The Ringed Castle: Fifth in the Legendary Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett
Some such thing was happening now. Chancellor could see two livid bodies strapped to the scaffold, and a cart which clearly held one or more, already cut down. Christopher, who had stood up, said abruptly, ‘They’ve been flogged,’ and sat down. Blacklock’s flying horse, rearing, plunged into the group by the scaffold. They saw Blacklock dismount and heard his voice shouting; but already another horse was racing towards him over the snow as the procession reined, and the Tsar and princes and boyars looked, astonished, at the odd upheaval round the bloodstained snow of the tribune.
Lymond had left the Tsar’s side to ride after Blacklock. He rode flat out, balancing the horse against the uneven, slippery snow and they saw him halt, far across the square, where Blacklock was yelling, held struggling in a swaying crowd of angry men. They heard the Voevoda’s voice ring out, sharp and clear, and saw the men loosen their grip and drop back, reluctantly, from Adam Blacklock who stood, his cracked voice raised, saying something over and over.
Lymond raised his whip and cast it, with a whistling snap, full across the other man’s face.
Adam stopped shouting. Cut in two by the red seam, his face stiffened, white as the ice. Lymond spoke, sharply and clearly. The scourger and his officials stirred, and a moment later, began to cut down the remaining two flogged men. Another command, and, slowly, Adam Blacklock moved to his horse and put his foot in the stirrup. The Chief Secretary Viscovatu, bent over the Tsar in earnest conversation, sraightened and moved round the royal sleigh, clearly to follow the Voevoda across to the tribune. At the same moment, the Tsar gave a sharp order and the Streltsi, with Danny Hislop riding with them, deployed and began to file on foot after the Chief Secretary’s horse.
They met face to face within earshot: Viscovatu with Hislop and the Streltsi just behind him and the Voevoda, with Blacklock’s reins in his grip. Lymond’s face showed almost nothing: a mask of stone, Chancellor thought, to make worshippers tremble. And Blacklock, sitting unmoving beside him, with the blood coursing unchecked from that disfiguring wound, might have been dead already. Viscovatu said, ‘Your officer is the prisoner of the Church, and you are to hand him into the Church’s custody. It is the command of the Tsar.’
They saw Danny Hislop’s horse stamp as his gloved hand crushed tight on the reins. But on Lymond’s face there was no change; and Blacklock himself might not have heard. Lymond said, ‘The Tsar’s virtues are the salvation of his country; his wishes are my own; his commands are only to be obeyed. May I know the grounds for the complaint of the Church against Blacklock?’
‘Is it unknown to the Voevoda?’ said the Chief Secretary in surprise. ‘He has corrupted the hearts of the faithful, and has caused them to flout the edicts of the Stoglav. The three he seduced to the path of the Devil are punished. The holy Russian church will decide what judgement his evil counsel deserves.’
For a moment, Lymond studied him without speaking. Then lifting his glove, he flung the reins of Blacklock’s horse to the other man. Again, Hislop’s horse moved, but neither Hislop nor the Streltsi said anything. ‘It was unknown to me,’ Lymond said. ‘And I grieve for it. He is yours to punish as you think fit. Will the Tsar, who has heard the words of his secretary, hear the humble apologies of the Voevoda Bolshoia?’
He had raised his voice. ‘Approach,’ said the Tsar. He did not look at the Metropolitan, seated below him. But Lymond’s hard blue gaze, approaching, was on the mitred, grey-bearded face of Makary before it moved to the stiff, beaked profile of his master.
Lymond said, ‘Like your Tartar allies, this man is useful as well as a carrier of heresies. On men such as him, the success of your spring campaign in the Crimea might well rest. If the Church wishes to take his life, I bow to the Church’s decision. If not, I ask that he be made to suffer today, not tomorrow or next week or next month, when the season is turning, and his skill and knowledge will be most needed. The hurt he has caused you, vile though it is, would be as a blessing compared to the infidel rule of the Tartars.’
Viscovatu had followed him. ‘The Voevoda is overmodest,’ he said. ‘Without this one man, he cannot defend Moscow from the Khan Devlet Girey?’
Lymond did not look round. ‘The Tsar knows how many men he has, and how many he needs.’
