The Last Crusaders: Ivan the Terrible
Title Page
THE LAST
CRUSADERS
IVAN THE TERRIBLE
William Napier
Moscow, 1541
His family were killing each other again.
Crouching in his chamber, the boy stared up towards the window and grey daylight and prayed and shook with terror. He seemed to have been shaking with terror all the few years of his life, praying desperately to God for mercy and safekeeping as long as he could remember.
There were screams, shouts, the ring of steel, the sounds of heavy-booted running men. An animal howl. The boy crouched lower, gripping the embroidered curtain that hung around his bed for thin comfort. He was petrified, unable even to crawl under the bed to hide. The curtain trembled as he clutched it. The embroidered figures of noble huntsmen and their ladies rippled and waved mockingly at him from their golden otherworld. Something thumped at his chamber door. He could not move. The shouting men ran on.
Another day, another round of bloodletting and vengeance in the gaunt palace of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, called simply the Kremlin: the Fortress.
At last he unclenched his bunched fists from the curtain and stepped slowly over to the door. Something was pushing gently against it from the other side, but he could hear nothing, no breathing. Bathed again in the icy sweat of fear, he slowly drew the door open. A body lay just outside, head lolling across the threshold, tongue out, throat cut, blood oozing in a dark swathe across the polished wooden floor towards him. He stepped back in disgust so as not to soil his soft sheepskin boots. But he felt another emotion too: triumph at seeing another slain, another dead, another rendered this stupid, lolling corpse, so helpless at his chamber door – and he still alive, so alive. There was a strange sweetness to it. A power.
He did not recognize the corpse. A thick-set man, eyes puffy and closed. Some henchman who chose the wrong side. In life he could have picked the boy up and hugged him to death like a bear, but now he was just dead weight. The boy kicked him gently in the ribs. Dead, dead as a dead hog at Martinmas. The boy smiled faintly. And he himself alive. Life was cruel, but God had made it thus.
Was the dead man at his door a warning to him, a murderous threat? Or was it merely by chance that it was at his chamber door this particular thug had fumbled his weapon and lost his life? He would never know.
His heart still racing, mind in a whirl of God and dread and triumph, he pushed the door closed again. Shot the bolt. Went carefully over to the window, trying to calm his breathing, stepping slow and stately as if the Duke himself in a cathedral procession. To be a Duke, said his father, you must act a Duke.
He stood at the tall window of the chamber and looked out upon one of the Kremlin’s inner courtyards. There came another distant scream, and he laid his hands flat on the cool stone ledge. He was Ivan, son of Vasily, Grand Duke of Moscow, and of Elena, of Lithuanian descent. Surely his father would soon have restored order, taken red revenge on these barbaric boyars running murderous riot. But both his parents were dead now, his father when he was just six, his beautiful mother when he was eight, surely poisoned, the palace gossip said. He was a pitiful orphan in a young, unstable city racked by rivalry, hatred and the relentless struggle for dominance. He had once seen a pack of street dogs erupt into a mass brawl, ripping into each other with slavering jaws.
As in the street, so in the palace. As amongst dogs, so amongst men.
More screams, sounding far off. But the boy was already retreating from the sordid world around him into dreams of power and grandeur. He prayed to God Almighty and God heard his prayers. He would survive, by the grace of God, Creator and Destroyer of men. He would conquer, and one day he too would be Grand Duke.
One scream rose above the others. It was the scream of a woman, driven out onto a high balcony across the courtyard from where he stood and watched. Again he felt a tranquillity. It was her they were about to kill, not him. The tranquillity of relief and curiosity. The men behind had stripped her half-naked and driven her at swordpoint onto this cruel public promontory. Perhaps she was the wife or the whore of the man butchered at his door. If the boy glanced back now, he thought he would see the man’s blood seeping under the door towards him, a spreading crimson lake …
He did not look round. He stared across at the woman about to die, feeling more intensely that calm and vicarious power. Kill her, he found himself thinking. Yes, kill her! And he did not even know who she was. Again a faint smile.
The men behind her stabbed her three or four times in the back and she arched and howled once more and crawled up desperately onto the parapet and one gave her a last sharp stab in the arm and she was over and falling and hitting the ground below with a leaden thump. Her limbs spasmed briefly and she was still.
One day … One day all this would be his. And the whole world would feel his power. The boy lowered his gaze and thanked God and was at peace.
Shropshire, England, 1574
The early spring sunshine fell on the fields bright with young green wheat and spangled with dew, and the bell of the manor house chapel was calling its summons to the field workers. Sir Nicholas Ingoldsby, aged twenty-five, baronet in the County of Shropshire, had been up since before dawn, bent over his desk. He laid down his pen and rubbed his eyes, and gazed out of the lead-paned window into the enchanted country beyond. He had always preferred being out of doors – on his feet, on a horse, even up a tree. Then he gave a deep sigh and read what he had written.
