The Golden Horde (5 page)

“I do, Majesty.”

“You said nothing of this at the Council meeting when my father gave me Khorlov and those same dominions, more than a year ago. Why so slow, Eminence?”

“It didn’t concern me then, since you had been practicing the,” he glanced sidelong at Mar’ya Morevna, “the Art Magic for some years with no harm either to yourself or others.”

“No harm?
No
harm
?” Mar’ya Morevna flared up, losing all her patience and most of her manners. “Glory to God, Eminence, if that’s all you can say about my husband’s employment of the Art, you had best go read some of the chronicles that mention it. He saved this realm more than once, and your intolerant stiff neck along with it!”

“The use of sorcery, noble Lady, is acceptable – if only just – in a youthful and headstrong Prince, but without precedent in a Tsar.”

“Only because the precedent has never been set,” snapped Ivan. “Consider it done as of my coronation. Consider too the good that the Art has done for all the lands of the Rus. I haven’t heard you level any criticism at
them
, Eminence.”

“What is done in Kiev is on the head of the Prince of Kiev,” said Archbishop Levon. “I am Patriarch of Khorlov, and my concern is with Khorlov.”

“Your concern, as you call it, is with me.”

“Then Majesty, my concern is with your children as well.” He gazed thoughtfully at the two infants, who were being quiet for once and playing some game of their own invention with quill-pens shattered beyond repair. “Are they not being taught the, um, the Art?”

“Yes, Eminence, they are. As they learn to talk, and while they learn their letters.” Levon Popovich looked aghast at this frank admission, and Ivan guessed he’d been expecting a far more reluctant response.

“Eminence,” said Mar’ya Morevna, trying to be reasonable after her earlier outburst, “take heed of what was already said. The lowest peasant in Russia can create a little fire without flint and tinder if he knows the least part of the Art; just enough to light a candle in the dark or a stove to keep him warm. But most do nothing of the sort. It involves too much effort and an untrained mind would find it too much trouble. Besides,” she forced her mouth into a smile, though smiling at this wearisome priest was the last thing she wanted to do, “what would the poor yokel do if he started the fire burning on the wrong side of his skin? So he uses flint and tinder after all, and lifts a burden with his arms rather than the Art. But the potential is there.”

“It’s that potential which has been so good for Russia, Eminence,” said Ivan. “It’s kept the Tatars at bay, except for their damned raids. They fear us, not as warrior adversaries but with the fear of superstition.”

“Majesty, this is all very well and
probably
true.”

Mar’ya Morevna drew a sharp breath to say exactly what she thought of that malicious comment, but swallowed the words and sat back in her chair as Ivan waved her to silence. “But sorcery,” continued Archbishop Levon remorselessly, “is intrinsically evil and while good may come from it, the Devil can quote scripture for his own ends.”

Ivan glowered at him. “You wouldn’t have said that to my father.”

“I did, Majesty, as frequently as courtesy permitted. But your father the old Tsar – who I believe is spending the evening of his years in the company of those other sorcerers, your brothers-in-law – was a man well advanced in years, with his own idiosyncratic notions of right and wrong.”

“A fine and well-turned speech, Eminence,” said Ivan in the low voice of real anger. “Well salted with long words. If you’re claiming my father’s judgments were in error because of his age …”

“I didn’t say so, Majesty.”

“Just as well for you, a man far older than he is. And… And had you ever shown the slightest talent for the Art, you wouldn’t be complaining about me. And what you didn’t tell my father to his face, I won’t hear from you behind his back. Thank you, Eminence. You may go.”

“But Majesty —”

“Go.
Now
!”

The Archbishop went, rather faster than he’d come in.

Ivan slumped back in his chair, blew out a gusty breath and regardless of the paperwork already there, swung his boots up onto the table. “I think,” he said to Mar’ya Morevna, “that I might have made an enemy.”

“I doubt it. But you might have gained a little more respect.”

