Prince Ivan (19 page)

“Vanyushka, my love,” said Mar’ya Morevna, “I know what angers you, better than you think: but I met you as I began this war, and I’ve got a strange fear I might lose you as I end it.” She touched his hand and felt the tremor that was neither fear, nor cold, but the angry pride of one who would die sooner than be called a coward. “My father always warned me I should heed such fears. He knew more than most about such things.”

The trembling in Ivan’s hand eased somewhat, and Mar’ya Morevna watched him with her blue eyes until she saw what might become a smile. “Let me make a bargain,” she said. “This time
you
stay here, away from whatever loose horse or stray arrow casts its shadow in my mind. And next time
I’ll
stay here, and let you lead the army. I might even practice my embroidery.”

This time Ivan did smile, though it was still somewhat thin. “All right, I agree. But I hold you to that bargain. Just don’t,” his smile grew warmer, “expect
me
to embroider while you’re gone.”

Mar’ya Morevna laughed and kissed him. “No indeed! I expect you to guard and rule. Go everywhere, watch over everything. But Vanya, I expect something else as well.”

“Name it.”

“Remember what I told you. These are my people, not yours, not yet. Treat them kindly as you guard and as you rule, and they’ll soon come to treat you the same way. I would have them love you as they love me, and as I love you. But their love must be earned, not simply gained as part of marriage. Do you understand?”

“Have I been so arrogant these past months?” said Ivan, surprised.

“No, never,” said Mar’ya Morevna. Then she smiled at him, and there was a glitter of wicked humour hiding in its depths. “But then you’ve never had a realm to rule alone, have you?”

Ivan stared, almost on the edge of anger as he guessed at the original source of his wife’s lecture. “What has your High Steward been telling you?”

“Nothing more than I told you.” She reached out to touch the anger as it began to glow red beneath his fair skin, and with her fingertips and her next words stroked it away. “But he was talking to your father’s High Steward Strel’tsin after the wedding, and High Stewards are much the same in any Tsardom.”

“So it seems.” Ivan’s mouth shaped a crooked grin. “So. It. Seems.”

Mar’ya Morevna reached to her belt and unhooked the great ring of keys that opened every door and window, every chest and closet, in the whole of her great kremlin palace. “Here. You get to carry these for now.”

Ivan took them in both hands, treating them carefully as they shifted and rang together. The weight of the laden ring was such that it less a bunch of keys than a mass of metal with a myriad ragged edges, any one of which could open up his fingers as easily as any key could open up a lock. “God be good!” he said. “Do I lug this lot everywhere I go?” He glanced at Mar’ya Morevna in time to see the unheard chuckle vanish from her face. “I notice that you don’t!”

“Of course not. That’s what servants are for. Among all your other duties you must keep them busy, without demeaning them by your choice of tasks. You simply hand out whichever keys are needed for the day’s work, and leave the rest with the High Steward.”

“And how do I know which ones are needed?”

“The High Steward will give them to you.”

“Uh. Yes. I understand. I think. And if I want any other keys?”

“You won’t need them.” Mar’ya Morevna chuckled again at Ivan’s expression, and this time didn’t try to hide it. “Open doors that need opened, and leave the rest be. Do what needs done, and no more.”

“Why not?” he started to say, then hefted the keys and grinned. “Ah. Because that’s what servants are for?”

Mar’ya Morevna laughed and clapped her hands. “You’re learning how to be a good ruler already.”

For all her power and riches, Mar’ya Morevna was a woman who found delight in the smallest things, and Ivan loved her all the more for that. He lifted the keys and hung them from his belt, sagging comically to one side as he did so just to make her laugh, and then escorted his wife from her kremlin to the courtyard where her captains of her army waited to salute their Princess and commander.

Those stern, bearded warriors raised a great cheer when Prince Ivan kissed Mar’ya Morevna in the plain sight of them all and set a helmet on her head, and cheered again when he helped her to her saddle in a stirrup made of his own two hands.

