The Golden Horde (48 page)

And then the earth shook. It lurched under his outstretched hands as though he had in very truth touched some exposed nerve. But why now? Why, when it was of no use? Why could something not have happened before…

Before.

Ivan raised his head from the dirt, stood up even though he wanted to crawl like a worm, and watched with tear-blinded eyes as the vortex began to collapse, blackness and brightness devouring each other, spiralling in on itself with a vast howling noise while random pulses of energy sleeted across the sky like the Northern Aurora gone mad. The lofty pillar that had towered into the sky and defied Heaven itself slumped to a sphere no bigger than two men could span with their arms, roiling with incredible light and utter darkness as if those colours or the lack of them were still shining through holes cut into other worlds than this.

And perhaps they were. Ivan no longer cared. The light in his world had gone out.

The howling faded to a rumble and then to an impossibly deep, fading groan, the sound that Ivan’s heart might have made in the moment that it broke. With shocking suddenness the brilliant light and deep darkness both vanished, leaving in their wake a perfect outline of the sphere sliced out of everything it had come in contact with. Buildings, walls, even the ground itself had a perfectly curved scoop taken out of it.

Then he heard the sound of laughter, a sound he had never thought to hear again in this life, and the darkness in his mind groped out to find a chance for light. Ivan took a tremulous step forward, and then another, and the third one that let him peer over the sharp-edged brink.

Nikolai and Anastasya were there, at the bottom of the shallow depression, looking as unconcerned as if nothing of note had happened, and they were laughing and playing catch with a little, glossy ball, like hollow glass filled with whirling skeins of black and white that never mixed to grey.

Ivan heard footsteps behind him as he slithered down into the pit and swayed there, his heeled boots unsteady on the glass-smooth surface. The twins eyed him curiously as he reached out to take the ball and rest it on the mud-smeared palm of his right hand. Already it was smaller than when he saw it first. He went down on one knee beside the children, their faces pressed alongside his, while up on solid ground Mar’ya Morevna stood with Volk Volkovich at her side, and they all watched in silence as the ball dwindled away, smaller and smaller, until there was nothing there at all.

He handed son and daughter to their mother, to be caressed and cried over, and taken one by one and then together into a crushing hug, then scrambled awkwardly up himself and to stare at things he hadn’t noticed. All the walls of all the buildings around the crater-cup were white, no matter what colour they might have been before; and on them, starkly silhouetted on the original paint or brick or stone, were the shadows of all those who weren’t either bowing in terrified supplication or diving for cover.

Mar’ya Morevna was there, so was Ivan, and on the farther side Amragan
tarkhan
and a few others, even the Ilkhan Batu himself. All could be identified with ease, because the profiles were almost crisp enough to discern individual hairs. But there was one shadow that made no sense to most of those who stared at it. Instead of a man, it was the outline of a monstrous wolf. Volk Volkovich looked at it, and then at them, and then he shrugged.

There was, Ivan decided later, not much else he
could
have done.

*

“
Hui
! Look at my city, Russian! My beautiful golden city! Your demons have wrecked it! What have you to say for yourself,
uu
?”

Ivan bowed his head in well-feigned remorse. There were a number of things he might have said, but Khan Batu would have appreciated very few and taken grave exception to the rest. But the old Mongol warlord was right about one thing. Sarai was wrecked indeed. What hadn’t been pulverized by the fight between the powers of light and darkness had been demolished by their cataclysmic departure.

“It is as well you say nothing, Ivan of Khorlov,” said Batu at length, swigging
kumys
without the usual accompaniment of pipes and cymbals. The Splendid Khan of the Golden Horde had let it be known in no uncertain terms that he’d heard enough noise for one day. “Excuses only compound an obvious error,
uu
? But I will not have you killed for what you have done. I should be grateful after all that you dismissed the demons before more harm was done.”

Neither Ivan nor Mar’ya Morevna said anything just yet. It wouldn’t have been wise to remind Batu that his policy with the crowns of the conquered domains had been largely responsible for one ‘demon’, while Mar’ya Morevna had summoned the second. They were both waiting nervously for the inevitable sting that lurked in the tail of such statements as these. But this one was blunt.

“No,
huu
, I shall dismiss you. Completely. I want nothing more to do with you, or your adventures.” He glowered at Ivan. “When I want such things, you
tell
me about them. Don’t
show
me unless I ask! Hah! Go back to Khorlov and stay there, the sooner the better. You do not exist!”

