The Ringed Castle: Fifth in the Legendary Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett
It was late. Replacing the inkhorn and casing his papers, and marshalling his wide, impeccable desk, he made a decision of no importance, and instead of returning to his room sent his body-servant, one of the anonymous changing team who served his person, to warn the bath keeper that he was coming.
The baths in Güzel’s house were Turkish in fashion. No one sweated at bath stoves, and, like the Streltsi, jumped naked into the river. The dressing-room was silk-hung, with Persian rugs on the floor, and low cushioned sofas lining the walls. The tepidarium and calidarium were in marble, with wall fountains and a stepped marble bath, from which the steam, with inspired ingenuity, rose straight to furnish the winter garden with warmth.
Above all, it was silent. The servant who disrobed his master; the masseur who oiled the scarred, highly trained body lying still on the marble after the bath, knew better than to comment on their work. The masseur’s powerful hands moved kneading over the spider-white whip marks; the old wounds, gained in battle and out of it; the flourished white brand of the galleys. Strong and balanced and limber, the flesh warmed and eased to his moulding. What teemed within the still, arm-cradled head was the Voevoda’s own affair: he looked asleep, but the masseur knew from bitter past experience that he was not.
Only afterwards, when he was standing barefoot in the dressing-room with the servant placing over his shoulders the short, furlined caftan he used as a nightgown, and binding round his waist the thin fringed silk of the girdle, did Lymond motion him suddenly to be still, and in the silence, cock his damp head, listening.
The servant waited, obedient. Far out in the mews, the man who tended the eagle was whistling. The calidarium boilers murmured. The iced fountain ran, distantly, like a song. Above them all, faintly, swooped the ctesiphon sound of thin fluting.
‘It is the doves,’ the servant said; and stopped, aghast at his own temerity.
‘I know,’ said Lymond; and catching sight of the man’s ashen face, said curtly, ‘Had I wanted a deaf-mute, I should have bought one.’
Colour crept back into the man’s face and then left it. For the Voevoda, stirring the day garments he had discarded, had transferred to the waist of his caftan a small, glittering knife one could not have guessed that he carried, and then, unhurriedly placing each foot into the thin, curling slipper presented him, said, ‘I am going up to the winter garden. If I do not call for you within the next five minutes, you may retire.’
The slippered feet made no sound. The furlined caftan, calf-length, did not drag on the steps. As Lymond mounted, the golden light from the sconces lit the fine coloured silks, full of pagan motifs: sirens and monsters and Alconosts, the birds with human heads who inhabit Paradise, where they delight the virtuous with their songs. He opened the door of the winter garden.
A dove fell like a flower at his feet.
They lay like orchids, veined and tender with wings queerly cloven, on the pool and the trees and the bushes, and on the blue Isnik tiles of the floor. As he stood, another flute-note cascaded, gentle as sallow, and bright feathers touched his slipper, and a drop of thick blood. Then the bird fell: a rare one, brought with long hardships from the islands of Java. ‘How generous is your mistress,’ said the light, mocking voice of Prince Dmitri Ivanovich Vishnevetsky, ‘who said that as your guest I might hunt where I pleased.’
Half veiled by the blossom, he leaned against the opposite wall: a man strongly made with cleft chin and soft chestnut hair and moustache, and all the arts of a courtier. In his hands was a small Turkish bow; and across the spangled silk of his shirt hung a quiver. He smiled as he ceased speaking, and bending the bow, took aim, lightly, at a fluttering host of birds calling from the cherry tree over his head.
The Voevoda smiled. ‘I am more generous still,’ he said, and drew back his arm, the fingers brushing his girdle. A flick of silver, arching through the air, touched Vishnevetsky’s bow with a click, and the Prince made a sound, cut off at once, as he stumbled off-balance, the sliced wood and hemp whipping about him: his arms flung involuntarily apart. Lymond’s knife, its chased hilt gold in the lamplight, lay on the cracked tiles at his feet. Lymond said, ‘I give you both weapon and quarry.’
Vishnevetsky bent, watching him, and picked up the knife. Then he unbuckled and laid down the quiver. ‘You visit the birds,’ he said. ‘Then by all means, let us spare them. Crassus, they say, adored a marine eel which came to feed from his hand, decked with pearl collar and earrings. And when it died, he wore mourning. Let us spare the birds, if they are your passion. You have thrown your mistress often enough in my path.’
