But no. It was hopeless. The Czar himself had spiked the Czar gun, and there were no gunners, no powder and no shot with which to use it. It was a magnificent bronze monument to German engineering and nothing else besides.
Prince Michael Vorotinsky bade them farewell and sent them away with one of his aides. They found Stenka and Andriushko and rode out of the western gate of the city for the makeshift Cossack camp.
‘Where are outriders, your scouts?’ asked Stanley.
The aide said, ‘There are none. For fear they will ride away and join with the Tatars, and then betray the city to them.’
‘Is that likely?’
The Russian shrugged sullenly. ‘Anything is possible now.’
They spent the rest of the day overseeing the citizen militia drilling, and beginning to make meagre preparations for siege: setting up water barrels on street corners for fires, laying out piles of wet sheepskin, timber props for the gates. It was pathetically little.
That evening they ate at the English House, a grim and subdued meal. The merchants were quiet, anxious, and somehow resentful. Nicholas could tell that they blamed the new arrivals for this unpleasant turn of events. In a way they were right. The embassy men still could not believe that the army of Devlet Giray would ride in and sack Moscow. They could not understand the urge to destruction when there could be trade and prosperity, and they certainly did not wish to hear about the military preparations for siege. It was all too ridiculous.
The daughter of Thomas Waverley, however, wanted to know. She asked boldly, ‘If the Tatars do attack, will the city be able to hold them off ?’
Nicholas looked at her. Trying not to feel drawn to her. Just a schoolgirl. Just a young girl who looked a bit like Maddalena, and yes, had admirable spirit. And was, admittedly, pleasing to look at.
‘Daughter,’ scolded Waverley.
But Stanley waved his hand. ‘The walls are strong,’ he assured her, ‘and there is a civil defence force of several hundred. We also have our friends the Cossacks.’
Thomas Waverley snorted.
Rebecca said, ‘But the Tatars number thousands.’
‘True,’ said Stanley. ‘But a force attacking a well-walled city needs to outnumber it by ten or a hundred to one. I believe this city can withstand a long siege, and send the Tatars home empty-handed at the end of summer.’
Waverley banged his goblet down hard. ‘That it should come to this. All quite unnecessary.’ Already he was planning to open direct negotiations with Devlet Giray, as a neutral representative of the Great Queen of England, and have the English House declared a Tatar protectorate.
‘Have you seen many battles?’ purred a woman’s voice to Nicholas’s right, as the conversation continued around them.
Mistress Ann Southam seemed an unlikely wife to her husband, an Englishwoman who behaved more like a Frenchwoman. She wore her dress cut rather low on her full bosom, and talked in a husky, insinuating voice that sounded not quite sincere.
‘I, well, some – I am no Knight of St John, just a fellow traveller, on Her Majesty’s business.’
‘But you have scars on your hands, I see.’ She reached out and touched the back of his hand with light fingertips. ‘And another on your brow.’
‘I’ve been in a few scrapes. Nothing to boast of, I assure you.’
She looked at him from under lowered eyelids, as if they were already involved in some amusing conspiracy together. He glanced around. The men were now debating animatedly.
‘What age are you?’ asked Mistress Southam.
‘Twenty-five.’
‘So young – little more than a boy!’ She bit lusciously into a leg of chicken. It was absurd. He did not ask her age, naturally, but she must have been at least ten years his senior, perhaps fifteen. Hard to tell beneath all the white lead and rouge. He downed his glass of red wine, heart thumping. Only last night he had lain at death’s door, croaking to be let in and be done with it all. How he had bounced back! And she was striking, in her way. Even if her most attractive feature, perhaps, was what wits and gallants joked was always the most attractive thing in a woman: availability.
‘Brother Ingoldsby,’ came a voice down the table. It was Stanley. ‘Some cool fresh water? Good for the head.’
Nicholas took the ewer, avoiding Stanley’s eye.
He lay hot and full of wine on his bed and wondered what tomorrow would bring. But the night was not done yet. He heard the latch raised on his chamber door and a figure slipped inside. In the dim moonlight, a full figure in a cream-coloured shift.
‘No, really,’ he said, rising from his bed, ‘this is not right, this will only cause trouble tomorrow …’
But already she was embracing him, pressing him down onto the bed again, climbing on top of him, kissing him with hungry lips, and all thought of tomorrow left him.
In the morning he opened his chamber door to check the corridor, and all was clear. Ann Southam squeezed past him, breathing hotly in his ear as she went and patting his bottom, and was back in her chamber in a trice. Very practised. Tch, you would have thought she had done this before. But surely not.
