Nicholas looked up at the rope they had left behind, like some silent threat. It was a stout piece. He scrambled up on his horse’s back and untied it and looped it over his left shoulder. Then he rode back to find his comrades, feeling madly exultant. That sweet savour of victory! Though not a blade had clashed, not a drop of blood had been shed, yet that was a true skirmish back there, one against six, and he had triumphed! Great God it was a sweet feeling! In the heart and the blood and, shame on it, every one of a man’s organs. He had just looked into the face of evil, and treated them with disdain, and survived, and now he knew that their enemies were as much these gloating black-cloaked devils as the Tatars themselves, and they were already in one tormented country and one hell of a mess. But as his blood pumped and he spurred violently and his good horse galloped and jumped tree trunk and stream as exultantly as he, his only thought was, God but it is sweet, this life of danger! I had almost forgot it, dutiful Shropshire squire that I was, but now – bring it down on me like rain!
He came galloping back into camp grinning like a crazed thing, and reined in so flamboyantly his mare’s front legs splayed out and her hooves skidded forward in the dust.
Stanley was sitting on a tree trunk, trying to stitch up the sole of his boot with a thin strip of leather sliced from his own jerkin. It wasn’t working. ‘Invigorating ride? Not had enough time in the saddle lately?’
‘Most invigorating, thank you. A pretty woodland, and then an interesting talk with some riders of the Oprichnina.’
Stanley laughed. Smith glared at him. Hodge looked puzzled.
‘They were insulting towards our Queen Elizabeth, and then they hung a rope over a branch to lynch me. But I reproved them in no uncertain terms, and they rode off like chastened schoolboys. Nevertheless, I think we may encounter them again.’
‘You have a vivid imagination, Brother Ingoldsby,’ said Stanley.
Hodge narrowed his eyes. ‘Are you telling tall tales?’
He slipped from his horse. ‘I am not. Every word is true.’
Stanley laid off stitching and looked at him hard. ‘You … this is the truth?’
‘It is.’
Smith gave a rare smile. ‘You just ran into the Oprichnina?’
‘All as I said.’
They absorbed this unexpected news and then Smith roared with laughter and stood and, though Nicholas tried to avoid it, seized him and gave him a bear hug. Smith’s bear hugs hurt.
‘Devil take you, Ingoldsby! Born survivor, ex-galley slave, escaped from Algiers gaol, swum the channel to Elmo, shot by musket fire, shipwrecked, and now narrowly escaped a lynching by the Oprichnina! You’ve had almost as many narrow escapes as I, and still but twenty-eight, is it?’
‘Twenty-five.’
‘The devil.’ Smith shook his head. ‘You should have been a Knight of St John after all.’
‘I couldn’t live with the—’
‘The chastity, I know, I know.’
‘So where are these Oprichnina swine now? How many? Where are they travelling?’
Then he told them about the slain man, the grotesque mutilation, and he felt chastened that he had felt such exultation so soon after, that it had meant so little to him. We all have the strength to bear the sufferings of others. What cynic had said that?
‘The savagery of these black-cloaked thugs is beyond all reckoning,’ said Smith. ‘How can we serve this Czar Ivan—’
‘We are not serving Czar Ivan,’ said Stanley, ‘nor any prince of this world. We are serving the Christian Ideal. As always. You think our allied captains at Lepanto were all saints? Come, Brother John, you know better than that. Even Don John himself, our gallant
commander there, notoriously loves his whores and hardly lives a life of virtue.’ He looked down and began to stitch his battered boot again. ‘Few men are saints, and very few in war. And we know that this Czar Ivan is a tyrant and rules cruelly. But in Russia this is usual. They hardly know or expect any different here.’
‘Well,’ said Smith, ‘we can but pray that we run into these damned Oprichnina once more.’
‘I very much fear we will.’
They rode out the last day before dawn with summer stars still bright, Altair and the lovely Vega in Lyra. The four rode near the head of the column with Yakublev and Stenka and his men. They would travel for a good hour before stopping to eat some coarse millet bread.
They were riding a pale sandy track when Ivan Koltzo stopped and looked down. ‘Many horses have passed this way.’
‘Recently?’ said Stenka.
‘Within a day.’
‘They are not …?’
Ivan Koltzo shook his head. ‘Big horses. Heavy. Perhaps fifty of them, well-laden.’
