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

hills and winding waters, and Nicholas had an overwhelming sense of a vast land spreading away on every side. The next sea was the frozen Arctic, many thousands of miles north.
    There was a scattering of fishing boats and some smoke arising from a few homesteads along the shore, but no sign of any major settlement. Then a fair-haired boy came across to them in a bobbing wooden boat and back-rowed in the small waves, calling up to them in Russian.
    ‘He’s no Tatar,’ muttered Hodge.
    ‘Maybe Russian, or maybe Germanic,’ said Stanley. ‘There remain old villages of the Goths hereabouts. From a thousand years ago.’ He called down. ‘We don’t want your fish, boy! But find us a pilot for the river and you’ll have a silver penny.’
    ‘I can pilot you,’ said the boy. ‘It’s my river. Where are you from?’
    ‘And if we turn over on a sandbank?’ said Stanley.
    ‘Then you can beat the devil out of me,’ said the boy cheerfully. ‘You won’t though. I’m the best pilot for miles.’
    ‘Proud little beggar,’ said Smith with grudging admiration.
    Stanley scanned the shore, glanced down at the slaves, considered. It might be good to deal with no one else but a boy for now. Keep low. He called back, ‘Very well! We’re sending you two more rowers. You go ahead, we follow. How many days can we go upstream?’
    ‘Three days. Then you come to the market. Saturday’s the fair!’
    ‘Perfect.’
     
    It was no exaggeration. This great river made the Thames look like a stripling stream. In the morning mist, keeping close to the east bank, the far west bank was several miles away and barely visible. Nicholas felt almost humiliated. England was so small. But Hodge sneered, ‘No safe anchorage here. Might as well still be at sea. And I don’t see any Greenwich Palace neither, nor Whitehall, nor St Paul’s. Lot of barbarians they must be here.’
    Just green shores, sandbanks, smoky huts. Just a thin growth of alder and willow and then beyond, the limitless steppe.
    The further upriver they rowed, the further they left the cooling sea breezes behind them, the hotter it got. They all felt a growing oppression. The vastness. The wide slow river. The loneliness under this boundless sky.
     
    It was with relief they came to habitation three days later, just as their young pilot had said. A huge, motley slave fair on the right bank of the river. They anchored two hundred yards off in the lee of an island and rowed ashore in the longboat. The boy came as their interpreter.
    ‘Keep your eyes skinned,’ said Stanley. ‘And answer no questions. We are here only to find horses and move on.’
    They walled up a wooden jetty and into the mêlée, by no means exotic in that haggling, money-changing, hard-drinking hubbub of humanity. They walked between stalls fluttering with colourful banners, and the pony carts of fur sellers and sellers of sheepskins. Pushing through the crowds they saw all the races of Asia, not at cut-throat war but simply buying and selling. There was a round-faced, yellow-skinned fellow with a topknot and a long belted gown …
    ‘There’s your first Tatar,’ said Smith.
    ‘Shall we ask him if he knows of the planned attack on Muscovy?’
    ‘Perhaps not.’
    There were Kipchaks and Uighurs, Russians and Germans and Ukrainians, Greeks and Armenians, Bulgars and even a white-robed desert Arab with a camel train of four. How on earth did he get here? But he well knew how much profit he might make from selling Damascus dates and decorated daggers and slim rolls of the finest watered silk in this country. He could then increase his gains tenfold, twentyfold, by buying a fair-skinned Circassian maiden here, long flowing hair the colour of spring sunshine, to auction in the souq of Damascus … If he made it safely back home with her untarnished, virgin, untouched by any robbers and bandits along the perilous way, and kept his own hands off her himself all that time – though the Prophet knew what