Authors: Peter Morwood
The Golden Horde
© Peter Morwood 1993; Revised © Peter Morwood 2015
Peter Morwood has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author and editor of this work respectively.
This edition published by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd in 2016.
“What’s life but an improvisation to the music?”
“Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.”
The
Independent
Tsardom
of
Khorlov
;
June
,
1243
A
.
D
.
“Papa, what are those bells?”
There was a wool-stuffed leather ball arching through the air towards him, and even though the catch was an easy one, Tsar Ivan Aleksandrovich Khorlovskiy came very close to missing it.
“Bells? What bells?” he said, knowing even as he spoke that he was lying. The bells were there, they’d been there for several minutes past, and not all the feigned ignorance in the wide white world would wipe them from the hearing of a child.
Ivan set the ball down carefully and dusted off his hands, then peered over the kremlin battlements in the various directions wildly pointed by his son. Nikolai was seven and a half years old, as fair-haired and innocent-looking as both his parents, and though sometimes he could be unsettlingly wise in the ways of the world, at most other times he was no more than a little boy. This was one such time, and Ivan hated it as much as all the others.
Far off across the steppe a rider thundered by, almost lost in the haze of distance and the dust of his own speed. The man was leaning low across his horse’s neck, almost crouching as he rode; Ivan could see that much from the vague silhouette. What he didn’t need to see were the high stirrups that gave such a stance in the saddle, or the fur hat flapping in the wind of the horseman’s speed. Or the curved sword, or the bow, or the quiver crammed with arrows. The sound of the crossed belts of bells told him all those things were there, as necessary to a courier of the Great Khan as his very horse.
“A messenger, that’s all,” he said, as if the messenger and the Tatars and even the Great Khan Ogotai himself were of no importance. To emphasize his lack of interest he nonchalantly stroked the golden sweep of moustache and close-cropped beard cultivated in the seven years since he became Tsar. Ivan fancied they made him look older and wiser. His loving wife Mar’ya Morevna had other opinions on the subject, but short of attacking him in his sleep with a razor and a lathered brush had done nothing more about it. He grinned and picked up the ball again, tossing it invitingly from hand to hand to resume the game of catch, or indeed do anything at all rather than discuss the matter further. With a younger child it might have worked, while an older might have detected the edge in his father’s voice and veered from mentioning the evident source of such displeasure.
Nikolai was neither young enough nor old enough; he could play ball at any time and the finer tones of voice were still a mystery to him. But he had seldom in his short life seen anyone riding so fast, and certainly never heard anyone wear bells so mere folk on foot could hear him coming and get out of his way. The boy was sharp enough to realize what the harsh, bright noise was for, and say as much, and innocent enough to say the little more that sank a knife into his father’s heart.
“Those bells must mean he’s very important, Papa. Do they mean he’s as important as you? Or even Grandpapa?”
Ivan glanced at his son, then gazed out at the Tatar messenger in the way a man might watch an annoying insect that buzzed just out of reach. He didn’t reply, so Nikolai Ivanovich lost interest, seized the ball from his father’s hands and ran off with it.
As
important
as
Grandpapa
? thought Ivan sourly, and turned his back on the racing horseman as if by doing so he could make the Tatar – all Tatars – cease to exist.
More
important
.
So
much
more
important
that
you
can’t
yet
grasp
it
.
And
sometimes
,
neither
can
I
…
The
Independent
Tsardom
of
Khorlov
;
March
,
1236
A
.
D
.
The waiting was the worst. Ivan, Tsar’s son and Heir to the crown of Khorlov, wouldn’t have believed it had anyone said so. There were many things worse than waiting. At least, he wouldn’t have believed it an hour ago. Now…
Now he wasn’t so sure.
There could be few things worse than this sort of waiting, in the grinding cold of an early Russian spring, with occasional apprehensive glances at the kremlin’s Lesser Council Chamber. When your own father summoned you to attend him there with only a time but not a reason, and when you got there the huge double doors were closed and locked and guarded against even you, the Tsar’s own and only son, then listening to the ebb and flow of raised voices inside the high wooden hall had an added piquancy which was far from pleasant. The sound was blurred and muffled enough that Ivan could make no sense from the individual words, but the tone of each outcry was unmistakable.
Tsar Aleksandr’s councillors didn’t like what he was telling them.
Ivan stopped pacing to and fro, listened harder as if that might make some difference – which it didn’t – and scuffed the toes of his boots into the handspan’s depth of snow that still remained in the kremlin courtyard. He wanted to be inside the Council Chamber, to stand at his father’s side during whatever turmoil the old man had stirred up among the
boyaryy
. And at the same time he wanted to be a long way from Khorlov; certainly not standing in this chilly courtyard with a far-from-specific royal summons hanging over his head.
Ivan preferred to know things, for either good or bad, rather than be kept in suspense. The only concern right now was
what
he should know.
Tsar Aleksandr had been behaving strangely in the past year, a strangeness that had begun a few months after the Teutonic Knights had been turned back at the River Nemen. The erratic flashes of violence and foul temper were things Ivan had never seen before, yet at the same time there was the constant feeling that even at the height of his softly sneering rages, Tsar Aleksandr was watching his son and coldly gauging his responses to each unreasonable insult.
