The Last Crusaders: Ivan the Terrible (20 page)

32

Even the knights had thought it. Smith had muttered, ‘You would think Ivan was in league with the Tatars, almost.’

Stanley said, ‘He is mad, but not that mad. Though it sticks in my throat to say so – he is, for all that, a devout believer. What God will make of him at the Judgement I dread to think. But Ivan would not league with any Mohammedan force. He sees himself as a Christian king still.’

‘God help us all,’ said Nicholas.

Now they raced back through streets eerily quiet and deserted. In the far distance they heard another muffled boom, and instinctively Nicholas ducked as he rode. Malta again. But no force of Knights upon the walls to fight back, no Jean de la Valette to lead them.

Galloping over the bridge, he tore off the hated animal mask and threw it into the river below. Even if it had afforded disguise and protection, he would do without it now. It carried an odour of evil.

They came skidding to a halt before the English House once more. Smith hammered at the wooden gates into the stable yard. A window shot up in the house and Nicholas’s heart warmed to hear those familiar stubborn Shropshire accents.

‘We’ll not have any of you buggers in here! This is the English House, and the English House it will remain. Now shog off with ye!’

Stanley could not help but grin. ‘Well held, Master Hodge, well held. Would that all Moscow were as stoutly defended!’

‘I thought you were those damned Oprickniks. Those cloaks you’re in.’

‘Safe disguise.’

Hodge and the servants began unbarricading the gates from within. They had barricaded well. It took a while.

Nicholas slipped down from his horse and helped the girl down after him. She seemed calmer now, very tired. She said quietly, ‘I did look.’

He was blank.

‘In the square there,’ she said. ‘I did look, though you forbad me. I saw those things. I need to understand. I am young, I understand nothing. You think I am stupid.’

‘I certainly do not think you are stupid,’ he said. ‘But I do think you are young.’

‘You were at Malta,’ she said. ‘At sixteen, I hear.’

As if in mocking reminder, another boom sounded, and this time it was followed by a high roaring.

‘Incendiary!’ muttered Smith. ‘Watch for it.’

And like a shooting star, a missile larger and clumsier than any cannonball came flaming and tumbling overhead. Clumsily shaped, more like a haybale – for that was indeed what it was. Yet it flew well enough, propelled by some rope-powered onager or trebuchet beyond.

Smith was itching to get up on the walls. ‘Come on, Master Hodge, let us inside!’

‘All in good time!’ replied Hodge. More huffing and puffing, more moving of heavy oak furniture.

And then immediately after, another such missile, lighting up the night sky like a giant firework. It crashed heavily into a wooden rooftop only two streets away and immediately the hungry flames began to roar upwards.

‘Moscow,’ said Stanley, ‘is really going to burn tonight.’

‘How come it flies so well?’ asked Nicholas.

‘Huge trebuchet to shoot it,’ said Smith, ‘very high trajectory. A heavy weight jammed inside it, maybe even a cannonball to give it momentum. The whole thing soaked in heavy oil, naphtha, honey, any old ingredient of Greek fire – she’ll burn up very well. And of course,’ he added, his voice dropping even lower, more bitter, ‘not a soul to resist, shoot back or douse the flames.’

‘What of Vorotinsky?’

Stanley shook his head. What indeed? They had not heard one Russian musket shot from the walls. And of course, the guns faced the wrong way …

Come on
, Hodge.

Nicholas turned back to Rebecca. She was shaking again. He dared to take her in his arms. Like an older brother, he told himself.

‘Yes,’ he resumed, ‘I was at Malta. At sixteen.’

‘And I am seventeen.’

‘You are a maid.’

‘Maids can bear children at seventeen, and younger. You think there is no blood and pain in that?’

He said nothing. From the heart of the city he seemed to hear a sound like the roar of the sea.

‘I saw,’ she said. ‘I saw enough in that square. The cruelty of men is a bottomless abyss.’

He did not disagree.

‘But – but I thank you for what you did in the courtyard. Killing those men. You saved me after all.’

Suddenly a wild-eyed figure appeared at the end of the street, shoeless, hat askew, carrying a sack on a stick as if ready to set off on great travels. ‘The Tatars,’ he cried, ‘the Tatars are coming!’

