The Golden Horde (34 page)

This one, an open hand laid over the closed fist that Ivan used to push himself back from the table, said ‘
Cover
for
me’, as clearly as words. As he stood up, Mar’ya Morevna immediately began an elaboration on her lecture about the dangers of drinking, drawing on examples real and legendary, approved and disapproved, and didn’t lower the stridence of her voice until Ivan was back in his seat.

He looked pale and slightly sweaty, but that was only to be expected from someone who had slipped quietly into the curtained privy-alcove and used two fingers against his own tonsils to bring up all the drink so ostentatiously swallowed into the bucket underneath the seat.

Mar’ya Morevna took his damp, clammy hands between her warm, dry ones. “Why all of this, Vanyushka?” she said softly. “Why?”

“Wait a while.” His gaze shifted momentarily to glance at the riot of moulded flowers and leaves decorating the panels which covered one wall of the room. Though it would have meant nothing to eyes a degree or so to either side, from where she sat it was a gesture as plain as a pointing finger. Mar’ya Morevna lowered her head in a movement far too slow to be a nod of understanding, and waited while he took another drink, sipping slowly at the fruity liquor to clear the foul taste of regurgitation from his mouth.

After a few minutes he relaxed, and this time it wasn’t the feigned slouch of impending inebriated sleep. Mar’ya Morevna was glad to see it, and when she said so Ivan nodded shakily.

“They’re gone now,” he said, and leaned across the table to lift another bottle and watch her lips compress in the beginning of a protest. But instead of pouring out still more vodka, he rapped the bottle sharply against the tray to loosen the ice that crusted it, then picked up a double handful of the splinters and scrubbed his face with them. He gave a gasp at the sudden shock, and a protracted shudder as rivulets of chilly water ran down inside his loose collar and over his chest. Then he grinned at Mar’ya Morevna again, the grin this time a little strained, but still not that of a drunkard. “Dear God, I needed that!”

“I should think you did. A peephole?”

“Yes, blast their eyes to blindness. Over here.” He stood up again and walked over to the panelled wall, passed his hand quickly over a cluster of ornamental embossing made of gilded plaster in the shape of a spray of chrysanthemums. “See it?”

“No.”

“Neither did I at first. Watch again.” This time his hand moved more slowly, and further away from the wall, so that its shadow rather than the hand itself was what crossed the surface. Mar’ya Morevna’s eyes widened, then went narrow as she said several things learned in the course of her leadership of armies that young Tsarevich Nikolai would have loved to memorize. The shadow, cast by the light coming in at the open window and thus a steady source of illumination, had been constant as it passed over the domed shapes of the plaster flowers; always a series of convex curves – except for one place where it had gone briefly flat over a pattern not moulded but merely painted to match the rest.

“I should have inspected that wall myself,” she said venomously. “Not even the Chin use that much complicated design unless they’re concealing something in the middle of it. And anyway, now that I look at it,” she stalked over to give the panelling a closer inspection, “this wall’s half as thick again as the others.”

“It
is
the outside wall of the house,” Ivan pointed out.

“And I’ve been running spies of my own for longer than we’ve been married. So I should have noticed.” Mar’ya Morevna peered at the whorls of gilding and grunted softly. “Or maybe not. This is all very clever. Not one large hole, but a lot of tiny ones. There’ll be a section behind this with all the appropriate plugs, something you’d pull out then swing to one side.” She shook her head in reluctant admiration. “But even when the damned thing was open, if you didn’t know what you were looking at, you’d only think there were worms in the panelling.”

“Instead of a single big one.”

“Very droll.” Mar’ya Morevna went back to the table and picked up her vodka, obviously torn between drinking it and throwing it. Ivan could see her running through a mental catalogue of her activities in this room during the past four days, recalling all the things she would prefer not to have done in front of an audience. He knew, because his thoughts had travelled down exactly the same path, and thanks to that and the way her face suddenly blushed deep scarlet, he was able to step forward and snatch the half-full cup out of her hand just before she flung it at the wall.

“What’s past is past,” Ivan said, and if he sounded calm it was only because he’d rehearsed this same speech half a dozen times. “At least they don’t know we’ve spotted them, so let’s not advertise the fact with red stains on an unblemished white wall.”

Mar’ya Morevna glared at him, at the wall, and at the world in general, but was practical enough to admit the sense of that. “All right. All right.” She took another few deep breaths until the angry flush began to fade from her cheeks, but her eyes stayed hot and bright. “Agreed. No stains. No needles pushed through the holes the first time I see one of them open. Now. How did you spot this? And when?”

“The when is easy. This morning —”

“God
damn
them …!”

“— When someone opened it to take a peek at me. They couldn’t have realized I had the lamp over there,” Ivan pointed at one of the room’s two oil-lamps, set on a low clothes-chest by the wall, “and that its light was reflected on the gilding when it moved. Otherwise I still wouldn’t know.”

“So why the play-acting?”

“To give them something to report. Something derogatory, to make them maybe just a little careless. They think we’re dangerous, Mar’yushka, and that scares me. The Grey Wolf overheard it on the march and he told us both, but …” Ivan hesitated a second. “But you weren’t listening to that source. What with the Art Magic and our past reputation, Amragan
tarkhan
was expecting trouble at Khorlov. He didn’t get it, and was grateful for that much. But some of his men have been wondering what we’re plotting, when it’s going to happen, why we did nothing before we got to Sarai and what we’re going to do now we’re here.”

“The Firebird didn’t help.”

