The Golden Horde (38 page)

“Less safe without an
oborotyen
werewolf than with one?” Ivan shifted his position in an attempt to see her face, but it was still turned towards the glow of the banked stove pouring in amber stripes of hot light through the slots cut in its iron door, and the crown of Mar’ya Morevna’s frost-blonde head was giving away no secrets. Yet he knew exactly what she meant. To know that at least one of the deadly shadows in the darkness was a friend, an ally who had promised to defend you and yours against all enemies and odds, was a comfort granted to few men and women, regardless of their skill in the Art Magic or their lack of it. And he might still be out there, somewhere in the shadows, watching, waiting, hopefully guarding. Ivan only wished he knew for sure.

“I wish I knew for sure,” said Mar’ya Morevna, choosing her words with an eerie prescience that made Ivan start a little. “Whether I was right or wrong about him. Whether I offended him so much he washed his hands of us.”

“Shouldn’t that be ‘paws’?”

“What? Oh. Yes. Very funny. It was, really. I – I just don’t feel like laughing very much right now. I’m growing afraid of the dark, Vanya. Hold me. Just hold me.”

Ivan put his arms around his wife, and held her close.

Eaten through at last, the last logs criss-crossed in the stove slumped and sent up a crackling plume of sparks. Little tongues of yellow flame licked up chips of dried bark in the bed of red coals underneath. Their light shone back in strands of gold from the tear-tracks on Mar’ya Morevna’s face until she abruptly pulled clear of Ivan’s embrace, cleared her throat, sniffled vigorously and dried her eyes with a kerchief from her sleeve.

“That was supposed to make me feel better,” she said, and smiled damply. “Who makes up such lies?”

“The sort of person who says ‘
this
won’t
hurt
.’ Because it does. Always.” He stood up, a little awkwardly from having held his cramped position for as long as she needed him not to move, and stretched to ease the kinks from aching joints before going to the table and pouring them both something to drink from the always-replenished flask. It was vodka again, this time flavoured with herbs and honey, and while it was good enough cold, Ivan considered moving it to the top of the stove. Hot honey and alcohol would help them sleep, and from the look on Mar’ya Morevna’s face she would need as much help as she could get. Later, perhaps. Right now there was a question needing answered. He gave Mar’ya Morevna her cup, sipped delicately at his own, and then said gently, “Why the dark? You were never afraid of it before.”

“I’d hoped our trick with the crown would work,” said Mar’ya Morevna obliquely, swallowing half the vodka at a gulp. “I hoped it as I hoped for an easy birth of healthy children, and if a man can’t imagine what that means to a woman, be grateful.”

Ivan sat down on the arm of the chair. “They
were
healthy, their birth
was
easy, if you and the midwives weren’t sparing my tender sensibilities, and the trick didn’t work. But my head’s still on, and Batu still doesn’t have the Great Crown of Khorlov for his collection.”

“He’ll have it soon enough. I’ve run out of deceptions, Ivan, and he won’t listen to the truth. He wouldn’t believe it, not after what we tried to do. He’d think it was just one more excuse, and anyway, you heard the Turk. No more excuses.”

“Would the Khan ever have listened? I don’t think so.”

“He might. That’s what makes me so angry. I pictured a degenerate old tyrant, steeped in cunning. This one… This one seems almost civilized. At least he has a practical mind.”

“This practical, civilized Khan had Mikhail of Chernigov stamped to death for refusing to bow to him.”

Mar’ya Morevna laughed. It was a shocking sound after her tears and soft speech, brittle and cynical and all too worldly-wise. “That was the excuse. The
reason
was that he was part of a failed rebellion, and the only one of its three leaders too proud to submit and too brave to run away. Too stupid to do either, if you want my opinion.”

“So why did he come here at all?”

“He thought that he could do some sort of merchant’s deal with the Khan to keep both his honour and his lands.” Mar’ya Morevna finished her drink. “He, an unrepentant rebel, making bargains? Stupid, as I said.”

