The Last Crusaders: Ivan the Terrible (13 page)
Stanley took the risk and interrupted. ‘We know for a fact the Tatar Army is not far off, with Janizary units too, perhaps a hundred thousand. They have already overrun your frontier garrisons on the River Oka—’
Ivan overran him likewise, not listening. ‘It is the people of Russia themselves who threaten us, day and night, without rest. It is those all around us. Look.’ He nodded at the guards along the walls, staring blankly ahead; at the court officials, eyes bowed, mouths dry with fear. ‘It is they. It is the boyars. It is my own treacherous, cowardly, deceitful, devil-born Russian people. It is they who league with the Tatars and destroy us from within!’ Suddenly he was up and pacing and shouting, the change terrifying in its abruptness. ‘My ever-treacherous people plot continually against me, they return me evil for goodness, hate for my love …’ He clenched his fists and thumped them against his chest, and Nicholas saw to his astonishment that there were tears in his eyes.
Just as suddenly, he switched off. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘you must be hungry. Let us dine. You shall be my guests of honour.’
Was he quite mad? wondered Nicholas. How did such madmen survive as leaders of nations? Yet they did. Even Caligula, rapist, sodomite, who fornicated with his own sisters in public – even he lasted four years. And Ivan was no Caligula. He was far more cunning.
They processed after him to the banqueting hall.
Aware that every word of theirs would be heard and understood, even in English, Stanley spoke with care. ‘A most interesting audience.’
‘A ruler of great majesty,’ said Smith, bitterness veiled.
‘Our gift of Her Majesty’s portrait in miniature was well received,’ said Nicholas. ‘Very well received. And he is a most philosophical ruler. A deep thinker.’
‘You speak the truth, Prince Nikolas Ivanovitch,’ said Stanley gravely. Smith gave a quiet snort. ‘Yet there are courts,’ continued Stanley in code, ‘where to be too well received, to be a favourite of a more unbalanced ruler, is to be in great danger. Better to go unnoticed.’
‘Aye,’ said Smith grimly. And they had been well noticed.
‘You know what I thought at first?’ said Hodge. ‘Him sitting there at first so grim-faced and unstirring?’ Smith should have clapped his hand over Hodge’s plain-spoken mouth, but it was too late. ‘I thought he looked like my old man on the privy when he can’t go.’
Nicholas would have laughed, but he was still chilled, even frightened by the crazed things Ivan had said to him in private. He longed to tell Stanley. But what was the point? None of it made sense. It was just that now, Nicholas felt sure they were in the Court of a truly evil ruler.
They waited, Smith drumming his knife with impatience, nearly an hour before the Czar once more made his entrance, and all bowed. Now he wore a conical hat in the Persian style, trimmed with black fox fur, a long white gown, and Morocco boots embroidered with pearls. The four Englishman were summoned to sit on the high table with him. Down below sat long tables of boyars, the arrangement something like an Oxford college.
At the end of the high table sat a man slightly apart, in plain dark robes like a cleric, with clever but predatory face, spectacles perched on his lean nose as he peered down short-sightedly at his food. Then he glanced up and caught Nicholas staring at him, and seemed to smile a faint, wintry smile.
‘Who’s that?’ whispered Nicholas.
There was enough noise and clatter now at the table for them to speak to each other without being overheard. Just about.
‘That must be Elysius Bomelius, I think,’ said Stanley. ‘We must tread very carefully around him. He’s as clever as he looks. A Dutchman, I have heard, or perhaps a Westphalian – he also trained in England. A lifelong student of alchemy and the magical sciences, the Czar’s personal physician, and also, some say, his Poisoner-in-Chief. He has a great hold over the Czar’s mind. Ivan believes he can see the future.’
‘But only with his specs on,’ said Hodge. ‘Pass the bread basket.’
Besides humble bread and salt, there were richer dishes: roasted swans, spiced and roasted cranes in saffron, cock pheasant with ginger, pikes’ heads with garlic, hare stew with kidneys and ginger; and to drink, plentiful Rhenish wines and malmsey, and also heady Russian liquor, kvass and vodka. Yet it seemed to them a banquet of the insane. Outside in the villages was a tormented and starveling people, and at any moment, Nicholas could imagine a howling and uproar from the streets, growing louder and louder, like an approaching storm. And then the great double doors of the hall bursting open and the Tatars standing there, at their head some huge reincarnation of the spirit of Ghenghiz Khan himself, grinning ferociously, hands on hips, his thick leather belt hung with dozens of skulls of slaughtered Christians …
But they dined as best they could, and drank likewise. Nicholas’s cup emptied frequently. Stanley said, ‘That won’t help. With the coming storm, you’re going to need all your wits about you, not a hangover.’
