The Golden Horde (42 page)

Not that he was fool enough to make use of either. When the commander at last shoved him disgustedly towards a low, massive building, the soldier’s flailing stagger and ultimate collapse at the feet of the one guard on duty would have brought satisfaction to the stoniest heart. It was effective enough that the officer contented himself with a single kick before striding off about his own interrupted business, leaving the sprawled Tatar to warily pick himself up, wipe himself off and start his duties for the night as if nothing had happened.

Like the Golden Pavilion, the treasure-house stood alone at the centre of an open square. Torches flared and spat from iron brackets on the doorposts, and there were others at the corners of the four-square building and in the middle of each length of wall, throwing pools of yellow light overlapping each other like the scales of a good hauberk with no shadows where an intruder could creep close. Even if a potential thief could get near without being seen, the windows were small and barred, they had iron shutters on the inside and there was only a single door.

Volk Volkovich lay down in the lee of a house on the far side of the square, laid head on paws, and studied the problem. He wasn’t discouraged, just mildly amused that he hadn’t noticed this place before, probably because it looked like so many other houses in Sarai. With Rus noblemen locked up in several, guards were common, and as for houses set off by themselves, the place had been built by so many diverse hands and in so many styles of architecture that no one construction looked much more unusual than another.

There were only two guards here, who took turns every few minutes to walk right around the building before coming back to the shelter offered by the awning over the doorway. There were the windows, with their bars and shutters. There was the door itself, bolted at top and bottom but not locked because there was no keyhole in the heavy planks. Either the Khan trusted his men not to steal, or they were too well-trained to steal, or they were too afraid of their own commanders. That was the most likely of all.

Any discipline imposed by fear of a superior could be put to good use by anyone bold enough to play such a superior, and from the few words exchanged before the angry troop-commander went on his way, neither guard would be surprised by an officer speaking Farsi. Volk Volkovich could manage that as well as anyone in Sarai, and play the harshness of a Tatar officer better than most real ones.

A few minutes later, the two sentries heard footsteps approaching from the far side of the square. They were firm, steady footsteps, the tread of someone with nothing to hide and every right to be where he was. That meant only one thing, a surprise inspection. The sober guard shot a warning glance at his erstwhile drunken companion, and both men gripped their spears tighter as they straightened from the occupational slouch of all sentries on a boring duty late at night.

Volk Volkovich had seen all of it, and was well pleased. For all the dislike of his blunt-sensed human shape, its eyes and ears were still inhumanly sharp, and he’d watched the two Tatars convince themselves of what to expect before he emerged from the uncertain shadows beyond the flickering torchlight.

What they saw was a Turk six feet tall and looking even more, towering above the stocky Uighurs as he stared coldly down at them from eerie eyes that seemed illuminated from within. He wasn’t someone they recognized, but he had to be an officer, to be so heavy-footed. Even worse, from his expression he knew one of them had been caught drunk when he should have been on duty, and worst of all, he didn’t care which one.

“Report!” Volk Volkovich allowed a little wolf’s voice to edge the Farsi accent, putting a snarl like the tearing of metal behind that single word. The Tatars weren’t as frightened as they would have been had he appeared in his true shape, but they were exceedingly respectful.

“Nothing to report, Lord,” said the sober one, saluting fist to forehead in the Tatar manner. The drunk one wisely said nothing at all, and Volk Volkovich could hear him breathing shallowly so any smell of
kumys
couldn’t reach the officer’s nostrils. He needn’t have worried. No ordinary officer of the Horde whether Mongol, Turk or Tatar, could have smelt anything other than the refuse which the man had fallen in on his way to duty.

“Good.” A pause, then a hard stare. “You,” to the other man, who twitched perceptibly. “You stink. Stand away.” The soldier saluted in his turn, then gratefully set off on a round of the treasure-house in no great haste, hoping this particular officer would have gone by the time he completed his circuit. He was right, since Volk Volkovich had no intention of staying here longer than necessary.

But what
was
necessary was to see the inside of the treasure-house. It concerned the Gates again. One look around inside the building would be enough for him to enter it safely without troubling the guards again, stepping quietly out of this world and then back into it again on the other side of the closed and bolted door. But without that look he stood a more than even chance of sharing the same floor-space as whatever golden things were piled up within the Khan’s treasury. There would be little satisfaction in finding one of the lost crowns of the Rus domains if the damned thing was embedded in his liver.

“All in order inside?”

“Inside, Lord?”

“Inside.” He glared at the guard as though the man was half-witted. “Where the treasure is. Where a thief would be.”

“I heard nothing, Lord.”

“Just so. You would not hear a thief. Open the door.” There was just the tiniest hesitation, not so much suspicious as confused and put off-balance by a change in routine. “Or have you some reason why not,
uu
?”

That was enough. “At once, Lord!”

“And quietly. Just in case.” The Grey Wolf gave the man a quick grin to set him back at ease, a grin that promised rewards and maybe promotion if anything amiss was discovered, and a report to the man’s own officer that if not actually good would at least not be bad.

The bolts, well-greased, slid back in silence, and the door swung open. Volk Volkovich reached up and took one of the doorpost torches from its bracket, and stepped forward into the blackness. It wouldn’t have surprised his cynical mind to discover that the place was empty, that all the torches and sentries and thick walls were just a bluff and that real security lay in concealment of the treasure rather than guarding it.

He would have been wrong.

For just an instant there was only darkness in the treasure-house, darkness that drank the yellow torchlight like wine. Then he raised its sputtering, smoky flame above his head and the light returned, reflected back from what lay strewn across the floor and heaped like windblown autumn leaves waist-high along the walls, a thousand, thousand glints of icy brilliance, like the eyes of his own people, murderous gemstones embroidered on the sable fabric of the night.

