The Ringed Castle (25 page)

But this time, there was no need to send a party ashore, and to demand food and hostages. Men were aboard before they were content with the grip of the anchor, with gifts of eggs and butter and beef, and mutton from the white-faced black sheep they saw moving about the short grass. And in a matter of hours, Chancellor and his son and the members, agents and other employees of the Muscovy Company were within the log walls of St Nicholas Abbey and feasting upon mead instead of sour beer, and duck and goose and roast swan and pancakes instead of biscuit and salt pork and the never-ending diet of fish. The foolish loaves, fashioned like doughnuts and horseshoes, disappeared each with a powerful bite, and the regrettable fish-tasting bacon was devoured clean from the plate under the twenty pairs of calm, hooded eyes.

And the language came, creakingly, to the tongue again. Often as they had practised it, one forgot the abrupt, vehement cadences. Chancellor talked, haltingly, to the Abbot about his journey, about the weather here at St Nicholas, about the news from Kholmogory, the nearest trading town up the river; about, with difficulty, the health and affairs of the Tsar. It was only half-way through all this, applying to Sedgewick and Johnson and Edwards for missing nouns and incompetent verbs and delinquent adjectives, that he realized what the Abbot, in turn, was trying to tell him. They had found Sir Hugh Willoughby.

He said, ‘By your leave?’ and fought off the chorusing voices of his companions, like a nest of competing and baritone birds, and the beautiful Russian of Robert Best, the most successful grammarian of them all, confident in delivery and despairing of understanding the tongue he had barely heard except from Chancellor before.

‘By your leave, sir. Sir Hugh Willoughby and his two ships are safe?’

‘My son, how could such news be?’ said the Abbot. ‘The ships are safe. You will find them here in the roads of St Nicholas, with their stores intact as on the day the storm divided you, two years ago. They were discovered last spring by the Lapps in Nokuyef Bay, on the Frozen Sea, at the mouth of the River Arzina, and word was brought to the Governor. They were drawn here with great pains, sailing from harbour to harbour, and when the sun rises, you will see their masts, over the bay.’

‘But the men?’ Chancellor said. ‘Where are the men?’ And this time no one spoke but the Abbot.

The men were aboard, every one, from the least of the seamen to your lord, the Captain General himself. And dead, every one: frozen and dead, with ice for their shrouds.’

They took the pinnace next morning to where, lodged quietly at anchor, the
Bona Esperanza
and the
Bona Confidentia
lay, the flag of St George still flying in the clear Russian air. It was silent on board: their feet on the rungs of the ladders echoed through the crowded chambers, and a footfall on the deck above sounded out of place: hesitant and stealthy instead of light, uneven, purposeful; the footsteps of men at sea, about their business of sailing.

It was all as the Abbot had said. The cargo stood still in the holds; uncrated, so that the kerseys were white with mould and the copper spurs sweating and green. There were unwashed bowls where men had eaten at random, long after the rusted ovens were cold; and the surgeons’ jars stood in rows clouded with dust, with their corroded blades and their books. The pilots’ instruments were intact, and the charts, settled like cloth in the tube. And there was powder still, like cement, and slow matches stored by the cannon.

But in neither ship was there a rag or a blanket, or any item of clothing, from the Captain General’s ceremonial doublets to the ship’s store of blue watchet livery. Nor was there anywhere a ledge or a stool or a table, a door or a panel, a box or a crate or a chest which could be hauled out and burned. Only, emptied by the Muscovites, were the barrels which had held their food, and the makeshift bows and shafts they had used in their hunting. And one table and one chair, in Willoughby’s cabin.

Willoughby was there too, that tall and fashionable man, with his long nose and high forehead and dark, pointed beard in a finely carpentered coffin, dust covered, which gave no offence. And by the coffin, laid there by the Russians, were the possessions of all his seamen, who had found graves less dramatic in Lapland. Chancellor did not touch the keys or the money, the knives or the rings or the crosses. Instead he walked to the desk, on which stood the hourglass, and the inkstand and the pen, still laid where Sir Hugh had replaced it when he wrote his last words in the log.

