The Golden Horde (29 page)

August
,
1243
A
.
D
.

Ivan Aleksandrovich was weary. He was weary of the featureless vastness of the steppes, so flat and unchanging that the presence of a scrubby tree was an event. Weary of sleeping in a
yurtu
that smelt strongly of whatever creature’s fur had been hammered together to make the felt which covered it, more strongly still of the ten Tatars who had slept in it on their journey up to Khorlov, and positively reeked of the camel which carried it during the day. Weary of being pleasant and courteous to Amragan
tarkhan
, watching his smile and listening attentively to what he had to say, when what he really wanted to do was shear off smile and head together.

And most of all, he was weary of
grut
.

There had been enough and more than enough of what the children called proper food when they left Khorlov; Mar’ya Morevna and High Steward Strel’tsin had seen to that. They had meat from every bird and beast in the storage cellars under the kremlin kitchens: barrelled hams of pork and mutton, beef trimmed lean and packed in preservative spices, joints of roasted geese packed in jars under a sealing layer of their own fat. There was dried meat, salted meat and smoked meat; there were bales of crimson-black sausages as long as a man’s arm, hard enough to be used as cudgels and spiced like the hearths of hell. There were cheeses in small tubs, cheeses in cloths, and cheeses in thick coats of beeswax. There was wine, and ale, and
kvas
, and various flavoured vodkas in small stoneware bottles. It was enough food and drink to last Ivan and his people all the way to Sarai, and part of the way back.

Or it would have been if someone – neither Ivan nor Mar’ya Morevna then or later admitted responsibility, though both of them blamed the other for playing trustworthy subservience a little too far – hadn’t invited Amragan
tarkhan
and his officers and shamans to as formal a dinner as could be contrived in tents of beaten hair. Ivan had seen how vassals ate, and how peasants ate, and how even less human creatures ate; but though he had dined with Tatars before, he had never seen how they ate when someone else was providing the food and they were not, unlike at the banquet outside the walls of Khorlov, on their best behaviour. He had watched in appalled fascination as Amragan
tarkhan
and nine other Tatars gorged their way through a feast that in Khorlov’s banqueting hall would have more than satisfied three times their number of Rus noblemen and warriors.

“Storing up for hard times,” Mar’ya Morevna had said behind her hand. The joke would have been funnier if there had been any indication it might be the truth, but though broad and stocky enough, none of the Tatar captains had any spare flesh worthy of comment, and the shamans were positively gaunt. Where all the food and drink was going was a mystery, but go it did so that the quartermaster told them next morning that instead of ample food for forty days of wandering in the wilderness the Tatars had made of southern Russia, they now had barely enough to last for twenty-five.

That was when the Rus contingent added
grut
to their diet. As the days went by they ate more and more of it; not because they were growing accustomed to the taste, but because there was less and less of anything else. But unfortunately there was always plenty of
grut
, and plenty of water to mix it into the nasty granular sharp-cheese soup which was the accepted method of consumption. The ‘unfortunate’ part of it was Ivan’s own opinion, grown from an awareness that while there was enough of the wretched dried curds, none of the Tatars bothered hunting fresh meat – and they weren’t letting any of their Rus ‘guests’ go galloping over the horizon with a bow and arrows either.

It gave the lie to what Amragan
tarkhan
had said about
grut
being only a ration of last resort; but then he was a Barlash clan Turk, and every other man in the Tatar column was from one or other Uighur or Mongol tribe. Perhaps a fondness for the flavour went with high cheekbones, slanted Oriental eyes, and an excessive respect for the memory of that old butcher Chinghis-Khan, but except for Amragan they all seemed to actually enjoy the sour crumbly soup rather than eat it from sheer necessity. The Turk, on the other hand, wasted a lot of his breath in reminiscence about
yo’gurt
, which he claimed bore as much relationship to
grut
as a strip of dried beef to a gravy-dripping roast served up with all the trimmings.

