Prince Ivan (10 page)

There were few enough of those as he rode onward, for within a matter of days he left the birch forest and the hills of Khorlov far behind, and came to the wide white world. Prince Ivan Aleksandrovich stood by his horse’s side on the last hill before the Great Steppe began, the only place for miles or leagues all around him much higher than the rest, and looked out across the land to the east. It was a featureless plain of grass that rippled and whispered in the breeze, stretching out on all sides to the uttermost edge of the world. Ivan had good eyes, if not quite so sharp as the eyes of Prince Fenist the Falcon, but they saw nothing in every direction because there was nothing to see.

The steppe was empty of trees, empty of animals, empty of houses, empty even of a horizon to ride towards. Though the sky arched overhead clear and blue, there was no sharp-edged junction of earth and sky where it swept down to join with the world, only a soft blur where one haze dissolved into the other. Ivan patted Burka’s neck and swung into his saddle, then rode down from the hill and away east into the endless, eternal steppe.

*

Ivan rode one day, and two days, and three, and soon learned that appearances were not what they seemed. The steppe was less desolate than his first glance suggested, though its inhabitants were mostly not those whose conversation would relieve boredom. The occasional scuffling in the grass was more often followed by the brief sight of a hare sprinting for cover, or a quick flutter of apprehensive wings, than by the sound of a voice upraised in greeting.

There were a few of those, hunters for the most part, lean rangy men who watched Ivan – and his two swords and his bow and his shield – with the wariness of the wild animals they hunted until convinced that he meant them no harm. He shared more than one meal with a steppe hunter, if sharing was the proper word when the man he shared it with took pains to keep the fire between them.

As the days passed, even those contacts grew farther and farther apart. Ivan saw more wolves than ever before in his life, and was grateful he was making his journey during a time of the year when they had more than passing Princes to eat. He wondered when he would see the monasteries that Strel’tsin had mentioned, or perhaps a village owing allegiance to one or another of his brothers-in-law, yet for day upon day saw nothing but steppe. At least there were no brigands to worry about. Brigands, he decided, wouldn’t be so foolish as to come out here. There was little profit in robbing wolves and rabbits, and from the look of them not much more in robbing the hunters. He began to grow suspicious of the few birds flapping lazily across the sky, wondering which of them might be looking down at him and laughing; then even the wolves and the birds went away.

*

Ivan rode for some days more without even a wolf to look at, until at noon on one of those long, depressing, monotonous days, he saw something in the distance that wasn’t just haze. He reined in and stood up in his stirrups, the better to look at what it might be. There, far away yet not as far as it might be, stood a kremlin palace, built of grey stone, roofed with blue tiles and set square in the midst of the steppe.

Tsarevich Ivan set heels to his horse and rode closer, watching narrowly all the while. There was no town surrounding the kremlin, nor any roads leading into it or out again. It just sat there, huge and handsome, as if it had dropped from the sky overnight – and Ivan, already suspecting who owned it, wondered smiling to himself if he was meant to ride in at the gate or drop through the roof and the ceiling. How he was meant to do that with Burka beneath him, he hadn’t a notion.

To his relief there was a gate in the wall of the kremlin, its wood painted blue as the sky and its nails of polished silver, and standing alongside the gateway was a tall birch-tree. The kremlin and its palace was the first building Ivan had seen since leaving Khorlov, and the birch-tree was the first growing thing that stood taller than the grass, so he paused to rest his eyes on them both. That was when he saw he was being watched from a branch at the top of the tree, where a bright Falcon perched and gazed down with sharp eyes.

Prince Ivan laughed as he saluted the bird, because he was glad to have reached the right place. There was a look about this Falcon, a brightness of the eye and a brilliance of the plumage, that told him plainly it was more than just another of the hawks he’d seen quartering the grassland in search of some unsuspecting mouse. The Falcon took wing, and when it had flown down, it struck three times on the ground before him and became a fine young man. “Health to you, brother-in-law Ivan,” said Prince Fenist Sokolov. “How does God favour you?”

