Nicholas trotted away with the girl barely stirring. After a while he pulled into the shadows under the wall and shook her, as if shaking her awake. He made her sit up behind him, arms about his waist.
‘You are not hurt yourself ?’
She shook her head. Face tear-stained, eyes red.
‘My pity upon your nurse. She died to save your life.’ He tore a strip off the bottom of his shirt.
‘I know,’ said the girl very softly. ‘It should have been me. I sent her out to the market.’
‘She was old, you are young,’ said Nicholas. He bound the strip of linen tightly but not too tightly around the cut in his thigh, as he had seen Stanley do many a time.
‘You are hurt?’ she said.
He flicked the reins. ‘Hold tight now. We face a short but eventful ride.’
They must head back to the English House. Hardly a place of greater safety now, by any definition. But where else was there? It was the only choice. If only they could escape the city altogether soon. For this wretched crusade was surely over and done.
He rode feeling the girl’s head upon his shoulder, sometimes her trembling body. He rode with his sword hanging loose at his side, bright in the firelight, past gang after gang of leering faces, hands reaching out to touch, to whistle or comment, or sometimes merely staring, eyes blank with slaughter. But he batted them aside and not one touched them. They passed through them unscathed like Shadrach and Meshach through the flames of Babylon.
Not far behind them were two heavy-armoured horsemen. No one dared to leer at them.
And then behind them, in chilling silence, abreast across the street, a troop of eight Oprichnina. They carried long spears. The man at their head wore an animal mask. They rode at the same pace as the three, not attempting to overtake them. As if herding them forward towards some deliberate fate.
Stanley looked ahead. The great red square, riotous shouts, the bonfire of the vanities.
Before they came to the square, there were two more dark alleys, one left, one right.
‘Nick,’ said Stanley softly. ‘Do not look back. When we get to the alleys there, you break left. We break right.’
‘Can we not stay together?’
‘No. They will pursue us. Get the girl back to her father. Ride like the wind.’
The dark alleys came nearer, and the wild shouts from the square. And then without even a shout to warn their followers, they broke.
Nicholas galloped his horse down a horribly narrow alley, it jutted left – and straight into a small courtyard, still hung with washing from a hemp line. They were finished.
He slid from the horse, teeth gritted for the throbbing pain in his thigh, worsening by the minute now. He bade the girl stay mounted, and told her to look to the wall. She stared down at him, wide-eyed.
‘Look to the wall!’ he shouted and shoved her round, then turned and stood before horse and girl.
Two Oprichnina came round the corner and stopped in the entrance to the courtyard. One of them wore an animal mask. His eyes glittered. Could it be …? Yes, he feared so. The eyes of Maliuta Skuratov, who had hated him and hunted him from that first day beside the stream in the birch forest. He did not know why. Because he had not been sufficiently afraid of him, perhaps, as a grovelling peasant should be. But Nicholas Ingoldsby was no grovelling peasant, he was a hereditary knight, son of a Knight Hospitaller, and an Englishman to boot.
He glanced about in desperation. Had he been alone, and not so badly cut, he might have tried climbing up that creeper there, into a window … If if if.
The unmasked of the two Oprichnina was smiling. He said, ‘You are the English.’
He said nothing. His left hand felt empty. He remembered what the knights had taught him. Use anything, throw anything. You can kill a man with a sharp stick or a soup spoon if you must. He slashed out with his sword and cut down one of the pieces of washing and seized hold of it. The riders laughed.
‘He fights with washing. How very English. They are all women.’
He saw in a flash what would happen to Rebecca if they killed him and took her captive, and he thought of the knights’ other lessons. Do not delay. Attack at once, in silence, and with all ferocity. Attack like a madman: not just with a wild ferocity, but irrational, unpredictable. He took in the thick brutish eyebrows of the unmasked rider, the scars on his cheek as if made by the fingernails of some too-young girl he had raped, the rotten black teeth. He saw him and his fellows jeering and swiving, jaws sagging, stupid, while Maliuta Skuratov looked amusedly on. Then as suddenly as someone striking a match, the old furore came upon him, the crimson madness, the lust for battle, controlled – only just – by the sense of killing only those he knew as evil. For God was a God of battles, the Lord was a man of war, and fighting was a heady wine – he was racing at them now, seeing a low stone post nearby, aiming to get his right foot upon it and launch himself upon the right-hand rider, Maliuta himself – and sweetly drunk it made you, so drunk you did not even regard your own wounds while you fought. Had he not seen that gallant Italian knight Lanfreducci still fighting at Malta when he could hardly walk, and laughing in the face of the Turks until the moment he died? Lanfreducci was watching him now, looking down from the gold court of heaven.
