The Golden Horde

by Peter Morwood

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Khanate of the Golden Horde;

  September, 1243 A.D.

  Mar’ya Morevna ached in all her bones, right down to the tiny ones of hands and feet, and understood with painful clarity why the Khan’s couriers swathed their bellies with tight bandages. It was supposed to cushion them against the jolting of a constant hard gallop, but if the way she felt now was an indication, it also probably saved time in the infirmary later.

  Amragan tarkhan had taken four weeks to cover the distance between Sarai and Khorlov. She and her escort did it in eleven gruelling days, and it became a stubborn point of honour to display no more discomfort than the hard-bitten horsemen. She succeeded, though whether she had gained their respect was hard to say.

  They had certainly gained hers.

  As members of the Khan’s own guard, even the common troopers each outranked a commander of one thousand in the ordinary army of the Golden Horde, and when fully trained was reckoned fit enough to command a troop of ten thousand. Rather than the furious gallop of the express couriers from one post-house and a change of horses to the next, each one of these thousand men had two or three spare horses in tow, and were capable of maintaining a monotonous pace of walk-run-walk from dawn to dusk, changing mounts on the move, eating or sleeping in the saddle, and halting only to perform their hasty eliminations. Even though the roads they travelled were no more than dusty or muddy tracks, the route outlined by wooden poles against those times when the changing weather swept the road away completely, there was never an occasion when they were lost.

  The only real relief was in the evenings when they halted and made camp, and even that was a double-edged comfort, because rest lasted only long enough for strained muscles to stiffen and be doubly painful when the march began again at dawn. It didn’t trouble the Tatars. What would have disturbed them more was the prospect of traveling by night, because if the Chingisid khans were afraid of thunder and the anger of Tengri, these ordinary soldiers were afraid of the dark.

  Mar’ya Morevna couldn’t understand why. Never mind bears, or wolves, or even Volk Volkovich; these Tatars were by far the most dangerous creatures in the area, and there was a twisted feeling of security about riding in their midst. But they were still fearful to be out on the cold black earth of the open steppe after nightfall, and none of them would tell her why.

  The old shaman Beyki was a little more forthcoming. “Erlik Khan is lord of the empty places,” he mumbled, chewing a strip of dried meat and washing it down with swigs of kumys and he rode along, swaying, always swaying, but never falling off. One skinny arm waved towards the desolate horizon, a grand sweeping gesture for all it was made by a stick wrapped in leathers and furs. “Huu, places like these.”

  Like the movement of his jaws on the meat, his words went around and around and always returned to the same place, chewing sense slowly to pieces. “We pay him no heed in the daytime for we pray to Tengri, the Blue Sky, the bright day. Erlik hates that. Hui! He hates us. He dwells in the earth, in the dark, where we give him our bodies. But not our lives. He eats only the dead.”

  His old, old eyes gazed at Mar’ya Morevna, cold as frozen flint, glittering with ancient wisdom and ancient wickedness. “Huu. That is Erlik Khan. That is why they fear the night. They fear Erlik. Men should have something to fear, uu? Or they might become too bold even for their gods.”

  It was all superstition, all stories, all nonsense. Mar’ya Morevna knew that when she heard it… until nightfall when the shadows gathered, and she heard the old man’s creaking voice from every sound in the dark of her tent. She didn’t sleep well that night, or for many nights after, and it still muttered at the back of her mind in uneasy dreams.

  Mar’ya Morevna avoided Beyki even now, though with more reason. The Great Crown of Khorlov was thumping against her knee, its carrying-box wrapped three layers thick in sheepskin and stuffed into a leather bag hung from her saddle. The Tatars had fallen back when she emerged from the Treasury in Khorlov with it tucked beneath her arm, and they were happy to give her the responsibility for carrying it. That wariness was much to Mar’ya Morevna’s advantage, because there were other things about her that were different.

  One was the additional pair of saddlebags secured to her saddle, filled with the changes of clothing needed by a weak and feeble woman who wasn’t as tough as she pretended. None of them unwrapped the carefully-folded robes and blouses and embroidered shifts to stare fearfully at the books they concealed.

