Firebird (Tales of Old Russia Book 2) Read online

  “Anything on this list?”

  Mar’ya Morevna nodded, her mind already a little distracted by the thought of what news the spies would have brought this time. Ivan knew from past experience that news actively good or actively bad was often easier to deal with, having certain requirements of its own, than information neither one nor the other. Vague generalizations needed more work if one’s hand wasn’t to be seen in the matter.

  “Good,” he said, and couldn’t keep the grin off his face any longer. “Then we’ll start with shchi, very sour, with salt-pickled mushrooms, black bread and sweet butter. After that—”

  “There’s no after when you start with shchi!” said Mar’ya Morevna, coming down from her political calculations with a bump. “Not the way that Yuriy makes it!”

  “Then we’ll just have a little. But I’m not missing any chance to eat Yuriy Oblomov’s sour cabbage soup. Or his bread. A table with good bread on it is an altar; otherwise it’s just a plank. You know what the peasants say: when you die, the Lord God,” – he crossed himself – “hangs you upside-down with your head in a barrel and then your name-saint,” – he crossed himself again – “pours in all the food and drink you spilled or refused when it was offered. How you feel after that depends entirely on what you do while you’re alive. I don’t intend to have more than my hair wet.”

  “Have you been sneaking more of that new wine?” said Mar’ya Morevna, looking suspiciously at the jug. “And not giving any to me?”

  “No to both questions,” said Ivan cheerfully. “You said yourself: I should eat something before we broach and taste from the other two pipes of red in the cellar. So, after the shchi, we’ll have ryabchik grilled crispy, with that sharp cherry preserve.” He smiled a long, slow smile. “Well marinated and moist by the time they get to my mouth.” Now it was Mar’ya Morevna’s turn to blush, and Ivan’s expression went innocent. “You know I know how much you like grilled partridge.”

  “While you, beloved, just like—”

  “—All sorts of things,” said Ivan, and stroked the palm of her hand with one fingertip.

  Mar’ya Morevna shivered deliciously and closed her fist on his finger. “Later for you,” she said very softly. “But not much later.”

  “After the kasha,” he said. “With lots of butter. You can’t spoil kasha with too much butter.”

  “Oh, no indeed.” Mar’ya Morevna giggled a little and looked very much as if she would have giggled a lot, and done other things as well, if not for the spies having first demand on her time.

  Ivan made a mental note of it. Not even his wife’s most wordy informant could keep talking until past midnight, and if he tried…Well, there were certain privileges that went with being a prince, and one of them was being able to tell almost anyone else to shut up, at least until next morning.

  “We’ll finish with smetannik,” he said firmly. “Though I think that should really be brought to our chambers after we’re done with business for the day.”

  “Otherwise we really will be done with business, and before it’s even started.” Mar’ya Morevna knew exactly what she was talking about. Smetannik was a pie of almost sinful richness: a pastry case lined with jam made from the autumn’s raspberries, filled with a mixture of soured cream, milk thickened by stewing ground almonds in it, then toasted chopped walnuts and hazelnuts on top. She shook her head again, all amused disbelief.

  “Vanyushka, I’ve never met anyone who can be quite so, so lascivious about food. Probably because that’s not the only thing on your mind.”

  “As I said, I like all sorts of things. Shall we summon Nikolai and get this request for indulgence down to the kremlin kitchens…or would you like to talk some more about how lascivious I can really be?”

  “I think,” began Mar’ya Morevna, then hesitated briefly as she forcibly changed her mind. “No. I’m quite sure that we had better deal with matters in their proper order. Otherwise nothing will get done, and we’ll have to start again tomorrow. Agreed?”

  “Reluctantly. Except for starting again tomorrow. That part I quite like.”

  “Ivan! Sometimes you’re impossible! Can’t you think of anything else?”

  “Nothing as important as producing an heir,” said Ivan, forcing his features into an expression of prim sincerity that had long ceased to deceive anyone, his wife least of all. She fluttered her eyelashes at him, and he grinned back and tapped the chessboard. “But if you give me until dinner arrives, I think I might just get you into check.”

