The Ringed Castle (3 page)

Philippa went to her mother. ‘It
is
all right. I promise you.’

Kate Somerville looked up.

Concern surrounded her. Above her, the pleasant, middle-aged person of Richard. Below, peering at her, Philippa’s overcast and luminous face. To herself,
I am a widow
, said Kate Somerville grimly.
A widow with one married daughter
. And to Philippa, ‘I’m sure it’s all right. At least it’s a novelty,’ her mother said flatly. ‘You’ll be the only divorced child-bride in Hexham.’

They began, at last, to walk up the steps. ‘All the same,’ Richard said. ‘I should like to know where Francis is.’

No one answered him.

‘Or even who he’s with,’ pursued Lord Culter reflectively.

Archie Abernethy looked across Kuzúm’s head at Philippa, and Philippa said prosaically, ‘We know who he’s with. He’s with Kiaya Khátún.’

‘Kiaya Khátún?’ said Sybilla blankly.

‘Kiaya Khátún,’ said Philippa patiently. ‘Head of the harem, and until recently Dragut Rais’s mistress. The Diane de Poitiers, as you might say, of the East.’

At which, despite herself, her mother began, rather helplessly, to give way to laughter.

*

There were no children with Kiaya Khátún, on the other voyage from Volos, whose character was infinitely more worldly and which partook more of the nature of an exodus.

In the heart of the mule-train travelled the four mummy cases painted with lotus flowers and the names of pantheistic God-triads: Ptah, Sekhet and Imhotep; Osiris, Isis and Horus; Magna, Horus and Harpoctates, and beside them the crates of innocent merchandise: the poor silk, the dried fruit, the sacks of sponges and screws of spoiled amber, turgid as egg in blown glass.

Among the muscatel raisins heady with syrups were the Mistress’s rubies. Behind the wagons, suitably altered, rode Kiaya Khátún’s private household: her cooks, her physician, her chamberlain, her maids, her secretary and those men at arms who were not already discreetly bestowed at the caravan head.

There the Mistress also rode, in a felt cloak and two fustian over-gowns covering a shift which had taken twelve women three painstaking months to embroider. Without undue haste, unassuming as a
cut of rye bread, she passed through the late winter mud of the Balkans and was taken for what she appeared to be, a woman among petty Syrian traders, and not what she was, Kiaya Khátún, late harem keeper to Suleiman; the powerful mistress whom the corsair Dragut knew as Güzel, and owning a ransom in gold beneath the false base of each wooden cart.

It amused the distinguished nobleman who, from Sofia onwards, had offered her his protection. Prince Dmitri Ivanovich Vishnevetsky was also new come from Turkey where he had been carrying out a small and unpublicized task for his master. He had seen Kiaya Khátún in the Seraglio. He had even, to his surprise, found her of decidedly practical help. His mission had failed, but he was inclined to believe she might favour him on another occasion, as she had favoured others, equally gifted and perhaps equally blessed in appearance, in her long and notorious career.

Meeting her again, not entirely by accident, in Sofia he thought again what a magnificent pair they made, he and she. He helped her pay her small dues at the barriers and decided after all to give her the benefit of his company and that of his men. As Governor of Cherkassy he had standing outside Lithuania and authority within it. Religious houses made him welcome. Mudwalled villages gave of their biscuit, mutton and rice. And when, on their last day in Turkish-held land, they overtook the camel string of a colonial Pasha, with six cloth-of-gold wagons for his wives and his catamites and a consort of reed pipes and tambors and brass dishes to knit up the travail of their passage, the Turk neither approached nor molested them.

That night, in the hide tent they raised for her, Vishnevetsky shared her supper and ventured a question, which he expected her to avoid.

Instead, she was frank. ‘Roxelana the Sultan’s wife became jealous. It was needful to leave.’

‘You have left Turkey for ever? And Dragut?’

Her hair shone and glittered like coal: her brushed eyebrows gleamed above the moist coffee shells of her lids. Her nose was Greek and short; her warm cheekbones and brow a smooth sun-ripened olive. In Stamboul she had been tinted and gemmed like a Persian painting. She said, ‘Dragut Rais understands these things, as men of stature may do. No jewel can remain in the same box for ever.’

‘And the next owner?’ said Prince Vishnevetsky.