The pale, goitrous eyes looked at him from under the sable rim of the schapka. ‘So you beg for his life?’ the Tsar said.
Lymond’s unemotional gaze did not alter. ‘I beg for nothing save your highness’s forgiveness. If the Church so decides, it may hang him from this tribune now.’
‘What does the Church decide?’ said the Tsar.
The voices, thin over the snow, came clearly to Chancellor. Beside him, Christopher was breathing heavily, and George Killingworth’s face, above the vast golden beard, had turned an odd shade of red. Chancellor supposed he himself must be pale: he felt very cold. The other officers and the Streltsi had done nothing. It was, he supposed, part of the test. How loyal was the Voevoda; how loyal were his men; how strong was his grip on them? Strong enough, at least, to prevent them at this moment from taking wild action. And of the loyalty of the Voevoda, looking at that blood-streaked face and listening to Lymond’s cool, implacable voice, the Tsar and the Metropolitan must have no permanent doubts.
The glittering form of the Metropolitan stirred, an old man, weary under the great uneven gems on the golden scaled robe, and the stole with its grotesque river pearls. He said, ‘Is it worthy of the offence that the decision be taken here, in the streets of the city?’
‘Yes,’ the Tsar said suddenly. ‘I wish to hear what is in your heart. Half the case has been judged. The three ikon painters have suffered. This man did not outrage his faith, but corrupted another’s. I do not see how his punishment can be less.’
Viscovatu’s voice said softly, ‘Your offending servants were flailed.’
In the sleigh with his father Christopher said, whispering, ‘They were dead.’
‘Not quite,’ Chancellor said. ‘But then, they were Russians, with Russian bodies. This man would die.’
The Metropolitan stirred again, clutching the crozier with its double gilt cross, looking neither at the Tsar nor the Chief Secretary. He was an old man, and cold, and although his power was great, the power of the Tsar was still greater. Finally, he raised his face, and looked, flatly and sternly, on the Voevoda and the artist, still and drawn and silent beyond him. ‘His punishment also,’ he said, ‘is the flail. Let it be carried out.’
‘Let it be carried out by me,’ Lymond said.
There was a little silence. Then Viscovatu smiled. ‘The Voevoda might be moved to be too lenient. A man is hanged by both hands at the pudkey, with weights attached to his feet. And the twenty-four lashes are from a wire flail.’
‘In that case,’ Lymond said, ‘lenience hardly enters markedly into the matter. But you may send what observers you wish.’
Viscovatu looked at the Tsar, and then at the Metropolitan. ‘There is the tribune. Why not settle the issue now?’
‘Willingly,’ said Lymond’s crisp voice. ‘Or tonight, if the Tsar would prefer.’
It was the solution. ‘Tonight,’ said the Metropolitan gratefully, shivering within the furs under his sakkos.
And: ‘Tonight,’ said the Tsar. ‘After the banquet.’ And raising his hand, caused the sleigh to drive off.
The second sleigh followed, and then the boyars, followed by the Streltsi, and the scourgers, and the cart with the three ikon painters, broken and bloody within it. They had taken Blacklock from his horse and tied him to Viscovatu’s stirrup. The little procession turned into the Frolovskaya Gate and disappeared up the slope. Lymond, Chancellor saw, was again riding beside the Tsar’s sleigh. Killingworth said, ‘We’re supposed to be going in there. Aren’t we? For the banquet.’
‘Yes,’ said Chancellor. Christopher, beside him, said nothing at all.
Francis Crawford attended the Tsar’s Twelfth Night banquet, and was even lightly voluble, seated among the noble guests and not far from the English
party, who returned his graceful greeting but had no occasion to speak to him. Afterwards, they all issued by torchlight into the open space behind the terems, beside the church of St Saviour in the Wood, where a temporary post and crossbar had been erected, to which Adam Blacklock’s hands had been strapped.
His body, stripped almost naked, showed a raw blueish white in the flambeaux, and the wound on his face was a black seam crossing its whiteness, from cheekbone to lip to chin, distorting its normal lean diffidence. The bright, hollow eyes were different, too, from the steady, observant gaze of the artist. They moved restlessly, following the movements of the torchbearers, of the servants and the boyars and courtiers as they passed and repassed in his view, wrapped in furs and enjoying the hazed after-warmth of the banquet. There was a great deal of talk, and some laughter.
