The Ice Queen

by Bruce Macbain

  No one had taken Mstislav inside or even covered his nakedness with a blanket against the frigid night. What a sad end for Mstislav of the Loud Laugh, I thought—even if he was a military ass and a traitor to the pact he had made with his brother.

  Time now to slip away to Vyshgorod. What we had learned so far was discouraging: the enemy’s force, though unruly and disorganized, was large, well fed, and in a mood to stay. Mstislav was alive—barely—but it seemed impossible that we could get him away from his captors or prevent his being killed instantly if we launched an attack on the camp.

  “To the river,” Kuchug motioned with his head.

  Our plan was to pick our way along the edge of the bluff, then back through the deserted ruins of the podol, and away to the north, following the shore and swimming, if necessary, to avoid patrols.

  But first, I wanted a closer look at that discovery of mine; I’d had only a glimpse of it earlier in the day. Half hidden by bushes at the bottom of a small ravine was the mouth of a cave.

  “Kuchug,” I whispered, pointing down into the dark cleft, “you know this ground. Are there more caves here like that one?”

  “Many. Come away, leave it.”

  “Why, what’s the matter?”

  “Crazy old men in there—dead men, too. Maybe ghosts, I think. Leave it alone.”

  Now, I’m no more fond of ghosts than the next man, but my curiosity was aroused.

  “Let’s have a look.”

  “What for?”

  “Because I’ve taken a drubbing all day for nothing unless there’s some advantage here for us.” A vague notion had occurred to me of somehow smuggling our men into these caves for a surprise attack.

  I took his arm but he drew back. “Too narrow, no good for steppe-people. Come away, hurry!”

  “Not yet. Stay here, I won’t be long. Lend me your sword.”

  17

  The Caves

  Clinging to roots and brush, I eased myself down the side of the ravine. The night was dark, the bottom of the ravine darker still; but it was when I put my head into that cave’s mouth that I felt darkness envelop me like a black sack.

  A quavering inner voice pleaded to go back, but no—just a little farther—a little farther … The floor took a sudden dip, I lost my footing and slid down on my backside in an avalanche of pebbles. When I finally came to rest, I lay still, my heart beating like mad. From the echoing clicks of the falling stones I sensed a large space around me.

  Off to my right something stirred. The scuffling of feet? Tightening my grip on Kuchug’s saber, I crept in that direction. Again the scuffle of feet—surely human—rapidly retreating. Did whoever it was fear me more than I did him?

  “Ya drug,” I called softly in Slavonic, “I’m a friend. Show yourself.”

  But there was only the echo of my own voice. Then, more stirrings: soft steps, an indrawn breath, the rustle of cloth. Whoever they were, they surrounded me now. Why didn’t they speak? For a swift instant I was in Pohjola again, in the bowels of Louhi’s Copper Mountain with its buried horrors. The hairs on my neck stood up. I would have run away except that I had lost all sense of direction. I crouched down, feeling the cold sweat run down my back.

  “In Christ’s name, stranger,” came a voice nearly at my elbow, making me jump, “you are welcome if you come in peace.”

  Flint scraped against steel; a candle blazed; then another and another … Standing in the yellow pools of light, were white faced men, wrapped in dark robes.

  The one who had spoken held up his candle, allowing me to see his face. It was covered by an immense white beard that began below the eyes and rippled over his chest right down to the knotted rope that served him for a belt.

  “I am Feodosy, a servant of God and the abbot of these humble brothers,” he said. “We are all poor monks here; you will find little to eat, but you are welcome to what we have.”

  Feodosy? Didn’t I know that name? Father Dmitri had mentioned a Feodosy of the Caves in our catechism class and read us something by him. Yes, that was it—he was the one who warned against sharing your bowl with a heretic for fear of pollution. Well, never mind, I thought. If only he hates the Pechenegs half as much as he does the Catholics.

  “Who are you, stranger, and what do you seek in Pechersky Lavra—the Monastery of the Caves?” It was a deep, not unpleasant voice.

  Quickly gathering my thoughts, I answered that I was a druzhinik of Yaroslav the Wise.

