The Golden Horde

by Peter Morwood

  Ivan stared at them coldly. “I don’t like threats,” he said. Stepan Mikhailovich shook his head.

  “We don’t threaten, Majesty. We promise. Because we know the Tsar of Khorlov has a wife, and a son, and a daughter. Good day to you, Majesty. Close the door as you leave …”

  *

  Volk Volkovich strolled through the shadowy streets of Sarai. Sometimes he ambled on two feet, and at other times he trotted on four; but nobody challenged him either way. Even with his drooping false moustache, this time made of his own hair and much superior to the last one, he would never have passed for a Tatar or one of the squat, bandy-legged Chingisid Mongols. But even without it he was already lean-faced and long-jawed enough to pass for a Blue Turk from the high steppes, and one of particularly nasty disposition. There was less risk of a challenge here than there had been in the siege-camp outside the walls of Ryazan six years ago. Only in the smallest tribal bok might one man know the names and faces of all the others, and Ilkhan Batu’s city of the Golden Horde was far too big for that. With a constantly changing population that never fell lower than eighty thousand, and any given fifty thousand of those the five tuman divisions at the Khan’s disposal, there was no way anyone he might encounter could know every other.

  He had prowled around in one form or another for almost two weeks now, first shadowing the column escorting Tsar Ivan from Khorlov then later simply lurking in the vicinity of Sarai to see what could be seen. He hadn’t been missed by Amragan tarkhan and the other Tatars of the escort, who might even think he’d been killed by the wolf that had been tracking them. But he’d kept clear of Ivan and all the other Khorlovtsy Russians as well. Pretending to be one Tatar among so many thousand others was a simple matter, but being one Rus among twenty, unable to come and go as he pleased, would curtail his activities as Ivan’s spy in the enemy camp.

  The Grey Wolf preferred his natural form, which he adopted on the quieter streets. That wasn’t just because he found walking upright as uncomfortable as a man would find stumbling about on all fours, but the wolf-shape had added advantages. He could no longer see a full range of colours, though after nightfall that was small loss, but he could see in darkness that would rob human eyes of more than just colour, he could hear farther than most humans could see in better light than this, and what he couldn’t see or hear, he could smell. And he was so much quicker, stronger and more agile in his true shape that not even Tsar Ivan could hope to understand the difference.

  Just because the streets were quiet didn’t mean they were empty, and with him prowling through them, they were most certainly not safe. The whole city and everyone in it felt uneasy. Volk Volkovich knew it wasn’t because of him, since he’d taken pains to ensure nobody knew he was here. But there was a tight, hot sensation in the air that left the Grey Wolf feeling uncomfortable all the time. In wolf’s shape he was itchy, as if his fur was inside-out, and in human form he had skull-splitting headaches. The whole of Sarai felt like a pot come to the boil and about to overflow, but that there was a weight on its lid, holding all that pressure back until… What?

  Until the heat beneath it died away, or the lid was lifted and the pressure released?

  Or until something blew that lid clean off and whatever seethed within came out in a searing rush?

  He’d been spotted two or three times now, a furry shape fading into the broken shadows beyond the doorway lanterns. There had been some slight bewilderment, but so far no alarm. The few men who had seen him were just common soldiers of the Khan, Mongols, Uighurs and the like. Steppe nomads all their lives, they had been city-dwellers for the past few years, still amazed by living among the buildings their Ilkhan chose to build rather than destroy. Their eyes told them they’d seen either a wolf or one of the big herd-dogs that were no more than a well-fed generation removed from wolves. It was very much like Ryazan all those years ago. This was a city, so what they’d seen couldn’t be a wolf, and therefore had to be a dog.

  A bloody big dog, but just a dog after all.

  Volk Volkovich pricked his pointed ears forward and listened to the slurred mumblings of the man who reeled along the street ahead of him, unaware of the fanged grey bulk lurking in the darkness at his back. He was one of the burly, short-legged Uighur tribesmen, and though he was mumbling to himself, it was some Turku-Mongol dialect that made no sense to his unseen listener. Not that it was anything a spy could have used, since of all the smells that hung in the air the sharp buttermilk tang of kumys was predominant. With enough fermented mares’-milk on board, a steppe Tatar might see wolves anywhere, even when there wasn’t one close enough to take out his throat with a single leap-and-snap. The Grey Wolf grinned, curling back his lips in a leer that exposed teeth like an ivory picket-fence.

