L. Camp - The Exotic Enchanter

“What’s happening? Who’s fighting whom?” Shea panted. He took another step backward and brought his heel up against a fallen body. It wasn’t the first one.

“Our men have gone mad! They fight each other.” From the dazed way he spoke, Mikhail Sergeivich hadn’t had time to think much.

Suspicion turned to blazing certainty in Shea’s gut and burned its way to his brain. “Mount guard,” he told the Rus. “I can stop it.”

He didn’t dare sheathe his sword, but kept his guard down. Gesturing with the sword in his right hand, he recited:

“O would some power the giftie gie us

To see the truth the spell hides frae us!

What friends, what foes do battle wi’ us

To us be shown!”

Shea could detect no change in the fading sun or clouds, but everything looked a bit brighter. He could see small differences in the appearance and the armor of the fallen. As he caught his breath and looked around, he saw the living change also. Some still bore Igor’s device on their shields, but others had their shields covered.

Mikhail Sergeivich looked a trifle less hostile. Before he could say anything a scuffle on the ramparts made them both look up. Euphrosinia Yaroslavena and a boy of about twelve, daggers in hand, grinned triumphantly at a prisoner between two guards.

Mikhail Sergeivich smiled too, or at least moved his lips. All around them the strange swordsmen were drawing back toward the outer gate.

A door in the wall between the two courtyards burst open. Igor charged through it at the head of bloodstained men moving too fast to be counted. The prince still wore his riding clothes, but carried his sword and wore a helmet at least two sizes too large for him. All were stained with blood.

The attackers recoiled from Igor. That left the prince a clear path to the gate. In a moment the last avenue of retreat was blocked — and a moment after that the strange men were dropping their weapons and lowering their shields.

Igor followed everyone’s glance at the ramparts. “Glory to God!” Igor exclaimed. A smile split his face. Then It vanished as he recognized the prisoner.

“Bring him down.”

While the guards did so, the prince looked around the court, apparently counting the dead. His own men cordoned off the prisoners. Shea wiped and sheathed his saber, but Mikhail Sergeivich stayed at his elbow, his longsword still in his hand.

The guards shoved the prisoner, his hands bound behind him, through the archway. The princess and Vladimir Igorovich followed. Igor hugged Euphrosinia tightly, and she didn’t seem to mind the blood.

Igor smiled at his son. “Did you capture him?”

“Well, I helped” Vladimir said. “I was in Mother’s outer chamber when he broke in. He kept trying to grab Mother, and I kept trying to stab him, and finally the guards came, If I’d had my own sword . . .” His voice trailed off.

“You shall have one, of the finest Frankish steel.” The pleasure Vanished from Igor’s voice as he stared at the prisoner. “Sviatoslav Borisovich! Rebellion? From you, cousin?”

The prisoner stared at his cousin and prince with a corpse’s eyes. “I thought to take Seversk by guile.” He stopped.

Prince Igor looked at the prisoners, then gestured at one. The guards brought him over. “What were your orders?” Igor asked.

“To seize the castle, most especially the inner parts and the armory, slay you and Prince Vladimir, and take the Princess Euphrosinia alive,” the soldier answered dully.

“You knew that this was treason,” the prince stated.

“He was our lord.”

Oleg Nikolaivich now entered the court, accompanying a man with a bloody bandage on his arm. “Sergei Ivanovich is one of the scribes assisting — who assisted — your steward, Your Highness. You should hear him,” Oleg’s voice was soft with tightly leashed anger.

In a low voice that grew stronger as he continued, Sergei Ivanovich told how the wagons supposedly bringing Sviatoslav’s taxes contained weapons and armed men. They had slain the steward, seized the storehouses, and opened the gate to the inner kremlin .

“I lay as if dead from a wound,” the scribe said. “The boyar ordered that word be brought to him when Your Highness, Prince Vladimir, and the princess were taken. But he also said, ‘Make sure it’s Prince Igor’s men you’re fighting.’”

Murmurs and gestures of aversion followed this, but Igor paid no heed. “What demon possessed you, cousin? Even if You had succeeded, do you think the boyars of Seversk would have accepted you as prince? Or Vsevolod, or the Prince of Kiev?”

“I was told there was a man of power here, a bogatyr , who hated you. He would have given me your semblance until all enemies to my rule were either slain or won over.”

A good many stares showing both understanding and hostility turned in Shea’s direction.

“Not this man” Mikhail Sergeivich said. “He fought our enemies and broke the spell. I saw him.” He looked at Shea, “Where is Rurik Vasilyevich?”

“In our chamber the last I saw of him.”

“Bring him down,” Igor ordered.

“May I go up, Your Highness?” Shea spoke low, to keep his voice from shaking with the knowledge of what Chalmers had done. But Harold Shea would not desert him. Neither of them was Igor’s man, after all.

Igor considered “Disarm and bind him,” he ordered. “Let neither of them speak or act, and bring them both back.”

Mikhail Sergeivich unbuckled Shea’s swordbelt and tossed it to a guard. He gestured, and another guard came over, bound Shea’s hands with a rawhide thong, and gagged him with another. The two marched him off.

At the door of their chamber Mikhail marched him in, barely two seconds after his, “Open in the prince’s name!” Fortunately, the door was not latched.

Chalmers was sitting calmly, but he was obviously shocked at the spectacle of Shea In bonds. “Take them off?” he ordered.

Then he recognized Mikhail Sergetvich, and Prince Igor’s device. His shoulders slumped just a trifle.

That was enough to convince Mikhail Sergeivich. He grabbed Chalmers and tied his hands. Being out of rawhide, he took the gag off Shea and used it on Chalmers.

“Just cut that one’s throat if he squeaks,” Mikhail told the guard.

The augmented party returned to the courtyard, where, in addition to those they’d left, they found the Patriarch and a man who had to be an executioner; he held a huge two-handed sword.

Chalmers and Shea were shoved to the front rank of the prisoners. Mikhail Sergeivich exchanged a few words with Igor.

“Sviatoslav Borisovich,” Igor said, “do you know either of these men?”

“No, Your Highness.”

“Rurik Vasilyevich, do you know this man?” The guard removed Chalmers gag. “No, Your Highness,” he practically spat.

“Do you, Egorov Andreivich?”

“No, Your Highness.”

“Who told you then, that there was one here who would work with you?”

Sviatoslav was silent.

“Sviatoslav Borisovich, boyar of Seversk,” Igor pronounced. “You did not pay the tax due the prince of Seversk. For that, triple taxes will be collected from your estate.

“You caused the death of my steward, and thirteen of my guards. For that you owe a blood price of eighty grivnas for the steward, and forty for each guard. You also owe a blood price for every wounded man.

“Finally, you attempted to slay the prince of Seversk and his family. For this, your estates are forfeit, as is your life, if I see fit to take it.

“I shall not take your life, Sviatoslav Borisovich. Instead, you shall be blinded, Before you are blinded, you will see the deaths of the men you led into treason. That is the last thing you will ever see.”