Firebird (Tales of Old Russia Book 2) Read online

  Firebird

  Tales of Old Russia Book Two

  Peter Morwood

  © Peter Morwood 1992

  Peter Morwood has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1992 by Legend Paperbacks.

  This edition published by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd in 2016.

  To Terry Pratchett,

  For singing horses and other matters

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  ПОСЛЕСЛОВИЕ

  CHAPTER ONE

  The window was three times as tall as a man, and the only thing to see beyond it was the forest of the Polish-Prussian border, shading from dark green down to black as the autumn evening shadows slid across it. But not even the man standing in front of it could see through its glass, for each small piece was stained and patterned so the whole huge window formed – from a distance – the picture of St Mary the Virgin, blue-robed and gently benevolent as any image in a great cathedral.

  Beyond that serene figure was a deep, chill moat, then open ground where the forest had been cleared for a distance of two bowshots so no attacker could creep in without being seen by the sentries who constantly walked the ramparts. Despite the presence of crucifixes, holy relics and the image of the Blessed Virgin, this was no cathedral.

  Cathedrals didn’t have walls twelve feet thick and pierced with arrow-loops, nor iron shutters to close across those stained-glass windows. Nor, whatever their thickness, did the walls of cathedrals have racks of spears and javelins alongside their fonts of holy water, or crossbows forming other and more sinister cruciforms than many repeated images of the Roman gallows and their tormented, spear-pierced, thorn-crowned burdens.

  The man by the window stared out through cobalt-blue glass at the blue-tinged cold darkness beyond the walls and the window. Despite the warmth of open hearths and charcoal-laden braziers within, he shuddered. Albrecht von Düsberg had started out short and burly and had become stout, with the well-padded waist and cheerful round features of a man fond of cup and platter. Even though such fondness had given him a florid complexion, it had at least faded from the peeling brick-red that was his sole memento of service in Jerusalem as a knight of the Teutonic Order.

  His well-fed frame was topped by thinning sandy hair, cut so the advance of early baldness looked more like a monastic tonsure, and with one thing and another he was entirely ordinary in appearance and reputation. But not everyone thought him so ordinary. His overlord, the Grand Master of the Order, had summoned him over many leagues to be here, and despite the hospitality of his greeting he couldn’t help but wonder why.

  Just six weeks ago, Albrecht had been comfortably ensconced in the palace library of His Eminence Joachim, Cardinal-Archbishop of Salzburg – a man coincidentally his cousin once removed on the paternal side – with the heat and the flies and the Saracens of Palestine mostly forgotten. He had taken care to stay busy cataloguing and annotating the contents of the Cardinal-Archbishop’s library so no one could call him a slacker and, having heard nothing from the upper hierarchy of the Order in a comfortably long time, was more than willing that they should think him dead, crippled or mad, like many of his brethren after the long campaigns to wrest the Holy Land from the hands of the infidels.

  Albrecht had, in his own opinion, worn armour for quite long enough, to no good purpose except working indelible rust-stains into some of his better clothes. Instead of mail he now wore the white mantle of the Cistercians, in the quiet hope that any who saw him would presume he had reverted from military to Holy Orders. It had almost worked, but only almost. Grand Master von Salza’s letter made that quite clear.

  *

  Click. The sound of a shifted chess-piece was surprisingly loud in the echoing quiet of the great hall, but scarcely surprising since the piece was polished iron almost a handspan tall, and it moved on a board whose alternating squares were of appropriately coloured marble.

  “Your move, Albrecht.”

  Von Düsberg dragged his thoughts back to the here and now, turned from the window, which like himself had come from the Holy Land – though by a more direct and better-escorted route – and gazed with what he hoped was no more than a player’s mild interest at the chessboard.

  “Thank you, Grand Master, but not just yet. Let me consider what few options remain. A drink, perhaps?”

  “Of course.” There was a soft chuckle. “But since I think…Yes, I have you beaten already, so there’s no advantage in trying to fuddle me with wine. Let me do the honours.”

  Clink. This time the sound was of a jug’s metal lid being raised then lowered again after blood-red wine poured with a musical gurgle into cups of horn. Those cups were the only truly simple things on the entire table. Despite the studied simplicity of everything else, chessboard, chessmen, players and all, a careful rather than a casual look could see wealth masquerading as poverty. That everything appeared poor and plain was enough for the two men in the hall and others like them, and efforts made to preserve such an appearance satisfied patrons and supporters alike.

  The Order of Knights of the Hospital Church of St Mary the Virgin of the House of Teutons in Jerusalem had long concluded they could be pious or powerful but not both, and the results of some long-dead Grand Master’s decision glittered up and down the walls of Burg Thorn. At some time during the making of his decision that Grand Master had also abandoned the Order’s wordy title for all save documentary use, and from then onward the brethren of the black cross were known to Christendom as the Teutonic Knights.

  “Albrecht,” said the present Hochmeister gently, “delay is pointless. Make your move.”