‘Ah, you mistake me,’ said the woman called Güzel; and lifting the four pointed nails of one hand, ran them down his white sleeve and over the flesh of his hand, lightly scoring, so that the blood sprang sudden and scarlet in beads. ‘I am the owner. And I have chosen my jewel and my box.’

He could not get her out of his thoughts. He spent his last evening
with her on the frontier, but could not touch her or obtain any satisfaction but word-play. But she was well disposed towards him and at the end rose from her meal, and took one of her keys, and sent her steward to where the merchandise stood ready piled, to pass out of Lithuania in the morning.

Among the rest stood the stacked cases of Ptah, Osiris and Magna, with the customar’s mark still upon them. Key in hand, the steward approached, while Prince Vishnevetsky and his hostess observed him. ‘What a curious fashion it is, this craze for embalmed bodies. If there were tax to pay,’ he said, ‘would we import them, I wonder?’

‘For every pleasure, one pays,’ Güzel said. ‘Come. I have in mind a small gift for you.’ And they crossed to the coffins.

He laid his hand, a tough, soldier’s hand on the top one. ‘A handsome box, for an Egyptian.’

She glanced at her steward. ‘The first is a gift for the Emperor. The one below may be opened.’

It was unlocked. The bandage shroud, delicately disarranged, revealed a custom-free fortune in spice-bags. Half a dozen changed hands, and the rest were repacked, rebound and coffined. Vishnevetsky was smiling. ‘I hope you will remember,’ he said, ‘the small benefits which may have accrued from my presence.’

‘And the pleasure,’ said Kiaya Khátún kindly. ‘For the rest, it is not I who shall remember, but the Emperor.’

They parted company the following day, and he stood on the town walls and watched her pass through the gates with her wagons, before he collected his men, and turned them, and resumed his own journey thoughtfully.

He did not see therefore her arrival at the first post-house; where a group of the Emperor’s men were awaiting her. Nor how she was conducted from station to station, and used with deference but not with ceremony, as one might receive an august employee, but not a person of the first reputation or rank.

Nor how his place at his side had been filled, quietly, as of right, by one of her anonymous entourage. A man he had never observed who had travelled, discreet as their cargo, from Volos and was now placed by Kiaya Khátún at the head of her household, which found it expedient very quickly to humour him.

Far from his troublesome homeland of Scotland, and from the courts and battlegrounds, boudoirs and souls he had ravaged, Philippa’s husband Francis Crawford of Lymond was riding. If the climate had affected him at Volos, it did so no longer. If he remembered friends or family, wife or commitments, it was quite unapparent. Instead he led his mistress’s caravan and ordered it in every rigorous detail; using his many tongues, and the new one he had in seven weeks already half mastered.

With Prince Vishnevetsky, Güzel had employed her beauty and her experience, and had let him feel her strength, both of wit and of will.

With the man who was known simply as Lymond, she used none of these. They rode together in company, but spoke rarely, and then on affairs of the journey. Their meals were formal. They slept and took their leisure at all times apart.

She knew her household, watching, were mystified and, self-sufficient that she was, it gave her no concern. To be with her, Francis Crawford had come a long way, in mind and in body, and had to travel still farther yet. A patient woman, Güzel was content to wait and to watch, and to allow him what power he wished to exert.

They were then no more than a week’s journey from their destination. Spring was coming. The sun dried the quagmires and ditches and the bogs platformed with fir trees. Birds whistled in the thick, reeded rivers and women stood watching outside the thatched villages of wood-pinned bark houses, with their ditch-and-stake fence against bear and boar and the marauding bands of wild horsemen, who rode by with undressed furs on their mares’ buttocks, and chains of silver and gold swinging bright from their ears.

They were nearly there, and she could be forebearing as she had been after this man had joined her, as bidden, at Volos. When at length, since he had not asked, she had told him the name of the land he was bound for.

Or rather, she had described it all, watching him. ‘A land other than yours, baptised and blessed by St Andrew. A place of black wolves and white bears, of marshes, rivers and forests, of wide skies and fiat vales of cherries and tall trees all running with honey: the sweat of heaven, the spittle, they say, of the stars. The sleeping cold of the north, which is the mother of whiteness. The land whose Emperor is Ivan Vasilievich of Vladimir, Novgorod, Pskov, Tver, Yogorsk and Smolensk, Duke of Muscovy and Tsar of all Russia.