Stanley said, ‘We will go ahead. If you hear two shots in rapid succession, come quickly.’ He was already drawing the two German handguns he carried at his waist, and putting a pinch of powder in each.
They went ahead some few hundred yards, spreading wide, looking far into the forest left and right. Yes, there was something. They could not say what. Something nearing them. Like the old witches’ rhyme,
By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes …
And then the track broadened and there was a clearing in the trees and a village. Or what remained of a village.
They closed up together instinctively and reined in and stared. Smith unsheathed his sword. They surveyed the scorched earth in silence, the blackened, still-smoking cottages, the wisps of smoke rising in the peaceful summer air. There were cattle lying slaughtered, cut open, guts fed upon by squabbling crows. There
were beheaded chickens, trampled sheep and stuck pigs. And there were dead people.
The Oprichnina had been through here on their punitive raid or
chevauchée
. Already Nicholas understood, they all understood, that there need be no reason or rationale for their cruelty. It was recreational. This village was just unlucky. Word of the slaughter would spread, and other villages, whole provinces, would hear of it and take note. Do not rebel against the Czar. He is God’s Anointed, and he afflicts you for your sins. Pay your taxes. Obey. This savagery was committed deliberately to oppress the people, to assert the power of Ivan IV Vasil’evich over every human soul in the land of Russia.
Hodge said quietly, ‘You would think the Tatars had already been.’
‘Aye,’ said Stanley. ‘Yet this is what the Russians do to themselves. This is surely more work of the Oprichnina, who you must remember do not officially exist, though they are seen riding beside the Czar on every State occasion. Such is the madness of the State. And they may rape, torture, plunder and slay with absolute freedom. In their black robes they are devilish mirror-images of some black monkish order. We have heard their leader, the very worst, one called Maliuta Skuratov, even keeps trained bears, to hunt naked women through the forest and tear them in pieces for his amusement.’
Nicholas stared about and wondered once more, what terrible land had they come to?
Corpses hung from the trees. Some had been lynched, some hauled up by their ankles with their throats cut, bled like pigs. Their throats and faces and the ground blood-dark beneath them. Some of the slain were very young. There was a big pitchfork with three long tines, its haft driven into the ground, and on each tine was jammed a severed human head. At the foot of an old mulberry tree was an infant’s naked body. Its head had been dashed against the trunk.
An old woman sat on the earthen step of a cottage with her head completely hidden under a black widow’s veil, shaking violently. Smith dismounted and led his horse towards her and laid a huge hand on her bone-thin shoulder. He said quietly, ‘Mother, do you hear us?’
She did not respond.
‘We are not the men who did this. We are come …’ and he tailed off, feeling stupid and helpless. He was going to say, We are come to set this right, but that was absurd, obscene. This could not be set right. It was done and could not be undone. Anger rose in him. ‘I am sorry.’ He left the woman still sitting, still shaking.
‘God damn.’ Fire burned from inside him. ‘God damn these savages! We know who did this!’
‘Calm yourself, Brother—’
‘So, Ned Stanley,’ said Nicholas, angered too, wrenching at his reins, punishing his poor mount for the vileness of men. ‘Tell me, we have ridden all this way, under command of our Queen to deliver gifts to this Ivan. Gather what information might be useful. No more than that. And now we are supposed to be fighting for him? This is our cause, these are our allies?’ He waved his hand over the scene of horror. ‘We fight with these, against the Tatars? Maybe the Tatars are less cruel themselves, for all their unchristened hearts!’
‘Necessity makes strange bedfellows,’ said Stanley grimly.
‘Don’t give me maxims!’
Cossacks gathered round to watch. Amid this scene of horror, the young Englishman’s rage was a dramatic and splendid thing, and though the language of the two arguing was foreign, they understood the import well enough. Did an old Cossack not once observe, ‘If you serve Holy Mother Russia, she will devour you’?
‘We fight for the Christian Empire of Russia,’ said Stanley patiently, ‘not the men who did this. Fight for the people, the villagers themselves. Can you not see that?’
‘And we will fight the Tatar alongside these black-robed devils? How can we pollute ourselves so as to join arms with such vermin?’
‘First let us defend Moscow,’ said Stanley. ‘The future is always uncertain.’
Nicholas turned away. It was a sick war, a civil war, always the worst. Where was the clean nobility and the clearness of it? This was no Malta, no high crusade against barbaric invaders of an innocent country, but something far fouler. And they were becoming trapped in it.