  And none of them thought anything of it when Mar’ya Morevna’s horse went lame. That lameness was carefully arranged, a handy stone scooped from the ground and tucked into the frog of one hoof to make the animal useless for more of the hard riding that had brought them up to Khorlov. It gave her the excuse she needed to take a fresh horse and a remount from the kremlin stables, and the Tatars, who treated their own shaggy ponies better than they treated their enemies or themselves, had agreed. Her heart had been pounding up into her mouth the whole time, but no one scrutinized her choice too closely – and both Sivka and Chyornyy had displayed enough good sense to keep their own mouths shut.

  It felt pleasant to hold some of the advantages for a change, although knowing exactly how to make best use of them was another matter.

  *

  Sarai, capital of the Khanate of the Golden Horde;

  September, 1243 A.D.

  “What do you mean she’s gone for the real Great Crown? She can’t bring that thing back here!”

  Volk Volkovich tried to keep his voice under control, but Ivan could hear a howl of anguish that was pure wolf try to break through the human speech. It was almost midnight when a hammering on the door of the house had sent half-dressed servants scurrying in all directions, but Ivan was glad to see the Grey Wolf again after so long, and eager to hear what he’d been doing.

  That had been before he learned what Volk Volkovich had discovered in the Khan’s treasure-house, and how that long-threatened rending apart of the world’s very structure was likely to begin even though the full number of crowns hadn’t yet been gathered together.

  “The scheme with the false crown was a failure,” said Ivan wearily. “The Tatar shaman knew it was a fake from the moment he picked it up. They sent Mar’ya Morevna and an escort of a thousand men to make sure we don’t try the same thing again. She can’t not bring it back.”

  “You know what will happen, don’t you,” said Volk Volkovich.

  “I can’t begin to imagine. But I can guess.” Ivan’s mouth twisted in a sort of smile. “If you see what I’m trying to say.”

  “It’s as near accurate as you could manage without seeing. And you wouldn’t want to see.” The Grey Wolf had been leaning against the wall in one of the studied human postures he liked to adopt, as if something needing conscious thought took his mind off other matters. Now he straightened in a way no human ever could, the movement of limbs and muscles reminding Ivan that his companion might look human but wasn’t, and never had been.

  “Can anything be done without Mar’yushka here? Anything at all?” That desperation had begun to infect his own voice, and Ivan had always prided himself on being able to conceal his feelings either in Council or out of it. “Because we talked about this before. I thought if we could somehow – well, somehow get into wherever the crowns were kept, this treasure-house for example, and take one or two of them away… No?”

  Luminescent yellow-green eyes gazed at him for so long that there was almost a feeling of heat at the back of Ivan’s skull. “Yes,” said Volk Volkovich, a low rumble of triumph in a voice gone suddenly soft and speculative. “Yes.” Then he paused, and Ivan heard his teeth click. “Or at least, maybe.”

  “How did ‘yes’ become ‘maybe’ just like that?”

  “A man pulling burning thatch off his roof doesn’t know how much good it might do. None, if the house is on fire.”

  “But if it’s only the straw that’s alight, he’ll save the rest of the building.” T
hen Ivan chuckled, more wholesome amusement than the warped and bitter laughter he’d been uttering of late. “If we end up speaking in metaphors even at a time like this, we’ve spent too much time in Dmitriy Strel’tsin’s company. But we should try it. We have to try it.” He grinned wickedly, his always-mercurial mood completing its swing up out of the pit of depression he’d dug for himself. “If it was my house on fire, I’d climb up and pee on the thatch if I thought it would help.”

  “You’d get your… yourself singed,” said the Grey Wolf, straight-faced, “and that would scarcely please your lady wife.”

  “You might be surprised. If the fire was out.” It wasn’t his place to make Mar’ya Morevna’s apologies for her, or even to come right out and tell Volk Volkovich she’d had a change of heart, but there were other ways to show matters had changed for the better, and his own attitude was one of them.