  It was tempting. Very tempting. Granted, the Tatars weren’t a clean people, but it wasn’t the thought of stained clothing or grubby skin that was making the Grey Wolf’s mouth water. There was warm, savoury stuff inside the dirtiest wrapping that…

  Volk Volkovich closed his teeth silently on the desire to snap them shut and see the Tatar jump out of clothes and skin together. There was a time and a place for everything, and this was neither.

  But there would be other times.

  The Grey Wolf whined softly at the back of his throat and resumed man’s shape in a hurry. It might be weak and gangly, with feeble teeth and a feeling of having wool wrapped round its senses, but right now it had fewer temptations to master. He heard another voice further down the street, louder and more coherent than that of the drunk soldier he’d been tracking, and it said something in Turki. Volk Volkovich pulled his grey wolfskin cloak around his shoulders then up around his neck to better hide his face, and walked quickly and quietly in the opposite direction. Even though he was dressed to look like a Turk and could recognize the sound of their language, he could neither understand nor speak it and made a point of avoiding those who might. If a man who presumed they might both be of the same tribe tried to start a conversation, the sinister looks and ill-tempered snarls that helped maintain his disguise would only go so far.

  The voice, having no success with Turki, shifted to Farsi and doubled in volume.

  Volk Volkovich smiled thinly and kept walking. He knew the sound of an officer bawling out a subordinate for drunkenness well enough. A troop-leader commanding one hundred of the Khan’s own guard was outraged to find one of his own men staggering tipsily through the street, not because he was drunk, since all Tatars from the late Khakhan Ogotai on down were great drinkers, but because he was supposed to be on duty at Khan Batu’s treasure-house.

  Treasure-house?

  The Grey Wolf froze and flattened against the nearest wall, listening as well as those feeble human ears would let him. The officer’s infuriated bellowing helped considerably. He was a junior commander whose idea of a dressing-down wasn’t just to list the penalties he intended to award, but the duties that should have been performed by the transgressor and which would be doubled to help him remember next time.

  Volk Volkovich had no difficulty committing them to memory the first time, and felt gratitude to the man for finally giving purpose to all his creeping around Sarai. If a collection of stolen Russian crowns wasn’t being kept in the Khan’s own treasure-house then he would be very surprised.

  Finding the place would be easiest of all. Still yelling obliging explanations of what he was doing, the commander dragged his swaying soldier towards where the man was supposed to be on sentry, declaring he would stand sentry even if he had to be spiked upright to the door. Volk Volkovich grinned nastily, knowing the officer was both capable of doing it and well within his rights. Discipline in the Golden Horde was brutal. In an army of barbaric savages whose response to any opposition was force, superior force was all they understood.

  Neither of the Tatars heard the faint sound like an intake of breath as the Grey Wolf returned to his preferred shape. He drifted along with no more disturbance than a curl of smoke, and that sharp-fang
ed smile never left his muzzle the whole time.

  It wasn’t fear of the threatened punishments which sobered up the would-be sentry, because he’d not been sober enough to hear them in the first place. But the intermittent shaking that played punctuation to some particularly inventive unpleasantness, and the constant dragging through the dark, wet streets of Sarai, and the tumbles into puddles of standing water and less savoury stuff, all helped restore coherence to his speech and movement.

  Not that he was fool enough to make use of either. When the commander at last shoved him disgustedly towards a low, massive building, the soldier’s flailing stagger and ultimate collapse at the feet of the one guard on duty would have brought satisfaction to the stoniest heart. It was effective enough that the officer contented himself with a single kick before striding off about his own interrupted business, leaving the sprawled Tatar to warily pick himself up, wipe himself off and start his duties for the night as if nothing had happened.

