L. Camp: The Exotic Enchanter

Taste of the mead, to which our strength pays toll.

Come, prince of drugs! Thy powers unleash, restore

To all who drink, sobriety once more.”

The atmosphere in the lodge was anything but salubrious, but the spears remained stacked and the swords sheathed. Shea checked the pot; the bark had steeped. He wiped his cup and dipped some out.

Yeech!! It tasted vile, but warmed his stomach very nicely. In a few minutes he felt his incipient stomachache go away. His head felt clearer than ever.

He held out the cup to the princess. “The draught, Your Highness.”

All heads turned to her again. She didn’t hesitate. “Give him the draught,” she ordered. “If he is harmed, you will both be flogged and your eyes burnt out with hot irons before you lose your heads.”

She gestured, and Mikhail Sergeivich raised the prince.

Shea was relieved to see that he was not unconscious, just asleep. He put the cup to Igor’s lips; the prince swallowed by reflex. By the time it was empty he had opened his eyes.

“Gaaaah!” was his first sound, and “Water!” his first word. The water was hastily brought, and the hands which had tightened on swordhilts relaxed a trifle, but did not move. Igor downed a pitcher and part of a second, then looked around, cold sober.

The hands fell away from the swordhilts. The princess stared.

“Did you prepare this draught?” Igor asked the psychologists.

“Yes, Your Highness.”

“It tastes like rotten maresmilk. You bogatyri have stomachs of iron.” He smiled broadly. “Mine is only that of a prince, but I owe you a boon. Ask what you will.”

“Only that my wife be rescued, Your Highness,” Chalmers said, before the princess could recover.

Igor repeated his previous vow, not as loudly but with more dignity, as well as several embellishments. By the time he had finished, half the room was cheering.

The prince was also beginning to find company in sobriety. Three or four of the men came up to the table and dipped their cups, and many a respectful, even awed, look was aimed at the strangers.

Princess Euphrosinia gave them a respectful nod, then turned to the prince. “Let us go to bed, my lord The morning is wiser than the evening, and there will be much to do.”

Igor offered his arm. “Gladly, my lady,” he said, with more than a suggestion of a leer. He escorted her out. II

Two days later, Harold Shea and Reed Chalmers were riding with Prince Igor’s party eastward to the Don country. It was a fine day for riding, clear and neither too hot nor too cold. The trails, the occasional wide trail that deserved to be called a road, and the stretches of grassland they frequently had to cross were all firm beneath the horses’ hooves.

“Just as well we’re tiding now.” Oleg Nikolaivich remarked. “In another month, two at the most, this will all be mud.”

Shea paraphrased an old description of a swamp. ‘‘Too thin to ride on, too thick to row through.”

Oleg Nikolaivich grinned.

Shea found the high-cantled saddle comfortable enough, and was grateful to be in a dimension that had invented stirrups. The Rus were clearly equipped to press home a charge with lance or sword, as well as fight from a distance with a three-foot bow. Some of them also carried battle-axes: Shea had yet to see a mace.

They all wore mail shirts, of varying lengths, some ring mail and some made of metal discs sewn to leather backing, or strips of metal and leather woven together. Their helmets were iron, open-faced, and pointed, with mail attachments to protect neck and throat. Their shields were kite-shaped, and the whole effect reminded Shea somewhat of the Bayeux Tapestry.

Except that no self-respecting Norman knight ever used a bow. The Rus might have equally grand notions of honor, but that didn’t keep them from riding out equipped to pay horse archers back in their own coin.

Shea himself wore only a helmet and a knee-length mail shirt. Hed buckled on his basket-hiked saber and borrowed a dagger, but refused a shield.

“I am accustomed to fighting without one,” he said, and his status as a bogatyr rose. So had Chalmers’; he wore a shorter mail shirt and a helmet, but carried only a dagger.

They were not actually headed for the Polovtsi camp — no prince of the Rus would do that unless he led a full war party. It would be prudent, Princess Euphrosinia reminded Igor, to see if the captives could be ransomed. So a negotiating party of forty men was headed for a neutral spot on the west bank of the Don, where the Polovtsi occasionally did some legitimate trading.

They stayed in the shadow of the trees as long as they could, and Igor deployed scouts a couple of hours’ ride ahead. He feared treachery, it seemed.

“Some of the boyars and even the princes have fought with the Polovtsi,” he explained. “You seldom know who’s turned his coat until they attack.”

Shea wished he knew more of this continuum. He vaguely recalled that in the opera, Prince Igor had been a Polovets captive.

“What is worse,” Igor continued, “is the way the Rus fight each other. If we put our joint strength against the Polovtsi we could crush them. By Saint Vladimir! My grandfather Oleg Sviatoslavich, curse his name, fought against the last Great Prince of Kiev. Now I must negotiate new alliances each time I face peril, instead of being sure of support from all the princes of the Rus.”

“If the Polovtsi are such bad neighbors,” Shea asked, “why will any of the Rus deal with them?”

“They want Polovtsi slaves,” Igor said shortly.

Shea and Chalmers discussed this later in the day.

“It sounds as If the Rus never learned about hanging together or hanging separately,” Shea said.

“They didn’t, Chalmers replied. “Russia was never united until the Grand Dukes of Moscow took a hand. That’s why they styled themselves the ‘Czar of all the Russias.’ Plural.”

“But no one’s mentioned Moscow, Doc. Does it even exist here?”

“I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure about the slaves.

“Russia’s always been huge, Harold. Until the railroad and telegraph were invented, Its eastern frontier was just like our west — dangerous, but a place to run away and not be found if you didn’t want to be.

“To prevent the farmers, the peasants, from doing just that, Russia stuck with serfdom a lot longer than most countries. It wasn’t officially ended until the reign of Czar Alexander II, well Into the nineteenth century.”

“Yeah, but what does that have to do with Polovtsi slaves?”

“It sounds as If these boyars and princes are trying to ensure a labor supply, and are not too scrupulous about its source.”

There was silence, as both men remembered that the supply included Florimel.

They journeyed for nearly ten days, sleeping in their cloaks and existing for the most part on smoked meat and journeybread. They made fires and did some hunting while in the shelter of the forest, but once on the steppe, the dry grass and the chance of being seen made for cold meats and nights.

Shea occasionally visited his family in St. Louis by way of Chicago, and he was all too familiar with the hypnotizing sameness of Route 66. Mile after interchangeable mile of field and sky made the trip seem like three thousand miles, not three hundred. He was truly grateful for the succession of towns and country crossroads, which proved he was not just sitting in the same spot, and could even muster up some gratitude for the farm machinery ambling along. Having to watch for tractors did focus his attention.

I hope no one ever builds one of those German auto-bahns down here, he remembered thinking. No one could stay awake long enough to reach St Louis.