The Ringed Castle: Fifth in the Legendary Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett
And in that moment, high, unseen above that vast yellow moon, Slata Baba swept hunting down.
They did not know until later how hungry she was: how for days her food had been stinted. Or how angry; thrown from an inexpert fist from the dark lee of a shed on the island to rise one, two, three hundred feet into the moonbright searing cold of the night and hang, looking down at the white, frozen river, and the animals which fled across it, thick, long-legged and ungainly, their rhizomed shadows flowing beside them.
Deer. Her prey and her quarry, which she alone of the hunting birds had the power to attack; whose blood she would taste and whose flesh she would tear until the beast stumbled and fell and her master would come with his knife and throw her her portion. She picked the victim she wanted among the bunched animals in the front of the concourse, banked a little, her wings half open and rigid, and then, her talons cupped, fell like a knife.
In the last moments of her fall Lymond saw her and, shouting, swept his stick in the air. Had she been aiming for his deer, he might have diverted her. But she was not. As the men racing beside him glanced round there was a long, echoing hoot, followed by a chain of high, panting squeals mixed with a hissing and something else, like the sound of a cloak thrown about by the wind. The antlered head of the deer next to Lymond’s was invested with a demoniac presence, dark and vengeful as the Stymphalian Bird with wings, beak and claws of iron; piercing eye and brain with its spears; sucking out sense, air and life with the bat of its murderous pinions.
The deer screamed, tossing its head, bowed with the terrible weight and twisting, ran maddened straight across the course of the oncoming sledges. As it did so its own sledge overturned, throwing the Lapp it was carrying under the oncoming hooves. The sledge jumped, freed of its weight; cracking against the stamping legs round about it; throwing them off balance in turn while the reindeer, grunting and mewing, ran jarring directly into another beast’s shoulder.
The shock of it dislodged the eagle. As its victim crashed back sinking, and the other deer, thrown off balance, skidded and fell, taking the turning sledge with it, Slata Baba flapped the eight-foot spread of her wings among the shying, scattering animals, the sharp, golden head jerking, and heard at last the voice of her master.
Driving one-handed, wildly tipping; jostled among the frantic bodies around him, Lymond had been calling from the start, his free arm high, his reins forcing the deer inwards, away from escape and towards the plunging centre of the still-moving morass of sledges and bodies. Three sledges broke from it and fled upriver, their drivers shouting, their reindeer crazily galloping. The eagle, baulked and malevolently angry, rose a little higher and considered the upraised arm she knew, without the lure to which she was accustomed. With deliberation, she took three, steady flaps of her towering wings; and flew straight at Lymond.
Chancellor saw it. He had cast the lure as Slata Baba made her first swoop; but he was too far behind; and with living flesh underneath her, the eagle ignored it, if she saw it at all. After that, he had found it hard enough merely to force the sledge closer to the wild, slithering concourse ahead. The pulkha trembled with the battle between himself and his terrified animal. Bearing his whole weight on the reins, he kept it running, wider and wider from the dark mass in front of him. He saw the three sledges break free and run straight ahead, out of control. He saw Slata Baba lift, pause and then suddenly fly towards Lymond, while Lymond’s deer, flinching and swerving, turned against his one-handed grip and set on a new, panicked course sideways, towards Chancellor, alone far to its left. His own deer turned, against all the aching, ebbing strength of his arm and fled for the bank of the river as Slata Baba braked and closed on her landing-place.
The black talons, the muscular legs breeched with feathers, struck Lymond’s head, and sinking down, closed on his shoulder and arm. A foot lifted, clogged with deer blood and flesh and a gouging of fur from his coat and he dropped the reins, speaking to her, his gloved left hand up and protecting his face while his right stayed outstretched, a path for her to walk down to her proper place, where the hooked, scissored beak might look outwards, and the slashing talons might settle six inches, a foot farther off from his head and his eyes.
With vindictive perversity, she stayed where she was. She flapped her wings once, bearing hard on his shoulder and then, leaving them loose in great eaves over her gold-ruffled hackles, she felt for and gripped the lower part of the thick of his arm with her free claw. As the sledge rocked and the deer careered blindly on, behind and parallel with Chancellor’s, Lymond stayed very still, balancing, and bracing his gloved hand at his hip, held her steady. Chancellor, his left arm nearly dragged from its socket, picked up the lure with his other and flung it.
