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.
“Let them in,” the prince said.
The bay horse skidded to a halt just inside the gate, and the monks at once urged the groaning hinges shut. The rider handed the girls down and then slid off his horse’s shoulder himself. “The children are cold,” he said. “They are frightened. They must be taken to the bathhouse at once—or the oven. They must be fed.”
But the girls clung to their rescuer’s cloak when two of the village women came up to lead them away. Sasha strode forward. The clamor had drawn him from the chapel and he had heard the last of the exchange from the wall-top. “Have you seen these bandits?” he demanded. “Where are they?”