The Last Crusaders: Ivan the Terrible

by William Napier

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Hardened by battle, seasoned by war, four adventurers caught in the path of one of history's most enigmatic leaders. 1571. At the great naval battle of Lepanto the Ottoman Empire is finally defeated, and it seems that Europe is safe. But then Nicholas Ingoldsby is summoned to London by the Queen herself and sent on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople, the heart of the old enemy - and then onward, to a little-known but rising power called Muscovy, ruled by a deranged but cunning czar - Ivan the Terrible. The rise of Muscovy has also caught the attention of the Ottomans; and their allies, the wild Tatar horsemen of the Asiatic steppes, Russia's ancient enemy. Soon Nicholas and his fellow travellers are caught up in their most dangerous adventure yet, trapped in a doomed Muscovy with a vast army of Tatar tribesmen riding down upon them, vowed to burn the city to the ground and extinguish Russia for ever...

Release date: May 12, 2015

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 304

Sample

 

 

 

 

Prologue

Moscow, 1541

 

His family were killing each other again.

Crouching in his chamber, the boy stared up towards the window and grey daylight and prayed and shook with terror. He seemed to have been shaking with terror all the few years of his life, praying desperately to God for mercy and safekeeping as long as he could remember.

There were screams, shouts, the ring of steel, the sounds of heavy-­booted running men. An animal howl. The boy crouched lower, gripping the embroidered curtain that hung around his bed for thin comfort. He was petrified, unable even to crawl under the bed to hide. The curtain trembled as he clutched it. The embroidered figures of noble huntsmen and their ladies rippled and waved mockingly at him from their golden otherworld. Something thumped at his chamber door. He could not move. The shouting men ran on.

Another day, another round of bloodletting and vengeance in the gaunt palace of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, called simply the Kremlin: the Fortress.

At last he unclenched his bunched fists from the curtain and stepped slowly over to the door. Something was pushing gently against it from the other side, but he could hear nothing, no breathing. Bathed again in the icy sweat of fear, he slowly drew the door open. A body lay just outside, head lolling across the threshold, tongue out, throat cut, blood oozing in a dark swathe across the polished wooden floor towards him. He stepped back in disgust so as not to soil his soft sheepskin boots. But he felt another emotion too: triumph at seeing another slain, another dead, another rendered this stupid, lolling corpse, so helpless at his chamber door – and he still alive, so alive. There was a strange sweetness to it. A power.

He did not recognize the corpse. A thick-set man, eyes puffy and closed. Some henchman who chose the wrong side. In life he could have picked the boy up and hugged him to death like a bear, but now he was just dead weight. The boy kicked him gently in the ribs. Dead, dead as a dead hog at Martinmas. The boy smiled faintly. And he himself alive. Life was cruel, but God had made it thus.

Was the dead man at his door a warning to him, a murderous threat? Or was it merely by chance that it was at his chamber door this particular thug had fumbled his weapon and lost his life? He would never know.

His heart still racing, mind in a whirl of God and dread and triumph, he pushed the door closed again. Shot the bolt. Went carefully over to the window, trying to calm his breathing, stepping slow and stately as if the Duke himself in a cathedral procession. To be a Duke, said his father, you must act a Duke.

He stood at the tall window of the chamber and looked out upon one of the Kremlin’s inner courtyards. There came another distant scream, and he laid his hands flat on the cool stone ledge. He was Ivan, son of Vasily, Grand Duke of Moscow, and of Elena, of Lithuanian descent. Surely his father would soon have restored order, taken red revenge on these barbaric boyars running murderous riot. But both his parents were dead now, his father when he was just six, his beautiful mother when he was eight, surely ­poisoned, the palace gossip said. He was a pitiful orphan in a young, unstable city racked by rivalry, hatred and the relentless struggle for domin­ance. He had once seen a pack of street dogs erupt into a mass brawl, ripping into each other with slavering jaws.

As in the street, so in the palace. As amongst dogs, so amongst men.

More screams, sounding far off. But the boy was already retreating from the sordid world around him into dreams of power and grandeur. He prayed to God Almighty and God heard his prayers. He would survive, by the grace of God, Creator and Destroyer of men. He would conquer, and one day he too would be Grand Duke.