‘I tell you!’ said Stenka. ‘I tell you how it is, young English. It is simple. First we destroy the Tatars. Then we destroy the Oprichnina. Destroy them both! Stenka Timofeivitch swears it.’
‘You cannot destroy the Oprichnina,’ said Yakublev. ‘That is foolish talk. They are an entire professional army, and the close guard of the Czar himself.’
Stenka scowled. He was right, of course.
‘Tell us,’ said Smith, pulling his horse up before the old woman again and speaking through gritted teeth. ‘Tell us, Mother, where have they gone?’
‘Wait,’ said Stanley more firmly now. ‘We present ourselves at Ivan’s court, having just attacked a troupe of his own personal bodyguard? A fine plan that is.’
The old woman stirred under her veil. Nicholas had the terrible fear that beneath that covering might be two lightless and bloody sockets for eyes – or they had sliced out her tongue. Some such horror which she hid for misplaced shame. Then she mumbled her answer.
‘They have gone back to hell.’ The words hung in the air. ‘Back to their master the Devil. What do I know? Or the next village, God have mercy on their souls, the next valley.’ She gestured with a skinny arm. ‘Through the woods, a few miles’ ride. If they have gone that way you will see the hoofmarks,’ she said. ‘And the blood.’
They rode through thin birch forest and there were many hoofmarks, and the summer sunlight was beautiful on the pale green leaves and on the soft dappled forest floor. Butterflies flittered through the glades as they rode, speckled woods, or flashes of red and purple wings high in the old oaks. Birdsong and the sound of a startled deer in the undergrowth – and then a high, human scream.
Stanley’s wise caution was powerless then. All argument was ended with that scream, which set Nicholas, nerves already jangling, spurring his horse into a canter towards the sound. Hodge naturally went after him, and so the knights after them both. Seeing this, Stenka went after his new brothers-in-arms, and then his Cossacks too. Yakublev roared out, forbidding any more of his men from going after, but by that time two or three dozen were already galloping towards the place of meeting.
‘Cover your faces at least, for the love of God!’ cried Stanley. And as they rode they fumbled with kerchiefs and tied them roughly over mouths and noses. Then Nicholas, urging his willing bay mare into a gallop, erupted out of the trees into a wide clearing, blood pulsing in his ears, deaf even to the cries from Hodge and Smith and Stanley yelling at him not to go out alone, to attack in a line, he would be trapped …
He took in the scene in an instant. A broad sandy clearing, the Oprichnina camp, black tents. Men standing about or sitting, gaming, drinking, dozing. Maybe fifty in all. A naked girl bound to a tree for amusement over on the far side of the camp, already shot with one arrow in her shoulder. Exhausted, filthy with mud, hair plastered to her cheek with sweat as if she had already been chased though the woods like prey for mile after mile, hunted down like a hare. Stripped and doubtless raped and now finally tied, to be shot to death with arrows. Good target practice.
Her head hung down, her lips moved as if in prayer. Around her a group of men in black. Nicholas saw eight, five still mounted, including the one in the animal mask. Three standing a mere twenty feet from her – some archery – one about to shoot. Another casually relieving himself against another nearby tree. Her death so trivial.
The bowstring was drawn back. He would be too late.
As he erupted across the sandy clearing he roared out the first battle cry that came to mind – God for England and Queen Bess! – and the foreignness of the words had its effect. The archer about to shoot the girl turned round and stared, mouth agape, bowstring slackening in his fingers. Other men around the camp lurched to their feet, unarmed, puzzled, and took in this lunatic on a galloping horse, sword swinging. It made no sense. No one attacked the Oprichnina. Ever. They were unassailable. Then behind the lunatic – loosely masked, they now saw, like a bandit – came more of them. This was serious. They began to reach for weapons.
The masked lunatic, howling his strange execrations, swung his sword sharply and it cut straight across the throat of a tall thin fellow stepping forward to halt him with a pike. He collapsed like a puppet and the lunatic rode over him.
Nicholas rode straight for the girl. The archer hadn’t even the presence of mind to turn his arrow, already nocked, against him.
