The Golden Horde (39 page)

It was never more so than now.

Ivan settled himself as comfortably as he could onto a pile of cushions in the Golden Pavilion and tried not to move. Those cushions were covered in sleek silks and satins rather than a nice fuzzy velvet, so that the least change of pressure sent them shooting out from underneath him.

Thanks to some whim of the Khan’s which might well have been a way to put either Amragan
tarkhan
or Aleksandr Nevskiy back in their place, he had been adopted as Batu’s pet Russian. Since Mar’ya Morevna and her escort left for Khorlov, he had been summoned to the Pavilion almost daily to sit carefully on cushions he didn’t want to sit on, and drink
kumys
he didn’t feel like drinking, and talk about what seemed like every subject under the sun.

At first Ivan had thought that if this was the punishment he was suffering for insubordination, then it was far lighter than he deserved. Then he realized it was far from light. While he was here, warm and dry, taking his ease with a drink in his hand while he listened to the rain beat against the fabric of the great tent, his wife was somewhere out on the steppes and the rain was beating against
her
. No. Batu Khan had once again shown himself an admirable judge of character and human relationship. It wasn’t a light punishment at all.

Ivan pushed the thought from his mind, in case it might be somehow be seen on his face or heard in his voice and only serve to make matters worse. He glanced to one side, stared briefly at the Khan’s gouty, slippered feet which were the objects closest to his head, then looked beyond them, grimaced and turned away. It wasn’t the proximity of Batu’s feet that was the problem. Though it might have been.

The Khan, like his subjects, observed the
yasa
, the code of laws laid down by Chinghis-Khan, and one of those laws required that no one, whether rich or poor or even a khan, should wash their clothing. It was meant as a perpetual reminder of the time when the Conquerors of the World had been no more than poor nomads on the steppes of Sibir’ya, where clothing to keep out the cold had more value than gold, and where water was rarer than silver. It also meant that a Tatar encampment could be smelt miles away, though like any who lived amid stink for long enough, Ivan and the others had grown used to it. It was lucky that Batu the Splendid Khan, unlike most of his subjects, had more than enough changes of clothes that no one garment among them smelt especially rank and besides, he had a fondness for the heavy perfumes of musk and civet which helped to disguise any lingering aroma.

There were other proximities that gave Ivan more immediate concern, and three of them were staring at him right now. Batu Khan’s pets included more than Russians with a talent for story-telling. Besides the herd of three thousand pure white mares that provided milk and
kumys
for the Khan and the court, and the massive bears kept as totem beasts by the shamans, there were animals in Sarai that Ivan had only ever heard of. Huge striped Sibir’yan tigers and indolent blotched leopards kept for no other reason than they were living, beautiful ornaments; their leggy cousins the cheetahs, who wore little red cloth hoods with holes cut for their ears and worked for their keep in the hunting field; and the
böragut
eagles with a wingspan of ten feet from tip to tip that hunted with them, flying from the Khan’s own wrist. The sleepy interest of one wild beast more or less was something Ivan had been forced to live with since his first summons into the Pavilion.

If anyone had bothered to ask, though nobody ever did, he would have preferred the cheetahs. He liked cats, at least cats of a reasonable size, and these blunt cat faces were marked with dark stripes down the sides of their muzzles that gave them a depressed expression. Probably it was the hoods. They looked very foolish with their hoods on, and if there was one thing a cat of any size disliked, it was looking foolish.

Perhaps because all they ever wore were heavy collars, and chains that to Ivan’s jaundiced eye weren’t anything like thick enough, the tigers and leopards never looked foolish, and nothing like as tame as Batu Khan had maintained once he stopped laughing at Ivan’s first reaction to their presence. For all their glossy coats and well-fed bellies, these striped and spotted cats always looked more than willing to try Tsar as a change of diet from horsemeat. Never Khan, oddly enough, so maybe they were indeed as well-behaved as Batu claimed.

The eagles just stared haughtily at him down their great hooked beaks like the Firebird, and looked even more murderously insane.

It was a cheetah and a leopard today, lounging half-asleep with heads resting on crossed forepaws, hind legs and bodies and tails disposed in that indolent, untidily elegant way of all cats. One of the
böragut
eagles was preening itself on a perch at the back of the cushions; now and again it favoured the world in general and Ivan in particular with a yellow-eyed glare that combined arrogance and malevolence in equal measure.

It was strange that the Khan’s animals, his wild beasts, personified more of a conqueror’s vices than the man himself. Ivan could see laziness, cruelty, ferocity or demented rage just by turning his head. But when he looked at Batu there was no shadow even of ill-temper. It was certain that a Chingisid khan had long since trained any betraying flickers of emotion from his facial muscles, but there should have been some trace of where they had been. And there was none.

Their discussions of the world at large could become lengthy and convoluted, Batu dropping into Farsi when his command of Russian failed, but he still demonstrated an interest in what went on beyond his borders that was more than Ivan expected from a Tatar just two generations removed from the howling wilderness of the steppes. But the Khan had never given Ivan a chance to see what he truly felt or thought about such things. Oh, he smiled, frowned, even laughed out loud, but there was always the sense that these were movements and expressions as studied as those of an actor, appropriate to the moment but not necessarily to the workings of the mind behind the mask. Yet there was a feeling that the Khan of the Golden Horde valued what his pet had to say, and Ivan knew why. It wasn’t just the tantalizing presence of the Art Magic about his adventures, though he related enough of those both large and small. It was that same reason the ordinary Tatars found him so interesting.

Because he was different.

