The Ringed Castle (33 page)

‘Then he’s a fool,’ Killingworth said. ‘Does he think one pack of vainglorious mercenaries will hold back Poland and Lithuania? I’d like to see them in action.’

‘So should I,’ said Chancellor thoughtfully.

Francis Crawford reached the same conclusion, on hearing Fergie Hoddim’s report on the petition the Muscovy Company had been allowed to present to the Tsar.

‘… complete freedom of trade, and special jurisdiction for all English settled in Russia. The English to decide their own quarrels, and the Tsar to settle all litiginous cases between subjects of England and Russia. A market twice yearly at Kholmogory, prices to be optional. Freedom from tolls——’

‘What?’ said Lymond.

‘And he’s offered them a wax monopoly,’ Fergie said, eyes shining with legal mysticism.
‘Proxime et immediate sequens
. And ye ken what the tolls are. A tenth of a dengi on all Turkish and Armenian imports. Two dengi a rouble on all goods weighed at the Emperor’s beam. Toll-bars. River-dues. Storage-dues. Dues on the written contract if you sell an old nag. Dues on every God’s pound of salt.… They send out fifty thousand pounds of wax a year, they reckon,’ said Fergie. ‘And they can get four pounds the hundred for it in England.’

‘Maybe the Tsar will ask four pounds the hundred pounds for it in Russia,’ said Lymond.

‘No. It’s fixed. Two pounds seventeen shillings and sixpence,’ said Fergie with triumph.

The Voevoda’s chilly blue eyes were open in thought. ‘And what favours did the Tsar ask in return?’

‘None,’ said Fergie. ‘Or none so far. Ye ken Viscovatu. He can eat without opening his mouth.’

‘Then I think,’ said Lymond, ‘we had better have a show of strength. Tell Plummer to stop mourning over St Basil’s and do something about the weather. There must be a use for engineers in the cosmos somewhere. Meanwhile, until the snow comes, we had better keep Master Chancellor and his party entertained.’

‘Tartar women?’ said Fergie helpfully. ‘Danny Hislop …’

‘Healthy physical exercise,’ said Lymond tartly. ‘Until the roads harden up and they can get on with their trading. They have to wait in Moscow anyway until the Tsar replies to their letter. And meanwhile we all want the Tsar’s noble mind irrevocably set on war with the Tartars; none more so than Prince Vishnevetsky and his gallant Cossacks. War with Lithuania would be an unfortunate mistake. Not to mention the Poles. A haughty nation and a very insulting people upon advantage.’

‘You’ve heard from Vishnevetsky?’ said Fergie. He missed the niceties of civilized law, but the nature of Russian intrigue almost made up for it.

‘He’s coming to see me in December,’ said Lymond. ‘Let’s have our exercise in December. What a pity we couldn’t induce a Tartar or two to set fire to us.’

‘We could set fire to ourselves,’ offered Fergie, with unthinking enthusiasm. ‘Except then we’d have no one to fight with.’

‘I shouldn’t be too sure of that,’ said Francis Crawford.

And thinking of the character of his leader, and the strong and divergent personalities of his colleagues in the company of St Mary’s, Fergie Hoddim was inclined to agree.

Half-way through November, after the mildest autumn for three hundred years, the temperature in Moscow dropped thirty degrees. By the beginning of December, the days were bringing anything up to ten degrees of frost and the rivers became broad white highways along which moved eight hundred sledges daily, carrying corn and fish into the city. The winter ice market opened on the Moskva, outside the Kremlin, selling casks and earthenware pots and painted sledges and grain, and stiff-legged hogs and bullocks and poultry, frozen like boulders, and boys swooped and flashed on the crystalline ice, bones bound on their feet and iron-shod stakes in their hands, as staffs and as weapons. Tame bears danced, their teeth rubbed with vitriol, and wild ones crept close to the villages. The rest of the Muscovy Company’s wares set off by sledge at last from Vologda, and the sledge carrying the Tsar’s wine and sugar overturned and was lost.

Diccon Chancellor, sick of hunting and hawking and eating and drinking and witnessing crude entertainments unrelieved by the presence of women, took George Killingworth off to the Kremlin to present his apologies to the Tsar through his Chief Secretary Viscovatu, and to ask, for the fifth time, whether his highness was graciously disposed to reply yet to the Company’s humble petition. Master Viscovatu, faintly severe on the subject of the wine and the sugar, said an answer would certainly be supplied in due course, but that his highness was at present much occupied with affairs of war.

‘War!’
said George Killingworth, and broke off as Chancellor kicked him on the ankle.