He spoke only once, when he heard at last the step he was waiting for, and saw the flares close in and brighten, and the shadows of Lymond’s coatless body, various as the blades of a fan, spring wheeling on the lit snow. Then Adam said, ‘Once, when you had been flogged at the post by your own men, I helped to save you.’
He had been overheard. Someone uttered a swooping obscenity.
Unlike those of his audience, the Voevoda’s voice was not thickened with drink, but neither did it reveal any minor key of concern or of pity. ‘Once,’ he said, ‘you were Adam Blacklock. But I, sad to relate, was a different man.’
Chancellor watched the twenty-four strokes, which Christopher did not; and saw Lymond at the end toss the rod with its fine clotted wires to the officers waiting, and turn back to the Tsar, pulling down the plain, samite cuffs of his shirt. The drawn thread work, stitched and spooled down the edges was flecked black with haphazard blood. Then someone cut down the raw, senseless flesh on the scaffold, and lifted it, face down like a child, on to a sheet ready spread on the snow. The two men who carried it off were, Chancellor saw, Guthrie and Hislop.
The Tsar stood up. Bright-eyed in the firelight, he strode forward and gripped Lymond’s shoulders. ‘A strong arm! A strong arm for justice, and a strong arm to defend me from evil.’
He opened his hands, his face surprised. ‘You are cold? A coat for the Voevoda!’ And while it was brought, he said, ‘I have that in my chamber will warm you. Let us see whose king will fall on the chessboard tonight! ‘
Lymond said, ‘It is late, majesty.’ They had put his coat, with its wide expensive edgings of fox round his shoulders.
The Tsar’s voice was softly resonant in his chest. ‘Do you refuse me?’
‘My lord, you are the halter of the colt and the horse; the leash of the goshawk,’ said Lymond. ‘I am your servant. I refuse you nothing.’
That night, returned to his chambers, Chancellor called his servants to him and revoked every arrangement for his visit next day to Lampozhnya.
In Kitaigorod, the men of St Mary’s did not go to bed, but waited all night without speaking outside the quiet room where Adam Blacklock was lying, in Dr Grossmeyer’s pedestrian care.
In the Kremlin, Francis Crawford played chess; and lost.
Chapter 9
Before Chancellor was awake, Lymond walked into his chamber next morning, bringing with him a baleful humour, dry and chill as the weather outside.
‘Arise with mirth,’ he said. ‘And remember God. I have countermanded your orders. Springs of wine, milk and honey gush from the rocks, and love is born everywhere. Whether you wish it or not, you are travelling to Lampozhnya today.’
He was dressed for travel, in linen breeches and boots under a high-collared tunic, with a loose, widesleeved garment in wool gem-buttoned over it. Searching out the landscape of his face with the shrewd master mariner’s eye, Chancellor noted the faint, spoiling traces of a night untroubled by sleep. No one but a European, Chancellor thought, could carry with him such an air of insolent decadence. Poor Philippa Somerville. He said, ‘I ask myself how you knew I had cancelled my journey.’
Lymond said, ‘Then I hope you answer yourself accurately. You are an Englishman, therefore you think like the canary, taught to repeat the song of the flute. I work for a different nation. I propose to guide and protect you, because it serves my own interests. You will not, like the ikon painters, be infected.’
‘Did he die?’ Chancellor said.
Lymond walked forward. With one fastidious finger he lifted the blankets and counterpane of the navigator’s meagre bed and flung them back sharply, revealing, spread in anger, his sinewy body in its chaste white cotton nightgown. ‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘I hate travelling with a man who wears lace in bed. Did you know that you may beat the Devil, but your whip must be drawn from a winding sheet? So far as I know Blacklock lives, breathes, and is being sprinkled with aqua vite and marigold water. It does not affect your forthcoming journey.’
Diccon Chancellor stayed where he was, his eyes steady, his arms folded hard on his chest. ‘You will excuse me,’ he said. ‘I do not go to Lampozhnya.’
