The Ringed Castle (43 page)

But Lymond, to his relief, did not attempt even a standard exchange of civilities, far less a discourse or an apologia. He merely remarked, in the same prosaic voice, ‘The mortifying quality of cold,’ and then abandoned communication, leaving Chancellor wondering, for an unlikely moment, if he had read his mind. He waited, and then, as nothing happened, spread his rug more comfortably over the floor, and stretched himself full length to sleep.

To a healthy, vigorous man in his thirties pursuing an open air life with a clear conscience and an active mind, this presented no problem.

An hour passed, during which sleep surprisingly avoided him. Chancellor turned, twice, and settled down with a sigh, once more, for his night’s rest. At the end of a further hour he was, to his annoyance, still fully awake.

So was Lymond. He discovered that, by a discreet glance, as he turned over yet again. The Voevoda was exactly as he had left him, his head resting against the wall, his body perfectly still, his face indistinguishable in the flickering candlelight. Only Chancellor could see the two points of flame, reflected in his dark, open eyes.

The next time he looked, the place was empty. Then the door behind him was pushed quietly open and Lymond came in, carrying in each hand a pewter tankard from which steam was rising. He
pressed the door shut, waited a moment, and then having made sure Chancellor was still awake, moved forward and placed one of the beakers beside him. It smelt of hot mead, with something else added of a distinctly alcoholic nature.

‘Drunk among the Scythian snows,’ Lymond said. ‘It is, sometimes, preferable to being sober.’

It was Candy wine. Chancellor sat up slowly.
To be drunk among the Scythian snows in their native purity and pleasantness
was what Richard Eden had written about Candy wines, in the Russian coda to his book he and Chancellor had worked on, before he left England. There was a copy in his baggage. He looked up.

‘I have a copy, too,’ Lymond said. ‘Sent me from Danzig.’ He took his place again by the opposite wall, and, resting his arms on his knees, cradled the tankard in his two ringless hands. Below his candlelit hair, his face was in shadow. ‘It seemed a mischievous waste, to chain that observing brain to Moscow. In any case, no doubt Eden is planning to collaborate on a sequel.’

‘That is why I am here?’ Chancellor said. He did not believe it.

‘You intended to come,’ Lymond said. ‘An irrelevant emotional crisis could not be allowed to prevent it. I am not saying it was unimportant. Only that it should not affect this experience.’

‘Ah,’ said Chancellor. ‘Trade. The chief pillar to a flourishing Commonwealth.’ He had taken a deep draught of the mixture and fire, human and reviving, again flowed through his veins. ‘The Tsar commands that the Muscovy Company should see the best furs and buy the cheapest train oil, and in all things be satisfied. Why, I wonder?’

‘The Tsar’s counsel is his own,’ said Lymond. ‘All I can tell you is that he is not responsible for your journey to Lampozhnya. And that I am beginning to be singularly weary of peddling.’

It struck, as it happened, a vibrating chord in Chancellor’s present mood, but he did not say so. He said, ‘It is a poor country. It needs trade, if only the Emperor would allow his people to benefit from it.’

Lymond said, ‘It needs trade. It needs miners and metallurgists, architects, doctors and apothecaries. It needs good roads and schools and universities and first-class local government and a decent drainage and irrigation system and a stock improvement process and well-made bridges and a unified tax system. And security.’

‘Beginning with security?’ Chancellor said.

‘Because it is needed most, yes. Because it will impress the Tsar most, yes. Because it will create the climate in which other reforms may be contemplated, yes.’

‘And because the Voevoda Bolshoia, as a result, will be the most wealthy and powerful man in Russia?’ Chancellor said. He had not intended to descend to personalities, and was not sure why he did so,
except perhaps to keep an articulate and beguiling tongue at a defensible distance.

There was a moment’s flash of total anger, abruptly destroyed. Lymond said, ‘My dear Master Chancellor. You appear to have closed the conversation, don’t you?’

Chancellor stared at him, his wits shocked awake. He said, ‘How can you complain? It is the impression you give without stint.’

