The Golden Horde

by Peter Morwood

  “No I don’t! And anyway, if we both did it together, we could go even farther away from here.”

  “As far as Khorlov?” Ivan spoke casually, trying hard to keep the eagerness out of his voice, but the twins had sharp ears. Natasha’s face fell and her lower lip came out.

  “No, Papa. Not home. It’s too far. We couldn’t do it ourselves, and we couldn’t do it with you either.”

  “I just wondered.” Ivan shrugged, making light of it as best he could. He had been spending a lot more time with his children than he could normally spare, but he didn’t have a Tsardom to take care of right now. Whenever he was able to forget the why of that, he was able to relax and enjoy his unaccustomed liberty. But when the wheres and the whys couldn’t be ignored, he had also been doing a good deal of ‘just wondering’ since Mar’ya Morevna and her escort – he’d forgotten just how imposing and threatening a thousand armoured horsemen could look – had ridden off to Khorlov last week. Wondering how long it would be until he saw her again, for one. At best speed in this foul weather, and it was certain that the troop-leader would be driving his men at best speed all the way, she wouldn’t be back for another four weeks. With the crown.

  With the oil for the fire that might burn down the house.

  The twins had been complaining recently about heat, and cold, and wet, and dry, about being itchy, about having headaches. Ivan didn’t know how long it had been going on. Being so damned busy with one thing and another, nobody had thought it worthwhile to tell the Tsar and Tsaritsa that their children seemed to be catching something, except that even to Ivan’s inexperienced eye, neither Kolya nor Tasha looked in the least bit unwell. They had missed their mother loudly and inconsolably both before and after she left, but within a day they had bounced back with a healthy anticipation of her return. For the rest of it, while within Sarai’s ring of walls they ran about almost unsupervised, playing the sort of games with the swarms of Tatar children in the city that seemed to require no skill at language except the ability to emit piercing shrieks.

  It was only outside the gates that there were reminders of being less than guests. Ivan was allowed to ride out with one child at a time, never both together, just as they were allowed to ride out together on their fat little ponies, but never with their father. And always, whether Ivan was with them or not, there was a ten-strong troop of Tatars shadowing them wherever they went, as if those small animals could suddenly develop wings and fly away before a patrol could be dispatched from the city itself.

  The ponies couldn’t, but the twins were another matter entirely.

  Except that they’d made it plain, with all the defiant stubbornness and crooked logic of which the seven-year-old mind was capable that they wouldn’t leave without him, even if they could. Explanations of how much easier it would be for both their parents, of how much less there would be to worry about, even how much of a score it would be over Amragan tarkhan – whom neither child liked – fell on deaf ears.

  “Either we all go, or we all stay,” Nikolai had said at the beginning of this wet afternoon when Ivan put the suggestion to them once again. The adult phrasing and delivery in that child’s treble voice had been so comical that Ivan had to go away for a few minutes. If he fought to conceal tears instead of laughter, it was no one’s business but his own. All the discussion after that had been light-hearted wrangling about just how far various combinations of people and things could travel by way of these natural Gates.

  Not as far as Ivan had hoped, was the conclusion, and certainly not as far as the powerful, elaborately constructed Gating-spells that Mar’ya Morevna used so warily and rarely. One didn’t expect unaided human muscles to perform as well as a machine of gears and counterweights and levers, so why should the same difference not apply in sorcery? Ivan could think of several reasons why not, but none of them would stand up even to his under-educated evaluation. Magic-users from birth they may have been, but Nikolai and Anastasya were still only seven years old.

  Mar’ya Morevna would have been better able to explain it in the proper long words beloved of sorcerers and scholars; but from what the children had been chattering about, he could no more expect them to perform prodigies of sorcerous travel and transport than he could reasonably expect any other adult display of strength or skill from a child. But the limitations of weight and distance seemed to apply only when their Gates were being used as a short-cut between one part of Russia and another. It made a sort of perfect sense, at least in that way the Art Magic had of twisting anything it touched to conform with its own convoluted rules.