“Well enough,” said Ivan, dismounting. “But the rest of the world wants me married.”

Fenist laughed, and clapped him on the shoulders, and when servants had come to take care of Ivan’s horse, they went together into the kremlin and up to the palace. Yekaterina was there, waiting as though expecting company. She ran down the great stairs and threw her arms around Ivan to welcome him, then immediately began asking about his life, and his health, and her sisters, and their parents.

Married
life
agrees
with
her
, thought Ivan. There had been no mention of lakes or cold water in an entire conversation, and that was something of note; of course, the conversation had been rather one-sided since Katya had asked question after question without once giving him the opportunity to answer any of them. At length Fenist the Falcon extracted him from Katya’s grasp and showed him to the rooms in the tower that had been made ready for his visit.

After that, and rather pointedly, Fenist took him to where the bathhouse was. Ivan wasn’t surprised. After long, weary days in the saddle, his clothes were so dusty and muddy and sweaty that they could have walked back to Khorlov all by themselves, and despite his attempts at washing himself in rivers so cold they made the teeth ache in his head, the body inside the garments wasn’t much better. The thought of hot water and steam was a pleasant one, and so was soap and razors, because besides feeling dirtier than any Tsar’s son should do, his beard was making him itch.

*

“Dry heat first, to start a good sweat,” said Fenist a few minutes later, waving a wooden water-dipper. “Then thin steam, very hot.” He was sitting with Ivan in the steam-bath, no longer two Princes but just two young men wrapped in towels on either side of an iron basket of red-hot stones, flicking each other with water and amiably discussing the strength of the steam.

“Not too hot,” said Ivan, scrubbing the back of his hand across a jaw lined with pale blond bristles, “and make the steam thick. These whiskers need softened before I put a razor anywhere near them.” He laughed. “None of the
bogatyri
in the tales ever have this trouble. They always get from one place to the other in fine robes and bright armour, and never a hair out of place.”

“When you’re a
bogatyr
you pay your chroniclers well enough that they don’t mention the dirt or discomfort,” said Fenist the Falcon, carefully pouring water onto the stones until the air in the bathhouse was transformed into thick fog.

Ivan sighed with pleasure and lay back on the slatted bench, feeling the heat soak into his bones and begin to draw drain the ache out of his tired muscles. For the next half hour, he decided, he would forget about the needs of the Tsardom and the requirements of the succession, about Strel’tsin and his lists, and about all the eager young women who wanted to be the Tsar’s wife once his father died. It was unfortunate that he failed to warn Fenist the Falcon of his decision, for the Prince of the High Mountains had been asked for advice, and he was going to give it.

“Have you ever asked yourself the same question that you asked your sister?”

Ivan opened one eye, saw nothing but a wall of white steam, and closed it again. “What question was that?” he mumbled drowsily.

“The one about ‘
who
would
you
marry
if
left
to
yourself
?’ She told me you asked it that day in the garden, just before I arrived.”

“I’ve never given it a thought.”

“Don’t you think you should? Or are you riding across the wide white world for the good of your health?”

Though the fog was too dense to see the look on his brother-in-law’s face, Ivan could imagine it well enough. The tone of Fenist’s voice had already told him that the Falcon Prince was learning certain tricks of speech from Yekaterina. He had probably learnt the expressions to go with them – and maybe other things as well. A streak of mischief, for one, and its association with cold water…

Suddenly quite awake, Ivan sat up straight and stared into the blank whiteness, where he was certain he could hear stealthy movement and the dripping of water. “Stop right there! And put that dipper down!”

There was a pause in which nothing happened, and then a clatter of wood, and a splash, and a laugh that came from out of the heart of the steam, well removed from where Prince Fenist had been sitting.

“And they say
my
eyes are sharp!” he said. “All right, Ivan my brother. Take your ease. We’ll continue this discussion over dinner and a glass of something good.” Ivan relaxed a little, but not completely until he heard Fenist return to his own bench and sit down. “Besides,” the Falcon said, laughing again, “if we reach a conclusion without letting Katya interfere, she’ll have us both in the moat.”