  Like the Golden Pavilion, the treasure-house stood alone at the centre of an open square. Torches flared and spat from iron brackets on the doorposts, and there were others at the corners of the four-square building and in the middle of each length of wall, throwing pools of yellow light overlapping each other like the scales of a good hauberk with no shadows where an intruder could creep close. Even if a potential thief could get near without being seen, the windows were small and barred, they had iron shutters on the inside and there was only a single door.

  Volk Volkovich lay down in the lee of a house on the far side of the square, laid head on paws, and studied the problem. He wasn’t discouraged, just mildly amused that he hadn’t noticed this place before, probably because it looked like so many other houses in Sarai. With Rus noblemen locked up in several, guards were common, and as for houses set off by themselves, the place had been built by so many diverse hands and in so many styles of architecture that no one construction looked much more unusual than another.

  There were only two guards here, who took turns every few minutes to walk right around the building before coming back to the shelter offered by the awning over the doorway. There were the windows, with their bars and shutters. There was the door itself, bolted at top and bottom but not locked because there was no keyhole in the heavy planks. Either the Khan trusted his men not to steal, or they were too well-trained to steal, or they were too afraid of their own commanders. That was the most likely of all.

  Any discipline imposed by fear of a superior could be put to good use by anyone bold enough to play such a superior, and from the few words exchanged before the angry troop-commander went on his way, neither guard would be surprised by an officer speaking Farsi. Volk Volkovich could manage that as well as anyone in Sarai, and play the harshness of a Tatar officer better than most real ones.

  A few minutes later, the two sentries heard footsteps approaching from the far side of the square. They were firm, steady footsteps, the tread of someone with nothing to hide and every right to be where he was. That meant only one thing, a surprise inspection. The sober guard shot a warning glance at his erstwhile drunken companion, and both men gripped their spears tighter as they straightened from the occupational slouch of all sentries on a boring duty late at night.

  Volk Volkovich had seen all of it, and was well pleased. For all the dislike of his blunt-sensed human shape, its eyes and ears were still inhumanly sharp, and he’d watched the two Tatars convince themselves of what to expect before he emerged from the uncertain shadows beyond the flickering torchlight.

  What they saw was a Turk six feet tall and looking even more, towering above the stocky Uighurs as he stared coldly down at them from eerie eyes that seemed illuminated from within. He wasn’t someone they recognized, but he had to be an officer, to be so heavy-footed. Even worse, from his expression he knew one of them had been caught drunk when he should have been on duty, and worst of all, he didn’t care which one.

  “Report!” Volk Volkovich allowed a little wolf’s voice to edge the Farsi accent, putting a snarl like the tearing of metal behind that single word. The Tatars weren’t as frightened as they would have been had he appeared in his true shape, but they were exceedingly respectful.

  “Nothing to report, Lord,” said the sober one, saluting fist to forehead in the Tatar manner. The drunk one wisely said nothing at all, and Volk Volkovich could hear him breathing shallowly so any smell of kumys couldn’t reach the officer’s nostrils. He needn’t have worried. No ordinary officer of the Horde whether Mongol, Turk or Tatar, could have smelt anything other than the refuse which the man had fallen in on his way to duty.

  “Good.” A pause, then a hard stare. “You,” to the other man, who twitched perceptibly. “You stink. Stand away.” The soldier saluted in his turn, then gratefully set off on a round of the treasure-house in no great haste, hoping this particular officer would have gone by the time he completed his circuit. He was right, since Volk Volkovich had no intention of staying here longer than necessary.

  But what was necessary was to see the inside of the treasure-house. It concerned the Gates again. One look around inside the building would be enough for him to enter it safely without troubling the guards again, stepping quietly out of this world and then back into it again on the other side of the closed and bolted door. But without that look he stood a more than even chance of sharing the same floor-space as whatever golden things were piled up within the Khan’s treasury. There would be little satisfaction in finding one of the lost crowns of the Rus domains if the damned thing was embedded in his liver.

  “All in order inside?”

  “Inside, Lord?”

  “Inside.” He glared at the guard as though the man was half-witted. “Where the treasure is. Where a thief would be.”

