Prince Ivan
Authors: Peter Morwood
© Peter Morwood 1990
Peter Morwood has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1990 by Legend Paperbacks.
This edition published by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd in 2016.
And as always,
for Diane.
Concerning
Tsar
Aleksandr
and
his
children
The walled town of Khorlov was no city, and the mansion at the centre of it was no palace, but the citadel at the heart of the mansion was a proper kremlin just as much as the great palace-strongholds in the great cities of the greatest princes in the land. The best that could be said about it was that it looked as if it was there to protect Khorlov rather than to dominate and threaten it, as so many of the larger fortresses seemed to do to the cities cowering around the hems of their grim stone garments.
That it looked reassuring instead of sinister didn’t mean that this particular kremlin was an unimpressive place. Its lofty outer wall was still high enough to repel all but the most determined foe, its Hall of Audience was known to be among the largest in all of Russia, and its gardens were among the fairest. Whilst those gardens might not be known for size, certainly there was enough room within their carefully-trimmed hedges for ladies and gentlemen to take the air, to walk and talk.
And often enough, to argue.
*
“You’ve heard me say ‘no’ so many times, Vanya. And sometimes you’ve prompted the ‘no’ when I might have said ‘yes’. So tell me, who else is to blame but the two of us?”
Tsarevna Yekaterina Aleksandrovna looked at her brother, not expecting any sort of answer. After their father Tsar Aleksandr they, the senior daughter and the inheriting son, held most responsibility in the Tsardom. One was to marry and bring the realm a favourable alliance, the other to marry and secure the succession with children. It wasn’t an appealing prospect, especially for Yekaterina, the eldest of three sisters.
Tsarevich Ivan did much as she had expected and said nothing. He had said enough already, and every word was a waste of breath. It had been one of those annoying conversations that go around and around without ever coming to an end, or even reaching agreement to differ. At one stage of the proceedings there’d been a very real risk that one or other of his own drinking companions might be considered as possible suitors.
In making himself secure against that most unpleasant possibility, Ivan had gone a little too far, souring all of his sisters against any of the young men eager enough to be considered a worthy would-be husband. He was guiltily aware that he’d performed his self-appointed task too well, but now any attempt to alter or retract his views were seen as the result of outside pressure rather than a change of mind, and duly ignored.
What made matters worse was that the feasts where he and his three sisters were meant to find husbands and a wife would have to stop, or soon there wouldn’t be enough silver in the treasury to provide even one dowry for whichever husband was eventually found.
Despite that, there was a feast going on in the Hall of Audience at this very minute, which was why Yekaterina had retreated out of doors.
Ivan looked around the gardens of the kremlin where he had walked and talked and argued with Katya for close to an hour. Spring was gradually changing to early summer and the air of the garden was warm and pleasant, heavy with the sound of bees at work amongst the flowers. The ornamental trees were in full leaf and loud with birdsong. All of the warmth and greenness and beauty meant only one thing to Prince Ivan, that two seasons had slipped by since his father the Tsar summoned him urgently from the frozen ramparts of the kremlin. For all that urgency not a thing of note had happened in the five months since, except for lavish spending that the small Tsardom of Khorlov could ill afford…
A distant crack of thunder cut through his glum thoughts and he looked up, beyond the walls of the garden, to where a bank of dark clouds was piling up in the east, the sort of clouds that were laden with rain and indiscriminate in their dropping of it. As Ivan watched, a flicker of lightning ran along the edges of their contours and made them for an instant as sharp and clear as outlines cut from blackened copper. The tearing thunder-crash repeated itself a few seconds later, much louder than before.
“Damn,” said Katya. “It looks like there’s a proper storm coming in.”
“I see it,” said Ivan. “But the storm I’m thinking about has nothing to do with the weather.”
“You shouldn’t have been so convincing in your dismissals of our suitors, dear brother.” The tone of Yekaterina’s voice was neither grim nor melancholy. Instead she sounded waspish, impatient with her brother and his moods. Katya too was feeling guilty, knowing that as firstborn child and senior among her sisters she should have done something more than simply follow a spiteful lead. It had made her spiteful in her turn. “I notice that our Metropolitan Archbishop has yet to publish any banns of marriage in
your
name.”
“That was uncalled for.”
“Was it? At least when you marry you’ll have taken some sort of step toward securing the succession, and brought some money into the treasury besides.”
“If Levon Popovich wasn’t such a stiff-necked old b—”
“Bishop! Remember it.”
“He always does, so why should I? But ‘bishop’ is what I was going to say.”
“Indeed?”
“Indeed.” Ivan held his breath, and with it whatever else he might have said. Any more words would only harm. Then he shook his head, annoyed with himself more than with Katya. “Forget about it. All that’s past.”
His sister gazed at him sidelong, and her own volatile temper swung at once from irritation to good-humoured sympathy. “Past, but not entirely done with,” she said. “Not when the thought of it still vexes you.”
“Not vexes. Irritates. Annoys. After all, I’m the Tsar’s son.”
“Sometimes the trouble with old men is that they don’t know when they’ve lived long enough,” said Katya.
“It’s more that sometimes they forget what it was like to be young. Father never has. And he’s had no objections to my learning how to read, either.”
Ivan had been five years old when the Metropolitan Archbishop Levon made it known he wouldn’t accept a Tsarevich who studied magic. It was widely considered he might have banned anyone from practicing even the smallest spells, had he not been assured that his congregation would dwindle to almost nothing. Everyone in Khorlov from the Tsar down had formed a solid, silent wall of disapproval. The Rus had used magic since before the Christians came to Kiev, small, useful, everyday spells for finding lost things, or summoning livestock, or lighting fires without flint, tinder and dry wood.
