The Golden Horde (2 page)

“What is it?” Ivan spoke in a way he’d learned from Mar’ya Morevna, a quick, slipshod mumble that didn’t move his lips. All of a sudden, every subtlety his wife had ever used to conceal her dealings with spies and informers seemed significant and important. Akimov blinked, managing by that small gesture to convey a nod of satisfaction.

“Your father, Highness,” he said quietly, “has made announcements that don’t meet with the council’s approval.”

“I’d guessed that all by myself,” said Ivan. “But you could tell me something useful.
What
announcements?”

“About you, and how you’re to become —”

“Captain Akimov, enough!” The interruption was accompanied by a quick rapping of boot-heels on the wooden floor of the Council Chamber as a richly dressed
boyar
emerged scowling from the shadows of the hall into the dull daylight.

Ivan couldn’t put a name to the face at first, but he knew this man was a member of the Tsar’s
druzhinya
retinue. The
boyar
stared at Guard-Captain Akimov as if waiting for an explanation, but Ivan stared in turn until the nobleman shifted his attention, then held the stare for a good minute more to let the discomfort build.

“Is it customary,” he said at last, “for one servant of the Tsar of Khorlov to interrupt another, when that other is speaking to the
Tsar’s
son
of Khorlov?” He smiled, a slow, careful, nasty expression, while his eyes never left those of the
boyar
and the man’s name dropped at last into his mind. “Let me put it in a way even you can understand, Count Danyil Fedorovich. Since when do my father’s servants break into
my
conversations without asking
my
permission first?”

That was his own fear talking, taking refuge in pride and unpleasantness. If he couldn’t put himself at ease, he was more than willing to spread unease around and maybe dilute it a little. The effect on Danyil Fedorovich was more than he expected, because the man’s anger-flushed face went pale and when Ivan raised his eyebrows in curiosity it was taken for irritable impatience. The
boyar
stammered uselessly for a few seconds without saying anything of note, then bowed low enough that he seemed almost to grovel.

“Highness, I – that is, your pardon, Highness! My apologies! I didn’t mean —”

“Then what
did
you mean?” Ivan gazed thoughtfully at the
boyar
for another few seconds as if committing the man’s name and face to memory, then waved his hand, dismissing the matter. “Never mind. If it was to say my presence is required at last, then Captain Akimov already conveyed that information… with a deal more courtesy and respect. Thank you for that, Captain.”

And
thank
you
, he thought,
for
trying
to
warn
me
of
what
to
expect
inside
.
Even
if
you
were
a
damned
sight
too
slow
about
it
.

*

As he stepped through the door and into the Lesser Council Chamber, Prince Ivan shivered slightly. It might have been because of the hostile atmosphere within, something he could feel as heads turned and eyes stared, but that shiver had a more mundane cause. Despite the number of fur-clad people inside, despite the fact that the Lesser Chamber had been chosen instead of the Great for that very reason, the place was bitterly cold.

Though the Lesser Council Chamber was built in the usual Russian style with wooden walls and floor and ceiling, the Great Chamber, part of the kremlin fortress, was walled in stone, floored with marble and roofed with tile. It was the most impressive single room in the entire building, but even in high summer that great vault breathed a stealthy cool. In winter that coolness dropped to a brutal cold that kept the place from use.

Perhaps
, thought Ivan as he strode towards the elevated dais where his father sat,
holding
this
meeting
in
the
Great
Chamber
might
have
been
a
better
idea
after
all
. He glanced from one side of the hall to the other and saw more, too many more, bad-tempered faces like the one which Danyil Fedorovich had worn.
If it did nothing else, my lords, it would have kept your tempers from growing so heated.

Ivan Aleksandrovich squared his shoulders under his heavy furred robe, then straightened his back and the set of his handsome egret-plumed hat. He drew a deep breath, slowly, so that it wouldn’t be noticed, then with a deliberately arrogant hammering of red-heeled boots on inlaid flooring, walked the gauntlet of unfriendly eyes all that long way from the doors of the Council Chamber to where his father the Tsar awaited him.

Tsar Aleksandr was sitting bolt upright in the Chair of State, long, lean hands hooked like talons around the carven terminals of the chair-arms, watching as his only son stalked proudly towards him. Ivan focused all his attention on the old man’s regal features, so no member of the hostile
druzhinya
retinue could claim to have attracted any notice. Until he found out more of what had been going on behind those closed and bolted doors, Ivan intended to treat all of his father’s councillors with equal disdain and equal distrust.

All, perhaps, except one. There was no great love between Ivan and Dmitriy Vasil’yevich Strel’tsin, but his father’s High Steward and First Minister – and his grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s, come to that – had proven himself honest over so many years that doubting his good faith was like doubting the sun would rise. Strel’tsin stood now to the right of the Tsar’s chair, a place of honour he would vacate for Tsarevich Ivan and no one else. His long silver-grey beard hung down below his waist, his white hair was precisely parted in the middle to frame his lean, clever face, and he looked so much all that typified a minister and a wise advisor that Ivan, for the thousandth time, felt certain something, somewhere about him, had to be false.

Except there was nothing. Ivan’s impression and error was the same one made by a succession of envoys down the years, and Dmitriy Vasil’yevich used his appearance like a weapon against them. It was only when the treaty, pledge or whatever had been irrevocably signed and sealed that those envoys realized someone who looked so intelligent might actually turn out to be that way.

Strel’tsin bowed slightly as Prince Ivan approached, and was about to move aside when Tsar Aleksandr lifted one hand, index finger extended, and stopped him. “Stay where you are, Dmitriy Vasil’yevich,” the Tsar said.

