3.

The Grandsons of Ivan Moneybags

The Grand Prince’s feasting-hall was long and low and dim. Boyars sat or sprawled like dogs at the long tables, and Dmitrii Ivanovich, Grand Prince of Moscow, held court at the far end, resplendent in sable and saffron wool.

Dmitrii was a man of ferocious good humor, barrel-chested and vivid, impatient and selfish, wanton and kind. His father had been nicknamed Ivan the Fair, and the young prince had inherited all his father’s pale good looks: creamy hair, tender skin, and gray eyes.

The Grand Prince leaped to his feet when Sasha came into the long room. “Cousin!” he roared, face alight beneath his jeweled cap. He strode forward and upset a servingman before he stopped, recalling his dignity. He wiped his mouth and crossed himself. The cup of wine in his free hand marred the gesture. Dmitrii put it hastily down, kissed Sasha on both cheeks, and said, “We feared the worst.”

“May the Lord bless you, Dmitrii Ivanovich,” Sasha said, smiling. As boys these two had lived together at Sasha’s monastery, the Trinity Lavra, before Dmitrii reached his majority.

A babble of men’s voices filled the smoky feasting-hall. Dmitrii was presiding over the remains of a boar. The light women had been pushed hastily out, but Sasha could smell the ghost of them, along with the wine and the greasy ends of meat.

He could also feel the boyars’ eyes on him, wondering what his return foretold.

What, Sasha had always wondered, made people want to cram themselves into grimy rooms and shut away the clean air?

Dmitrii must have seen his cousin’s distaste. “Baths!” he cried at once, raising his voice. “Let the bathhouse be heated. My cousin is tired, and I want some private talk.” He took Sasha’s arm confidingly. “I, too, am weary of all this clamor,” he said, though Sasha doubted it. Dmitrii thrived on Moscow’s noisy intrigues; the Lavra had always been too small and too quiet for him. “You there!” called the Grand Prince to his steward. “See that these men have all they need.”

LONG AGO, WHEN THE MONGOLS first swept through Rus’, Moscow had been a crude and jumped-up trading post—an afterthought to the conquering Horde, beside the glories of Vladimir and Suzdal and Kiev herself.

That was not enough to keep the city standing when the Tatars came, but Moscow had clever princes, and in the smoking ash-heap of conquest, the Muscovites at once set about making allies of their conquerors.

They used their loyalty to the Horde to further their own ambitions. When the khans demanded taxes, the Muscovite princes delivered them, squeezing their own boyars in order to pay. In return the khans, pleased, gave Moscow more territory, and still more: the patent for Vladimir and the title of Grand Prince. So the rulers of Muscovy prospered and their little realm grew.

But as Muscovy grew, the Golden Horde diminished. Bitter feuding between the children of the Great Khan shook the throne, and the whispers began among the boyars of Moscow: The Tatars are not even Christians, and they cannot keep a man on their throne six months before another one comes to claim it. Why, then, do we pay tribute? Why be vassals?

Dmitrii, bold but practical, had eyed the unrest in Sarai, realized that the Khan’s record-keeping must be five years behind, and quietly ceased paying tribute at all. He hoarded the money instead, and dispatched his holy cousin Brother Aleksandr to the land of the pagan to spy out their dispositions. Sasha, in his turn, had sent a trusted friend, Brother Rodion, to his own father’s home at Lesnaya Zemlya to warn of war brewing.

Now Sasha had returned from Sarai, in the teeth of winter, with news that he wished he was not carrying.

He leaned his head back against the wooden wall of the bathhouse and shut his eyes. The steam washed away some of the grime and weariness of travel.

“You look dreadful, brother,” said Dmitrii cheerfully. He was eating cakes. The sweat of too much meat and wine ran off his skin.

Sasha cracked an eyelid. “You’re getting fat,” he retorted. “You ought to go to the monastery and take a fortnight’s fasting this Lent.” When Dmitrii had been a boy in the Lavra, he had often sneaked into the woods to kill and cook rabbits on fast-days. Sasha thought, judging by the look of him, that he might have kept up the practice.

