The Golden Horde (31 page)

Ivan heard the way Mar’ya Morevna drew in her breath and laid one restraining arm on her shoulder. That might not have had any effect, as well he knew, except for Nikolai and Anastasya simultaneously tugging the skirts of her long riding-coat. They said nothing, knowing well enough not to abuse the privileged position of being present during an adult argument, but Mar’ya Morevna looked down at their anxious faces and swallowed whatever she’d been about to say. Then she stared accusingly at Volk Volkovich. “Are you trying to steal my children from me?” Her voice was flat and cold. “Because I think you’re succeeding.”

The Grey Wolf returned her stare with glowing yellow-green eyes that never blinked. “I’m trying to prevent Death stealing them from you,” he said, and with huge dignity turned his back. He didn’t stalk away, but his silent presence was more an accusation than any dramatic exit.

Face expressionless, Ivan looked at his wife, then pointedly walked around until he was face to face with Volk Volkovich. They gazed at one another for several silent seconds before Ivan inclined his head. “Later,” he said. That was all. He hoped it was enough.

When he turned back to Mar’ya Morevna, he knew it was impossible to be angry with her. She had told him enough of why she felt the way she did about the Grey Wolf for Ivan to understand all the parts she hadn’t dared to explain; but he’d hoped she might be able to control such feelings for the sake of that political abstraction ‘the greater good.’ Not today.

Perhaps Volk Volkovich would understand. Perhaps he already
did
understand, and all he wanted was the simple apology that cost no more than a little flex in the rigidity of her pride. And he might receive it. But not today.

Ivan let the matter drop. It wasn’t something easily dealt with in the open, in front of the children and in front of the Grey Wolf and in front of as many of Amragan
tarkhan
’s Tatars with ears sharp enough to heard what was being said. He hoped Volk Volkovich would understand that, as well.

At least, and there was a gloomy humour about it, Ivan’s brain had been shaken from its boredom in a way not even the appearance of the Firebird had done. He knew exactly why Mar’ya Morevna wanted to know how close they were to Sarai, and exactly why the Firebird’s unexpected arrival – unexpected even by itself – concerned her so. Things were already beginning to slip to and fro between the boundaries that kept each world separate from the next. The doors leading into the corridor were no longer locked, and some of them were hanging ajar.

A Firebird was impressive enough, but it was nothing by comparison with some of the, the
things
that dwelt in the cold dark and might find the bright warmth of the wide white world as appealing as a candle to a moth. Most moths burned up in a candle-flame; but a big enough moth could put the candle out. Ivan shivered, and all the eminently sensible things he was going to say fell out of his mind. “Back to the tent,” he said finally. “There are things I want before it’s packed away.”

That was sensible enough for now.

*

The rest of the journey to Sarai took less time than Ivan feared, but more than he hoped. There was a taut, unpleasant atmosphere about the caravan which hadn’t been there before. Some of it came from the incident with the Firebird, some from the sharp exchange between Mar’ya Morevna and the Grey Wolf and some, quite simply, from the all too human curiosity of Rus and Tatars waiting to see if a juicy scandal was on the way.

Was there more than just honest duty between the Tsar’s handsome henchman and the Tsar’s beautiful wife? Was there more than that between the Tsar’s handsome henchman and the handsome young Tsar himself? Was it true that the Tsar’s twin children were as close to the henchman as to their own father, and if so did that simply mean they were as close to their own father as to the Tsar? The possibilities and permutations were endless and delicious.

Ivan officially heard none of it, and neither did Mar’ya Morevna. If Volk Volkovich heard any, as seemed likely with his sharp ears, he didn’t pass the information on and for that much at least, Ivan was grateful. What he didn’t know, he didn’t have to answer. But there was a list of names taking shape at the back of his mind, cross-referenced with other lists that went back almost eight years, a list that one day quite soon he might sign and seal and hand over to Khorlov’s under-worked executioner. And if any of what he had not heard was reported back to him by either of the children, he wouldn’t even wait that long.