  Albrecht von Düsberg glanced first at the Grand Master, then at the chessboard. Hermann von Salza had that effect on noblemen and commoners alike. Most Germans who spent four years on crusade against the Infidel were lean and scarred, their pale Northern skins scorched beyond recovery by the desert sun, but von Salza looked as if he’d never seen a climate fiercer than summer by the Rhine.

  He was everything Albrecht was not: tall and tanned instead of fat and florid, handsome, not plain, his hair silvering elegantly at the temples rather than falling out. Even though his skin wrinkled at brows and eyes and mouth, the lines were those of laughter rather than time and long hot days of squinting against the sun of Palestine. He was as clean-shaven now as in the Holy Land, despite a ruling that members of the military Orders should wear unkempt pilgrim beards as outward sign that they cared more for holiness than appearance. Albrecht couldn’t imagine anyone daring to enforce such a ruling on Hochmeister von Salza, who had probably never been unkempt in his life.

  In the white mantle of the Order he looked even more splendid than von Düsberg remembered. It was a garment that, in accordance with a knight-brother’s vows of poverty, was usually made of ordinary and ostentatiously dirty linen. The Grand Master wore nothing so plain, though it was only when he moved and the candlelight reflected from the surface of the fabric that his own form of ostentation became plain. This mantle was tissue of cloth-of-silver lined with Chinese silk, light as gossamer, white as virtue, and as costly as the favour of the Pope.

  Von Düsberg was surprised to see dirt on so marvellous a garment, until he got close enough for his nose to tell him that the token dust-marks were rare, sweet Persian spices worth mor
e than every piece of clothing he owned. At first he had been scandalized, wondering how the wearing of such things accorded with vows of poverty, charity and obedience. Then he dismissed the rest of the thought as irreverent, dangerous, and quite possibly heretical, and instead smiled at the stylish way those vows had been circumvented, because in white from head to heel even to the cyclas, hose and boots beneath his surcoat, von Salza looked as noble and imposing as a Grand Master should look.

  Hochmeister Hermann von Salza had his reasons for such splendour, and those reasons couldn’t be questioned. The sign that he was more than merely the Grand Master of a military Order, if such a rank was ever ‘mere’, glittered on his breast and at the shoulder of his mantle, woven in threads of precious metal: argent a cross potent sable, in fess an inescutcheon or, an eagle displayed sable. They had begun as arms as simple as those of most crusader knights, a plain white shield with the black hammer-headed cross of the Order such as von Düsberg wore himself, but where the arms of the cross met at what the heralds called fess-point was another smaller shield, this one emblazoned with an eagle, black on gold, and that was von Salza’s alone.

  Emperor Friedrich II himself had awarded that badge to the Grand Masters of the Teutonic Order not two years past, along with the title of Erzherzog, Archduke of the Empire. It was appropriate enough, some had said at the time, and quite in the tradition of any ancient and far less holy Roman Emperor ensuring the support of his Praetorian Guard. That Friedrich had since been excommunicated was neither here nor there; the Papal interdiction concerned other matters altogether.

  Hermann von Salza wore that sign of the Emperor’s favour as lightly and carelessly as he wore his own good looks or a lady’s colours in a tournament, had he troubled himself to frequent tournaments, which he didn’t, and if the Order’s vows of chastity permitted him to consort with ladies, which they didn’t. It might have appeared that cities and thrones and powers concerned him as little as they should a knight whose sword and strength were dedicated to the service of God, but since he was also Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, his Treasurer Albrecht von Düsberg was expecting every minute to hear otherwise.

  He spotted an amused twinkle in von Salza’s blue eyes and blushed slightly at having been caught staring. Albrecht leaned over the chessboard and moved a piece, then took a quick swallow of wine to stifle the notions that always rose in his mind when he, a very small fish in a very large pond, thought too much about the politics of the Empire. Albrecht had been doing a great deal of that these past few days. He’d been doing it, in fact, since the Grand Master dragged him from Salzburg right across what felt like all the principalities of Germany to this grim fortress on the Vistula.

  “Albrecht, sit down.” Von Salza gestured towards the empty chair on the far side of the chess table. “You may be saddle-sore and needing to ease the kinks out of your backbone, but all this pacing makes me weary. After we talk you can soak away your aches in a hot bath.”

  Von Düsberg was shocked at the prospect of such Eastern decadence in Germany. He had bathed before leaving Salzburg and would do so again at Michaelmas, but certainly no sooner if the weather stayed cold. It was widely known that bathing weakened a man, and bathing in hot water provoked lechery. The Grand Master must have spent too long consorting with the Pullani, the Saracen-influenced Franks who lived in Palestine, and picked up these heathenish notions from them…

  Such thoughts jolted away when von Salza lifted up one of the chessmen and rapped it briskly against the board. “Hurry up, Albrecht,” he said. “You can sleep later. Sit, sit, sit.”

  Albrecht von Düsberg sat quickly, obediently, and harder than he intended, with the inevitable result. He stifled a most unknightly oath and dabbed ineffectually at a spreading cranberry-coloured stain of the red Ahrwein that had jolted in an elegant parabola out of his cup, wondering in vague annoyance why, when he wore his Cistercian robes, he never splashed himself with something unnoticeable like white wine or water. Not that some of the water he’d had to drink in Palestine would have stained less, but there was a difference between the pious dirtiness of poverty and lack of pride, and obvious marks of wine…

  The mopping kerchief slowed, then stopped entirely, as von Düsberg tried to convince himself he hadn’t heard what the Grand Master had just asked. But he had indeed heard correctly and, to emphasize that fact, Hochmeister von Salza asked it again.