Dmitrii laughed. His exuberant charm distracted the unwary from his calculating glances. The Grand Prince’s father had died before Dmitrii reached his tenth year, in a land where boy-princes rarely saw adulthood. Dmitrii had learned early to judge men carefully and not to trust them. But Brother Aleksandr had been Dmitrii’s teacher first, and later his friend, when they had lived in the Lavra before the prince’s majority. So Dmitrii only grinned and said, “A night and a day with the snow falling so thick—what can we do besides eat? I cannot even have a girl; Father Andrei says I must not—or at least not until Eudokhia throws me an heir.”

The prince leaned back on the bench, scowled, and added, “As though there is a chance of that, the barren bitch.” He sat a moment grim, and then he brightened. “Well, you are here at last. We had despaired of you. Tell me, who has the throne at Sarai? What are the generals’ dispositions? Tell me everything.”

Sasha had eaten and bathed; now he wanted only to sleep, anywhere that was not the ground. But he opened his eyes and said, “There must be no war in the spring, cousin.”

The prince turned a flat stare onto Sasha. “No?” That was the voice of the prince, sure of himself and impatient. The look on his face was the reason he still held the throne after ten years and three sieges.

“I have been to Sarai,” said Sasha carefully. “And beyond. I rode among the nomad-camps; I spoke to many men. I risked my life, more than once.” Sasha paused, seeing again the hot dust, the bleached steppe-sky, testing strange spices. That glittering pagan city made Moscow look like a mud-castle built in a day by incompetent children.

“The khans come and go like leaves now, that is true,” Sasha continued. “One will reign six months before his uncle or cousin or brother supplants him. The Great Khan had too many children. But I do not think it matters. The generals have their armies, and their power holds, even if the throne itself is tottering.”

Dmitrii considered a moment. “But think of it! A victory would be hard, and yet a victory would make me master of all Rus’. We will pay no more tribute to unbelievers. Is that not worth a little risk, a little sacrifice?”

“Yes,” Sasha said. “Eventually. But that is not my only news. This spring, you have troubles closer to home.”

And Brother Aleksandr proceeded, grimly, to tell the Grand Prince of Moscow a tale of burning villages, brigands, and fire on the horizon.

WHILE BROTHER ALEKSANDR ADVISED his royal cousin, Olga’s slaves bathed the sick man Sasha brought with him to Moscow. They dressed the priest in fresh clothes and put him in a cell meant for a confessor. Olga wrapped herself in a rabbit-edged robe and went down to see him.

A stove squatted in one corner of the room, with a fire new-laid. Its light did not quite pierce the dimness, but when Olga’s women crowded in with lamps of clay, the shadows retreated, cringing.

The man was not in bed. He lay folded up on the floor, praying before the icons. His long hair spread out around him and caught the torchlight.

Behind Olga, the women murmured and craned. Their din might have disturbed a saint, but this man did not stir. Was he dead? Olga stepped hastily forward, but before she could touch him, he sat up, crossed himself, and came wavering to his feet.

Olga stared. Darinka, who had invited herself along with a train of bug-eyed accomplices, gasped and giggled. This man’s loose hair fell about his shoulders, golden as the crown of a saint, and beneath the heavy brow, his eyes were a stormy blue. His lower lip was red: the only softness amid the fine arching bones of his face.

The women stuttered. Olga got her breath first and came forward. “Father, bless,” she said.

The priest’s blue eyes were brilliant with fever; sweat matted the golden hair. “May the Lord bless you,” he returned. His voice came from his chest and made the candles shiver. His glance did not quite find hers; he gazed glassily beyond her, into the shadows near the ceiling.

“I honor your piety, Father,” said Olga. “Remember me in your prayers. But you must go back to bed now. This cold is mortal.”

“I live or die by God’s will,” replied the priest. “Better to—” He swayed. Varvara caught him before he fell; she was much stronger than she looked. An expression of faint distaste crossed her face.

“Build up the fire,” snapped Olga to the slaves. “Heat soup. Bring hot wine and blankets.”

Varvara, grunting, got the priest into bed, then brought Olga a chair. Olga sank down into it while the women crowded and gawped at her back. The priest lay still. Who was he and where had he come from?

“Here is mead,” said Olga, when his eyelids fluttered. “Come, sit up. Drink.”