He moved as he spoke, between the thin, fruiting trees, treading the long, jade-pale stems of carnations. Lymond, empty-handed and calm, eased between the branches, never quite coming into view, while above the birds jostled still, shrilly piping, and displaced from a leaf, a plucking of white down rocked through the air to their feet. Lymond said, gently, ‘I should test a Tartar Cossack, for courage and honesty. A Lithuanian prince I should have to accept, from what I know of him.’
Dmitri Vishnevetsky moved closer, but slowly. ‘And what do I know of Scotland, a nation of tankard-bearers?’
Lymond said, ‘I might say, perhaps, that in Scotland hospitality is sacred. It is also a country which has never been subdued by the enemy over its frontier, as you have never been able to subdue the Tartars.’ There was a stand of tapers, ring upon ring on a wrought iron base just beside him. While still speaking he unhooked the snuffer and pressed out each light, one by one. Half the garden fell into darkness.
‘We have such laws in Lithuania too,’ said the Prince. ‘But they apply only between gentlemen. So, your country being too mean to please you, it seems you have found the way to pomp and power, garlic to a gamecock, through the twelve modes of Cyrène. But I do not think I choose to find my life’s work subject to a mercenary’s whim.’
Lymond’s eyes were wide and blue. ‘Should I call for help?’ he said.
Vishnevetsky put up an elegant hand and pressed a bough of white flowers out of his way. ‘To put me out?’ he said. ‘Then the Cherkassy Cossacks would be denied to the Tsar and his army for ever. To defend you against my attack? The Voevoda’s repution would never recover. Besides, am I attacking you? I have trifled with your mistress’s aviary, that is all. Surely the Tsar’s supreme commander would not set the idle life of a bird against the favour of one who might be a powerful ally?’
‘Subject to your whim?’ Lymond said.
Vishnevetsky smiled. ‘You take my point,’ he said.
Lymond had stopped moving backwards. ‘I wonder,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘what makes you think I can be influenced by personal violence?’
Prince Vishnevetsky had not stopped. ‘I have no doubt of it,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I miscall you and your nation, and you stand behind bushes, a pretty mouset, and talk about shouting for help.’
Lymond stayed where he was. ‘It seems reasonable,’ he said. ‘You have a knife and I haven’t.’
‘But you have another,’ said the Prince. He had moved round the pool: a pillar, twined with some flowering shrub, was all that stood between him and the quarry Lymond had offered.
‘No,’ Lymond said. ‘But keep your knife. I cannot throw an unarmed guest into my pool. It would offend my fine instincts.…’ And as he finished speaking, Vishnevetsky laughed and sprang.
The second candelabra was at Lymond’s elbow. He lifted it like a tilting-pole and drove it, with all the power of his shoulders, at the Lithuanian’s body.
The force struck the candles streaming asunder. Some fell. Some sprang like the spines of a hedgehog. But the edge of the ring, in a hissing, glutinous mass, struck the stuff of Vishnevetsky’s bright quilted sleeve and set it alight as he ducked and hurled himself sideways, half overset by the weight of the blow.
The candelabra fell to the ground, in a crash of smashed tiles and rent foliage, and like napkins in a gale the remaining birds rose calling into the twilight. The last candles went ou
Fragile terror filled the black air, with the buffeting of wings and the confused music of flutes. The air held all the life of the garden: the scent of blood and of jasmine, the stench of candlegrease and of singed and burned taffeta. From the ground below there was no sound after Vishnevetsky, thrusting his shoulder among the green leaves, had stifled the flames, and taking fresh grip on his knife stood waiting, somewhere, as his eyes widened in the dark. A siskin, crying, touched Lymond’s cheek and beat wildly off, its heart pulsing. Lymond spoke.
Seven Peters seven times
Send Mary by her Son
Send Bridget by her mantle
Send God by his strength
Between us and the faery host
Between us and the demons of the air …
The voice wandered, tangled with flute music. ‘… Your birds are taking revenge.’
