The Golden Horde (12 page)

They built twenty of those in the first afternoon alone, and put them to work hurling sawn-off sections of tree trunk at Ryazan. Even though Volk Volkovich was in human shape and no longer had enough hackles to be worth raising, they raised anyway. There was something terrifying about the leisurely curving flight of a chunk of timber, especially when it weighed as much as a man. And that was only the first day.

By the second day, the engineers had fussed and nagged for long enough that they finally started to build their greater engines. Some of them were laying out positions with rod and measuring-chain, others were supervising the construction of monstrous wooden boxes and a third group, assisted by the shamans from half-a-dozen tribes including one woman who limped on feet thickly wrapped in bandages, were mixing grains and powders and thick black oils then pouring the results into pottery jars. Strangest of all were the hordes of men, and this time not just slaves, who had started digging with a frightening persistence that paid no heed to the iron-hard ground. They heaped the spoil into enormous piles of frost-crusted earth and stones that were too small to be of use as missiles for the great catapults.

The function of those heaps of rubbish became plain once the wooden boxes were complete. Crudely built of split logs held together by an iron framework, their function was simply to hold vast quantities of anything remotely heavy: soil, stones, chunks of wood, anything at all. But they held that massive weight at the end of yet more sling-armed beams and this time, once they were propped between their uprights, the missiles those slings could throw were vast. The huge counterpoise catapults flung rocks of two and even three hundred pounds and, most awesome of all, they did so in virtual silence. There was the squeal and creak of timber and cordage as the counterweight was released, and the gigantic rushing sound as the sling unfurled, but it seemed eerie that so much power should be expended for so little apparent effort.

Then they began to sling the pottery jars. Whatever those substances might have been when separate, once mixed together they were a terrifying compound that produced a monstrous bellowing sound as it left the catapults, and spewed a blazing trail of fire and smoke to mark its passage through the air. As each jar burst anywhere within the walls of Ryazan, they exploded with a slamming detonation and a splash of yellow flame that erupted outward like ripples in a still pond. Volk Volkovich watched half a dozen of them being shot into the city, and he could see nowhere that it had been extinguished until there was nothing left to burn.

He went to and fro along the siege-lines with absolute impunity, speaking Farsi when any other soldier spoke to him, and for the rest of the time being a huge, harsh, gruff figure from one of the Blue Turk tribes, the sort of man who went untroubled without good reason to disturb what passed for his tranquillity. And as for the man he was pretending to be…

No one noticed the difference.

In a raiding party he might have been spotted within the first day, but in this host, the Golden Horde led by Batu Khan who was the eldest son of Chinghis-Khan’s own eldest son, he went unnoticed. There were so many men and women of so many clans and tribes and races that the absence of one or the presence of another attracted no attention.

Volk Volkovich soon learned to behave as a Tatar among the Tatars, one granted all the world for a plaything by the great God Tengri. It was a philosophy which got into the brain and the blood so he tended to snap at slaves and those of lesser race without even thinking how to play the part. Within three days the part had begun to play him, so well that accepting it was easy and rejecting it was hard.

The bombardment went on for five days, by both day and night. Once the great counterpoise catapults had been aligned, their engineers no longer needed to observe the fall of shot – although with the jars of Chinese fire, a man half-blind could see where they burst and burned. All they had to do was have their assigned slaves wind the engines back to the chosen setting, then load and loose. The magic of weight and speed and distance did the rest.

Prince Roman Ingvarevich’s city of Ryazan became a crawling lake of fire, hemmed in by its own walls as it blazed from end to end. It seemed to the Grey Wolf that there would be very little left to pillage once the Horde finally broke through the walls, and he said so to one of the engineers who supervised launching yet another jar of fire. The man paid him no heed while the missile was being loaded; any lapse of concentration might see the fire-pot dropped, and Volk Volkovich was sure its contents were unselective about what they burned. Only when the catapult creaked and slung and another long trail of oily black smoke joined the scores already crisscrossing the grey sky, did the Uighur turn to stare at him as though he had lost his wits.

“Where were you when the orders were given out,” the man rasped in Farsi. “Sleeping,
uu
? No,” he gave Volk Volkovich an odd, amused look, “maybe not sleeping.”

“What makes you so sure of that, brother?”

The Uighur grinned. “You still have a head on those broad shoulders. Now
my
commander would have lopped it off if you had so much as yawned while he was speaking, but maybe yours is more well-disposed to his men,
uu
?”

“I was,” said the Grey Wolf with all the dignity at his disposal, “riding patrol with the others of my
arban
. And my commander. What were you doing that you didn’t know it?”

“
Hui
! Working with these damned engineers, probably.”

“At least they know their business.”

“They still have heads, don’t they?”

“
Huu
. Maybe they know their business too well.” Volk Volkovich glanced towards Ryazan in time to see another fire-pot burst, its new gout of flame quickly lost amid the rest. “I ask again, brother: what about our plunder?”

“Since you were too busy to hear the orders, brother, you had best know there will be no plunder, not this time.”

“None?”

“None. There will be no looting, no slaves, no hostages. Kill all and destroy all, says the
Sain
Khan. Would one called ‘Splendid’ give such a command without good reason?”

“The Khan’s reasons are the Khan’s reasons,” said the Grey Wolf sagely, “and who are we to question them? Thank you, brother, and good shooting.”

He wandered off, a man with time on his hands until the engineers were done with the doomed city. Ryazan was doomed indeed, though it had nothing to do with how Prince Roman Ingvarevich had treated the Tatar envoys. After his refusal to submit, the result would have been the same. Batu Khan was practicing what had proven so successful in the campaign against Persia; to demand submission from the first city encountered, and if that was refused, then destroy it utterly and slaughter the inhabitants. The news would weaken the resolve of the next city, or the next, or the next. There was far richer plunder to in a place completely undamaged by siege, and sooner or later the citizens of such places would throw open their doors to the Golden Horde and be glad to be alive to do so.

