The Golden Horde (11 page)

Then the great grey Russian wolf swung his muzzle from side to side, testing the scents that hung in cold, still air. He howled mournfully down the wind so his fellows would know of his presence in their territory, trotted slowly over the crest of the hill, and vanished from sight among the dark, snow-laden trees.

*

The Tatar siege-lines closed around Ryazan like a noose encircling an unwary throat. Nothing went into the city, and most assuredly nothing came out. The citizens and the Tatars just sat there, staring at each other over the cleared and empty ground that lay for more than a bowshot around the walls. Once in a while an optimistic flight of arrows might be exchanged, more as a relief from boredom than anything else, but for the most part it was as if one side or the other was waiting for some event that might break this stalemate before it could properly begin.

A sortie might have succeeded in breaking through for long enough that someone, perhaps Prince Roman Ingvarevich and a chosen few of his supporters, might have made good their escape: but the frightened townspeople were unwilling to leave the shelter of their wooden walls, and the Tatars seemed content to remain among their hunched felt tents, watching and waiting. There was nothing that a cavalry army, no matter how large, could do against a fortified city locked, bolted and ready for them. The only tactic possible was an escalade and pitched assault, but Ryazan had the look of a place that would eat many, many lives before it was taken.

So they watched, and waited, and bided their time. If the folk of Ryazan were waiting for some response from Great Prince Yuriy of Vladimir, their suzerain lord pledged to their defence, they waited in vain. He had received the warning from Ryazan of the coming of the Tatars on the same day as news of the fall of Moscow, swallowed up without so much as a pause in the invaders’ advance, and had gathered his armies in response. But then, guided by the more craven among his council and
druzhinya
retinue or deeming his own princely neck of more importance than a vassal city, he retreated to a new headquarters on the River Sit and left Ryazan to its fate.

That fate wasn’t long in coming, for on the second day, the slow ox-and yak-drawn wagons of the Tatar siege train arrived. The engineers, not just Tatar and Mongol but lean Arabs of the annihilated Khwarizmid domains and small slant-eyed Chin men from the silk lands of far Kithai, unloaded their burdens, and made ready to ravage the city that lay before them as defenceless as a bride on her wedding night.

For half of the first day, the Grey Wolf watched their preparations from the nest trampled into deep, drifted snow among the trees halfway up a convenient hill. Thereafter, and by accident, he had an opportunity for closer observation. It wasn’t his fault: he’d taken care to bury his pack beneath a tree so big it was more trouble to fell than it was worth in firewood. He hadn’t considered that the Tatars might have more than fuel in mind.

The tall man on the small horse who came ambling through the snow-deep woods wasn’t carrying his bow or hunting for something tastier than route-march rations. His appearance had come as something of a surprise even to the Grey Wolf’s senses; snow had been falling since before dawn, descending in soft, sodden white whirls, and the rider had appeared out of the middle of one of them as though the snow had given him solid shape. There was a short-handled axe in his hand, and every now and then he would examine a tree then chop a pale blaze of bark from its trunk to mark it for…

What
?

Volk Volkovich stared at the man on the horse, quite unseen under the layer of snow that lay unmelting on top of his own dense pelt. The dark patches of fur that did duty as eyebrows in his wolf-shape drew together in a frown as he watched the erratic to-and-fro wandering of the Tatar, and first one then both triangular ears flicked up and forward at the repeated chunk of the axe. Green eyes that glowed inwardly with a light of their own watched the man as he worked his way through the tall timber, studying first one tree then another before leaning over and swinging his axe. The Grey Wolf was watching one tree in particular, and the Tatar horseman was drawing dangerously close to it.

Chunk
went the axe-blade, and then again, twice in rapid succession. He was marking out tall, straight trees, ignoring all the others and the tree where Volk Volkovich had buried his gear was one such, lofty and unmistakeable. He had chosen it for that reason, and now someone was likely to choose it again for reasons of their own.

Angry, irritated or simply wary, the Grey Wolf eased himself from his bed of body-warmed snow and oozed silently in the Tatar’s wake.