None of the expected expressions, of anger, of annoyance, of impatience crossed Lymond’s face. He said simply, ‘If I order it, there is very little you can do about it. Your cargo is loaded, and the sledges are waiting below. You may travel dressed or in your nightshirt, as you please.’
Christopher had wakened. Chancellor saw his son’s stiff, outraged face in the doorway and said slowly, ‘I am in no position to resist you, of course. But you, in your turn—do you think this is a moment to abandon your officers?’
The handsome blue eyes opened. ‘Do you think they burn to expel me? They don’t. And if they did, they would have even less chance of it than you have. The bow and arrow, as they say, commands with a fine and delicate voice.’
Christopher said, ‘It isn’t the bow and arrow you shelter behind. It’s the Tsar.’
Lymond turned. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘And you find that despicable? But you are wrong, you know. Aut Caesar, aut nihil. It is the Tsar who is sheltering behind me.’
An hour later, having kissed Christopher and shaken hands with his silent compatriots, Diccon Chancellor took his place in the sledge-train, and, escorted by a band of sixty fully armed cavalrymen from the barracks at Vorobiovo, swept out of the Neglinna Port and across the six-arched wooden bridge to turn north, along the Wolf Road, the great frozen highway to the sea. Ahead, enclosed in furs, Lymond rode with his captain, with Slata Baba on the sledge just behind him.
So, their estrangement complete, the two men, Lymond and Chancellor, entered a strange world of sleigh bells and silence. The sledges ran day and night, served by the post-stations, and Chancellor found that, supported by cushions, with the curtains drawn and bearskins heaped about him, he could sleep, and read his maps, and make his notes frozen-fingered in the daytime as he could not do two years before, shepherding his nervous merchants from post to unknown post from the Frozen Sea down to Moscow.
As far as Kholmogory their present journey was the same, but infinitely faster, and with every care removed from his shoulders. Food appeared, or hospitality in fortress or village or monastery. Or failing all else, they carried tents, and the men would make windbreaks and shelter from the upturned sledges themselves.
The Streltsi were swift, obliging and cheerful. He grew used to the sound of Russian constantly spoken, and began to catch and understand the coarse, half-heard jokes, and enjoy their deep, throaty voices when they were permitted to sing. They were the élite of their corps, he began to realize; already stringently trained, and chosen to escort the Voevoda Bolshoia. That they were afraid of him to a man took nothing, he saw, from their zest, or the sparkling tension which clothed them like frost. He had seen that once before, in a company under the Duc de Guise, about to go into battle. It was the sign of success; the fire and stamp of natural leadership.
He found it disturbing. And leaving Vologda behind him, with its lightly drunken, arguing oasis of confident English voices and futile English problems, he gave his mind and his eyes instead to the land, the mother of whiteness; to the f
alling snow, a host of dove-grey particles against the pale downy sky; a rush of white against the dark trees and bushes. To the sunlit snow, golden white against blue on the roofs of the villages, and the bright lime green and umber of the trunks of the thinning forests, their snow-white profiles lost to the vaster white space of the sky. The twin churches, for summer and winter, set like pine cones in the snow by the hamlets. The scrubbed wooden floors of the houses, the truss of foot-wiping hay by the threshold, the box of wood and barrel of water placed just inside.
There were no beasts to be seen but the wild ones: the hare in her milk-white coat, and the grey squirrel and the stoat with its snowy-tipped tail. In the woods there were wolves, and bears, and elks: they saw their prints, and the horses shied at the smell. But the stock, the small, runted cattle and lean hogs were killed and frozen, or sharing with their owners the unstable log izbas, built up so assiduously against the snow, which the thaw might so easily bring slipping to disaster again. Inside, the ikon; the wall-plank for bedding. The stove-room with its bundles of birch-slivers where twice weekly the steam bath was taken, for cleanliness and to ward off disease. A diet of roots and garlic and onions and cabbage and too much time to sleep, or to toil under the stinking tapers at your painstaking craft: the working of skins and furs, the shoemaking and woollen embroidery; the making of wooden bowls and stools and sledges and hanging cradles and chests, painted raspberry red, and yellow, and black; the shallow gingerbread moulds, with their cocks and their pigeons patterned in the white wood; the beehive tooled like a bear, with flight-entries formed in its muzzle. The harsh drink; the coarse clothes; the grey, crackling pile of hard fish, culled for soup with a hammer.