He was just closing his door again when he realised a figure was approaching: neat slippered footsteps, girlish gait, the swish of a dress. It was Rebecca. Had she seen? Nicholas could not shut his door, he was strangely paralysed. She looked as proud as a princess just insulted by some unwashed peasant, flushed with indignation, and swept past him with all the shy haughtiness of her seventeen years, not even turning her head. She must have seen.
As she reached the top of the staircase she turned back to him.
‘I am so glad to see that you are fully recovered from your sickness, Master Ingoldsby.’
He could think of nothing intelligent to say, and turned dolefully back into his chamber. That old trollop, Mistress Southam. Now look what she had done. Then he despised himself. That old trollop. How dare he? Had he fought her off manfully, had he struggled for his virtue when she embraced him, pressed herself against him, when she planted her red lips on his and pushed him backwards onto his bed? Hardly. And now that lovely maid despised him for a cheap lecher, an indiscriminate fornicator with other men’s blowsy wives – which he was. He looked in the silvered glass upon the chamber wall and said sourly to himself, You cock-eyed fool.
It was time to bring in the Cossacks. Though it would cause great tension in the city to have three thousand wild horsemen within the walls, they could no longer delay. They must take the risk and ask for their help.
They rode over a flat terrain, sandy soil, empty farmland and now depopulated villages, wide open to attack by horsemen of the plains. Timber was plentiful here, wooden barricades might be made, enough to break up a charge – but there was no time. All they could hope to do was barricade the city itself.
They found the Cossack camp a few miles off. It was indeed makeshift – as though the horsemen were ready to shift at any moment, with barely a minute’s notice. Most had not even set up their tents, but slept on reed mats on the ground under the summer stars. The packhorses were already half laden.
Stanley found Yakublev. The Cossack chieftain listened to him expressionless, brawny arms crossed over his bare chest.
‘Timber, props, brushwood for burning, anything you can drag into the city …’ said Stanley, tailing off. Around him the Cossacks sat cross-legged, drinking, smoking clay pipes, chatting. Some called out obscenities. One shouted,
‘Find women to cut wood for you! That is women’s work, not men’s.’
‘Though when the topknots come,’ sneered another, ‘they won’t find your brushwood much of a barrier. They just crossed half of Asia!’
That was Petlin. Smith felt his right hand bunch into a fist at the very sound of that wheedling, whining voice, but he controlled himself.
‘You will not help us?’ he said. ‘As you promised you would? Is a Cossack promise so light a thing? Then why in God’s name are you still here?’
‘We are ready to ride at a moment’s notice, have no doubt,’ said Yakublev. ‘We will not enter that city – it is doomed, I see it burning already, and any that stay in it are doomed with it – but we will not abandon you either. A Cossack promise is for ever, and no man calls Yakublev a promise-breaker. We are your allies still. We may be able to skirmish with the Tatars, in our time-honoured way. We may be able to pick off their outriders, sow confusion, fall on their van—’
‘And get yourselves some good loot,’ said Smith bitterly.
‘Of course,’ said Yakublev. ‘We are not paid soldiers of the Czar, and Cossacks must eat.’
‘And drink,’ said Petlin.
‘We came to fight for God,’ said Yakublev, ‘and perhaps for Holy Mother Russia. But we will not throw ourselves onto that funeral pyre that is Moscow. Which is all you are doing here. And you, Stenka, Andriushko, my brothers – surely you are not going back?’
Stenka hung his head. There was silence. Then slowly he walked over and stood beside Yakublev. Andriushko followed him. Stenka’s broad cheeks burned with shame and anger. But this was right. ‘I am sorry, my English brothers,’ he said quietly. ‘You know I am no womanish coward. But the Hetman is right. Moscow is but a brand for the burning now. We do not owe it our deaths, and we cannot fight the Tatar from behind high walls. That is not the Cossack way. You should know it too, and you should ride with us. As the saying is, “To fight another day.”’
‘Think of the Athenians,’ said Petlin, the reader. ‘I have read it in a book. You know the story. They abandoned their beloved city before the oncoming Persians, and took to their wooden walls, their ships, under the guidance of wise Themistocles.’
‘Moscow is not beside the sea, in case you had not noticed,’ said Smith. ‘And she has no ships.’
‘And her leader is no wise Themistocles either,’ muttered Stanley.
