The Golden Horde (10 page)

There was a long silence after that; the Grey Wolf guessed it was mostly disbelief from listeners who could never imagine themselves doing any such thing at any lord’s command. They knew little about the Tatars.

“We are the Khan’s arrows,” said the other man, also speaking Russian and as well as any of the various Rus who listened to him, “that he may let fly on a venture and not fear to lose, if that loss serves his purpose.”

“If your Khan has no concern about your loss,” said Roman Ingvarevich, his voice taking on an ugly, husky tone, “then why should I disappoint him?”

For the first time since Volk Volkovich had heard him speak, he forgot or no longer chose to use the plural of his princely dignity – and what
that
might mean, the Grey Wolf could only wonder. It was apparent from the man’s words that he had failed to hear the threat or promise in what the Tatar had just told him. Whatever he did now, unless to submit, would be fatally wrong.

And being the sort of Prince he was, Roman Ingvarevich did it.

“Seize them!” he yelled, as everyone including the Grey Wolf – and probably the Tatar emissaries – had been expecting since the conversation first began. Spear-butts swung and thudded and the three riders spilled from their saddles to sprawl at the Prince’s scarlet-booted feet. His soldiers leapt on them, lifted them, looped cords around their wrists and ankles, then jerked the knots brutally tight and let them drop back into the snow. Roman Ingvarevich of Ryazan looked down at them and smiled. “Now that,” he said, “is a better position to adopt when you speak to me. Have you anything else to say? Any other wise observations? Threats? Pleas for mercy?”

If
you’re
expecting
that
, thought Volk Volkovich, scrambling to his feet and backing further into the shadows,
then
best
not
hold
your
breath
while
you
wait
.

The Prince had just doomed himself and his entire city to whatever the Tatar army had been intending for it all along. The reason was obvious, made plain from the first by his treatment of the Kipchaq that Tsar Ivan had sent to warn him. Roman Ingvarevich was totally ignorant of the numbers he faced, because he didn’t believe what he’d been told could be the truth. Tsar Ivan himself teased his Kipchaq mercenaries for routinely doubling numbers encountered, or dangers faced, or hazards surmounted, all for the sake of more silver than he’d already paid them. But he believed them more often than not, rather than automatically dismissing every word as a lie just because of their race. The Grey Wolf suspected that the Prince of Ryazan habitually halved, and then halved again, whatever he was told by a Kipchaq. He might, just might, live long enough to realize what a fatal mistake that had been, and yield up the city before Subotai or Burundai or Batu brought their boot down and ground every living thing within its walls out of existence.

Or then again – Volk Volkovich eyed the preparations being made – he might not.

A prince acting in the heat of passion after an insult might have made excuses afterwards for having his guards decapitate whoever had offended him. The Tatars, themselves notorious cutters-off of heads, might have understood and forgiven if the prince in question grovelled properly before the Khan and banged his forehead against the earth in the approved fashion.

What they would not forgive was the removal of their emissaries’ heads not with the quick sweep of sword or axe, but slowly under the teeth of a double-handed saw from the city’s lumber-yard.

A block of timber was brought and the two male Tatars flung across it from opposite sides, with a broad plank laid flat from shoulder to shoulder across their necks to give the saw something to bite on before its blade reached flesh. At a gesture from Prince Roman Ingvarevich two guardsmen grasped the handles of the saw and went to work, until blood steamed in the cold air and sticky gobbets of flesh mingled with drifts of fresh pine sawdust and the heads rolled free at last. That messy execution had fewer witnesses at the end than at the beginning, for citizens at first fascinated and later nauseated fled in ever-increasing numbers.

Even the Grey Wolf, his mouth watering as the scent of freshly-butchered meat filled his nostrils, regarded the proceeding as a pointless shambles. He had never taken so long over killing even armoured men, and while he could understand the Prince’s desire to strike terror into his enemies, it made sense only if the terror would do some good. No Rus could teach anything about inspiring dread to a host whose warriors, sixteen years past, had methodically, efficiently and systematically slaughtered the seven hundred thousand people crowded for safety behind the walls of the Persian city of Merv, just to encourage the next city on their line of march to surrender more readily.

