‘Here they come!’ yelled Stanley. ‘Steady now, boys! Make every shot count!’
Nicholas’s arquebus was shaking in his hands. He knew at a glance that this old gun he’d been given would be no good at anything more than thirty yards or so, and he could already imagine the deafening bang it would make when fired. The spit and spew of powder, his eyes screwed shut. This was the kind of gun that exploded in your face. As if he didn’t have enough to fear.
They could hear them before they saw them, given the curve of the valley. The thunder of hooves, the wild yelling. And then round the bend came a fantastical figure on a squat skewbald, teeth bared, reins bunched savagely short, galloping like fury, the rider crouched low, holding just a long knife in his right hand, arm outstretched. Some fifty yards behind him rode the mass of horse warriors. Many hundreds of them were coming.
Nicholas’s trembling did not get any better. He looked down the wavering barrel and it helped him focus. He saw the old warrior out at the front and recognition stirred.
‘Smith!’ he called. ‘It’s the old chieftain from the steppe!’
Smith too was looking down the long, elegant barrel of his jezail. ‘Got him,’ he muttered. He felt an unwonted disgust. He had already killed the son, though of necessity, and now he was about to kill the father. What was it all for? The old warrior, some twenty years his senior, rode bare-chested, without gun or even bow. Just a knife, little longer than a kitchen knife. But Smith knew what it was all about. The old warrior wanted to die, here, now, in battle, leading his men. He was on the verge of becoming sick of his life, sick of his old man’s aches and pains, dreading palsied old age, deaf ears and dim eyes, longing for the heaven of his people.
Smith’s finger tightened on the trigger and he quieted his breathing and pulled and the wheel lock whirred. Fizz and sputter and the sharp crack, and the ball flew from the beautifully rifled barrel, and eighty yards off, old Tokhtamysh was shot clean through the heart. He fell back and rolled from his horse, and the skewbald came galloping on riderless towards them.
Behind him, five hundred warriors howled and spurred forward.
And then Nicholas began to hear the familiar crescendo hiss of arrows, the muffled thump as they stuck into the ground or the wooden boards of the wagons. Or men. One cried out, another. Two of them hit already, Tatar horsemen sending arrows arcing high into the air from their immensely powerful compound bows even as they galloped, perfectly judged so that they turned and came down again like stooping falcons upon their enemy. Crouching behind the wagons did little good. They’d have been better crouching under them.
‘Fire!’ bellowed Smith, and every Cossack gun barked out.
Ears ringing, eyes stinging, black powder smoke, men and horses falling, horses screaming, tumbling over fallen horses. And then the horsemen were breaking into a circle to gallop round the wagons. Not even a Tatar horseman could make a horse crash bull-like into a solid barrier. They were difficult, fast-moving targets, pouring arrows down inside the wagon circle or wildly firing with squat arquebuses and pistols. Lead balls slammed into the thick boards of the wagons, wooden splinters few wide, a ball passed straight through and ploughed into the ground. Cossacks ducked and yelled to each other, desperately fumbled to reload their ancient guns, but were slow, too slow …
‘Quicker, my brothers, quicker!’ said Stenka, standing broad-chested in the centre of the circle, clutching his sword already, head back, seemingly invulnerable. ‘Return fire, or they will soon be in!’
Stanley looked desperately to the heights – nothing – and then knew that he must not look again. They must simply fight on, and stay alive, and hope.
Then warriors who had had their horses shot from under them came running towards the circle, knives in their belts.
‘Men coming in! Take them first!’ yelled Smith.
A heavily tattooed warrior leapt up and caught the upper edge of an ox cart and swung himself up and came slithering over the top. Nicholas laid down his gun and drew his sword and seized the huge ironbound ox wheel and tried to pull himself up to meet him. A knife flashed down and he ducked, Hodge yelled out something and a pistol banged nearby. The warrior slammed down upon the boards. Nicholas’s head must have just appeared over the top as he looked to see if he still lived, and a second later an arrow swished in low and he distinctly felt its flight feathers kiss his hair as it passed by.