Poverty. Poverty in the presence of starving cold and great, earth-cracking heat, and life lived in the shadow of the wolf and the bear, and tribes more cruel and avaricious. For it was the land which was implacable, far more than its masters. An obja, tilled by one horse, could be rented for two or three roubles or its equal in labour, and a fee of perhaps half of the rotated crop of rye or of oats. In law, the peasant might be hanged, where the boyar was only whipped or imprisoned, but discrimination was less than he had expected; serfdom was almost unknown.
Lymond had left the Tsar’s side to ride after Blacklock. He rode flat out, balancing the horse against the uneven, slippery snow and they saw him halt, far across the square, where Blacklock was yelling, held struggling in a swaying crowd of angry men. They heard the Voevoda’s voice ring out, sharp and clear, and saw the men loosen their grip and drop back, reluctantly, from Adam Blacklock who stood, his cracked voice raised, saying something over and over.
Lymond raised his whip and cast it, with a whistling snap, full across the other man’s face.
Adam stopped shouting. Cut in two by the red seam, his face stiffened, white as the ice. Lymond spoke, sharply and clearly. The scourger and his officials stirred, and a moment later, began to cut down the remaining two flogged men. Another command, and, slowly, Adam Blacklock moved to his horse and put his foot in the stirrup. The Chief Secretary Viscovatu, bent over the Tsar in earnest conversation, sraightened and moved round the royal sleigh, clearly to follow the Voevoda across to the tribune. At the same moment, the Tsar gave a sharp order and the Streltsi, with Danny Hislop riding with them, deployed and began to file on foot after the Chief Secretary’s horse.
They met face to face within earshot: Viscovatu with Hislop and the Streltsi just behind him and the Voevoda, with Blacklock’s reins in his grip. Lymond’s face showed almost nothing: a mask of stone, Chancellor thought, to make worshippers tremble. And Blacklock, sitting unmoving beside him, with the blood coursing unchecked from that disfiguring wound, might have been dead already. Viscovatu said, ‘Your officer is the prisoner of the Church, and you are to hand him into the Church’s custody. It is the command of the Tsar.’
They saw Danny Hislop’s horse stamp as his gloved hand crushed tight on the reins. But on Lymond’s face there was no change; and Blacklock himself might not have heard. Lymond said, ‘The Tsar’s virtues are the salvation of his country; his wishes are my own; his commands are only to be obeyed. May I know the grounds for the complaint of the Church against Blacklock?’
‘Is it unknown to the Voevoda?’ said the Chief Secretary in surprise. ‘He has corrupted the hearts of the faithful, and has caused them to flout the edicts of the Stoglav. The three he seduced to the path of the Devil are punished. The holy Russian church will decide what judgement his evil counsel deserves.’
For a moment, Lymond studied him without speaking. Then lifting his glove, he flung the reins of Blacklock’s horse to the other man. Again, Hislop’s horse moved, but neither Hislop nor the Streltsi said anything. ‘It was unknown to me,’ Lymond said. ‘And I grieve for it. He is yours to punish as you think fit. Will the Tsar, who has heard the words of his secretary, hear the humble apologies of the Voevoda Bolshoia?’
He had raised his voice. ‘Approach,’ said the Tsar. He did not look at the Metropolitan, seated below him. But Lymond’s hard blue gaze, approaching, was on the mitred, grey-bearded face of Makary before it moved to the stiff, beaked profile of his master.
Lymond said, ‘Like your Tartar allies, this man is useful as well as a carrier of heresies. On men such as him, the success of your spring campaign in the Crimea might well rest. If the Church wishes to take his life, I bow to the Church’s decision. If not, I ask that he be made to suffer today, not tomorrow or next week or next month, when the season is turning, and his skill and knowledge will be most needed. The hurt he has caused you, vile though it is, would be as a blessing compared to the infidel rule of the Tartars.’
Viscovatu had followed him. ‘The Voevoda is overmodest,’ he said. ‘Without this one man, he cannot defend Moscow from the Khan Devlet Girey?’