Prince Roman Ingvarevich looked on with an irritable air of vague dissatisfaction, vexed that from first to last the Tatars made no sound. There was little point in creating original methods of death when those who suffered them refused to show it.

“And the woman, Highness?” said his Captain of Guards. The Prince broke out of some private dream and glanced at her, hoping for more reaction to the beheadings than he had seen in the men under the blade. He was disappointed.

“Do your men want her?”

“No, Highness.” The man spoke with urgent emphasis and Volk Volkovich, listening with pricked grey ears from well out of sight, lolled his tongue in a nasty grin. There were limits even to what the brutal and licentious soldiery would put up with, and now the deed was done they were beginning to feel the first tiny prickles of apprehension that it might have been excessive.

“Then put her where she belongs.” The Captain looked blank for long enough to become a target for his Prince’s unfocussed frustration. “On the horse, you idiot!” The sound of the back-handed slap was louder than any other noise in the square since the soggy rasping of saw-teeth fell silent. “Do I – do
we
have to explain every attempt at wit before we get some sort of response?”

The Guard-Captain shook his head, not in response to the question but to shift the stars floating across his vision. Cheated of pain from one source, Roman Ingvarevich did his best to create it elsewhere; the full weight of his arm and shoulder was behind that blow and for all his affected daintiness, the Prince of Ryazan was no scented exquisite. The Captain’s head was still ringing when he forced his mouth to say, “Shall we tie her in place?”

“Yes. And tie that carrion to their horses as well. Then get them out of our city, and out of our sight.” Roman Ingvarevich turned away, nursing his knuckles because not even a Prince can box the ears of a man in a helmet and mail hood without suffering the consequences, then swung back with a grin tugging his lips back from his teeth. It was such a grin as men might have called wolfish, though not in the Grey Wolf’s hearing if they valued their lives.

“No,” he said. “Take off her boots, put her in the saddle, then
stitch
her feet to the stirrups.”

It was done eventually, using coarse twine forced through holes made with a bradawl, and though it took three men to hold the horse’s head, the Tatar woman herself made no more sound than her companions had done under the saw. Their headless corpses were slung unceremoniously over their horses’ backs, strapped in place with stirrup leathers, and the severed heads were each tied to a loosely-flopping wrist with a braid of its late wearer’s own long hair.

Volk Volkovich the Grey Wolf arose, yawned, stretched, and watched as the three horses and their grisly burdens were whipped away from the gates of Ryazan. He decided there would be one more big dog among the many lurking around the Tatar camp when they arrived, unnoticed for the same reason he’d gone unseen here. Tsar Ivan would also welcome a report of the past half-hour’s proceedings. But there was one place he was certain he didn’t want to remain, and that was within this city’s walls.

Especially once the Tatars arrived…

*

For all it was closer than the Prince of Ryazan believed, Volk Volkovich didn’t go looking for the Tatar
bok
, an encampment large enough to be a city made of tents. Nor did he take even the little time that would have been required to make his report back to Tsar Ivan Aleksandrovich in Khorlov.

But he did get out of Ryazan, and quickly. He had never seen a Tatar horde in action, but had read and heard enough before setting out on this dangerous duty to know how easily the fast-moving nomad horsemen could throw a circle of steel around their quarry, whether man or beast or city under siege. They practiced such manoeuvres in the hunting field, where the common soldiers could hone their skills with spear and bow, and the commanders of tens, of hundreds and of thousands could learn the art of tactical command.