‘Down, you fool! Have you forgotten everything?’ shouted Smith.
He had not forgotten Malta, but it seemed long ago and far away. He was older now – and slower.
They fought with grim desperation, and only a handful of the most foolhardy horse-warriors, vainglorious adolescents, managed to bring their horses in close, vault from them in mid-gallop and come flying in over the top of the wagons with knives ready in their hands. One landed so clumsily that he cut himself in the belly. Another crashed straight over into the circle and stood and Stenka stood before him with his sword and they fought hand to hand for a minute or more, and the Tatar boy was very good, very quick. And then by one of those evil chances in which war is so abundant, a Tatar arrow came down and sank deep into the boy’s shoulder and he dropped his knife and clutched the arrow and stood amazed. Stenka brought his sword in wide and quickly felled him.
It was the arrowstorm that would destroy them. It came down like iron rain, and the Cossacks could hardly move within their circle for fear of being hit. And they were hit, time and time again. Already dead and dying men lay strewn about, the survivors trying to drag the wounded under paltry cover close by the wagons. Their fighting numbers were down from three hundred to no more than two hundred. Another hour of resistance, another half an hour, and they would be done for. Of the Tatar horsemen, they had brought down a few, but many more still rode around. Some even took a rest, turning back down the valley, trotting their horses through the boggy ground to water them at the river’s edge, and then coming back fresh for the fight.
Stanley and Smith communicated by signs, but there was little more to say. A miracle would save them.
And then the Tatars threw in ropes, tied at the end with iron poles hammered into hooks, and hooked one of the great wagons and began to drag it clear to open up a breach.
‘Bastards!’ shouted Hodge. ‘Look, breakin’ in!’
‘And we’ve got to break out!’ cried Nicholas desperately. For they had to get to her, and now. But how could they ever break out amid this?
A band of defenders climbed up onto that wagon and tried to hack through the ropes, a lashed team of Tatar horses straining at the other end a mere twenty or thirty feet away. Hodge leaned out dangerously between two wagons with a smouldering arquebus and released a blast of ball and stone chips at the horsemen, and several were hit, cursing and howling. One of the ropes was cut, but others were flung in now all around the circle. And from beyond that, still the arrows came down.
Another Cossack was struck in the temples by a ball that did not kill him, but sent him reeling around the circle, bleeding profusely, his face a terrifying red mask, and crying out, ‘We are betrayed, my brothers! Where are they? We are betrayed by the Muscovites, for what need had they to come to us? They are happy to see the Cossacks destroyed, along with a few hundred Tatars with us. Never trust a Russian. Never!’ And then he fell silent when Smith stepped up and clubbed him quiet with the butt of his gun.
Stanley looked down the valley. There was something coming. A distant noise. More horsemen. There was no limit to their numbers.
Devlet Giray was sending in another five hundred, fresh and ready for the kill. He wanted this finished off now. Tokhtamysh was slain, a clean and noble death. Let it all be done with now, let every one of those impudent Cossacks be slain, and they could head home. He glanced up one last time at the heights to the north, thinking they ought to have put lookouts up there. But no point now. It was all done. It was as good as over.
With the five hundred he sent forward, another thousand or more surged along too, wanting to be in on the famous victory over that cluster of obnoxious strangers, and the celebratory scalping. Many of his khans rode with them, eager as boys. He watched them ride off, but he would not join them. Many of his best and boldest warriors went. Far too many. And then still more of the Tatar army streamed down that narrow valley beside the cold lake shore.
As they rode away, Devlet Giray saw that the ground they galloped over at the river’s edge was already being pounded into thick mud. Many of them as they jostled together slowed from a gallop to a canter, even to a laborious trot, their hardy little steppe horses sinking now up to the fetlock, snorting with disgust, accustomed as they were to the dry, windswept grasslands of the open steppe. So much for the glorious charge. This would be a famous but a very muddy victory.