The log was there too. With hesitant fingers, Chancellor turned back the limp pages.
The Voyage Intended for the Discovery of Cathay
, Sir Hugh Willoughby had headed it; and below he had listed the souls in his charge on each ship. And below that, day by day, an account of their wanderings until, lost and despairing, with the
Confidentia
leaking and the inshore sea thickening to ice, he had run into the deep bay and stayed there. He had sent three search parties ashore, but found no human life in the darkness: the fishermen and hunters had long since left the north coast for the winter. And although it was only September, snow and hail came upon them, and severe frosts, which sealed them into their harbour.

They had had food for eighteen months, but heat and water were different matters. They lived, it seemed, through Christmas to January, and Sir Hugh himself was one of the last on board to die.

Chancellor took the log with him back to the
Edward
. To cross the sea in the sunlight; to step into the hot, reeking uproar of his own living ship, was a comfort whose poignancy brought tears to his eyes.

Then he set his men hard to work, for in a week’s time the Governor of the Province would arrive, to escort them on the first stage of their thousand-mile journey to Moscow.

To Christopher, it was all fresh to his appetite, like food laid on a white cloth, tempting him with recondite colours and odours. And yet it was not so alien. No one spoke English. But who could speak English in Antwerp? There were trees outside, of a scrubby kind; and four little houses, and hens, which looked a bit smaller than London hens, but were still poultry; and sheep which looked about the same size as Norfolk sheep, although a different colour. And the church, although without pews and packed full of paintings and tapers and candles, had a cross on top, which everyone did reverence to.

During that strenuous week, he found time to explore the thick pine and birch woods and the small, straggling islands parting the Dwina’s four mouths. He picked wild strawberries and saw the cinnamon rose spilling its single-starred blossom over acres of meadow; he walked along virgin white beaches, and ate blackcock, and bought snow larks, fat and sweet, for three kopeki a basket, and wished that his father or Rob Best were there to translate for him what people shouted at him, from the doors of their cabins, before they hurried inside with a swing of coarse cloth and stained deerskin waistcoat.

He helped them all unload the
Edward
. Under the carpenter’s direction a log shelter was made, a primitive warehouse, to hold the Hampshire kerseys, the fine violet in grain, the London russets and tawnies and good lively greens; the barrels of pewter and the butts of Holland wine and the six hundredweights of sugar, which Christopher helped the purser to mark off and check. By the time the Governor came, the
Edward
was empty, and lying further east off the island of Jagrô in a cloud of gnats, from which, provisioned and loaded, she would leave them to go back to England.

The Governor’s name, alarmingly enough, was Prince Simeon Ivanovich Milulinsky Punkoff, and with him came Fofan Makaroff, the Chief Magistrate of Kholmogory, together with three of his colleagues.

Chancellor knew them all. By then his Russian had regained its fluency: he introduced his son, and his own three countrymen from the previous voyage, and then one by one the agents and merchants who had not been here before.

This was his duty, no less than the long weeks of pilotage and the tasks in which lay his real interest: in defining and mapping this country of Russia, and discovering what had been unknown before. This journey to Moscow was his duty, and all the stately mummery at the Kremlin, where he must exchange regal gifts and regal greetings once more with the Tsar.

This was what, last time, Willoughby had been chosen to do and what he, with common sense only to guide him, had had to manage somehow, alone. And manage so well, be it said, he thought with a twinge of wry self-congratulation, that at least he had been elected to carry out both tasks again. Through all this winter, he was to stay in Moscow, the figurehead of the new English traders now settling in Muscovy. And come the spring, with the cloth sold and the merchants well established, he would leave them there and, with Christopher, sail back with the new cargo to England, to tell the Company all he had learned, and to persuade the Company to send him once more, and untrammelled, to try for the route to Cathay.

But meantime, there were the lighters to load and a journey to get under way through which, like two threads, sometimes competing, would run his office as spokesman and ambassador, and the work of the merchants; the trading for which they had voyaged to Russia. Diccon Chancellor had no quarrel with commerce: it had paid for his ship and his voyage. But he was not, and never would be, a merchant.