He had surrendered, and yet he hadn’t; he had submitted, and yet he hadn’t. Except for the matter of the Great Crown of Khorlov, he had done all the things that Batu Khan required of a vassal prince from a conquered realm, and yet he personally had managed not to be conquered at all. The normal Tatar response to that was to stamp it out, in case such insouciance towards authority bred a more serious form of rebellion in other, lesser princes. Yet the stamping boot had been withheld even when the business of the false crown made it entirely justified, and now he was as much an object of curiosity and an ornament to the Golden Pavilion as any other strange beast, interesting and, for the moment, harmless.

His own reputation had a good deal to do with that, of course. From what he’d overheard, easily done since so many tribal dialects in the city meant the commonest language was Farsi, the Tatars were fascinated by the Rus magic which was so different to the conjuration performed by their shamans. There was much wondering why it had never been turned against them during three years of invasion since they, the Golden Horde, would never ignore any weapon if it was available.

Ivan had smiled grimly at that. The Art Magic could be used as a weapon of sorts in an individual combat, one on one. Not for a battle. Beforehand, yes, that was the proper place for sorcery. But it couldn’t be the obvious things from the old
skazki
tales, fire called from the sky to consume the enemy host, or an army of demons conjured up to oppose them. The sorcerer who tried to fight his battles by the summoning of demons would find all his time taken up with trying to control his summonings, while still needing to fight those of the original enemy not burnt by the fire or opposed by the demons, and failing to do either. And the other sort of wizard, those who tried to create such ostentatious effects by wands and circles and the direct manipulation of power? They would briefly become an ostentatious effect themselves, blown to bloody rags and tatters by the strain of attempting to channel such energies through a human brain and body that was, when all was said and done, only well-educated meat.

What a sorcerer
could
do was rather more limited and rather less obvious, so much so that few chronicles of battles where sorcery had been involved even mentioned the fact. They were in any case the sort of battles where the Princes in command wouldn’t attribute their great victories to sorcery, so the chronicles were likely rewritten to delete such unpalatable information.

Aleksandr Nevskiy had done that very thoroughly with the Battle on the Ice against the Teutonic Knights. By his command, the Lavrent’skiy and Novgorod chronicles ignored the Firebird’s presence, and indeed everyone’s presence but his own, changed the year in which the battle was fought, and even moved its location from the river Nemen to the river Neva, so his own nickname of ‘Nevskiy’ would seem like a battle honour rather than a birthplace. But he couldn’t change the fact that it was another of those battles in which inexplicably convenient things happened. One where a dust-storm rose suddenly and blinded the enemy archers, or a sudden downpour soaked the ground to mud and impeded a fatal cavalry charge – or where river ice thick enough for safety suddenly cracked beneath an advancing enemy’s feet and pitched them, weighted with their armour, into deep and freezing water.

Ivan knew all about that particular reason, and Nevskiy could rewrite history all he chose.

But all those things had to be there already. It was no use trying to stir up dust after a week of rain; no use calling rain from a cloudless sky; no use cracking ice so thin that the enemy hadn’t been enticed onto it. But if the dust, or the clouds, or the ice, were there already, then a sorcerer with any brains at all knew how to use such tools to advantage, provided the commander who relied on sorcery also had a grasp of tactics. When talking to Batu Khan about them, Ivan always stepped gingerly around such subjects. It was a balancing act, neither to reveal how weak the much-feared magic was where it really mattered to the Tatars, nor to suggest it was so strong as to provoke some sort of pre-emptive action against risk of its further use.

He was always relieved when the Khan sat back and drank, accompanied as usual by those damned flutes and cymbals, then leaned forward on his cushions, dismissed the cares of the wide white world and asked yet again for a story of wonders.

At first Ivan had been suspicious even of that. He knew the cool, subtle, mind working behind the blunt, seamed face. There was always a fear that the constant requested repetitions of his own hard-won successes against the Teutonic Knights or Baba Yaga or Koshchey the Undying were being sifted for useful knowledge, and during the third re-telling of that time four years past when he encountered Zmey Gorynych the Dragon-
boyar
and Tugarin Zmeyevich, he changed a couple of particulars of the story.

They were unimportant, just details of what Tugarin the Dragon’s son had looked and sounded like, but he’d mentioned them on both previous occasions. It was when Batu called the error to his attention that Ivan knew there was nothing to be afraid of. The Khan was doing nothing more suspicious than committing each story to memory.

Something
to
boast
about
, thought Ivan, just a little sourly. Maybe he was doing the old Mongol an injustice, or maybe not.
The
only
Ilkhan
in
the
empire
to
have
a
skazki
hero
for
a
vassal
.
It
must
be
like
having
a
pet
who
can
do
really
impressive
tricks
.

Then suddenly, with his mind still full of the bright magical images of the past times and past places that had no Tatar invaders in the background, Ivan remembered Aleksandr Nevskiy’s taunt about Khorlov living in a world of its own. The recollection hit him like a bucket of cold water, but he smiled at the shock. Nevskiy had meant only an insult, but there were worlds indeed, and to spare. The worlds that existed behind the mirror, of which this one was but a pale reflection. Tsar Morskoy’s gratitude had promised him the Blue Kremlin and all its domains, if ever he and Mar’ya Morevna chose to live there. Even now he could smell the salt sea air, and hear the green waves crash in foam against the cliff-face far below.

And then there was the Summer Country. Even when things were worst, there was always the Summer Country. Ivan grinned at the Khan of the Golden Horde, at his leopards and tigers and eagles, and the Khan, not knowing his mind, grinned back.

“The Great Ancestor Chinghis-Khan Temujin said that an empire was won from the saddle, but ruled from a throne.
Hui
! He did not say how much less of that empire you see from the throne. Put an old man back in his saddle, Ivan of Khorlov. Tell me a tale of adventure …”