The Golden Horde Read online

  Except there was nothing. Ivan’s impression and error was the same one made by a succession of envoys down the years, and Dmitriy Vasil’yevich used his appearance like a weapon against them. It was only when the treaty, pledge or whatever had been irrevocably signed and sealed that those envoys realized someone who looked so intelligent might actually turn out to be that way.

  Strel’tsin bowed slightly as Prince Ivan approached, and was about to move aside when Tsar Aleksandr lifted one hand, index finger extended, and stopped him. “Stay where you are, Dmitriy Vasil’yevich,” the Tsar said.

  Ivan blinked, and his confident stride faltered just ever so slightly. Not to be granted his proper place at his father’s right hand sounded like some sort of insult, and not a subtle one. The Tsar glanced at him, inclined his head a fraction in a gesture that might have been either acknowledgement of Ivan’s presence or of the expression that had flickered briefly across his face.

  “Not by my side, Vanya,” said Aleksandr of Khorlov in a voice too quiet to carry beyond the foot of the dais. “Stand at my back. Guard it.”

  There was a curved shashka sabre hanging from Ivan’s belt, and a long Circassian dagger thrust through the belt itself just across the centre of his stomach. Neither weapon had been more than ornaments until now, but suddenly Ivan felt very grateful for the present fashion that said gentlemen of quality should go armed about their everyday affairs. Though instinct and reflex and simple fear twitched at his hands, he managed to keep them from checking the blades, from loosening them in their scabbards, even from drawing them and resting the slim curve of the sabre in readiness on one shoulder.

  “Well done, Highness,” said Strel’tsin as Ivan passed him, proof that the old courtier had seen and identified his indecision. “Stand quietly. Watch, listen, but say and do nothing unless the Tsar’s Majesty bids it.”

  Ivan nodded, observing with the mild surprise of one who has always known it but never taken notice, that First Minister Strel’tsin used Mar’ya Morevna’s art of speaking without moving his lips, and had refined it so that every word he said was – within a very limited radius – quite plain. For Ivan’s own part, he could only utter murmurs that he hoped Strel’tsin could hear. He could barely hear them himself, because another of the Tsar’s councillors was on his feet by now, holding forth with the orotund phrases of one in love with the sound of his own voice.

  I’ll be your Tsar one day, gentlemen, Ivan thought as he listened to fine, rolling words of which only one in seven had any relevance, and you’ll learn to speak plainer, I promise.

  “What concerns the council?” he tried again, a little more loudly. This time Strel’tsin heard him, and jerked his head ever so slightly towards the gorgeously-clad men whose complexions so closely matched the popular shade of scarlet velvet most of them were wearing.

  “The succession,” Strel’tsin replied. “Your succession, which …”

  Ivan went white and lost the rest of what the High Steward was saying amid the hissing tide of blood in his own ears. If the Council and the druzhinya were disputing what was the most basic of Khorlov’s laws, then they were talking something close to treason. And if that was the case, why was the Tsar his father allowing them to get away with it? Why were Guard-Captain Akimov and his soldiers standing idle, when every law of every realm in all the Russias, down to the smallest independent principality, said they would be within their rights to harvest traitorous heads like scythe-wielding peasants in a field of standing barley?

  Instead these people were getting a more than fair hearing, their complaints treated as if they had value, and even Tsar Aleksandr, despite his temper of late, was nodding his head and waving his hand in invitation for this latest traitor to continue with his lies!

  “Highness? Highness!” Dmitriy Vasil’yevich Strel’tsin’s voice was no longer a subtle murmur for the conveyance of secrets, but a snap of caution, of warning, of command.

  Ivan’s head jerked around, his mouth twisting automatically into a snarl of disapproval at being addressed by a Crown servant in such a manner for the second time in five minutes. Then he pulled himself back under control with an audible click of teeth, writhed the snarl a little wider until it might just pass for a crooked sort of smile, and said, “Yes?”

  “I said stand quietly, watch and listen. Each change of mood is plain across your face for every man to see! I beg you, please be more prudent!”