  In the last extremity all of them, or at least the children, would be able to get away completely, without any hope of return, to the Summer Country; where it was obvious Nikolai and Anastasya had friends to care for them until they grew up, even if those friends weren’t always of human shape. To go away and stay away was another matter entirely. If it became necessary – and Ivan didn’t like to think of what sort of threat would make such a step necessary – the trick would be in persuading them to do it.

  For the meanwhile, if none of them looked too closely, they could ignore the guards and the closed gates and pretend they were merely visiting a friend.

  *

  At times when Amragan tarkhan and his sardonic smile weren’t around, that friendship was easy to believe. The attitude displayed by most of the Tatars in Sarai was a straightforward one. Ivan was still alive, so the Ilkhan Batu had forgiven him, and there was an end to the matter. If their Khan exonerated instead of executed, it wasn’t the place of Batu’s loyal retainers to reinterpret his ruling. Thus Ivan found himself the subject of more interest and curiosity than anything else. Accustomed to and knowing how to deal with either armed rebellion or absolute subservience, the Tatars of the Golden Horde were confused, amused and often utterly bemused by a polite, courteous, diplomatic and only mildly insubordinate Russian prince who did exactly what he was told ninety-five times out of every hundred. It put them off their stride, so much so that they took refuge in the good-humoured wariness that Ivan was coming to recognize as their most common alternative to destructive ferocity. Since he didn’t know when or why he might say something to make that particular coin spin to show its opposite face, one was as unsettling as the other.

  It was never more so than now.

  Ivan settled himself as comfortably as he could onto a pile of cushions in the Golden Pavilion and tried not to move. Those cushions were covered in sleek silks and satins rather than a nice fuzzy velvet, so that the least change of pressure sent them shooting out from underneath him.

  Thanks to some whim of the Khan’s which might well have been a way to put either Amragan tarkhan or Aleksandr Nevskiy back in their place, he had been adopted as Batu’s pet Russian. Since Mar’ya Morevna and her escort left for Khorlov, he had been summoned to the Pavilion almost daily to sit carefully on cushions he didn’t want to sit on, and drink kumys he didn’t feel like drinking, and talk about what seemed like every subject under the sun.

  At first Ivan had thought that if this was the punishment he was suffering for insubordination, then it was far lighter than he deserved. Then he realized it was far from light. While he was here, warm and dry, taking his ease with a drink in his hand while he listened to the rain beat against the fabric of the great tent, his wife was somewhere out on the steppes and the rain was beating against her. No. Batu Khan had once again shown himself an admirable judge of character and human relationship. It wasn’t a light punishment at all.

  Ivan pushed the thought from his mind, in case it might be somehow be seen on his face or heard in his voice and only serve to make matters worse. He glanced to one side, stared briefly at the Khan’s gouty, slippered feet which were the objects closest to his head, then looked beyond them, grimaced and turned away. It wasn’t the proximity of Batu’s feet that was the problem. Though it might have been.

  The Khan, like his subjects, observed the yasa, the code of laws laid down by Chinghis-Khan, and on
e of those laws required that no one, whether rich or poor or even a khan, should wash their clothing. It was meant as a perpetual reminder of the time when the Conquerors of the World had been no more than poor nomads on the steppes of Sibir’ya, where clothing to keep out the cold had more value than gold, and where water was rarer than silver. It also meant that a Tatar encampment could be smelt miles away, though like any who lived amid stink for long enough, Ivan and the others had grown used to it. It was lucky that Batu the Splendid Khan, unlike most of his subjects, had more than enough changes of clothes that no one garment among them smelt especially rank and besides, he had a fondness for the heavy perfumes of musk and civet which helped to disguise any lingering aroma.

  There were other proximities that gave Ivan more immediate concern, and three of them were staring at him right now. Batu Khan’s pets included more than Russians with a talent for story-telling. Besides the herd of three thousand pure white mares that provided milk and kumys for the Khan and the court, and the massive bears kept as totem beasts by the shamans, there were animals in Sarai that Ivan had only ever heard of. Huge striped Sibir’yan tigers and indolent blotched leopards kept for no other reason than they were living, beautiful ornaments; their leggy cousins the cheetahs, who wore little red cloth hoods with holes cut for their ears and worked for their keep in the hunting field; and the böragut eagles with a wingspan of ten feet from tip to tip that hunted with them, flying from the Khan’s own wrist. The sleepy interest of one wild beast more or less was something Ivan had been forced to live with since his first summons into the Pavilion.

