PRELUDE

 

1560

Moscow, Russia

 

Through the pain that never seemed to leave her, Anastasia Romanovna, wife of Tsar Ivan Vasiljevich, the Fourth, heard her nurses muttering.

“The tsarina grows weaker with each moment. She will not live another night.”

“When she goes, the tsar will go mad!”

“How will we cope? What will they do to him?”

Anastasia didn’t want to hear more, for her caregivers spoke the truth.

She was dying, and her husband’s hold on sanity was tenuous at the best of times. The boyars and peasants alike called him Ivan Grozny—Ivan Awesome, Ivan Terrible.

Anastasia’s death would leave him alone and vulnerable to his bouts of rage, his madness, and his rampages of violence, for she was the one who helped him control them. She was the one on whom he relied.

Gathering all of her strength, she called for one of the nurses, one of the few members of her husband’s court that they trusted. “Adejana.” The nurse she’d named came to her bedside. “My husband…please find him for me.”

“I will call for him.” The nurse bobbed a bow and dashed from the room, but not before Anastasia saw pity in her face—and then fear.

Indeed, the nurse should fear. When Anastasia was gone, there would be no one to hold her husband’s rages in check. Ivan would have the heads of the men who poisoned his wife, who now waited gleefully in the wings for her to die. Theirs would not be a simple, nor a quick, death.

She felt no pity for those men, devout Christian though she might be. They were stealing her life at the age of twenty-six. And for no reason other than to destroy Ivan.

Anastasia’s pain blended into sleep, then back into wakening. She sipped from something when it was brought to her swollen, cracked lips. It felt cool and smooth sliding down her throat.

Then he was there. Ivan.

His large, warm hands grasped hers and she forced her eyes open to look at him. Pain and anger lined his face.

Anastasia could not save herself, nor could she save him from the madness in his eyes. But she could save something.

“Ivan. The books.”

“Yes, yes, the books. I will care for them. Rest. Do not speak; you will get better.”

She rolled her head on the pillow in negation. It took too much effort, but she opened her mouth to speak. “They will destroy them.”

“My grandfather’s books?”

“I have heard it is their plan. My spies…tell me.” She paused to catch her breath, and Ivan leaned toward her, bringing his familiar scent of cinnamon and clove. He trembled, for though he spoke otherwise, surely he knew it was too late for her.

But the books. They must be saved. She would make him understand that he must protect their secrets.

There were hundreds, perhaps a thousand of them. The volumes filled three vaults that were specially made to protect them from the fires that tore much too often through the wooden buildings in Moscow. Brought from Byzantium by the bride of Ivan’s grandfather, Sophia Palaeologa, and hidden away beneath the Kremlin, the tomes and scrolls and papers surely bore untold information. Much of it was as yet undiscovered, unread, unstudied. No one knew all that was there—even her husband.

Ivan, with his insatiable love of reading, had visited the library countless times during his youth. He’d pored over the books, and later shared them with Anastasia. The two could read very few of them; they were written in ancient Greek and Roman and other unfamiliar archaic languages.

At Anastasia’s urgings, Ivan had selected a few trustworthy scholars and set them to work in secrecy, translating the works. But there were so many, and the pages were old, delicate, and faded. They had barely begun their daunting task.

“The library must be saved,” she managed. “Promise me.”

“I do promise, my love. I do.” And beyond the unhealthy glint in his eyes, she recognized determination. He would see to it.

And she could die now, for there was nothing else she could do. She could not save either of them.

Only the books.

 

***

Four months after his wife’s death, just as the heavy snows of winter began to descend upon Moscow, Tsar Ivan Vasiljevich emerged briefly from his despair and grief to fulfill the vow to his wife.

He had kept other promises he’d made to himself upon Anastasia’s death, including torturing and killing the boyars he knew were responsible for poisoning her with mercury. Though he knew they were guilty, he had no proof. But he didn’t care whether there was proof. God knew the truth, and that was all that mattered to Ivan.

And then there were the writings. The ancient library.

It took him weeks to make the arrangements; even longer than it should have, because when the rages and madness overtook him, he lost all reason. His forehead, scarred from the splits and cuts from when he smashed it against the floor in agony and fury, still throbbed and bruised, and caused him to fade in and out of lucidity.

But the books.

Knowing his own time on earth was limited, he’d worked quickly to have them carefully crated up. He executed or exiled some of the men after they had done this work, for he couldn’t allow the boyars to learn what he planned. He dared not allow the traitors to discover the priceless library.

The men Ivan had not killed numbered four scholars and twenty soldiers, and he ordered them aboard a ship with the crates. His only concession was in selecting good, loyal men who had no family to leave behind, for he knew the depths of grief. The man to whom he gave complete and utter responsibility for the library the journey was his wife’s cousin, Leonid Aleksandrov. A good man. One Ivan trusted as had his beloved Anastasia.

Under the instruction of Aleksandrov, the captain would sail the men and the library north along the wintry waters of Moskva River, into the Barents Sea. Then they would travel far east to the lands of mountains and long winters.

To a land remote and safe. A land newly conquered by Ivan: Siberia. It was place unexplored and thus protected from the murderous hands of the boyars, who’d threatened Ivan from the day he’d become Russia’s ruler at the age of three.

Someday, God willing, he would leave the madness that was his life and go to the wilderness, and to his books.

Away from the ugly memories and violence of his youth.

Perhaps then he would be at peace.