The Khan held out one hand. The sheet of parchment laid in it had one tattered edge, like a page torn violently from a book. He waved the sheet under their noses then tore it across and across, flung the pieces into the nearest brazier of charcoal, and watched as they curled, blackened, flared and were consumed. “Your names are gone. The realm of Khorlov is gone. The page that bore them is gone from the chronicle of the Khanate. Live in your own world, and do not intrude on mine!”

Ivan and Mar’ya Morevna looked at one another, then, greatly daring, winked at the Grey Wolf and the children. They had already been erased from the chronicle of Aleksandr Nevskiy, and were content to be gone from this one too. If Russian and Tatar both wanted them out of the world but were unwilling to do it in the brutal, old-fashioned way, they would be more than happy to oblige in their own fashion.

As he had done once before, Batu Khan of the Golden Horde clapped his hands in dismissal. “Go!”

They went.

ПОСЛЕСЛОВИЕ

(
Epilogue
)

Ivan heard the door of the kremlin library open then shut, he heard footsteps descend slowly and wearily down the long flight of dressed stone stairs that led out at last into the courtyard, and he stood in the falling snow, and he waited.

Mar’ya Morevna and Nikolai and Anastasya emerged blinking into the pallid light. The children were holding their mother’s hands, and all three looked tired to the point of exhaustion. That didn’t stop first one child and then the other from running through the snow and leaping up into their father’s embrace.

“Will it work for both?” he said. “You promised, remember?”

“It will,” said Mar’ya Morevna. “For both of them.” The last time Ivan had heard such deep satisfaction in her voice had been after the birth of the twins, when the doctors had assured her that all had gone well and she had at last believed them. But this time ‘both’ didn’t mean the children. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Ivan set his son and daughter down with a little grunt of effort because they were sturdy, well-grown, and getting no lighter. He watched as they ran off across the snow-covered courtyard, and that same gaze took in all the hopeful, or nervous, or downright fearful faces staring at him. “I’ve been ready for months,” he said softly. “And never more ready than now. Say the words.”

“Nothing so crude, my loved one. The Great Gate is open and ready.” She smiled, and kissed him lightly on the lips, regardless or maybe because of the watchers. “What is they say in the stories? ‘
Just
wish
,
and
you’re
there
.’ So wish …”

A sudden gust of warmth swept through the courtyard, a breeze laden with a tingling scent of flowers that was the very breath of summer. The falling snow stopped, and that on the ground began to melt into little, chuckling rivulets of clear water. Ivan looked upwards as an arch of light came sweeping from the east in an impossibly swift dawn. It was like a rainbow with no colour but sunlight, and as it advanced across the sky the grey, snow-laden clouds were driven before it and only clear blue remained in its wake.

“They won’t care about my domain,” said Mar’ya Morevna thoughtfully. “But they’ll say you ran away.” Half the sky was grey now, and the rest was blue.

“Let them say it,” said Ivan, grinning. “At least I won’t have to listen any more. I’ve spent my life being concerned over other opinions. This is my Tsardom, these are my people, and if this is the way that I choose to protect them, so be it.”

Somewhere away in the distance, among the shadowed green woods, a wolf howled. Though the long, smooth rise and fall of the voice sounded melancholy, Tsar Ivan knew better. There was no heartbreak in this wolfsong, nor threat either. He nodded acknowledgement of the greeting, then reached out for Mar’ya Morevna and they walked hand in hand across the kremlin courtyard, enjoying the warmth of the sun as they awaited the arrival of their first guest.

There was only a new-moon curve of winter grey remaining low in the west, for the realms of Khorlov and Koldunov were slipping quietly sideways out of Russia, out of the world, and into the Summer Country.

A single brightly-coloured butterfly fluttered for a few confused seconds on a gust of cold air, its wings spattered with flecks of falling snow. Where there had been a city, and a fortress, and a great kremlin palace, there was just a sliver of blue summer sky against the grey clouds and white snow. A warm scent of flowers flowed from it, and already the sliver had narrowed to half of its previous width. With all the stern purpose that an insect could summon, the butterfly plunged back to the Gate, and through it, just as the magic winked shut.

With no errant summer heat to interfere, the snow began to fall again in earnest. Wind sifted it and sculpted it across the open steppes, and the snow kept falling. Within an hour, or perhaps a little longer, there was no trace remaining to show that the Tsardom of Khorlov had ever existed in the wide white world.

And if the chronicles of the Golden Horde and of Aleksandr Nevskiy can be believed, it never did…

If you enjoyed
The Golden Horde
, we would be really grateful if you could leave a review on the Amazon page and Goodreads.

You might also be interested in
Peter Morwood’s CLAN WARS series:

For weekly updates on our free and discounted eBooks
sign up to our newslette
r
.

Follow us on
Twitter
and
Facebook
.