  If anyone had bothered to ask, though nobody ever did, he would have preferred the cheetahs. He liked cats, at least cats of a reasonable size, and these blunt cat faces were marked with dark stripes down the sides of their muzzles that gave them a depressed expression. Probably it was the hoods. They looked very foolish with their hoods on, and if there was one thing a cat of any size disliked, it was looking foolish.

  Perhaps because all they ever wore were heavy collars, and chains that to Ivan’s jaundiced eye weren’t anything like thick enough, the tigers and leopards never looked foolish, and nothing like as tame as Batu Khan had maintained once he stopped laughing at Ivan’s first reaction to their presence. For all their glossy coats and well-fed bellies, these striped and spotted cats always looked more than willing to try Tsar as a change of diet from horsemeat. Never Khan, oddly enough, so maybe they were indeed as well-behaved as Batu claimed.

  The eagles just stared haughtily at him down their great hooked beaks like the Firebird, and looked even more murderously insane.

  It was a cheetah and a leopard today, lounging half-asleep with heads resting on crossed forepaws, hind legs and bodies and tails disposed in that indolent, untidily elegant way of all cats. One of the böragut eagles was preening itself on a perch at the back of the cushions; now and again it favoured the world in general and Ivan in particular with a yellow-eyed glare that combined arrogance and malevolence in equal measure.

  It was strange that the Khan’s animals, his wild beasts, personified more of a conqueror’s vices than the man himself. Ivan could see laziness, cruelty, ferocity or demented rage just by turning his head. But when he looked at Batu there was no shadow even of ill-temper. It was certain that a Chingisid khan had long since trained any betraying flickers of emotion from his facial muscles, but there should have been some trace of where they had been. And there was none.

  Their discussions of the world at large could become lengthy and convoluted, Batu dropping into Farsi when his command of Russian failed, but he still demonstrated an interest in what went on beyond his borders that was more than Ivan expected from a Tatar just two generations removed from the howling wilderness of the steppes. But the Khan had never given Ivan a chance to see what he truly felt or thought about such things. Oh, he smiled, frowned, even laughed out loud, but there was always the sense that these were movements and expressions as studied as those of an actor, appropriate to the moment but not necessarily to the workings of the mind behind the mask. Yet there was a feeling that the Khan of the Golden Horde valued what his pet had to say, and Ivan knew why. It wasn’t just the tantalizing presence of the Art Magic about his adventures, though he related enough of those both large and small. It was that same reason the ordinary Tatars found him so interesting.

  Because he was different.

  He had surrendered, and yet he hadn’t; he had submitted, and yet he hadn’t. Except for the matter of the Great Crown of Khorlov, he had done all the things that Batu Khan required of a vassal prince from a conquered realm, and yet he personally had managed not to be conquered at all. The normal Tatar response to that was to stamp it out, in case such insouciance towards authority bred a more serious form of rebellion in other, lesser princes. Yet the stamping boot had been withheld even when the business of the false crown made it entirely justified, and now he was as much an object of curiosity and an ornament to the Golden Pavilion as any other strange beast, interesting and, for the moment, harmless.

  His own reputation had a good deal to do with that, of course. From what he’d overheard, easily done since so many tribal dialects in the city meant the commonest language was Farsi, the Tatars were fascinated by the Rus magic which was so different to the conjuration performed by their shamans. There was much wondering why it had never been turned against them during three years of invasion since they, the Golden Horde, would never ignore any weapon if it was available.