“Go safe, be safe, return safe,” he said softly. That simple wishing of luck was the only thing they said to one another; with all else between them long passed beyond words. Then Mar’ya Morevna, fairest princess in all the Russias, set heels to her tall horse and led her army out to war.

*

There were enough things needing done in the running of a princely state for Tsarevich Ivan to realize why his education under High Steward Strel’tsin had been so wide-ranging and severe. In his youthful days, knowledge of what it meant to rule had come from
byliny
epics and from
skazki
folktales, which told him all about the noble cities where free-handed lords reigned in splendour, but nothing of what was needed to maintain that splendour, that nobility, that free-handedness.

He learned.

On his first night without Mar’ya Morevna, Ivan thought sleep might be hard to achieve, all alone for the first time in many weeks in their great bed. Instead he slept like someone stunned with a cudgel, exhausted by papers and discussions and inspections as he hadn’t been tired by endless days of riding across the endless steppe. Next morning the Groom of the Bed-Chamber had to shake him awake. That was a surprise, and not a pleasant one; Ivan Aleksandrovich had woken with the sunrise for as long as he could remember, except on those occasions when too much wine or ale or vodka had made sleep more preferable. He began to realize why his father and Dmitriy Vasil’yevich Strel’tsin could seem so weary and short of temper despite doing nothing more than sit around a desk all day; and he began to appreciate that Mar’ya Morevna had paid a considerable compliment in trusting him with such responsibility.

He lay for several minutes in the dream-time between sleep and wakefulness, watching the play of sunlight across the carved ceiling, halfway glad to be awake on such a fine morning and halfway annoyed not to be left alone till nearer noon. Then with a small sound that might later in the day become a laugh, he made his way to the bath-house in the hope that enough hot steam and enough cold water might make him feel a little more alive.

That day’s workload was as severe as the one before but, to Ivan’s surprise and hidden pleasure, he found it easier. Not much, but enough to transform drudgery into mere hard work. The Tsarevna’s secretaries were certainly pleased at not having to repeat themselves so many times, and the clerks of the treasury could concentrate more on their columns of figures and less on explaining matters to their Prince.

That small improvement was as much as Ivan achieved in the next few days. Any further easing of his duties would take longer and require more effort as he grew accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of each kremlin official, but for now he was like someone crossing a deep river, not yet far enough in to swim and reduced to shuffling both feet along the bottom.

At least he’d been able to find where the shingle began…

*

Tsarevich Ivan awoke with a start in the lonely expanse of his bed, knowing even as he opened his eyes that once again he had stretched out in sleep to touch someone who wasn’t there. Then a little thrill of pleasure flickered through him, a pleasure with two sources: first, he had woken at dawn for the first time in almost a week before Groom Oleg Pavlovich started shaking his shoulder; and second, if the couriers who galloped to the kremlin every noon had timed their reports correctly, then Mar’ya Morevna would return victorious this very afternoon.

Ivan was pleased by the return of more normal sleep and waking, a light step and cheerful demeanour showed that the return of his beloved pleased him still more, and though work proceeded as on all the preceding mornings, Mar’ya Morevna’s High Steward could see his lord’s mind was on other things than recording of taxes.

Indeed, Ivan was so distracted from what he was doing that, after a seventh correction with scraper and silver sand, High Steward Fedor Konstantinovich suggested in his most courteous tones that perhaps the Prince might like a walk in the fresh air, to blow the ink and parchment fumes from his doubtless busy mind. Ivan looked at the Steward in the head-back, heavy-lidded way he had practiced on Strel’tsin, a look which showed he knew when a high servant’s apparent concern was actually delicate impudence. That way the high servant didn’t win. Then with honours equal, and feeling as he’d felt many times before when his lessons ended earlier than expected, Prince Ivan made his escape from the treasury counting-house.