The eagle turned, glared and rose. Chancellor’s deer gave a great swerve, pulling the reins out of his hand and sending the sledge slurring towards the high snowy bank of the river. He saw Slata Baba pin the chipped lure in the air, and Lymond’s sledge turn on its side as his frightened deer bucked and stumbled, its feet trapped in the reins. He did not see Lymond thrown out because his own sleigh struck the bank at that moment, and crumpled, soft as the skin of a hare, and flung him straight into the glittering pile of ice blocks and snow and sheared glacial debris. There was a violent coloured explosion inside his head, and his mind ceased to function.
Chapter 11
He woke on Lymond’s mattress, back in the hut, with Grey, unevenly flushed, kneeling on the floor by his pillow. Behind, his two aides moved purposefully backwards and forwards with steaming kettles and handfuls of cotton: he could see the backs of two soldiers pressed against the window, outside which there appeared to be a great many people, incomprehensibly talking. His shoulder ached, and he felt very sore. He saw that the hand holding a cup under his nose for the second time belonged to the Voevoda, sitting with composure beside him.
Anger, deep, shaking and resentful swept over him, recalling all the resentment of the Troitsa. ‘Only a bloody, arrogant bastard,’ said Richard Chancellor, ‘would choose a born killer to cut a bloody, arrogant figure with.’
The cup remained. Lymond said coolly, ‘Who freed her?’
Grey said, ‘I was asleep. I didn’t see anybody. I was asleep until you woke me just now.’
Lymond repeated, without turning, what he had said. ‘Who freed her?’ He was still in his torn furs, spattered with deer blood. A scarlet handkerchief had been stuffed inside his coat, to one side of his neck.
Chancellor took the cup and sat up. His shoulder was wrenched, and his ribs hurt, and two fingers of his left hand were swollen and reddened. His head throbbed. He said, ‘There was no one in the house when we came back from drinking. Grey fell asleep right away, and no one came in until the captain came and told us about the race. I found the eagle gone then, and the jesses and chain.’
Lymond said, ‘I have sent someone to look for them, on the shore where we first saw the eagle. A faint hope. They will be safe in someone’s cabin by now.’
Grey, willing but not yet quite awake, said, ‘Would she not simply slip the thong from the swivel and fly out?’
Chancellor stared at him with equal dislike. ‘And take her hood?’ he suggested. ‘Anyway, she had no jesses on her. No. Someone must have taken her when we were out drinking. Someone with a right to come in, or a key, or access to a key.’
‘The two men behind us came in,’ Lymond said. He was speaking in English, extremely clearly: it suddenly penetrated Chancellor’s senses that he was in a towering rage: and that this harsh, level tone was a mark of the force he was at this moment using to control it. Lymond added, ‘They say they were called out later by Konstantin, but locked and barred the front door behind them. Konstantin had a key. So had Aleksandre. Master Grey was here alone before you, Chancellor, came. Any one of the soldiers may have stolen and replaced one of the keys. They will all be questioned, when they are sober enough to be frightened. Meantime the field, unfortunately, is extremely wide open.’
So we
Lymond had stopped listening to him. He said, staring at Chancellor, ‘The ironic thing is that I suspected that race from the start. I tested every inch of the reins and had a look at the shafts and the terrets. But it wasn’t the sledge he had tampered with.’
So, against all appearances, he had taken seriously after all the warning Chancellor had been instructed to convey to him. Not excluding even Grey from his suspects. Too seriously to be perfectly rational on the subject, perhaps. Probably few people could be called rational, once they had been warned that their lives were in danger. Chancellor said, ‘There are less devious ways, equally secret. Such as poison.’
‘Except that I would have discovered it. Over the years,’ Lymond said, ‘a great many people have persuaded themselves that the world would be a brighter place if I were not in it. When I am given a warning, I never ignore it. Besides, this is the third attempt since Kholmogory.’