  “I heard nothing, Lord.”

  “Just so. You would not hear a thief. Open the door.” There was just the tiniest hesitation, not so much suspicious as confused and put off-balance by a change in routine. “Or have you some reason why not, uu?”

  That was enough. “At once, Lord!”

  “And quietly. Just in case.” The Grey Wolf gave the man a quick grin to set him back at ease, a grin that promised rewards and maybe promotion if anything amiss was discovered, and a report to the man’s own officer that if not actually good would at least not be bad.

  The bolts, well-greased, slid back in silence, and the door swung open. Volk Volkovich reached up and took one of the doorpost torches from its bracket, and stepped forward into the blackness. It wouldn’t have surprised his cynical mind to discover that the place was empty, that all the torches and sentries and thick walls were just a bluff and that real security lay in concealment of the treasure rather than guarding it.

  He would have been wrong.

  For just an instant there was only darkness in the treasure-house, darkness that drank the yellow torchlight like wine. Then he raised its sputtering, smoky flame above his head and the light returned, reflected back from what lay strewn across the floor and heaped like windblown autumn leaves waist-high along the walls, a thousand, thousand glints of icy brilliance, like the eyes of his own people, murderous gemstones embroidered on the sable fabric of the night.

  The Grey Wolf had never seen the riches scattered broadcast in the Golden Pavilion at Ilkhan Batu’s slippered feet, but he would have known why they were discarded. They were merely splendid, as befitting the court of the Splendid Khan, but set against the magnificence of what lay before him, they would have become valueless, cheap and tawdry. What these four strong walls contained were the fruits of the mightiest plundering that the wide white world had ever known, wealth enough to make all other conquerors from Aleksandr the Macedonian and the Roman Caesars gnash their teeth in envy and own themselves defeated.

  Volk Volkovich had long thought the Golden Horde was named for the altan uruk, the ruling Golden Clan who traced their descent from Chinghis-Khan and from whose family the Great Khans were chosen, but the name had truly hatched in this sto
ne nest, from this golden egg. Batu’s armies had crushed every realm from the Urals to the Danube, from the Straits of Hormuz to the Baltic, and while much of that wealth had been channelled back to the heart of the empire, the rest of it was here. It was a golden hoard indeed, a hoard worthy of Zmey Gorynyts and Tugarin his son, worthy maybe of the great Dragons from ancient times, and even they might concede they were outmatched.

  Volk Volkovich was glad he wasn’t human. A man might not have resisted the lure of so much gold in chain and plate and coin and bar, so many jewels raw and cut, set in their mounts and loose like pebbles, so much sheer power that wealth could buy. But a wolf had little use for precious things and as for the power, he could feel it dinning at his brain as though he was standing beneath the great bell of Khorlov’s cathedral tower.

  And there they were, all in a row. Twelve wooden boxes, carved, inlaid, jewelled, each different but alike enough as form must follow function. The crowns of twelve kingdoms, taken by conquest and left together in the dark to brood on their defeat. It was all her, the power of untold years of ruling, the strength of laws and armies and successive generations unbroken until now, all humming in his ears and inside his skull like a swarm of monstrous golden bees. Here was the source of the itch, of the headaches, of the pressure grinding down on Sarai like a fist kneading dough. Volk Volkovich thought of that one image, and flinched. What happens to dough when the kneading is done? It goes into the oven. Human or inhuman, the Grey Wolf didn’t like to dwell on what sort of oven waited for this city and the people in it.

  Especially when some of those people were his friends.

  He turned about and walked from the treasure-house so fast that the torch-flame roared softly above his head, almost flung it at the sentry, nodded a curt ‘all’s-well’ at the startled man, then slammed the door and bolted it. Oak and cold iron had some small use in magic, so they said. It would hold back the wild energies swirling within the treasure-chamber for long enough to let him get to where Ivan and the other Khorlovtsy folk were being held. Despite their differences, despite their arguments and fights, the Grey Wolf had to speak to Mar’ya Morevna. He didn’t know what was about to happen, but he did know that she was the only person in Sarai who could prevent it…