailed off rather sooner than it might have done, and he eyed Ivan dubiously, wondering if this Rus might have made some impudent, dainty thrust in the manner of his people. But with his wife and children in the same trap as himself, he couldn’t be so stupid as to dare any such thing. That much was clearly written on his face and Ivan, trying not to wipe his sweating palms on his own breeches, was grateful for it. If your tongue is sharp enough, it will cut your own throat, Amragan tarkhan had said not half an hour ago. He hadn’t said anything about eyebrows, or sardonic smiles, or adversaries clever enough to read your thoughts from the very posture of your body. Any one of those could be as fatal as the wrong word in the wrong place.

  “You are supposed to be wise, but you have been brave instead,” said Batu. “This,” he gestured at the crown, “is stupid. The time for such bravery is past, and you should know it. Bow down, or be destroyed.”

  To Ivan’s shock he spoke this time in Russian; carefully pronounced, thickly accented, but Russian for all that. If the Khan spoke it, it was more than likely other Tatars spoke it too. Neither Ivan nor Mar’ya Morevna needed to turn around to know that numerous guilty glances were being exchanged by other people as they tried to recall impolitic statements made in a language they thought was safe.

  “If you and all these others,” a quick, all-encompassing wave took in every Russian boyar, bogatyr and nobleman in the hall, “had been as brave all together and all in the one place, then maybe I might not be here saying this to you.” Batu shrugged, in that ponderous, studied and deliberate way that only heavy men with a sense of their own dignity can truly manage. “Or you might all be dead, and I would be saying it to your successors. All that is in the past. I am here. And you are here, for which you may thank Amragan tarkhan and my own curiosity. You saved the life of an able commander, and I give you your life back in exchange. But even without that,” the broad, slit-eyed, cruel face became momentarily childlike and eager, “I could not have you killed until I heard you speak of your adventures.”

  The Khan shuffled himself into a more comfortable position among the cushions and drained a cup of kumys while the pipes played and the cymbals clashed, then threw the empty cup to a servant who caught it with the ease of long practice. “But for the peace of my realm, this matter must be settled. So tomorrow you will approach me and make whatever recompense for your stupid bravery that I may think necessary. If it does not please you, then the fault and the blame and the penalty is on your own head, not on mine.”

  It wasn’t excuse or apology, any more than observing that water is wet. The Splendid Khan of the Golden Horde didn’t waste his breath on such inconsequential matters. Batu struck his hands together, two sharp claps like the strokes of a whip. “Go.”

  Ivan gathered up his family and retinue, and went.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Sarai, capital of the Khanate of the Golden Horde;

  September, 1243 A.D.

  “Go back to Khorlov? Don’t be bloody ridiculous, man! We’ve only just arrived!”

  That wasn’t strictly true, they’d been in Sarai for five days before Batu Khan deigned to notice their existence, but Ivan knew well enough that Mar’ya Morevna never let accuracy stand in the way of a well-justified blaze of indignation. Not Amragan tarkhan’s presence, angry as only a man can be who has been played for a fool, nor even his own signals to be quiet and calm down. She was far from calm right now, and with good reason.

  “I referred only to you, Lady,” said the Turk. “All the others stay here. It is the Khan’s command.”

  “What?” Even as he protested, Ivan knew that he was wasting his breath. The suggestion had most likely come from the man in front of him, put forward as a means of revenge on those who had made him look stupid, but this had to be the Khan’s command in very truth. Ivan stared at Amragan tarkhan, and knew he was looking at someone whose delayed arrival back at the house had been caused almost entirely by his lord and master voicing opinions of stupidity, promises of punishment and orders to set the matter right. Had Amragan not already spoken his piece about how his life had been saved by the Tsar of Khorlov, who had fought a duel on his behalf, those words would never have been uttered. And that same Tsar would have suffered whatever punishment the Ilkhan of the Golden Horde decreed for forgery and a vassal’s attempted deception of his overlord. “I’ll go instead,” he said. “Let Mar’yushka stay with the children.”

  “No,” said the Turk. “You will stay. Your children will stay. Your servants will stay. Your wife will not. The people of Khorlov will not rise in rebellion to support her as they might do with you, and the presence of the brats will persuade her not to try any other little tricks.”

  Amragan tarkhan smiled, once again a bleak movement of his moustaches rather than his lips, which stayed as thin as the stroke of a sword. “But to be doubly certain, she will have an escort. Beyki the chief shaman and a troop of one thousand will accompany her, to make sure that this time the crown is the one required. By post-road. First thing tomorrow morning. And that is no
t the Khan’s command. It is mine.”