  Ivan nodded and cleared his throat, feeling no end of a fool. The he tried to clear his face of expression and his mind of reaction to each councillor’s words. The hardest part of all – as ever – was just listening without letting his personal view of rhetoric, delivery and content put its slant on what was being said. And – as ever – once he started paying proper heed, Prince Ivan found he was gaining information rather than losing his temper.

  It wasn’t treason. Treason would have been easy to deal with. This was honest concern for the tsardom of Khorlov, and the reason for that concern was on the Tsar’s own head. Ivan stared at his own father, wondering what was going on in that wise, wily, wickedly convoluted mind. The matter under discussion was Tsar Aleksandr’s immediate abdication…

  And that was when Prince Ivan felt his stomach drop out from inside him.

  *

  It was one thing to know you would become Tsar when your father died, another entirely to discover your father had decided not to wait that long. The prospect was both a flattering display of confidence from his father – and an unsettling demonstration of what Khorlov’s High Council thought of the prospect while they were able to express opinions to their current lord. If Aleksandr was indeed still current, rather than already previous.

  Swallowing quietly enough that he hoped nobody, not even Strel’tsin, might hear such undiluted apprehension, Ivan started to listen a great deal more closely. When all the courtly phrases were stripped away, it was very simple: the nobles of the Council and the druzhinya opposed abdication on the grounds that Prince Ivan was neither old enough nor experienced enough to rule. Tsar Aleksandr, however, took the irritable view that if he suddenly fell over one fine evening, they would have a great deal less choice in the matter. For all their loudly-stated reasons, neither side had seen fit to consult Ivan any more than they would have consulted him had the Tsar indeed dropped dead over dinner.

  Primogeniture, the passing of property or title from father to male firstborn, was still not established throughout all the Russias, though it had long been a custom among the North people who were their common ancestors. Nor was it generally assumed that a ruler would continue to rule until he or she died in office. Lords and ladies, Tsars and Princes, were all people of power, and among other things that power gave them the right to make up their own minds. If they decided they had suffered the complaints of their subjects long enough, they could either silence those subjects once and for all – which had been done on more than one occasion – or they could take off the crown, lay down the sceptre, and leave their troublesome people to complain amongst themselves.

  In the city-states of Kiev and Vladimir, the great families of Yaroslavich and Vsevolodovich had taken turns keeping the throne-cushions warm over something like fifteen years. The title of Velikiy knyaz, meaning ‘Great Prince’ or ‘Grand Duke,’ had passed from father to son, son to father, brother to brother and finally back and forth between uncles, nephews and relatives of increasingly obscure degree like an overheated meat pie. Then Yuriy Vladimirovich, not even a distant cousin of either family, became Great Prince of Kiev almost by accident, slipping onto the throne while the other half-dozen contenders weren’t looking.

  He had remained there for almost four years, something of a record since in the same time there had been not one, not two, but three Princes of Vladimir before their Prince Yuriy took the ruthlessly obvious step of arranging accidents for his most immediate potential rivals. It didn’t matter whether they were rivals in truth or not, the potential was reason enough. Their accidents weren�
�t fatal, of course: that would have been too much. Slaughtering peasants was an acceptable demonstration of noble annoyance, but slaughtering those of equal rank was considered boorish. Even so, those accidents were enough to take two of Yuriy’s own brothers out of circulation, along with Ingvar and Andrey Yaroslavich and five of their major supporters.

  By the time they returned to court life, Great Prince Yuriy was firmly entrenched. He had bribed the unswerving support of every boyar not already aligned to someone else, and re-enacted the ancient Byzantine law that a liege lord must be sound and whole in all his parts. It excluded all who might have challenged him until injuries healed and scars were no longer visible, and the longer he went unchallenged the more secure he became.

  Khorlov’s political life was boringly straightforward by comparison, or had been until now. Ivan stared through the vaulted shadows of the Council Chamber, studied the faces of boyar and bogatyr, nobleman and warrior, and began compiling a mental list of who spoke in his favour and who spoke against. It was reassuring to find the council equally divided, with little difference between one man shouting disapproval of the Tsar, and his neighbour shouting disapproval of him.