  The Grey Wolf had been his friend for long enough to know it. From master and servant, Prince and chief henchman, Tsar and favoured retainer, they had grown more like elder and younger brother. Mar’ya Morevna more than once hinted they confirmed it with the inventiveness of their insults when the mood was on them, but Ivan suspected it was much more. He wasn’t enough at ease with the Grey Wolf to regard a skin-changer as a brother, even if his three brothers-in-law were all shape-shifters, but it was good for a man in authority to have a friend whose friendship wasn’t based on ambition or hope of profit. It gave him someone whose truth was honest, not slanted for favour, and someone who could hear honesty in turn. Honest fear sometimes, as in the past few minutes before he was given that straw to clutch at. Ivan smiled to himself. Even if it was a burning straw.

  “To business,” he said then hesitated, looked about, reached for the jug of cooling spiced honey and water sbiten on the dead stove and raised it in a toast. “To business,” he repeated briskly, and swigged the stuff. His face twisted as he got an involuntary mouthful of the sediment and he spat the gritty stuff through the stove door into the ashes. “To hell with it! Never mind straw, this stuff is better when it’s hot.”

  “Of course.”

  “Believe me, it is.” Ivan spat again as if clearing his mind as well as his mouth. “Now, how do we get at the crowns?”

  *

  By the time Volk Volkovich had outlined his half-formed idea, Ivan had discarded the sbiten and was sipping white wine cut with water. If that idea was successful, and even without Mar’ya Morevna it could well prove so, a small anticipatory celebration was called for and cold sbiten wasn’t a proper drink.

  “Mar’yushka and even the children know more about the Gate spells than I do,” he said finally. “But if I understand what you’re driving at, then now you’ve seen the place, you can come and go as you please?”

  “Without becoming part of the jewellery collection.”

  “And take one of the crowns away with you each time?”

  “No.”

  The bluntness of the answer caught Ivan off-guard, and he was halfway through an enthusiastic scheme for getting each crown back to its proper domain before the single word hit home. “What do you mean, no?”

  “The opposite of yes.”

  Ivan Aleksandrovich knew that sharp-voiced reply of old, and that the anger of it was directed in and not out. “I should have said, why not? Surely when the access Gate is established, it’s a straightforward matter of —”

  “Entry and exit, yes, that’s straightforward enough. But Vanya my friend, in all this you’re forgetting one very important factor. This.” For an instant, an eyeblink, there was a huge grey-furred, white-fanged wolf sitting in the chair opposite Ivan. It was nothing like a full change of shape, more an image left on the eye like the aftermath of lightning, but it was still enough to send Ivan bolt-upright in shock. “I’m not a man. I’m a creature of sorcery. And I can no more lift one of those crowns and take it away than you could carry Khorlov’s kremlin. Even the words ordinary people use suggest they know something of these matters. What about the burden of power; or the heavy head that wears a crown, or the weight of responsibility?”

  “All figures of speech, nothing more.”

  “Are they? Words have weight and power of their own.”

  “I know that, but …”

  “But?” The Grey Wolf pounced on his hesitation as if it was a careless rabbit.

  “But never mind. It’s late.” Ivan stared down into his cup of watered wine, then up into glowing eyes that were much more a wolf’s eyes tonight than he’d ever seen before. “And getting later all the time. Tell me how I can help.”

  “Not you. The children, though …”

  Ivan had been expecting those words for a long time now. He’d proposed the same idea to Mar’ya Morevna weeks ago, yet hearing the same thing from someone else was appalling, especially when that someone, no matter how good a friend, wasn’t a member of his family. The tone of voice in which those words were spoken couldn’t have changed their meaning one way or the other, and the Grey Wolf didn’t bother with feigned concern. Ivan kept his temper leashed at that, but because he was their father he had to know if there wasn’t some other way to circumvent the problem than by putting his own son and daughter at such risk.

  There wasn’t.

  “I can use the Gating spells as naturally as I draw breath, but because of what I am, I can’t take any crowns away.” Volk Volkovich spoke softly and with something closer to sympathy. “You could take as many of them as you could carry, but passing with them through the Gate might kill you. Nikolai and Anastasya are betwixt and between. They most likely couldn’t steal away more than one crown apiece, but they can come and go between the worlds as easily as—” and he snapped his fingers. “And that at least would be two coals less from the fire.”