He also knew that retaining his proper shape of wolf, or at least of wolfish dog, was no guarantee of safety when – not if – the city fell. That dry stick Dmitriy Vasil’yevich Strel’tsin had personally warned him of it, driving home the message with a vigorous tapping on the page of one of his precious illuminated Persian chronicles. Chinghis-Khan’s favourite grandson had been killed during the taking of Bhamayan in Afghanistan, and in retaliation the Khan had obliterated the city so completely that when he was done with it, the site could have been ploughed and sown with grain. By his command, no head was left on any neck, neither the livestock nor the poultry nor even the dogs and cats which had survived being eaten during the siege. Even the corpses of the fallen were beheaded and their heads added to the appalling crow-haunted pyramid raised outside the vanished city as a memorial to that one young man.

The envoys killed by Prince Roman Ingvarevich might not be the relatives of anyone important, although given the woman shaman’s prideful membership of clan Korjagun there was always that risk. But they had been Mongols rather than some lesser tribe. That was bad enough, but the manner of their dying and the insulting mutilations inflicted on the woman who was also a priest would have been enough to inspire the notion of pitiless reprisals even in a Rus commander’s breast. How much more likely, then, that a Mongol khan would deal most savagely with the slayers of his kin.

The Grey Wolf intended to see, and report back what he saw first to Tsar Ivan then to the other Princes of the Rus, but not if possible to be any more involved than that. Being too close to a massacre, even one of the strictly disciplined massacres conducted by the Tatars, would prove unhealthy for even the most innocent bystander, and the Grey Wolf had promised his mother he would always be careful of his health…

He remained in wolf’s shape since it made survival on the wild winter steppe that much easier. If the Tatars caught him it might grant no more safety than staying in Ryazan, but first they had to catch him. He could run faster, see and hear better, smell what could neither be heard or seen and rip the throat from any threat before it could even react to his presence, and anyone who saw him now would think twice about being that threat. A wolf within the confines of a city might be presumed to be a dog, but not the huge, loping grey shape he had become. Volk Volkovich was not merely his proper shape but his proper size, big enough to have carried Prince Ivan on his back like a horse more than once. Even in Russia few wolves were so big, and even in Russia no wolves wore a backpack.

When he made his change from wolf to man, the man was naked under a long mantle of grey wolf-fur and for most situations that was inadequate. The pack contained clothing of the same soft grey as the fur of cloak or pelt, and by much necessary practice during his service with Ivan of Khorlov the Grey Wolf could transform himself from wolf to well-dressed man or back again in something less than three minutes. That had saved his life or his secrecy on more than one occasion, for adventuring with the Prince of Khorlov and his wife Mar’ya Morevna was anything but dull.

It would do him no good right now; a wild wolf in the woods would have a better chance of watching undisturbed than any man a domestic animal associated with the Principality of Ryazan. Volk Volkovich even wondered whether he should find some way to dye himself blue, as he’d done last year to great advantage when dealing with the Mongol clan Borjigun, Chinghis-Khan Temujin’s own people. His size and his carefully-applied colour had convinced them he was an incarnation of their ancestral deity the Sky-Blue Wolf, and superstitious good manners prevented them from wondering why their ancestor spoke only a debased and rather clumsy form of Farsi.

Or indeed how it was that despite many legends stating the Sky-Blue Wolf was female, the passage of years had made her so obviously male.

The Grey Wolf sighed gustily; that adventure had been exciting enough but much less dangerous than this. He began to dig a hole between the tangled roots of the tallest pine-tree he could see, and stopped only when he reached soil frozen so hard that even his claws could make no impression in it. He buried the pack there, marking the place not as a real wolf might by pissing on the tree, but in his mind’s eye. He might need that human clothing at a moment’s notice and had no desire to waste time he might not have to spare in sniffing from tree to tree like a dog in an orchard. With the loose dirt scraped into place, the Grey Wolf rose up on his hind legs and shook the lower branches of the tree to bring down loose snow over the patch of freshly-turned earth. If some wandering Tatar discovered the pack, the garments in it were of fine material but dull grey, a distinctive combination that might make their wearer just as distinctive and attract the attention a spy could do without.