In the meanwhile he tried to find out why the Firebird should have appeared where it did, when it did. The why of the matter he knew already, but for a long time the rest was more puzzling.

Mar’ya Morevna was of little help. There had been more words between them, as they lay in bed together on the night of the – was it a quarrel when it hadn’t been between the two of them? There had been other fallings-out in the course of their marriage, sharp-worded differences of opinion about one thing or another. But both had long been content that those were nothing more than bickering. It was only human nature that even when two people were very much in love, if they were both well-educated in the same subjects then sometimes there was a reluctance to allow one to score what the other felt was an undeserved point. It was an almost childish silliness, the sort of thing that within an hour might be laughed or grimaced at. And if this business had blown up out of all proportion, what was only one of those in eight years? Unusual? Remarkable? Ivan knew the real answer.

It
was
one
too
many
.

The words they’d exchanged had been pointless for the most part, spoken in such low tones for the sake of privacy that they’d been robbed of any impact, wandering round and round the subject at hand without ever piercing to its centre, where it would have done some good.

“Apologize,” he’d said at last. Not to whom, not for what. Just, “Apologize.”

That was when her eyes went as cold and hurting as daggers of blue crystal; cold, and guilty, and ashamed. And unbendingly proud. “No. I can’t apologize.”

“Why?
Why
?”

“Because …” Again the cold daggers, pride and shame together, aimed not at him but through him, at someone beyond him, and he knew who that someone might be. “Because I can’t find the words. Because I don’t know how.”

He took those daggers full in the face without a word, understanding while not understanding, and not daring to say so because that was the last thing in all the world she wanted to hear right now. Then he took his wife’s hand in his, and held it all that night, while they lay on their backs in the silence of two people with nothing left to say, staring at the low, dark, musty ceiling of the felt tent as they tried to sleep. All that night, fingers entwined, their hands remained together; wrist to wrist, elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder. But there had been no other touch, and it was as if a bared sword lay between them down the centre of the bed.

*

Sarai
,
capital
of
the
Khanate
of
the
Golden
Horde
;

September
,
1243
A
.
D
.

There was an escarpment where the dreary flatness of the steppe became the valley of the river Volga, just as wide, just as flat, marsh-wet instead of dust-dry. Ivan reined his horse to a standstill on the crest of that low eminence and looked down towards Sarai and the Court of the Splendid Khan. He did it not so much because he wanted to, as because he thought he must. There was a feeling of portent and significance about this moment, though whether it would turn out good or bad rested in the hands of a man Ivan had never met, but who controlled his destiny as surely as though he pulled the strings of a puppet.

The city hadn’t been built so much as it had grown – like a poisonous fungus, he thought – on the old Bulgar lands near the mouth of the Volga, eighty miles upstream from where the river poured into the waters of the Caspian Sea. Once it had been no more than just another
bok
, a vast trading camp whose walls enclosed hundreds upon hundreds of hunched felt tents, whose magnificence rested solely on the plunder strewn haphazardly here and there as magpies might strew shiny gewgaws.

That had changed. Ilkhan Batu of the Golden Horde wasn’t known as
Sain
Khan for nothing. His splendour in dress, his fondness for jewels and adornments, his extravagant generosity when giving feasts for his commanders and lieutenants, all that had gained him the title ‘Splendid’; but it was what he had done to Sarai that confirmed it.

Amragan
tarkhan
had related all that, in the friendly and slightly relieved fashion of a man glad to be home after a task which had turned out more difficult than at first suspected. Ivan had smiled and nodded thanks for the information, as he had nodded and smiled almost all the way from Khorlov, with just enough vinegar spiking the honey to make the Turkic envoy appreciate what a quiet, well-behaved hostage he was all the rest of the time. Hostage, not guest. He made sure to remember the difference even as he took pains not to show it. If any man had the wealth of empires at his disposal, and the slaves taken from those empires to do his bidding, and enough constructive stirring of his imagination to want to live in something other than a felt
yurt
, then that man could make a city like Sarai.