  “They’re only seven years old!”

  “You’re a Tsar, who may have to sacrifice those he loves for the greater good. Your father didn’t stand in your way when you went against the Teutonic Knights”

  “I was a grown man!”

  “You were twenty-one, three times the age of the twins. Tsar Aleksandr was almost seventy, three times the age of the son who was going off to war. The proportions have changed very little, so where’s the difference?”

  “If you can’t see it —”

  “I can’t.”

  “— Then you’re even more inhuman than you claim.”

  “I would say one is either human or not, rather than try to measure such things by degrees.”

  “Understand me, Volk Volkovich. These are children, I wasn’t. I knew what I was doing, and why.”

  “What makes you think that they don’t. Ivan, you do your son and daughter less than justice. Children they may be, but blind and foolish? No. Tell them the problem and ask for help. Let them make their own decision. It’s been done before. Is there not a tradition that a father may give his only son to die for the greater good?”

  Ivan froze as all the spoken and unvoiced meanings bit into him like teeth. Then he signed himself carefully with the cross and stared coldly at this self-confessed creature of sorcery. “Blasphemy hardly makes an appropriate argument.”

  “If you believe your God and His Son did this to save generations yet unborn, where’s the blasphemy?”

  “That I should dare suggest —”

  “You didn’t. I did.” The Grey Wolf watched Ivan, and behind that gaze, as bestial as anything seen glittering in the shadowed forest, there was a sadness that had no place in the eyes of a wolf. “Are we enemies?”

  “No. Damn you, no. I can’t make an enemy of a friend who was doing what he said he would – telling me things I need to know but don’t want to hear.” Ivan slammed down the wine-cup hard enough that its contents spattered out across the table, but he paid that no heed. Instead he put out one dripping hand, and after a moment Volk Volkovich held out his own so that they met in a gesture that became somehow not a handshake but the wrist-clasp of comradeship from older times. “I understand. So would Mar
’ya Morevna. But even so, I’m glad she isn’t here.”

  “She isn’t, but your children are. So ask them.”

  “When? Now? They’re asleep!”

  Volk Volkovich glanced at the shuttered window and the windy, rainy night beyond it, and perhaps at something beyond the night that he alone could see. “The sooner the better,” he said. “I was there. I felt what was building in that place. Tomorrow may be too late.”

  *

  Nikolai and Anastasya shared a room at the end of the corridor, each with a little truckle bed tucked into opposite corners. There was an oil lamp high up on the wall, clumsily glazed in thick amber glass but throwing dark golden light that kept the worst of the shadows at bay, and each child had the usual two or three toy animals for company at night.

  Ivan could see the toys from the doorway where he stood. A bear of stuffed rabbit-fur, loved to shapelessness and premature mange; a woolly lamb so distorted by years of affection that it looked nightmarish; a bird with embroidered plumage so gaudy that it could only represent flames; and two small grey wolves, fuzzy and friendly, with little resemblance that he could see to the sinister reality.

  Even though all the toys were scattered on the beds and close to hand, these wolves were the only ones being cuddled. Ivan gazed down at his sleeping children and through the surge of warmth and love for them, he still felt a tiny pang of jealousy, something like what Mar’ya Morevna must have felt the first time she looked in on her children and saw what gave them comfort in the dark.

  Though he touched their sleeping faces, it was a long time before he dared to wake them. Heavy-eyed and drowsy, neither child was quite sure what was going on, and the first thing that registered on either of them was the tall, lean, grey-haired and grey-cloaked figure standing just outside the door. As Kolya and Tasha scrambled out of bed in a flurry of blankets and long night-shirts, more awake at sight of the Grey Wolf than their own father, Ivan felt that jealousy return to drive its spike up into his gullet. For just a second his eyes stung and his choked throat refused to swallow. But its hurt died an instant later when they came back, scampering on bare feet across the chilly floor to swarm all over him and babble thanks for bringing back their Uncle Wolf, as if Volk Volkovich was another reward for being good. Ivan looked at them, and at the Grey Wolf, and at the wall, and found that if he closed his own eyes really tightly shut the tears couldn’t escape.