The Golden Horde (27 page)

“But I got smacked!” protested Nikolai as plaintively as though the injury was still fresh.

“Afterwards.
I
couldn’t have done it at all. Fair exchange, you see.”

“Um.” There was muttering between the twins, who despite their often-violent differences usually managed usually to present authority with a united front. The outcome was as grudgingly conceded as effort from a camel. “All right,” said Natasha at last. “I suppose it is.”

“That’s very generous of you. Now come here and sit down. Your father and I have something we want to talk about.”

“Oh,
that
,” said Nikolai, scornful that a Prince of mature years should be ignorant of such vital matters. “We already know where children come from.”

“Ah… no,” said Ivan, after a pause to gather wits scattered for what felt like the hundredth time today. Though the accuracy of Kolya’s information would have to be checked later, he didn’t feel quite up to it right now. And from the look of her, neither did his wife. “Not quite. We were more inclined towards, er, finding out where children
go
…”

*

“The Summer Country,” said Mar’ya Morevna once the twins had gone. They’d wandered out not quite hand in hand, which suggested that as soon as they were out of earshot there was going to be a flurry of accusations over who had blabbed their secret. “No doubt about it.”

“That’s where they go to play, and hide,” said Ivan. “But as for the rest – are you absolutely sure what they’re doing?”

“Didn’t you understand? For all she doesn’t know half the terms of reference, Tasha was quite intelligible.”

“I understood enough to start to worry. Explain the rest, and make me stop.”

Mar’ya Morevna smiled indulgently and patted Ivan’s hand in a way he was starting to find annoying, not because it was an over-repeated mannerism but because it was usually prompted by some ignorance on his part, and usually an ignorance of the Art Magic at that. If even his own children knew more than he did, it was time to get back into the library for more study, in his copious spare time. If Batu Khan appointed a Tatar
daru
-
gashi
governor and a swarm of tax-squeezers he would have plenty of that.

“All right,” she said. “Will I make it insultingly simple?” Ivan gave a wry smile and nodded permission, certain she would do so anyway. “The children can move between the wide white world and the Summer Country the way we move between rooms in this kremlin. When they come back from —”

“The corridor outside the door?”

“Do you need an explanation at all?”

“Yes.”

“Then be quiet. But yes. The corridor makes better sense. If the Summer Country is the corridor, and our world is the kremlin, then they don’t have to come back to the same place – the same room – as they left. So long as they know a room – another part of the world – is there, they can go to it. No spells, no circles, no Gates.”

“You sound jealous.”

“Of my own children?” Mar’ya Morevna shook her head; then grinned quickly and shrugged. “Well, I suppose a little. What they can do without effort or any risk of harm, I could never match if I studied the Gating-spells from now till the day I died. Which might not be too far off, if I was as careless with the Gates as they can be. So yes. Envious, and just a bit sad. If a man invented a machine to let him fly, he would still envy the birds who can do it all by themselves.”

“I don’t want to fly,” said Ivan. “What I want is to keep my people safe. And if that means keeping my crown, and taking back all the other crowns the Tatars stole, and saving the wide white world from falling through whatever pit you say is being opened up beneath it, then I’ll do it. And the children can help me do it. Let them see where the crowns are kept and —”

“Ivan?”

“What?”

“Have you been drinking?”

“No. Why?”

“Because if you had, and not given any of it to me …” Mar’ya Morevna aimed an affectionate cuff at his head that would have raised all the stars of a summer sky if it had landed. “You are the crookedest, most devious and nasty-minded —”

“— Man you ever married.” Ivan finished for her, smirking now, in a wicked and far better humour than he had been for hours. He put both arms around her waist and his mouth close enough to one ear that he needed only to whisper. “But don’t stop. I love compliments.”

“Never mind the compliments. We’re going to get ready for our journey to Sarai and the court of the Golden Horde.”

“And if we should first happen to visit the Treasury —” Mar’ya Morevna shivered in his arms, and Ivan felt sure it was from more than just his breath tickling her ear.

“— Or the armoury …” she murmured.

“— We’d best make sure that Nikita Pavlovich the goldsmith is with us. Just in case the Great Crown …”

“Or a helmet …”

“Needs to be repaired.”

“Or gilded, trimmed with fur and studded with fine gems …”

“And made to look like something else.”

*

The
Khanate
of
the
Golden
Horde
;

August
,
1243
A
.
D
.

Ivan stood up in his stirrups and shaded his eyes against the glare of the sun, but all he could see was a vague shadowy blot against the steppes, black against the brown and green of vegetation. He dropped back into his saddle and looked quizzically at Volk Volkovich.

“Chernigov,” said the Grey Wolf. That was all. Ivan flinched and stared again at the distant blot, then turned to Mar’ya Morevna.

“The children will stay in the wagon,” he said. “And with the curtains drawn, if we get any closer to… To that.” There were the beginnings of complaints from Nikolai and Anastasya, but those fell silent when he jerked his horse around and glared at them.

Both children knew they could take an excessive number of liberties with their father and survive, but there was a point past which it was wiser to sit still and be quiet. The expression on Ivan’s face told them that such a point had just been reached. Watching a swordfight – or an execution, if it came to that – could be justified as a part of the education of any Tsar’s children, if only to teach them that life wasn’t taken without good reason since it could never – usually – be returned. Looking at other gruesome scenes like those he suspected were waiting closer to Chernigov was simply unpleasant, thus unnecessary. If anyone, child, councillor or ally, needed to see rotting corpses before they understood what a war could do to the fragile creatures that they were and ruled, it was already too late to make an impression. Even so, there was always the possibility that time wasn’t wasted nor senses blasted quite in vain. But not those of children. Never the children…

It was small wonder they were restless, because the journey to Sarai had been uneventful. Boringly uneventful, and for almost three weeks on end. While Ivan was the first to admit that boredom was preferable to any amount of near-fatal excitement, there could always be too much of any good thing.