It was true, damn him. His ears clouded by bird-sounds, Vishnevetsky had to strain all his acute senses to hear and follow the other man, his arm smarting under the fragments of quilting. A fool not to foresee that. And a fool to underestimate a man at the pitch of his training. It had been necessary to teach humility to this ambitious alien, and to show to the woman Güzel the quality of the choice she had made. Honour now demanded a good deal more than humiliation.…
The knife was knocked from his hand.
It did not seem possible. He flung out his hands, whirling round, and struck the edge of a tub. There was nothing but flowers, and space, and blackness. He could not see: neither of them could see. He had made no sound which could have betrayed him. And yet his right arm had been found somehow and struck, so that the knife had fallen lost on the ground. A voice, distantly, said, ‘Not alike are the inmates of the fire and the dwellers of the garden: the dwellers of the garden are they that are the achievers.’
He was mocking him, the dog, by revealing his own whereabouts. A bird blundered into him and rose with a whirr to the rooftop, leaving a draught of scent from its jasmine-soaked wings. But the flute wailing was less, and for the first time you could hear plainly the quiet spray of the fountain. The birds were quietening. Delayed by a second, Vishnevetsky’s very competent brain followed suddenly a train of thought from that soft breeze of perfume. His tunic. His singed tunic must be signalling his presence as clearly as a drenching of ambergris. Raising his hands, he ripped down the fastenings and dropped the ruined cloth quietly to the ground. The warm air from the steam pipes touched the sweat on his brown, half-naked body. Then, struck by a better thought, he picked the taffeta up and moving noiselessly, one hand before him, found a little lemon tree and draped the tunic over one of its branches. Then, taking three steps back, he placed his fingers on the trunk and stood without moving, all his sharpened senses devoted to listening.
The birds were quiet. Once, high above, a leaf rustled and once, from across the pool, he heard the throaty sound of a dove, and the rasp of claws on the spars. But from below, nothing, Then the bark of the lemon tree shook under his fingers, and he sprang.
The Tsar’s foreign mercenary was there. Vishnevetsky’s hands gripped a right arm and shoulder and held, while he kicked with the full force of his iron-shod boot.
He heard the other man’s explosive grunt as it landed. But the Voevoda was already giving way before it. He did more. He used his rigid right arm as a fulcrum to swing his whole body against Vishnevetsky’s. The Lithuanian felt the sudden increase of weight in his grasp, and before he could recover was hurled backwards, the other man on top of him, among the wooden borders and tubs of the garden. Something cracked hard against the ridge of his spine and he roared, just as the Voevoda’s body landed with a crash half over him, winding them both. He kicked, and something caught his boot in both hands.
‘Bears,’ said Lymond, ‘have weakest heads, as Lions have strongest. When forced to cast themselves down from any rocks, they cover their Heads with their Feet, and lie for a time Astonished.’
More bombast. It didn’t worry Prince Vishnevetsky, who was beginning to get his opponent’s measure. He grinned, and pulled his foot out of the boot. As he rolled away, he felt the other boot dragged off as well, against the full power of his kick. Vishnevetsky whirled and got to his feet.
‘Now!’ said Lymond cheerfully; and jumped at him.
While no kin to Milo of Crotan, who carried a calf daily to season his muscles, and continued to carry it while it developed through heifer to cow, Dmitri Vishnevetsky was a formidable professional, unfairly handicapped by the caprice of his adversary. Once at grips with him, feeling for the eyes with his fingers or the back of the neck with his strong knotted arm, the Governor of Cherkassy was able at length to employ all the arts he used so liberally with his Cossacks, and to thank his trainers who had fought in Spain and in Sweden and in Germany, and had taught him to counter the kind of nasty clip he got now, as they staggered together, and how to somersault out of trouble, taking his enemy if possible with him.
The Voevoda, it seemed, had been soundly taught also. Both men back-heeled expertly, and the first abrupt fall came when Vishnevetsky hooked the Voevoda’s left leg on the inside, just below the calf, and the Scotsman gave way, so that they both fell with a crash, taking a trailing plant with them and upsetting the birds all over again. The rest of the fight indeed, the Lithuanian seemed to remember, was implected with the lyre-like concerto of the birds, and their battering wings, and the crack of splintering pots and split tiles, or the deafening splash as some snapped bough or rocking statue cannoned into the pool.