The assault went in that same afternoon, under a bombardment so ferocious that Volk Volkovich saw several missiles collide in mid-air. When one or both were the Chinese fire-pots, the resultant explosion was spectacular indeed. He managed to keep clear of the escalade, not merely for his own safety’s sake – the people of Ryazan were still able to shoot back – but also because he didn’t want to see what happened when the city fell. That he, the Grey Wolf, could be sickened by what men might do was ridiculous; but it was also true.

Some eighteen of the largest engines had shifted their point of aim under cover of the frenzy of that last barrage, and now a salvo of stones came lumbering ponderously down through the smoke-fouled air. Ryazan’s wooden walls went crashing down in five separate places, so suddenly that the Rus defenders hadn’t realized their defences were breached before an entire
tuman
of ten thousand horsemen were pouring into the city streets. Anyone worth raping was raped in a perfunctory way, then wrenched forward by the hair to stretch their necks out under a descending blade. Others were herded at spearpoint into the fires still glowing all over the city, fires that sprang up anew when fuelled by human fat. The riders hunted men and women, priests and nuns and children up and down the spattered, smoking streets, trampling them with their horses or cutting them down with sword and axe and spear; not with any wild excitement but bringing in the harvest like men with scythes in a field of standing grain.

And one of them caught Prince Roman Ingvarevich alive.

Volk Volkovich saw the Prince a little later, and found that once again he had to look up at him. Far up, this time, thirty feet above the ground and silhouetted against the sky; but even though he still lived, after a fashion, there was no recognition in the man’s eyes. He would never recognize anything again, for whatever might have remained of his mind was concentrated entirely on the slender stake driving slowly upward through his guts.

Roman Ingvarevich had been given to Tengri of the Eternal Blue Sky, as a punishment for the insult visited on Tengri’s priest. The shamans had gone into the woods and returned with a tall birch-tree, slim and straight as a spear-shaft. They had trimmed it of its branches, then greased one end carefully with sheep fat and shoved it into the Prince of Ryazan. After that they hoisted the squirming, screeching burden up into Tengri’s sky before ramming the other end into the ground. And there they left him, to the mercy of the crows and the ravens and his own weight. The Grey Wolf looked up once more, his face carefully disinterested, and turned his horse away, reflecting grimly that Roman Ingvarevich had several hours left to him in which to regret he wasn’t heavier.

An instant later, Volk Volkovich regretted that he himself hadn’t been more careful, or less proud, or even that his own fur wasn’t so fine. He had reburied his other clothing, but kept the splendid cloak that was his own pelt when in wolf’s shape. And it was that cloak which caught the eye of the drunken Mongol reeling towards him. The man had evidently been busy obeying his khan’s commands, for he was smeared to the eyebrows with blood and far less pleasant fluids. He had a stoneware vodka flask in one hand and a notched sabre in the other, and a reek like that of an abattoir hanging around him. It would have had been an affront to the nostrils of a human and to the Grey Wolf it was an outrage. In wolf-form or in man-form, whenever he killed, he washed; no wild beast would go through life smelling of his last kill, not if he wanted to make another one.

The Mongol shoved his flapped sheepskin cap more or less straight on his head, and gestured once again at the cloak. He said something that wasn’t Farsi, but the sense of the question was plain enough. Volk Volkovich had looted a fine fur cloak, which was against orders, but the Mongol was willing to forget such a grievous breach of discipline if the cloak was handed over.

Volk Volkovich the Grey Wolf would as soon have given the man one of his eyes. That cloak wasn’t just a garment but a part of him. And it was something he couldn’t have risked explaining, even had they a language in common and the Mongol warrior been stone cold sober.

“No,” he said in Farsi, and shook his head.

The Mongol stopped smiling, glowered at him for a moment, then swigged more vodka and rattled out several sentences that were no longer a friendly suggestion about the cloak’s ownership. His sword stopped wavering and became much more purposeful. Volk Volkovich grunted one of those non-committal noises he had heard throughout the
bok
siege-camp, swung down from the horse’s back and then, as though taken with second thoughts, gestured at the vodka-flask.

“Where did you get that, brother?” he said in Farsi. The Mongol understood it well enough and probably spoke it too, he just wasn’t taking the trouble right now. The man’s sullen face lightened as quickly as anger had shadowed it at the first sign of refusal, and he pointed towards the wrecked city.

Volk Volkovich glanced up at its impaled Prince, and shrugged. He was in a fouler frame of mind than he would have believed possible, and the awareness was stealing over him that there might be something in his own much vaunted claim to be not merely a wolf, but a
Russian
wolf. It was strange that the last time such a killing mood had come over him, it had been created by the foul manners of Roman Ingvarevich and the people of his city. Their deaths and its destruction might have seemed some sort of back-handed revenge, but this was too much to tolerate.

He followed the Mongol into what remained of Ryazan and into a wine-shop. At least he followed the man to the doorway of the shop, then stopped on the threshold with his nostrils twitching. The flame-scarred interior was dark enough that not even he could make out more than a few vague details, and he was grateful because he knew this shop from his brief sojourn in the city as Tsar Ivan’s envoy. A family had lived here, father, mother and two small daughters. They had still been alive when the Golden Horde poured through the breached walls. They had even been alive for a little while after that, but from the smells assailing his sensitive nose, the Grey Wolf guessed that such a little while had still been far too long. The father had been killed first, while the others… His nose told him much more than he wanted to know.

The Mongol came out of the shadows with an armful of bottles, grinning.