INVITED INTO THE PRINCE’S receiving-room, the horses consigned to oats and the stranger’s men assigned to lodgings, the red-headed Kasyan drank off his beer beneath Dmitrii’s low, painted ceiling while Sasha and the Grand Prince waited with impatient courtesy. Wiping his mouth, Kasyan began, “It started with whispers, a season ago, and thirdhand reports from lost hamlets. Robbers. Fires.” He turned his cup in a hard hand, his glance faraway. “I did not heed. There are always desperate men, and rumor exaggerates. I put it out of my mind when the first snow fell.”
Kasyan paused again to drink. “I see now that I made a mistake,” he went on. “Now I hear reports of burning at every hand, and desperate peasants come every day, or nearly, begging for grain, or for protection.”
Dmitrii and Sasha glanced at each other. The boyars and attendants craned to hear. “Well,” said Dmitrii to his visitor, leaning forward in his carved chair, “you are their lord, are you not? Have you helped them yourself?”
Kasyan’s lips thinned to sternness. “We have gone hunting for these evil men not once, but many times since the snow fell. There are clever folk in my household, fine dogs, skilled hunters.”
“Then I do not see why you came to me,” said Dmitrii, surveying his visitor. “You can hardly hope to escape the tribute now, since I know your name.”
“I would not have come without a choice,” Kasyan said. “We have found no trace of these bandits—not even a little—not so much as a hoofmark. Nothing but burning, and wailing, and destruction. My people are whispering that these bandits are not men at all, but demons. So I have come to Moscow,” he finished, with a frustration that he could not hide, “when I would rather have stayed home. Because there are men of war, and men of God, in this city, and I must beg help for my people.”
Dmitrii, Sasha saw, looked fascinated despite himself. “No trace at all?” he said.
“None, Gosudar,” said Kasyan. “Perhaps these bandits are not men at all.”
“We leave in three days,” Dmitrii said.
5.
The Fire in the Wilderness
Olga did not tell her brother what she had learned of their father’s death, or their sister’s. Sasha had danger enough awaiting him, and he must meet it with a clear head. It would grieve him especially to hear of Vasya, she thought. He loved her so.
So Olga merely kissed Sasha and wished him well, on the day he came to take his leave. She had a new cloak for him, and a good skin of mead.
Sasha took the gifts distractedly. His mind was already out in the wild: on bandits and burnt villages and on how to manage a young prince who no longer wished to be a vassal. “God keep you, sister,” he said.
“And you, brother,” Olga said, her gathered calm unbroken. She was used to leave-taking. This brother came and went like a wind in the summer pines, and her husband, Vladimir, was no better. But this time she thought of her father and sister, gone, never to return, and the effort of composure cost her. Always, they go while I remain. “I beg you will remember me in your prayers.”
DMITRII AND HIS MEN left Moscow on a day of drifting white: white snow and white sun, glittering on white towers. A mocking wind teased its way beneath their cloaks and hoods as Dmitrii strode out into his dooryard, dressed for journeying, and vaulted lightly to his horse’s back. “Come, cousin!” he called to Sasha. “Bright day, and dry snow. Let us be gone!”
The grooms stood ready with haltered packhorses, and a troop of well-mounted men waited, armed with swords and short spears.
Kasyan’s people mixed uneasily with Dmitrii’s. Sasha wondered what was behind their unsmiling faces. Kasyan himself sat quiet on his big chestnut mare, his glance flicking round the teeming dooryard.
The Grand Prince’s gates creaked open, and the men kicked their horses. The beasts lunged forward, full of grain. Sasha mounted his gray mare, Tuman, and nudged her out last into the cruelly shining winter. Dmitrii’s gates roared shut behind them.
The last they heard of Moscow was the sound of her bells, ringing out over the trees.
FOR THOSE WHO COULD bear it (and many could not), winter was traveling season in northern Rus’. In summer, men went through the wilderness by cart-track and deer-path, often too narrow for wagons, and always axle-deep in mud. But in winter, the roads froze like iron, and sledges could bear great burdens. The frozen rivers made roads with no trees or stumps, nothing to bar progress, and they ran in wide, predictable patterns, north and south, east and west.
In winter the rivers were much trafficked. Villages lay along either bank, nourished by the water, and there stood also the great houses of boyars, ready to play host to the Grand Prince of Moscow.
On the first day they rode east, and toward evening they came upon the lights of Kupavna: glad fires in the dusk. Dmitrii sent men to demand the lord’s hospitality, and they feasted on pie with cabbage and pickled mushrooms.
But the next morning, they left the tamed lands, and any expectation of shelter for the night. The wood grew dark and trackless, dotted with tiny hamlets. The men rode hard by day, camped in the snow, and kept watch by night.
For all their care, the riders saw neither beast nor bird, and certainly no bandits, but on the seventh day they came upon a burnt village.
Tuman smelled the smoke first and snorted. Sasha curbed her with steady hands and turned his head into the wind himself. “Smoke.”
Dmitrii reined his horse. “I smell it.”
“There,” said Kasyan beside them. He pointed a mittened hand.
Dmitrii snapped out hasty orders and the men circled nearer. There was no hope of a silent approach, not with so many. The dry snow groaned beneath the horses’ feet.
The village was burned to ashes, as though crushed by some giant hand of fire. At first it seemed utterly dead, empty and cold, but in the middle stood a chapel, which the fire had mostly spared, and a little smoke rose from a hole hacked in the roof.
The men drew nearer, swords drawn, bracing for the whine of arrows. Tuman rolled an anxious eye back toward her rider. The village had once had a palisade, but it was burned to a slag-heap.
Dmitrii snapped out more orders—some men to stand guard, others to look for survivors in the surrounding forest. In the end, only he and Sasha and Kasyan leaped what was left of the palisade, with a few men at their backs.
Bodies lay strewn as they had died, black as the burnt houses, with pleading finger-bones and grinning skulls. Though Dmitrii Ivanovich was not a man given to either imagination or sentiment, he grew white around the mouth. But his voice was quite steady when he said to Sasha, “Go and knock on the door of the church.” For they could hear sounds inside.
Sasha dropped to the snow, rapped on the church-door with his sword-hilt, and called, “God be with you.”
No reply.