CHAPTER 5:
ONE OF US
The messenger knelt in the tent, his long cloak of furs doing an ill job of masking how he shook from the cold he had endured to reach this encampment. Outside, the night wind made the hide walls ripple with its angry, icy lash; inside, braziers burned sweet-smelling coniferous wood, filling the air with a warmth that could not quite drive off the chill from without.
Melting snow dusted the messenger’s shoulders, and his short cropped hair framed a youthful face. He bore no weapons, having left sword and bow in the hands of the heavily scarred retainer who stood watch outside the door. His eyes were a light blue of the sort common in the north. Despite the dirt on his clothes, he had the look of a boyar’s son, nervous but eager to succeed, and as afraid of failure as he was hopeful for success in his mission.
Illarion felt a small knot twist in his gut—equal parts pity and grief. Had it not been for Onghwe Khan, this boy could be my son, he thought. He looked away from the boy, directing his gaze at the other person in the tent—the man whom the messenger had come to see.
Sitting in a dark chair, wrapped in surprisingly utilitarian garments for one of his station, was Prince Alexander Iaroslavich. He had a long, young face and his dark eyes had a weight to them that made his gaze hard to meet straight on. In years, he was little older than twenty, but the beard lining his jaw made him look older, and there was an energy about him that lay beneath the austere expression with which he watched the kneeling man. The Novgorodians had taken to calling him Nevsky after the battle of Neva he’d won in his nineteenth year. They had named him and then exiled him, and now they were asking him to come back.
The messenger fidgeted, looking sidelong at Illarion. Nevsky had heard his words, but was taking a long time to respond. Illarion had no advice to offer the young man.
Finally, Alexander sighed and the messenger stiffened, his gaze snapping back to Nevsky.
“Was there any dissention in the Veche?” Alexander asked. “Were they unified in this…request?” The prince’s tone was quiet and congenial, but Illarion heard the stress laid on the last word. In the brief time he’d been with Alexander, he had learned to hear the undercurrents in the prince’s diction. For all his youth, there was a hardened veteran—in both war and politics—that lived within that body. I am who I am because I have earned it, this voice said. Do not take me for a fool.
“They speak with one voice,” the messenger gulped, “and I am that voice. Lord, Novgorod the Great is in peril and, as one, the people call their Kynaz to his duty.”
As a prince of Novgorod, Alexander had been responsible for coming to its defense and negotiating its relations with foreign powers, all under the watchful, but distant, authority of his father, Iaroslav, in Vladimir. When the Mongols had come, Alexander had struck bargains with Batu and the other Khans: in return for taxes and obedience, Novgorod and Pskov were to be spared. The people had looked upon Alexander as their savior, and in retrospect, Illarion wished he and the other nobles of Volodymyr-Volynskyi had been less proud in their defiance when the horde had come to their walls. Shortly after the battle of Neva, where the young Alexander earned the name of Nevsky, the prince had laid claim to rights that the ruling boyars of Novgorod—the Veche—had been unhappy to grant. Their solution had been to exile the prince.
“Do you think I have abandoned my duty?” Alexander asked.
The messenger looked down at the floor of the tent, trying to hide the glimmer of fear in his eyes. Illarion stirred slightly, feeling the knot in his gut again, but he remained silent. While it had been clever of the boy to keep Alexander’s focus on him and not the Veche, the ploy had brought the entire weight of the Veche’s actions down upon his shoulders.
“I…I would not be here, my Prince,” the messenger said, “if I thought such a thing were possible.”
Alexander glanced at Illarion, a thin smile touching his lips, and Illarion inclined his head in return.
“I find such faith reassuring,” Alexander said quietly. “And I would hope that the Veche is of the same mind as you, as well as the same voice. I, too, am filled with faith—faith that the Veche has come to realize that their security must be paid for. Or do they still believe that men will die for them out of duty?”
The messenger touched his lips briefly with one hand, considering the prince’s question. “Will you heed the Veche?” he asked, opting to interpret the prince’s question as a decision.
“I might,” Alexander said. He clapped his hands, summoning the retainer from outside the tent. “See that he is fed and given a warm place to sleep. His ride has been long, and I can see that he is exhausted. God alone knows how difficult it was to find my camp in the dark.”
The retainer, a bearded man with a northern look who was one of Alexander’s sworn Druzhina, nodded in response and gestured for the messenger to follow him. The young man rose, seeming at once nervous and relieved, and made to follow the retainer. But he paused before he left the tent. “Is that the message you wish for me to take back?” he asked.
