Кэтрин Арден - The Girl in the Tower

More than one haggard face lightened. They all crossed themselves. “That is the Lavra,” one man told another. “That is the dwelling of holy Sergius, and no god-damned bandits—demons—will we have in there.”

The horses’ heads hung low, and the column passed through the forest with a keener watch than usual. There was a sense—unspoken, but shared—that today, so near shelter, when the horses were stumbling from weariness, these phantoms might finally attack.

But nothing stirred in the wood, and they soon broke out of the trees into a clearing that contained a walled monastery.

The challenge met them before their horses were well clear of the wood, cried by a monk keeping watch on the wall-top. In answer, Sasha put back his hood. “Brother Rodion!” he bellowed.

The monk’s stolid face broke into a smile. “Brother Aleksandr!” he cried, and spun to shout orders. There came a clamor from the yard below, a creaking, and the gates swung ponderously out.

An old man, clear-eyed, with a snowy tumble of beard, stood waiting for them in the gap, leaning on a stick. Despite his weariness, Sasha was off his horse in an instant, Dmitrii only a step behind him. The snow crunched beneath their booted feet when they bent together and kissed the old man’s hand.

“Father,” Sasha said to Sergei Radonezhsky, the holiest man in Rus’. “I am glad to see you.”

“My sons,” said Sergei, raising a hand in blessing. “You are welcome here. You are come in good time too, for there is evil afoot.”

THE BOY SASHA PETROVICH—WHO became the monk Brother Aleksandr Peresvet—had come to the Lavra as a boy of fifteen, proud of his piety, his skill with horses, his sword. He had feared nothing and respected little, but life in the monastery shaped him. The brothers of the Trinity Lavra built huts with their own hands, fired the brick for the ovens, planted their gardens, baked their bread in the wilderness.

The years of Sasha’s novitiate had run by quick and slow at once, in the way of peaceful times. Dmitrii Ivanovich had come of age among the brothers, proud and restless, well-taught and fair of face.

At sixteen, Dmitrii went away to become the Grand Prince of Moscow, and Sasha—a full monk at last—took to the road. He had wandered Rus’ for three years, founding monasteries and aiding others, as their custom was. Journeying burned his youth away, and the man that had returned to Muscovy was cool-eyed and quiet, slow to fight but steady-handed in battle, and much beloved by the peasants, who had given him his name.

Aleksandr Peresvet. Lightbringer.

Sasha had tried, after his wanderings, to return to the Lavra to take his final vows and be at peace amid the woods and streams and snows of the wilderness. But among those vows was one of stability of place, and Sasha found that he could not yet live quiet—for God called him out. Or perhaps it was the fire in his blood. For the world was wide and full of troubles, and the young Grand Prince desired his cousin’s counsel. So Sasha had left the monastery again, with his sword and his horse, to join the councils of the great, to ride the roads of Rus’, healing and advising and praying by turns.

But always in the back of his mind was the Lavra. Home. Bright in summer, blue-shadowed in winter, and overflowing with silence.

This time, though, when Brother Aleksandr passed the uprights of the wooden gate, he was met with a wall of noise. People and dogs, chickens and children, crowded the snowy spaces between buildings, and everywhere were cook-fires and clamor. Sasha’s feet faltered; he turned an astonished look to Sergei.

The old monk only shrugged. But now Sasha noticed the dark sweeps of skin beneath his eyes, and how stiffly he walked. Sergei did not hesitate when Sasha offered him his arm.

On Sergei’s other side, Dmitrii uttered what Brother Aleksandr was thinking. “So many,” he said.

“They knocked on our gates eight days ago,” said Sergei. With his free hand he blessed people left and right; several ran forward and kissed the hem of his robe. He smiled at them, but his eyes were weary. “Bandits, the people said, yet unlike bandits. For these men took little strong drink, and little loot, yet they burned villages with a fierce fire. They looked into the face of every girl and took the ones they wished. The survivors came here—even folk from homesteads and villages as yet unburnt—begging for sanctuary. I could not deny them.”

“I will order grain up from Moscow,” said Dmitrii. “I will send hunters, that you may feed them all. And we will kill these bandits.” The bandits might have been monsters out of legend for all the sight they’d had of them, but the prince did not say that.

“We must see to the horses first,” said Sasha practically—he glanced at his Tuman, who stood still in the snow, spent—“and take counsel amongst ourselves.”

THE REFECTORY WAS LOW AND DIM, as all buildings were in that frost-haunted land, but unlike most of the monastery it had a stove and a good fire. Sasha sighed when the heat touched his weary limbs.

Dmitrii also sighed, unhappily, when he saw the meal laid out. He would have liked some fat meat, roasted slowly in a hot oven. But Sergius observed fast-days strictly.

“Best we strengthen the walls first,” said Sasha, pushing aside his second bowl of cabbage soup, “before we go out searching.”

Dmitrii was eating bread and dried cherries, having rather resentfully finished his soup. He grunted, “They’ll not attack us here. Monasteries are sacred.”

“Perhaps,” said Sasha, whose long journey to Sarai was fresh in his mind. “But Tatars pray to a different god. In any case, these, I think, are godless men.”

Dmitrii swallowed a mouthful, then returned practically, “So? This monastery has good walls. Bandits steal what they can, they do not attempt winter sieges.” But then he looked doubtful. Dmitrii loved the Lavra, in his shallow, brave heart, and he had not forgotten the smell of the burnt villages.

“It will be dark soon,” the Grand Prince said. “Let us go to the wall now.”

The walls of the Lavra had been built, with much slow labor, of a double thickness of oak. Not much beyond a siege-engine could reduce them. But the gate could be reinforced. Dmitrii gave the orders for it, and also had his men set to thawing and digging great baskets of earth, to be kept warm and close to hand, in case they were needed for smothering fire.

“Well, we have done what we can,” the Grand Prince said at nightfall. “Tomorrow we will send out scouting-parties.”

BUT THERE WERE, in the end, no scouting-parties. It snowed all night, and the next day dawned gray and perilous. Just at first light, a bay stallion with an enormous, misshapen rider on its back came galloping out of the forest.

“The monastery! The gate! Let us in! They are coming!” cried the rider. The cloak fell away, and the misshapen thing was revealed to be not one rider but four —three small girls and a lad a little older.

Brother Rodion was on watch again, peering over the top of the wall. “Who are you?” he called down to the boy.

“Never mind that now!” the boy cried. “I went into their camp and brought these away”—a gesture indicated the girl-children. “Now the bandits are behind me in a boiling fury; if you will not let me in, at least take these girls. Or are you not men of God?”

Dmitrii heard this exchange. Instantly he ran up the ladder to look over the wall. The rider had a fresh, young face, big-eyed, beardless. No warrior, certainly. He spoke in the rough round words of a country lad. The little girls clung to him, half frozen and dazed with fear.