“But he has his honour.”

“That should be a great comfort to the refugees living on the open steppe who could have begun rebuilding Chernigov if they’d had a lord to stand between them and the Golden Horde. A great comfort indeed. Especially with winter coming on. Yes. Winter. And the dark. You wanted to know about the dark.” She held the empty cup out abruptly. “Give me another.”

Ivan splashed vodka into her cup, replenished his own, and returned to his perch on the chair-arm. Then he reached down and took her hand and held it. “Mar’yushka my loved,” he said softly, “tell me or not. Whatever eases you.”

“You’re very sweet, loved.” Mar’ya Morevna laid her cheek against his hand like a cat, and sighed. “And you really want to be told. Well. It won’t ease either of us, but you’re better knowing than not.” She tasted her vodka, no gulp this time, no more in fact than a moistening of her lips, and sat up straighter in the chair. “The equinox is next week,” she said. “Day and night will be of equal length. After that the nights grow longer as the wide white world slides down the throat of another winter.”

“Until we reach the bottom of the year and the pendulum swings again.”

“Unless something stops it.” Her voice was flat, the words unequivocal. To ears acquainted with the Art Magic as Ivan’s were, deny it as he might, there was a shuddersome brutality about the statement. “Autumn equinox, then winter solstice, and the darkness growing stronger all the way.” Mar’ya Morevna took a long drink of the honeyed vodka, although it was having no more effect on her than if it had been honeyed water. “You know it, I know it, the shamans know it too. But though they can sense the difference between a true crown and a false one well enough, like the heat from coals in a closed jar, they can’t sense there might be anything bad or dangerous in it. A fire can warm your house or burn it down.”

“Like a rotten egg,” said Ivan. “You can’t tell until the shell’s been broken, and by then it’s too late.”

“Except that if this egg breaks, the one we call our world, then the rot will come in from Outside. Oh, Vanya —” Mar’ya Morevna stared at him with wide, haunted eyes that held a degree of fear he would have sworn she didn’t know, and her fingers closed on his in a grip tight enough to hurt, “— I wish they had come for the crown in the springtime …!”

*

“I could take you out of the city without them knowing about it, Papa,” said Nikolai Ivanovich, peering over the ramparts and pointing to the distant line of shallow cliffs where the steppes tumbled downward to become the valley of the Volga. “I could take you right out there.”

“So could I! So could I! So could I!” Anastasya shot her brother a glare for leaving her out, and gave him a push. “We both could, and I could do it better than him. I’m sure I could. But he just wants to sound important.”

“No I don’t! And anyway, if we both did it together, we could go even farther away from here.”

“As far as Khorlov?” Ivan spoke casually, trying hard to keep the eagerness out of his voice, but the twins had sharp ears. Natasha’s face fell and her lower lip came out.

“No, Papa. Not home. It’s too far. We couldn’t do it ourselves, and we couldn’t do it with you either.”

“I just wondered.” Ivan shrugged, making light of it as best he could. He had been spending a lot more time with his children than he could normally spare, but he didn’t have a Tsardom to take care of right now. Whenever he was able to forget the why of that, he was able to relax and enjoy his unaccustomed liberty. But when the wheres and the whys couldn’t be ignored, he had also been doing a good deal of ‘
just
wondering
’ since Mar’ya Morevna and her escort – he’d forgotten just how imposing and threatening a thousand armoured horsemen could look – had ridden off to Khorlov last week. Wondering how long it would be until he saw her again, for one. At best speed in this foul weather, and it was certain that the troop-leader would be driving his men at best speed all the way, she wouldn’t be back for another four weeks. With the crown.

With the oil for the fire that might burn down the house.