One scream rose above the others. It was the scream of a woman, driven out onto a high balcony across the courtyard from where he stood and watched. Again he felt a tranquillity. It was her they were about to kill, not him. The tranquillity of relief and curiosity. The men behind had stripped her half-naked and driven her at swordpoint onto this cruel public promontory. Perhaps she was the wife or the whore of the man butchered at his door. If the boy glanced back now, he thought he would see the man’s blood seeping under the door towards him, a spreading crimson lake …

He did not look round. He stared across at the woman about to die, feeling more intensely that calm and vicarious power. Kill her, he found himself thinking. Yes, kill her! And he did not even know who she was. Again a faint smile.

The men behind her stabbed her three or four times in the back and she arched and howled once more and crawled up desperately onto the parapet and one gave her a last sharp stab in the arm and she was over and falling and hitting the ground below with a leaden thump. Her limbs spasmed briefly and she was still.

One day … One day all this would be his. And the whole world would feel his power. The boy lowered his gaze and thanked God and was at peace.

 

 

 

 

 

1

Shropshire, England, 1574

The early spring sunshine fell on the fields bright with young green wheat and spangled with dew, and the bell of the manor house chapel was calling its summons to the field workers. Sir Nicholas Ingoldsby, aged twenty-five, baronet in the County of Shropshire, had been up since before dawn, bent over his desk. He laid down his pen and rubbed his eyes, and gazed out of the lead-paned window into the enchanted country beyond. He had always preferred being out of doors – on his feet, on a horse, even up a tree. Then he gave a deep sigh and read what he had written.

Three horses, £6 10s; six pigs, £2; a hundred and fifty sheep, £37; nineteen acres of wheat, £27; thirty-two acres of barley, £32; two acres of beans, £1 10s.

He smiled ruefully. He had become a bean counter, the dutiful son of his late father, old Sir John Ingoldsby, managing the ancestral estate that had been in the family of the Ingoldsbys for three hundred years. But was this really the duty he owed his father? When he was younger, and still a naïve boy, he had felt differently. He glanced up at the ancient sword that still hung above the fireplace – the sword with which his father had fought against the Ottoman Turks, at the desperate, heroic and doomed Siege of Rhodes in 1522, when he was still a Knight of St John.

But when the Order of St John was abolished in England by order of the State, Sir John had had to choose between his loyalty to that strange, antique, ferocious brotherhood of warrior-monks, or his country. He had chosen his country, and returned to England to marry, to raise his children, and live as a quiet, obedient, unobtrusive old Catholic family of the shires.

Now Nicholas seemed set on a similar life. Was he old before his time? He flexed his aching shoulders. No, his heart still burned within him. Just like at sixteen, when he had seen his beloved father killed in a stupid accident before his eyes, and in a fit of youthful idealism, had set off with his faithful old friend, Matthew Hodgkin, for the island of Malta, to serve with his father’s old Order, in some confused dream of a Noble Crusade … What a trial by fire that had been!

And an unexpectedly long one too. The Great Siege itself, all that deadly summer of 1565 – the young girl Maddalena, his first true love, his first heartbreak – the sorrowful departure from Malta, and then the fate of so many Christian voyagers on that sea: capture and enslavement by Barbary pirates. The galleys.

And Algiers jail. Years passed. He grimaced. Even now he could smell the dungeons he and Hodge had lain in, hear the scuttle of rats, picture their sharp, inquisitive muzzles nosing the fetid air, one forepaw raised, searching out any fresh corpses to feed on in that hellhole. Their escape.

Drunken quayside brawls, whorehouses, knife fights – the feckless life of any nationless vagabond. And then the Cyprus campaign with the Knights once more, quite unexpectedly, and that epic, destructive naval battle of Lepanto.

And then home – and this. Peace. Domesticity. He who had come back from the front line of the Turkish wars with a still restless heart, who still awoke from nightmares of Malta and Lepanto – strange nightmares that comprised exhilaration as well as terror – he who had for seven wild years lived in the heart of history!