‘Yes. It is the Emperor’s custom,’ said Ivan Viscovatu, ‘to hold a Triumph in the fields outside Moscow shortly after the St Nicholas’s Day banquet. It is the Tsar’s desire that you and your fellows will honour the Tsar and his commanders with your presence. Afterwards, it is possible that the Tsar’s time will be less circumscribed. I am sure you are anxious to visit trading centres other than Moscow.’

George Killingworth opened his mouth and shut it again, the golden beard drawn like a curtain. ‘We are honoured,’ said Chancellor, and got Killingworth out before he could say anything aloud about the Voevoda Bolshoia, whose fine touch would be detected behind every courteous sentence. They already knew that the Tsar was pleased with his army. It looked rather as if the Voevoda were pleased with it, too. It remained to be seen whether the Tartars would be pleased also. ‘And every man in it a gentleman,’ said Diccon Chancellor to himself, thoughtfully.

Later, when he understood what St Mary’s was, he realized that any soldier in Europe might have told him what to expect on that clear, cold day when he and Christopher and his quartet of impatient merchants finally stood on a field of snow outside Moscow, and watched marching past a thousand-long column of hackbutters in blue stammel and velvet ranked five abreast, each with his gun on his left shoulder and with his right hand holding his match. On beautiful Turkish horses and jennets, the Tsar’s boyars and nobles followed them in gold brocade, riding three by three. And lastly, there entered the Tsar in brilliant tissue, his scarlet cap hung with pearls and his high officials around him. At his right, grey furred and wholly calm, rode the Voevoda Bolshoia.

George Killingworth, as was his regrettable habit, spat.

Afterwards, they agreed it was a circus; a drama, a ritual dance; a precise entertainment designed and created by a clever and ruthless ringmaster. The silk pavilions; the flags; the rippling cloth which held back the crowds were all devices of western chivalry. The massed displays of drill and horsemanship were not. Only over the wide steppes of Russia was it necessary to move blocks of men by the thousand, riding hundreds of miles into battle; able to wheel and manoeuvre to distant, half-perceptible command.

It was a skill they had never possessed; just as they owned the endurance to sustain siege to the point where life ceased; where they ate rats and shoe leather and, sometimes, each other; but did not have the stamina or knowledge or ability to mount the attack which would break the siege in the first instance.

To simulate these things, with wooden forts and moveable towers, was only spectacular play-acting, just as the drill carried out on the pressed snow, on foot and on horseback, by hackbutters and boyars alike, with brands and pennons and flashing silk cords, was to the
eye merely a brave coloured pattern shifting like shaken mosaic on the glaring white sheet of the snow.

But even to the eye of a seaman or a clerk, or a merchant, it said something more. It spoke of brutal discipline. It told of a control based on skill, as well as on fear. And it showed a pride, in themselves and their training, which was reflected, in spite of himself, in the Tsar’s austere, bearded face.

The last of the demonstration belonged to the gunners. Mounted on their long wooden platform, the hackbutters gave first their traditional display. Their target, sixty yards off, was a bank of pure ice, built six feet high and two thick, and stretching for a quarter of a mile before the chain of orderly, liveried men. The gunfire, rapping hard on the ears, seemed to be shot from the thin, glassy sky. Sound exploded around them like gorse-pods, striking their eyes and vibrating their finger-ends while the blue wall turned frosty and crumbled, and broken ice jumped like mirrors and cast long swathes hissing like salt to spangle the pale tender blue of the air.

The wall lay flat. Beside it, two earth-filled houses thirty feet deep faced the long row of cannon, gold baguettes beading the snow. A match flared, a flag lifted and fell, and the guns fired: brises, falcons, and minions; sakers, culverins and cannons, double and royal; and lastly in order of size, the great cannon:
Kazan
, a year old, and
Astrakhan
, cast only three months before, each over a thousand pounds’ weight, with their black mouths more than a foot in diameter.

They fired the ordnance three times in all, from the least to the largest in order, and as the last round went off, the small-bellied pot guns shot wild fire into the smoke, rising in flashes of scarlet and gold among the reeking black clouds, as the fields shuddered to the mounting explosions. Where the houses had stood, there was nothing.

It was over. Unable to hear his own voice, Chancellor obeyed the Tsar’s summons to join him, and tried to express, in serviceable Russian, his ecstatic admiration for what he had seen.

‘It is the might of Russia,’ said Ivan Vasilievich. ‘The Voevoda Bolshoia can answer your questions.’