*

Ivan was clean once more, shaved and dressed as a Tsarevich should be, and much refreshed after a few hours’ rest on a bed far softer than the steppe with a blanket laid on it. He sat at the banqueting table in the Falcon’s great hall, meat and drink in front of him and more spread handsomely to either side, and drank wine while his sister and brother-in-law watched him indulgently. When he had pronounced it good, they fell to together.

After the first edge of their hunger had been blunted and there was time for talk, Ivan pointed with his eating-knife at the great vaulted ceiling, and at the rich rugs from Bokhara and from Isfahan, and most particularly at the many servants and the great variety of dishes that they carried to and fro. Besides those tasted already, he could see Georgian-style spatchcocked chicken, a side of smoked salmon that had to come from Siberia, and many others from equally distant places.

“Maybe I’m tired, or maybe I’m slow, or maybe I’m just missing something,” he said at last. “But I didn’t see a single road as I came here across the steppe, nor anything higher than tussocks of grass. So where are these high mountains you’re supposed to be Prince of?”

Fenist sat back in his chair and smiled at Katya his wife in a conspiratorial way. “We have ways. We have means. The wealth of this realm is in building-stone rather than farmland, and it goes to those who pay well for good granite. A few small luxuries,” he waved dismissively at the richness of the hall and the laden table, “find their way back by the same route.”

“There has to be more to all this than just ways and means, even if—” Ivan pulled himself short and grinned, feeling no end of a fool. “Even if you can change yourself into a Falcon.” Shaking his head at himself, he drank more wine to take the taste of short-sightedness out of his mouth. “And more than that, I think.”

“But something like that,” said Yekaterina. “We all go where we please, when we please. My Fenik isn’t called the sorcerer’s son without reason. Now, while we’re taking about reason, what are you doing? Hunting a wife, avoiding a wife, or just staying far from home?”

Ivan played with his wine and toyed with his food, but for a while was reluctant to speak. Then he shrugged, one-shouldered, just like the Tsar his father, and began to speak. All of it came out, about the High Steward and his lists, and the ambitious ladies who wanted a rank, not a husband, and the constant pressure from inside and out to make a choice, any choice, and settle down. They listened without comment until he was done, then Katya nodded.

“We’d guessed most of it already,” she said. “What I had to live with, but worse. Four times worse. So while you slept, Fenik and I had a long talk together. We decided to send you after a bride of our choosing rather than one selected by that dry stick Strel’tsin. Not immediately, of course: Vasiliy and Liza, and Mikhail and Lena, would have hard words with us if we kept you all to ourselves. You should visit them before you go to find your wife.”

Ivan smiled, hearing the faintly bossy sound of the sister he remembered from his younger day. Sorcerer’s son or no, Prince Fenist the Falcon hadn’t smoothed off all her sharp edges, not by a long way. “You use ‘bride’ and ‘wife’ as if the wedding’s already certain,” he said, then raised his eyebrows when both of them chuckled. “Just who is this paragon of all the virtues, and how will I know when I’ve found her?”

“You’ll know,” said the Falcon, and grinned. “Believe me, you’ll know.”

“How could anyone not know Mar’ya Morevna?” said Yekaterina.

“The fairest Princess in all the Russias,” Prince Fenist added helpfully, then glanced at his wife and cleared his throat. “So they say.”

Ivan’s eyebrows went even higher up his forehead. He had heard the lady’s name before, but from Guard-Captain Akimov rather than someone waving potential wives at him. The Captain had mentioned her casually as a curiosity, a Princess who commanded her own army rather than letting her captains do it. It was a situation he disapproved of, and not because she was a woman acting like a man. Akimov was too pragmatic for that. What concerned him was an employer doing an employee’s work. If enough lords across the wide white world took such a notion into their heads, a professional Captain-of-Guards like Petr Mikhailovich Akimov could find himself out of a job.