He flung the square of washing in Maliuta’s face, placed his foot on the post, launched off and barged into him in mid-air from the side. He hung from him with his left arm clenched around the startled rider’s neck, flailing with his sword but was too close to use it. The horse bucked and began to topple sideways. At last he mastered his sword, holding it at an extreme angle and driving it sidelong and deep across Maliuta’s back. The Oprichnik commander roared in pain, his horse sidestepped whinnying into the neighbouring horse, Nicholas’s arm still bizarrely clenched around his neck as if throttling him, hanging down with his feet almost touching the ground. Yet the wounded Maliuta was his best shield, and as the horses barged together and the second rider, utterly baffled by what was happening, struggled with the reins, Nicholas thrust his sword forward behind the first, a long low clean thrust that went straight through the second rider’s belly. God, the stench, the instant privy stench of ruptured guts.
He moved faster still then. He dropped his sword, pulled himself up onto the horse with both hands, thigh fire-hot yet causing him no pain now. He wrestled briefly with the wounded Maliuta before him and then rolled him clumsily to the ground, turned on the second but he was already dead, slumped forward in his own stench, red and brown leaking over his saddle and down his leg. He slipped off the horse again, drew his dagger and knelt over the prostrate Maliuta Skuratov, who was twitching horribly, wriggling, trying to move away from him but as if paralysed. He had cut him across his back deeper than he had thought. Perhaps his spine …
‘Please, please,’ said Maliuta, his voice high with fear behind that horrible mask, ‘in the name of God, let us not be brutal as Russians are brutal …’
‘I will treat you,’ said Nicholas, ‘far better than you have treated others. I will not torture you, I will not burn you nor shoot with arrows so that you suffer but do not die—’
‘Thank God, thank merciful God, let me confess …’
Maliuta’s hand had slipped under his cloak as he spoke. His legs seemed paralysed but he could still stab.
It was wrong to torment one dying – a Turkish trick. Make it clean.
‘But nevertheless,’ said Nicholas, ‘your life ends here.’
‘I must confess!’ cried out the wretched Maliuta. ‘I must not die unshriven!’ Then his hand flashed upwards, holding a dagger, and Nicholas thrust his own dagger hard into his assailant’s forearm and the dagger dropped. Maliuta shrieked and clutched the wounded arm across his chest.
‘You will never be unshriven,’ said Nicholas, ‘nor ever forgiven your sins.’ He reached down and shoved the mask off his face and his vision seemed to swim, his face prickle with cold. Beneath him lay Elysius Bomelius.
‘You,’ he said at last.
‘I.’ He was gasping, shaking. ‘You have sore wounded me, we have been enemies, but now for the love of God and the love of Catholic Europe, let us two find unity in our—’
Nicholas pressed his left hand down hard on Elysius’s forehead and drew his dagger swiftly across his scrawny neck and he gargled and died. He cleaned his dagger on Elysius’s robe.
He went to the second rider sitting a dead weight in his saddle, pulled him down and rolled the heavy weight of his corpse into a corner. Then he sank back against the wall, mind reeling, and closed his eyes a moment. Red fog and exhaustion and the shakes and the blood pumping to the beat of a frenzied drum, and the thought struck him hard as a bullet, that they were indeed fighting on two fronts.
He realised he had been cut across the forehead, he had no idea how or when, and the blood was leaking into his eyes. He pressed the back of his hand against the wound and it made the imprint of the cut enough to tell him it was not wide or deep. He tore off another linen strip. He was running out of shirt. At this rate he’d be half naked by the time they got back to the English House. Keep jesting. Get through hell by jesting. He tied the strip around his forehead and pushed himself off from the wall.