  Mar’ya Morevna gave old Nikolai brief instructions both for their own food and for the waiting spies and dispatched him towards the kitchens. Then she glanced at the positions of the pieces and laughed quietly.

  “In one sense you’ve got me in check already. As for the other – until dinner arrives when? Next Easter? It should be fun to see you try…”

  *

  Ivan followed Mar’ya Morevna up yet another flight of stairs, holding a candelabrum filled with white beeswax candles high overhead to light the darker corners. There were torches set in brackets along the walls, but the chill in the stairwell and the way that they smoked and guttered suggested they had been lit only a few moments before. The tower they were climbing was the highest in the entire kremlin, Krasnoy Bashnoy, the Red Tower, and there was a single small, comfortable and ultimately private room right at the top. Once the bolts had been shot and keys turned in the locks of every door between that room and the bottom of the tower, it was also the most secure place in the entire fortress.

  “I should have put Koshchey up here,” said Mar’ya Morevna over her shoulder, “and saved us all a lot of trouble.”

  “You said that before, and I gave you the same reason why you shouldn’t have done any such thing. The wasp has been swatted; I prefer that to having him still alive in a bottle. A prisoner always has a chance of getting out of whatever place you put him in. Except the grave.”

  “Now this is still Koshchey the Undying you’re talking about, isn’t it? Not some other Koshchey? And anyway, you’re hardly the one to talk about death being permanent.” Mar’ya Morevna unlatched yet another door and fitted a key into its lock. “Loosen that bolt and swing it around, please.”

  The keyhole of each lock had sliding iron shutters on both sides of the door; when a key was put into one side and turned, the shutter on the other side was cranked down on little toothed rails and protected the entire lock from picking. The bolts, bars of forged steel two fingers thick and as long as a man’s arm from elbow to palm, were much simpler. Each was held in place by a second smaller bolt of the same steel; once removed, the entire mechanism could swivel from one side of the door to the other.

  At first Ivan had wondered why it wouldn’t have been simpler to have bolts inside and out. The reason was obvious: it prevented the awkward situation of someone shooting one of the bolts while you were on the wrong side of the door. Being held prisoner in one’s own tower was bad enough, but to have actually provided an enemy with the means to do it was even worse.

  Five people, three men and two women, were waiting for them in the little secure room at the top of the tower. All set their wine cups aside and stood to bow or make a courtesy when Ivan and Mar’ya Morevna came in, but Ivan smiled when he saw the wreckage of dinner on a table in the corner. It was the same food he had enjoyed, so the spies had been eating quite literally like princes.

  Last time had been much less secretive. In the middle of summer when the days were longest, everyone was more inclined to stay up late and make use of the daylight. It was also warmer out of doors, which was where the last meeting had taken place. Instead of the lofty tower and the multitude of locked doors against eavesdroppers tonight, that bright summer evening needed only the wide-open space of the kremlin’s largest courtyard. No one could come close enough to listen without being seen, and the chairs had been close enough to the fountain at the centre of the courtyard that splashing water would make nonsense of anything spoken over-loud. Tha
t was a trick borrowed from the antique Romans – or maybe the Greeks – who had known a thing or two about keeping information from unfriendly eyes and ears.

  Both Ivan and Mar’ya Morevna knew their own kremlin had a scattering of spies among its population; any fortress with information worth gathering would have one or two, in much the same way that a well-stocked granary had rats. The trick was to ensure they had to work at it; a spy who thought spying was too easy might work harder, and in Mar’ya Morevna’s sorcerous kremlin there was no telling what they might find out.

  Ivan looked at these five spies and out of courtesy tried not to seem over-inquisitive, even though he was bubbling with curiosity. It was only the second time in his life he had ever encountered people whose purpose was the acquisition of secrets: though he knew of their existence, his father’s select small group remained a mystery.