  Ivan had smiled grimly at that. The Art Magic could be used as a weapon of sorts in an individual combat, one on one. Not for a battle. Beforehand, yes, that was the proper place for sorcery. But it couldn’t be the obvious things from the old skazki tales, fire called from the sky to consume the enemy host, or an army of demons conjured up to oppose them. The sorcerer who tried to fight his battles by the summoning of demons would find all his time taken up with trying to control his summonings, while still needing to fight those of the original enemy not burnt by the fire or opposed by the demons, and failing to do either. And the other sort of wizard, those who tried to create such ostentatious effects by wands and circles and the direct manipulation of power? They would briefly become an ostentatious effect themselves, blown to bloody rags and tatters by the strain of attempting to channel such energies through a human brain and body that was, when all was said and done, only well-educated meat.

  What a sorcerer could do was rather more limited and rather less obvious, so much so that few chronicles of battles where sorcery had been involved even mentioned the fact. They were in any case the sort of battles where the Princes in command wouldn’t attribute their great victories to sorcery, so the chronicles were likely rewritten to delete such unpalatable information.

  Aleksandr Nevskiy had done that very thoroughly with the Battle on the Ice against the Teutonic Knights. By his command, the Lavrent’skiy and Novgorod chronicles ignored the Firebird’s presence, and indeed everyone’s presence but his own, changed the year in which the battle was fought, and even moved its location from the river Nemen to the river Neva, so his own nickname of ‘Nevskiy’ would seem like a battle honour rather than a birthplace. But he couldn’t change the fact that it was another of those battles in which inexplicably convenient things happened. One where a dust-storm rose suddenly and blinded the enemy archers, or a sudden downpour soaked the ground to mud and impeded a fatal cavalry charge – or where river ice thick enough for safety suddenly cracked beneath an advancing enemy’s feet and pitched them, weighted with their armour, into deep and freezing water.

  Ivan knew all about that particular reason, and Nevskiy could rewrite history all he chose.

  But all those things had to be there already. It was no use trying to stir up dust after a week of rain; no use calling rain from a cloudless sky; no use cracking ice so thin that the enemy hadn’t been enticed onto it. But if the dust, or the clouds, or the ice, were there already, then a sorcerer with any brains at all knew how to use
such tools to advantage, provided the commander who relied on sorcery also had a grasp of tactics. When talking to Batu Khan about them, Ivan always stepped gingerly around such subjects. It was a balancing act, neither to reveal how weak the much-feared magic was where it really mattered to the Tatars, nor to suggest it was so strong as to provoke some sort of pre-emptive action against risk of its further use.

  He was always relieved when the Khan sat back and drank, accompanied as usual by those damned flutes and cymbals, then leaned forward on his cushions, dismissed the cares of the wide white world and asked yet again for a story of wonders.

  At first Ivan had been suspicious even of that. He knew the cool, subtle, mind working behind the blunt, seamed face. There was always a fear that the constant requested repetitions of his own hard-won successes against the Teutonic Knights or Baba Yaga or Koshchey the Undying were being sifted for useful knowledge, and during the third re-telling of that time four years past when he encountered Zmey Gorynych the Dragon-boyar and Tugarin Zmeyevich, he changed a couple of particulars of the story.

  They were unimportant, just details of what Tugarin the Dragon’s son had looked and sounded like, but he’d mentioned them on both previous occasions. It was when Batu called the error to his attention that Ivan knew there was nothing to be afraid of. The Khan was doing nothing more suspicious than committing each story to memory.

  Something to boast about, thought Ivan, just a little sourly. Maybe he was doing the old Mongol an injustice, or maybe not. The only Ilkhan in the empire to have a skazki hero for a vassal. It must be like having a pet who can do really impressive tricks.

  Then suddenly, with his mind still full of the bright magical images of the past times and past places that had no Tatar invaders in the background, Ivan remembered Aleksandr Nevskiy’s taunt about Khorlov living in a world of its own. The recollection hit him like a bucket of cold water, but he smiled at the shock. Nevskiy had meant only an insult, but there were worlds indeed, and to spare. The worlds that existed behind the mirror, of which this one was but a pale reflection. Tsar Morskoy’s gratitude had promised him the Blue Kremlin and all its domains, if ever he and Mar’ya Morevna chose to live there. Even now he could smell the salt sea air, and hear the green waves crash in foam against the cliff-face far below.