With some revulsion he picked up Elysius’s demonic animal mask and tried it on. It fitted. He shoved it inside his jerkin for now. The second horse, damn it, and the horse’s saddle were too befouled to use. Poor beast. He remounted the first horse and took up the reins and finally looked over to the girl, to say she could turn about now.
She was staring at him with horror-stricken eyes.
He shook his head. ‘I told you to look to the wall.’
‘You have killed them both,’ she said in a haunted whisper.
‘That I have. Before they killed me, and did worse to you. Come. We must ride out. Put up your hood.’
But she could not, he saw. She was almost paralysed with horror. And there were more horrors to come this night, that much was sure. How else could he protect her? Struck now with deep exhaustion, he slid a final time from the horse and remounted in front of her, awkward, thigh muscle taut, skin crusted and cracking with dry blood.
She was trembling.
Innocence was more rare than rubies in this world, and must be protected.
‘Close your eyes,’ he said. ‘Bury your face in my cloak. Do as I say this time. Do not look out. Or you will never sleep easy again.’
And he – he would ride through hell with eyes wide open.
Yet still she looked revolted by him, this killer of men, this madman. The courtyard was filled with blood and the stench of ordure and two corpses, and he had knelt beside one of them, there before her very eyes, a wounded man, and had cut his throat with a single draw of his dagger as if he was killing a chicken.
He reached back and placed his hand on her head and drew it against his cloak. He kicked the tired horse, its own large brown eyes as if filled with horrors too, and said again, ‘Close your eyes,’ and they rode out of the courtyard.
From a window above, a child watched them go.
At the entrance to the passageway were two more hulking Oprichnina.
Nicholas could not fight again. He bowed his head. They were foredone.
The two thugs barged them backwards into the courtyard once more. They sat their horses before him in the gloom, dimly lit by reflected street fires and the burning night sky, and then pushed back their hoods.
Smith and Stanley.
Nicholas was too tired to rejoice. ‘You.’
‘Us. It is our only hope of getting through this. Here.’ And they tossed him another black cloak, a heavy black whip, and even a severed dog’s head on a short rope, the rope threaded in and out of a hole knocked in its skull. Hodge the dog-lover would not like this. He grimaced and tied the ugly parody of an heraldic emblem to the pommel of his saddle.
And from his jerkin he drew a wooden animal mask.
Stanley drew breath. ‘You killed him? Maliuta Skuratov?’
Nicholas shook his head. ‘Prepare yourself for a shock. It was Elysius Bomelius.’
They stared. ‘The physician?’
‘Or poisoner, depending on your point of view.’
Smith said slowly, ‘He has been the secret head of the Oprichnina all along?’
‘More than one wear such masks,’ said Stanley. ‘And Maliuta Skuratov still lives, and still wants us dead. But we salute you, Brother Nicholas. It is never pleasant to take a man’s life, but that was good execution done on that wretch. I just wonder if he might have told us anything useful under questioning.’
Nicholas shrugged. ‘I don’t think his word was ever reliable.’
‘No. We also found on one of the dead a roll of paper. A letter.’
‘Not … not Waverley’s letter to the Tatars?’
‘Just so. Still in his robes. We burned it.’
‘And you … you killed all who pursued you?’
‘There wasn’t much room for manoeuvre down that alley,’ said Smith. ‘They had no idea, crowded each other. It was a straight hacking job.’
Nicholas felt the girl’s arms tighten around his waist. He was glad she hadn’t witnessed Smith’s straight hacking job. And he still could not believe the luck of the letter …
‘You think the news of it never got back to Ivan?’
‘Not yet.’
‘And now the very Oprichnina who arrested Ballard, all those who actually knew about it, are slain?’
‘Let us hope so,’ said Stanley. ‘Then we may just have a needle’s breadth of a chance of escape from this circle of hell. Keep close now. Maid,’ he added, ‘we will ride straight back through all that mayhem, to the English House, to your father. You understand?’
She nodded. Face already hidden, eyes closed.
Nicholas drew on the wooden animal mask and tied it round the back of his head, then drew up his hood again. He prayed the evil spirit of Elysius Bomelius would not somehow infect him. Did they not say he practised alchemy, magic? But the eyeholes were perfectly placed. See and not be seen. He felt strangely invulnerable. Yes, the perfect accessory for any secret and all-powerful State servant.