  A current of excitement ran through the shrouded figures around me. “The prince here!” they whispered. “How? When?”

  Briefly I told of our arrival and explained our position. “I was sent to scout the camp and chanced to see the entrance to your cavern. I have no plan, but hope somehow to turn it to our advantage.”

  “Ah,” said Feodosy, “I hardly think so. We are but humble soldiers of Christ here—our enemies are temptation, pride, and lust.”

  “And demons, Father,” struck in one of the monks helpfully, “don’t forget the demons.”

  “I wasn’t forgetting—”

  “Demons, is it?” I said in sudden irritation. “There are your demons!” I thrust my saber into the blackness overhead. “You must know what’s going on up there—has it occurred to you that you might help?”

  “But we are helping,” replied Feodosy, offended. “We pray without cease for the deliverance of Kiev.”

  “Oh, yes, of course—that.”

  “You give no credit to prayer?”

  “Prayer is best combined with action, Father Feodosy; there may be other ways of helping.”

  “May there?”

  “How large is this place?”

  “Why, large enough to afford each monk the solitude he craves. Altogether many caves reached by many tunnels—some of them natural, most dug by ourselves and by the saintly hermits who lived and died here before us.”

  “Take me through them, Father, and as we go we shall both of us pray for inspiration.”

  And so, with Feodosy and a few of the more sociable brethren leading the way, I crawled along dripping, niter-encrusted tunnels that led from one tiny cave to another. Within most of them, faintly limned by a candle flickering before an icon, knelt a monk—shaggy, bone-thin, and rapt in contemplation of the holy mysteries. Everywhere, soft sibilants of prayer whispered along stone corridors.

  The extent of this underground city was astonishing. The monastery numbered only about fifty souls, but each one had his den at the end of some twisting passageway, dug by himself, in order to be removed as far as possible from his fellows. Hours passed, or so it seemed, while we groped our way down one black tunnel after another.

  “Perhaps you have seen enough?” Feodosy suggested at last.

  I said I supposed so. I had to admit that the notion of smuggling in fighting men was a foolish one; they could too easily be trapped here and starved into surrender.

  With an uncanny sense of direction the abbot began to lead us back to our starting point. When we came to a place where a hard-packed mound of dirt seemed to offer a place to sit, I begged a moment to rest.

  Agitated murmurs stirred among the brethren.

  “Please,” said Feodosy sternly, “not to sit there. It is where Brother Timofeo buried himself.”

  “Buried himself, did he?” cried I, leaping straight up.

  “His one desire was to be deader than the rest of us,” replied Feodosy.

  “Deader?”

  “We war against the body, gospodin druzhinik, as you do against your bitterest foe. Yet even in this a limit must be set. A monk, like anyone else, may fall victim to the sin of pride. I fear there was a tincture of it in Brother Timofeo. He refused all nourishment while heaping dirt upon himself, a little more each day, until at length, being nearly entombed, he gave up the ghost.”

  They were all entombed, as far as I could see, and no better off than a flock of ghosts. There flashed through my mind the painful memory of how Kalf Slender-Leg and I had quarreled that day
in Nidaros when he tried to convert me to a hermit’s life, using almost Feodosy’s exact words.

  “You spend your whole lives down here, Feodosy, never seeing the sun, never feeling the rain?”

  “God must be sought in solitude and quiet,” he replied. “A quiet which has been sadly shattered in these past weeks.”

  “It seems quiet enough to me.”

  “Oh, yes, at night, when the pagans are asleep. But in the daytime we hear the drumming of their horses’ hoofs above our heads.

  “And shouts, Father,” added the helpful monk again, “don’t forget shouts.”

  “Shouts too,” said Feodosy patiently, “though faintly.”

  “You hear them? I swear I will never say a another word against prayer, gospodin abbot, for mine has just been answered!”

  “Eh? How so?”

  “Like flint against steel your words have struck a spark in me. Listen. I have something to propose to you—a sacrifice, a very great one for men who prize silence as much as you do, but one that will win you the undying gratitude of your prince. Imagine that it is his voice you hear now, not mine.”

