The Golden Horde (28 page)

Ivan opened his mouth to speak, but what came out instead was an oath as his bay horse shied at something in the long, dry grass. He stared downward, then began to concentrate on calming the horse rather more gently than the others might have expected. His voice, when he spoke at last, had become hushed as it might have done in Khorlov’s cathedral, and he was still staring at the ground as he made the sign of the cross over his heart. “The price of defiance,” he said, “is higher.”

The skulls were everywhere.

It wasn’t as though Ivan was taken by surprise; he’d heard reports of Tatar sieges and their aftermath from Volk Volkovich and knew what to expect. Except that reports and forewarned expectations didn’t do justice to the reality, and the reality here was a field full of skulls stretching from where he sat for as far as he could see towards the blasted patch of land that had been Chernigov. There were so many that they looked at first glance like a harvest of turnips, and that rustic image was preferable to the alternative. His eyes and mind, which had in their time encompassed many more gruesome sights, couldn’t immediately accept that these, so many of these, had once been living heads attached to living bodies.

“No ribs or arms or legs,” said Mar’ya Morevna, crossing herself in turn. “Someone made themselves a victory monument.” Her voice was as quiet as Ivan’s had become, but it had retreated into a familiar coolness. Not quite unconcern, not quite lacking grief for the dead, but certainly not his own level of awestruck shock.

Mar’ya Morevna had looked upon such scenes before, and caused some of them herself – Ivan could still remember three thousand dead Tatars strewn from one horizon to the other. But that had been a battle. These skulls had been pulled free of one of the ghastly pyramids of severed heads that Tatar commanders made to indicate displeasure at a too-stubborn defence, a too-reluctant surrender, or whatever else had vexed them on that particular day. As Ivan rode slowly closer to the bare ground which had once been a city of forty thousand souls, he discovered that even four years of being washed by the rain and bleached by the sun, of being picked at by birds and gnawed by – he glanced at Volk Volkovich – other creatures, hadn’t been time enough to completely flatten out this monument to savagery.

It had been too big.

Cawing wildly, crows erupted from the pile of skulls that even after so long still rose as high as Ivan’s saddle. He reined in with a soft oath and blessed himself again with a hand that shook, though whether with anguish or anger he didn’t know. The scattered skulls were long since clean and smooth, scoured to the colour of ivory. These were not.

Heaped and tumbled together as though still trying to protect each other from the weather and the scavengers, the remainder were a hideous reminder of the mortality of man. Patches of hair and shreds of dried and blackened flesh disfigured them, and untouched by sun or rain or beak or fang they had become instead a banquet for the smallest vermin of the steppe. The hot, still air was heavy with the buzz of carrion flies, and a stench had soaked into the ground so that it seemed the place would never be truly free of it again. At least it was old, faded like the skulls themselves. Ivan had smelt the sickly-sweet gagging reek of fresh putrescence before, and this was more tolerable. Just.

He jabbed his heels into the bay gelding’s flanks, but had to put his whip to it again before the shuddering beast would move. That reaction at least he understood. He would have preferred to turn back himself, but there were two reasons why he didn’t, and they were riding up behind him now. Ivan heard the stifled cries of horror and disgust from his two councillors as they came close enough to see the more repulsive details of the skull-mound, and he suspected that they too would have chosen not to go any further. Only the presence of their Tsar in front, and Mar’ya Morevna and Volk Volkovich behind, kept them in their place.

He tugged a rein, dug in a knee, and walked his horse slowly all the way around the mound, not looking at the thousands of eyesockets that seemed to stare at him, but at four eyes reluctant to meet his own. The young
bogatyr
Konstantin was signing himself with the cross over and over again and muttering some litany of prayer under his breath, but his companion wasn’t giving way to any such display.

Count Danyil Fedorovich had flouted Ivan’s authority once before and had been slapped down for his trouble. The
boyar
had never forgotten it, and had made it his business to oppose Tsar Ivan thereafter for no reason other than the attainment of some obscure satisfaction. His had sometimes been the sole voice of dissent in matters where Khorlov’s Council was otherwise unanimous, but his reasoned arguments in those matters – as well as his position and the support it commanded – had meant there was no way to accuse him of simple obstruction. As a token of displeasure, Ivan had removed him from his place as a member of the
druzhinya
, the Tsar’s personal retinue, but it hadn’t deterred Danyil Fedorovich.

Even when Ivan made the scandalous announcement of unconditional surrender to the Tatars and almost provoked swordplay in the Council Chamber, Fedorovich’s objection was so smoothly worded that the Tsar could do nothing about it. By that time unanimity less one had become so much an expected part of any agreement that the
boyar
’s words hadn’t swayed the ultimate decision; but it hadn’t made the man any less aggravating, and there were times when the Grey Wolf’s advice regarding badly-behaved councillors seemed as practical as any. The only problem was that if Tsar Ivan killed off every councillor who disagreed he would soon have no Council left, and the standard response of ‘
then
kill
them
all
and
have
some
peace
for
once’ seemed less coarsely funny since the Tatars came.

Killing
them
all
had happened far too many times already. He had only to look around him to see that.

“Do you still think Khorlov should have fought?” asked Ivan.

Fedorovich blinked like a man awakened from an ugly dream and looked his Tsar in the face for the first time. That look wasn’t the hatred Ivan had been expecting. It was contempt. “This is an uncouth way of driving home a point,” the
boyar
said. “I had expected better of your father’s son.”

“My father’s son,” said Ivan wearily, “has spent six years and more trying genteel methods, and none of them worked. Well, Danyil Fedorovich? Have they? Explanation, logic, even appeals to what in any other man would be common sense. At least now you’ve admitted there
is
a point I’m trying to drive home. That’s an improvement of sorts.”