It wasn’t a compliment.

Sarai was still a trading camp, just as it had been in the days of the Volga Bulgars a hundred years and more ago. It was still an infestation of tents encircled by a wall, and even at this distance Ivan could smell it. The city stank as badly as every other Tatar camp he had ever encountered. But now, after four years of occupation by Batu
Sain
Khan, four years of backbreaking work by only God knew how many slaves, it was more than a mere
bok
on the steppes.

The walls were no longer sun-dried mud bricks but worked stone, an elaborate ring of fortifications, battlements, ramparts and ditches surrounding buildings of half a dozen styles from half a dozen conquered countries. Ivan had seen none of those styles in their proper place, but he had read Dmitriy Vasil’yevich Strel’tsin’s chronicles and studied their tiny, beautiful illustrations. Even from where he sat he could recognize curved, peaked, red-painted roofs from Kai-ting and Tung-huan and the other fallen cities of what had been Sung China. Here was elaborate latticework in carved brick and inlaid patterns of blue and turquoise tiles from Bokhara and Samarkand in Khwarizmid Persia. There were low, blocky, ponderous houses, each one its own fortress, like the caravanserais of Kashgar and Khokand in the Syr Daria at the Roof of the World.

Ivan knew them all, the strange names from the strange places; places as far away as last night’s dream, places he’d wanted to visit, places with names like strange jewels, capable of creating their own bright images from mere black letters and coloured inks on a sheet of parchment. Names to conjure with, and make a far more wholesome magic than the jarring syllables of true sorcery. Images like the fortress of the Bala Hissar and the great port at Basra; the weavers of Isfahan and Tashkent, the swordsmiths of Nishapur and Khandahar; the mountains of the Hindu Kush, the crags of Koord-Kabul, the ship-lined curve of the Golden Horn beyond Byzantium, and the gleaming spires of the Hagia Sofia.

Ivan drew in a deep breath and sighed, frowning as the heavy stench of Sarai filled his nostrils. Long ago, before the realities of being a Tsar’s son had begun to weigh upon him, he had wanted to be a
bogatyr
. Not one of the wretched self-seeking political creatures who now made up the greater part of his
druzhinya
retinue, but a true hero-knight, a wanderer, a journeyer to the far places of the world.

And now they were here before him.

But not really here, because they had been built by men whose minds and bodies had been stolen from where they belonged, so that the buildings they made were no more than a cheat and a deception, like false, cheap jewellery of paste and coloured glass. Tsar Ivan Aleksandrovich of Khorlov hadn’t been stolen like the slaves and artisans. There were no ropes binding him, no chain shackling him like a leashed dog to Amragan
tarkhan
’s saddle. He had come and would enter as he had been invited, freely and of his own will.

Ivan smiled, a smile that was mere skinning back of lips from teeth in a way Volk Volkovich would have been proud of. Once invited within those walls, so the old legends said, he would be like one of the
oupirchiy
, those who once were dead and now were risen again – and that at least was true enough, thanks to Koshchey the Undying. He would be free to come and go as pleased him; to do what pleased him; to visit whatever mischief as seemed right and proper on the people there…

He smiled again and leaned forward in his high-peaked saddle, gazing down on Sarai through eyes narrowed by more than the glare of the sun as its light pierced like a sword-blade through the western clouds, and entertained the thoughts of a Tatar
voevoda
who would see not a city but a nest of ants. As he stroked the lashes of his riding-whip slowly through his fingers, he dreamed a secret, ugly dream from long ago, of his boot-heel coming down, and down, and down again until that nest and all the ants within it had been stamped from the face of the wide white world. Sarai, and Khanbalik, and even Karakorum on the high steppes of Central Asia; all of them, and all their people, no more than a bloody smear on the crushed wet earth.