At the time, he was hardly aware of it. His body ached, from the battering wood and porcelain and alabaster into which he slammed in the dark, cursing the blood and feathers which betrayed his bare feet, and the spray which made his hands slippery. Then he obtained the grip he wanted on the splendid Alconosts on the Voevoda’s silk robe and was able for the first time to throw him. He must have twisted and risen like the marine eel of the Lithuanian’s taunt, because he came back through the spray while Vishnevetsky crouched, hands apart and panting, listening for him. The change in the sound of the water gave him his warning, but when he touched the Voevoda, his hands slid from bare, dripping skin. The Alconosts had been discarded. With no regret, Prince Vishnevetsky abandoned a finicky programme of leverage and settled down to some straightforward dirty fighting of a nastiness quite unparalleled.
He had not then seen the brand on Francis Crawford’s bruised back. There is no foul trick in Europe or out of it which is not known to a chained galley slave. As the Lithuanian’s teeth closed on his arm, Lymond drew a long, aching breath and used, in quick succession, the flat of his hand, his knee and his foot. Then, as Vishnevetsky’s grip slackened, he began, very fast, all the unpleasant strokes. He stopped short of irreparable injury, and he collected some extremely painful cuffs and twists and punches himself. But he halted for nothing until, with the Lithuanian limp in his hands, he lifted him high over his head and cast him, with a flounce of water that reached to the ceiling, among the dashing carp in the swirling, invisible pond.
The Voevoda Bolshoia waited a moment, breathing quickly, until there was a movement in the lapping water and a dim blur in the whirling darkness, from which he judged that the Governor of Cherkassy had lifted his head and was sitting, sluggishly, at the foot of the pond. Then Lymond himself slipped into the stormy waves at the pool edge and, with a few long, lazy strokes, drove himself under and up from the cool, flowered water, until in turn he half sat, half lay, head thrown back, in the pool at the other man’s side. ‘You were saying?’ he said.
Prince Dmitri Vishnevetsky moved his stiff lips. ‘I was saying,’ he said, ‘that I believed my Cossacks would follow you.’
The Voevoda’s eyes, unseen in the darkness, were wide and calm and smiling. ‘I don’t want them to follow me,’ he said. ‘They will follow you, as always. My hope is that you and I may find ourselves yokefellows. It seems to me our whims are well matched.’
There was
Somewhere at the side of the pool was a tinder box. Lymond made his way groping towards it, and found a candle, and turned in a moment, the golden flame high in his hand. Ghostly as ruined Atlantis about them hung the shreds of Güzel’s winter garden. With equal gravity, the Voevoda looked at Vishnevetsky, his battered body supine in the water.
‘Even doves,’ Lymond said, ‘sometimes quarrel.’
Prince Dmitri Vishnevetsky began to laugh. He was still laughing, holding his aching ribs, when Lymond pulled him out.
*
The Governor of Cherkassy was in bed and the house was totally silent when Lymond was free at last to walk down the stairs, the key of the winter garden in the pocket of his stained caftan, and make his way to his room.
The wall-sconces were burning low, their glow falling like water-light on the fine tapestries hung throughout the long galleries which joined each wing of the great household. When, turning a corner, Lymond saw the loitering figure before him he thought at first it was a night-steward, tending the flame. Then he saw it was not, but the cloaked figure of a boy who slowed still further as he watched, and then stopping, looked over his shoulder as if he had heard Lymond’s step.
But he had not, because at the sight of him he stood perfectly rigid, his dark eyes dilated, and remained staring, without speech, while Lymond in turn walked up and stopped. ‘Venceslas?’
The boy took his hands away from his throat. ‘My lord.’
Below the fine, curling hair, his face was as stiff as a sledge of shot hares: his eyes, on Lymond’s face, were quite blank and darkly sleepless. He ran his hands up and down the cloak edge. Lymond said, ‘What are you doing? It must be four hours to dawn.’
The fingers ran up and down, up and down. The cloak slipped and he caught it, his soft fingers trembling. ‘My lady called me.’
Beneath the cloak, plain to see, had been the sheen of bare flesh. There was a pause of hardly perceptible length. Then the Voevoda’s veiled eyes smiled. ‘I think not,’ he said. ‘I think perhaps one of the Mistress’s charming young sempstresses is waiting somewhere … or one of Leila’s helpers? Am I right?’