‘Shoot him down, you idiot!’ one of the mounted men was screaming, pulling his own horse around, reaching for his own sword. But he wore no sword. None of them did. They were in camp, there had been no need. They pulled back, one or two of them even broke away and took cover in the trees, and then Nicholas descended on the paralysed archer, sword swirling, and took off the top of his head. The archer turned, dazed, and dropped his bow and fell. He lay there, watching the fight, life ebbing slowly. He felt no pain. He rolled over, clawing at the ground, and the last thing he saw was the bound girl looking down at him. Her face was quite expressionless. He thought that was how the Angel would look on Judgement Day. And then he died.
The knights raced after the madcap Ingoldsby. Four horsemen together had closed in around him, unarmed as they were. One used a branch to fend off his swordcuts, and another hefty fellow seized him round the waist and took them both to the ground. Nicholas lay dazed, the sword gone from his right hand, the weight of the brute upon him, his breath hot and foul. Then he saw the flash of a dagger. Not even time to grab a handful of dust … He craned up and bit the brute on his fat, pustular nose. He howled and rose up. A second’s grace. Then the brute stabbed down with his dagger, eyes closed in pain, and the blade went into the earth an inch from Nicholas’s side. Nicholas slammed his arm into the outside of the brute’s elbow joint and he howled again, letting go off the dagger. Nicholas turned his head, grabbed the dagger by the hilt, pulled it free and stuck it in his assailant’s side. Well-padded, not enough. He stabbed and stabbed again, unable to see, trying to find some vital organ. Wet sides. The fellow’s hands at his throat, gargling in his face. Then he jerked and the strength went from him. Nicholas shoved him off in disgust, rolled in the dust and came to his feet, backing into the edge of the forest, bloody dagger extended before him, trying to take it all in.
It was done. In that short time, half of the black troop had been killed. The other half had jumped on unreined and unsaddled horses and fled into the trees. The Cossacks were hunting them like deer. It was imperative that none escaped.
He swiped the sweat from his forehead and blinked and looked down at his hands, his side. Drenched in blood – but whose? He knew of old that even lethal wounds could hurt barely at all. He moved carefully, bent double, stood upright again, leaned left, right, a strange ritual. No, nothing. His worst injury was a bruised arse where he fell from his horse with the brute on top of him. The patient beast stood nearby, waiting for him. Christ, he was lucky, again. Time to thank Him later.
He stepped swiftly over to the girl and sliced through her bonds. She stared ahead, still expressionless. He glanced down. No sign of blood. The only injury, the arrow stuck in her shoulder. The last bond cut, she fell forward into his arms. At a range of twenty feet, the arrowhead had passed almost through her slim shoulder. He could see the dark metal protruding under the skin, just above her shoulder-blade, like some foul boil. It would be best to break off the shaft and push the arrowhead on out. Work for Stanley. All Knights of St John were expert physicians, and Stanley as deft and gentle a battlefield surgeon as any he’d ever seen.
He bore her over to one of the ruined cottages and found a clean enough blanket and laid her down and went to find Stanley. Her eyes followed him as he left her.
‘I will find you help,’ he said. ‘Rest awhile.’
She said nothing.
Already the Cossacks were dragging the corpses of the hated Oprichnina, their tents, gear, everything into the centre of the clearing and piling them onto a heap of dry, resinous pine brushwood. No fewer than four of the thugs they slung onto the pile wore the sign of ‘Stenka’s cross’ on their torsos: one swordcut across, one down.
They piled more on top. They would burn everything, leaving nothing of these wretches’ earthly remains but a smoking black pit. ‘After all,’ explained Chvedar, ‘their souls are gone to a smoking black pit for all eternity – why not their corrupted bodies likewise?’
After some time the other Cossacks returned from their pursuit through the forest, bringing back a sack of severed heads.
‘How many?’ demanded Yakublev, seizing the sack and glancing within. ‘Half a dozen. Curse them.’
‘They are cunning,’ said Ivan Koltzo. ‘We can track them, but they have already headed back to the City … the outskirts … we could pursue no further.’
Stanley lowered his head, settled his hands on his pommel, breathed. This was bad. Smith too was turning over in his mind just what they had done. Attacked and slaughtered the Czar’s own elite soldiery, a day’s ride from Moscow. Clever. And now they were about to ride into Moscow themselves, and bid good day! Smith glanced left and saw the proximate cause of their troubles now running over to them. Ingoldsby. All his fault. Hectic of complexion, bright-eyed, his father’s son, reckless dreamer, chivalrous to women as a storybook knight, though no celibate. Yet Smith almost smiled, against his will. He could not blame him. Such absurd gallantry as this Ingoldsby’s, against impossible odds and in the very face of death, was just what the Knights of St John lived for.