  It would be.

  “You to the Black Pit, Amragan tarkhan,” snarled Ivan, the curse soft and venomous.

  This time the Turk’s grin was a wide flash of white teeth, the delight of a man who has won the game at a stroke. “And you before me to hold the door, Khorlovskiy.” He bowed mockingly in the silence, and stalked from the room.

  Ivan sat for a long time in that silence, trying and discarding a hundred things to say. Anger, blame, guilt and recrimination all fought for precedence, and the person deserving them changed with every passing breath. But someone had to take responsibility, and it couldn’t be Mar’ya Morevna.

  From Sarai to Khorlov and back by the Tatar post-roads would be a brutal journey at the best of times, and these were not such times. The weather had begun its change already and the sky was seldom without its clouds, for rasputitsa was upon them. The rain was pounding on the roof overhead, a sound like impatient fingers drumming on a table. It would seldom cease from now on, leaving Moist-Mother-Earth sodden with red mud until the rain became snow as winter closed its jaws on the world, then rain again in the spring. The Time of Bad Roads seemed sometimes to last for most of the year, and it was small surprise now that the Tatars had chosen to invade during winter, when the ground underfoot was at least frozen hard and not mud or drifting dust.

  And there was something else besides. “What,” said Ivan at last, “will I tell Kolya and Natasha?”

  Mar’ya Morevna gripped both his hands in hers, then curled herself down beside him in the wide, over-cushioned chair. “I’ll see them before I go,” she said, and affected a smile for him. He could almost see her putting it on, as bright and artificial as any cosmetic. “They’ll understand better than you think, you’ll see.”

  “You’re angry.”

  “No. Yes. But not with you. The Khan, yes. Amragan tarkhan, yes. And everything else, perhaps yes too. But not you. Never you.”

  “Never?” He tried to tease, to do something to lighten the despair that was threatening to fall like a leaden cloak over both of them.

  “Not about important things. Not even about Volk Volkovich any more.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “I’ll hold you to that, if he ever comes back. The children miss him.”

  “Well, I don’t …” She hesitated, shook her head, and snuggled it into the comfortable angle between his neck and shoulder, then stared at the bronze and ceramic stove in the corner of the room for so long that Ivan thought she had gone to sleep. But she hadn’t. “I didn’t think I’d ever say this. But yes, I do miss the sarcastic bastard, and I believe you when you say he means us no harm.”

  Ivan stroked her hair lightly. “Really?” he said, not teasing now, nor even digging for an honest answer; just wondering. “When did you change your mind?”

  “When he was gone. Not just because it left you angry, and me angry, and neither of us willing to say ‘I’m sorry’ to the other. But because I felt… less safe.”

  “Less safe without an oborotyen werewolf than with one?” Ivan shifted his position in an attempt to see her face, but it was still turned towards the glow of the banked stove pouring in amber stripes of hot light through the slots cut in its iron door, and the crown of Mar’ya Morevna’s frost-blonde head was giving away no secrets. Yet he knew exactly what she meant. To know that at least one of the deadly shadows in the darkness was a friend, an ally who had promised to defend you and yours against all enemies and odds, was a comfort granted to few men and women, regardless of their skill in the Art Magic or their lack of it. And he might still be out there, somewhere in the shadows, watching, waiting, hopefully guarding. Ivan only wished he knew for sure.

  “I wish I knew for sure,” said Mar’ya Morevna, choosing her words with an eerie prescience that made Ivan start a little. “Whether I was right or wrong about him. Whether I offended him so much he washed his hands of us.”

  “Shouldn’t that be ‘paws’?”

  “What? Oh. Yes. Very funny. It was, really. I – I just don’t feel like laughing very much right now. I’m growing afraid of the dark, Vanya. Hold me. Just hold me.”

  Ivan put his arms around his wife, and held her close.

  Eaten through at last, the last logs criss-crossed in the stove slumped and sent up a crackling plume of sparks. Little tongues of yellow flame licked up chips of dried bark in the bed of red coals underneath. Their light shone back in strands of gold from the tear-tracks on Mar’ya Morevna’s face until she abruptly pulled clear of Ivan’s embrace, cleared her throat, sniffled vigorously and dried her eyes with a kerchief from her sleeve.

  “That was supposed to make me feel better,” she said, and smiled damply. “Who makes up such lies?”