Ivan reserved judgment on that. As a Russian, he liked sour cream; but he ate it as a relish, not as the main dish. One food made from maltreated milk was probably much like another, and
grut
washed down with mares’-milk
kumys
went a long way to explain why the Tatars were the way they were. Sour on sour made sour.

The Tatars laughed among themselves, cracking jokes like any other group of soldiers whose duty was easier than it might have been, but there was always harshness to the laughter. Ivan was honest enough to accept that without knowledge of what they were saying, his own mind provided its own shades of meaning. But no amount of error could erase the fact that these men, or others like them, had turned the city of Chernigov into a waste of bare soil and piled up the severed heads of its people as children might heap plum-stones in autumn. From what he’d heard and now seen, the Tatars could take any land of milk and honey and transform it to a desert of ash and
grut
, so that their Khan could state without any fear of contradiction that there was peace in his domain.

The dead are very peaceful.

*

Ivan was dozing on the elaborate Persian couch that did duty for a bed in his appointed
yurtu
tent when he heard the travel-camp start to wake around him. The sun was barely above the horizon, and there was just enough light to see the faintly glowing verticals of where the tent’s door-curtain didn’t quite align with the doorway. Certainly it was too early to even think of getting up and Oleg Pavlovich, Groom of the Bedchamber and head of the servants brought from Khorlov, had yet to arrive with hot water for washing and shaving. Just because a group of civilized persons travelled with barbarians was no reason to live like them. Ivan rolled onto his back – quietly, so as not to disturb Mar’ya Morevna who was fast asleep and snuggled tight against his ribs – then crossed his arms behind his head and resumed thinking the same sort of unpleasant thoughts about Amragan
tarkhan
as had occupied his idle waking moments for all the days since the ruins of Chernigov.

Mar’ya Morevna called it unhealthy; Volk Volkovich called it a waste of time; but Ivan called it an indulgence. There was little likelihood he would ever have the Turk at sword’s point without having to worry about the consequences of killing him, but not even Batu Khan of the Golden Horde could police a man’s thoughts.

Sometimes it was a slim, curved Cossack sabre like the one he wore each day; sometimes a heavy
shpaga
sword like the one with which he’d fought Aleksey Romanov. Sometimes it wasn’t a sword but a dagger, like the one with which he’d ripped up Dieter Balke before shoving the Teutonic Knight into the maw of an unformed Gate; at other times it was a slender iron mace with a flanged steel striking-head the size of an apple that could burst a man’s skull open like a raw egg. And sometimes, just sometimes, it was one of the spells from the less savoury side of the Art Magic, spells that could shred meat from bone with a word and a gesture, that could boil the blood in living veins, that could…

Then he realized the undertone of distant shouting wasn’t just the ordinary camp-waking noise he’d grown familiar with over the past few weeks. Ivan had often wondered what a Tatar would sound like when in terror for his life, when making the sounds he’d so often caused in others.

He heard it.

Ivan realized in that instant it was a sound he would have preferred to hear somewhere else, far away from his wife and his children. He rolled sideways off the couch and grabbed for his clothes with one hand. The other hand had already closed around the belt-wrapped scabbard of his sword.

Mar’ya Morevna had been asleep and snoring in a tiny, charming way when he began to move, but at the first muted clatter of sheathed steel she was wide awake and sitting up, with the dagger that had been somewhere under the tumbled pillows now drawn and glinting in her hand.

“What is it?”

Ivan stamped his foot to get a twisted boot in place around his ankle bones. “Damned if I know,” he said, then belted his sword in place over his shirt and breeches without bothering about an outer tunic. Not the most enlightening of observations, it at least had the virtues of accuracy and brevity. “But I intend to find out.”