They rode out.
All the other streets were barricaded. There was no way back but through the great square before St Basil’s, and the heart of the festivities.
They would never forget what they saw that night, though they would try often enough. A vision of a mad king’s nightmare, or of some medieval doom painting perhaps, with the Devil and all his horsemen loosed upon Moscow. The square was lit by many torches as if for a play, and many more bonfires. There was a gallows all set up ready in one corner, and over another fire was a huge cauldron of boiling water, and a kind of vast frying pan, as if from the kitchen of a giant. The crowd surged back and forth, crying out their love of the Czar and their hatred of traitors. The three had never seen such madness.
‘Russia’s greatest enemy is rolling towards us,’ said Nicholas tightly from behind his mask, ‘and even now the Chieftain of the Russians is busy sentencing to death hundreds of his own people. For which they applaud him.’
Then out of the gates of the Kremlin rode the infernal procession itself. There was a buffoon riding an ox – for this killing was after all a comical business, as Ivan the Visionary saw, and a grand jest of God. Ivan sometimes tried to explain to his closest confidants, under the deep inspiration of vodka, that all human sufferings were but the jests of God. And then came the Czar himself.
The three riders were holding their horses tight, pushing on through the crowd, wanting only to be away from this garish carnival, heated by the raging bonfires around them – and yet they could not help but stop and look, and their blood was chilled. Ivan was dressed half as Czar, half as a member of the Oprichnina himself. A tall red conical hat, richly bejewelled, a long golden coat fabulously studded with emeralds, a quiver full of gilded arrows over his shoulder, a bloody dog’s head at his saddle, and in his hands, arms outstretched like Christ on the cross, a sceptre and a whip. It was all the more terrifying for being both nightmarish and comical.
‘Make way!’ bellowed Smith. ‘Out of our way there!’
The crowd moved apart for them, but it was damnably slow. Let them not be noticed, please God. Let them not be suspected.
They came to the edge of the square and the exit was heavily barricaded. Even Oprichnina could not escape.
A half-naked man was tied down upon a wide wooden bench and a thick, taut rope lowered over him. Nicholas held the girl’s head and pressed her face against his shoulder. The rope was drawn back and forth over the man’s belly, and very slowly he began to be cut in two. His cries were so terrible that after a time even his executioners could not stand it, and shoved a gag in his mouth.
Upon a platform before the Kremlin walls stood a clownish figure in his tall jewelled conical hat. He seemed to be wearing a rare smile.
‘Do you not find the sentence just, good people?’
They roared back that they did.
They made a man kill his own father, then killed him for being a patricide. People were impaled. Women were tied to stakes and whipped, and then set upon by trained bears. No one ever asked what their offence might have been.
Rebecca put her hands over her ears but she could not drown out the sounds entirely, the screams or the harrowing cries, half agony, half despair. Nor could she block out that smell of burning human hair and flesh. But with eyes closed she imagined she was riding blindfolded through some ancient and barbaric city before the time of Christ, perhaps Rome, or Nineveh, and she prayed that they would somehow ride clear, though she knew they were no less sinners than any who suffered here. Then she ceased praying for their own safety and prayed instead for the poor people who were being so vilely treated and killed all about them. May God have mercy on their harrowed souls.
‘Enough!’ said Stanley angrily. ‘We must get through!’ And they pushed on into the crowd, bellowing out in Russian, ‘Business of the Czar, clear the way there!’ Then people called back, ‘God save Ivan the Dread!’
Nicholas pictured the Czar seated on a golden throne atop a pyramid of slaves, and those slaves a people unawakened, silent and inert, regarding their Father the Czar with awe and love no matter how cruelly he might treat them. A ruler must be Dread and Terrible, or how should his people respect him?
The clown came down from his platform and took a copper jug himself and poured boiling alcohol over the heads of traitors or boyars he had long disliked, and set light to their beards and watched their heads burn like plum puddings! The air made a funny roaring, whooshing sound through their gaping mouths and noses as their skulls blazed up. The victim of torture reveals his true self beneath his struggles and desperate cries, Ivan had long understood, so he observed closely the final throes, but he was disappointed to learn but little here.