‘My friend, you are going to Moscow.’

And he had been acquiescent and civil as ever, at which she had concealed every trace of relief.

For greater than all her gold or her spices was this gift she was bringing to Muscovy.

‘Russia! Christ!’ said Danny Hislop. ‘What in hell is he doing in Russia
?’

‘Waiting for us,’ said Alexander Guthrie in the level tone of precarious patience exercised over the years with lesser scholars and fighting men both.

It took more than that to deter the band of free fighting men known as St Mary’s, at present concluding an engagement in France. It took a great deal more than that to put off Danny Hislop. ‘I thought,’ said Danny Hislop emotionally, ‘that
I
was the mother ship and
he
was the bloody dove with the twig in its beak?’

Elbowing off the heavy-breathing crush of his officers, Alec Guthrie looked again at the astonishing communication from their absent and unaccommodating commander. After twelve months of private vendetta, Francis Crawford had been reminded, it seemed, of the fighting force he had left under Guthrie, on lucrative hire to the monarchs of Europe.

Lymond had left Turkey, it transpired, for Moscow. And now was inviting the pick of his captains to follow him.

‘Well?’ said Guthrie. ‘He says the prospects for trained men seem excellent.’

The legal mind in the group was affronted.
‘Prospects?’
said Fergie Hoddim. ‘Yon’s a sore outlay, travelling to Russia and back for a prospect. They’re a coarse, jabbering, ignorant people, and ye canna issue a complaint against wrangeous and inordinate dunts if ye’re lying down deid on your baikie. I’ll not move a step but a contract.’

They left at the end of the week: eight well-balanced and reasonable mercenaries, who had made up their minds to this exploit before ever finishing that laconic letter. And Fergie Hoddim was one of their number.

They were bound, it seemed, for an unknown and barbarous country, ignorant of modern warfare and backward in weapons and tactics, there to offer their specialized services for what they were worth to the Emperor.

The recompense might be large. It might be more than they dreamed of. Or they might be spurned by the boyars. Or never reach Russia at all, through the ring of unfriendly lands which surrounded her. So the letter had said; nor had its summing-up any message of feverish bonhomie.
There is a prospect of employment, entertainment and riches, but I can guarantee none of it, and least of all your personal safety. You have the facts. I merely place the proposal before you
. And it was signed,
CRAWFORD OF LYMOND AND SEVIGNY
.

‘Sevigny?’ had inquired Ludovic d’Harcourt.

And Guthrie had answered. ‘He has a French comté.’

‘But no scent,’ Danny Hislop had said, and had withdrawn his tip-tilted nose from the pages. ‘This is a clever bastard, my friends. I like that word
entertainment
, for instance.’

And d’Harcourt had said, ‘We thought you would,’ and tripped him up with casual competence.

But the four who knew and had been trained by Francis Crawford had been tactfully silent. To Danny Hislop, they were aware, the word conveyed Tartar maidens in wolfskins. To Lancelot Plummer, a land where he could preside, an architect among builders of cabins; to Alex Guthrie, a scholar and Latinist, a new nation to study in genesis, all patched together from snatched states and princedoms. To Brown and Vassey and d’Harcourt, their Knights of St John, a high church which called itself Christian but spurned so far both the advances of the Protestant lords and the Pope. And for Adam Blacklock the artist, older, wiser, and perhaps less vulnerable than once he had been, a chance to assess from maturity a person whose maturity was and always had been a thing disconcerting to witness.

For what, after these violent years, would entertain or even interest Francis Crawford, Blacklock found he had no idea.

They travelled each in his own way to Muscovy, the eight chosen men summoned by Lymond. They came by sea and by road; through Lübeck and Riga, by Vienna, Silesia and Moravia, across the Danube and past the walled city of Vilna in its high wooded hills. They traversed forests and marshes and rivers and saw bison and buffalo, and herds of light-footed wild horses, and the small sheep of the mountains with their high-stretched ringed horns. And at length they foregathered in the oak fortress town of Smolensk on the western extremity of Russia.

There they found lodging prepared for them, and guides waiting who gave them little respite but hurried them on their journey, answering their queries with nothing more than sign language and smiles. Which was something, as Fergie Hoddim was heard to remark sourly. But he would be damned glad when their meat, their fleabites and Danny Hislop’s ill-organized appetites could be dealt with in civilized English.