The Ringed Castle (40 page)

After a few weeks he had asked for, and received, the boy Venceslas as his servant again.

Chancellor had seen nothing. But not because there was nothing to see.

The morning before the Feast of Epiphany, the people of Moscow took chalk and marked their doors and windows with crosses, lest the devils conjured out of the water should fly next day into their homes.

At four o’clock on the morning of Epiphany the Tsar rose as usual, and as usual was attended on rising by Francis Crawford, waiting silently through the prostrate devotions
(Help me, O Lord my God; Lord comfort me, defend and keep me, a sinner, from doing evil …
). Later, crowned with the shapka monomach and bearing on his wide shoulders the burden of a robe woven of jewel-encased metal, he sent to ask after the health of his wife and met her, briefly, in the middle chambers to salute her before walking slowly, his fingers sunk in the Voevoda’s steady shoulder, to meet his courtiers and lead the stately procession through the Sacred Vestibule and down the Red Staircase into the torchlit darkness of the Cathedral Square.

There he crossed the garlanded bridge erected over the packed snow between the Granitovaya Palace and the Uspenski Cathedral, where the Metropolitan and his clergy awaited him, their breath white in the air; their shadows stepped down over the bright snowy ground, while light and incense and the deeply choired notes of the liturgy filled the tall painted spaces behind them, glimmering with their ranked enrichments of gold.

During the service, Lymond waited outside with all his officers and the Streltsi, drawn up in columns, their arms gilded, between the bridge and the people lining the square in the darkness. Distantly through the closed doors came the drone of the readings: the Athanius Creed; the Ten Commandments; the chanting voice of the Metropolitan; the singing voice of a priest; the psalm, with its tenfold Alleluias. A chant began: six syllables repeated over and over by priests and congregation alike. Behind Lymond, Alec Guthrie said quietly, ‘What’s that?’

Lymond said,
‘Lord have mercy on us
. The boys will answer thirty times, very fast, with the single word
Praise
. Listen.’

High-pitched and staccato, the sounds rattled dimly behind the towering walls, half drowned by the murmur of the crowds waiting outside. Behind the bell-tower there was an almost insensible lightening in the sky. It was approaching nine in the morning, and despite the faint clustered warmth of the square, the bones of the face ached with the cold. Ludovic d’Harcourt said, ‘They say the Tsar’s mother was Catholic. They say the priests are all quite unlearned and never
preach, except for admonitions twice yearly against treason and rebellion and malice, and to remind about fasts and duties and vows. They say they do almost nothing but read the scriptures, and sing the liturgy, and administer the sacraments, and deck the ikons for church ceremonials. They barely know the Pater Noster, they say, or the Belief, or the Commandments. They say the priests are permitted to marry, and that abbots are drunken and slothful and worldly, and they talk of young boys in the nunneries.…’

Lymond said, his voice murmuring, ‘You sound surprised. The abuses are those the late King Henry complained of in England. And in England, unless they have burned him, the Primate himself has entered the holy condition of matrimony. The difference is that here the monasteries still flourish, levying their own taxes, making their own major investments, producing and storing their liquor. The Metropolitan’s annual income is three thousand roubles while the Archbishops earn two and a half thousand and the bishops are worth a thousand apiece. By courtesy of the Tsar, it is a rich church in a destitute nation.’

‘Living on superstition,’ said Adam Blacklock. ‘They have plenty of privileges, but what duties do they perform? The Troitsa will give hospitality to the Tsar and his courtiers, but the poor are barely allowed to enter its doors.’

‘The Tsar has given sanction for church schools to be opened,’ Guthrie said.

‘The Tsar gave sanction for printing presses to publish the liturgies,’ Adam said through his teeth. ‘And what happened? The presses were burned overnight. By the clergy.’

‘Has it been proved?’ Lymond said.

‘Have the new schools so much as opened their doors?’ Adam shot back. ‘And d’Harcourt is right. This sacred orthodoxy, on the distaff side, is hardly one generation old. Elena Glinskaya was a civilized woman brought up in Lithuania.’

‘The Tsar’s grandmother was an equally civilized woman, brought up as a ward of the Pope,’ Lymond said. ‘Unhappily, you are dealing with the only surviving independent Greek Orthodox state, and a culture wholly intolerant of gynarchy. They don’t know what they are missing.… It is nearly time, gentlemen.’