  And I laid before them the stratagem that had just then taken shape in my mind. When I finished, Feodosy and his fellow monks looked uneasily at one another.

  “Brother Nikita won’t go along,” said one, with a shake of his head.

  “It will kill Brother Gennady,” said another.

  “Pah!” said Feodosy testily. “If the sound of his own singing hasn’t killed Brother Gennady already, neither will this.”

  “There’s no warrant in scripture for such a thing,” a third monk warned.

  “But you’re wrong, Brother Vasili,” Feodosy answered, “just think a moment. Joshua at the battle of Jericho! Why, it’s nearly the same thing, don’t you agree, druzhinik?”

  “Why, yes, Father, now you say so, just about identical—I should have thought of it myself, by God!” I made a mental note to ask someone who this Joshua was.

  “Of course,” said Feodosy, “I shall compel no brother against his will. But to strike a blow for our prince and our Faith! And to picture the expressions on those heathen faces!” He began to smile and then to laugh out loud—a sound those dismal walls must have heard but seldom.

  “Then you’ll do it?”

  He embraced me, planting a woolly kiss on each cheek. “Tell the prince we are his men!”

  The other monks kissed me in turn, calling me ‘God’s angel of deliverance’—which made me feel damned queer; nor would they let me go without sharing a bit of moldy bread and water with them.

  Back in the outer cavern, which was now ablaze with banks of candles, I was presented to the whole crew, who had gathered from their isolated cells to pray and break bread together.

  Feodosy, kneeling before a great carved crucifix that stood over against one wall, asked God for his blessing on our enterprise. Afterwards, he offered me a drink from his bowl and we sat for a while working over the details of my scheme. He would accomplish his part in three days, four at the most, he promised, and would send word by one of the brothers when he was ready.

  I would never have expected to like this fellow, who, had he known me for what I truly was, would surely not be sharing his water bowl with me. But in the flesh I found him kindly, patient, and good-humored; not at all the ranting fanatic I would have supposed from the words that Dmitri read to us. What is more full of surprises than Man? I began to like Feodosy despite the fact that I could no more comprehend his manner of life than I could interpret the dreams of a fish.

  Outside again, I filled my lungs with fresh night air and found Kuchug perched at the edge of the ravine, exactly where I had left him. “Now, let’s be off, friend Kuchug,” I said. “Tonight has been worth all the pounding my poor shoulders have taken.”

  18

  An Army of Ghosts

  It was a long hike back to Vyshgorod, and late at night before we reached it. I roused Harald from his sleep and described my adventures to him, sketching a rough map of the Pecheneg camp with some idea of the caves and tunnels beneath it. When I was done, he burst out laughing to think of starveling monks saving Kiev with such an absurd trick, and he promised me a bonus of twenty silver grivny if the plan succeeded.

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “In that case, Tangle-Hair, surrender to the first Pecheneg you meet and beg to be his slave; you’ll live longer and happier that way than if you show your face to me again. Now go get some sleep, you look about done in.”

  Some hours later, after I’d slept a little and Kuchug had gently washed my wounds and doctored them with some concoction of his, Yaroslav convened his war council. We met in the church, where Eustaxi lay, and Kuchug and I reported to the assembly all that we had seen. I couldn’t avoid mention of the sad state of the prisoners and the great number of dead.

  “And my son?” the prince asked, tight-throated with dread.

  “We saw nothing of him. I’m sorry. But many may have gotten to safety inside the citadel.”

  “Yes, yes, of course, of course they may.” How desperately he wanted to believe it.

  “The main thing,” I said, “is that the Pechenegs are eating through the countryside like a plague of locusts, and what they don’t eat they burn. Unless we drive them off soon, Kiev will be a city of corpses.”

  “Then there’s nothing more to say,” said Harald, “we attack at once.”

  “As Mstislav did?” Eilif laughed harshly. “We all see what that came to. Yaroslav Vladimirovich, don’t listen to these two crack-brained children. Take the advice of seasoned men. It’s plain that we can do nothing until Sudislav and the other princes arrive.”

