The Golden Horde by Peter Morwood Read Free Book Online Page A

they ran away.” He turned his head and spat into the snow, more for punctuation than anything else. “They resisted, the resistance didn’t work, so they took to their heels and made up tales of an overwhelming enemy so they wouldn’t look like cowards.”
    Mar’ya Morevna looked at him sideways with a crooked smile. “My husband the hero, armed with a hero’s hard words. Tsar for exactly one year and nine months, and already so practiced and cynical. Well, my hero, no matter what happened, here we are, here we stay and as I said before, here we wait. But we might as well be comfortable while we do it.” She muttered under her breath and made an elaborate gesture with her fingers that still managed to be graceful despite the padding of her heavy gauntlets.
    Ivan felt a glow of warmth spread through him, as though someone had been warming his blood over a fire before running it back into his veins. It was comfortable indeed, but he still grimaced at the prospect of waiting. No matter what he might say, he hated waiting; here, outside the Council Chamber, inside a barrel floating on the Azov Sea. He had always hated it. There was usually something nasty at the end.
    *
    They waited, and time passed, and nothing happened. An hour went by, and the army held its formation while the Russian winter gnawed even the Russian soldiers who had grown up enduring it as a dog gnaws a bone, slowly wearing them away. As a second hour crawled to its weary conclusion, Ivan and Mar’ya Morevna could see the formations were beginning to lose their integrity. Even the thickest mantling of furs and a lifetime’s acquaintance with such weather, was no preparation for this. Standing with shield and spear at the ready in the closed ranks of an army expecting imminent attack, even the smallest movement of the air chilled weapons and armour and penetrated fur and leather with blades of ice that bled heat instead of blood.
    “What are those damned scouts doing?” snapped Mar’ya Morevna, staring at the empty horizon where white ground met grey sky. More than an hour ago, and then again twenty minutes after that, the silhouettes of first two and then five horsemen had skylined briefly, paused, presumably stared hard, then wheeled and ridden away. The silhouettes, stocky men on stocky ponies, were unmistakeably Tatars, the outriders of the raiding party whose main body was somewhere beyond that misty line where earth and sky came together. She had sent a party of Kipchaq mercenaries out to shadow the outriders, but there had been no further sign of hunters or hunted.
    “Our last report said the Tatars were half an hour away and we’ve seen their outriders twice since then. They know we’re here, so why aren’t they advancing? If they’re not, I want to know it. And why not, too. The bait’s tempting enough.”
    “Maybe they’re waiting for the cold to cut us up before they come in to finish the job,” said Ivan. “It’s already working. Look at that.” He pointed to where yet another soldier had fallen over in the snow and was now being helped from the battle-line back to where braziers of charcoal were set amongst the wagons.
    Mar’ya Morevna opened her mouth to say something then shut it again with a snap. She’d fought the Tatars before, it was true, but that had been in summertime where waiting a few hours before the onset made little difference. A raid in winter was different, and different enough that no Rus commander had any experience of Tatar tactics in cold weather.
    “You may be right,” she said, unbuckling her helmet and taking refuge instead within the deep hood of her fur robe. Mar’ya Morevna didn’t suffer fools gladly, but she was a good enough general that she would accept advice and even criticism if it was justified. “Boris Petrovich, to me!”
    Guard-Captain Fedorov saluted, responding to the summons at a jog-trot and glad to have a reason to move. He and the other captains and commanders were standing