“Yes,” Alexander said. “Remind them that if they wish to lay claim to me in the guise of duty, I will expect the same from them.”
After the retainer and the messenger had left, the prince leaped out of the chair and began to pace around the tent. His face lost some of the severity it had held during the messenger’s visit, and his posture relaxed. “I had been planning on returning anyway,” he said to Illarion. “It will be easier now that they are expecting me.”
“Pride can slow a man’s actions,” Illarion said.
Alexander peered at his face for a moment and then laughed. “You are like an old grandmother,” he said. “I never know if you are talking about me”—he gestured at the wall of the tent—“or those old fools in the Veche.”
Or myself, Illarion thought fleetingly, an image of the old crone he had seen outside the citadel walls in Kiev flashing through his mind.
“Though it does not matter whether it was my zealousness or the Veche’s wounded honor,” Alexander continued, a frown pulling at his mouth. “The Veche may not trust me, but they will not stand in my way, and the militia of Novgorod will be at my back.”
“Dare you lay your trust there?” Illarion asked.
Alexander walked over to a small table shoved against the wall of the tent where a number of hide maps were scattered. From previous examination, Illarion knew they were out of date, but the inked details were of little import to Alexander. He hadn’t lived a cloistered life—much of his boyhood had been spent traveling between his family’s extensive holdings; as a result he knew the intimate details of his country better than any city-bound mapmaker.
“Perhaps it is a dangerous assumption,” the prince admitted as he shuffled through the maps to find one to his liking. “But this Hermann of Dorpat still has an army in Pskov. When the spring thaw arrives, he will march on Novgorod; otherwise, why would he be wintering in Rus when he could be in the comfort of his own home? Time is running out for the Veche, and I suspect they’ve called up what reserves they have and have realized they do not have enough men to make the Teutonics reconsider their plans.”
He found the map he was looking for and spread it across the top of the others. “They lack battle-tested commanders, and foolishly hoped that the Prince-Bishop would abandon Pskov when winter came.” He shook his head. “Naive fools. Winter did not stop Batu Khan from marching up our rivers and defeating my grandfather, my father, and my uncles in their turns. These knights know it is possible to conquer Rus; they might not have a strategist as brilliant as the Mongols, but they can follow a course laid by others.”
Hermann of Dorpat was the Prince-Bishop of Riga, a trading city that lay along the river route that the Vikings used to reach Byzantium. Livonia had been brought under Christian rule by the Livonian Brothers of the Sword and when the order was broken by a pagan army of Semigallians and Samogitians at Schaulen, Hermann had turned to the Teutonic Knights, who had only been too happy to crusade in the north. Bolstered by former members of the Livonian Order, Hermann’s army of Teutonic Knights had set their sights on Mongol-battered Novgorod.
“It isn’t just the weather, though,” Alexander mused. “They outnumber us and their knights are better armored. Why have they held back?”
“Uncertainty,” Illarion said as he walked over to the table and looked at the map Alexander was considering. “The Mongols have a tendency to feign a retreat. This kuraltai could be another ruse. Had Hermann marched earlier, he might have done so only to discover the horde waiting for him.”
“This…what did you call it?”
“Kuraltai. It is the ceremony where the Mongols chose a new Khagan—their Khan of Khans.”
“And they all have to be present for this kuraltai to happen?”
“If they want to be considered for Khagan, yes.”
Alexander shook his head. “And if the previous Khagan, ?gedei, had not died, how different would our lives have been? Batu would still be in Christendom and Hermann of Dorpat would not be nipping at my heels. He is like the scrawny scavenger who only shows his face after the bear has gone.”
“Aye,” Illarion agreed, his thoughts drifting to the company of Shield-Brethren whom he had last seen at Kiev more than half a year ago. Had Feronantus’s wild mission been successful? Had any of them survived their journey into the heart of the Mongol empire?
“We will show ourselves at Novgorod, which will make the Veche happy,” Alexander said. “Then we will gather what militia they have and march. Word will reach our enemies and force them to decide whether or not they will move.”
“Hermann is a careful man, from what I have heard,” Illarion mused. “He will have to see this as a chance to crush you in the field before he commits his men.”
“That is my hope.”
“And if you make yourself an irresistible target…” Illarion trailed off.
Alexander smiled at him. “What good am I to the people of Pskov if I die here, in the woods, a victim to the weather and my own boredom?”