‘Yes,’ growled Smith. ‘We know that.’

Then Nicholas, and Stanley too, understood the approaching roar. It was the Moscow mob in full panic and running crazed riot, understanding at last that now was not the time for their festivities. The Tatars were hammering at the gates, they were hurling incendiaries over the very walls, and the city was virtually defenceless.

The roar came nearer, and then at the end of the street appeared a great surge of people, maddened by fear. And the Englishmen were standing in their path, as if in the path of a buffalo stampede.

‘Hodge!’ Smith kicked furiously at the door. ‘Get this door open
NOW!
’

‘The damn gate-bar has jammed!’ cried Hodge. ‘We can’t open it!’

‘Then let us straight into the house!’ Smith put his shoulder to the door and started to heave. Stanley joined him. It did not give. The tide of people was almost upon them. Nicholas was about to lift the girl back onto his horse but the poor creature began to rear, eyes wild and white. They crammed into the doorway, horses pulled in close, swords drawn. Oprichnina in appearance still, but who knew what protection that might still afford? Maybe they were the enemy too now.

They heard cries of ‘
The Tatars are at the Gates!
’ and ‘
Christ save us!
’ A maddened, blood-crazed mob of housewives and wailing children and apprentices clutching axes, and they watched in horror as an old goodwife came tottering out of her door ahead of them and one stout apprentice simply cried out, ‘The Tatars!’ and swung his axe and cut her down, and they surged on. Where were they going? Out of the south gate, straight into the arms of the enemy?

Nicholas got ready to fight them off, hundreds of them, shouting out that they were Oprichnina, but it was futile. The mob would kill anything that stood in their way.

Suddenly Smith was back on his horse and wrenching it about and letting it rear, spurring it, bellowing, panicking it further, and then its forehooves came crashing down against the stout front door and it burst inwards and he rode through straight into the hall. Nicholas thrust Rebecca through and then he and Stanley followed, dragging their horses after to cover them. They turned on the threshold and someone flailed wildly in the doorway, blocking it, he only had one eye, and Stanley planted a boot high in his chest and shoved him back into the raging human torrent. Whether he lived or was trampled, they would never know. They flung shut the doors again, one hanging badly loose, and Hodge appeared behind, panting, with some manservants and began shoving furniture close to again.

They collapsed in exhaustion. Waverley and Greene were standing on the stairs, gazing aghast. Then Waverley saw his daughter and she ran to him and they embraced and wept.

‘I thank you, gentlemen,’ said Waverley through his tears. ‘My daughter …’

Stanley waved a hand. It was nothing, really. Nicholas thought he might have made more of it.

‘Are we …’ stammered Robert Greene, ‘are we all lost? What is to become of us? Do we face lives of Tatar slavery?’

‘They are not in yet,’ said Stanley. ‘But they soon will be. They mean to burn the city first, I think, and then ride in and scoop up what remains for booty.’

Greene crossed himself and bowed his head. ‘My children …’

Aye, it was hard for those with children. What was to become of them indeed?

They left their horses trembling and sweating in the hall, one of the grooms calming them and rubbing the foam from their flanks with wide sweeps of his hand. Foam spattered upon the black and white tiles. Waverley looked disgusted. This house would look like a common stable before the night was out.

Smith read his thoughts and laid his hand on his shoulder as they strode past him. ‘Do not be anxious,’ he said in the words of Christ. By less obvious way of comfort, he added, ‘The house will probably be burned to the ground soon anyway.’

The merchants were in despair. Everything was against them. Had it come to this? What were they to do?

Smith turned sharply. ‘On which note – your cellars are made of brick, are they not?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Show us.’

The English House had two large, vaulted red-brick wine cellars, stacked high with barrels of malmsey and Canary wine.

‘Be ready to remove yourselves down here. Have the servants bring down wet sacking, buckets of water, plenty of cloths.’

‘When do we move down here?’ said Waverley, quailing.

His young daughter said, ‘I think we will know when it is time, Father.’