“Maybe.” Ivan yawned, more from nervous reaction than from the weariness that had been creeping over him. “If this is the life of a Tsar, beloved, then I could easily wish for something to break the monotony. An adventure. Or is that only permitted to princes, like magic?”

“Again, I doubt it.” Mar’ya Morevna crossed herself quickly, and made a little deflecting hand-gesture after it that had nothing to do with religion. “But avert, my dear. Be careful how you ask for things in such vague terms. Like the wishes in the old tales, you can easily get much more than you expect.”

“What I expect right now,” said Ivan, halfway through another yawn, “is some sleep. The Kievans tomorrow, remember?” He stood up and stretched, then looked quizzically at Mar’ya Morevna. “Was I ever ‘
youthful
and
headstrong
’?”

“The Archbishop was much more polite than me,” she said with a quick smile. “What he really meant was ‘
young
and
stupid
.’ And you were. Definitely. Now, my beloved Tsar, sorcerer, diplomat and doting parent, let’s get you and this pair of reprobates to bed before you’re all too asleep to care …”

CHAPTER TWO

The
Principality
of
Ryazan
;

November
,
1237
A
.
D
.

“We can’t be any more ready than this,” said Mar’ya Morevna, snuggling deeper into the thick fur robe covering her armour as an errant breeze chilled the metal. She looked from side to side from her vantage point at the top of the hill, and nodded in satisfaction. “So now we wait.” Her voice had a decisive edge that sounded odd in someone commonly called the fairest Princess in all the Russias, but didn’t sound odd at all to those who knew she was a renowned commander of armies.

One of those armies was drawn up in battle array, secure behind a barricade of ponderous wagons and a bristling fence of sharpened stakes driven into the snowy ground at just the proper angle to impale an oncoming horse. Such a barricade might have seemed hasty and makeshift, but there was nothing makeshift about this one. The wagons were fastened together with great chains of forged iron and their sides, with loopholes for archers, were built of timbers almost as thick as those of a kremlin wall. This
gulyagorod
, the ‘walking city’, had developed over time as defence against mounted enemies and had proved its worth time and again, when the Polovtsy and the Pechenegs and the Kipchaqs and the Tatars came raiding into the lands of the Rus.

The right and left wings of the host were in extended order to either side, concealed in ambush by the thickly wooded hills as much as possible with seven thousand men in battle formation. The centre was exposed, an obvious target, but the men in the woods were well-hidden. Without knowing of their presence, an attacker would concentrate his assault on the
gulyagorod
fort and be caught in the jaws of a trap.

Tsar Ivan breathed out a pale plume of breath that joined the accumulated frost bleaching his beard white and glanced dourly at his wife from under the brim of his helmet. “Waiting,” he said. “My favourite part of any battle.”

Mar’ya Morevna gazed at him for a moment, then raised one eyebrow. “Any battle?” she echoed, teasing just ever so slightly. Ivan had seen precisely one battle before in all his life, not quite three years ago, and that was the famous victory over the Teutonic Knights on the frozen river Nemen. Not that he or she – or anyone but Prince Aleksandr Nevskiy – had really been there, of course. At least if one believed the official chronicle written by Prince Aleksandr Nevskiy’s official chronicler.

There was something to be said for bringing a court archivist on campaign, if you were absolutely sure he was going to be recording victory, not defeat. Mar’ya Morevna thought about that and then smiled inwardly. Nevskiy was thoroughly unlikable. No, she corrected herself, he was a detestable creature whose personal and political habits needed watching from a safe distance; but his chronicler’s presence at that battle on the river had anticipated success instead of failure and was as close to a compliment as he was likely to offer any of the other Princes whose presence his history omitted.

There would be no such omission today. Khorlov’s own archivist was back with the baggage train, but if he didn’t present himself for duty very soon Mar’ya Morevna was going to have words about the man’s continued employment. It wasn’t as if he had much to do since except for Ivan and herself, there were no other persons of note. In the depths of winter, with nothing worth stealing beyond the walls of their kremlins and no way a mere raiding-party could breach those walls, not one of the Great Princes of the Rus had bothered to stir from beside his palace fire.