  Harald turned on them hotly, “Prince, give no ear to cowards! Sudislav might be as much as ten days behind us. As for the other two, we don’t know if the couriers we sent even got through. Meanwhile our rations are nearly gone. In another day we’ll all be starving. No. We must raise the siege now, and do it in a way that will put the fear of God into these savages for years to come.”

  “Of course,” sneered Eilif, “you’ll tell us how you plan to do that.”

  “With pleasure, Eilif. With the help of certain allies of ours, seven hundred brave druzhiniks will be as good as seven thousand. Now, attend all of you to my plan—” (Not for the last time did Harald lay claim to a stratagem of mine.) When he was done, and his words had been translated for those Rus and Slavs who spoke no Norse, there were grunts of satisfaction around the room. The idea pleased them.

  Eilif, shamed and desperate, swore, by Christ, that neither he nor a single one of his Swedes would waste their lives in this folly!

  “In that case Eilif Ragnvaldsson,” cried Yaroslav in a fury, “I strip you of your rank, in God’s name I do, and—and I order you from my sight!”

  Shocked silence.

  What an effect this bracing military air was having on our prince. At home, under his wife’s withering glance, he would never have dared.

  Eilif knew that too. “You what? Strip me of my rank? Why you pathetic, weak-minded, old cripple, the princess will have the balls off you for this—I mean if you’ve got any …”

  Harald sent him staggering across the aisle with a single blow to the jaw. As he rose on wobbly legs and drew his sword, two of his own men pinioned his arms and dragged him, choking with rage, from the church.

  Of course, it was easy to say later that we should have killed him then, when we had the chance. The next morning he was nowhere to be found within the walls of Vyshgorod.

  Now there followed an anxious time of waiting.

  Regularly each morning a band of Pechenegs came screaming over the plain, to ride round and round our walls until they tired of launching arrows and insults. During these assaults only Eustaxi’s men were allowed to show themselves on the ramparts, while the rest of us, by Harald’s order, crouched out of sight.

  We were hungry all the time now. Water from a well within the fort was the only thing we h
ad in abundance. We were reduced to eating the last of the cats and dogs and all but two of the remaining horses. Inside Kiev, I kept reminding myself, it must be even worse.

  A day, a night, another day crept by, while we stewed and fretted. Harald and Yaroslav began to give me searching looks. Had I led them into making fools of themselves? I put on a bold face, but doubt gnawed at me. Had Feodosy and his crew of lunatics sunk back into their pious torpor as soon as I departed?

  But the next night—our fifth in Vyshgorod—brought a messenger to say that all was in readiness. Yaroslav ordered us all on our knees while he thanked Christ and a host of saints for near an hour. Kuchug and I slipped away unnoticed and spent the time more profitably readying our gear.

  Finally, our little army, with a surge of battle joy that made us forget our empty bellies, moved to attack.

  Harald and Yaroslav set out together at the head of the Norwegians and the bravest of the Rus warriors. They would be the spearhead, aimed straight at Tyrakh Khan’s silken tent.

  The Swedes, Eilif’s former men, were now commanded by a certain Helgi Whale-Belly, a druzhinik they’d elected from among themselves. He was ordered to lead his men around to the west of the city and, as soon as he heard the sound of battle on his left, to attack the camp at its farther end, free the prisoners who were penned up there, scatter the horses, and fight his way to us. The Swedes received these orders in silence.

  Harald had pleaded with Yaroslav to stay back, but the prince would not be dissuaded from leading the main thrust. He would leave to no other’s hands, he swore, the sacred duty of cutting his poor brother’s bonds. Among his motives was no doubt an element of sweet revenge—that brawny, boastful Mstislav, who had bullied him since childhood, should have to owe his life to his despised and crippled brother.

  Wrapping our weapons in our cloaks for silence, we advanced along the river bank and through the ruins of the podol to that point where the ground begins to rise. We saw no Pecheneg pickets anywhere; weeks of drinking and gorging had taken its toll of discipline.