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By Root 2868 0

these sessions, which were held strictly in private. Sigismund-August, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, thirty-four years old and shakily lost in high living, wanted no war, and Livonia, under the declining feudal Order of Teutonic Knights, was the weakest of Ivan’s neighbours. But the town of Pskov on Livonia’s borders, reconquered forty-four years before by his father, was Russia’s only station towards the western sea, other than the frozen coast of Ingermanland on the Gulf of Finland. It was a dream of the Tsar’s, more than either of his chief ministers, to acquire part of the Baltic seaboard, and to recover the lands inhabited by Orthodox Russians and seized by his western neighbours when the Golden Horde held the whole of Russia in its grip.

So, vouchsafing no political opinions, Lymond with Guthrie’s stolid presence beside him elicited the strength and the weakness of Ivan’s westerly neighbours and then turned to the subject nearest Adashev’s heart and Sylvester’s too: the fending-off and eventual conquering of the children of Ahmed, the heretic remains of the great Golden Horde which had ruled for two hundred years: the war against the last of the Tartars.

Danny Hislop, temporarily seconded from wounding the feelings of the Streltsi, became their expert on Tartars. He visited the prisoners from Kazan and the renegades already working for Ivan: he found where the Tartar settlements were and in what numbers, and how they lived, camped, fought, ate and rode. He found the dangers were two. Across seven hundred miles of wild steppeland to the south-west of the Volga lay the Tartar Khanate of Crimea, vassals of Ottoman Turkey, who lived on raids into southern Lithuania and Muscovy, and sold jewellery, church gold and slaves into Egypt and Stamboul.

To the south-east lay the Horde of the Nogai, led by two brothers. ‘Ismail likes Ivan, but Jusef breaks out in pustules at the thought of him,’ Danny reported, sitting with his feet on the desk between Lymond and Guthrie. ‘Luckily, Tartars don’t much like other Tartars, and the ones who are sitting in Astrakhan at the mouth of the Volga are the least liked of all, especially by God’s Keybearer and Chamberlain, Ivan of Russia, who would like to possess the whole of the River Volga, including the mouth. There’s a Khan called Yamgurchei in Astrakhan, and Ismail has offered to join his part of Nogai to the Russians to fling Yamgurchi out.’

‘And hand the town over to Russia?’ Guthrie asked.

‘Not exactly. A former Khan called Derbysh is the current favourite. Everyone hopes that if he is brought back, he will show Ivan a proper gratitude. Two of the Kremlin princes, Pronsky-Shemyakin and Vyazemsky, went south in the spring to attack Yamgurchei with the help of the Nogai, and when they get back, if they get back, they are going to be the mascots of Muscovy. I’m tired of training,’ Danny complained. ‘Couldn’t we plunder something, such as decadent idols with emerald eyes and a lot of clean, unspoiled village maidens?’

But instead, he was sent with Plummer to conduct a survey with Adam’s maps of a proposed chain of fortified points to extend those already defending the hundred-mile zone about Moscow. He rode through Tver and Rzhev and Staritsa, Serpukhov, Kashire and Kolomna, Ryazan and Zaraisk and Kaluga; Mosaisk and Cheboksari and Sviajsk to the rumble of Plummer’s unceasing voice, and the squeak of the clerk taking notes for him. At every second location Danny said monotonously, ‘You can’t do that,’ and Plummer bridled and said, ‘They built Sviajsk three years ago in four weeks. They felled the timber at Uglich and floated the logs down the Volga——’

‘The cost. The cost, you fool!’ Danny would scream.

‘Four thousand five hundred roubles. From the foundations. My God,’ Plummer would cry. ‘Can’t you get it into your head that it’s a carpentry culture? Houses cost three roubles each. They buy them ready-made in the market from numbered stacks of standardized timbers, already tenoned and mortised. The buyer states the number of rooms, gets the logs loaded on carts and