The twins had been complaining recently about heat, and cold, and wet, and dry, about being itchy, about having headaches. Ivan didn’t know how long it had been going on. Being so damned busy with one thing and another, nobody had thought it worthwhile to tell the Tsar and Tsaritsa that their children seemed to be catching something, except that even to Ivan’s inexperienced eye, neither Kolya nor Tasha looked in the least bit unwell. They had missed their mother loudly and inconsolably both before and after she left, but within a day they had bounced back with a healthy anticipation of her return. For the rest of it, while within Sarai’s ring of walls they ran about almost unsupervised, playing the sort of games with the swarms of Tatar children in the city that seemed to require no skill at language except the ability to emit piercing shrieks.

It was only outside the gates that there were reminders of being less than guests. Ivan was allowed to ride out with one child at a time, never both together, just as they were allowed to ride out together on their fat little ponies, but never with their father. And always, whether Ivan was with them or not, there was a ten-strong troop of Tatars shadowing them wherever they went, as if those small animals could suddenly develop wings and fly away before a patrol could be dispatched from the city itself.

The ponies couldn’t, but the twins were another matter entirely.

Except that they’d made it plain, with all the defiant stubbornness and crooked logic of which the seven-year-old mind was capable that they wouldn’t leave without him, even if they could. Explanations of how much easier it would be for both their parents, of how much less there would be to worry about, even how much of a score it would be over Amragan
tarkhan
– whom neither child liked – fell on deaf ears.

“Either we all go, or we all stay,” Nikolai had said at the beginning of this wet afternoon when Ivan put the suggestion to them once again. The adult phrasing and delivery in that child’s treble voice had been so comical that Ivan had to go away for a few minutes. If he fought to conceal tears instead of laughter, it was no one’s business but his own. All the discussion after that had been light-hearted wrangling about just how far various combinations of people and things could travel by way of these natural Gates.

Not as far as Ivan had hoped, was the conclusion, and certainly not as far as the powerful, elaborately constructed Gating-spells that Mar’ya Morevna used so warily and rarely. One didn’t expect unaided human muscles to perform as well as a machine of gears and counterweights and levers, so why should the same difference not apply in sorcery? Ivan could think of several reasons why not, but none of them would stand up even to his under-educated evaluation. Magic-users from birth they may have been, but Nikolai and Anastasya were still only seven years old.

Mar’ya Morevna would have been better able to explain it in the proper long words beloved of sorcerers and scholars; but from what the children had been chattering about, he could no more expect them to perform prodigies of sorcerous travel and transport than he could reasonably expect any other adult display of strength or skill from a child. But the limitations of weight and distance seemed to apply only when their Gates were being used as a short-cut between one part of Russia and another. It made a sort of perfect sense, at least in that way the Art Magic had of twisting anything it touched to conform with its own convoluted rules.

In the last extremity all of them, or at least the children, would be able to get away completely, without any hope of return, to the Summer Country; where it was obvious Nikolai and Anastasya had friends to care for them until they grew up, even if those friends weren’t always of human shape. To go away and stay away was another matter entirely. If it became necessary – and Ivan didn’t like to think of what sort of threat would make such a step necessary – the trick would be in persuading them to do it.

For the meanwhile, if none of them looked too closely, they could ignore the guards and the closed gates and pretend they were merely visiting a friend.

*

At times when Amragan
tarkhan
and his sardonic smile weren’t around, that friendship was easy to believe. The attitude displayed by most of the Tatars in Sarai was a straightforward one. Ivan was still alive, so the Ilkhan Batu had forgiven him, and there was an end to the matter. If their Khan exonerated instead of executed, it wasn’t the place of Batu’s loyal retainers to reinterpret his ruling. Thus Ivan found himself the subject of more interest and curiosity than anything else. Accustomed to and knowing how to deal with either armed rebellion or absolute subservience, the Tatars of the Golden Horde were confused, amused and often utterly bemused by a polite, courteous, diplomatic and only mildly insubordinate Russian prince who did exactly what he was told ninety-five times out of every hundred. It put them off their stride, so much so that they took refuge in the good-humoured wariness that Ivan was coming to recognize as their most common alternative to destructive ferocity. Since he didn’t know when or why he might say something to make that particular coin spin to show its opposite face, one was as unsettling as the other.