  Almost all the bogatyri who had fought against the Teutonic Knights were on Ivan’s side, and that too was a comfort. He knew from tutoring in the history of the antique Romans that a man backed by the army could survive at least for a time without the Senate. Khorlov’s High Council was no Roman Senate, and its part-time army was no Praetorian Guard, but the booty earned from plundering the Teutons’ camp was as good as any Caesar’s bribe. The Knights of the Order were a great deal less austere than their image as crusader monks might have claimed, and the loot from their tents had paid the bride-price of several daughters and augmented the inheritance of several sons. It was those fathers and those sons who were cheering for Ivan now. Their cheers were strong and lusty, drowning out the reedy, reasoned cries of older men, and they would last…

  …As long as the money did.

  Ivan grimaced slightly, then forced himself to relax. He suspected he could already see what would happen when all the shouting and complaints died down. What always happened. Both sides and the undecided would sit down together and drink a great deal too much wine and vodka, then agree to differ, then do what Tsar Aleksandr had wanted all along even though they would do it for the good of the realm rather than at the Tsar’s command.

  At least nobody had raised the subject of sorcery. For that at least Ivan was grateful, since it meant Khorlov’s Metropolitan Archbishop wasn’t in the Council Chamber. Had he been there Levon Popovich would never have let such a golden opportunity go by without expressing his views on Tsarevich Ivan and the Art Magic, on Mar’ya Morevna and the Art Magic, and on the Church’s view of them both.

  It mattered not a whit to the Archbishop that it was mostly magic in the shape of the Firebird – together with courage, military skill and more than a little luck – saving him from being burned as a heretic when the Teutonic Knights and their inquisitors reached Khorlov. Ivan, his father the Tsar, Mar’ya Morevna and quite possibly Dmitriy Vasil’yevich Strel’tsin had all spoken to Metropolitan Levon, with varying degrees of severity and varying degrees of success. Those lectures changed only the way he spoke aloud, not the way he thought inside. It was an unsettling truth that the Archbishop of Khorlov and the Holy Inquisition could well have become fast friends when they weren’t busy trying to burn one another as heretics or lapsed schismatics, or using the rack and the boot and the choking-pear to reinforce their own opinions of some obscure point of doctrine.

  Ivan shrugged inwardly. The Metropolitan Archbishop, whoever he might be, was just one more weight around any Tsar of Khorlov’s neck, and his father had successfully borne Levon Popovich – or should that be tolerated him? – for almost his entire reign. There was one comfort: the Archbishop was so advanced in years that he wouldn’t last more than a few into Ivan’s reign, then his replacement would be someone more sensible in the ways of the world or more amenable to the Tsar’s suggestions.

  Someone younger, anyway.

  Ivan was tired of old voices uttering old opinions, refusing to change them because, like the Archbishop, not one of the old men on the Council had enough expectation of life that any change would matter worth a damn. Ivan suspected they knew the way his mind worked, and why they were so reluctant to have a new Tsar forced on them by anything less permanent than death.

  “Father,” said Ivan quietly under cover of three yelling councillors venerable enough to have better manners, “Father, this is, er, a great honour you want to confer. But could you not have asked what I thought before giving orders to the Council?”

  Tsar Aleksandr glanced at the squabbling men in the chamber. Their argument, no longer anything to do with the succession, was spreading fast and becoming more partisan with every boyar and bogatyr involved. Then he swung around in his great chair and eyed his son from head to heels in much the way that Ivan had seen potential buyers eye their purchases. Speculative; wondering about the value; suspecting a waste of money. It made him feel like a slave on the bidding-block – much as the Tsar had often complained the responsibilities of the crown made him feel.

  “No, my son, I could not. You might have refused the honour, and then I would have had to force you. This way, the councillors do it for me.”

  Ivan was shocked at such duplicity. “Force me? What makes you think that I’d need forced?”

