Prince Ivan (7 page)

CHAPTER THREE

How
the
Tsarevnas
found
suitors
who
pleased
them

Invitations to this banquet were sent out by rider where the roads permitted it, or by swift
troyki
up and down the frozen rivers. Tsar Aleksandr sent his messengers mostly along the Dnepr, but also as far north and south as the Dvina and Dnestr and as far east and west as the reaches of the Pripyat and the Upper Volga. More than anything else, it was those great distances across the face of Moist-Mother-Earth that meant there would be no more than one feast before Lent.

For all that, he made certain to invite the powerful as well as the eligible. Manguyu Temir of the Tatar Golden Horde was to be a guest, as were the Princes Oleg Vladislav and Aleksandr Yaroslavich, with careful seating arrangements to keep those worthies and their supporters well away from one another..

*

As the banquet began, Ivan wasn’t so concerned with the daintiness of the political machinations as he was with the presence of a mob of his very good friends, all scrubbed and scented and dressed in their finest garments. It was fairly certain that neither the visiting Princes nor any of the Tatar delegation were at risk of being chosen as husbands by any of his sisters, though if Manguyu Temir found himself married to Yekaterina it would assure peace in all the Russias for years to come. Not even an Ilkhan of the Sky-Blue Wolves could survive that experience for long without being thoroughly domesticated.

Those most at risk – and the risk was entirely his own thanks to too much mead and not enough thought – were the sort of people that Tsarevich Ivan wouldn’t let near his horses, never mind his sisters.

The feast was held in the great Hall of Audience and began in its usual fashion, with the principal guests being guided to the places deemed proper to their greater or lesser dignity. From those places they could be amused by the scuffling as everyone else endeavoured to find seating that suggested higher rank than they actually possessed.

Only Ivan didn’t laugh; he merely smiled thinly and watched with narrowed eyes because most of those doing the scuffling were his own splendidly attired companions. For all their fine clothing, and for all that every one of them was plainly hoping to catch the eye of one or other of the Tsarevnas, he could see that whenever their concentration slipped they still behaved at table as they’d always done. That was a relief: it made what he had been saying about them all the more easily believed.

Except for its function, this banquet was like all others during
Maslenitsa
, a celebration of the end of winter and a preparation for the Great Fast that followed. In his younger day Archbishop Levon had tried to insist that no meat should be served, and no alcohol drunk. He’d finally given up the task, saying that he might as well keep winter at bay by collecting each snowflake with tweezers. Old Tsar Andrey had been a man who enjoyed all the pleasures God sent, and hadn’t been about to give up a single one of them. He had agreed to the Lent fast only on the grounds that it would give larders depleted by Butter Week a chance to be restocked in time for another feast at Easter. Tsar Aleksandr was his father’s son in that respect, as well as in so many others, and the quality of his table was famous.

Before the eating began, the Archbishop read a grace and choristers from the cathedral sang an anthem. Then a figure was brought into the hall and set upright in the only hearth that had no fire in it. The figure was made of straw, but it had been left out of doors for long enough that it was crusted with snow, wore a long beard and hair of icicles. The Tsar rose to his feet and took a copper cup from the table in front of him.

The cup was filled with a mixture of lamp-oil and distilled spirit, and everyone present watched as it was emptied over the straw man, then set alight – not by sorcery, for this one ritual, but with a burning brand. Despite its covering of snow the figure’s straw was dry, and it burned fast and fiercely until nothing remained in the hearth but a mound of black and grey ash with small flames dancing around it. The smell of the burning was sweet, since scent and incense had been mixed with both the straw and the oil. Tsar Aleksandr lifted another cup, this one filled with vodka, and held it high in salute to the fire. “Winter is dead!” he said, then drank the vodka down in one gulp and flung the cup into the fireplace, where it shattered and the remains of the vodka burned blue.

“Winter is dead!” cried everyone, even the foreigners – at least, once the ceremony had been explained to them. It was as good an excuse as any to lay hands on the first drink of the evening. A shower of cups crashed into whichever of the great hearths was closest, and then the serious business of the feast began with the arrival of the first tureens of soup.

There was
shchi
and
borshch
, salty
rassolnik
and
solyanka
with mushrooms, great platters of black bread hot from the ovens, and for those who thought soup was too thin without something floating in it, dishes of dumplings and buckwheat noodles. Ivan drank his own soup thoughtfully, not really appreciating its splendid flavour, for once again his attention was elsewhere. He was watching the doings at the farthest table, where Pavel and Nikolai had already started flicking little pellets of bread at one another, and he wasn’t alone in noticing them.

“Was this why you wanted them invited, Vanya?” said his mother in her soft voice. Ludmyla Ivanovna was known for her wisdom as well as for her beauty, and if she had gone to the trouble of making a comment, Ivan didn’t dare to even think of making an excuse.

“No, Mother,” he replied, just as quietly. “They were invited because I wasn’t thinking.”

The Tsaritsa smiled, and glanced at the unruly guests again. “I suspected as much when Dmitriy Vasil’yevich arrived with his idea for a new list of suitors. He gave you full credit, of course. Another of his little jokes: I’m sure he’s fully aware of the way your friends behave. It’s his business to know such things.”

Ivan stared at his soup-bowl, tapping it with his spoon while he debated whether to laugh or be angry. Anger would be justified, of course – he detested being made fun of – but at the same time there was a certain elegance about the way the High Steward had sprung his trap. Even while disliking the man just as much as ever, Ivan could appreciate the neatness of the trick. Strel’tsin knew perfectly well that Ivan’s friends would never make good suitors on the best day of their lives, but at the same time their behaviour would reflect badly on the Tsarevich and so pay him out nicely for a great many sharp words and barely-veiled insults. All of which he’d achieved without once leaving himself in a position to be blamed for anything. Ivan shook his head slowly, shrugged, laughed, finished up his soup – then noticed just how very good it was, and called for a second helping.

