Sasha took the gifts distractedly. His mind was already out in the wild: on bandits and burnt villages and on how to manage a young prince who no longer wished to be a vassal. “God keep you, sister,” he said.
“And you, brother,” Olga said, her gathered calm unbroken. She was used to leave-taking. This brother came and went like a wind in the summer pines, and her husband, Vladimir, was no better. But this time she thought of her father and sister, gone, never to return, and the effort of composure cost her. Always, they go while I remain. “I beg you will remember me in your prayers.”
DMITRII AND HIS MEN left Moscow on a day of drifting white: white snow and white sun, glittering on white towers. A mocking wind teased its way beneath their cloaks and hoods as Dmitrii strode out into his dooryard, dressed for journeying, and vaulted lightly to his horse’s back. “Come, cousin!” he called to Sasha. “Bright day, and dry snow. Let us be gone!”
The grooms stood ready with haltered packhorses, and a troop of well-mounted men waited, armed with swords and short spears.
Kasyan’s people mixed uneasily with Dmitrii’s. Sasha wondered what was behind their unsmiling faces. Kasyan himself sat quiet on his big chestnut mare, his glance flicking round the teeming dooryard.
The Grand Prince’s gates creaked open, and the men kicked their horses. The beasts lunged forward, full of grain. Sasha mounted his gray mare, Tuman, and nudged her out last into the cruelly shining winter. Dmitrii’s gates roared shut behind them.
The last they heard of Moscow was the sound of her bells, ringing out over the trees.
FOR THOSE WHO COULD bear it (and many could not), winter was traveling season in northern Rus’. In summer, men went through the wilderness by cart-track and deer-path, often too narrow for wagons, and always axle-deep in mud. But in winter, the roads froze like iron, and sledges could bear great burdens. The frozen rivers made roads with no trees or stumps, nothing to bar progress, and they ran in wide, predictable patterns, north and south, east and west.
In winter the rivers were much trafficked. Villages lay along either bank, nourished by the water, and there stood also the great houses of boyars, ready to play host to the Grand Prince of Moscow.
On the first day they rode east, and toward evening they came upon the lights of Kupavna: glad fires in the dusk. Dmitrii sent men to demand the lord’s hospitality, and they feasted on pie with cabbage and pickled mushrooms.
But the next morning, they left the tamed lands, and any expectation of shelter for the night. The wood grew dark and trackless, dotted with tiny hamlets. The men rode hard by day, camped in the snow, and kept watch by night.
For all their care, the riders saw neither beast nor bird, and certainly no bandits, but on the seventh day they came upon a burnt village.
Tuman smelled the smoke first and snorted. Sasha curbed her with steady hands and turned his head into the wind himself. “Smoke.”
Dmitrii reined his horse. “I smell it.”
“There,” said Kasyan beside them. He pointed a mittened hand.
Dmitrii snapped out hasty orders and the men circled nearer. There was no hope of a silent approach, not with so many. The dry snow groaned beneath the horses’ feet.
The village was burned to ashes, as though crushed by some giant hand of fire. At first it seemed utterly dead, empty and cold, but in the middle stood a chapel, which the fire had mostly spared, and a little smoke rose from a hole hacked in the roof.
The men drew nearer, swords drawn, bracing for the whine of arrows. Tuman rolled an anxious eye back toward her rider. The village had once had a palisade, but it was burned to a slag-heap.
Dmitrii snapped out more orders—some men to stand guard, others to look for survivors in the surrounding forest. In the end, only he and Sasha and Kasyan leaped what was left of the palisade, with a few men at their backs.
Bodies lay strewn as they had died, black as the burnt houses, with pleading finger-bones and grinning skulls. Though Dmitrii Ivanovich was not a man given to either imagination or sentiment, he grew white around the mouth. But his voice was quite steady when he said to Sasha, “Go and knock on the door of the church.” For they could hear sounds inside.
Sasha dropped to the snow, rapped on the church-door with his sword-hilt, and called, “God be with you.”
No reply.
“I am Brother Aleksandr,” Sasha called. “I am no bandit and no Tatar. I will help you if I can.”
Silence behind the door, then a skittering of conversation. The door flew open. The woman inside had an ax in her hand and a bruised face. Beside her stood a priest, streaked with blood and soot. When these two saw Sasha, tonsured, indubitably a monk, their makeshift weapons dropped a fraction.
“May the Lord bless you,” said Sasha, although the words stuck in his throat. “Can you tell me what happened here?”
“What matter?” said the priest, full of wild-eyed laughter. “You have come too late.”
IN THE END, IT was the woman who spoke, and she could tell them little. The bandits had come at daybreak, fine snow flying from their horses’ hooves. There had been a hundred at least—or it seemed so. They were everywhere. Nearly all the men and women died under their swords. Then they went for the children. “They took the girl-children away,” the woman said. “Not all—but many. One man looked into each of our girls’ faces and seized the ones he wanted.” In the woman’s hand lay a small, bright kerchief that had clearly belonged to a child. Her wavering gaze rose, found Sasha’s. “I beg you will pray for them.”
“I will pray for them,” said Sasha. “We will find these bandits if we can.”
The riders shared what food could be spared and helped make a pyre for the half-burned bodies. Sasha took some fat and linen and eased the burns of the survivors, although there were those who would have benefited more from the mercy-stroke.
At dawn they rode away.
The Grand Prince threw the burnt village a look of dislike as it disappeared into the forest. “We will be a season on the road, cousin, if you must bless every corpse and feed every mouth we meet. As it is, we have lost a day. Not one of those people will last the winter where they are—not with their grain all burned—and it did the horses no good to stop.”
Dmitrii was still white to the lips.
Sasha made no answer.
IN THE THREE DAYS after their first burnt village, they came upon two more. In the first, the villagers had succeeded in slaying a bandit’s horse, but the raiders had retaliated with great slaughter before firing the chapel. Their iconostasis was splinters and blowing ash, and the survivors stood around it, staring. “God has abandoned us,” they told Sasha. “They took the girls. We await judgment.”
Sasha blessed the villagers; they returned only empty stares, and he left them.
The trail was very cold. Or perhaps there had never been a trail.
The third village was simply deserted. Everyone had gone: men, and women, babes and grandmothers, down to the stock and the hens, their tracks muffled in new snowfall.
“Tatars!” Dmitrii spat, standing in this final village, with the smell of stock and smoke lingering. “Tatars indeed. And you say I will not have my war, Sasha, and take God’s vengeance on these infidels?”