The Ringed Castle (39 page)

‘Yes,’ said Rob Best.

‘Leased at three thousand roubles a year, and the landlord daren’t throw out a drunk or he’ll be sued for spoiling his sovereign’s income.…’

Chancellor let him run on, with the sledge. They had been saved, by Hislop’s force and Fergie’s jovial implacability in argument. Their right to trade had been proved. Their innocence in the matter of the fire had been, if not proved, at least left in doubt. Killingworth’s mad disregard of the inspectors had been the only incontrovertible sin, and there had been a nasty possibility at first that the matter would be removed, as the law properly demanded, to the Tsar’s courts at Moscow.

He did not want that, and neither did Killingworth. There must be no trouble between themselves and the Tsar. Nor—what would almost be worse—should the Tsar be moved on their behalf to punish
the Novgorodians, and thereby end all hopes of peaceful trading with the city for good.

It was Fergie who had reduced the matter to a fine, to be paid on the spot; and it was Danny Hislop who, when the sum demanded proved to be stubbornly monstrous, suggested the common Russian alternative of duel by proxy.

They had argued all afternoon over that, choosing their champion, and then demanding Chancellor’s. Chancellor had wanted to do it himself. He had been warned against this practice, which admitted any form of attack, and any weapon save the gun or the bow. Short and stocky in build, he was no match in weight for these thick-built men with the powerful shoulders and arms. But he was fit, and fast, and had learned a few tricks at sea he had found useful, before now, in dark streets in alien harbours, and he was tired of life as a draper’s major-domo. But though he was vehement, and Christopher naively eager, and George Killingworth, in a dignified way, perfectly prepared to take issue on behalf of his rights, the matter was settled by Rob Best, who said simply, ‘I’m the biggest,’ and by Danny Hislop, who said immediately, ‘Right. Best it is.’

Which was the intelligent choice. For no sooner did the Novgorodians see Robert Best issue, stripped to the waist, to defend his Company’s rights in the courtroom, than they decided to cancel the fight and draw lots. Then, buffeted in the back by the swaying of half the citizens of Novgorod, held back neither by rail nor by bar, they had witnessed the name of the Company sealed in a round ball of wax, and the name of the Governor of Novgorod sealed in another.

Beside him, Chancellor knew, Fergie Hoddim was grinning. On his other side, Christopher had turned faintly green. Then the tallest man in the crowd was brought forward to hold the two balls high in the crown of his hat, while another stranger came forward on tiptoe, his arm stripped to the shoulder and stretching, picked out one moist lump of wax.

The judge broke the ball in his hands, and unfolded the stained scrap of paper.

It held the name of the Muscovy Company. They had carried their point, and the Company was held innocent of any malicious intentions towards the Governor and people of Novgorod.

The air had not been rent by cheering, and the thumping he received on his spine was not entirely that, Chancellor thought, of bonhomie, but no one knouted them either. Now, Moscow-bound with the sledges hissing in train through the snow, he said to Fergie Hoddim, ‘What was grand about it from your point of view, Hoddim? No disputation; no subtle by-play between the opposing lawyers. Merely a display of animal force displaced by an accident of fortune.’

‘Aye, well,’ said Fergie, who with Hislop had joined Chancellor and his son in the heavy, roofed sleigh for the homeward journey. ‘It was the subtle by-play, ye might say, that got ye the accident of fortune, not to mention the happy outcome of the process, confirmed under the white wax, so to speak. As to disputations,’ Fergie said, ‘ye need look no further than Daniel Hislop.’

‘You may be right,’ agreed Danny Hislop, pink bull terrier to Fergie’s lined bloodhound. ‘I lack Mr Hoddim’s profound faith in the powers of argument. I wanted to do something crude, like threaten somebody.’

‘No, no,’ said Mr Hoddim. ‘Threats? Bribes? Remeid of law should be open to a’body,
proponi in publicum
, without recourse to perversion. Public justice is sacred.’

‘What was in the second ball of wax?’ asked Diccon Chancellor.

Fergie Hoddim looked astonished. ‘The name of the Muscovy Company,’ he said, affronted. ‘A good lawyer leaves nothing to chance. The wax came from the store ye had just bought up yourselves, and at a better price, I may tell you, than if the Tsar had elected to commandeer it. Just so.’

Diccon Chancellor laughed suddenly. ‘Just so,’ he agreed. ‘Mr Hoddim, don’t you miss your compatriots? Rude of arts and ignorant of politics, they’re too simple for you here.’

