Until the Sun Falls (32 page)

“Only worthless.”

“I meant that you were worthless because Sabotai had torn you down in front of the whole staff. You made a mistake. So did I. I should have… done something other than—”

“Shut up. You sound like a woman. Kowtowing to Quyuk has given you a mouth like a fat eunuch. Get out of here and leave me alone.”

Psin grabbed him by the knee and shoulder and dumped him on the floor. “The next time you talk to me like that, I’ll kick your brains out.”

Tshant darted swiftly out of his way. In the corner Djela whimpered.

“That’s better,” Tshant said. “That’s more like you. Get out. It’s hard enough to endure you in the normal run of things. I’m not going to put up with you unless I have to.”

Psin started toward him, and Tshant coiled up. A long knife glittered in his hand.

“Stay away from me.”

Straightening, Psin shook his muscles loose. He took a sliding step to one side, and Djela flung himself on him.

“No, don’t. Please don’t. Grandfather, please.”

Tshant relaxed and the knife’s tip dropped. Psin put his hand on Djela’s head. The child clung to him.

“All right,” Psin said. “I suppose it’s better, anyway.”

He turned and started toward the door. Djela still hung on to him. Psin paused and said, “Stay here.”

“Grandfather. Let me go with you. I want to—”

“Stay here.”

“No.”

Psin picked him up, held him at eye level, and shook him. “You brat. I said you were to stay. Don’t bother me. I’m not your father.” Tshant was on his feet, and Psin tossed Djela to him. Tshant had to drop the knife to catch him. Psin stared at him a moment, hawked, and tramped outside to spit into the snow.

Two days later, leaving Quyuk in command of the garrison near Tver
, they started out for Novgorod. The horses were gaunt from winter feeding, and the snow was deep and wet, hard to plow through. After four days of it, Psin told Sabotai that he doubted they would reach Novgorod before the thaw.

“We’ve covered less than half as much ground in four days as we did when I rode reconnaissance here. Look at the sky, look at the sun—spring’s coming. I saw some hay from Novgorod; it was half weeds. Their springs are wet. The army is tired.”

Sabotai looked out through the trees toward the west. That wing of the army stretched out across the slopes, sagging in their saddles. Already the trees were growing more thickly, and the hills were treacherously steep under the snow. He said, “We’ll keep going.”

They pushed on. Batu’s outflung western flank made contact with them two days later. When Sabotai asked for supplies the scouts only smiled.

“We were hoping you’d bring us some.”

“No matter. Tell Batu to hold this line.”

The only advantage to this, Psin thought, was that the riding was so hard and the food so scanty that neither he nor Tshant had the strength to fight. They seldom met. Tshant rode in the eastern wing and Psin stayed near Sabotai in the center.

He had thought at first it would be difficult riding with Sabotai; he was sure that Mongke was right about the fighting between the Altun. But it didn’t seem to make any difference between them. He and Sabotai were old friends, and he discovered that the long patterns of association between them held up easily enough even now.

Once Sabotai said, “You’ve fought with Tshant, haven’t you.”

“Yes.”

“Is there no way to reconcile you?”

“Oh, there probably is.” Their horses jogged side by side over a little meadow. “But there’s no sense in it. We don’t like each other. It’s better if we don’t force it.”

Sabotai looked sharply at him, but the horses were on the upward slope and they both had to concentrate on riding.

The forest closed in on them, and the going was twice as hard as before. The horses gnawed the bark from the trees and still neighed from hunger. At night the men crouched over their fires and made thin gruel from their grain, protecting the pots and the fires from the dripping trees all around them. The wet cold crept inside their coats and cloaks. Psin’s teeth chattered all night long, and his lips chapped and bled.

On the eighth day of the ride north they woke up in the rain. It came without wind and fell like the stones of Tver. The snow, already soggy, turned to slop. Psin bundled himself into his cloak and swore.

“Don’t open your mouth, you’ll drown,” Kadan said cheerfully. “Here. Eat.”

Psin looked at the diluted gruel. “That might drown me sooner.”

“How close are we?”

“A day’s ride in dry weather on the flat steppe.”

“Three days’ ride, like this.”

Psin threw down the empty bowl. “Thank you. Where is Sabotai?”

“Here,” Sabotai said. “I’m catching cold.”