For some of Nika’s sisters, the tales of the stooped, toothless crone were as real as the ground upon which they stood. That hadn’t been the case for Nika—brave strong Nika who could move through the wilderness with none the wiser to her passing, who could kill a man and be gone before his friends even knew she was there. For her, the stories of Baba Yaga had been nothing more than fairy tales, until the night in Kiev when the mist parted and showed her both the future and the past.
Since then, the bleak Ruthenian nights had held no comfort for her. The wind was a sinister beast, slithering and moaning in the darkness. During her nocturnal vigils, she would wrap herself in multiple layers of furs as protection against the wind, but when it blew out of the north—as it did this evening—she could still feel its chill touch.
She heard the approach of two sentries and she turned her head slightly so they would know she was aware of them. They gave her a wide berth, keeping her outside the quivering circle of lantern light. They stared as they passed, and she did not rise to the bait and stare back. The weak glow from the lantern was disturbing her night vision as it was.
Not all of the Kynaz’s men were happy sharing a camp with the Shield-Maidens.
The Kynaz had accepted Illarion and the Shield-Maidens into his camp readily enough, but Nika and her sisters still had to establish themselves in the same way they always had to do when faced with those who did not understand or respect them. It had only taken a day or so before a loud-mouthed braggart made the first rebuke, proclaiming loudly to several other like-minded men that a skinny wench like Nika would be much warmer in his tent, on her back on a pile of furs. She had suggested that if he believed her to be so helpless, he should carry her back to his tent, and when he had tried to pick her up, she had knocked him to the ground and broken his arm. Illarion had been appalled at the violence, but the Kynaz had understood why she had done what she had done. Alexander needed experienced fighters, and who had more value: the man in the dirt, weeping and moaning about his arm, or a warrior like her? There will be no more pissing contests, he had said. The Shield-Maidens are our guests and our equals. And that should have been enough, but she knew it wouldn’t be. There would always be those who did not understand them, and hatred would always be coupled with such ignorance.
As long as such stupidity did not endanger those she loved—or all of Rus, for that matter—Nika did not waste much thought on men like these. People would talk and would stare and would think themselves entitled. That was the way of the world, and weeping and moaning over it did not make it go away. Warriors had to concern themselves with their strength and their ability to protect those who they had sworn to guard.
The sentries passed, and the light from their lantern illuminated the snow-flecked walls of a row of tents. Shadows squirmed on the tents as the light passed, making patterns in the wind-blown snow that reminded her of the striations in the walls of the caves of Kiev. Cryptic messages left by the dead.
As the sentries reached the end of the tents, they suddenly changed direction, and Nika saw the reason for their course correction. If there was anyone less liked by the Kynaz’s men than she and her sisters, it was Illarion Illarionovich. They called him ghost and thought him cursed. He was bad luck, a phantom who had returned from the dead. He walked with his head held high, seemingly untouched by the wind, and he did not look at the men as they scuttled out of his way. It was as if they did not exist to him. His eyes were focused on a different world, a realm beyond this one.
He wasn’t a ghost, Nika knew, but something worse. Death had rejected him, filling his bones with a hellish sorrow that would never go away.
And Baba Yaga had chosen him.
She knew the old stories well. Faery tales of princes named Ivan, of Koschei the Deathless and other, older things great and terrible. She knew that there was more truth to the legends than most thinking men imagined, but had thought the older terrors gone from the world since long before the days of Saint Ilya. Koschei had been the last menace to dabble in the black matters best left to the old stories, and he had been dead for centuries. But the enemies of Rus had awakened something when they had ravaged the land. Some things should stay buried, she thought.
“May your heart keep you warm, little sister,” Illarion said as he reached Nika’s side.
“And yours you,” she replied a little stiffly. She always felt self-conscious echoing this greeting with Illarion as she knew what he had suffered at the hands of the Mongols. “I saw the messenger,” she said, eager to talk of something else. “Has Novgorod finally relinquished its death-grip on their pride?” Leaders who would not do so in the face of conquest were, in Nika’s opinion, unworthy of their high seats.
“They have,” Illarion replied. “The Veche have recalled the prince. In the morning, we’re to make preparations to march.”
“Lord Novgorod the Great,” Nika mused, “I’ve not been there since I was a little girl.”
That seemed to surprise him, which was not all that shocking. He’d once been a boyar, and those from high places were always surprised to learn how far someone without wealth or status could go, given the chance.
“We won’t be there long,” Illarion said, staring off into the darkness beyond the camp. “Once the prince has reconciled with the Veche, he hopes to march again.”
“Against the Teutonic army in Pskov?” Nika asked.
Illarion nodded. “Aye. There is more, though. I understand that Hermann of Dorpat has Livonians in his ranks.”
