Olga said nothing. In the days of their grandfather, the Horde had been unified under one Khan. It would have been unheard of for Tatar bandits to strike Muscovy, which had always been a devoted vassal-state. But Moscow was no longer so tame, so canny, nor so devoted, and, more important, the Horde was not so united. Khans came and went now, putting forward now this claim, now that to the throne. The generals fought among themselves. Such times always bred masterless men, and everyone within the Horde’s reach suffered.
“Come, sister,” added Sasha, misreading her look. “Do not fear. Moscow is too tough a nut for bandits to crack, and Father’s seat at Lesnaya Zemlya too remote. But these bandits must be rooted out. I am going back out as soon as can be managed.”
Olga stilled, mastered herself, and asked, “Back out? When?”
“As soon as I can gather the men.” He saw her face and sighed. “Forgive me. Another time I would stay. But I have seen too much weeping these last weeks.”
Strange man, worn and kind, with his soul honed to steel.
Olga met his glance. “Indeed, you must go, brother,” she said evenly. A keen ear might have detected a bitter note in her voice. “You go where God sends you.”
3.
The Grandsons of Ivan Moneybags
The Grand Prince’s feasting-hall was long and low and dim. Boyars sat or sprawled like dogs at the long tables, and Dmitrii Ivanovich, Grand Prince of Moscow, held court at the far end, resplendent in sable and saffron wool.
Dmitrii was a man of ferocious good humor, barrel-chested and vivid, impatient and selfish, wanton and kind. His father had been nicknamed Ivan the Fair, and the young prince had inherited all his father’s pale good looks: creamy hair, tender skin, and gray eyes.
The Grand Prince leaped to his feet when Sasha came into the long room. “Cousin!” he roared, face alight beneath his jeweled cap. He strode forward and upset a servingman before he stopped, recalling his dignity. He wiped his mouth and crossed himself. The cup of wine in his free hand marred the gesture. Dmitrii put it hastily down, kissed Sasha on both cheeks, and said, “We feared the worst.”
“May the Lord bless you, Dmitrii Ivanovich,” Sasha said, smiling. As boys these two had lived together at Sasha’s monastery, the Trinity Lavra, before Dmitrii reached his majority.
A babble of men’s voices filled the smoky feasting-hall. Dmitrii was presiding over the remains of a boar. The light women had been pushed hastily out, but Sasha could smell the ghost of them, along with the wine and the greasy ends of meat.
He could also feel the boyars’ eyes on him, wondering what his return foretold.
What, Sasha had always wondered, made people want to cram themselves into grimy rooms and shut away the clean air?
Dmitrii must have seen his cousin’s distaste. “Baths!” he cried at once, raising his voice. “Let the bathhouse be heated. My cousin is tired, and I want some private talk.” He took Sasha’s arm confidingly. “I, too, am weary of all this clamor,” he said, though Sasha doubted it. Dmitrii thrived on Moscow’s noisy intrigues; the Lavra had always been too small and too quiet for him. “You there!” called the Grand Prince to his steward. “See that these men have all they need.”
LONG AGO, WHEN THE MONGOLS first swept through Rus’, Moscow had been a crude and jumped-up trading post—an afterthought to the conquering Horde, beside the glories of Vladimir and Suzdal and Kiev herself.
That was not enough to keep the city standing when the Tatars came, but Moscow had clever princes, and in the smoking ash-heap of conquest, the Muscovites at once set about making allies of their conquerors.
They used their loyalty to the Horde to further their own ambitions. When the khans demanded taxes, the Muscovite princes delivered them, squeezing their own boyars in order to pay. In return the khans, pleased, gave Moscow more territory, and still more: the patent for Vladimir and the title of Grand Prince. So the rulers of Muscovy prospered and their little realm grew.
But as Muscovy grew, the Golden Horde diminished. Bitter feuding between the children of the Great Khan shook the throne, and the whispers began among the boyars of Moscow: The Tatars are not even Christians, and they cannot keep a man on their throne six months before another one comes to claim it. Why, then, do we pay tribute? Why be vassals?
Dmitrii, bold but practical, had eyed the unrest in Sarai, realized that the Khan’s record-keeping must be five years behind, and quietly ceased paying tribute at all. He hoarded the money instead, and dispatched his holy cousin Brother Aleksandr to the land of the pagan to spy out their dispositions. Sasha, in his turn, had sent a trusted friend, Brother Rodion, to his own father’s home at Lesnaya Zemlya to warn of war brewing.
Now Sasha had returned from Sarai, in the teeth of winter, with news that he wished he was not carrying.
He leaned his head back against the wooden wall of the bathhouse and shut his eyes. The steam washed away some of the grime and weariness of travel.
“You look dreadful, brother,” said Dmitrii cheerfully. He was eating cakes. The sweat of too much meat and wine ran off his skin.
Sasha cracked an eyelid. “You’re getting fat,” he retorted. “You ought to go to the monastery and take a fortnight’s fasting this Lent.” When Dmitrii had been a boy in the Lavra, he had often sneaked into the woods to kill and cook rabbits on fast-days. Sasha thought, judging by the look of him, that he might have kept up the practice.
Dmitrii laughed. His exuberant charm distracted the unwary from his calculating glances. The Grand Prince’s father had died before Dmitrii reached his tenth year, in a land where boy-princes rarely saw adulthood. Dmitrii had learned early to judge men carefully and not to trust them. But Brother Aleksandr had been Dmitrii’s teacher first, and later his friend, when they had lived in the Lavra before the prince’s majority. So Dmitrii only grinned and said, “A night and a day with the snow falling so thick—what can we do besides eat? I cannot even have a girl; Father Andrei says I must not—or at least not until Eudokhia throws me an heir.”
The prince leaned back on the bench, scowled, and added, “As though there is a chance of that, the barren bitch.” He sat a moment grim, and then he brightened. “Well, you are here at last. We had despaired of you. Tell me, who has the throne at Sarai? What are the generals’ dispositions? Tell me everything.”
Sasha had eaten and bathed; now he wanted only to sleep, anywhere that was not the ground. But he opened his eyes and said, “There must be no war in the spring, cousin.”
The prince turned a flat stare onto Sasha. “No?” That was the voice of the prince, sure of himself and impatient. The look on his face was the reason he still held the throne after ten years and three sieges.
“I have been to Sarai,” said Sasha carefully. “And beyond. I rode among the nomad-camps; I spoke to many men. I risked my life, more than once.” Sasha paused, seeing again the hot dust, the bleached steppe-sky, testing strange spices. That glittering pagan city made Moscow look like a mud-castle built in a day by incompetent children.