33

They went up to the first floor chamber. Nicholas glanced from the upper window. Was that God’s benevolent dawn that was breaking, or just man’s malignant fire? An oppressively red summer dawn, as full of foreboding as a puritan sermon. His heart beat, his mind raced with all the old eve-of-battle thoughts. Let me not die. Let those I love not die. But how can we live? Let me not show cowardice. I am still young, O Lord. And she is younger. Christ, save her. Make my sword arm strong, for her sake.

Stanley drew Smith’s attention to something further off. A burning house in the next street. They watched. The flames that had roared up in the still night, the sparks spiralling above them – they had begun to veer and tilt, the sparks to dance more wildly and fly sideways, over rooftops not yet ablaze … The wind was getting up. As if Devlet Giray’s own prayers had been answered, not theirs, and the ancient, malign Tatar gods of the sky had commanded the wind from the steppes to rise up and do their bidding.

‘To the walls,’ said Smith curtly. ‘But you, comrades, stay here. Ingoldsby, you need that leg wound seeing to.’

‘We are with you,’ said Nicholas. His jaw jutted a little, his mouth set in that old stubborn line the knights knew so well of old.

‘You are not.’

‘That I am. I am no knight, nor Hodge, and not under your command, but under that of the Queen of England. If we want to go to the walls, we go to the walls.’

Stanley sighed. ‘That leg will get worse.’

‘It’s fine. It just needs a splash of that Russian grain spirit.’

‘You are leaving us?’ said Waverley.

‘We will be back. Move down to the cellars soon. Take nothing with you that might burn. And pray.’

Stepping out into the street and looking up, Nicholas realised it was only the city burning that made the sky red. It was still night. A cursed long night for a summer night. They wet their neckerchiefs in a water trough and tied them about their necks again. Ready to pull over their mouths when the smoke should start to thicken, which it would soon now.

There was a group of six militiamen huddled miserably at the top of some steps. Only two had muskets. They were drinking from a shared flask. Stanley demanded to know where Prince Michael Vorotinsky was. They gestured sullenly.

Nicholas held his hand out for the flask and they passed it. He took a burning draught and then poured another splash over his thigh wound. They stared at him. He passed the flask back. They grunted. They’d all be dead or enslaved by dawn, what did it matter? Even a waste of good vodka did not matter.

They found Vorotinsky at the base of a gun tower. He greeted them with subdued courtesy, and his white brow was tight with despair. He gestured inside the gun tower. They went in and looked and came back.

Smith said, almost disbelieving, ‘They have been turned around.’

Vorotinsky nodded. ‘Czar’s orders.’

‘To face into the city.’

‘Aye. The enemy within.’

‘Even now, when the enemy is so visibly and plentifully without.’

‘Ours not to reason why.’

Out in the darkness, among the Tatar lines, they could hear the familiar sounds of gun platforms being built. Ottoman or Bulgar carpenters working peacefully on fine timber, constructing good strong catapults and trebuchets. Smith peered into the darkness, lit by occasional pinpricks of torches, flickering now in the rising wind. Beyond the flames of the city, damnably dark, a clouded night. But in that darkness, plenty of activity. They stared and stared. Nicholas thought of Priam on his lofty ancient walls, hear
ing in puzzlement the work of the Achaean carpenters, and then the sound of the wooden horse rumbling close …

As doomed as Troy the night before she burned.

‘You have wet all the house roofs, spread sacking, rugs?’ said Smith.

‘We have done what we could,’ said Vorotinsky. ‘They are going to rain down more incendiaries, are they not? As much as cannon fire?’

‘Evidently. You can just make out the steep trajectories out there. A few big cannonballs to batter in the gates, but mostly high arcing catapults and trebuchets to toss in burning loads over the walls.’

‘Bales of hay and straw,’ said Stanley. ‘I thought it might have been plague victims they would be lobbing in, diseased body parts, the putrid corpses of rats … Such things have been known in the Mongol Wars, and since ancient times. But plague still needs days or weeks to take hold, and can be as much a menace to the besieger as to the besieged. He comes to round up the defeated for slavery, only to fall to their diseases too. No, Devlet Giray wants fast results. The Tatars are rapid skirmishers. They like to fight with fire.’