That had never been Mar’ya Morevna’s way, nor was it Ivan’s. The harvest was in and safe, but the peasants who gathered it were far from safe. Most lived in villages not cities, and a Tatar raid that would never dare attack a kremlin-guarded town could stamp a village flat before its snug, safe Prince and his snug, safe army could do anything to help. If that happened often enough there would be no peasants left to sow the next harvest, never mind gather it. Better by far to bring a kremlin of armoured wagons out to meet the Tatars, and persuade them by force of arms to take their depredations somewhere else.

Mar’ya Morevna watched her husband study the disposition of the army for a few seconds more, frowning slightly as she’d seen him do when playing chess, moving the pieces around inside his head to check possible moves against possible consequences. He was doing the same now, except that this time the pieces were human, and the moves and consequences worse than simply losing a game. “Last time I saw only the aftermath,” he said. “Just what did you do?”

“To Manguyu Temir? Besides kill him? I’d have thought that was enough.”

“Funny. You know what I mean. Tactics, strategies – which did you use? Or was it magic after all?”

“Only the magic of defeating superior numbers in open battle, and you don’t need to be told to know what that feels like.” Mar’ya Morevna looked thoughtful. “It wasn’t much of an open battle. We drew the Tatars onto a prepared position like this one, and when they started to hammer the walls of the
gulyagorod
, we closed the wings of the host around them and shot them off their horses from three sides. And we kept shooting, because they kept coming, until there were no more left.”

“Obliging of them.”

“It was all their khan knew to do. Manguyu Temir wasn’t one of the Great Khan’s great generals, just a brigand commanding brigands.”

Ivan laughed at that. “Did you see Manguyu Temir?” he said. “Meet him, even?”

“No. Why?”

“Because I did, at a banquet almost five years ago. In Khorlov.” Mar’ya Morevna raised her eyebrows, but Ivan shrugged dismissively. “It was a political thing and he was better invited than ignored. That way we knew where he was. I remember my father said exactly the same thing: that he was a brigand. But I wonder about this present gang, because brigands don’t normally raid in winter.”

The point was well made, and Mar’ya Morevna wondered why she hadn’t considered it before. A raid was a raid was a raid, and she’d given little thought to its background, just as someone confronted by a wasp didn’t pause to think before swatting. But it was true enough. Tatars and the various other tribes of nomadic bandits usually came raiding between late spring and early autumn, choosing their time carefully so that their horses and the livestock they hoped to drive away wouldn’t be wallowing in the mire created by thaw or rain at either end of summer, or wasting their time during the icy season when everything worth stealing was locked away from harm.

Her mind jumped to the last enemy who attacked the Rus lands in winter. “The Teutonic Knights could have made some agreement with the Tatars, after what I did to Grand Master von Salza.” Ivan looked dubious, and after a moment she nodded agreement. “No indeed. Why wait? Even though he wouldn’t dare come back himself, an arrangement like this could have been made at any time …”

When Hermann von Salza and the Knights of the Teutonic Order failed in their attempt to take possession of the rich border country, von Salza had been taken prisoner. Before releasing the German knight, Mar’ya Morevna laid a soul-rending on him, an enchantment that would strike the Grand Master painfully dead if he ever set foot in Russia again.

That should have kept him and the Teutonic Knights out of the Rus lands for the rest of von Salza’s life, because the Order, still busily conquering – they called it crusading – along the Baltic coast, required their leaders to lead from the front. Any leader who deputized such a responsibility, never mind handed it over to dubious outsiders like the heathen Tatars, would find himself replaced as Grand Master by whichever ambitious deputy acted first and lucky to avoid an accusation of heresy for working with the enemies of Christendom. There had – so far – been no further incursions under von Salza. But rumour had him ailing, and there was no reason for the soon-to-be Grand Master Konrad von Thuringia to hire Tatars for his dirty work when he could do it himself.