‘I have none,’ said Chancellor. His ears ached. A young, bearded man in an incredible robe lined with white ermine smiled, and raised his eyebrows at Lymond.

‘I have,’ said Christopher under his breath.

The Voevoda, unhappily, had heard it. ‘What is your interest? The guns?’ Lymond said.

Christopher had gone scarlet. He said. ‘Yes. No. I wondered how the men were trained.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Lymond, ‘he would like to visit our training quarters at Vorobiovo, His father and friends might find it instructive
indeed to accompany him. My own house is nearby, and I should be honoured to offer you all hospitality.’

Diccon Chancellor said, ‘We are only merchants and seamen. I am afraid we should not know how to appreciate what we saw. But Christopher would enjoy it.’

‘Then let Christopher go,’ Lymond said. ‘Master Hislop will take him, and bring him back to my house, where you may take wine and await him in comfort. And, of course, your friends …?’

But George Killingworth, mumbling into his golden beard, cravenly declined and so did Harry Lane and Ned Price. Only Best, who had so nearly smuggled the Voevoda’s wife on to the
Edward Bonaventure
to join her soldier husband in Russia, accepted almost before he was asked. A marriage of convenience was what Philippa Somerville had called it. And Rob Best did not need any convincing that the Voevoda’s domestic arrangements were very convenient indeed. He did not ask himself, as Diccon Chancellor did, why on earth the Voevoda should wish him to witness them.

Lancelot Plummer, who had designed it, took Chancellor and Rob Best to Lymond’s home at Vorobiovo, riding south through the snow, and across the broad links of the river, and up the white, wooded incline from which the Kremlin domes could be seen flashing golden against the dusky red snow-sky of sunset. Earlier that day, Christopher had gone to visit the Streltsi. D’Harcourt, riding briefly beside them, said, ‘Danny is not perhaps the most maternal of guides, but he’ll see the lad comes to no harm. On the other hand …’

He hesitated. They were riding together in the Voevoda’s own massive carved sledge, drawn by matched and plumed horses, their harness whipped with silver and set largely with turquoises. Rob Best’s mouth had been slightly open since they set out, but Chancellor’s black-bearded face was unyielding. ‘What?’ he said.

‘The boy is coming to join you?’

‘Why not?’ said Chancellor with some impatience. A tall brick wall had come into view, speckled with snow, with snow-laden trees like a painting behind it. The entrance was through a handsome tower of white stone, leaved and patterned with brick. The sledge drew up, was recognized, and allowed to pass through.

Plummer said, ‘Ludo thinks our honoured leader is not to be trusted with children. You will realize this is nonsense. A harsh and holy life has our Mr Crawford, like the great and glorious St Antony. Ludo is only resentful because the Voevoda doesn’t think much of his medicine. You must admit, Ludo, that Master Grossmeyer inspires a little more confidence.’

Ludovic d’Harcourt didn’t reply. Chancellor said, ‘But the Voevoda has a son of his own, I understood?’ and was taken a little aback as they both turned and stared at him. Then d’Harcourt said, ‘Yes. In England. He has a wife also. I gather they weigh equally on his conscience.’

They passed under a bower of branches, false-lit like a delicate woodcut by the riming of snow from the north. Bushes fled past them; beaded trusses of white; furred spokes of wood; and the veiled trees in the white distance almost hid the white-grey pile of a great house. Lights glimmered.

‘All this is the Voevoda’s?’ Chancellor asked.

‘It belongs, tax-free, to him and his mistress,’ said Lancelot Plummer. ‘So do the townships of his pomestie, his military fief. Also all the meadow and pastureland on both sides of the Moscow, and the rent of the bath stoves and bathing houses outside the walls of the
city. His annual income is hard to keep track of, but I imagine fifteen thousand roubles would safely cover it.… We designed the gardens on the lines of the Queen Dowager’s at Binche, but had to take the statues inside in November because of the cold. We have marble rockeries and scented fountains, and flowers of silver and coral, with artificial showers and lightning. It would be a perfect showplace, if anyone ever came who could appreciate it.’

‘Does the Tsar visit him?’ Chancellor said.

‘The Tsaritsa has been here,’ said Plummer. The sledge was sweeping round to a halt before the dusky mass of a house, built like quartz, crystal on grey crystal, with the leaves and towers and cupolas of its rooftops like a worn flowerhead crowding the sky. A long, canopied staircase, cascading down the tiers of the building, ended in wrought copper gates between which stood the elegant, fair-haired person of their host. The grooms jumped from the sledge and drew the rugs to one side.