He turned to the slave at his side for a beaker of water, and when he turned back, at the edge of his vision he saw some movement on the heights. One of his khans must have posted a troop of scouts and lookouts up there after all. Wise man. And yet … He stared, eyes narrowed.
‘Slave, up there on the hills … what is it?’
The slave, a Circassian youth, looked for a moment and then gasped and held his hand to his mouth.
Then Devlet Giray knew what he saw. Waving like reeds against the sky, pennons and banners. Gold banners of Saints, and the Crucified Jew …
Then his voice sounded horribly afraid and weak in his own ears. He clutched at his reins and cried out, ‘They are no scouts, they are Russians. Turn back! Turn back!’
He might as well have tried to turn back the river itself.
The mass of eager Tatar horsemen, now closing in on that pitiful little circle of unbelievers at the head of the valley, even squabbling amongst themselves for best position and most scalps, cast never a glance up at the heights to their right. But one or two, amidst their own wild gunfire and the drifts of black powder smoke, happened to look up, pricked by some sixth sense. And they saw with puzzlement the eerie procession of gold crosses and icons being raised high upon long poles against the grey sky, and they glimpsed black-gowned priests swinging censers among long, orderly lines of men, heavily bearded men with heavy muskets. The musket barrels were unwavering, solidly rammed for firing down, expertly balanced upon pikeheads with their butts driven into the ground.
One Tatar horseman, suddenly chilled to the bone and understanding what was happening, stared wildly around and saw his fellow warriors as they really were, a horribly tight-packed, jostling crowd of thousands, all order gone.
‘Brothers!’ he cried, trying to pull his own horse around and failing in the oncoming tide. ‘Brothers, look up! See above! We are ambushed!’
A few looked up, and reined in, but others did not even hear and pushed them on from behind. They heard only the sound of their own wild cries of victory and their guns loosed off carelessly into the sky, saw only the gilded glory of the coming victory. But the warrior trying to stem the tide caught a faint drift of the haunting and demonic sound of the hymns of the Christians, the ‘
Dies Irae
’ and other hymns of judgement and apocalypse sounding over the valley and fading away over the cold waters beyond.
In desperation he started to lay about him with his whip, as if trying to drive recalcitrant cattle. ‘Go back, you fools, turn back! It is a trap!’ He caught another violently across the cheek and that warrior, incensed, and thinking this fool had lost his wits out of sheer cowardice, knocked him clean off his horse with a mighty punch in the face, and the Tatars pressed on.
Devlet Giray felt a growing fury that must find outlet. He rounded on his slave.
‘Ride back to the slave pens, and order the guards to stand ready to slaughter every last captive taken at Moscow.’
‘Every …?’ faltered the Circassian. He was born a Christian.
‘Every man, woman and child,’ said Devlet Giray. ‘All of them. And the two Cossacks held captive. Kill them.’
But Ivan Koltzo knew this would come, and had already made his move. Once the Streltsy appeared, he knew his hours were numbered.
At the rear of the Tatar party only yesterday, he had taken his chance. He stumbled and fell at the river’s edge, and was savagely beaten for it. But as he was being beaten, such was the Cossack’s strength of mind, his hardiness, that he was thinking clearly all the time. Even as he rolled and yelled out, he was feeling with his bound hands for the stones beneath his own body, blazing with pain. Then he found what he sought, a flat, sharp-edged stone, and clutched it and folded his fingers around it and staggered to his feet, bleeding from head and cheek and his elbow singing in agony.
But he was nearing his freedom, one step nearer. Hidden in his palm now was one of those grey stones called flints, still used sometimes by the steppe horsemen for their arrowheads, and to powerful effect. That night, thrown in the dust under a wagon along with Petlin, he cut his own bonds, craning in pain with his bruised elbow, sawing for three hours solid. But eventually the bonds gave, and he rubbed his chafed and bleeding wrists, and peered out. The guards slept. So did Petlin.
He would never wake.