“I hope you sneeze yourself back to the Volga camp.” Psin threw his saddle onto his dun horse and yanked up the girths. “The trail from here to Novgorod is due north. It goes up a steep hill and down a steep hill and through what is by now undoubtedly a marsh deep enough to lose a horse in. Shall I lead off?”

Sabotai laughed, coughed, and wiped his nose.

Psin, riding, caught a glimpse of Tshant, a good distance away. He had left Djela behind, in Quyuk’s camp, with Ana and Dmitri to look after him.

Ana had said, “What’s wrong? Are you two fighting?”

“Woman, we are always fighting.”

He did not know what he would do if they ever fought hand to hand. Mongke was right. Tshant would beat him. He wondered if he could bear that. When he thought of it he was filled with dread.

The rain continued all day long. Snow slid heavily down on them from the branches of trees. The dun’s neck streamed darkly with water. On the slopes, bare rock nudged up out of the rotting snow. One of Sabotai’s horses broke a leg in the afternoon, and they butchered it and ate it for dinner. In the marshes, the horses staggered and leapt forward and sank down to their hocks, neighing madly, while the stink of the putrefying earth stuffed up their riders’ noses. Sabotai sniffled and sneezed constantly.

Toward sundown they drew up on a ridge Psin knew was only a short ride from Novgorod’s lake. The sky was dark grey and no sunlight came through; the forest was full of a vast dripping. He could smell marsh at the foot of the ridge. Boulders lay tumbled all down the slope.

Two scouts came toward them, splashing through black mud. They paused halfway up the slope, and one called, “Marsh all ahead. We have a deer.”

“The ravine down the way?” Psin shouted.

“Full of water.”

Sabotai cursed. He had wanted to ride the ravine north.

Psin looked behind him. He could see only the first few ranks of the army. Kadan sat slouched in his saddle, his horse’s hoofs on a flat rock. Tshant, behind him, looked grim and tired.

“Yes,” Sabotai said. “I see what you mean.” He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “The road?”

They had crossed the road twice, so far, and each time their horses had sunk to their stifles in the mud. The sentry raised both hands and shrugged. “It’s under water.”

“Hunh.” He swung toward Psin. “We’ll camp the night here. Tomorrow…”

Psin looked up at him from under his eyebrows.

“Tomorrow we go back,” Sabotai said, and sighed.

Hungry, cold, drenched to their underwear and so tired that they swayed in their saddles, they turned south. The thawing spring swept over them like a flock of birds. When they reached the place where the pine forest gave way to oaks and beeches, they found the open meadows running with melted snow. A few days later, Batu and Kaidu with their personal guards joined them. Batu had left the bulk of the army under the command of his brothers; he said they were spread across the hills to the Kama River, and that they had come decently through the winter.

“I’m glad they did,” Sabotai said, and sneezed.

They swung west, to bypass Tver and the land they had already taken, crossed the Dnepr on ice that heaved and shuddered beneath the horses’ hoofs, and looted all the estates on the river’s east shore. These were many and rich, but even so the army’s supplies shrank dangerously. Some of their horses died, so that they had meat.

“We can’t stop to take cities,” Sabotai said. “Look—look.”

He threw his right arm out toward the forest. Through the thin sheet of dissolving snow, grass thrust, startling green. The trees were hazy with new buds. Psin nodded. The air was heavy and sweet, almost singing with warmth. Flowers showed where the sun reached in through the canopy of branches. The horses dug wildly through the shell of snow to get to the new shoots.

He had never liked Russia before, he had thought of it only as land to be taken, as grass for horses and cattle, a source of supplies, but that spring made him love it. When they had left Tver to ride north, the cold had clutched at them; now no one wore a coat. The air was so rich he could not breathe enough of it. The dun horse bucked and played like a foal, although his ribs showed and hollows lay deep under his hipbones.

They reached the margin between the forest and the steppe, turned along it, and plundered two villages in one day. Sabotai left three hundred men to keep watch on the country around them. The villages, full of tanned leather, furs, even gold and silver from the churches, gave up nothing to eat but some dried vegetables and a few baskets of grain, and Sabotai chafed.

“We’re almost out of food.”

“We can reach the Volga camp on what we’re carrying now.”