And he was covered in blood.
‘From your vigour I would guess that is not your blood there, Brother Nicholas.’
He shook his head. ‘The man I killed. It was ugly.’ Then he realised they were all looking at him pointedly. He flushed, tried to say sorry for his impetuosity, mouth working, and failed. Stanley saw it too and grinned. He understood precisely.
‘No, you’re not sorry,’ he said, cuffing him. ‘Nor I. It was the least they deserved. But I have to say, Ingoldsby, I really don’t think you will ever make a very subtle ambassador for the Court of St James. And we are now in quite a predicament.’
‘We’re in a heap of shit,’ said Hodge. ‘We’re right down in Beelzebub’s own privy.’
Nicholas looked rueful. Then he told them the wounded girl lay in yonder cottage and needed Stanley’s attention. The knight dismounted and strode over to her at once. Nicholas turned to Ivan Koltzo. ‘One other thing. Was there a rider you hunted who wore a wooden animal mask – or had it tied to his saddle maybe?’
Ivan Koltzo nodded. ‘Their captain. And it was our brother Dmitri who rode against him, but his horse stumbled as he came alongside and this fellow thrust him clean through and our brother Dmitri died. The rider escaped. A true swordsman, and perhaps a nobleman too.’
‘Noble?’ said Nicholas. And laughed.
He went and watched Stanley work. It was always a good thing to see. His huge gentle hands turning her, touching the arrowhead through the stretched and reddening skin, murmuring to her. Of course she wanted to die, but this red-cheeked, flaxen-haired giant of a man was a comfort to her, she could not deny. He said they could give her brandy but alas they had no opium.
She said, ‘Do it. Bearing my child hurt more.’
‘Where is your man? Your child?’
Her eyes shone with tears and she turned her head away to the blackened cottage wall.
The devils.
He sent Nicholas to order men to bring in wild garlic, fresh streamwater, boil more water and to dig down below the sandy soil of the heath and find two good handfuls of dense clay. Boil the garlic lightly then boil the clay in the water and bring all to him immediately. And any spiders’ webs they found, clean of flies. The silk was perfect for staunching wounds.
Nicholas ran and gave the orders and returned.
The knight held brandy to her lips. At first she refused, as if wanting to suffer the more, but he forced the neck of the flask between her lips, the masterful physician who knew best what his patient needed, and made her drink. Then he slid his right hand under her shoulder, raising it a few inches off the blanket, and took hold of the arrow shaft very lightly in his left hand.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘Shout when I shout. Don’t scream, shout. Bawl. Do not feel pain, feel anger.’ And a mere second later he roared out over her like an enraged bear, she raised her head and bellowed all her grief and rage to the black burnt rafters, and simultaneously he gripped the shaft hard and thrust it down smoothly through the back of her shoulder. The arrowhead emerged in a gout of dark blood. She continued to roar in her pain, but feeling more anger than pain as he had said. He propped his knee under her shoulder, and then in a blur of speed and astonishing deftness that Nicholas had witnessed so many times before, he gripped the remaining shaft in both hands, clenched side by side, snapped off the flight in his left hand, plucked loose splinters from the break, gripped the arrowhead beneath her once more and pulled it clean. Glanced at it and flung it away. He rolled the girl onto her side, wound uppermost.
The steaming pots he asked for were brought and set down beside him, and he packed a hot compress of the dark green leaves on both sides of the wound, holding her powerfully so that she did not flinch under its touch. He held it there for many minutes, though his arm must ache, and then drew it away. The wound still oozed blood. He applied another compress, then another, repeating the process eight times in all until he judged the wound had bled out most of its poison and begun to clot. Then he applied the spiders’ webs they had collected, and another thin layer of wild garlic leaves, and finally the hot clay, smoothing it over. It dried to a firm crust in moments. At last he was satisfied and sat back.
‘That will do,’ he said. ‘You must keep very still. Lie on that side and sleep now. Do not roll over. Nick – give her water to drink.’
Nicholas held a flask of fresh water to her lips and she drank a little. She never spoke another word and her eyes remained so indifferent it frightened him.