Koltzo fell upon the traitorous wretch, gripped him round the neck, and drew the sharp stone hard across his bared throat as if he was no more than killing a chicken. The flint cut like a knife. Petlin opened his mouth and gargled almost inaudibly, a dying man. Ivan Koltzo dropped him and spat on him. ‘You were a true traitor indeed, Petlin,’ he said. ‘But I was a true Cossack.’
He rolled Petlin on his stomach so no blood showed, then he lay down again with his hands behind his back as if still bound, and waited for the first man on a horse to pass by.
He lay under the wagon until long into the next morning, all but ignored, and heard the sound of the battle down the valley. Eventually he took the risk and crawled out and stood and watched, hands behind his back. The rough Tatar camp with its scattered tents was a mile or more behind the post of Devlet Giray, but he could make out the land and hear the thunderous noise of the charge, and he could see the grassy heights. He leaned against the wagon, throbbing with pain but little fear. Ivan Koltzo had lived through many worse situations.
Finally a plump Tatar came ambling lazily by, and stopped and grinned. ‘Your friend still sleeps?’
‘Aye. Idle dog.’
‘He is missing the great battle. You have won our thanks.’
‘In truth, it was nothing.’
‘Your reward from the Khan will be great.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘No, truly.’
Then there was movement on the heights, and the Tatar gazed up. He squinted. But Ivan Koltzo’s heart leapt. It was working. After all, this whole madman’s plan was working. Yet still so much to go wrong.
He vaulted up behind the Tatar on his horse and hugged him to steady himself and cut his throat with the flint. Then he tossed the flint to the ground and pulled out the Tatar’s dagger and shoved him off the horse and galloped away before any more of the bewildered guards could understand what was happening.
Koltzo rode out of the camp and wide towards the long shoulder of the hills just as the message came back from Devlet Khan to kill him and Petlin.
‘Bring him down!’ cried a Tatar captain. ‘That man going there! Bring him down!’
Muskets and arquebuses were hurriedly brought to bear on the galloping figure, but there were few finer horseman on that steppe than Ivan Koltzo. He stayed low and swerved his horse back and forth and already he was a hundred, two hundred yards away up the slope. Musketballs zinged past his ears but none struck him, and a small party of Tatar horsemen was finally sent after him, but he had too great a lead on them.
The biggest danger was as he appeared on top of the rise and hurtled towards the Streltsy lines. Would they take him for a lone maddened Tatar?
To face any outflanking manoeuvres, Vorotinsky had of course placed a powerful left horn of his musketeers six deep, to take down any Tatar horseman coming that way. But they would have to be riding uphill, not a Tatar speciality, and he guessed they would not.
Without forethought, Ivan Koltzo began yelling out the Lord’s Prayer in Russian at the top of his voice as he galloped. One of the Streltsy captains looked out at this single, crazed-looking figure, seemingly unarmed, and gave the order to hold fire. Koltzo came in and fell from his horse and leaned against its heaving flanks and looked back. A distant band of Tatar horseman was wheeling round and back down the slope.
Panting, he looked to the ranks of men along the heights and his heart burned. Two thousand only, perhaps, but immaculately ranged in four ranks, five hundred guns in each rank. Two thousand best German muskets between them. They had been drilled and drilled for weeks and months on end by their severe Brandenburger commanders, and they were all hardened veterans of the Polish and Livonian wars. And they had just come from Moscow. They had seen what the Tatars had done to their city.
This was a good spot. They were almost unassailable by cavalry. Each rank would fire a volley of five hundred guns. Perhaps a tenth of the guns would misfire each time, but that was still a lethal rain. A Streltsy musketeer could reload and fire in a minute. Thus every fifteen seconds, another fresh rank of five hundred men would step forward as the front rank stepped back to reload, and the muskets bark out again.
Ivan Koltzo swiped his face and grinned and bowed to the captain.
‘Ivan Koltzo,’ he said. ‘At your service.’
Every single one of the last men fighting within the wagon circle was caught up in their last desperate stand when the first musket volley rolled out from the heights. Nicholas heard it, and Hodge, and then Stanley was yelling out, ‘Smith! Smith, you deaf ox! Did you hear that?’