‘Then the people should flee into the countryside!’ said Petlin. ‘To their forests vaster than the sea itself ! In the city they will all burn.’
‘We must stay,’ said Stanley simply.
Petlin shrugged. But all Stenka’s anger rose up at this cruel, one-sided war, this doomed and stupid city. ‘Why, for the love of God and his Virgin Mother?’ he roared. ‘Ride with us! You are my brothers, it hurts my heart! Why do you stay?’
To save the noble new Christian Empire of Russia from being overrun by the Mohammedan horde? That was why they were here officially, but somehow that grandiose explanation now stuck in Stanley’s throat. He said, ‘I cannot explain. But we must stay.’
Stenka turned to Nicholas. ‘You, young English hothead who rode alone against the Oprichnina like a drunken man – you are not of the Knights, I know you are not.’
‘I …’ Nicholas couldn’t explain either. Men so often did not know their own motives. He could only say, ‘If they stay, I stay.’
‘And if he stays, I stay,’ put in Hodge. ‘See how it is? We’re stuck to each other like tupping dogs.’
‘Ahh!’ Stenka gave a great cry and raised his face to the sky. Then after a while he breathed more calmly and shook his head. ‘Well, God go with you, and may you by some miracle survive. The Cossacks will still be riding the free steppes, and you may ride with us too again some day.’ He turned away and seized his horse and mounted up.
It seemed to be taken as a general signal, for then the rest of Stenka’s band mounted up, and Yakublev gave the same signal to the rest. Within five minutes the remainder of the baggage was tied to the packhorses, the fires were stamped out, the empty pots and flasks smashed in the ashes, and with a mighty clattering of hooves, the three thousand Cossacks rode out and were gone.
The four and their sullen aide sat a while longer in silence, watching the dust gradually settle behind the departing host. Then they pulled their mounts around and rode back to the city. Ahead of them, they could see a constant, thin stream of people, refugees from the villages, pouring into the city through the south gate with their paltry belongings on mules and in barrows.
Near the western gate, Hodge jumped down and picked up a dry stick and remounted.
Nicholas looked at him. ‘Don’t tell me …’
‘Timber, for bulking the gates,’ said Hodge. ‘Wouldn’t want to have had a wasted trip.’
Even Smith laughed. The darker the times, the more desperate the jesting.
Should they report to the Czar? They decided not. What was there to report? When he heard the Cossacks had gone, his wrath would be terrible. Tense and filled with cold dread, they entered the doomed city once more.
Yet what they saw that afternoon began to give them hope. Prince Michael Vorotinsky and his deputy, Prince Andrei Kurbsky, had been busy. They had bulked the gates with mighty four-wheeled ox-carts laden with stonework, simple but effective. They had organized a citizen militia in each district of the city, and every street that ran under the city walls had its own female troop who were to be ready with buckets and beaters for fires. They had assessed the city’s food and fresh-water supplies, and they were very good. Vorotinsky had also rounded up any in the city who had any medical knowledge whatever – there were perilously few, and the Orthodox priests disdained such matters of the body. They certainly would not dream of tending a female patient. But Vorotinsky assembled a few midwives who said they knew how to staunch blood at least, and to comfort the sick, and he found a mendicant friar who knew his herbs, and a few others. He appointed them the Czar’s Own Physicians to the People, and the title immediately made them stand a little straighter and take their work more seriously. He established them in a field hospital towards the south of the city, in a granary, scrubbed with saltwater from top to bottom and prepared with pallets and blankets.
‘What about the Czar’s own physician, this Bomelius?’ asked Smith.
Vorotinsky looked sour. ‘His talents lie in other directions than curing men, I think.’
‘And what about the guns? Can they be brought to fire?’
‘We are trying.’ He began to ride off again, set on more tasks of organization.
‘The Cossacks …’ Stanley cried after him. He had to be told.
Vorotinsky stilled his horse and his shoulders bowed a little. He did not look back at them but only said quietly, ‘I know. I saw them ride off as I stood on the walls. But in truth, I never expected different.’ And he heeled his horse and rode on.
‘This Vorotinsky – another Jean de la Valette?’ murmured Stanley.
‘There’ll never be another Valette,’ said Smith.
‘Even I’d second that,’ said Hodge.
‘But still,’ said Stanley, ‘troubled straits bring out the finest in some men, though the worst in others. Most go through their whole lives mere ordinary citizens, mediocre, plodding, law-abiding – but when great danger threatens, great darkness falls over the kingdom, suddenly they are free to become the heroes they may have been all along.’