Guthrie had already moved to give orders. When the bells rolled in the dark over their heads and the Cathedral doors burst open, casting golden light from end to end of the square, the Streltsi were already deployed and waiting, the horses saddled; the ornate, gilded sleigh standing awaiting the Tsar. Then the mile-long procession wound, singing, down the steps and set off through the Kremlin and downhill by the houses of Kitaigorod, to hold the
Kreshenea
of the River Moskva, and hallow the water.

The five Englishmen and one boy had already arrived, and stood, protected by soldiers, in the forefront of the jumping, hand-flapping crowd waiting there on the river-ice in the dark. People jumped because they were cold, and their torches, whirling sparks in the air, gave off stinking smoke and a flickering manic light which touched the greased furs and the broken-backed hats and the broad, heavy faces, sallow with winters of thick, stove-heated air. There were children, and somewhere Chancellor glimpsed a grown man being carried. And women by the hundred: the discreet embargoes of the courtier did not seem to apply to the peasant. Hundreds of women, some with babies; most with some sort of vessel: an earthenware pot, or a pail of leather or wood clutched in their powerful arms.

Where the market was held, they had cut a square twenty-foot hole in the ice, lined and edged with white boards, and had set a staging beside it, on which the Metropolitan’s tall gilded chair had been erected. Beside it, lit from within, was a small, spired pavilion of mica, with a chair and footstool inside for the Tsar, and the household guard, in white fur and velvet standing around it. Beyond the guard were the Streltsi, forming a double line on the ice as far as the Beklemishevskaya Tower, at the south-east point of the red Kremlin wall, round which the procession was coming. Soon after the bells of the Kremlin rang out, the Englishmen could hear a rumour of noise from the city and presently, over the dark mass of heads on the ice, a moving river of fire as, led by tapers and lantern, the banners came, of St Michael and Our Lady, floating crimson and blue in the dark; and then the great silver-gilt cross, bright as drawn-wire on the tender tinged clouds farther east. Behind, in books of gold as transparent and thin as the mica, you could see marching the frames of the ikons.

By the time the processions had come: the hundred robed priests of Moscow, two by two with their copes and their shining panagias; the monks and abbots and friars; the six Bishops of Riazan, Tver, Torshok, Kolemska, Vladimir and Susdal; the four Archbishops of Smolensk, Kazan, Pskov and Vologda, and the Metropolitan Makary himself, led between two priests in his gemmed mitre and cloth-of-gold cope, with the double gilt crozier with its wrought cross in his hand, the sky behind them had paled and lightened to almond. And as the Tsar moved to his seat, with his courtiers sparkling about him, the sun showed its vermilion rim beyond the river; beyond the dark bulk of houses and wall, and behind the tall crowded towers of the Kremlin.

Beside him, Diccon Chancellor saw his son’s face, and the grey, cold-drawn faces of Price and Killingworth, Best and Lane turn ruddy and shadowless, formal as a Book of Hours painting. Great as a city, the red sun rose higher.

The Tsar’s gold sabled crown burst into flame like a coal, his shoulders suddenly dazzling, and as the Metropolitan stepped slowly forward, his sakkos with its flat plated orphreys flashed like a mirror in firelight. A prayer began, and a soft, close-grained chanting behind it.

Chancellor and the others were silent, feeling the cold air no longer. As the light grew, and the singing, and the domed censers swung to and fro, clouding the dim ice with frankincense, the peopled landscape before him grew in line and deepening pigment, like a painting redeemed from its shadowy burial and alight with Russian colours: yellow, brown and blood-red. And Russian detail: a sloping shoulder; a pursed mouth; a squat hand outspread. And behind, dormer roofs unevenly drawn through the treetops. The snow stood sherbet-pink on the roofs, and among the burning domes of the Kremlin, Chancellor thought he saw a hastening angel in sandals, its head bent; its kneecaps sharp under the lines of its robe. Christopher said, ‘Father! You’re sleeping.’

The Devil was conjured out of the river. Salt was cast, and the cross dipped and shaken over the Tsar, who stood bareheaded to be thrice blessed, and kissed it. Then the Metropolitan, dipping his hand, cast the holy water in turn over the child Ivan and each of the princes, and Chancellor, roused and doubly alert, saw the Tsar stretch to draw someone else forward.

The fair hair was unmistakable, although at this distance he could not see the Voevoda’s face. Killingworth grunted. It seemed to Chancellor that the Metropolitan hesitated, and someone else spoke: a tonsured figure with a long, square-collared robe frogged and slit at the sides. Viscovatu. It was, he was sure, the Chief Clerk of the Council. Then the Tsar made an angry gesture, as if brushing something aside, and Viscovatu bowed, and Chancellor saw the spray of water, fine as dust over Lymond’s bent head.