A few minutes later the man suddenly reined his horse to a dead stop and twisted in his saddle to look behind him. The Grey Wolf was still mostly white from the blanket that had covered him while he dozed, so when he froze in his tracks he became part of the landscape. Only his eyes were alive, and more brilliantly, wickedly alive than usual. Whether he chose to run down his prey, or watch it and then let it go, the wolf in him was hunting.

And the prey knew he – or at least
something
– was there.

Without the thud of his horse’s hoofs and the intermittent metallic clank of his axe-blade, the snow-silence closed in around the Tatar and his mount like a stifling blanket. It was a lack of sound in a place where any sound, whether heartbeat or breathing or the imagined noise from somewhere unseen, struck like a hammer in the stillness. One tree-branch, a scrawny old arm protruding from the blaze-mutilated body of its trunk, shifted ever so slightly and the heavy sleeve of snow which clad it inches thick slid free. It made no more than a slither and a muffled thump, but the Tatar all but jumped out of his own covering of furs and leather. He stood up in his stirrups and peered around him, while the axe gripped in his hand shifted its angle slightly, no longer a woodsman’s tool but a horseman’s weapon.

Volk Volkovich pressed lower against the drifted snow and held his breath so the plumes of vapour from his mouth and nose wouldn’t betray him. Not that any mere man could see them; men were so short-sighted, even those like the Tatars who boasted of the sharpness of their eyes. It was the horse that concerned him. Horses had only to see a threat and run from it; men, scant generations removed from the hairy monkeys that his dire-wolf ancestors crunched up as snacks, still thought instinctively that climbing trees was their best defence. The Grey Wolf snorted a silent laugh, and squirmed closer. Able to climb or not, it meant they didn’t think they had to see so far, or so well, or so quickly…

The Tatar called something into the woods, but his voice rang flat in the muffled stillness. The Farsi words soaked into the snow and choked to death within a hundred paces. If any of his companions were out here, they didn’t hear him. Certainly they didn’t reply. Volk Volkovich grinned with all his teeth, then went belly-flat in a drift of snow on the far side of a tree and peered with one eye around the trunk.

The man’s horse had seen nothing, heard nothing, and more importantly, smelt nothing, and its placid unconcern decided the Tatar at last. He shuffled back down into his saddle and continued about whatever task had brought him up out of the siege-camp, muttering to himself. The Grey Wolf had no need to understand the words; they were morose griping about being jumpy in a strange place, what would your friends say, don’t be so stupid, get on with this and get it over with and get back to beside a warm fire. Familiar words, grumbled low in the throat. He had heard them all before, and even sheared some of them in half at the source when he had to.

Chunk
again, and another tree grew that handspan of white against the darkness of its trunk. The Tatar was definitely marking a particular shape of tree for a particular purpose, and the Grey Wolf tried to think of why. Then that concern faded as something more immediate took its place. For all his silent mocking of the short-sightedness of men, he had taken care over burying his pack in case just such a half-blind human should stumble across it and this one was far from blind. The man stopped his horse again, without the nervous urgency of the last time, and peered down at the snow tumbled between the twisted roots of a very particular old tree.

The Grey Wolf went flat again, then flatter still, and swallowed to silence the deep growl that flowed up from the barrel of his chest.

The Tatar unhitched his spear from where it was thrust under the girths of his saddle, and poked curiously at the snow. The long iron point went through the snow, and then on into the ground, much more easily than would have been possible in mid-winter unless someone or something had been digging there. Burying valuables in the face of a threatened attack was common enough, and the Tatar slid down from his horse’s back then set about poking in the dirt with his sword.

Volk Volkovich the Grey Wolf curled back black lips from ragged white teeth and snarled softly. This time he wasn’t quite so silent, and its sullen rumble echoed through the trees with a noise that might have been mistaken for distant thunder.