“Wait for me —” shouted his wife, but anything else she might have said was lost in the noise as Ivan plunged out of the
yurtu
and into the middle of more chaos than two hundred Tatars and forty Rus should have been able to cause. The first man he asked for explanation was a waste of time; the Mongol archer didn’t speak Russian and wasn’t listening to Farsi. He flung off Ivan’s restraining arm and ran away for all the world like someone taking cover, which was unusual behaviour for a soldier of the Golden Horde and an accredited part of the Scourge of God. Everyone knew
they
didn’t run away, except in some elaborate tactical withdrawal to entice the enemy onward – but Ivan would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that this particular Scourge of God was looking for somewhere to hide. The way the man dived under a wagon did nothing to change his mind.

Yet whatever was going on was a matter for men and nothing else, because there was no disturbance from the animal pen on the far side of the
bok
camp. The morning was beautifully clear, with only a few fine skeins of cloud high up in the sky, and the newly-risen sun was throwing hard-edged black shadows across the ground from tents and running men alike.

Ivan squinted into the glare. He’d been awake enough not to have dreamed sunlight beyond the curtained doorway, and yet in common with all the Tatar tents of the
bok
, that door-opening faced towards the auspicious south rather than impudently towards the sunrise. In addition, the whole southern side of his tent was in the shadow of the one beyond, and would be so for another half-hour or more. So where had the glare of not-sunlight come from …?

Then he laughed out loud, remembering another time and another place in another world than this one, and ran to a clearing beyond the cluster of tents where there was enough space for him to see more of the sky.

“Firebird,” he said quietly, not summoning but inviting as he stared up into the vast blue vault of the new day. Small wonder, on a morning like this, that the Tatars claimed it as their god. “If you seek me, here I am.”

Nothing moved, nothing responded, and he began to wonder if all of this was nothing more than his own imagination coloured by wishful thinking. “A Firebird?” said Mar’ya Morevna, who had just caught up with him with the children in hot pursuit, and overheard what he’d said. She shook her head regretfully. “Hardly. They don’t cross into the wide white world unless someone calls them, and then they come to where they’re called. A pity …”

“A pity about what?” Volk Volkovich the Grey Wolf arrived on soft feet, moving almost as quietly in human form as in his natural shape. From the look of him he hadn’t been sleeping this past night; his relaxed, well-fed air was something Ivan had come to recognize and not ask about.

“Firebirds,” said Mar’ya Morevna shortly, still never at her best with Uncle Wolf around, and especially in the early morning before breakfast when he’d so obviously eaten already.

“Then you saw it too? Good.”

That put an effective end to further speculation about imagining things, though not to the children’s joy. “He’s here! He’s here!” Tasha squealed delightedly, jumping up and down and clapping her hands, not frightened but thrilled at the prospect. Kolya was waving both his hands at the sky, alternating between cheering like a small but very piercing adult, and whistling between his teeth like the merest peasant at a horse-race.

Ivan watched them bounce around for a few seconds and frowned at such a display of pleasure. Just a month ago he would have blamed such excitement on the uproar in the camp and a chance to see an
ognyevits’
fire-creature of the sort Nikolai and Anastasya had heard their parents talk about. Now he wasn’t so sure. It wasn’t
a
Firebird they hoped to see but
the
Firebird, and all this looked like reaction to an unexpected visit by a friend. Since they’d been casually popping in and out of the Summer Country where the Firebirds lived, that didn’t surprise him as much as it should have done. It worried him, though; one more worry among the many a father doesn’t usually have, to keep company with the many that he does.

“Calm down, both of you,” he said. “If there
was
a Firebird here, it’s gone now. So behave.”

“He wouldn’t have gone away without saying good morning to us,” said Anastasya firmly. Ivan blinked and Mar’ya Morevna stared, both of them suspecting that their daughter’s use of ‘us’ was entirely accurate and specific. The twins, it seemed, were on good terms with a creature more explosive than the largest fire-bombs of the Tatar siege artillery, and though shocked by the potential risks, Ivan was unsurprised. Even without the sorcerous location and circumstance attending their conception, a friendly relationship between these children and creatures capable of extreme violence was all too appropriate.