Those new-arrived Christians, after much dismay, had made sure the spells weren’t some manifestation of evil with such a waving of crosses and incense as had never been seen before. The demand for holy water alone was such that the Metropolitan Patriarch of Novgorod actually blessed a cross-section of the River Volkhov and sent his Archpriests wading out with buckets. After the first fine frenzy died away cooler heads prevailed, particularly amongst the Archpriests of Novgorod. River wading in November cooled almost anything. That following Easter the Patriarch – surrounded with icons, thoroughly doused in holy water, and censed until he sneezed – had personally lit a sacred candle on the high altar with fire summoned by magic. Afterwards he decreed there was indeed nothing reprehensible about sorcery, since the effort of channelling a spell through his relatively untutored mind had brought him out in a sweat like that of honest toil.
The Archbishop of Khorlov was another matter. Ivan learned his magic and his letters like every other noble child across the Tsardom, but only at the cost of frowning disapproval from Metropolitan Levon. It had been an unsettling few years for a small boy until he grew tall enough and bold enough not to care, or at least give that impression. And then, a little after his sixteenth birthday, he learnt what was wrong. Just as some people couldn’t read because their eyes saw only nonsense instead of words, Metropolitan Levon Popovich couldn’t learn spells. He could read the words, he could have them read aloud to him, he could – and had – even have them sung in six-part harmony by the cathedral choir. But the connection, the spark that lit the fire, the string that made a bow more than a stick, never took place. It was as simple as that, and a simplicity Ivan could understand. It wasn’t the first time he had encountered jealousy…
“If I hadn’t been so worried about what the Archbishop would tell God, I might actually have learnt something.” Ivan grinned briefly, then let the subject go as a vivid glare of lightning painted his shadow across the grass. This time there was nothing coy or distant about the thunder; it was a long, rolling bellow of sound that seemed to come from almost above their heads, the echoes and the remnants of it rumbling and muttering away off towards the western horizon. The summer sky, blue not ten minutes ago, had become the colour of lead.
“That sounded like some sort of comment,” he said as the first heavy drops of rain spattered his crimson tunic with purple spots and silvered the fur of its collar.
“I know you don’t much like the feast, Vanya,” said Katya in a tone of voice that suggested whatever he might say, her mind was made up. “So you can stay out here if you like. But I’m going to find some shelter.” Katya reached out and tugged with finger and thumb at the fabric covering his right shoulder. It was already damp. “And you’d come too, if you knew how long it takes brocaded velvet to dry out, or what a wolf-fur trim smells like when it’s wet.”
Ivan laughed. “I do know, on both counts. So let’s go. But there’s no need to get any wetter.” He muttered under his breath, then raised one hand in the air above their heads with a little grunt of effort as if he was lifting something much larger than his empty hand. The rain didn’t stop – doing that would have been too much of a strain, and attempting it would have knocked him flat on his back – but at least the falling drops bounced away from his outstretched fingers as if he carried a circular table made of the clearest glass. With the other hand, he took Katya’s arm and helped her scurry through the grass as quickly as dignity and long skirts would allow. “We can continue this argument in comfort, if you like.”
Katya shook her head, and pearls of water flew from the pearls of a lofty headdress that was too tall for his charm to cover it over. “I don’t like, and I’m done with argument. We’ve already said everything we can say ten times over, and I’m sick of the sound of the words.”
“All right.” Ivan opened the door, then ushered Katya back inside the palace before cancelling the spell and leaping through himself to avoid the splash of suddenly-released raindrops. “One day,” he muttered, “there’ll be a means of doing that which won’t leave puddles on the floor.” He shook water out of his sleeve and glanced at his sister. “Answer me one question, just for the sake of curiosity.”
“You won’t get the answer if I don’t like the question.”
“Forthcoming as ever, Katyushka. Just tell me this: what sort of a man would you marry?” Just as he finished speaking, the clouds opened and released what seemed almost a solid wall of water onto Khorlov. Katya stared out of the open door, listening to the hiss of rain and the gurgle of more water in the gutters than they could cope with as she watched the rebounding dance of drops against the ground. Lightning flashed until the world was all white light and black shadows, and thunder rolled until the ground trembled and the palace of the kremlin vibrated like a drum.
“What sort of a man?” she echoed him, in a voice so soft and dreamy that she seemed to be speaking to herself, and yet so clear that Ivan could hear her words above the sounds of the storm. “Vanya, if I was sure I could love him as Mother loves Father, I would marry the first man who asked for my hand.”
As she said it the lightning flashed again, from the garden and through the open door at Katya’s back, so that she was outlined in the jewels of rain and a great flaring of white fire. Hard on its heels, the thunder roared.
And the kremlin roof and ceiling split asunder.
*
Ivan threw himself forward to protect his sister from falling debris, but there was none. The stones and timbers hadn’t been destroyed but instead had parted like a door, or like a curtain, or like the opening of a tent. Through that opening, with lightning flaming at its back, came a bright falcon in a stoop that struck against the floor of the kremlin palace hard enough to shatter bones and tiles together. But instead of broken tiles and a broken bird there was another flash of light, less bright than the lightning but more blue, a brilliant sapphire like the sunlit sky from which all the storm clouds had vanished.