The Last Crusaders: Ivan the Terrible (18 page)

‘Hodge,’ said Stanley, ‘you remain here.’ He clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Remember this is English soil, old comrade. It will agree with you.’

Smith said, ‘Organzie the servants as best you can, stout sticks and staves at the door. Stop that Russian wench caterwauling and putting the fear of God in ’em all. Tell any that come to the House in no uncertain terms that it is English, favoured by the Czar himself. Deny all knowledge of that damned letter. Hold firm. The mob has no real plan, no real determination, and can be turned aside by firmness. And if you have to fall back – take to the wine cellars.’

‘And the Oprichnina? If they come?’

Stanley’s mind raced. What indeed? He pictured them all trapped on a desolate plain, between a line of Tatar horsemen to the south, and to the north, a monstrous, red-mawed bear. ‘We will be back soon. Stand fast. Hold firm.’

Waverley was not yet done. ‘I’ll not take orders from servants, even in extremis! I am still master of this House!’

Smith lost his last shred of restraint. It never took much. He seized a fistful of Waverley’s doublet-front and pulled the merchant towards him, until their faces were but an inch or two apart: a study in contrasts, the merchant whey-faced, scanty-bearded, looking into the blood-red face of Mars himself. Waverley went up on quivering tiptoes. ‘Do as Hodge says,’ Smith advised him softly. ‘You are no longer master of this house.’

Then he dropped him and they were gone.

28

Nicholas was mounted up and out of the stables. No good ordering him to stay. He was already, on such slim acquaintance – Stanley could see it plain – half in love with the girl Rebecca. Well, he thought with a sour smile, at least unlike so many of his other conquests, she wasn’t half-whore. Though sired by a world-class dolt.

The other two were saddled up in less than a minute and galloping out through the stable-yard arch into the street, the servants bolting the gates firmly behind them. They reined in and listened a moment. Distant shouts and cries, the sky full of eerie light and soaring sparks, everything humming and prickling. Waverley’s pale, silent face looking down on them from an upper window. But otherwise they were not watched. The Oprichnina were busy elsewhere tonight.

Then Nicholas saw it. Nailed to the front door of the house, concealed from Waverley’s view above by the portico, was the head of Edward Ballard, his mouth an open, gory hole. They had knocked out all his teeth.

Stanley swiftly rode over and pulled the ghastly trophy free of the nail and hid it under his cloak. They rode up the street and he stopped on the narrow bridge and dropped it into the stream below. An ill burial. They could do no other. He prayed for the poor man’s soul.

He said to them, ‘Our own lives are in danger here with every breath, but we must pray that Christ and the darkness will protect us. The girl cannot have got far, and we know where she is heading. Hannah also will be between here and the market. For God’s sake do not be recognized, do not let your faces be seen by those devil’s black horsemen. Keep to the shadows.’

‘There are many shadows in this city,’ said Smith.

‘Speak only Russian. Do not even try to explain that we are English and under protection. A mob inflamed with murder pays no heed.’

Nicholas had no helmet. He tied a kerchief over his nose and mouth, and they urged their horses on, towards whatever evil cere­mony or foul Walpurgisnacht was taking place in the heart of the accursed city.

They passed by refugees, huddled, half-starved, bareheaded, sitting like beggars and madmen in a graveyard under hides and soiled blankets. They cried out feebly for food and water but what could the three riders do? Down the street, the wooden houses of the citizenry were all firmly barred against the desperate country ­people, flooding into the city for succour. A cruel regime makes all its people cruel, thought Nicholas. The infection of callousness starts at the top.