Lymond did not look round. ‘The Tsar knows how many men he has, and how many he needs.’
The pale, goitrous eyes looked at him from under the sable rim of the schapka. ‘So you beg for his life?’ the Tsar said.
Lymond’s unemotional gaze did not alter. ‘I beg for nothing save your highness’s forgiveness. If the Church so decides, it may hang him from this tribune now.’
‘What does the Church decide?’ said the Tsar.
The voices, thin over the snow, came clearly to Chancellor. Beside him, Christopher was breathing heavily, and George Killingworth’s face, above the vast golden beard, had turned an odd shade of red. Chancellor supposed he himself must be pale: he felt very cold. The other officers and the Streltsi had done nothing. It was, he supposed, part of the test. How loyal was the Voevoda; how loyal were his men; how strong was his grip on them? Strong enough, at least, to prevent them at this moment from taking wild action. And of the loyalty of the Voevoda, looking at that blood-streaked face and listening to Lymond’s cool, implacable voice, the Tsar and the Metropolitan must have no permanent doubts.
The glittering form of the Metropolitan stirred, an old man, weary under the great uneven gems on the golden scaled robe, and the stole with its grotesque river pearls. He said, ‘Is it worthy of the offence that the decision be taken here, in the streets of the city?’
‘Yes,’ the Tsar said suddenly. ‘I wish to hear what is in your heart. Half the case has been judged. The three ikon painters have suffered. This man did not outrage his faith, but corrupted another’s. I do not see how his punishment can be less.’
Viscovatu’s voice said softly, ‘Your offending servants were flailed.’
In the sleigh with his father Christopher said, whispering, ‘They were dead.’
‘Not quite,’ Chancellor said. ‘But then, they were Russians, with Russian bodies. This man would die.’
The Metropolitan stirred again, clutching the crozier with its double gilt cross, looking neither at the Tsar nor the Chief Secretary. He was an old man, and cold, and although his power was great, the power of the Tsar was still greater. Finally, he raised his face, and looked, flatly and sternly, on the Voevoda and the artist, still and drawn and silent beyond him. ‘His punishment also,’ he said, ‘is the flail. Let it be carried out.’
‘Let it be carried out by me,’ Lymond said.
There was a little silence. Then Viscovatu smiled. ‘The Voevoda might be moved to be too lenient. A man is hanged by both hands at the pudkey, with weights attached to his feet. And the twenty-four lashes are from a wire flail.’
‘In that case,’ Lymond said, ‘lenience hardly enters markedly into the matter. But you may send what observers you wish.’
Viscovatu looked at the Tsar, and then at the Metropolitan. ‘There is the tribune. Why not settle the issue now?’
‘Willingly,’ said Lymond’s crisp voice. ‘Or tonight, if the Tsar would prefer.’
It was the solution. ‘Tonight,’ said the Metropolitan gratefully, shivering within the furs under his sakkos.
And: ‘Tonight,’ said the Tsar. ‘After the banquet.’ And raising his hand, caused the sleigh to drive off.
The second sleigh followed, and then the boyars, followed by the Streltsi, and the scourgers, and the cart with the three ikon painters, broken and bloody within it. They had taken Blacklock from his horse and tied him to Viscovatu’s stirrup. The little procession turned into the Frolovskaya Gate and disappeared up the slope. Lymond, Chancellor saw, was again riding beside the Tsar’s sleigh. Killingworth said, ‘We’re supposed to be going in there. Aren’t we? For the banquet.’
‘Yes,’ said Chancellor. Christopher, beside him, said nothing at all.
Francis Crawford attended the Tsar’s Twelfth Night banquet, and was even lightly voluble, seated among the noble guests and not far from the English
His body, stripped almost naked, showed a raw blueish white in the flambeaux, and the wound on his face was a black seam crossing its whiteness, from cheekbone to lip to chin, distorting its normal lean diffidence. The bright, hollow eyes were different, too, from the steady, observant gaze of the artist. They moved restlessly, following the movements of the torchbearers, of the servants and the boyars and courtiers as they passed and repassed in his view, wrapped in furs and enjoying the hazed after-warmth of the banquet. There was a great deal of talk, and some laughter.