Ivan blinked, and his confident stride faltered just ever so slightly. Not to be granted his proper place at his father’s right hand sounded like some sort of insult, and not a subtle one. The Tsar glanced at him, inclined his head a fraction in a gesture that might have been either acknowledgement of Ivan’s presence or of the expression that had flickered briefly across his face.

“Not by my side, Vanya,” said Aleksandr of Khorlov in a voice too quiet to carry beyond the foot of the dais. “Stand at my back. Guard it.”

There was a curved
shashka
sabre hanging from Ivan’s belt, and a long Circassian dagger thrust through the belt itself just across the centre of his stomach. Neither weapon had been more than ornaments until now, but suddenly Ivan felt very grateful for the present fashion that said gentlemen of quality should go armed about their everyday affairs. Though instinct and reflex and simple fear twitched at his hands, he managed to keep them from checking the blades, from loosening them in their scabbards, even from drawing them and resting the slim curve of the sabre in readiness on one shoulder.

“Well done, Highness,” said Strel’tsin as Ivan passed him, proof that the old courtier had seen and identified his indecision. “Stand quietly. Watch, listen, but say and do nothing unless the Tsar’s Majesty bids it.”

Ivan nodded, observing with the mild surprise of one who has always known it but never taken notice, that First Minister Strel’tsin used Mar’ya Morevna’s art of speaking without moving his lips, and had refined it so that every word he said was – within a very limited radius – quite plain. For Ivan’s own part, he could only utter murmurs that he hoped Strel’tsin could hear. He could barely hear them himself, because another of the Tsar’s councillors was on his feet by now, holding forth with the orotund phrases of one in love with the sound of his own voice.

I’ll
be
your
Tsar
one
day
,
gentlemen
, Ivan thought as he listened to fine, rolling words of which only one in seven had any relevance,
and
you’ll
learn
to
speak
plainer
,
I
promise
.

“What concerns the council?” he tried again, a little more loudly. This time Strel’tsin heard him, and jerked his head ever so slightly towards the gorgeously-clad men whose complexions so closely matched the popular shade of scarlet velvet most of them were wearing.

“The succession,” Strel’tsin replied. “
Your
succession, which …”

Ivan went white and lost the rest of what the High Steward was saying amid the hissing tide of blood in his own ears. If the Council and the
druzhinya
were disputing what was the most basic of Khorlov’s laws, then they were talking something close to treason. And if that was the case, why was the Tsar his father allowing them to get away with it? Why were Guard-Captain Akimov and his soldiers standing idle, when every law of every realm in all the Russias, down to the smallest independent principality, said they would be within their rights to harvest traitorous heads like scythe-wielding peasants in a field of standing barley?

Instead these people were getting a more than fair hearing, their complaints treated as if they had value, and even Tsar Aleksandr, despite his temper of late, was nodding his head and waving his hand in invitation for this latest traitor to continue with his lies!

“Highness?
Highness
!” Dmitriy Vasil’yevich Strel’tsin’s voice was no longer a subtle murmur for the conveyance of secrets, but a snap of caution, of warning, of command.

Ivan’s head jerked around, his mouth twisting automatically into a snarl of disapproval at being addressed by a Crown servant in such a manner for the second time in five minutes. Then he pulled himself back under control with an audible click of teeth, writhed the snarl a little wider until it might just pass for a crooked sort of smile, and said, “Yes?”

“I said stand quietly, watch and listen. Each change of mood is plain across your face for every man to see! I beg you, please be more prudent!”

Ivan nodded and cleared his throat, feeling no end of a fool. The he tried to clear his face of expression and his mind of reaction to each councillor’s words. The hardest part of all – as ever – was just listening without letting his personal view of rhetoric, delivery and content put its slant on what was being said. And – as ever – once he started paying proper heed, Prince Ivan found he was gaining information rather than losing his temper.

It wasn’t treason. Treason would have been easy to deal with. This was honest concern for the tsardom of Khorlov, and the reason for that concern was on the Tsar’s own head. Ivan stared at his own father, wondering what was going on in that wise, wily, wickedly convoluted mind. The matter under discussion was Tsar Aleksandr’s immediate abdication…

And that was when Prince Ivan felt his stomach drop out from inside him.

*

It was one thing to know you would become Tsar when your father died, another entirely to discover your father had decided not to wait that long. The prospect was both a flattering display of confidence from his father – and an unsettling demonstration of what Khorlov’s High Council thought of the prospect while they were able to express opinions to their current lord. If Aleksandr was indeed still
current
, rather than already
previous
.

Swallowing quietly enough that he hoped nobody, not even Strel’tsin, might hear such undiluted apprehension, Ivan started to listen a great deal more closely. When all the courtly phrases were stripped away, it was very simple: the nobles of the Council and the
druzhinya
opposed abdication on the grounds that Prince Ivan was neither old enough nor experienced enough to rule. Tsar Aleksandr, however, took the irritable view that if he suddenly fell over one fine evening, they would have a great deal less choice in the matter. For all their loudly-stated reasons, neither side had seen fit to consult Ivan any more than they would have consulted him had the Tsar indeed dropped dead over dinner.

Primogeniture, the passing of property or title from father to male firstborn, was still not established throughout all the Russias, though it had long been a custom among the North people who were their common ancestors. Nor was it generally assumed that a ruler would continue to rule until he or she died in office. Lords and ladies, Tsars and Princes, were all people of power, and among other things that power gave them the right to make up their own minds. If they decided they had suffered the complaints of their subjects long enough, they could either silence those subjects once and for all – which had been done on more than one occasion – or they could take off the crown, lay down the sceptre, and leave their troublesome people to complain amongst themselves.