The Hall was a sea of colour, for it wasn’t merely Ivan’s friends who had dressed in their best. All of the Rus wore long kaftans, brocaded, jewelled or richly embroidered, and the tall furred hats that were the fashion in the deeps of winter – though many had taken them off to prevent them falling in the soup – and even Manguyu Temir had made an effort, which was a high compliment indeed.

The stocky, deep-chested Tatar wore his hair in the usual four-tailed tonsure of his people, but had gone to the trouble of washing both it and himself in the recent past. There was still a faint aroma of grease and horses hanging around him, but at least the most recent layer of grease had been one containing perfume. The robe that covered his two coats was rare and beautiful watered silk, in a Persian style and pattern most likely not acquired by honest trading. Only good manners – also widely separated tables and the presence of Tsar Aleksandr’s guards – prevented several of the princely guests and their attendant
boyaryy
from saying so and provoking a regrettable scene.

With the soup cleared away, the feasting progressed to more solid fare: poultry, fishes and game of all sorts, sausages with thyme and costly pepper, buckwheat
kasha
, pickled cucumbers, stuffed cabbage, succulent small pasties, and great joints of beef with sour cream and horseradish.

With the first edge of their appetites blunted by the good soups that began the meal, everyone in the hall soon found time to talk as well as eat. Ivan finished the food on his plate, wiped his eating-knife and spoon before putting them back in their case on his belt, then made his excuses and pushed back from the table. Many others had already done the same, moving from their own places to more easily hold conversations with friends or acquaintances elsewhere, but thus far none of the suitors had screwed up enough courage to approach any of the Tsarevnas. Ivan filled his glass with wine and sauntered over to where the girls sat, gossiping with one another and making observations about this young man or that.

“Now that one I like,” Yelena was saying, pointing with her spoon in a tipsy and suggestive manner that was completely deceptive, since Ivan had never seen her tipsy in his life. He glanced down the line indicated by the spoon and frowned slightly, for though the young man in question was seated amongst his own noisy friends, that pale face above black clothing was unfamiliar. For just a moment their eyes met across the length and width of the crowded hall, and the young man, recognizing Ivan as the Tsar’s son, rose from his seat and bowed low.

Ivan matched the bow, but with slightly less than good manners since he was staring all the time. Yelena made a tsk-tsk noise and rapped him sharply on the elbow with her spoon. “Vanya!” she said, “I thought you were supposed to be watching the young
ladies
!”

“Only when I see one worth watching,” he said, and grinned. “The way you were watching him. Who is he?”

“Oh.” Yelena looked flustered and had the expression of someone about to rummage for a list of names, except that Katya already had it.

“Mikhail Voronov,” she read, rather disapproving. “He and two brothers. All of them are princes, it says here, but,” she waved the paper under Ivan’s nose, “though they’ve claimed the style and title, they didn’t give us the name of their domains.” Yekaterina hiccupped in a manner that was most restrained and ladylike, but was a hiccup nonetheless. “Otherwise it would be too easy for Strel’tsin to track down where they aren’t, in his damned books.”

She dropped the piece of paper onto the table, where Yelena scooped it up, and blinked at Ivan through the eyes of someone who has started their party an hour or so before the other guests. Katya, oldest of the family and a spinster with a reputed savage temper, had her own reasons for disliking celebrations like this one and her own way of either surviving or of leaving early. “Are you having a good time?” she asked, speaking very, very carefully so that all the letters fell – or staggered – into their proper place.

“Very good,” said Ivan. “Try the sturgeon pie. It’s excellent.” Directly he tried to change the subject they all looked at him at once, with expressions that varied from amusement to the sort of steely glint that had him thinking about freezing lake-water.

“I’ve tried it,” said Tsarevna Yekaterina, “and it’s not as good as it might be. The cooks need livening up.”

“You’d do it with a knout, I suppose?”

“If necessary. This is an important occasion, and—”

“—And I haven’t heard complaints from anyone else.”
Oh
yes
, he thought,
it’ll
definitely
be
the
lake
for
me
if
I’m
not
more
careful
. “So we’ll leave the food aside. What about the, er, other selection?”

Yelizaveta looked down the hall at Ivan’s cronies, and hid a most unPrincess-like giggle behind her hand. “Mother said you were responsible for them being here. True?”

Ivan grinned wryly. “In a manner of speaking. But when Katya saw the first list, she said—”

“Nothing like what you must have thought you heard! There was a nice one somewhere – he was in blue and grey – but I can’t see him any more.”

“Still, these are the sort of people you meant, aren’t they? Good lads, all of them. Even bandy-legs Temir.”

“You really must like the notion of swimming in winter, Vanyushka,” said Tsarevna Yelena, and smiled at him. It was a sweet smile, sweet as honey but with broken glass stirred into it. Ivan sat down on the corner of the table and drank some wine, knowing that he’d just been given his final warning.

Lena didn’t usually even bother with threats – she preferred to leave them to Katya, who being taller made them sound much more impressive – but when she did trouble to issue one, the person threatened knew it was their last chance. There was a bowl of cream-cheese on the table in front of his sisters and they looked it, then at him, in a way that made Ivan move the bowl a diplomatic distance away. “Oh, don’t do that,” said Liza. “I think you’d look very fetching with it in your hat.”

“And ornamented with some of these almonds,” added Katya, pouring a dozen of them from one hand to the other. Never mind the ornamentation, she could do more damage just by throwing them.

“Then I can take it that there’s no chance of Sergey Stepanovich becoming a part of the family?” he said, sounding relieved.