Nicholas thought back to Malta, to the prickling fear and dread they all felt at the coming of the Turks. But this was worse: less clear-cut, more muddled, their role more uncertain.
A servant brought them four golden cups of a spiced negus. Nicholas reached out for a cup but the servant insisted politely on handing them round one by one.
At last, slow and stately and red-eyed and almost blind drunk, the Czar stood and was led away to his private chambers, where his personal retinue of three blind old storytellers would tell him stories until he fell into a troubled sleep.
A small, dark figure followed him, almost scampering. It was Elysius Bomelius.
The four were reunited with the waiting Thomas Waverley, politely envious of their privileged banquet, and then at the door, a tall, handsome nobleman turned and bowed to them. Dark eyes; dark, burning eyes …
‘Prince Maliuta Skuratov,’ he said smoothly. ‘You are most welcome, ambassadors of England.’
Nicholas felt a sickening lurch. It was him – was it not? The black rider in the wooden animal mask. He himself had been scruffy and unshaven then, with a beard of many days, and now was clean-shaven once more. And when they rode in on the Oprichnina camp, they had hurriedly tied on face-cloths, thanks to Stanley’s timely command. Would this Maliuta Skuratov recognise him? He felt stripped bare. The nobleman’s eyes seemed to bore into him.
‘You did not find your journey dangerous?’ he said softly.
‘One or two common thugs and bandits,’ said Nicholas before Stanley could intervene. ‘Nothing to worry us. We gave them short shrift.’
‘And now we are here, safe within the far-famed walls of Moscow,’ said Stanley. ‘As personal guests of the Czar himself, no man will harm us. Loyal as we are to his cause.’
Maliuta Skuratov’s eyes glittered and he smiled, drawing on black gloves of thinnest leather. ‘Quite so,’ he said. ‘Sleep well tonight in the English House. But do post sound guards at your door. We live in uncertain times.’
‘That was him,’ hissed Nicholas as they hurried along the dark streets, led by a linksman with a lantern.
‘Quickly, quickly,’ said Thomas Waverley, glancing back at them. ‘We should not linger out this late.’
Yet Stanley did the opposite. ‘All of you, when I drop my right hand, halt.’ His hand dropped. Their footsteps fell silent. And somewhere behind them in the darkness, they heard one or two more pattering footsteps before they too halted.
‘We are being followed. Walk on quickly now. And I hope you trust your guards, Master Waverley.’
‘Of course, of course,’ said Waverley. ‘Everyone is followed in this city. Do not worry.’ He himself looked more worried than any of them.
As they neared the English House, Stanley stopped again and darted into a town garden that had run to seed, the house itself derelict and dark.
‘What the devil are you doing, sir?’ hissed Waverley.
Stanley appeared to be kneeling amid what was once a herb garden, like a man looking for a lost ring, and then he stood and went over to a large tree and then came back with a bunch of greenery in his hand. ‘Picking flowers,’ he said brightly. ‘Homeward!’
Stenka and Andriushko themselves slept on the floor across the doorways of the English House, much to the merchants’ disapproval.
‘If you are butchered in your beds tonight,’ explained Stenka cheerfully, ‘at least it’ll be over our dead bodies.’
Thomas Waverley looked pale.
Nicholas dreamt that they were crossing a wide, wide river over the thinnest ice, and under it he could see fires, spears, and roaming wolves in the ice-blue caverns. And the Wolfmaster himself was Ivan, tall and lean and black-robed, eyes burning like fire under the ice, spear in hand, conducting them down deeper and deeper, into a place of burning. And then he awoke out of his troubled dreams. ‘Hodge,’ he groaned. ‘Hodge!’
Hodge woke and lit a candle and raised it and stared at Nicholas’s face. He looked deeply shocked. Then Nicholas knew he was really ill.
Hodge went running down the corridor to get Stanley.
Nicholas lay back, feeling like he was dying.
He was already half delirious by the time Stanley and Smith and Hodge were around him again, candles being lit, Stanley pulling up a stool.
‘That Maliuta Skuratov,’ said Stanley urgently, ‘did you shake his hand?’
‘Can’t remember,’ mumbled Nicholas, ‘don’t think.’ His tongue felt thick and dry in his mouth, his head hammered, sweat poured from his forehead. Worst of all were the cramps. He felt like a chirurgeon had sliced open his belly, delved in with both hands and was twisting his guts into elaborate knots.
Waverley hovered anxiously behind them. ‘Shall we all be poisoned? Is it the plague? Tell me it is not the plague!’