The evening market lay in the north of the city, beyond the river and the main square. They must find her. They must. O, God, where was she? Mary shield her. Nicholas kept the outward calm of his older comrades, but his heart thumped with a painful dread. Where in this garish hell of a city could she be? Seeing such an eruption of the mob, would she not seek refuge in some kindly household, some monastery? But was there one safe place for her in the city? Was there any such kindness? He rode tall in the saddle, looking down every side street, surveying the dark houses and stables for the outline of a girl crouching, trembling. Such innocence must be saved. He felt it all the more acutely, knowing his own innocence was so long gone. She was a symbol to him now. Oh, if he could but shield her from the horrors to come, the atrocities of the Czar and the onslaught of the Tatar. A maid like her should not see them – but she would. What could he do, one paltry horseman, against such a storm of history? She was out alone now amid this, all he could do was find her, protect her, and try to weather it together. He dreamed as he rode, searching the darkness with a night-hunter’s eyes, that they would eventually ride away together, somehow, flee this accursed city, out into the sweet green countryside again …

The shouts of an inflamed crowd filled the air, and they carried their swords drawn, rested bare against their right shoulders like Spanish hidalgos, reins in their left hands. Rode tall and confident and haughty, so the mob would take one look at them and step aside, doffing caps, bowing, remembering they were but lowly serfs and peasants.

They rounded the corner, and there was the arched stone bridge over the Moskva – meaning
dark or troubled waters
,
Cecil had said – and it was densely crowded with people watching some torchlit spectacle on the water below. Brutish faces gleamed, mouths open and roaring like a crowd at a bear pit. Many were so drunk they could barely stand, breathing gusts of venomous grain spirit over each other, held upright only by the tightly wedged jam of their neighbours.

The three reined in at the edge of the crowd. Some glanced at them uncertainly but most ignored them.

‘If we force our way through it will attract a deal of attention,’ said Stanley.

‘What else can we do?’ said Smith. ‘Swim our horses across?’

Nicholas was standing up on his saddle, a little precariously. He said, ‘I’d keep out of the river if I were you.’

They rode through to the wall of the bridge, crying ‘Soldiers of the Czar!’ and the drunken crowd shuffled and shoved and barged and made way. They looked down. Spectators were roaring with glee and with relief that it was not they who were suffering down there.

The slow-moving river was illuminated for several hundred yards by bankside bonfires and flaming torches, as for some glittering royal pageant on the Thames: the gilded royal barge, brass trumpets flaring, regal magnificence, all of the guilds and citizens of London out to cheer Her Majesty, Gloriana, down to Greenwich in her splendour … but here things were done differently.

Here the torches were lit to illuminate the ceremony of the Oprichnina driving whole families wailing down into the river. The mob all around him was cheering them on, like some game played on the Styx or Acheron or one of the rivers of Hell.

Mothers floundered out into the deep mid-channel of the river, cold even in summer, and began to sink in their long skirts. More were driven into the water behind them at spearpoint. They cried out and rolled back, faces lifted out of the water, thrashing, struggling for breath. Then more of the Oprichnina pushed out among them in wooden longboats, and with long poles and boat hooks started clubbing them about the head or stabbing them with fishing gaffs and dunking them back under until they came up no more. They and their admiring spectators on the bridge found it all high entertainment. Nicholas felt physically sick.

‘Here’s another, here!’ shouted down a woman just near Nicholas, gesturing wildly. ‘Look, you missed her!’

And the Oprichnina came over in their boats. ‘Back down below, little fish, where you belong!’ Their wit was scintillating.

On the bankside just below the bridge now there also appeared a procession of Jewish elders in long robes. They went with dignity, eyes closed, praying the ancient prayers of King David. At the edge of the river they were clubbed across the back of the head and fell forwards into the water. The Oprichnina then dragged and kicked their unconscious bodies out into the river like so many animal ­carcases from the slaughterhouse, to be carried away by the Moskva, eastwards down to the Oka and then the mighty Volga and the sea.

One of the elders raised his head just before the blow of the club was delivered, and said in a voice that carried like the voice of a high priest over the water, ‘But hear me, though my people have not leagued with the Tatars, yet they are coming!’ By the flickering torchlight, Nicholas even thought he saw the bearded elder smile. ‘We have heard it. Tomorrow the wrath of God will come upon you for what you have done to his people, and the horsemen will come like fire and whirlwind. Your proud towers will be laid low, your walls will fall like dust, and you will be utterly consumed.’

And then the club sounded with a sickening hollow thunk across the back of his close-capped skull and he fell forwards.

Further along the crowded bridge, more people were being thrown over the parapet: old women, slaves, whole families.

‘What is their offence?’ demanded Nicholas of the red-faced fellow near him with the thick white moustache.