Nika’s hand fell to the hilt of her sword. “Livonians?”
“Aye,” Illarion said. He nodded toward the smaller cluster of tents behind Nika. “Let us walk,” he said.
Nika fell in beside Illarion, and they began a circuit of the Shield-Maiden camp. Unlike the sprawling mass of the Kynaz’s camp, the Shield-Maiden tents were arranged in neat arcs. There was no direct path through the tents, and from several key positions, a few guards could watch every approach. The organization of the tents would split any force into discrete lines that would be easier to defend against with a smaller force. As she and Illarion walked the night circle around the verge of the camp, she spotted the steadfast shapes of several other sisters who were also on the nocturnal watch.
“I have been troubled by the presence of the Livonian Order in Kiev last year. What were they hoping to find there?”
“Relics,” Nika said.
“But we didn’t bring any with us, which would suggest that there were no relics to guard.”
“Is that the only reason you think we stayed in Kiev?” she asked.
Illarion shook his head. “No, but when the Shield-Brethren came, you let them down to see the grave of Saint Ilya. And while they were down in the tunnels, they encountered that group of Livonians led by Kristaps. What were they looking for?”
“The grave is empty,” she said. “It’s always been empty.”
He stopped and his gaze swung across the Shield-Maiden tents and the sprawl of the Kynaz’s camp. “I do not like uncertainty,” he said, his gaze settling on the darkness beyond the camp. “I do not like the mischief that is spawned by old legends.”
“It is her way,” Nika said.
A thin smile creased Illarion’s face and he idly reached up and tugged at the end of his beard. “Alexander accused me of sounding like an old grandmother when I spoke like that to him. You neither agree with nor dismiss my fears. All you say is It is her way. As if that is explanation enough for a weary soldier like me.” He stopped pulling on his beard, and in that moment when he stood still, Nika got a glimpse of the fear that lay beneath the cold mask he presented.
Around them, large flakes of snow began to fall. The wind had fled, and in the emptiness that followed, the skies were filling with slow-falling snow. A flake landed on Nika’s cheek, a cold kiss that melted into a tear. “I have heard many stories,” she said, “and until very recently, I thought little of them beyond what I learned as a small girl. But I saw her as clearly as you. Do we share a madness, then? Or was she really there? I don’t know, Plank. It is her way may be the plainest explanation I can offer you.”
“You are asking me to believe something that may run counter to all that I have been taught,” he noted.
She hesitated as the teardrop slid down to her chin. “Yes,” she said finally.
Illarion raised his face to the sky and closed his eyes against the falling snow. “Then I choose to believe she was there, little sister. Otherwise, as you say, it is a madness that we share. This world is mad enough that we need not add to it. Let us be clear-minded.” The thin smile returned to his lips. His shoulders straightened, the weight being raised again. Weight makes you stronger. Nika recalled one of the lessons drilled into her by the older Shield-Maidens. If you refuse to be crushed, you will grow to hold it up.
“Aye,” Nika said, wiping the wetness from her face. “Let us believe.”
“I do not intend to tell the prince of…what we saw that night,” Illarion continued. “But I need to know. I need to know what you think is out there, watching us. Waiting for something to happen.”
“There are stories of Baba Yaga that have been passed down by my elder sisters,” Nika said. “She used to come more often—before we began to worship in accord with the priests in Kiev. She would come both in times of plenty and of sorrow.” Nika whispered, stepping closer to keep any others who might hear from listening. “Men talk of domovoi, or think they see gamayun flitting through the trees, but they do not remember. She is wisdom, yes, but she is also terror. She is the wrath of the land, and that fury has never been very discerning. Do you understand?”
“Aye, I do.”
“I do not know if you mean to follow Saint Ilya’s steps, or whether it is a hero or monster that lies in your heart,” Nika said.
“Are they all that different?” Illarion wondered.
“What has singled you out is as fickle as the wind and as terrible as the winter,” Nika continued, undeterred by Illarion’s query. “She is the harbinger of all the things that should stay in the dark forests at night. I do not know if the Mongols awakened her when they came from the east with their strange sorcery and foreign gods, or if the Livonians disturbed her with their meddling, but she is here now.” She swallowed heavily. “This is what I believe, and it makes me afraid.”
“Why,” Illarion asked, “does she hold such power over you and your sisters? You said she was to be obeyed, but why do you follow what terrifies you so?”
Nika took a deep breath. “If the stories are true, then once, long, long ago, she was one of us. Baba Yaga was a Shield-Maiden.”