Free The Last Crusaders: Ivan the Terrible by William Napier Page A

barely breathing, the one with a caved-in skull jabbering ceaselessly in Arabic … In desperate straits they might have pushed them into the longboat and let them fend for themselves, but now was the time for forgiveness.
    They hove to until dusk and then brought the galley in as close as they dared to the southern shore on the Chalcedon side. Smith himself rowed them in. They left them stumbling through the shallows in single file, arms on each other’s shoulders. All men, Smith reflected, the fire of battle now gone from even his bellicose heart – all men when walking wounded, limping, heads bandaged and bowed, looked much the same.
    They rowed after dark. Hodge took up the drumstick, an old mutton bone. ‘Always wanted to do this,’ he said.
    Smith squatted down at the hatch as the drumbeat began and said to the wretched below, ‘We are Christians and soldiers, not ambassadors, and damn finer soldiers than you’ll ever be. The rest of you are not even soldiers but the scum of the criminal earth. We are your deadliest enemies. My brothers have been fighting both Arab and Turk for five long centuries now. Twenty generations. Nevertheless, you may find we are not the harshest of slavers. Row well, do not stint, and you will see no sign of the whip.’
    And with that supreme insouciance which often comes good, they rowed back east under an Orient moon, its cold light silvering the small waves of the Bosphorus. They passed beneath the very nose of Seraglio Point and through the twenty miles or so of the narrow straits, and after they had disposed of the corpses and sluiced the decks once more, Nicholas and Hodge fell asleep. They dreamt disturbed and violent dreams.
     
    They awoke at dawn to the sun coming up over the vastness of a sun-beaten inland sea. The Euxine, the Black Sea, Kara Deniz.
    ‘Next stop,’ said Stanley, ‘the mouth of a mighty river called the Dnieper, and a coast the ancient Greeks called the Chersonese.’
    To a land called Russia, and a king who called himself Czar.
    ‘So remind me,’ said Hodge, rubbing his head. ‘What was our Royal Command in Constantinople? To look after this English alliance with the Turks, tread delicately and find out what more we could. Yes?’
    Nicholas looked at him sourly.
    ‘Well,’ he sniffed. ‘We fairly buggered that one up.’
    It was true. Though they’d discovered important intelligence in the city, and escaped with their lives, it was not a glorious success. They’d better charm Muscovy or they’d have hell to pay back home.
    The Black Sea was flooding north through summer meadows. Nicholas closed his eyes again to the early morning sun, and saw the Tatar Horde riding, almost hidden in the long steppe grass, the whispering feathergrass that could hide a whole army. Ancient nomad horsemen with their bows and blades, broad Asiatic faces painted for war, riding in revenge, revenge for Kazan and Astrakhan, so recently fallen to the armies of Ivan the Terrible. Passing along the old black roads of the steppe, resting overnight in shallow valleys studded with their campfires or in the thin birch forests, passing over river fords they knew of old, the wide ford of the Oka river, slipping through Muscovy’s poor defensive line, approaching the wooden city itself while the city still dreamed its restless dreams …

 
     
     
     
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    They stopped only once, a week later, to row to the Thracian shore and take on fresh water and food. The galley had been ill-provisioned, and they needed the rowing slaves well fed and strong. No whip was used but they made a good pace.
    ‘When we come to the mouth of the great river,’ Smith said, ‘there are slave fairs there. We may sell you to worse masters than ourselves – or we may simply turn you loose. Depends how you row.’
    It worked better than any whip. The galley surged north over the inland sea, a hundred miles or more from dawn till dawn.

    They came close to a broad flat country of plains and low pale