‘Traitors to our beloved Father the Czar!’ cried the fellow. ‘Jews, foreigners! Have you not heard?’

Nicholas glanced back the way they had come and there in the middle of the street was a single rider on a black horse, in a long black cloak, dog’s head hung from his saddle. The horseman seemed to be regarding him steadily through his wooden animal mask with that horrible lupine stare, eyes burning through the dark eyeholes.

Stanley had seen him too. He turned his face away. ‘Cheer,’ he snapped.

‘What?’

‘Raise your arm,’ he said, doing so himself. ‘Death to the ­traitors, everlasting life to the Czar!’

Another splash, another roar, another dull clubbing. Though it sickened them to their stomachs, both Nicholas and Smith saw he was right. May God forgive them. They raised their arms and cheered as another innocent was forced under.

‘And we are fighting soon to save this city?’ muttered Nicholas. ‘Why not just let it burn?’

‘This mob is but a thousand strong,’ said Stanley rapidly, beneath the roar of the crowd. ‘A thousand more Oprichnina. Enough to make a massacre. A city in boiling chaos is like a pot of boiling fowl. The scum rises to the top. Look around you – discreetly. Our friend still sits behind us. These are the worst of the people. The men are brutes and criminals, the women worse, the sourest, wanting vengeance on life itself for their own hardships. Look at the raddled old whore down there, rejoicing to see the beautiful young Jewess drowned. But most good folk are safe in their houses, as scared of all this as any. As is intended. There are many thousands of refugees from the country here too now, you saw them in the graveyard. They are not murderers and savages, they are a lost and suffering people. There are children and infants who do not deserve to die or be sold into cruel Tatar slavery. The Knights do not fight for mankind because they are innocent or perfect, but because they are mankind, and loved by God.’

Nicholas remained silent, heart wrenched. He felt a horrible powerlessness at so much passive suffering, so draining, so miserable, until he almost began to feel shame at being human. This was so far different from a noble cause like Malta, or a great maritime crusade like Lepanto. It would help if the fight could begin. But who to fight? Trapped in this squalid antechamber of hell. Let the girl be found at least, sweet Christ. Then let them just get home.

Suddenly a different shout went up from the mob, some word going round that the great festival in the square was about to commence, with the Czar himself as master of ceremonies. They began to surge north over the bridge and through the streets towards the great red square of St Basil’s Cathedral.

‘Come!’ cried Smith. ‘Push on through! Make way, soldiers of the Czar! Make way, you scum!’ And he heeled his horse forward through the people, freeing his boots from his stirrups and kicking out left and right. The people soon made way.

Nicholas glanced back. Their dark observer was gone.

29

They forced their way through the crowd with as much speed and braggadocio as possible, Smith leading. It was his forte. One glance up at that red-eyed, bull-necked figure, something like a centaur crossed with a minotaur, bellowing in thick Russian and waving a bare sword to boot, and most people gave him plenty of room. As they got ahead of the crowd and came towards the great square of St Basil, they forced their horses into a canter, veering and swerving to miss various obstacles. There was an elderly man lynched and hanging from a wall like a withered fruit. And there were more bodies strewn in the streets.

And then they heard a voice ring out behind them. ‘Those three! They are not to be trusted! Bring them down!’

Suddenly all pretence was gone. They spurred their horses into a crazed gallop and veered away from the flood of people streaming towards the centre, wrenching their reins and slewing right into a darker street between high wooden houses. Heart racing, mouth dry as dust, Nicholas saw a great burning firework fly across the sky overhead. How they were celebrating their pogrom!

The streets went by in a blur, shouts and cries, screams and odd musket shots. The city was in chaos, half the people were drunk, and it was all to the Englishmen’s advantage. No one knew what was going on. Another great flaming ball of a firework, fired with such carelessness that it caromed into a steep rooftop opposite, tiled with wooden shingles like all the houses in Moscow, dried pale grey in the summer sun. Almost instantaneously a house fire broke out.

‘That’ll really help!’ cried Smith. He might not have been joking.