Sabotai twitched. “We’re not going there. I want to summer west of it, on the steppe.”

“Well, we can get there.”

“No.”

They forded the Dnepr again and headed due south, crossed a smaller river where the water ran cold and clear over rocks and chunks of ice butted into the green shallows to be torn apart by the current, and plunged on. Two days later, scouts reported a small city up ahead on a hill.

“Ah,” Sabotai said. “How big?”

“Ask Tshant,” Psin said. “He scouted this region.”

Sabotai turned and passed the word back for Tshant. Psin reined the dun off some little way and let his reins slide. Tshant galloped up. The dun lowered his head and grazed; Tshant glanced at Psin and pulled over beside Sabotai.

Psin was too far away to hear what they said. He looked back at the army. The horses were tough, and on the new grass their necks were filling out, their coats regaining the shine of good health. But the men looked tired.

Tshant rode around to Sabotai’s other side, and Psin trotted back. Sabotai said, “He says it’s Kozelsk, on a bluff over a spring, hard to get at, but small.”

“Large enough to have something to eat in it?”

“Apparently.”

“I wouldn’t like asking them to fight uphill.”

“For food they’ll do anything. It’s right in our path. Let’s take it.”

They did not take the city in the first attack, nor in the second. Before they had regrouped—dusty, swearing—twilight rolled in, and Sabotai ordered the army to camp. Psin looked up at the city and grunted.

“You don’t seem to have thought this out properly,” he said to Sabotai. “You know we can’t withdraw now.”

“We’ll take it tomorrow.”

Psin glanced at him and turned back to the city, perched at the edge of the bluff. Against the luminous twilight sky the walls made a black lump. Torches shone abnormally bright on the stubby towers. The only approach lay between two great shoulders of basalt, a steep and narrow trough from the lower ground where the spring was to the thick stone walls. The Mongols could not bring their full weight to bear on the gate.

He walked the dun back through the camp and listened to the voices of the man hunched around their fires. Most of them were already asleep, their dinner bowls licked clean. The few who spoke sounded angry.

Stone walls. Tshant should have mentioned that. Perhaps he had, but Sabotai hadn’t thought it worth repeating. They could not burn Kozelsk, they could not storm it; the city they were attacking for its food supply they would probably have to starve into submission. He tried to raise the energy to laugh at that.

The deep night was full of a soft wind. The sky shone, dark rich blue. Everything seemed more distinct than usual, more alive. A nightbird shrilled. He dismounted and pulled his saddle off the dun, and great swatches of loose hair came with the blanket. He rubbed the horse down. On the dun’s shoulders his soft new summer coat showed in patches through the shed, three shades lighter.

If he were not on campaign he would be beside the Lake now, moving the herds slowly into spring pasturage, tending the foaling mares, counting new calves. The yurts would have patches after the long winter. Malekai’s new son would have a coat made of a lamb’s skin, and the meat would suddenly be tasting better, the kumiss more pungent, the game fatter.

We are hunters, he thought. We are herders. In God’s name, how did we come to be here?

“Do you think we’ll take it?” Tshant said, behind him.

“Eventually.”

“You didn’t discourage him much.”

Psin kept his back to Tshant. “I didn’t know it would be so hard to take.”

“Neither did I.”

Psin hunched up his shoulders. After a little silence he heard footsteps going away. He looked up at Kozelsk, at the black walls. It seemed to him that the land under his feet was tensing to throw him down.

Three times the next day they charged up the trough to the gate, and the Russians on the walls screamed and hurled stones and arrows and lances down on them, and they drew back, shouting with rage. Few died—Sabotai ordered them back each time just when it was obvious that to go on would cost too much.

They had to take Kozelsk now, no matter how long it took, and the army knew it and ground its teeth over it. To Tshant it seemed that the fresh wide pastures of the bursting spring lay just over the southern horizon, that the rest and food he had done so long without waited for him only two days’ ride south. But they had to stay, because Sabotai hadn’t judged this properly.

He rode out with four hundred men to raid the Dnepr. Psin was dispatching as many as half the army at a time to forage. Already the grass around Kozelsk was eaten down to the root. The grain was old and tasteless. Tshant didn’t like the way the water tasted, metallic from the rock just below the soil. He rode slowly, letting his horse graze.