Smith side-swiped a fellow with a half-broken arquebus, clutching it by the muzzle, and caught him a whooping blow in the guts. The fellow dropped to his knees and bowed his head. Smith raised his arquebus again and then heard the volley.
Vorotinsky had ordered his musketeers to turn their fire close towards the stricken wagon circle, but ensure they did not hit it. That first volley scythed in, the sound of the gunfire still heard by few above the roar of the fighting, and yet suddenly the Tatar horsemen closing in on that wretched ring found that that their comrades were falling all around them. They began to pull up, bewildered, still crowded on by more behind.
Stanley grinned at the two Tatars that stood to the left and right of him, both clutching bloody swords. Then with renewed energy he took them both down in a blizzard of blows from the sword in his left hand and the broken pike in his right. Seconds later, through eyes blurry with blood, some his own, some that of other men, he looked down at them stretched in the dirt.
A second volley. Dozens more horsemen fell.
He turned on another. Perhaps fifty Cossacks still fought within the circle, and there were at least that many Tatar warriors inside as well now, fighting hand to hand. Yet their mounted comrades outside the circle were slowing, pulling about, no longer trying. What was happening? They stood and stared.
‘Hear that?’ shouted Stanley. ‘You are done. Moscow is paid for. On your knees if you would live!’
One Tatar warrior wavered, holding his sword, suddenly unable to fight.
From all up the valley came a chaos of yells and screams. Wild, despairing screams.
A terrible panic was spreading through the close-packed masses of the Tatar horsemen. They were being fired upon by Russian Streltsy! The best musketeers north of the Ottoman Empire.
There was even another ugly rumour spreading. A much larger band of Cossacks, the Cossacks of Yakublev, were not with the wagon circle at all, but riding behind them, to destroy their rearguard or burn their camp. And worst of all, they had lost all their beloved freedom of movement, the one thing any wild nomads of the plains hated most. Lost their freedom to fall back, to gallop out wide, to manoeuvre and keep beyond range. They were locked down in a bloody, muddy riverside massacre, under the unblinking, murderous black eyes of two thousand Russian muskets. Another volley, another two or three hundred warriors reeling and falling … They were imprisoned between the hills and the river, and as they jostled and turned, their horses rearing and plunging, the ground beneath them was mashed to ever deeper and more cloying mud.
Some kicked their horses down to the river’s edge and drove them in, but the banks dropped away steeply and soon they were swimming. The current was strong, and horses and men began to founder.
On the heights, Prince Michael Vorotinsky, immaculate on a huge, dappled grey stallion and clearly visibly to all two thousand of the Streltsy in his resplendent bronze cuirass and crested helmet, threw his arm out and directed a volley over the valley to the river’s edge. Another hundred or more warriors were cut down, and many more panicked, more jostled and fell, trampled and floundering and then drowning.
It was not the noblest battle. But Prince Michael cried out, ‘Remember Moscow! They must not return!’ And his soldiers were steeled. Another rank stepped forward, muskets primed.
Within the wagons, the fight at last began to fall off. A few Tatar horsemen rode around one last desultory time, howling and slashing the air with frustration. And then they turned and pressed back down the hated valley. A few did try to ride up the steep slope to the heights, but naturally Vorotinsky had this all in hand. Special squadrons, posted earlier, now rose up from the grass and fired down on them and they were driven back.
Stanley leaned on his broken pike, exhausted. ‘Cannae, Trasimene …’ he murmured. ‘How one must study the battles of the ancients to win the battles of today.’
Smith lowered his arquebus and gave the Tatar whooping at his feet a gentle boot in the shoulder. The fellow looked up, green to the gills.
‘Stay there,’ said Smith. ‘Don’t move. And you may live.’
Stenka strode about, checking on his men. He found Nicholas, lying exhausted. He got to his feet.
‘Yes,’ said Stenka. ‘Now. Look, those six horses. They are yours.’
And Stanley too was calling, ‘Nick! It is time!’