The Tatar straightened up momentarily, but instead of looking into the woods he glanced up at the sky, sketched a salute with his sword and mumbled some rapid prayer to Tengri before returning to his digging. The loose soil crumbled away with surprising speed, so that it was only a few minutes before he rammed the sword into the ground and knelt to grub rapidly around the leather pack that seemed almost to float up and into view. If he was disappointed that it contained only clothing, the expression didn’t show.

He didn’t have time – not even for fear or surprise or any other emotions when a gigantic grey shape blocked out the sky as it sprang straight for his throat. The man was a Tatar and a warrior worthy of the Great Khan’s host: there was no scream of terror, no throwing up of hands in futile defence, only a wild grab for his sword that all but put the Grey Wolf off his aim.

But not quite.

The sound of fanged jaws slamming shut was horribly similar to the sound the Tatar’s axe had made, shearing chunks from trees.

The Grey Wolf clenched down and shook his head savagely like a dog worrying a rat. His huge carnassial teeth sheared together until they grated on backbone, and the hands scrabbling wildly at his muzzle thrashed briefly with a quicker frenzy, then went limp and sagged away. He sneezed blood, ran a long pink tongue over the ragged spikes of his teeth, and glanced from side to side. By sheerest good fortune he had hit the Tatar right over the patch of disturbed earth, and any fluids that hadn’t flowed down his own gullet had soaked invisibly into the ground. After a sensible wait while the steaming damp patch cooled and froze, another shaking of snow would cover the evidence. Or at least, most of the evidence.

The Tatar pony had moved a wary few paces away, and was watching him as he made the shift from beast to man. Otherwise it hadn’t moved. Volk Volkovich grinned at his own good luck, and the grin lasted all the way through the change. A Tatar mount would have seen and heard and smelt more death and destruction than one Russian wolf could provide in the course of a month, and even his smell was sufficiently different to an ordinary wolf that the stumpy little horse was unconcerned. He reached out and patted its nose, but despite the cold that slapped at him the minute his skin was bare of fur he didn’t waste time in dressing. Horses were hard to scandalize, but easy to scare. Instead he gripped the animal’s reins and walked it far enough away that what he did next wouldn’t provoke a panicked gallop into the next principality. With the horse securely tethered to a tree, the Grey Wolf turned his attention back to its late rider.

The man was much of a size with himself, tall and lean but very broad in the shoulders from much use of the heavy Tatar bow, though not really a Tatar at all but a Turk of some sort from the high steppes. Stripping the corpse of its conveniently blood-free clothes, and noting idly that for some reason Turks kept themselves much cleaner than their Mongol overlords, he stared at the drooping moustache and long braids of hair while an idea formed inside his head.

Then he shifted back to the shape of the Grey Wolf, licked his lips, and fed full to bursting for the first time in a long, long while.

*

Volk Volkovich found out what the Tatar had been looking for within the next few hours, when a coffle of slaves came trudging through the woods to fell every tree that had been marked. By then he was riding a dead man’s horse, carrying his weapons and wearing not only his clothing but his moustache and hair-braids as well. The carefully knife-shaved moustache was gummed to his upper lip with pine resin, and the braids were plaited painfully into his own hair. It didn’t matter that the Grey Wolf’s hair was grey regardless of its wearer’s shape and the braids were black, enough men went badger-coloured that it was of small account. Anyway, the long-flapped Tatar cap was on top of everything, and anyone impudent enough to knock his hat off was someone impudent enough to kill.

The trees went crashing down one after another and were dragged away, sometimes by the slaves and sometimes by teams of horses or complicated-looking two-humped camels from the Tatar baggage train. The purpose of all that timber wasn’t apparent while it was just newly-felled, but once the Arabs and the Kithaiyan engineers got at it, the function became all too clear. Siege engines didn’t have to be constructed of clean, planed, polished lengths of wood; raw trees with the bark still on were quite sufficient.

The first engines were simple traction siege-slings, entire trimmed trees set to pivot between a pair of braced uprights with a leather sling fitted to the longer end and ropes to the other. When those ropes were dragged violently downwards by a gang of slaves, the long end of the beam swung upwards hard and fast, and the sling whipped out in an arc until it snapped open and released its missile.