‘The …?’ said Chancellor. Someone had brought hot water and, displacing Grey at his side, was unlacing his shirt prior to pulling it off. He wondered if he had put out his shoulder, and decided that he probably had, and someone had wrenched it back into place, none too gently. The door rattled, and Grey went to open it.
The young Russian lieutenant Konstantin came in, his unbandaged hand holding a fragment of blue which he laid on the mattress. It was Slata Baba’s hood.
‘Where?’ said Lymond.
‘In the trampled snow between huts, a little upriver from where the eagle attacked you. There was nothing else there: it was the footsteps and sledge marks on the new snow which guided us. It lay in the moonlight.’
‘So careless?’ said Chancellor.
‘The spheres move,’ Lymond said. He was still looking at Konstantin. ‘Nothing else?’
Konstantin said, ‘Only stains. Some small stains of fresh blood on the snow.’
Richard Grey, his face shocked, had said nothing since the conversation had taken this murderous turn. Now, hesitating, he offered, ‘A lure? Some meat offered the eagle?’ And then as no one answered, took confused thought himself. ‘No. Not if they wished her to hunt.’
Lymond was still looking at Konstantin. ‘Not meat,’ he said. ‘But flesh. We want a man who is bloody, as any novice handling Slata Baba would be bloody. Strip. Strip to the waist. Coat, waistcoat, tunic and shirt. Unwind your bandage.’
The lieutenant was white. He said, standing upright, ‘I was here. I called the Boyar Chancellor. I could not have taken the eagle so far off in time.’
‘You might have taken her there. You might have paid an accomplice to fly her,’ Lymond said. ‘Strip. And you, Master Grey. And every other man in this hut.’
Grey jumped to his feet.
‘Do it,’ Chancellor said. ‘He is the Voevoda Bolshoia. Perhaps he will think I am stripped enough.’
The prick brought no recognition. Nor did the promptitude with which he was obeyed. Grey, the serving men and Konstantin were all without blemish, save for the dead flesh in Konstantin’s fingers. Grey had begun to rewind the bandage for him when Lymond said, ‘I want each of the soldiers stripped and examined, one by one. And Aleksandre brought here at once. Where is he?’
‘Outside,’ said the lieutenant. ‘There is a Samoyed Shaman with him who has been asking to see you. The tolmatch says that two of his tribe ran in the race.’
Lymond said briefly, ‘That has been dealt with. The Tsar accepts the blame, and the Tsar will be generous.’
Konstantin said, ‘He still wants to see you.’
‘Later, then. Call in Aleksandre.’
He came in; a short and burly young man, the deftest and most intelligent of all the new Streltsi Danny Hislop had trained. He said, ‘My lord——’ and stopped against the unyielding wall of Lymond’s face. Lymond said, ‘We are endeavouring to reach the truth; always a tedious proceeding. You will humour us by baring the sprain you received in the tavern tonight.’
The lieutenant looked at nothing, and the captain did not glance at him, but flushed in an angry awareness of his audience. ‘I, my lord?’
Lymond said dryly, ‘You are not alone in your predicament. Every other man in this room has also obliged. Unwind the bandage.’
The fur coat came off, with stiff obedience. The narrow sleeve underneath was rolled up, with some trouble. The bandage, unwound, revealed a bloated patch, red and misshapen, on the upper part of the wrist. There was no doubt that it was a severe sprain, and painful.
‘Now strip to the waist,’ Lymond said.
He didn’t do it. He had fallen, Chancellor conjectured, waiting and wondering, into some kind of daze, brought on by the lateness and the drink and the long and strenuous trials of the night. He saw Konstantin, with a glance at Lymond, reach out and touch Aleksandre on the arm. And he saw that Aleksandre, like a man frozen, still stood unmoving. Lymond said, ‘Captain.’
Aleksandre said, ‘I have an old wound. It is not very pleasant to look on.’
Lymond continued, calmly, to hold his eyes. ‘Konstantin. How many soldiers outside?’
‘Four, my lord. I thought it as well. There is much drunkenness.’
‘If they are sober,’ said Lymond, ‘bring them in. Then help the captain to undress.’