  “The sort of person who says ‘this won’t hurt.’ Because it does. Always.” He stood up, a little awkwardly from having held his cramped position for as long as she needed him not to move, and stretched to ease the kinks from aching joints before going to the table and pouring them both something to drink from the always-replenished flask. It was vodka again, this time flavoured with herbs and honey, and while it was good enough cold, Ivan considered moving it to the top of the stove. Hot honey and alcohol would help them sleep, and from the look on Mar’ya Morevna’s face she would need as much help as she could get. Later, perhaps. Right now there was a question needing answered. He gave Mar’ya Morevna her cup, sipped delicately at his own, and then said gently, “Why the dark? You were never afraid of it before.”

  “I’d hoped our trick with the crown would work,” said Mar’ya Morevna obliquely, swallowing half the vodka at a gulp. “I hoped it as I hoped for an easy birth of healthy children, and if a man can’t imagine what that means to a woman, be grateful.”

  Ivan sat down on the arm of the chair. “They were healthy, their birth was easy, if you and the midwives weren’t sparing my tender sensibilities, and the trick didn’t work. But my head’s still on, and Batu still doesn’t have the Great Crown of Khorlov for his collection.”

  “He’ll have it soon enough. I’ve run out of deceptions, Ivan, and he won’t listen to the truth. He wouldn’t believe it, not after what we tried to do. He’d think it was just one more excuse, and anyway, you heard the Turk. No more excuses.”

  “Would the Khan ever have listened? I don’t think so.”

  “He might. That’s what makes me so angry. I pictured a degenerate old tyrant, steeped in cunning. This one… This one seems almost civilized. At least he has a practical mind.”

  “This practical, civilized Khan had Mikhail of Chernigov stamped to death for refusing to bow to him.”

  Mar’ya Morevna laughed. It was a shocking sound after her tears and soft speech, brittle and cynical and all too worldly-wise. “That was the excuse. The reason was that he was part of a failed rebellion, and the only one of its three leaders too proud to submit and too brave to run away. Too stupid to do either, if you want my opinion.”

  “So why did he come here at all?”

  “He thought that he could do some sort of merchant’s deal with the Khan to keep both his honour and his lands.” Mar’ya Morevna finished her drink. “He, an unrepentant rebel, making bargains? Stupid, as I said.”

  “But he has his honour.”

  “That should be a great comfort to the refugees living on the open steppe who could have begun rebuilding Chernigov if they’d had a lord to stand between them and the Golden Horde. A great comfort indeed. Especially with winter coming on. Yes. Winter. And the dark. You wanted to know about the dark.” She held the empty cup out abruptly. “Give me another.”

  Ivan splashed vodka into her cup, replenished his own, and returned to his perch on the chair-arm. Then he reached down and took her hand and held it. “Mar’yushka my loved,” he said softly, “tell me or not. Whatever eases you.”

  “You’re very sweet, loved.” Mar’ya Morevna laid her cheek against his hand like a cat, and sighed. “And you
really want to be told. Well. It won’t ease either of us, but you’re better knowing than not.” She tasted her vodka, no gulp this time, no more in fact than a moistening of her lips, and sat up straighter in the chair. “The equinox is next week,” she said. “Day and night will be of equal length. After that the nights grow longer as the wide white world slides down the throat of another winter.”

  “Until we reach the bottom of the year and the pendulum swings again.”

  “Unless something stops it.” Her voice was flat, the words unequivocal. To ears acquainted with the Art Magic as Ivan’s were, deny it as he might, there was a shuddersome brutality about the statement. “Autumn equinox, then winter solstice, and the darkness growing stronger all the way.” Mar’ya Morevna took a long drink of the honeyed vodka, although it was having no more effect on her than if it had been honeyed water. “You know it, I know it, the shamans know it too. But though they can sense the difference between a true crown and a false one well enough, like the heat from coals in a closed jar, they can’t sense there might be anything bad or dangerous in it. A fire can warm your house or burn it down.”

  “Like a rotten egg,” said Ivan. “You can’t tell until the shell’s been broken, and by then it’s too late.”

  “Except that if this egg breaks, the one we call our world, then the rot will come in from Outside. Oh, Vanya —” Mar’ya Morevna stared at him with wide, haunted eyes that held a degree of fear he would have sworn she didn’t know, and her fingers closed on his in a grip tight enough to hurt, “— I wish they had come for the crown in the springtime …!”

  *

  “I could take you out of the city without them knowing about it, Papa,” said Nikolai Ivanovich, peering over the ramparts and pointing to the distant line of shallow cliffs where the steppes tumbled downward to become the valley of the Volga. “I could take you right out there.”

  “So could I! So could I! So could I!” Anastasya shot her brother a glare for leaving her out, and gave him a push. “We both could, and I could do it better than him. I’m sure I could. But he just wants to sound important.”