“Like using oil to put a fire out. So what I was doing was showing a failing they might use against us. If they think I’m like all the Rus or the old Khakhan and drink too much, they’ll be off guard when they find out otherwise. It’s like the children. Or like the Grey Wolf. Like anything they don’t know, or only think they know. It’s all useful, and hides a dagger in our boot.” Ivan ran the tip of one finger along Mar’ya Morevna’s jawline from ear to mouth, and tapped lightly against her lips. “Remember those words, loved. Because they’re all yours.”

“Indeed.” The edge in her voice was sharp enough that Ivan hastily moved his finger back, because Mar’ya Morevna looked as if she might bite it. “So are these. Remember them as well. From tonight, before we go to bed, the lamps go
out
…”

*

The summons came two days later, brought by none other than Amragan
tarkhan
himself. The envoy’s appearance had changed somewhat from that of the man who had kept them company on the three-week trek from Khorlov. He was more richly dressed than even at the banquet outside the city, and had shaved his head in the old Turki style. His three long braids and the fuzz of black bristles between them were gone, and only a single long scalp-lock remained so that he looked strangely like old portraits of Great Prince Svyatoslav of Kiev.

Another
bloody
-
handed
reaver
, thought Ivan.
But
a
Rus
for
all
that
. The Turk might have been paying his well-behaved hostages a compliment of sorts, but Ivan was less certain about the scroll of authority the
tarkhan
carried. It looked ominously like the warrants drawn up by First Minister Strel’tsin while his father was still Tsar in Khorlov, vaguely dangerous documents until certain specifics were added at the Tsar’s pleasure. Then they became lethal.

This scroll had that same look, a sleepy menace like a coiled snake, its serpentine image only increased by the writhing letters of the three languages in which it was written: Arabic, Uigur and Kithan. Amragan
tarkhan
didn’t trouble himself with reading all of it, but the opening words alone would have sounded foolishly grandiose to anyone unfamiliar with the Tatars. Such a person, if there were any still alive in the wide white world, would see only slit-eyed nomads wrapped in furs and stolen finery, with bowed legs from a lifetime in the saddle. They wouldn’t see what such consummate horsemen had achieved and what they thought of themselves as a result, so the salutation of the Khan’s letter would have been no more than the posturing of noisy children.

They would have carried their mistaken impression to the grave, and gone there with shocking speed.

Tengri
in
Heaven
,
the
Sky
above
the
Earth
, it read,
On
Earth
Ogotai
,
Khan
by
the
Power
of
Tengri
,
Khan
of
all
Khans
of
the
Mongols
,
Ruler
of
Men
.
By
this
Batu
,
Ilkhan
of
the
Golden
Horde
,
commands
… And then it got down to those specifics that could put a cutting edge on a sheet of parchment. Testing their sharpness was a suicidal waste of time, and in any case, after six days of kicking their heels in enforced idleness, Ivan and the rest of his party were more than willing to meet the Khan. He suspected, and Mar’ya Morevna agreed, that willingness generated through nervous boredom was as much a reason for the delay as any ‘waiting for the others’, even though the ‘others’ were in Sarai by now. The blare of welcoming trumpets had sounded enough times that the entire High Council of Khorlov might have been somewhere in the city and neither Ivan nor Mar’ya Morevna nor anyone else would have known it.

Keeping an eye open for strange or familiar faces had been first an interesting challenge, and latterly a waste of time. The Tatars assigned to guard and escort them from place to place had done their work so well that the occupants of one house often didn’t even see the people in the houses to either side of them from one day to the next, never mind setting eyes on other parties held in different quarters of the city.

Ivan hadn’t set eyes on the Grey Wolf, either. There were times when he wondered just how seriously Volk Volkovich had taken offence, and whether he would ever return at all. Then there were the other occasions when good sense prevailed and he realized how little good the shapeshifter would be to anyone, caught with the rest of them inside the walls of Sarai like a…

Like a wolf in a trap.

*

“You may bow to the Ilkhan Batu in the manner of the Rus if it pleases you,” Amragan
tarkhan
cautioned all the Russians when they had assembled in the courtyard of Ivan’s house. “But you will also do him honour in the proper fashion, and failure to do this will not be excused.”

“Noble Amragan, are the proper words not ‘
Bow
down
before
the
Khan
,
or
be
destroyed
,’” Nikolai Ivanovich piped up. There was a ripple of nervous laughter from servants and councillors, but not from Ivan, not from Mar’ya Morevna and most definitely not from Amragan
tarkhan
. The Turk stroked his drooping moustaches as he stared down at the small boy who stared back, Ivan was pleased to see, with all the bravado of a child who didn’t know any better. That might have been something to do with the way he was manfully ignoring how his sister was poking him in the ribs for butting into a grown-up conversation.

“Your son,” said Amragan thoughtfully after a few moments’ consideration, “has been listening to wise advice.”

That might have been another veiled threat aimed at everyone present, but here in the very tiger’s den, Ivan was growing tired of anything hidden behind oblique observation. When one had already knelt before the block, comments about how one’s head might be at risk were already superfluous. He gave the
tarkhan
a thin, resigned smile that disarmed the warning. “Both my children listen to everything, whether I want them to hear or not. Wait until you hear them swear.”

There was more uneasy laughter from the Russians, though this time it was because some of them weren’t entirely whether their Tsar was making a joke or being deadly serious. Ivan glanced back at them and raised one hand for silence. “Let all of us listen to wise advice, Amragan
tarkhan
. We’re required to do honour in the proper fashion. So then. What fashion is it?”