Diccon Chancellor saw, disbelieving, that Aleksandre’s face had quite changed. For a long moment he stood glaring at Lymond; then as the door opened and his men began to come in, he dodged suddenly and ran head down, straight for the door. He fought so hard that they had to half stun him before they had him, arms spreadeagled, in front of the Voevoda, and Konstantin peeled off his tunic.
The shirtsleeve beneath was marked by a bloodstain. Konstantin ripped it off. Below, covered with scraps of rags, were three deep, livid punctures, as well as some patches of red, roughened skin stretching from shoulder to forearm of the limb with the sprain.
Slata Baba had left her own finger-prints. Lymond said, ‘Who paid you to do this?’
Gripped by his bare arms, the captain spat on the floor. ‘Son of a whore,’ he said. ‘Why should I tell you?’
Taking his time, Lymond studied him. ‘Self-interest,’ he said eventually. ‘The question is not whether you die, but how you die. Tell me who paid you.’
Aleksandre smiled.
Konstantin struck him on the face. ‘Speak!’
And Aleksandre laughed through bleeding lips. ‘You teach well. You teach me how to withstand torture,’ he said. ‘I am not afraid. And meanwhile, you will wonder: who is it? Is it Prince Kurbsky who wishes ill to the Voevoda, that he may be the Tsar’s undisputed Commander? Is it Dmitri Vishnevetsky who has decided to leave Lithuania and throw in his lot with the Tsar, given a suitable office? Is it the priest Sylvester who hates you because you flayed your officer for attacking his frescoes, or Chief Secretary Ivan Mikhailovich Viscovatu, who fears you are too close to the ear of the Tsar? After I am gone, you will live for a short while I think, wondering. And then one of them will pay someone else to kill you, and they will do it.’
Chancellor saw, raw with shock, the eyes of the soldiers and Konstantin meet. Lymond studied Aleksandre. At length, ‘It sounds well,’ he said. ‘I cowered, almost, to hear you. Save that rivers must break from their courses before a Russian dares lay hands on me. Or any man whose life depends on the favour of the Tsar. And if you doubt it, let me tell you this. If you do not tell me the name of the foreigner who thinks he can kill the Voevoda, I shall give you to the Tsar’s courts for judgement. Who was it?’
Chancellor’s mind’s eye was awake, and witnessing the subtle, boundless range of the Tsar Ivan’s judgements and its weapons: fire and ice, the knife, the axe and the stake; the cunning abuses by snow and by
‘He is tried,’ Lymond said. ‘And sentenced. And will be executed when he has told me what I want to know; but not before. Konstantin and any four men he chooses will be his persuaders. When he has spoken the name of the man who has paid him, Konstantin will report it to me, and I, if I am satisfied, will give the order which will award his body to death. Konstantin?’
‘I understand, my lord.’
‘Aleksandre?’
‘I understand, my great lord,’ said the captain, with hideous irony.
They were about to take him away when Lymond spoke to him unexpectedly. ‘If you had attempted this solely for money, you would have been thankful to shorten your punishment. What grudge do you have, that is worth suffering for?’
For a long time, Aleksandre stood looking at him. Then he said, ‘I am a Lithuanian. What I learned from you I would have used against you, in Lithuania.’
Lymond said, ‘I see. But I am attacking the Tartars, not the Lithuanians.’
‘I hear differently,’ Aleksandre said. ‘I hear the great Emperor Charles is dying, leaving one inadequate son tied to Mary of England. I think when the Emperor is dead, the Tsar will think it safe to make Lithuania and Livonia his own, and the Tartar war will be forgotten. And with the Voevoda Bolshoia dead, he will fail.’
The emotionless blue eyes stared and stared, mordant in their contempt, until at last, Aleksandre dropped his. ‘With me or without me,’ said Lymond; ‘with the Tsar or without him, the army I am making will not fail, in any thing it may set its hand to. Konstantin, you will have the truth from him by the morning. Take him away.’
Richard Grey moved and then stopped, as the small cortège marched out. Chancellor, hastily attended to by the two half-dressed servants, began to push himself off the mattress. From his makeshift seat, shoulders on the wall, Lymond surveyed him. ‘Ah. The lit de parade is being vacated. Thank you. Which reminds me. I have another and pleasanter debt to pay off.’