 

Another sigh arose from deep within him, and he stared again at his estate accounts. Hereditary baronet he might be, but in terms of income, no more than a country yeoman. He had taken back the old family servants, the estate workers, he had cared for his sisters, married them off one by one to suitable husbands round about. He had even started to look around for a wife himself, to continue the ancient, noble, though distinctly impoverished, lineage of Ingoldsby. And to cool his restless heart with yet more dutifulness.

He ran his tongue over the pit in his gum where a tooth had been only yesterday. He refused to pay a professional tooth drawer, a damnable expense, so he had resorted – in traditional peasant style – to the services of the blacksmith, with his iron tongs and his strong right arm. Still cost him threepence. And that was the most bloodshed he wanted to see nowadays. No more wild travels and adventures for him. Not any more. He was, he told himself, perfectly content. He must be.

Now then. There were eight gallons of wheat to a bushel, and eight pounds of wheat to a gallon. But he was buying in grain from Cornwall where it was counted eighteen to the bushel – unless you were buying directly off a boat, in which case it was sixteen … And he was buying in Cornish grain unlading from the Severn. Did that mean … ?

There came a knock at the door.

‘Enter.’

It was Jenkyn, the old steward. He looked anxious.

‘What is it, man?’

‘Sire – they’ve took Master Hodgkin.’

‘Took?’

‘Bandits, sire. Holding ’im up in Hound Wood. Demanding a ransom for him they are and all, or they say they’ll cut his throat by midnight.’

He was on his feet and reaching for his cloak already. ‘How many of ’em?’

‘I don’t know, sire. The lad come running saying they was great brutes of men, with faces all snarled up like the gargoyles round the church porch.’

‘He has a vivid turn of phrase.’

He took down that venerable sword from over the fireplace and unsheathed it and eyed the blade. Still notched by Ottoman scimitars. ‘Get me Will Rooker and saddle up two horses. We don’t truckle with bandits in Shropshire.’

As he turned and strode from the room, his flaring cloak brushed the inkpot and overturned it. Black gall seeped over all the good work he had done, but he never even noticed.

 

 

 

 

2

 

He and his bailiff, sturdy Will Rooker, mounted up in the yard. Will had some old long beaten sword that might have seen service in the Wars of the Roses a century ago, and along with his sword, Nicholas carried a hunting crossbow across his back, and half a dozen bolts.

He felt the familiar excitement arise, all his good resolutions about sober duty and the quiet life already forgotten. One thing fighting the Turk had taught him: never negotiate, never surrender. And if he could face the Grand Turk, he could certainly face a band of impertinent Border bandits. They would have to fight. He had no choice. And assuming a band of twenty or so, they would have to attack with all aggression, hope to put a dent in one or two, and send the rest fleeing in confusion before they could put a knife to Hodge’s throat.

The night was growing dark, the moon too thin to give much light. They tied up their horses three fields away, downwind, and spoke to them to calm them and allay their fears, their harrumphs and whickers. Nicholas winched up the crossbow and loaded a bolt, and then they crept along the field’s edge under the darkness of the high old hedge, moving slow, until they came to Hound Wood. They crouched.

Nicholas glanced sourly at Will. Sneered in the dark. The fools of bandits had actually lit a fire to warm themselves and to cook whatever game they’d poached from his woods. Rank amateurs.

They went as silently as they could, knowing the bandits would see nothing, gazing sottishly into the orange heart of the fire, awaiting their ransom money. Patience was all. At last Nicholas was up behind a broad old oak not twenty feet off, crossbow readied, feet positioned carefully on soft ground free of twigs. He could have chuckled to himself. There were two of them. Two bandits. Hulking brutes, to be sure, from the hunched back of the one sitting, but no great number – the second of them lay wrapped in his cloak on the ground, probably dead drunk already. Hodge himself sat opposite, staring into the fire with an expression so untroubled Nicholas could have laughed again.

He lined up his crossbow and took aim at the head of the brute sitting on the log. Head the size of a cannonball from an Ottoman siege gun. At this distance it was too easy. Like potting apples at a May fair. He lowered the bow a little and aimed to take out his right arm. Hesitated. Something about the shape of the fellow …

He felt a presence just behind him, and then something cold at his throat. The touch of bright steel. He kept very, very still.