  Not even High Steward Strel’tsin got to deal with the Khorlov spies, and Tsarevich Ivan hadn’t been old enough. Besides, First Ministers and Tsar’s sons had both been known to grow ambitious, and while he would never have believed it of his own Minister or son, Tsar Aleksandr was well aware that various now-dead rulers hadn’t believed it either. In his view, only one man should have direct dealings with gatherers of information, and that one man should be the person for whom the information was intended.

  “These,” said Mar’ya Morevna, indicating the five with one hand, “and those you met last season, are among my most trusted servants. They pass freely where you and I can’t go, to watch and listen on our behalf. Know them well.”

  She introduced each spy in turn, with much less formality involved than was customary between Rus nobility and the vassals who served them. Even so, Ivan was given only a forename; there was no mention of family, place of origin or where they had last been. Mar’ya Morevna took every precaution for their safety, and a few more besides.

  “Stepan.” She gestured towards a tall, lean, dark man, his black beard heavy and bushy in the manner of an Orthodox priest rather than the more neatly trimmed whiskers worn by non-clerics. His voice was deep and musical, adding further emphasis to his priestly appearance.

  “Pavel.” This one was small, slight, his hair as pale blond as Ivan’s own, or any of the many whose ancestry went back to Ryurik the Viking and the other old North people. Indeed, it was paler still, to the point of being almost colourless. When he spoke briefly to acknowledge his liege lady’s introduction, Ivan thought he heard a touch of the quick, slurred accent of Novgorod the Great; but it was no more a part of Pavel’s own speech than any of the other intonations that came and went with each word and sentence.

  “Sergey.” He looked like a man-at-arms or city guard whose martial days were past, big, blocky and still possessed of a remarkable breadth of shoulder now matched by his waistline. Now he could as easily be an innkeeper, a decent trade for a retired soldier, his red-cheeked, friendly, trustworthy face a useful asset for someone in the constant presence of wine-loosened tongues.

  “Natasha.” There was another who heard secrets. She was young and pretty, her hair worn in two long braids and her eyes demurely lowered in just the sort of enticing way that might prompt a man to foolishness. Her role was doubtless the oldest part of the old profession of spying, though her clothing and demeanour suggested sufficient wealth to be a courtesan instead of something cruder. After money had changed hands and business was concluded, courtesans were like innkeepers and always had time to listen.

  “Olga.” Small and slender, her hair an unremarkable mouse-brown, Olga made Ivan glance back at the pale spy Pavel. They were two of a kind, with nothing about them to attract attention or, in a servant’s post, even recognition of their presence at all. That was common enough in great houses; the only time a servant might be noticed was when something was done late, or wrongly, or not at all, and he had a feeling these two were very, very good at the duties they performed. They could come into an occupied room, light candles, turn down bed-linen, fuel a fire and dust up afterwards, and afterwards the occupant of the room would scarcely remember they had been there.

  All of Mar’ya Morevna’s spies were one side or another of the same coin: either ciphers, colourless to the point of transparency, or fully rounded characters so typical of their assumed roles that no one would dream of questioning them. Who notices a priest’s face in church or during confession? Who looks twice at the innkeeper making vague and sympathetic noises during an outpouring of drunken problems?

  And who, looking twice and more than twice at a handsome and clearly available young woman, would suspect that she might have dressed and painted her face so blatantly not to attract, but to distract…?

  *

  Those were the spies. Ivan had expected more, since there had been a full dozen in attendance at the last meeting. The explanation, when it was given at last, was simple enough: only those who had something to report made the journey when winter was imminent. Travelling in summer wasn’t just easier, but less likely to cause comment.

  “Security again,” said Mar’ya Morevna and grinned at him, teasing gently. “It saves all the awkward questions like ‘why did you go?’ and ‘where did you go?’ and ‘who did you see when you got there?’ When I ask those questions I like to see for myself.”