  “That you haven’t accepted my bidding without question, for one,” said Tsar Aleksandr, a touch cool. “I didn’t think you preferred to become Tsar in the usual fashion. Are you so keen to see me in my grave?”

  “Dear God, no! I just… I don’t want to be the Tsar of Khorlov until I have to, that’s all.”

  “You have to do it now, Vanya. You’re my only son, and the child of my heart. But you’re also bound to obey the command of your lord. I say you will be Tsar, and so you shall.”

  In the background the Council resolved its differences for the present, and as the noise in the hall died to a more normal murmur Ivan lowered his voice to an abnormally quiet one. “But why? You’re well, in good health, your …”

  “… Mind is sound? Was that it?” The Tsar smiled faintly, the smile of a man enjoying a private joke. “Since you married Mar’ya Morevna and she brought her spy service as part of her dowry, your simple, trusting old Papa has known much more of what goes on in his domains and kremlin than he ever did before. I know what’s been said about my temper over the past year, but you – bless you, Ivan, you refused to believe it.” The smile stretched briefly wider. “Or at least you made sure nobody could report back that you did believe it.”

  “You were testing me,” said Ivan slowly, feeling stupid that of all the possibilities this one hadn’t occurred. His eyes narrowed as he bit down on the surge of anger that left a taste like acid at the back of his throat. “You were putting me through an examination, to see if I was a suitable Tsar before I had no choice.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your idea?”

  “Mine and Strel’tsin’s. But mostly mine.”

  “Then damn you.” Ivan shifted his glare to Dmitriy Vasil’yevich, who met it with equanimity. “Damn you both.”

  The High Steward bowed slightly as though complimented on some masterful piece of statecraft which, in a crooked way, it was. Both the Tsar and his Steward were well satisfied with what they’d learned about their Tsarevich, for all that he was bristling with outrage like a tail-trodden cat, otherwise he wouldn’t be standing here right now.

  “Damn away, Ivan,” said Tsar Aleksandr, completely unruffled. “It won’t change a thing. At least you’ll have good and trustworthy advisors to help you. Dmitriy Vasil’yevich knows more about how this realm should be run than both you and I together, and your wife has reigned alone in Koldunov since her father died. Never feel so proud and confident that you don’t need their advice. You have another advantage: a better relationship with the ot
her Princes of the Rus than I could ever gain.”

  “Have I?” said Ivan, and laughed hollowly. “There’s no love lost between me and Aleksandr Nevskiy, and as for Kiev and Novgorod —”

  “Peace, Vanya. I already told you I know more than I take credit for. Trust me on this. There’s a wariness among the other domains, but not the active dislike directed at me. You stood side by side with Yuriy of Kiev and the Mikhaylovichi of Novgorod in the battle on the ice, you were instrumental in that battle being a notable victory and regardless of how Nevskiy’s tame bookmen slant the history in his favour, they know it. They were there. In the marketplace of alliances, my boy, don’t sell yourself short.”

  The Council Chamber was almost completely silent now, and not because the councillors and the druzhinya retinue were trying to listen in. They knew the murmured exchange between Aleksandr and his son represented a crucial turning-point in this whole affair, and they held still like men awaiting judgment in a court of law. Ivan leaned closer and spoke so quietly that not even Strel’tsin could hear it.

  “One last question. Why now, and not later?”

  It seemed as if Tsar Aleksandr hadn’t heard the question, because he stared not at Ivan but past him for several seconds. Then his eyes focused on those of his son, and to Ivan’s surprise and discomfort, their expression was one of shame. “I’m an old man, Ivan. One more old man among all these others. Khorlov will need a young man soon.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Because you don’t have the Sight.”

  Ivan understood. It was an ability that appeared now and then in the Khorlovskiy male line, just as some families occasionally produced children with red hair. Dmitriy Vasil’yevich Strel’tsin claimed to trace it back to the pagan priests of Uppsala, when all the Rus were just one tribe or clan among the North people, the Vikings.