And then the brute at the fireside spoke, without turning round. A deep, rumbling, bearlike voice as if out of a cave.

‘Greetings, Master Ingoldsby. Fine hospitality you show us.’

The cold steel was removed from his throat and he lowered his bow to the ground, speechless with astonishment. He turned and there beside him stood a giant of a man with a broad, ruddy face and a mop of tow-coloured hair. For the first time he noticed another very serious sword indeed hanging in its scabbard from a nearby branch.

‘Ned Stanley! John Smith!’ he gasped. ‘If I knew any blasphemies I’d swear them now!’

‘Rubbish ambuscade of yours there, young Ingoldsby,’ said Stanley. ‘Brother Smith here said he smelt your horses coming ten minutes ago.’

‘And this hare’s tough too,’ grumbled Smith.

Hodge stood. ‘That’s because you’ve over-roasted it,’ he said. ‘You never could cook, you.’

After effusive greetings and embraces, Nicholas stood back, trying to make sense of their presence. Sir John Smith and Sir Edward Stanley, Knights Commander of the Order of St John, both old enough to be his father, both in their fifth decades, yet as he knew from fighting alongside them, as tough and as dangerous as any soldiers under the sun. They were the elite. The Turks called them the Mad Dogs of Christendom.

Nicholas grinned. Things always happened when these two appeared. Sir John Smith, a bear of a man with black hair and beard now increasingly grizzled, his deep rumbling voice, his eyes red and bloodshot when angered, like an enraged bull. He could knock any man senseless with a single, casual blow, and was seemingly indestructible. When he stripped to bathe, his tree-trunk torso had more scars than skin. And he took a grim delight in always predicting the worst.

And Sir Edward Stanley, of an old English family, of similar build to Smith but even taller, like a Norse giant, with tousled fair hair, ruddy cheeks, dancing blue eyes and laughing disposition. As Nicholas knew, he always seemed most cheerful when facing desperate odds, in the heat of a battle, with death staring him in the face. He was never happier.

And the pair were certainly in great danger in Protestant England, as well as being feared and hated throughout the Mohammedan world, just as much as the Knights Templar had ever been. Now the Knights Templar were destroyed, by corrupt kings without and their own corruption within. But the Knights of St John fought on, the greatest warriors of Christendom, against a Mohammedan tide that was once more sweeping westwards. Palestine was again in the hands of the Caliphate, and that old medieval dream of a Christian Holy Land seemed more distant than ever.

The Knights of St John had been driven from Rhodes, and finally besieged on their island home of Malta: an Ottoman siege that went spectacularly wrong, and became one of Christendom’s most heroic victories. And he had been there. Even now he could hardly believe it. All four of them had been there, comrades-in-arms; even the home-loving Hodge.

Nicholas waved at the two knights and explained to Will Rooker as best he could, ‘Old friends of mine. I can say no more. On your life, Will, mention this to no one.’

‘Not till Doomsday, sire,’ said Rooker stoutly.

Nicholas told him to head back to the house. He would return presently.

‘Last time we came direct to your door,’ said Stanley, solemn again, ‘tragedy ensued, and your father lost his life. As you well know. We needed to come and find you, but without risk of discovery or household tittle-tattle.’ He looked after the departing Rooker. ‘Less risk, at any rate.’

‘Rooker’s a good man.’ Nicholas looked them over. Two Catholic knights, travelling sub rosa and under cover of night in Elizabeth’s Protestant England. The danger was immense.

He said, ‘If you’re caught, you’ll be beheaded within a day. And Hodge and I will probably be racked till we stretch from here to Shrewsbury.’

Stanley looked evasive. ‘Our being here is not without risk, it is true. But we do carry a letter of passe-par-tout, a sealed letter direct to Elizabeth’s secretary from our Grand Master, and new information of great value to London. Tidings from the East, you might say. Though not exactly glad tidings.’

‘But the Pope, your Holy Father, has virtually ordered her assassination. Four years ago he declared her excommunicated and a heretic – which is as good as ordering her removal from the English throne.’

‘Is the Pope not your Holy Father too?’ said Smith sharply.