‘I think not,’ said Stanley through gritted teeth. ‘Wake up your kitchens, get me boiling water. Smith. You know what I picked …’
Smith was already out of the door. He returned with the bunch of greenery in a vase which Stanley had mysteriously foraged from the garden earlier. Sprigs of oak leaf, huge horseradish leaves, feathery yarrow …
‘Not just fortuitous, I take it?’ said Smith.
Stanley shook his head. ‘Precautionary.’
A wide-eyed maidservant appeared and Stanley rattled off orders. Were there bilberries or cranberries in the kitchen?
‘Cranberries, yes, sir.’
‘Smith – to the kitchens. You know what I want.’
Though they were absolute equals as Knights Commander of St John, Smith obeyed again. If anyone should take charge over a sick man, it was Sir Edward Stanley.
Nicholas groaned again, heaved, arched his back. Stanley’s own mouth was dry with anxiety. This was bad. He started forcing him to drink warm water, fresh-boiled and half-cooled. Pint after pint after pint.
‘Will he live?’ asked Hodge with quiet desperation. ‘What can I do?’
‘Stay near him is best,’ said Stanley. ‘Keep talking. He’ll hear your voice.’
Smith returned with various steaming bowls and mugs. Stanley mixed up grim-looking green potations that smelt of bitter field herbs and wet woodland, and forced Nicholas to drink again. He gagged, choked – and drank more. He prayed that the astringent tannins of oak leaf, the mysterious healing properties of dark-coloured berries and yarrow leaf would do their work.
Yet still Nicholas struggled – and then his breathing began to worsen, his chest rising and falling in shallow heaves as he desperately tried to suck in air. He could drink no more.
‘Do something!’ cried Hodge. ‘He’s going!’
It was Smith then who leaned forward and raised one of Nicholas’s eyelids – pupil dilated, as Stanley had already found – but then he raised the other eyelid as well. ‘See!’
The other pupil was normal.
‘The devil! I think he’s been poisoned twice,’ said Stanley. ‘Hodge, my pannier in my chamber, bring it!’
Hodge was back in seconds, almost tripping in his haste. Stanley rummaged in his pannier for a small leather pouch, explaining as much to himself as to them while he did so. ‘A most cunning poisoner. The obvious signs were all of a stomach poison, which could have come from bad meat, bad water, bad luck—’
‘But did you see the way the servant handed us out those cups of negus at the end?’ said Hodge. ‘They meant to get him.’
Stanley stared. ‘Damnation, I think you’re right, sharp-eyed Hodge. We do have enemies.’ He was shaking a yellow powder from the pouch into another cup of warm water and swirling it about. ‘Our cranberries and our oak leaf and such have powerful effects against stomach poisoning. But underneath that concentrated rottenness he was dosed with, something else is working too. The devils. It is that which would have killed him.’ Stanley was more confident now, praying inwardly. O Saint Luke, the doctor evangelist, and Saint Benedict, patron saint of those who had been poisoned. Let him not die, he prayed. His time is not yet. He is sinful but he is young.
He held the cup to Nicholas’s bloodless lips and trickled the liquid into his mouth. ‘Drink in between breaths, Brother Nicholas. Drink.’
With great self-mastery, barely conscious of where or who he was, but hearing that deep, reassuring voice, Nicholas raised his burning head off the pillow and swallowed and breathed fast and shallow and swallowed again as he was bid. Every part of him was in pain, his lungs most of all now, burning up – but his mind was blissfully far off from that, in white cloud. He drank more. He was gone.
‘What a game of wits it is,’ said Stanley.
Hodge looked sour. A game of wits and medical cunning played over his poor shivering sweat-soaked friend’s mortal body.
‘Worry not, Brother Hodge,’ said Stanley. ‘We are not heartless, but light-hearted. Can you not hear his breathing steadying already? We are in control now, thanks be to God for the Queen of Antidotes – the rarest herb of the Americas, carried in my pannier day and night.’
‘It was snake venom,’ said Smith.
‘My thinking exactly,’ said Stanley. ‘Our dear Ingoldsby was poisoned in his stomach, but also by snake venom. Truly devilish. This Elysius Bomelius has my sincere admiration. But now Ingoldsby here has working in him a herb called ipecacuanha. I wonder if our little friend Bomelius knows about this one? Fresh from the New World, the most powerful antivenin our Order of St John has ever seen work.’
‘They make us welcome here, don’t they?’ muttered Hodge. Then suddenly overcome he blurted out, almost in tears, ‘Will he be damaged for life in his organs, Stanley?’
‘Be not anxious, Brother Hodge. If we have treated him fast enough, there will be no lasting damage. He is young and strong.’
‘But why Nick?’
Stanley shook his head. ‘Perhaps it was meant for all of us. I do not know. Here, you make him drink.’