Three horses, £6 10s; six pigs, £2; a hundred and fifty sheep, £37; nineteen acres of wheat, £27; thirty-two acres of barley, £32; two acres of beans, £1 10s.
He smiled ruefully. He had become a bean counter, the dutiful son of his late father, old Sir John Ingoldsby, managing the ancestral estate that had been in the family of the Ingoldsbys for three hundred years. But was this really the duty he owed his father? When he was younger, and still a na
ï
ve boy, he had felt differently. He glanced up at the ancient sword that still hung above the fireplace – the sword with which his father had fought against the Ottoman Turks, at the desperate, heroic and doomed Siege of Rhodes in 1522, when he was still a Knight of St John.
But when the Order of St John was abolished in England by order of the State, Sir John had had to choose between his loyalty to that strange, antique, ferocious brotherhood of warrior-monks, or his country. He had chosen his country, and returned to England to marry, to raise his children, and live as a quiet, obedient, unobtrusive old Catholic family of the shires.
Now Nicholas seemed set on a similar life. Was he old before his time? He flexed his aching shoulders. No, his heart still burned within him. Just like at sixteen, when he had seen his beloved father killed in a stupid accident before his eyes, and in a fit of youthful idealism, had set off with his faithful old friend, Matthew Hodgkin, for the island of Malta, to serve with his father’s old Order, in some confused dream of a Noble Crusade … What a trial by fire that had been!
And an unexpectedly long one too. The Great Siege itself, all that deadly summer of 1565 – the young girl Maddalena, his first true love, his first heartbreak – the sorrowful departure from Malta, and then the fate of so many Christian voyagers on that sea: capture and enslavement by Barbary pirates. The galleys.
And Algiers jail. Years passed. He grimaced. Even now he could smell the dungeons he and Hodge had lain in, hear the scuttle of rats, picture their sharp, inquisitive muzzles nosing the fetid air, one forepaw raised, searching out any fresh corpses to feed on in that hellhole. Their escape.
Drunken quayside brawls, whorehouses, knife fights – the feckless life of any nationless vagabond. And then the Cyprus campaign with the Knights once more, quite unexpectedly, and that epic, destructive naval battle of Lepanto.
And then home – and this. Peace. Domesticity. He who had come back from the front line of the Turkish wars with a still restless heart, who still awoke from nightmares of Malta and Lepanto – strange nightmares that comprised exhilaration as well as terror – he who had for seven wild years lived in the heart of history!
Another sigh arose from deep within him, and he stared again at his estate accounts. Hereditary baronet he might be, but in terms of income, no more than a country yeoman. He had taken back the old family servants, the estate workers, he had cared for his sisters, married them off one by one to suitable husbands round about. He had even started to look around for a wife himself, to continue the ancient, noble, though distinctly impoverished, lineage of Ingoldsby. And to cool his restless heart with yet more dutifulness.
He ran his tongue over the pit in his gum where a tooth had been only yesterday. He refused to pay a professional tooth drawer, a damnable expense, so he had resorted – in traditional peasant style – to the services of the blacksmith, with his iron tongs and his strong right arm. Still cost him threepence. And that was the most bloodshed he wanted to see nowadays. No more wild travels and adventures for him. Not any more. He was, he told himself, perfectly content. He must be.
Now then. There were eight gallons of wheat to a bushel, and eight pounds of wheat to a gallon. But he was buying in grain from Cornwall where it was counted eighteen to the bushel – unless you were buying directly off a boat, in which case it was sixteen … And he was buying in Cornish grain unlading from the Severn. Did that mean … ?
There came a knock at the door.
‘Enter.’
It was Jenkyn, the old steward. He looked anxious.
‘What is it, man?’
‘Sire – they’ve took Master Hodgkin.’
‘Took?’
‘Bandits, sire. Holding ’im up in Hound Wood. Demanding a ransom for him they are and all, or they say they’ll cut his throat by midnight.’
He was on his feet and reaching for his cloak already. ‘How many of ’em?’
‘I don’t know, sire. The lad come running saying they was great brutes of men, with faces all snarled up like the gargoyles round the church porch.’
‘He has a vivid turn of phrase.’
He took down that venerable sword from over the fireplace and unsheathed it and eyed the blade. Still notched by Ottoman scimitars. ‘Get me Will Rooker and saddle up two horses. We don’t truckle with bandits in Shropshire.’
As he turned and strode from the room, his flaring cloak brushed the inkpot and overturned it. Black gall seeped over all the good work he had done, but he never even noticed.