  She opened a cylindrical case and hung what it contained on the curving wall of the tower room, standing on tip-toe to secure the enormous sheet of white Chinese paper. It was as thick and heavy as linen, so big that it filled the wall from window to window and floor to ceiling, and it was a map of the Rus lands from where the River Volga flowed into the Caspian Sea in the East, to where the River Vistula ran into the Baltic Sea in the West.

  The detail was superb. Mar’ya Morevna’s father, Koldun, had been a cartographer as well as a sorcerer, with many examples of his work in the kremlin library, but this was better than any of them. As Stepan, the priestly-looking spy, began making his report, Ivan went to study the map more closely, wishing he had a magnifying glass of some sort to better appreciate the detailed hills and trees and cities. Certainly a glass of great power and a pen narrow as a needle had been used by whoever had originally drawn the hair-fine lines. Then one of those same lines twitched and shifted its position, and Prince Ivan did the same.

  He jumped a foot backwards, and swore.

  Everyone was staring at him. The spy Stepan was still talking, but at a gesture from Mar’ya Morevna he stopped. Nobody said anything for a few seconds, and more importantly, nobody laughed or even smiled. That was just as well: for those few seconds, Ivan was in no laughing mood and it took him a couple of deep breaths to regain what passed for composure.

  “All right, so it’s a map that draws itself to instruction. But you might have told me…”

  “I thought you knew already.”

  Since she’d produced neither pen, ink nor paper to note down what her spies might say that was reasonable enough. Such charts weren’t uncommon, though the initial ensorcellment was sufficiently expensive to deter all but the wealthiest and most determined of lords. A chart as large as this one was uncommon, however, with such an expenditure of power and gold that both Ivan and her late father might have had second thoughts.

  “What you see,” she told him as he peered more closely at it, “is no more than what I read to it from past reports. This is the first time it’s heard accurate and first-hand information, and so of course everything will start to change even as you watch. Stepan, continue.”

  Ivan clasped both hands behind his back and leaned in until his nose was almost touching the surface of the chart, wishing more than ever for a strong magnifying-glass – and a strong glass of something, too, since his heart was still pattering harder than he liked. Nor was he accustomed to the way in which his wife referred to the map when she said, “What I read to it…” and “it’s heard accurate information.”

  Indeed? For someone who was usually so cautious about her – and anyone else’s – use of sorcery, Mar’ya Morevna seemed to
be enjoying this obvious and impressive piece of spell-casting for its own sake. The spy’s melodious baritone voice rumbled on in the background and Ivan listened carefully even as he watched the effects of that voice take shape on the map.

  “…Marriage between Ludmyla Fedorovna, niece to Yuriy Vladimirovich, Great Prince of Kiev, and the boyar Oleg Vasil’yevich,” Stepan was saying. “However, since there’s small love between the Great Prince and his brother-in-law Fedor bogatyr, only a little land was given as bride-gift…” And true enough, there on the outskirts of a diminutive Kiev, a thin blue line shifted to show the change in Prince Yuriy’s domain. That shift was echoed by a flickering as first tinted shading and then tiny columns of letters and figures changed to show the new values of various lordly domains: changes in alliance, indicated by colour and crest; numbers of troops capable of support on a given area of land; its tax revenues; and all the other indication of wealth, real, claimed and merely bragged-about.

  Ivan smiled thinly. Even though the columns would have fitted on the palm of his hand he recognized, from experience with Mar’ya Morevna’s high steward, diminutive pages of credit-debit accounting. This was at least more interesting than Fedor Konstantinovich’s ledgers and besides, he didn’t have to do the arithmetic himself. Or rub out his own all-too-frequent mistakes, either…

  “It will also,” said Mar’ya Morevna from just over his shoulder, “answer questions.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if it liked a drink afterwards as well,” said Ivan without turning round, and was rewarded with a brief titter from one or other of the two female spies, hastily stifled. He could imagine Mar’ya Morevna’s quick glare, half annoyance and half amusement. “I presume if you asked it, say, what might happen to the balance of powers in the event of an alliance, a raid or a crop failure, these lines and figures would change to show the result. Yes?”