Ivan had taken care to control his reactions: Tsar’s sons had been killed by their own fathers, or by their command, for nothing more than an eyebrow lifted in disapproval at the wrong time. He gained small reassurance from presumed well-wishers who suggested it was no more than a manifestation of his father’s great age. Ivan felt certain that it was a great deal more, but the matter wasn’t one to discuss either in the open or behind closed doors. If their words were meant as a comfort, then they had a great deal to learn – and if they intended more than comfort, then their opinions not only lacked subtlety but were dangerously close to treason.
Whatever was troubling Tsar Aleksandr was capable of lashing out in no particular direction; but if he suspected some conspiracy between the lords and warriors of his
druzhinya
retinue and his own son, there was one very specific target for the old man’s wrath. Ivan didn’t much relish whatever interview awaited him within the noisy Council Chamber. In delicate situations like this, mere innocence was no defence. Enough Tsar’s sons had learnt that lesson abruptly, fatally, and far too late to gain any profit from it.
Ivan wished Mar’ya Morevna could have been here by his side, but that was out of the question. Two six-month-old children were capable, singly and together, of making more demands on her time than ruling a princely domain had ever done, though being both the wife of the Tsar’s son and a liege lady in her own right provided certain advantages, mostly an unlimited supply of servants, wet-nurses and, especially, clean diaper-cloths. For all that, Mar’ya Morevna had made it plain that her – their – son and daughter wouldn’t suffer the usual fate of royal children, kept in a nursery and only seeing their parents at convenient times. Convenient for the parents, anyway. It had happened to her, and to a lesser degree to Ivan; she was determined it wouldn’t happen to Nikolai and Anastasya.
When the court surgeons came to him and told him that, all things progressing to a satisfactory conclusion, he would be the father of twins, Ivan had stared at them and refused to believe his own ears. He had actually said, “Twin what?”
After his wife’s somewhat shocked personal physicians finished with him he was thoroughly convinced they were men who valued their dignity more than the chance of a cheap joke. Besides which, they didn’t know. If Mar’ya Morevna’s occasional use of the Art Magic had told her anything, she hadn’t bothered to pass on the information to her servants.
But she had told Ivan.
Twins! Not just a son or a daughter, but one of each.
A son and heir to the Tsardom, would have been more than sufficient. Even a daughter would have been entirely acceptable; useful things could be done with daughters that involved dowries, politically expedient marriages, and favourable alliances…
But
twins
…?
Tsarevich Ivan had given way to a most unPrincely fit of chuckling, because he remembered his own childhood only too well and Prince Nikolai would never know just how lucky he was. They could so easily have been twin daughters, a combination as perilous as a matched pair of daggers and totally unfair to any later son. Ivan had grown up with not one, not two, but three elder sisters, and he liked to claim the bruises still ached when the weather changed. It was a joke, but those who heard it noticed it was never uttered when any of those sisters were within hearing. They weren’t well known for their sense of humour.
Another outburst of shouting from the Council Chamber suggested that neither was his father. Ivan’s wandering mind twitched abruptly back from private to public family matters, because Tsar Aleksandr seldom raised his voice in anger and when he did the sound was most distinctive. His son was hearing that sound now, and not liking it. Aleksandr’s roar still fell far short of the bellow of real rage that Ivan had heard only once before in his life, but there was a disturbing edge to it, fury held in check and overlaid with mellow persuasiveness, something Mar’ya Morevna had once described as broken glass stirred into butter. It was an accurate description: the voice of a man with the power to ensure his orders were obeyed, but who was trying – maybe for the last time – to gain that obedience by other than direct command. Either those direct commands were too easy or, and the thought insinuated itself unpleasantly into Ivan’s mind, no longer sufficiently reliable.
Prince Ivan felt again the notion that it would be better to be well away from Khorlov, hunting something safe like bear or boar, than standing out here waiting to find out what was wrong. He muttered something inaudible, kicked at the snow, and turned from the Council Chamber towards the kremlin’s stables. Then stopped in his tracks as the double doors were flung open and a double file of Captain Akimov’s troopers came out. They formed a guard of honour, flanking either side of the stairs and right up to the dark oblong of the doorway. But equally they formed a picket line through which Ivan couldn’t pass without making his departure look like an escape.
Petr Mikhailovich Akimov stood at the top of the stairs in full armour, even to shield and helmet, and stared down at Ivan. The Guard-Captain said not a word, but Ivan felt embarrassed to be seen looking less than eager about his father’s summons. He retraced his steps carefully, grateful that the snow was trampled enough not to betray how he’d been pacing, and looked up at the Cossack captain.
“Now?” he said.
“Now, Highness,” said Akimov.
As Ivan mounted the cut-stone stairs like a man ascending a scaffold, the captain flipped one hand palm-outwards in a ‘slower’ gesture so brief that Ivan almost missed it. He slackened his pace as he came within earshot of Akimov, noticing how the Guard-Captain had placed himself square in the middle of the staircase, a pose not only imposing but also out of earshot of the guardsmen to right and left. It didn’t encourage Ivan much, but it provided a jab of curiosity that blunted the edge of his nervousness.