The nobleman uttered a disdainful grunt, but it sounded less sincere than other such grunts that Ivan had heard down the years. Certainly it was nothing like as heartfelt as the noise of Konstantin Il’yevich leaning from his saddle to be sick. Ivan did him the courtesy of turning away until he recovered his composure, wishing that he too could give way to the churning in his guts. Or the stinging in his eyes. But while Count Danyil’s cold gaze was on him he had to maintain a dispassionate façade and be a Tsar.

Mar’ya Morevna stopped her own horse beside his, and the look on her face was plain. She was ready to support any decision he might make, whether it was to go on or return, and ram any clever observations or objections from the count back past his so-white teeth with the butt of her riding-whip. Not that it would do any good; but Ivan felt certain it would make her feel much better.

“We go on,” he said. “I’ve come this far, and seen this much. I might as well see the rest. And you,” he didn’t trouble to more than glance at Count Danyil Fedorovich, “will come too.” There was no answer and Ivan had expected none, but the presence of Volk Volkovich to enforce his will was assurance enough.

The city, or what had been the city, was both less ghastly and more distressing than the scattered pyramid of skulls. Ivan had been in Chernigov only three times in his life, twice of those since becoming Tsar. The place had struck him with its similarity to Khorlov; not just in the usual way that one walled city with a kremlin resembles any other, but in many small ways that made it comfortingly familiar. That meant it was easy to visualize the same destruction visited upon Khorlov, and only that familiar layout of walls and streets and buildings made it possible to know where the parts of the city had ever been.

Because they were gone.

Nothing remained except the empty ground where the city had once stood. Ivan had expected ruined houses, burned-out wooden shells with the grass of the steppes a second invader now the Tatars had left, and the full weight of what it meant for a place to be so destroyed that its site was ripe for plough and planting had never really struck home. Not until now. There wasn’t even grass; the soil was so soured with ash and shreds of charred timber that no plant could survive in it.

One image kept creeping back into his head, a childhood memory and not one to be proud of. Ivan, ten years old, had found a nest of red ants busily doing whatever ants do, and had squatted down to watch them. He learned within minutes that one of the things these particular ants did was to bite, and bite hard.

After the usual interval of squealing and running to his mother to have it all made better, Prince Ivan had come back. With a flask of lamp-oil and a taper stolen from the kremlin kitchens, he’d slowly and carefully burned the ant-nest, pouring the oil in ever-decreasing concentric circles to better enjoy how the little creatures ran frantically about, and thrashed, and crisped, and died. Then he’d ground even the site of the nest out of existence with the heels of his boots, and had later been smacked for scraping the gold-work from the leather. But the smacking had been worth it, because that burnt, smashed patch of ground remained until the next winter as a reminder of his mighty power to deal destruction on those who had offended him.

Was what had happened here a demonstration of power and nothing more? Was this how the Khan of the Golden Horde saw Russia and all the rest of the world that his horsemen could wrest from its rightful owners? Mere nests of insects to crush beneath his feet?

Tsar Ivan Aleksandrovich of Khorlov sat in the midst of desolation on his stupid, stubborn horse, and wept silently for the stupid, stubborn people of Chernigov.

He rode back towards the column of Tatars, staring at them, breathing shallowly, trying to control the black rage that wasn’t just righteous wrath but a desire to do unto others such as he’d never felt in all his not-quite-thirty years of life. Up until now he had been fair-minded, more so than most of his contemporaries, reluctant to do anything as irreversible as the taking of life for fear he would later be proven wrong. That was half an hour and an eternity ago.

Now if every man, woman and child of every tribe that made up the Great Khan’s empire had just one throat and he a razor, he wouldn’t have hesitated for the taking of a single breath. Never mind the specious arguments about how could he hold the women and children to blame? Tatar women had given birth to the men who had done this, and Tatar children would grow up to become or give birth to yet another generation of them. If he was going to kill Tatars, he would have to kill them all. Nothing could remain. No survivors, no retribution, nothing. Just bones, and ash, and dust on the wind.

No one dared speak to Ivan as he rode slowly past them; not his wife, not his friend, and most certainly not his councillors. All of them had seen his face, but neither Danyil Fedorovich nor Konstantin
bogatyr
saw other than the dry-eyed, expressionless mask of a man stoically trying to hide tears or nausea for the sake of his dignity. Mar’ya Morevna and the Grey Wolf knew more than that. What was hidden by those dispassionate features was made all the worse by being held on so tight a leash.

Mar’ya Morevna was the first to shake free of whatever spell this grim place had laid on them. She overhauled Ivan – not a difficult task, his horse was moving no faster than a walk – and rode beside him in silence for a few seconds before he even noticed she was there. “Vanya,” she said, “whatever you’re thinking, forget about it.”

“I was trying not to think about anything for a while.”

“Only trying. And not doing it very well. Vanyushka, I won’t give you a lecture. Now isn’t the time. But I’ll give you two pieces of advice. One is something my father said: revenge is like wine – it keeps well, and tastes better for it. The other is my own philosophy about Amragan
tarkhan
and all others like him: any man who trusts an enemy’s surrender puts a knife at his own throat.”

“If you run with the wolves, howl,” said Volk Volkovich, who had come up almost silently on Ivan’s other side. “But if you run with the dogs, wag your tail.”

Ivan looked from one to the other and slowly, like a fire whose draught is shut off, the heat faded from his eyes and the stiffness from his features until at last he gave them something that the charitable might have called a smile. “So many proverbs,” he said. “All right. You say wait. I’ll wait.” Then, mocking gently, “But to make it convincing, you’ll all have to wag your tails as well …”

CHAPTER SEVEN

The
Khanate
of
the
Golden
Horde
;