‘My city is to be brought low by a handful of straw,’ said Prince Michael.

They were silent. Nothing to say.

And worse still, nothing to do. It was agony for all of them.

At that very moment, the darkness out there on the plain burst into life and everything was illuminated. For with marvellous coordination and discipline that was surely Ottoman, not Tatar, torches were set to the entire line of catapults and their thickly oiled loads burst into life. The watchers on the walls drew breath. There must have been forty of them out there.

There was a single pistol shot and then the ropes were released. They heard the huge ropes thrum in unison as their mighty pent-up force was released, and the forty bales arced up in a long, graceful line, blazing more furiously as they sailed through the night air, their arc perfectly calculated, the wind reckoned, and came in right over their heads.

‘Now that’s what I call a firework display,’ said Hodge.

And then all forty came hurtling down upon granaries, barns, woodstores, churches, and narrow street after street of dry timber houses. A few simply exploded and scattered into bits in the middle of squares, adding to the general panic. They watched, and within only a minute or two, Moscow was alight with a dozen more inextinguishable fires, the wind fanning them into ever greater and more ardent life.

And then there were no more incendiaries. Not all night.

‘I think Devlet Giray has further plans,’ said Stanley.

They spent the last hours of darkness trying to help douse the flames, but the damage was great and the terror of the citizens much greater. When dawn broke they walked through a grey ashen cityscape through weary drifts and plumes of smoke, down streets where half the houses were nothing but smouldering heaps of earth. There were dead and charred bodies carelessly hidden under coverlets and canvas, though barely a shot had yet been fired. Nicholas felt that dreamlike unreality of war again, intensely. Through this ashen landscape, women were still heading off to the early morning market with their baskets over their arms, to the square before St Basil’s where only last night, many dozens of people had been tortured to death for their edification. He saw a group of headscarved housewives gossiping with each other, wondering about what would come of it all, grim-faced, yet still hoping … and immediately behind them, a mound of slaughtered bodies under a horse blanket. Slaughtered not by the Tatars, but as part of last night’s celebrations.

A strange, disconcerting lull – deliberately disconcerting, of course, nerves fraying like old rope, the temptation to simple surrender growing by the hour. Another trick of Devlet Giray’s. Your enemy’s fear and uncertainty are two of your most potent weapons. The Tatars were in no hurry, were fine-tuning their trebuchets and resting their guns, watching the sullen city smoulder behind its walls and reckon its own damage and their power over it. Why go to any great effort when you could have Moscow for nothing?

And then a messenger came to the south gate and was taken to Vorotinsky.

The message he bore did not even greet Ivan or any by name. It read with un-Oriental curtness, ‘You have no defences. You see what we can do. There is no need to take down your gates, your walls. Moscow is a city of wood, and we will burn you to the ground. But of our great clemency and mercy, we invite you first to acknowledge our suzerainty over Kazan and Astrakhan, and then to surrender and submit yourselves to slavery. Let that be punishment for your insolence, and be thankful that we exact no more.’

In trepidation they rode with the messenger to the Kremlin. They didn’t think the Czar was going to like it. He might very well kill the poor messenger on the spot.

‘Surrender and submit ourselves to slavery! The people of Russia are my slaves, not those of that unbelieving dog of a slant-eyed Tatar, shit on his mother’s grave!’

He picked up a wooden stool and hurled it against a wall. Ivan was a strong man, especially when maddened with rage, and the stool smashed apart. They stood well back. Then he snatched up his heavy iron-tipped staff and began to whirl it about like some deranged wizard. Stanley thought the Tatar messenger had a fifty-fifty chance of dying in this chamber. But the Asian warrior stood impassive, arms folded, obedient only to his Khan, a magnificent figure for all one knew of the Tatars and their rapacity, and quite evidently contemptuous of this childish tantrum of the Russian Czar.

‘Every last man, woman and child in Russia will die before we give way one inch to those Christless savages! I will tear that horse-fucker Devlet Giray limb from limb, I will drink his blood straight from his open throat!’

He seized a bottle that stood on a table and drained it in one. Hurled it to the floor. ‘And where is my cursed physician? We need more tonic! Find him!’