Slow, ungainly, and not very comfortable, the great overland Odyssey began on the broad River Dwina, with a long halt to load goods at Kholmogory, the first market town of size on the river. There they were to lose Dick Johnson, who was returning to England and who would see the new cargo safely north to the
Edward
.

Christopher found Kholmogory boring. There were a lot of meetings, and solemn pacings round warehouses full of stinking barrels of train oil and crates of walrus tusks and heaps of glistening salt. Some of the Russians came and pulled at the pieces of cloth Mr Lane picked out from the
Edward’
s cargo, and then began offering roubles and altines with their fingers: Mr Lane packed the cloth away and just laughed.

There was nothing much to do in the town, which was very old, and stuck on an island in the Dwina. There were no brick buildings at all: only log houses with carved eaves and windows, and a ramshackle church made like a toy out of spills, and the ships in the river. The
Edward
’s cargo was in flat-bottomed river boats with their decks lined with bark and caulked with tarred moss, with a long, heavy rudder. They were like Gravesend barges, and had a mast and a sail each to use if there was a following wind, which there wasn’t.

As it was, they would have to be towed all the way upstream,
Christopher reckoned. He thought of the
Edward
. He wondered if Mr Johnson and the purser would remember to check off the marks before loading, and whether Mr Buckland would put oatmeal and butter on the Kamen Woronucha, and if they would see any whales. He rather wondered what Nicholas was doing at Penshurst, and then stopped wondering as Judde and Hawtrey came to find him and carry him off to someone’s house to try caviare, which Hawtrey had just learned was an aphrodisiac.

Christopher asked someone later what an aphrodisiac was, and was convulsed with shame when the whole party exploded in laughter. Best patted him on the shoulder. ‘Know-alls,’ he said. ‘You should hear George Killingworth when his poods are giving him trouble.’

They stayed an interminable time in Kholmogory. But at last there came a day when Dick Johnson set off north with the new cargo, and Christopher’s father and his friends made their farewells and took to the boats, to be pulled south up the broad, dazzling reach of the Dwina. The magistrate Makaroff and Grigorjeff, his fellow merchant, came with them, while a light boat rode ahead to the
Peremines
, the towpath relay stations to arrange for food and drink and new bargemen. Before them lay a sail of seven hundred miles. And after that, two weeks of riding to Moscow.

It took forty days, in clear summer heat, which blistered George Killingworth’s tender, gold-bearded skin and turned the rest of them every shade from vermilion to russet. The bargemen sang as they pulled them past the short ochre scrub blocked with ice-tumbled boulders; past the queer fossil grove outside Yemza; past small wooden villages, and forests of elm and birch, oak and fir and fields of rich growing corn, fed by the river, while the hawks’ bells trilled at the mast, and the streamers trembled like fast-moving water against the deep ocean-blue of the sky. At night they slept by the riverside.

Presently the Dwina turned into the single stream of the River Sukhona, shallow and stony where a canal had robbed it of water. In the lee of the tar sheds at Ustiug they transferred to flat-bottomed stroogs, and suffered a minor delay while Lane and Grey went to cast an eye over some hides and some tallow on Grigorjeff’s recommendation. While the others were waiting, the cook drank himself senseless and fell into the river; they fished him out too late to save him. There passed a gloomy twenty-four hours, clogged with officialdom, which Makaroff spent largely in conclave. ‘He’s working hard,’ said Henry Lane.

‘He’s hoping for a discount,’ said Christopher’s father mildly. ‘I told you John Buckland refused point-blank to take that damned cook back on the
Edward
. I wish I’d never mentioned the Germans.’

‘What about the Germans?’ asked Christopher, mystified; but Makaroff came back at that moment, with all the arrangements
completed, and very soon they had embarked on the stroogs and were making for Totma, and from there to their main halt on the way to the capital: the large and ancient city of Vologda, whose Namiestnik, Osep Grigorievich Nepeja, came to the river to welcome them.

They were very wet. The warmth had not yet abated, although they were now past the first week in September, but there had been a thunderstorm a few days after Totma, and Christopher, aware of new responsibilities on his shoulders, was glad that the bales were wrapped in sacking and cerecloth, and wished he were, too.