The Golden Horde Read Online Free

longer visible, and the longer he went unchallenged the more secure he became.
    Khorlov’s political life was boringly straightforward by comparison, or had been until now. Ivan stared through the vaulted shadows of the Council Chamber, studied the faces of boyar and bogatyr , nobleman and warrior, and began compiling a mental list of who spoke in his favour and who spoke against. It was reassuring to find the council equally divided, with little difference between one man shouting disapproval of the Tsar, and his neighbour shouting disapproval of him .
    Almost all the bogatyri who had fought against the Teutonic Knights were on Ivan’s side, and that too was a comfort. He knew from tutoring in the history of the antique Romans that a man backed by the army could survive at least for a time without the Senate. Khorlov’s High Council was no Roman Senate, and its part-time army was no Praetorian Guard, but the booty earned from plundering the Teutons’ camp was as good as any Caesar’s bribe. The Knights of the Order were a great deal less austere than their image as crusader monks might have claimed, and the loot from their tents had paid the bride-price of several daughters and augmented the inheritance of several sons. It was those fathers and those sons who were cheering for Ivan now. Their cheers were strong and lusty, drowning out the reedy, reasoned cries of older men, and they would last…
    …As long as the money did.
    Ivan grimaced slightly, then forced himself to relax. He suspected he could already see what would happen when all the shouting and complaints died down. What always happened. Both sides and the undecided would sit down together and drink a great deal too much wine and vodka, then agree to differ, then do what Tsar Aleksandr had wanted all along even though they would do it for the good of the realm rather than at the Tsar’s command.
    At least nobody had raised the subject of sorcery. For that at least Ivan was grateful, since it meant Khorlov’s Metropolitan Archbishop wasn’t in the Council Chamber. Had he been there Levon Popovich would never have let such a golden opportunity go by without expressing his views on Tsarevich Ivan and the Art Magic, on Mar’ya Morevna and the Art Magic, and on the Church’s view of them both.
    It mattered not a whit to the Archbishop that it was mostly magic in the shape of the Firebird – together with courage, military skill and more than a little luck – saving him from being burned as a heretic when the Teutonic Knights and their inquisitors reached Khorlov. Ivan, his father the Tsar, Mar’ya Morevna and quite possibly Dmitriy Vasil’yevich Strel’tsin had all spoken to Metropolitan Levon, with varying degrees of severity and varying degrees of success. Those lectures changed only the way he spoke aloud, not the way he thought inside. It was an unsettling truth that the Archbishop of Khorlov and the Holy Inquisition could well have become fast friends when they weren’t busy trying to burn one another as heretics or lapsed schismatics, or using the rack and the boot and the choking-pear to reinforce their own opinions of some obscure point of doctrine.
    Ivan shrugged inwardly. The Metropolitan Archbishop, whoever he might be, was just one more weight around any Tsar of Khorlov’s neck, and his father had successfully borne Levon Popovich – or should that be tolerated him? – for almost his entire reign. There was one comfort: the Archbishop was so advanced in years that he wouldn’t last more than a few into Ivan’s reign, then his replacement would be someone more sensible in the ways of the world or more amenable to the Tsar’s suggestions.
    Someone younger, anyway.
    Ivan was tired of old voices uttering old opinions, refusing to change them because, like the Archbishop, not one of the old men on the Council had enough expectation of life that any change would matter worth a damn. Ivan suspected they knew the way his mind worked, and why