He spoke only once, when he heard at last the step he was waiting for, and saw the flares close in and brighten, and the shadows of Lymond’s coatless body, various as the blades of a fan, spring wheeling on the lit snow. Then Adam said, ‘Once, when you had been flogged at the post by your own men, I helped to save you.’
He had been overheard. Someone uttered a swooping obscenity.
Unlike those of his audience, the Voevoda’s voice was not thickened with drink, but neither did it reveal any minor key of concern or of pity. ‘Once,’ he said, ‘you were Adam Blacklock. But I, sad to relate, was a different man.’
Chancellor watched the twenty-four strokes, which Christopher did not; and saw Lymond at the end toss the rod with its fine clotted wires to the officers waiting, and turn back to the Tsar, pulling down the plain, samite cuffs of his shirt. The drawn thread work, stitched and spooled down the edges was flecked black with haphazard blood. Then someone cut down the raw, senseless flesh on the scaffold, and lifted it, face down like a child, on to a sheet ready spread on the snow. The two men who carried it off were, Chancellor saw, Guthrie and Hislop.
The Tsar stood up. Bright-eyed in the firelight, he strode forward and gripped Lymond’s shoulders. ‘A strong arm! A strong arm for justice, and a strong arm to defend me from evil.’
He opened his hands, his face surprised. ‘You are cold? A coat for the Voevoda!’ And while it was brought, he said, ‘I have that in my chamber will warm you. Let us see whose king will fall on the chessboard tonight! ‘
Lymond said, ‘It is late, majesty.’ They had put his coat, with its wide expensive edgings of fox round his shoulders.
The Tsar’s voice was softly resonant in his chest. ‘Do you refuse me?’
‘My lord, you are the halter of the colt and the horse; the leash of the goshawk,’ said Lymond. ‘I am your servant. I refuse you nothing.’
That night, returned to his chambers, Chancellor called his servants to him and revoked every arrangement for his visit next day to Lampozhnya.
In Kitaigorod, the men of St Mary’s did not go to bed, but waited all night without speaking outside the quiet room where Adam Blacklock was lying, in Dr Grossmeyer’s pedestrian care.
In the Kremlin, Francis Crawford played chess; and lost.
Chapter 9
Before Chancellor was awake, Lymond walked into his chamber next morning, bringing with him a baleful humour, dry and chill as the weather outside.
‘Arise with mirth,’ he said. ‘And remember God. I have countermanded your orders. Springs of wine, milk and honey gush from the rocks, and love is born everywhere. Whether you wish it or not, you are travelling to Lampozhnya today.’
He was dressed for travel, in linen breeches and boots under a high-collared tunic, with a loose, widesleeved garment in wool gem-buttoned over it. Searching out the landscape of his face with the shrewd master mariner’s eye, Chancellor noted the faint, spoiling traces of a night untroubled by sleep. No one but a European, Chancellor thought, could carry with him such an air of insolent decadence. Poor Philippa Somerville. He said, ‘I ask myself how you knew I had cancelled my journey.’
Lymond said, ‘Then I hope you answer yourself accurately. You are an Englishman, therefore you think like the canary, taught to repeat the song of the flute. I work for a different nation. I propose to guide and protect you, because it serves my own interests. You will not, like the ikon painters, be infected.’
‘Did he die?’ Chancellor said.
Lymond walked forward. With one fastidious finger he lifted the blankets and counterpane of the navigator’s meagre bed and flung them back sharply, revealing, spread in anger, his sinewy body in its chaste white cotton nightgown. ‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘I hate travelling with a man who wears lace in bed. Did you know that you may beat the Devil, but your whip must be drawn from a winding sheet? So far as I know Blacklock lives, breathes, and is being sprinkled with aqua vite and marigold water. It does not affect your forthcoming journey.’
Diccon Chancellor stayed where he was, his eyes steady, his arms folded hard on his chest. ‘You will excuse me,’ he said. ‘I do not go to Lampozhnya.’
None of the expected expressions, of anger, of annoyance, of impatience crossed Lymond’s face. He said simply, ‘If I order it, there is very little you can do about it. Your cargo is loaded, and the sledges are waiting below. You may travel dressed or in your nightshirt, as you please.’