Nicholas rode with his sword trailing low, ready. Someone staggered forwards out of the shadows and took a swipe at his face with a blazing torch. He wasn’t sure if it was only an accident but he struck it away with the full force of his blade. Someone cried out, already behind him now, and he rode on. The street curved around, the high close-packed ramshackle wooden houses seemed to teeter over their heads, and yet another firework exploded onto a rooftop nearby.

‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ said Stanley.

‘That I am,’ said Smith.

‘What?’ cried Nicholas.

Smith grinned insanely. ‘Those are no fireworks.’

No time to explain. Ahead of them the dark street was burning with the infernal orange glow of another house fire, and they galloped round, meaning to get past before it was too late. The Muscovites seemed intent not only on exterminating all Jews and foreigners tonight, any Persian and Tatar merchants unfortunate enough to be in the city, but on burning down their own city as well, to flush out the vermin and the enemy within. Such madness. And amid this growing madness, there were more and more chances for the English party to survive, if they could but seize them. But they must find the girl and old Hannah. Defeating the Tatars now seemed no more than a hollow jest, a distant dream.

But the orange glow wasn’t a house fire. They came round a corner and pulled up their horses so violently they reared and screamed, teeth bared, throats stretched taut. Ahead of them was a burning barricade of logwood, timber and smashed wagons. To prevent any wretches from trying to flee the festivities in the square, presumably. Burning everywhere. What need for the Tatars? And it was manned by a line of ugly-looking brutes armed with wood-axes, pruning hooks, hayforks and all the other clumsily murderous ironmongery of the peasantry-at-arms.

As always in moments of extreme danger, time slowed and Nicholas had time to think and plan – though he knew now it was really his brain racing urgently ahead, to ensure his own survival. This was no line of soldiers, just thugs. Untrained, one line deep, none behind. As he came crashing through, mounted, above them, there would only be a single man in range of hurting him on either flank. So all he had to do as he vaulted his horse over the barri­cade – all! – assuming the animal did his bidding, conquered its own primeval and thoroughly pragmatic terror of fire, and didn’t get itself skewered in the chest by a pitchfork – all he had to do was avoid a slash or a stab on each side, and cut the two fellows down in the correct order: first the more dangerous, then the less dangerous one. And all this to be judged and executed while in the air, clenching his mount, leaning fore then aft, and praying not to be pitched over onto the ground as they landed. For then he would be quickly despatched where he lay.

No more time. The heat of the barricade burned his face, the brutes moved and readied their weapons, seeing these three ferocious-­looking horsemen ride down upon them. Nicholas kicked his poor beast – and it shied violently at the leaping flames, reared up, screaming that terrible whinnying horse-scream. He held on. Smith and Stanley were over already and down the alley, not yet realising they had lost him. The peasants regarded this flailing ­spectre, began to crowd around him, though keeping their distance as he slashed around him mightily with his sword. He must pass. He must pass! Then they were swarming around him like wasps around an invading hornet, and he was slashing and cutting at them – these very people they had supposedly come to defend.

With one last terrific heave he pulled his horse around, deliver­ing a wide semicircle of a sword slash with it, and men went reeling backwards clutching opened faces. He spurred his horse back up the alley, took in another cluster of people ahead of him, wrenched his reins left so hard his horse’s rump skidded down into the ground, rear legs buckling, up again, sprang forward – another alley, another, under the inner walls of the city now, more fires, blurred faces, he was alone.

He cantered on, sometimes shouting out idiot Russian for good measure – ‘Long life to the Czar! Death to wicked foreigners!’ – almost laughing in his wild elation. It was becoming dreamlike now, as combat often could, and he began to feel absurdly invincible. Not good. No one was invincible.

He pushed up in his stirrups, stared about, glanced down every alley – and then there was another crowd of people across a street ahead, their backs to him. He craned over their heads. A terrific explosion went off somewhere in the heart of the city and women crossed themselves and cried out they were betrayed. The city was in the grip of near total hysteria. The Czar’s madness had spread over all.

He looked over the crowd of people, standing with solemn and murderous intent, and saw beyond them, trapped in a blind alley – the scene rushed towards him, magnified, intensified – the huddled figures of a girl and her aged nurse. The old woman in a grey serge dress and white apron, the young girl in a dark grey cloak, face buried in fear against her nurse’s side. Behind them, still another fire burned.