“You’re going to look?” asked Mar’ya Morevna. Ivan nodded. “What good will that do?”

“Satisfy my curiosity. And those two” – he indicated Count Danyil Fedorovich and the
bogatyr
Konstantin Il’yevich – “will come with me. For Konstantin, it should prove how right I was not to oppose the Tatars, and how right he was to support me. As for Danyil Fedorovich… Well, he might just have his mind changed.”

Mar’ya Morevna looked at the councillor dubiously. “So far as he and his kind are concerned, I sometimes wonder if they’ve got a mind to change. But yes. It might work. And if it works, it might shut up the opposition back in Khorlov.”

“The way you used on Aleksey Romanov is still the most effective,” said the Grey Wolf. He wasn’t smiling when he said it. “They’ll try to stab you in the back every chance they get, every chance you give them by being just and fair and forgiving. If one of your own council won’t agree with your decision, get rid of him. One way or another.”

“We had this debate before,” said Ivan. “How many times will we have it again?”

“As many times as need be,” said Volk Volkovich. “I’ve decided – for whatever reason I had at the time, I forget which – to help you, guard you, and defend you. And your family as well. That defence doesn’t always mean a sword and shield, Ivan Aleksandrovich, nor teeth in the night. It also means, or so your own father said, being ready and willing to say the things a high-born listener doesn’t like to hear or, by his or her rank,” he bowed slightly to Mar’ya Morevna, “expect to hear. So I alone am left to say them. And I do.”

“Constantly.”

“Thank you.” The Grey Wolf smiled, a quick gleam of that excessively white, excessively ragged and sharp array of teeth. “At least the effort doesn’t go unnoticed.”

“Volk Volkovich, you’re funny!” said Anastasya Ivanovna, leaning out of the wagon and as usual listening with more attention to things that weren’t her business than anything that was. “Have you ever thought of being a court jester?”

“No, my lady.” Again that elegant bow from the saddle, and the smile that this time had gone long-suffering, a wolf to the cub who was chewing on his tail for the hundredth time. “My jokes have too much bite in them.”

“How amusing.” Mar’ya Morevna stared at Volk Volkovich as he straightened up, and her frost-pale eyebrows drew together in a frown. For all his declarations of defending Ivan and his family, for all that she trusted him more now than she’d ever done before, she’d still grown up with too many tales where a meeting between wolves and children had only one ending.

The Tatar escort eyed Ivan’s party strangely as they rode out across the steppe towards the ruined city. He glanced at them and even though he was too far away for details, the thoughts crossing those weathered, slit-eyed faces were easily read.
What
was
he
doing
?
Why
was
he
doing
it
?
Doesn’t
the
idiot
Rus
know
there’s
no
point
in
visiting
a
place
after
we
finish
with
it
? How many of the fur-hatted horsemen had been here the first time, Ivan didn’t want to know. He growled something inarticulate deep in his chest, a sound that drew a look of surprise from the Grey Wolf, and laid his whip across his horse’s flanks to make the stupid thing move faster than a trot.

Sivka wouldn’t have tolerated such treatment, but then Sivka wouldn’t have needed it. This bay gelding, however, was a dumb animal in every sense of the word and needed all the riding aids ever invented by the agile mind of man to make it do other than eat grass and look handsome. Ivan wondered whether spurs might work better than the more usual
nagayka
whip, but suspected that the dogmeat-with-hoofs under his saddle had too much mule in its ancestry even for that. It would look impressive stalking into Sarai, but that was all he could say in its favour.

And it had a rotten line in conversation, too.

Volk Volkovich drew level with him after a few minutes, when the bay slackened its gait and Ivan had grown tired of trying to encourage it to greater effort. The Grey Wolf had no such trouble. He had long since reached some sort of unspoken rapport with the rangy grey mare that was his usual mount in man’s shape. Ivan had never asked, but he suspected the arrangement ran along the lines of ‘
do
your
best
or
be
eaten
.’

“Why in such a hurry, friend Ivan?” he said, reining the grey back to match Ivan’s pace. “And why so concerned with what the children will see? Chernigov fell four years ago, and the wolves —” He fell silent and had the decency to look ashamed of himself.

It was indeed a decency, a politeness, and nothing more than that, since shame about the completely natural doings of his real self and his relatives wasn’t something that the Grey Wolf ever felt. Ivan wondered how many hours Volk Volkovich had spent in front of a mirror to perfect the expression. He was glad that Mar’ya Morevna was still far enough away not to see it or hear the words which had caused it.

“I’m in no hurry to look at Tatar leftovers,” he said. “But any excuse to move faster than that damned amble is good enough for me.”

“It’s the way the Tatars march. And it’s taken them all the way from the high steppes to the gates of Vienna.”

“I know that. I don’t have to like it. And anyway, old friend,” Ivan slapped his horse’s neck and raised a little puff of the red dust of the steppes, “I’m just a little spoiled by Sivka. If it wasn’t for Amragan
tarkhan
, we could have been in Sarai and away again by now.”

“It’s the ‘
away
again’ that concerned him,” said Mar’ya Morevna, coming up to them in a cloud of russet dust. She brushed in a half-hearted way at the sleeve of her riding-coat, knowing it was a gesture matched only by mopping up an incoming tide with a sponge. “If he hadn’t known about the horses …” Then she shrugged. “Ah well. The price of fame.”