Hodge continued to make Nicholas sip on the potion, trickling it in mouthful by mouthful. ‘Be strong, Nick,’ he said softly all the while. ‘Breathe slow and deep, you will mend. And then we’ll get that bastard.’
At those words, Nicholas’s right hand clamped into a fist and he punched down weakly on the bed. Then they knew he would mend. Stanley laid his head on Nicholas’s chest. His heartbeat was returning to normal.
‘He’ll live then,’ said Smith, even more gruff than usual to hide his joy. ‘I’m off to bed. Hodge, stay with him.’
Nicholas awoke after daybreak to find Hodge, having been awake by his side until nearly dawn, now fast asleep. He grinned and stood slowly and flexed his limbs. Not bad. He stared at his tongue in the glass. Peculiarly yellow. Could be the poison, could be the cure. He was weak as a kitten, and still abominably thirsty, but all things considered … not bad.
He leant on the window sill with his brow against the lintel and looked out over the city. Church bells ringing, wood-fires burning, bread baking, shouts from the river, the summer sun coming up warm over the measureless continent to the east, all the way to Cathay … His heart stirred. In the dusty streets below, people abroad, washing faces and hands at corner pumps, the hung-over drenching their heads from wooden pails at the sides of wells, scolded by the old women for the waste of it. Nicholas grinned. These old Russian babushkas were a fierce tribe.
Two exotic-looking merchants on horseback, a noble lady hidden in a fine sedan chair going by, a horde of children following after a ragged barefoot priest, an old man pulling a camel – a camel? – and then the prettiest gooseherd of a girl he had ever seen in his life, driving before her a good forty cackling snow white geese, herself almost as fair. It would be vulgar to whistle down at her. Who was he, Sir Nicholas Ingoldsby, Bt, or some bricklayer by St-Mary-le-Bow? Yet by God she was pretty. He willed, but she never looked up. He would never see her again nor speak to her, let alone—
Fool. Amorous fool.
Yet it was a peaceful scene. Could an army really be coming? Did it make sense? Surely it was probable the Tatars would simply accept a pay-off and ride back to the Crimea with a few chests of gold?
Then round the corner came an eruption of horsemen, some five or six, and the geese reared up flapping their wings, orange beaks wide and indignant, then scattered, the harassed goosegirl trying to round them up again.
‘Hey!’ he shouted out. Pointless, he was not even heard.
The six horsemen slewed to halt. Immediately below. At the very door of the English House. And they were well-armed.
Nicholas was already running to shake Hodge awake where he lay on a low campbed – ‘Buckle up, we’ve got visitors’ – and then yelling out for Smith and Stanley. His yells were almost drowned by a furious hammering at the door. He seized his sword and ran to the top of the stairs barefoot. In the hall below, Stenka and Andriushko were already on their feet and glaring at the quaking door. But they had no weapons to hand.
Another figure appeared fleetly at Nicholas’s side. It was the girl Rebecca in a white nightshift.
‘Back to your room,’ he snapped.
‘I don’t take orders from guests in my own house,’ she snapped back.
The door was juddering violently.
‘Believe me,’ said Nicholas. ‘We are your best hope now. Not men such as your father—’
‘And I’ll thank you not to call my father a coward!’ Her dark eyes blazed.
He had seen that hot dark look in many a fair face before. Ah, how he loved a maid’s fieriness. Such promise and passion in it!
‘It is sober merchants and men of business such as my good father who earn the gold which makes England great. Not swaggering, unshaven adventurers like yourself and your companions. Who manufactures your powder, your swords, your armour? Do they fall ripe from trees?’
He grimaced. There was some truth in her answer. But still, that door was about to come in …
‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘But really, you should …’
At that instant, Rebecca’s beloved English nurse, old Hannah, appeared in the corridor too, bustling and tutting. ‘What are you doing out here in your shift, girl!’ she cried. ‘Back to your chamber, tut-tut, where is your maiden modesty before strangers? And you, sir, what is this, what is this? Put away that unmannerly naked sword, this is the English House, not a backstreet tavern!’
And then there was Thomas Waverley too, tucking his shirt into his breeches – and Smith and Stanley both racing past them all, swords already drawn, and taking up a fighting stance at the top of the stairs.
‘Is there a safe room for you?’ demanded Stanley.
‘There are extensive cellars,’ said Waverley reluctantly, ‘well-built, for our wines. But I do not—’
At that instant a panicked servant scurried across the hallway and flung back the bar. The doors crashed open and two or three of the dismounted riders came striding in. They eyed the drawn swords of the men on the stairs, unimpressed. Soldiers, Nicholas surmised at once. Not Oprichnina. Proper soldiers.
‘To the Kremlin with you,’ said one gruffly, with fine military succinctness. ‘The four emissaries. Czar’s own orders.’