Amid all this festivity there sounded a distant boom. A monstrous, muffled boom, a thunderous bellow from the plains beyond, a crack, a mighty splintering …
Smith looked around at his comrades with baleful eye. ‘Saved by the Tatars. Now there’s an irony.’
‘They have come?’ said Nicholas. He felt the girl behind him shiver. ‘Those are the Tatar guns?’
‘The Tatars never used guns,’ said Smith, ‘or but few, and none that size. Those are Ottoman guns.’
‘But indeed they have come,’ said Stanley, ‘and are already trying our gates. Break down that barricade, you there! They have come with Ottoman guns. Some very …’ Now he kicked out wildly, not caring, lashing with his whip. ‘Big …
GUNS
.’
Another leader of men also sat on a wooden platform that night, beneath a canopy of resplendent crimson and gold. A leader in a different mould to Ivan: shrewd, cautious, of fine judgement, scrupulous personal habits, an abstainer from alcohol but an enthusiast for women, a rider of brilliant horsemanship and a military commander with perfect understanding of the fighting tactics of the steppe. The Great Khan of the Crimean Tatars, Devlet Giray: most elusive and perhaps most intelligent ruler in all Asia.
Now he stroked his fine oiled moustaches and smiled. From his vantage point, in his sprawling camp upon the Sparrow Hills, barely a stone’s throw from Moscow, he could not but be amused at the scene spread out before him under the warm night sky of midsummer. His Ottoman artillerymen had lobbed a few incendiaries into the city, with happy results, but it was his spies and lookouts galloping back to the camp who had brought the strangest, the most absurd of all reports. At the same time as Devlet Giray was probing and testing, trying to ascertain Moscow’s defences, her guns, her ability to mount a cavalry sortie from the gates – none whatsoever, as far as he could tell – the Muscovites themselves were also setting fire to their city.
Devlet Giray smiled again and shook his head. Christians. Perhaps they were punishing themselves for their own sins again. What could one make of such crazed idolaters and drunkards as the Russians? Yet they had also visited humiliations upon his people of late, at the capture of Kazan and Astrakhan, and when they put their bovine minds to it, by the stars could they fight. He who underestimates his enemy will fall to him.
Still, Devlet Giray summoned his generals and his subordinate khans about him, and while he drank springwater they drank arak and toasted the fall of Moscow with much jubilation.
‘To the final extermination of Rus!’
‘Death to the infidel – and long life to his gold in our panniers!’
‘And his fair-skinned daughters in our beds!’
‘I’ll take his wives,’ growled another. ‘I prefer them with more fat on ’em, like I prefer my meat.’
That was old Tokhtamysh Khan, whose son was killed lately in battle with the Cossacks. In his seventh decade and still a keen collector of concubines for his tent.
Devlet Giray raised his hand.
‘But remember,’ he said, ‘this is not just another raid. A few dozen houses burned, a few churches torched. Muscovy not so long ago was barely a city, defended by nothing more than a wooden stockade. She was nothing compared to the great cities of the south, Bokhara and golden Samarkand, Astrakhan of the Volga, the fortress of Azov. But now look at her. She has great walls of stone, she has a strong regiment of musketeers, though we attack now because we know they are far away in the west. Her fool of a Czar has left her undefended. But still she must be brought down, and not by horseman and bow. She must be razed utterly so that she does not rise again.’
They nodded solemnly.
‘But then look how they burn their own city tonight in their revels. Apparently they are seeking out traitors in their midst. One of my men signals to my lookouts from a tower on the walls, and no one notices.’
Old Tokhtamysh said, ‘You would think it was their secret desire to be conquered. Like a woman. And they themselves have done half the work already!’
Devlet Giray arched his fine black eyebrows. ‘Yet within her walls, and aside from her many idol-filled churches, Moscow is still largely a city built of wood. It is a fine hot summer. Do we really need a long siege to take down her walls and towers and put her people under the yoke?’
‘We do not,’ said Tokhtamysh. ‘But fire or no fire, my men and I ride in, even into the flames. We have first right of blood. My son was slain. The Cossack party who did this came to Moscow. We know this. I saw the men who killed my son that day.’ He touched his fingertips below his right eye, and then drew them across his bare throat. ‘And I will know them.’