Then it was over, and the Tsar withdrew to his tower of mica, and the Metropolitan to his throne and the guards, stepping back, let the people bring their young and their sick to the water.

The Tsar stayed only a short time afterwards, to see some Tartar men christened, and some boys jump naked into the water, and the first of the thousands fill their pots and their pails with the blessed water, to take home to worship. Afterwards, they would bring his horses to drink, and those of his chief courtiers, so that the virtues of the cold, hallowed river would be evenly spread. Some, given the icy draught on their sickbeds, would die of it. Some, thought Chancellor suddenly, overcome with a sense of inexplicable danger, would die of the hallowing, though they had not drunk the water. He said in Russian to the Pristaf, ‘I wish to speak to the Voevoda Bolshoia.’

An uncommunicative man, the Pristaf was not unfriendly, but a stickler for orders. He said, ‘You will see the Voevoda at the banquet.’

Chancellor said, ‘We go to the banquet this evening. I wish to speak to the Voevoda Bolshoia now.’

The Pristaf looked over the heads of the crowd, to the vacant seats by the thronged edge of the pool. ‘They have sleighs. They have gone. The Voevoda Bolshoia has gone with the Tsar.’

‘Then we should have sleighs also,’ said Chancellor sharply. ‘Are the Tsar’s guests treated like moujiks in Russia? Do we walk from the river?’

As until this moment he had been prepared to do exactly that, there was no sleigh already commanded for them, and it took the combined pressure of Robert Best’s Russian and Killingworth’s formidable beard to impress the Pristafs enough to discover one. Even so, they were not far behind the massive stepped sleigh of the Tsar, passing with its accompanying Streltsi between the prone ranks of his subjects. The Metropolitan was sitting with him, and his household staff, including Viscovatu, Chancellor saw, in the sledge running behind. The boyars followed, and the army officers on horseback, while the remaining Streltsi fell back, preparing to escort the re-forming procession on foot.

It was day. The torches had been put out, and the lanterns. The sun floating high above the bright golden clusters of cupolas lit the dazzling white stretch of the river, and the struggling crowd which filled it from bank to bank, hiding the sanctified chasm, and the long, richly robed file of churchmen moving slowly away, its banners held blowing and high.

Ahead, climbing the slope from the river, the Tsar’s sledge moved slowly between the bobbing, morioned heads of the Streltsi, and the horsemen behind, talking among themselves, were allowing their mounts to find their own footing. Coming close, as the crowds thinned out Chancellor saw a group of faces he knew: Adashev and the Tsar’s confessor Sylvester, with Prince Kurbsky and Sheremetev. Then Danny Hislop, with Blacklock and Plummer and the Knight of St John, Ludovic d’Harcourt. No sign of the eagle he hated so much: no sign of Lymond.

High on their left, the sky was cut off by the castellated red wall of the Kremlin, with the empty ditch at its foot. On their right, they passed a scattering of houses and small churches, bulbous as mushrooms. Ahead, almost on the crown of the hill, was the scaffolding of the new church of St Basil’s, with the snow almost empty between it and the double rank of soldiers marking the Frolovskaya Gate into the Kremlin. Behind them, a trembling of bells told that one or two sleighs had freed themselves also from the ceremony and were running back home. As for the rest, the whole of Moscow, it seemed, was still on the river. And then, at last, Chancellor saw the Voevoda, riding one-handed beside the leading, slow-running sleigh, his head bent as the Tsar leaned over, speaking to him. Someone shouted.

It was unusual. In Russia cheering was rare. One showed respect for one’s Tsar by sinking on the knees and knocking the forehead three times, with reverence, on the ground. To foreigners, you shouted,
‘Carluke!’
an expression which had puzzled the Englishmen for days until, blandly, their tolmatch had translated it for them as ‘Crane-legs’. Which, to the breeched and trousered Russians, is what they probably seemed.

But this was not a cry of contempt. It was a shout of pure horror, mixed with a sort of ragged disbelief, and, as it was repeated, Chancellor realized that it was a man’s name which was being called in the thin air, and that the sound had come from the group of horsemen ahead. Then one of them wheeled, and disregarding all rule and order and, forgetting apparently even the presence of the Tsar in the sleigh just ahead, flung his horse over the snow to the white waste in front of St Basil’s.