He walked for a time as High Steward Fedor had suggested, along kremlin ramparts where the cool wind smelt faintly of birch-wood and the distant promise of rain before nightfall, and the dry mustiness of ledgers was just an unpleasant memory. Ivan felt a little guilty at evading his duties, but just a very little and certainly not enough that he was in any hurry back. He suspected, if his morning’s performance wasn’t proof enough, that Fedor Konstantinovich and his clerks were better off without him.

Other things needed done before Mar’ya Morevna returned, but Ivan felt sufficiently lazy that none of them seemed important. There were tentative plans to deal with the Prince of Kiev, or the Princes of Novgorod, or perhaps even the Tatars, and so secure peace not only for Khorlov but for all of Mother Russia, but those plans involved maps, charts, logistical tables, and seemed like too much hard work for little more than a daydream. Then there was his self-imposed study of the many magic books in the library, if something so fascinating could be called an imposition. But his learning had progressed slowly without Mar’ya Morevna’s tuition, and was also more work than play.

If he had wanted work, he could have stayed in the counting-house.

What Ivan Aleksandrovich really wanted was his wife back in his arms. After that, and after having been married a full quarter-year, it was time to visit their in-laws. The town and kremlin of Khorlov stayed in one place, so Ivan’s mother and father were easy to find, but it was another matter where his sisters and their sorcerer husbands were concerned. Most of the effort about sending their wedding invitations had been expended in learning where their kremlins might be on a given day.

And perhaps – Ivan grinned at the thought – while they were travelling to one place or another, he and Mar’ya could have an Adventure. Nothing impressive, or expensive, or elaborate. Just something small, comfortable, amusing and, for preference, without Tatars in it.

He rested his elbows on the battlements and gazed north-west, hoping hours too soon for a first glimpse of the banners of the returning army. There was nothing to see but the steppe grasses rippling as the wind stroked across them, nothing to hear but noises from the town beneath the kremlin walls and, off on the edge of hearing, the hiss and rustle of the distant birch forest. That soft wind carried more than sounds and scents from the north; it carried the chill of distant snow from many leagues beyond the birches and its touch made Ivan shiver, suddenly and with a startling violence that rattled one row of teeth against the other. In a belted tunic-shirt he was dressed adequately for a lord’s duties behind a desk, but not for the upper ramparts of his kremlin while a north-east wind sighed across the steppe.

Tsarevich Ivan was as much a bread and salt man as the sturdiest peasant, as ready to go about in deepest winter with his collar open and the life-giving cross at his throat on show, but when he did, he wore a thicker coat than this. He shivered again, and turned down the first stairway that would get him off the battlements and back to somewhere warm.

The passage at the foot of the stair was warm enough and, even though he didn’t recognize it, Ivan spent several minutes leaning against its wood-panelled wall just to thaw out. He smiled to think that he, a married man of almost four months now, should be so lost in mooncalf yearnings that he didn’t notice even when he started to freeze.

All of that thought was exaggeration, of course, but it would make Mar’ya Morevna laugh when she heard it. But first he would give back the keys he’d carried since morning, when High Steward Fedor had anticipated his liege lady’s return by restoring every key to its proper place and – with some relief – handing the ponderous ring back to Ivan.

He patted them where they hung from their chain at his belt, but the feel of the icy metal made him grimace when he imagined what Mar’ya Morevna and her army must feel like, encased in linked iron and chilled by the wind. Ivan hadn’t spent so long in armour that he knew that feeling from personal experience, and he would as soon not find out until the weather turned warmer. He glanced from side to side along the corridor, tried to decide which was the quickest way back to familiar parts of the kremlin and then, with a mental note to explore the sprawl of his own home sometime, walked off in what he hoped was the right direction.

Fifteen minutes later he stopped and looked around him, feeling puzzled and faintly foolish. After walking for so long and so fast, he should have run out of corridor, kremlin, town and all, and be on the edge of the forest by now. Instead there was only more corridor, behind him which was right and proper, but ahead of him as well—