Christopher had wakened. Chancellor saw his son’s stiff, outraged face in the doorway and said slowly, ‘I am in no position to resist you, of course. But you, in your turn—do you think this is a moment to abandon your officers?’
The handsome blue eyes opened. ‘Do you think they burn to expel me? They don’t. And if they did, they would have even less chance of it than you have. The bow and arrow, as they say, commands with a fine and delicate voice.’
Christopher said, ‘It isn’t the bow and arrow you shelter behind. It’s the Tsar.’
Lymond turned. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘And you find that despicable? But you are wrong, you know. Aut Caesar, aut nihil. It is the Tsar who is sheltering behind me.’
An hour later, having kissed Christopher and shaken hands with his silent compatriots, Diccon Chancellor took his place in the sledge-train, and, escorted by a band of sixty fully armed cavalrymen from the barracks at Vorobiovo, swept out of the Neglinna Port and across the six-arched wooden bridge to turn north, along the Wolf Road, the great frozen highway to the sea. Ahead, enclosed in furs, Lymond rode with his captain, with Slata Baba on the sledge just behind him.
So, their estrangement complete, the two men, Lymond and Chancellor, entered a strange world of sleigh bells and silence. The sledges ran day and night, served by the post-stations, and Chancellor found that, supported by cushions, with the curtains drawn and bearskins heaped about him, he could sleep, and read his maps, and make his notes frozen-fingered in the daytime as he could not do two years before, shepherding his nervous merchants from post to unknown post from the Frozen Sea down to Moscow.
As far as Kholmogory their present journey was the same, but infinitely faster, and with every care removed from his shoulders. Food appeared, or hospitality in fortress or village or monastery. Or failing all else, they carried tents, and the men would make windbreaks and shelter from the upturned sledges themselves.
The Streltsi were swift, obliging and cheerful. He grew used to the sound of Russian constantly spoken, and began to catch and understand the coarse, half-heard jokes, and enjoy their deep, throaty voices when they were permitted to sing. They were the élite of their corps, he began to realize; already stringently trained, and chosen to escort the Voevoda Bolshoia. That they were afraid of him to a man took nothing, he saw, from their zest, or the sparkling tension which clothed them like frost. He had seen that once before, in a company under the Duc de Guise, about to go into battle. It was the sign of success; the fire and stamp of natural leadership.
He found it disturbing. And leaving Vologda behind him, with its lightly drunken, arguing oasis of confident English voices and futile English problems, he gave his mind and his eyes instead to the land, the mother of whiteness; to the f
There were no beasts to be seen but the wild ones: the hare in her milk-white coat, and the grey squirrel and the stoat with its snowy-tipped tail. In the woods there were wolves, and bears, and elks: they saw their prints, and the horses shied at the smell. But the stock, the small, runted cattle and lean hogs were killed and frozen, or sharing with their owners the unstable log izbas, built up so assiduously against the snow, which the thaw might so easily bring slipping to disaster again. Inside, the ikon; the wall-plank for bedding. The stove-room with its bundles of birch-slivers where twice weekly the steam bath was taken, for cleanliness and to ward off disease. A diet of roots and garlic and onions and cabbage and too much time to sleep, or to toil under the stinking tapers at your painstaking craft: the working of skins and furs, the shoemaking and woollen embroidery; the making of wooden bowls and stools and sledges and hanging cradles and chests, painted raspberry red, and yellow, and black; the shallow gingerbread moulds, with their cocks and their pigeons patterned in the white wood; the beehive tooled like a bear, with flight-entries formed in its muzzle. The harsh drink; the coarse clothes; the grey, crackling pile of hard fish, culled for soup with a hammer.
Poverty. Poverty in the presence of starving cold and great, earth-cracking heat, and life lived in the shadow of the wolf and the bear, and tribes more cruel and avaricious. For it was the land which was implacable, far more than its masters. An obja, tilled by one horse, could be rented for two or three roubles or its equal in labour, and a fee of perhaps half of the rotated crop of rye or of oats. In law, the peasant might be hanged, where the boyar was only whipped or imprisoned, but discrimination was less than he had expected; serfdom was almost unknown.