Nicholas hesitated. ‘My Catholic faith is blurring with the years. This new Church of England is a broad church. Our parson here still has a crucifix on the wall, still reads the Psalms in Latin. And no, I most certainly have no interest in assassinating my Queen. Have you? Why are you here?’

Smith and Stanley exchanged glances. They would not be telling their old comrade Ingoldsby everything tonight. It was not possible. But they needed him. Stanley said, ‘We want access that you can get us. How is your account of your travels to Malta and the Battle of Lepanto that you were writing for the Court? Is the Queen not impatient for it? It will be excellent foreign intelligence for her and her secretary Lord Cecil.’

‘How do you know …?’ Then Nicholas shook his head. The spy network of the Knights of St John was legendary. It spread across all of Christendom and well beyond, to the court of Constantinople, to Persia even …

‘Nearly done,’ he said. ‘I will go to London later this summer.’

‘Finish it in three days.’

He snorted. ‘Out of the question, Stanley. It’s a busy time of year, seed to sow, animals to get out into the fields, endless ­accounts …’

‘Three days,’ said Stanley. ‘We need to move by then.’

‘Brazen cheek,’ muttered Nicholas. ‘Every time I encounter you afresh, I know there’s going to be trouble. It’s out of the question.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

3

 

It was with ink still on his fingers and bleared eyes that Nicholas rode out at the head of the four along the London road, three days later. There was much to do on the estate – not least the late lambing – but he had promised good reward to Will Rooker and his brother for managing it all while he was gone, and they were sound men. He would only be gone a short while, he said, just a few weeks. Back before May Day at the latest.

Hodge looked gloomy at his words. He felt a terrible foreboding that they would be gone a lot, lot longer.

 

They slept one night in the melancholy shadows of a ruined monastery, without any fire to warm their bones or cheer their hearts. Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. Was it possible – Nicholas lay awake wondering, the dew settling on his face towards dawn – was it possible that only four decades ago, when his father was a boy, this was one of the great monasteries of England, a place of prayer and worship, unspeakably beautiful choirs of heavenly voices? Rest and hospitality for any pilgrim that asked, healing for any sick that came? Surely when that oaf Henry destroyed the monasteries he destroyed part of England’s own soul.

And now his Protestant daughter sat on the throne. Nicholas’s Queen, whom he now served, now rode to London for. He rolled on his side. Truly the world was out of joint.

 

They found rooms at an unwholesome inn at Wapping, the Mermaid. Hodge squinted up at the worm-eaten sign-board of the fair fish-maiden. ‘Looks like she’s got a bad dose of the clap.’

The first thing the landlord said was it was sixpence for half an hour upstairs with his daughter, or a shilling for a quarter ounce of this new nicotiana. ‘Fresh from the Americas.’

They politely declined both.

Leaving his comrades to talk over old times in a private chamber, Nicholas rode over to Whitehall Palace to lodge his account of his travels with an uninterested clerk. Smudged and hurriedly written as it was, it would have to do. He stressed that it was commanded expressly by Her Majesty some three years ago. The clerk, sickly and pockmarked, seemed even more uninterested. He went back the next day to see if there was any response. Nothing. Dealing with government was often trying.

In the meantime they waited at Wapping and kept low. Smith and Stanley felt it was too risky to stay with Nicholas and Hodge and found lodgings somewhere else unspecified. ‘A safe house,’ said Stanley vaguely. Old Catholic families still abounded. Yet Nicholas already feared they were being watched. The landlord eyed them suspiciously from the start. No one could help but notice the two knights’ deep un-English colour, cheeks burned brown by the Mediter­ranean sun, and yet their gentlemanly demeanour, and their aura of martial power.

At night the Mermaid was filled with mariners of the roughest sort, all flashing gold earrings and ribbons in their pigtails and gleaming daggers at their belts, and some very tall tales indeed. They disbursed their hard-won earnings as fast as they could drink them, as did their brazen shouting whores.

Hodge and Nicholas tried to keep inconspicuous and drank small beer as long as they could. The noise and stench grew worse and the fetid reek of this new-fangled tobacco in every mariner’s clay pipebowl made the eyes sting and the stomach sicken. It would never catch on. Then a drunken whore fell across their table quite bare-breasted and eyed them with a stupid, feigned lasciviousness, before rolling onto the sawdust floor and lying there half asleep. Feeling rather ridiculous, Nicholas leaned down and covered her modesty with a kerchief.