Rebecca looked up and saw some horsemen behind the mob. Oprichnina no doubt. She was already praying to Christ to receive their souls. Two of the mob began to walk forward with their long staves, another was putting an arrow to a primitive woodsman’s bow. One shouted how pretty she was, though she was no Russian.

They shouted, ‘Death to the foreigners, death to the Jews, death to the Jewish whore and her bawd!’

Time slowed and Rebecca saw the arrow revolving slow but flying fast. Hannah stepped in front of her and the arrow found its mark with an ugly thump high in the nurse’s chest. She gasped, the thick grey serge of her dress and her white apron gradually stained red, and then she staggered. Far, far away, people were shouting. The girl behind her flung her arms about her beloved nurse and screamed, and they stood like that together for a moment, as if there was still hope. And then Hannah’s head fell forward on her chest and her weight dragged them both to the ground. The girl fell upon her howling.

Feeling a warm flood of power, the bowman nocked another arrow to the string.

Nicholas galloped round in a frenzy, however painfully his horse’s hooves must fall on the hard-packed summer earth, and found the entrance to the dark passageway he had glimpsed ahead.

The arrow flew and clattered uselessly wide. The bowman nocked another but another man batted him down. The mob walked nearer, grinning now. The alley was dark and there were many doorways. Why trouble to kill this Jewish whore? Why not just rape her to death?

And then out of one of those dark doorways, against the orange firelight that burned at the dead end of the alley, there stepped a single horseman, black silhouette against the flames. The men stopped, puzzled, muttering. ‘Oprichnina …?’

Nicholas sheathed his sword a moment and got quietly down and calmed his horse. Then he looked up at the ranks of the soot-smeared, sweat-streaked mob, and said, ‘Not Oprichnina, no. Englishman, and Christ be thanked, not damned Russian like you.’

They stared a little longer, motionless, dumbfounded. Very swiftly he turned to the girl, kneeling in the dust, clinging to the dead weight of her nurse like some shivering monkey to its mother. He prised her fingers apart. She was exhausted with grief. He laid Hannah down on the ground and pressed his fingertips under her jawline, then closed her eyes with a sweep of his hand. He slipped his arm round the girl’s back and his other arm behind her legs and lifted her up and laid her across his left shoulder.

He was aware without looking that they were starting to run towards him now, an animal roar, angry blackened faces in the firelight, faces bestial, contorted beyond reason or plea, bent only on slaying. He laid the girl across his horse’s withers and keeping the nervous stepping beast between him and the mob, set his left foot in the stirrup and … could not remount. Only then did he know he had been cut across the thigh by some filthy peasant blade. He still could not feel it. The devil. He stood as tall as he could, grabbed his saddle, tried to vault up, his thigh muscle screamed red and hot, he failed again. The horse began to pull around in its terror, the animal roar of the mob in its flattened ears. Nicholas’s sword still sheathed. The girl as if asleep across his horse. Please God. He breathed deep and heaved once more and was clumsily across and pulled himself upright and swiftly round and found his stirrups and drew his sword and cut wide. Then there was one fellow with the telltale look who came first, a fellow who must be taken down, and he wrenched the horse right and drove his sword forward unexpectedly over the girl’s body and down into his throat. Pulled back his sword, the fellow came with it, fell gargling against the girl’s dress. He wrenched his sword free, spurred violently. The rest of the mob came on. Among them, he saw a fat woman with a sickle and a boy with a dog on a rope.

He made for the narrow passageway just as two big armoured horsemen appeared. One of them was slathered in blood across his gleaming breastplate and pauldron. The two horsemen nodded and rode out into the blind alley and took up their positions, like bronze equestrian statues facing the mob. The boy rode away down the dark passageway with the girl.

The two horsemen sat their horses with swords ready but in utter silence, their visors down. Like gleaming metallic gods. The mob numbered more than a hundred, and yet, and yet … They slowed and came to an angry, frustrated halt, some twenty feet before the two silent figures guarding the passageway. There was a moment’s pause. And then, very slowly, one of the horsemen shook his head.