He drew himself upright and drank, gasping. All the while he watched her over the rim of the cup. “My thanks—Olga Vladimirova,” he said when he had finished.

“Who told you my name, Batyushka?” she asked. “How came you to be wandering ill in the forest?”

A muscle twitched in his cheek. “I am come from your own father’s home of Lesnaya Zemlya. I have walked long roads, freezing, in the dark…” His voice died away, then rallied. “You have the look of your family.”

Lesnaya Zemlya…Olga leaned forward. “Have you news? What of my brothers and sister? What of my father? Tell me; I have had nothing since the summer.”

“Your father is dead.”

Silence fell, so that they heard logs crumbling in the hot stove.

Olga sat dumbstruck. Her father dead? He had never even met her children.

What matter? He was happy now; he was with Mother. But—he lay forever in his beloved winter earth and she would never see him again. “God give him peace,” Olga whispered, stricken.

“I am sorry,” said the priest.

Olga shook her head, throat working.

“Here,” added the priest unexpectedly. He thrust the cup into her hand. “Drink.”

Olga tipped the wine down her throat, then handed the empty cup to Varvara. She scrubbed a sleeve across her eyes and managed to ask, steadily, “How did he die?”

“It is an evil tale.”

“But I will hear it,” returned Olga.

Murmurs rippled among the women.

“Very well,” said the priest. A sulfurous note slipped into his voice. “He died because of your sister.”

Gasps of delighted interest from her audience. Olga bit the inside of her cheek. “Out,” Olga said, without raising her voice. “Go back upstairs, Darinka, I beg.”

The women grumbled, but they went. Only Varvara stayed behind, for propriety’s sake. She retreated into the shadows, crossing her arms over her breast.

“Vasya?” Olga asked, rough-voiced. “My sister, Vasilisa? What could she have to do with—?”

“Vasilisa Petrovna knew neither God nor obedience,” the priest said. “A devil lived in her soul. I tried—long I tried—to instruct her in righteousness. But I failed.”

“I don’t see—” Olga began, but the priest had hauled himself higher on his pillows; sweat pooled in the hollow of his throat.

“She would look at things that were not there,” he whispered. “She walked in the woods but knew no fear. Everywhere in the village, people talked of it. The kinder said she was mad. But others spoke of witchcraft. She grew to womanhood, and, witchlike, she drew the eyes of men, though she was no beauty…” His voice fractured, rallied again. “Your father, Pyotr Vladimirovich, arranged a marriage in haste, that she be wed before worse befell her. But she defied him and drove away her suitor. Pyotr Vladimirovich made arrangements to send her to a convent. He feared—by then he feared for her soul.”

Olga tried to imagine her fey green-eyed sister grown into the girl the priest described, and she succeeded all too well. A convent? Vasya? “The little girl I knew could never bear confinement,” she said.

“She fought,” agreed the priest. “No, she said, and no again. She ran into the forest, at night, on Midwinter, still crying defiance. Pyotr Vladimirovich went after his daughter, as did Anna Ivanovna, her poor stepmother.”

The priest paused.

“And then?” Olga whispered.

“A beast found them,” he said. “We thought—they said a bear.”

“In winter?”

“Vasilisa must have gone into its cave. Maidens are foolish.” The priest’s voice rose. “I don’t know; I did not see. Pyotr saved his daughter’s life. But he himself was slain, and his poor wife with him. A day later, Vasilisa, maddened still, ran away, and no one has heard anything of her since. We can only assume she is dead as well, Olga Petrovna. She and your father both.”

Olga pressed the heel of her hand to her eyes. “Once I promised Vasya that she could come live with me. I might have taken a hand. I might have—”

“Do not grieve,” the priest said. “Your father is with God, and your sister deserved her fate.”

Olga lifted her head, startled. The priest’s blue eyes were expressionless—she thought she had imagined the venom in his voice.

Olga mastered herself. “You have braved dangers to bring this news,” she said. “What—what will you have in return? Forgive me, Father. I don’t even know your name.”

“My name is Konstantin Nikonovich,” said the priest. “And I desire nothing. I will join the monastery, and I will pray for this wicked world.”