Above the long, glossy moustaches, the hooded eyes cast him a shrewd look. ‘Simple, would you cry them? They knew just how far to go, to test your power and standing, and mine.’

‘Not yours, my dear innocent: the Voevoda’s,’ Hislop said. His pale eyes gleamed at the Chancellors, father and son. ‘You know he is a banner lord? Magnified, feared and beloved of all men. I hear you are considering a trip to the Lampozhnya Fair. I hope you will insist on his accompanying you. It will lengthen his life, I should think, by a couple of years.’

‘I don’t follow,’ Chancellor said.

Turning from Christopher’s open-eyed gaze, Hislop trained a bland eye on his father. ‘A man of rare endowments, the Voevoda,’ he said. ‘But in the north he need exercise fewer of them, perhaps. We inferior beings would also welcome a respite.’

‘Mr Crawford is a hard task-master?’ Chancellor said. ‘My son tells me that soon you will be able to put a hundred thousand well-furnished men into the field at forty days’ notice. In a country of this size, with such problems of climate and communications, and a people totally undrilled, I should have thought it quite a feat.’

‘Yes. Well,’ said Danny. ‘He has made sure there is one person we shall always fear more than the enemy. The atmosphere of lofty command can, however, be a trifle dispiriting. We do hope you will both go to Lampozhnya.’

Diccon Chancellor said suddenly, ‘What keeps you here? Mr Hoddim evaded the question. You are highly paid, I expect. Perhaps your commander has passed on his passion for power. But there seems to be no camaraderie. I have never heard one of you call the other by his Christian name. And no one, except perhaps Mr Crawford, could call the life easy. When the fighting is over, what can you do with your leisure? Where do you go for civilized conversation? What sport can you pursue but the coarsest, within the harshest extremes of the climate? What entertainment is there: where can you find books, or listen to music, or enjoy the pleasures of the table, and visit the homes of your friends?’

The pale, clever eyes glittered again. ‘Ah,’ said Danny. ‘You have a report to make to your superior.’

Chancellor made a sound of impatience. ‘I have. But you may also credit me with the normal instincts of friendship.’

‘And a nose, naturally, for the prevalent cult of Belial the Epicene,’ Danny said. ‘You have seen him at his house at Vorobiovo. I doubt if he is there, or at the Kremlin house more than two days a week, and sometimes not for a good many weeks at a time. It pains me to destroy the legend, but if he pursued a life of ease himself, I doubt if one of us would follow him.’

Chancellor said, ‘You still haven’t answered my question.’

‘No. Why are we here, Hoddim?’ said Hislop.

The tall brow ridged. ‘I’m damned if I know why you’re here,’ said Fergie candidly. ‘Why am I? The money’s good, and some day I’ll go home and spend it. I like fighting, and St Mary’s does that better than anyone else now in Europe. And I have a mind for the law, and a country where jurisdiction is just beginning to shake itself free of abuses, and has a use, maybe, for a trained mind in doing it. I never thought about it, but I suppose that’s why I’m here.’

‘You’re here because the land is virgin and you are an expert,’ said Danny crisply. ‘That’s why we’re all staying. Not only because we enjoy being superior soldiers. Plummer is spending all his spare time in a welter of bochki vaultings and wall systems. Guthrie visits a different lavra every week, unearthing ancient Greek scriptures like truffles. D’Harcourt is pursuing unfettered his God-given vocation to defend his sheep against the Mussulman wolf. And Blacklock, burning with artistic dedication, is teaching half the Ikonopisnaia Palata to oil-paint.…’

‘Half the——?’ said Fergie.

‘A slight exaggeration. Three pupils,’ said Danny cheerfully.

‘And you?’ said Diccon Chancellor.

‘You are, I suppose, right,’ said Danny Hislop. ‘There’s no conversation, except among ourselves: the princes aren’t going to hobnob with foreigners. There is no feminine company. The pleasures of
the great outdoors are strictly limited unless you care for massacres or for fishing, which I do admit is prodigious. Given a fine day, you might find a group of ladies having a gentle swing on a wheel in the meadow, but you are more likely to come across gangs of boys kicking each other freely to death. The less said about the winter the better. And as you say, there are no entertainments, short of church and court ceremonial, caterwauling, trials of strength and the indifferent jests by the Tsar’s team of paid buffoons.