  “You were our Treasurer in the Holy Land. But you were also recommended to me as a scholar who spent his time closer to civilization than here. So tell me, Brother Treasurer von Düsberg – what does Christendom currently say about sorcery?”

  It was much to Albrecht von Düsberg’s credit that when he echoed “Sorcery?” it left his mouth as a properly spoken word rather than the squeak of dismay that had formed in his throat. He blinked three times, very fast, in what seemed an effort to keep eyes somewhat prominent at best from popping right out of their sockets. Von Salza looked at the chessboard and the disposition of the pieces, then reached out with one long index finger and toppled von Düsberg’s king.

  “It would have been checkmate in two moves anyway,” he said, and set his elbows on the board in a casual, apparently careless gesture that still took pains to avoid the splashes of spilled wine. The Grand Master made a steeple of his interlaced fingers and rested his chin on their tips, then gazed levelly at his erstwhile opponent. “You spend enough time in other people’s libraries that you should know the word, my dear Brother Albrecht. Unless I was misinformed?”

  Pinned by the consideration of those cool blue eyes, von Düsberg thought faster than he’d done in his life. Sorcery’s approval – or lack of it – from the Church and its clergy depended on the ability – or lack of it – of that clergy in performing that Art. A priest able to work healing-spells for the good of his congregation was less inclined to denounce them as tricks of the devil because doing so would call his own holiness into question. It became more significant when the priest was someone of rank: a Bishop, a Cardinal…

  Or a Pope.

  *

  Innocent III had been interested in the Art Magic and had been a sorcerer of note, so much that he had added another title to the many he held already: Factor Labori Boni, Doer of Good Works. The vagueness of the title hadn’t gone unnoticed, although nobody could name any spell performed by the Pontiff that had done anything but good. Being the same man who had ordered the butchery of the Albigensian Crusade also discouraged close investigation.

  His successor Honorius had shared the interest, but not the ability. The old Emperor Charlemagne could speak Latin as easily as in his own Frankish tongue but could never read or write because his mind made no sense of the letters. Honorius had that difficulty not with a spell’s words but with the power they released and had reacted, wrapped in churchly phrases, with envy of those more talented. The practice of sorcery was placed under interdict, on pain of excommunication or worse.

  Possessing the ability Honorius had lacked, Pope Gregory rescinded the decree within a year of his election; but he also instituted a new Office of the Church called the Holy Inquisition. Even among the high and the mighty, those two developments cancelled one another out, and only the Knights Templar, protected by the unspoken but widely understood knowledge that they could buy and sell any Pope yet chosen, continued with their sorceries as they had done even through Honorius’s reign. Albrecht von Düsberg considered in his heart of hearts that the Templars had been most unwise, and would some day suffer for their arrogance. Personal insults were something that even Popes learned to live with, but insults to their office was something the Curia would never forget.

  The subject of sorcery was thus a delicate one, much debated in ecclesiastical circles from the Pope himself on down. That it was debated openly didn’t make it any safer. Knowing too little displayed heretical scepticism of matters held important by the highest hierarchies of the Church, while knowing too much displayed…

  Only God and His angels kn
ew what.

  “About what aspect of sorcery, Grand Master?” That was as safe a response as any. Answering a question with a question bought a little more time to think, but Grand Master Hermann grinned crookedly, not much amused.

  “Aspect? Someone in the Apostolic Chancellery must have decided the subject wasn’t complicated enough. How many aspects are there? Or how many has the Pope decided there should be?”

  “Too many for convenient dissertation, Grand Master,” Albrecht began briskly, after a pause to marshal his rattled thoughts. “Even learned authorities remain divided about the exact number of such aspects, never mind their deeper nature.” He held up one hand and began ticking items off on his fingers. “There are the actual, the mythical and the Biblical; the ecclesiastical, the heretical and the Pontifical —”

  “And God damn the lot of them!” The oath was made far more startling by its source than by its intensity, which was nothing much even though knights of religious Orders – never mind their Grand Masters – weren’t supposed to curse at all. Yet Hermann von Salza didn’t seem so much to be cursing as groaning in theatrical dismay as he held his head in his hands. “The Apostolic Chancellery indeed. A collection of scribbling curates who believe that complex is better than simple.” He picked up his wine cup and stared at it, then looked over the rim at von Düsberg. “And I suppose you think I should give myself a penance of some sort for swearing?”

  Albrecht said nothing; brethren of the Order might be equal in the eyes of God, but a treasurer didn’t make suggestions to his feudal lord, even one as seemingly amiable as this one. The Grand Master set down the cup again, then crossed himself and said three Paters and Aves in the fast, practiced Latin of one accustomed to either prayer or penance. When he finished von Salza signed another cross over the wine cup, drained it, and then refilled both from the jug.