A terrified servant said they had not found him yet, they were searching all the palace but he appeared to have—

‘Are you saying he has gone over to the enemy?’ cried Ivan, his voice almost a shriek, and he raised his iron-tipped staff high and prepared to bring it down on the idiot’s head. He knew how it would feel, the satisfying power of it, he had done it so many times before. The bony clonk and crack, the skull splitting open like an egg, the oozing of brain, the funny startled look in the fellow’s eye, and then the light going out. Him falling to the floor, clumsy and dead. And then the tiresome wiping clean of his staff …

‘No!’ cried out Stanley. ‘Excellency!’

Ivan must have heard something through his red madness, for the staff swerved at the last instant and crashed down upon the table, gouging a huge chip out of its surface. The servant was close to fainting.

‘Go!’ Stanley bellowed at him. ‘Find Bomelius!’

The servant fled.

Momentarily exhausted, Ivan let his staff drop to the floor. His rages always exhausted him, though the accompanying violence was exhilarating. He needed more tonic. Where was that Bomelius? He had gone over to the enemy. He knew it. He was beset by traitors and foul sinners.

He stared at these people before him. Who were these impertin­ent strangers? He knew them not. They offended him, distracted him from his Holy Work. He was like Christ scourged, panting, drenched in sweat, eyes burning beneath his brows. He felt the heat of his own beloved burning city in his blood. How he suffered! He was Russia, Russia was him. They were one. And he was holy as Russia was holy, beyond sin. But there must be sacrifice.

His thoughts tired him. He called for a chair and sank down.

‘No surrender,’ he muttered. ‘We will never surrender. Let there be death before slavery. The Tatars may not have Moscow.’

They sent back the messenger to Devlet Giray, saying they would fight on. Then they spent a grim morning overseeing the militia. Three hundred now. Eighty muskets. They concentrated them at the south gate. It was absurd. But perhaps there was still some faint hope that sheer stubbornness, sheer refusal to surrender, might wear the Tatars down …

‘Or plague in the Tatar camp,’ said Smith. ‘That would work. Pray God sends them boils and pestilence.’

Towards evening they returned to the palace. Smith was prepared to beg Ivan, to his face, to let them turn the guns around and man them. If Ivan tried to smash him on the head for his impertinence, Smith was beginning to think he might fight back, and hang the consequences.

A chamberlain shook his head. ‘The Czar has departed Moscow.’

‘De … Departed?’

‘He rode out of the north gate with his close guard an hour since. The Tatars made no move to arrest him.’

Maybe the Easterners reckoned the city would fall to them more easily with the Czar gone. Or they reckoned to capture Moscow first, and then mop up Ivan later. They stood stunned. The chamber­lain turned away.

‘A cheerful people,’ muttered Stanley.

‘You’d be cheerful,’ said Smith more loudly, ‘with a Czar who spends his time oppressing and torturing you, and then bolts and runs like a rabbit the moment danger appears over the horizon.’

‘Dangerous words,’ said Vorotinsky, ‘dangerous words.’

‘Then let them arrest me,’ said Smith. ‘Let those bastards of the Oprichnina come and try.’

Stanley called after the chamberlain, ‘Where has he gone?’

‘I cannot say.’

The time for caution was over. Stanley felt the relief of knowing that it was all in action now. He stepped close to the chamberlain and laid his hand very heavily on his shoulder, gripping just tightly enough to make his meaning clear. ‘Tell us, sir. We need to know.’

The chamberlain bit his lip. ‘The Czar has fled with the Czarevich and his children and his treasure and his faithful Oprichnina, to his palace at Alexandrovskaya Sloboda. He may retire further off yet if danger still threatens, or seek refuge in a foreign court.’

‘Did he talk of England? Refuge there?’

The chamberlain said quietly, ‘It has been mooted.’

Then Nicholas laughed, sensing too that the time for caution and diplomacy was over. ‘What an idiot!’

Devlet Giray still seemed to be practising diplomacy, or at least negotiation by pressure and threat. A stream of refugees from the outlying country came across the plain, and were allowed to pass unmolested through the Tatar lines and up to the gates, where they were admitted.

‘An act of mercy,’ people muttered.