‘… I think I am here for the same reason as Mr Crawford,’ said Danny reflectively. ‘To enjoy a condition of absolute superiority.… Isn’t that, after all, why you travel, Mr Chancellor? Why your friend Wyndham took combs and hatchets and nightcaps to the natives in Guinea: why Master Cabot returned so high-handed and generous from La Plata that he thought to bestow an island on his Genoese barber? Experts in a virgin land. What a world of confidence we may extract from it.’

‘I think,’ said Diccon Chancellor, ‘you underrate both us and yourselves.’

‘I know you think so,’ said Danny Hislop. ‘Wait, however. Wait until after Lampozhnya.’

It was then, Chancellor afterwards realized, that his decision was really taken to make the trip to Lampozhnya: the long, hard journey to the winter fair in the north, where men could see fire and ice on the same firebrand. And afterwards, also, he realized how much of that decision lay at the man Hislop’s door.

Returned, he told Killingworth, and, in Lymond’s absence, Alec Guthrie in the large house he and his fellows occupied when not out of Moscow. He had known Killingworth would easily be persuaded. He would take Christopher with him, and induce Richard Grey to leave the counting-house at Kholmogory. They needed train oil, and furs of a fresh killing. Why wait for them to come to Kholmogory, when one could buy them at Lampozhnya, straight off the sledge? Lane and Killingworth had their charter and the protection of the Voevoda’s establishment. They did not need his help to set up their warehouses and supervise the new house the Tsar was giving them at St Maxim’s, next to the Romanov palace.

These were drapers’ matters. He would travel north once again, conveying their cargo, calling on Hudson and Edwards and Sedgewick at Vologda; buying the Nassada and the two Doshniks perhaps on the way, which they would need on the Dwina in summer. He would renew his acquaintance with Nepeja.

Then, in February, he would come south to make his last call on the Tsar, and visit the merchants whose palms they had oiled so discreetly, and hold the final series of meetings with Lane and Price and Killingworth, and receive their reports and papers and the last
of the cargo, ready to leave for St Nicholas while the snow still made travelling easy. And soon after that, the ships would be there.

He wondered if he should be sorry, in the spring, to leave this cold and savage and curious land. By then, perhaps not. But first, he had a country to explore for his nation; and a man, for himself.

Francis Crawford returned to Moscow just before Christmas: Chancellor saw him at the Play of the Fiery Furnace outside the Uspenski Cathedral, when the angel slid down from the roof in a cloud of irresponsible wildfire, and rescued the three children of Judah, slightly singed, from the circle of jumping Chaldeans,

He saw him again, after the Metropolitan’s pageant, at the Christmas banquet given by the Tsar for his court and some three hundred guests. The display of plate and the cloth-of-gold gowns were the same, but this time there were singers, whose efforts he did not enjoy. The day afterwards, by invitation, he spent another evening with Lymond at his home at Vorobiovo.

It was as pleasant as before, and as unrevealing. The partnership between the Voevoda and his mistress seemed, as before, intelligent, skilful and courteous: Lymond expressed his satisfaction that Mr Chancellor wished to see something of the lands of the north. He said, as Güzel fingered her lute, ‘I cannot leave Moscow until after the
Kreshenea
, the hallowing of the water. That is held at Epiphany, and we might set out the following day, if you wish. If you tell me what goods you are taking, I shall arrange for the sledges and post-horses. You will need no other escort. Who else will go with you?’

‘I thought of Christopher,’ Chancellor said.

‘No,’ said Lymond. ‘It is not a journey for youths.’

Chancellor smiled. ‘You need have no fears for Christopher. He will stand the cold better than we shall. He has already made the journey with us from St Nicholas, after all.’

The fair brows lifted. For a moment Chancellor looked into a chasm of such chilly surprise that, experienced as he was, he felt his heart close with a blow.

‘… No,’ Lymond said, his face astonished, his tone one of utter finality.

Chancellor did not argue. And a moment later, Güzel changed the subject.

Later, after Chancellor had disappeared into the darkness: ‘Your spring campaign?’ Güzel said.

‘Guthrie will finish the training. I shall be back in Moscow by then,’ Lymond said.

She made no comment. Whatever his absences, they were his own affair, as was the conduct of her life her own in the interval. Only, when he was at home, he came to her when the day’s work was over, and stayed with her through evening and night until she slept,
brought to easement at last. When she woke, it was to find her bed her own, and herself her own woman again.