‘Quite the gentleman,’ said Hodge. ‘What’s this inn’s name again, The Devil’s Whore?’

Nicholas grinned. The reechy stew of humanity in all its rumbustious shamelessness. He checked the dagger at his waist. Might be needed before this night was out. Yet he felt the thrill of it all as well, the hum of the great capital. Though he loved his native countryside with a love too deep for words, there was another kind of pleasure here. But please God, let him not be tempted tonight by a whore. Another blowsy wench was pouting at them across the room, though sitting in a mariner’s lap. One night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury. One onion-breathed kiss on the lips, and a month later, a body of welted sores. Or the mariner’s own jealous dagger in your back, for that matter.

All was talk of foreign voyages and ventures. Even in darkest Shropshire they had eventually heard tell of Sir Francis Drake’s extraordinary voyage to the Indies, the looted Spanish treasures he brought back with him.

‘Four thousand seven hundred per cent!’ murmured an older man, more sober suited. A maritime investor, perhaps, listening for tips. ‘Four thousand seven hundred per cent on every guinea invested.’

‘What’s that in plain English?’ said a blear-eyed sailor, leaning towards him.

‘Invest a guinea,’ said the older man, ‘and you’ll get back forty-seven.’

The sailor gaped.

‘If Drake’s not shot, hanged, drowned, burned or devoured by cannibals on his next voyage!’ said another.

There was talk of other great travellers, of Giles Fletcher, of Anthony Jenkinson and his marvellous map of the East, and this new Empire of the Russias. A mariner sunburnt and muscled sat beside them, jovial and well soused, and showed them a bangle squeezed round his powerful wrist.

‘Pure gold,’ he said. He had a Devon accent, like Drake himself. ‘Pure African gold. Got from a woman there for a mere bit of cloth. And the women there,’ he waved his hands sinuously, ‘got rumps on ’em good enough to eat.’

‘’Pon my faith,’ said Nicholas politely.

‘Now I like to think there’s half a dozen pied coloured bastards o’ mine running about the jungle, naked as Adam!’ He roared with laughter. ‘Look. This bangle here. African gold.’ Why did drunkards always repeat themselves? ‘Come from the ancient kingdoms inland. Come by camel across the desert. Remarkable beasts. They call it the Gold Coast, ’tis so common.’

‘That’s nothing,’ said another mariner. ‘There are isles in the southern seas, about the Portugal islands and the East Indies, where gold is so common they reckon it worthless entirely.’

‘That’s lies,’ said the first.

Daggers would be out soon. A drunken mariner would quarrel with his own shadow. Nicholas had his dagger loosened in its sheath, Hodge likewise, but that hefty three-legged stool there might prove more useful if things should get lively.

The world travellers and gold connoisseurs talked of lands beyond the equinoctial sun where the natives were burnt quite black but gold was as common as clay, and though they were only naked and unchristened savages they dined off trenchers of pure gold. Gold knives, gold beds, everything. Gold gold gold. Nicholas began to sicken of the word.

‘You mean,’ he said, ‘you could sail back with a dozen shiploads of gold?’

‘Aye, lad, just so. For a few fardels of Hampshire kersey. Nice bit of cloth but not worth that much. And jacinths, rubies, emeralds …’

Hodge nudged Nicholas sharply under the table but he pressed on. ‘But then wouldn’t gold be worth less in England? If you came back with hundreds of tons of it? Like it is in these fabled islands of yours?’

The mariner snapped, ‘Gold is gold, you fool. Gold is precious wherever it is.’

‘But you just said it wasn’t. In these fabled islands. Because there’s so much of it. It’s only precious where it’s rare.’

‘You call me a liar?’

‘No, I just question your grasp of economics.’

‘Oh bloody hell,’ sighed Hodge.

‘Don’t get smart with me, Master Wordy Quickwits,’ snapped the mariner, ‘or I’ll kick your arse down Wapping Stairs and give you a bellyful of . . .