The Grey Wolf had never seen the riches scattered broadcast in the Golden Pavilion at Ilkhan Batu’s slippered feet, but he would have known why they were discarded. They were merely splendid, as befitting the court of the Splendid Khan, but set against the magnificence of what lay before him, they would have become valueless, cheap and tawdry. What these four strong walls contained were the fruits of the mightiest plundering that the wide white world had ever known, wealth enough to make all other conquerors from Aleksandr the Macedonian and the Roman Caesars gnash their teeth in envy and own themselves defeated.

Volk Volkovich had long thought the Golden Horde was named for the
altan
uruk
, the ruling Golden Clan who traced their descent from Chinghis-Khan and from whose family the Great Khans were chosen, but the name had truly hatched in this stone nest, from this golden egg. Batu’s armies had crushed every realm from the Urals to the Danube, from the Straits of Hormuz to the Baltic, and while much of that wealth had been channelled back to the heart of the empire, the rest of it was here. It was a golden hoard indeed, a hoard worthy of Zmey Gorynyts and Tugarin his son, worthy maybe of the great Dragons from ancient times, and even they might concede they were outmatched.

Volk Volkovich was glad he wasn’t human. A man might not have resisted the lure of so much gold in chain and plate and coin and bar, so many jewels raw and cut, set in their mounts and loose like pebbles, so much sheer power that wealth could buy. But a wolf had little use for precious things and as for the power, he could feel it dinning at his brain as though he was standing beneath the great bell of Khorlov’s cathedral tower.

And there they were, all in a row. Twelve wooden boxes, carved, inlaid, jewelled, each different but alike enough as form must follow function. The crowns of twelve kingdoms, taken by conquest and left together in the dark to brood on their defeat. It was all her, the power of untold years of ruling, the strength of laws and armies and successive generations unbroken until now, all humming in his ears and inside his skull like a swarm of monstrous golden bees. Here was the source of the itch, of the headaches, of the pressure grinding down on Sarai like a fist kneading dough. Volk Volkovich thought of that one image, and flinched. What happens to dough when the kneading is done? It goes into the oven. Human or inhuman, the Grey Wolf didn’t like to dwell on what sort of oven waited for this city and the people in it.

Especially when some of those people were his friends.

He turned about and walked from the treasure-house so fast that the torch-flame roared softly above his head, almost flung it at the sentry, nodded a curt ‘all’s-well’ at the startled man, then slammed the door and bolted it. Oak and cold iron had some small use in magic, so they said. It would hold back the wild energies swirling within the treasure-chamber for long enough to let him get to where Ivan and the other Khorlovtsy folk were being held. Despite their differences, despite their arguments and fights, the Grey Wolf had to speak to Mar’ya Morevna. He didn’t know what was about to happen, but he did know that she was the only person in Sarai who could prevent it…

CHAPTER TEN

The
Khanate
of
the
Golden
Horde
;

September
,
1243
A
.
D
.

Mar’ya Morevna ached in all her bones, right down to the tiny ones of hands and feet, and understood with painful clarity why the Khan’s couriers swathed their bellies with tight bandages. It was supposed to cushion them against the jolting of a constant hard gallop, but if the way she felt now was an indication, it also probably saved time in the infirmary later.

Amragan
tarkhan
had taken four weeks to cover the distance between Sarai and Khorlov. She and her escort did it in eleven gruelling days, and it became a stubborn point of honour to display no more discomfort than the hard-bitten horsemen. She succeeded, though whether she had gained their respect was hard to say.

They had certainly gained hers.

As members of the Khan’s own guard, even the common troopers each outranked a commander of one thousand in the ordinary army of the Golden Horde, and when fully trained was reckoned fit enough to command a troop of ten thousand. Rather than the furious gallop of the express couriers from one post-house and a change of horses to the next, each one of these thousand men had two or three spare horses in tow, and were capable of maintaining a monotonous pace of walk-run-walk from dawn to dusk, changing mounts on the move, eating or sleeping in the saddle, and halting only to perform their hasty eliminations. Even though the roads they travelled were no more than dusty or muddy tracks, the route outlined by wooden poles against those times when the changing weather swept the road away completely, there was never an occasion when they were lost.

The only real relief was in the evenings when they halted and made camp, and even that was a double-edged comfort, because rest lasted only long enough for strained muscles to stiffen and be doubly painful when the march began again at dawn. It didn’t trouble the Tatars. What would have disturbed them more was the prospect of traveling by night, because if the Chingisid khans were afraid of thunder and the anger of Tengri, these ordinary soldiers were afraid of the dark.

Mar’ya Morevna couldn’t understand why. Never mind bears, or wolves, or even Volk Volkovich; these Tatars were by far the most dangerous creatures in the area, and there was a twisted feeling of security about riding in their midst. But they were still fearful to be out on the cold black earth of the open steppe after nightfall, and none of them would tell her why.

The old shaman Beyki was a little more forthcoming. “Erlik Khan is lord of the empty places,” he mumbled, chewing a strip of dried meat and washing it down with swigs of
kumys
and he rode along, swaying, always swaying, but never falling off. One skinny arm waved towards the desolate horizon, a grand sweeping gesture for all it was made by a stick wrapped in leathers and furs. “
Huu
, places like these.”

Like the movement of his jaws on the meat, his words went around and around and always returned to the same place, chewing sense slowly to pieces. “We pay him no heed in the daytime for we pray to Tengri, the Blue Sky, the bright day. Erlik hates that.
Hui
! He hates us. He dwells in the earth, in the dark, where we give him our bodies. But not our lives. He eats only the dead.”