It looked as if he would receive no reply. Lymond put down his tankard and, stretching his legs, tilted back his bare head so that the light rested on his face and the length of his throat. His eyes were closed. ‘I don’t complain,’ he said. ‘I merely try to fill time with an exchange of views on a subject I supposed common to us both. You receive the impression that I am personally ambitious. I receive the impression that you are a draper. We may both be right. I had not expected to quarrel about it this evening.’

Chancellor said, without removing his eyes, ‘I am paid by the Muscovy Company. And you are paid by the Tsar.’

Lymond looked at him. Astonishingly, the brittle, high-tempered face had altered again. ‘And what do you see when you stand at the wheel,’ he said, ‘and face all the liberality of the ocean? A bolt of fine violet at eighteen pounds six shillings and sixpence the piece?’

In his turn, Chancellor was looking into his tankard. ‘Cloth builds the vessel,’ he said. ‘And launches her; and pays for her crew.’

‘But you do not travel by cloth,’ Lymond said. ‘But by sea card and compass and star. I say again. That is why you are here, on your way to Lampozhnya. That is why you have exhausted every merchant in Muscovy with your questions: about Sarai and Urgendj; about Bokhara, Samarkand and Otran. You will travel with trinket and parchment, but you will have no patience for huckstering. Your eyes are on the Ob and the Euxinian Sea: your heart, Master Chancellor, is in Cambalu.’

‘You are pleased to be caustic,’ Chancellor said. ‘I am not a Mandeville. I am the servant of Sir Henry Sidney and Master Cabot. I have some aptitude for navigation and I have been trained for it, most rigorously. I am told where to go by the Company and I am taught how to go by John Dee and Dr Records and Digges. That is all.’

‘Herbestein came here as an ambassador,’ Lymond said. ‘And left his writings, as Ibn-Fodhlan did six hundred years ago. Priests travel, dispatched by the Pope to make their conversions. Marco Polo became a trader of such wealth he was known as Il Milione. Pilgrims travel, and colonists, to escape persecution, and men sent by their monarchs to collect rarities: manuscripts or animals or evidence of natural phenomena. There is always a reason, a primary reason to start with. But a man who faces such dangers as the unknown world
still
offers must have, within himself, another compulsion. An
agitation, as Nicolas de Nicolay would put it. Why should it not be spoken of?’

‘To fill an idle moment?’ Chancellor said. He refused the lead.

‘To learn,’ Lymond said. ‘We have cross-staffs and astrolabes at Vorobiovo. War means cannon, and cannon means a system of range-finding. Measurement is a basic science which we need for our forts and our buildings; map making is another, for our campaigns. Plummer and Blacklock are our experts: you know that; they have picked your brains often enough.’

‘And you would pick my brains also?’ Chancellor said. ‘Or do you have something to offer me?’ And again, before he could stop himself: ‘An appointment if Adam Blacklock should die?’

But this time there was no answering anger. His arms folded, Lymond waited a moment, and then said without moving, ‘I cannot discuss my disciplines with you. But it is all too recent, I gather, to make it possible to talk about anything else. It is a pity, because we may not meet after this expedition, and I understand perhaps better than you think.’

‘From a cataclysmic encounter with Nicolas de Nicolay?’ Chancellor said. He finished, obstinately, all that remained in his tankard.

The lines round Lymond’s mouth deepened for a moment. ‘His conversation, I agree, is entirely frivolous, but his mind is very admirable indeed. So are his charts. He became cosmographer to the King of France but he began, as I suppose you know, with a military career. Espionage and maps, I suppose, are natural bedfellows … John Elder, Edward Courtenay.… But that is by the way. Who else? De Villegagnon, who has gone to colonize Brazil, was a lawyer. I learned of Thevet from him and from Pierre Gilles, whom I met in Stamboul. Chesnau and Belon and Postel I heard of from d’Aramon, the French Ambassador to the Sublime Porte. Once, in Dieppe, I met Pierre Desceliers of the School of Hydrography, although not Ribault, who was in the Tower, I believe, at the time.

‘Rotz, too, was already in England. It was just after all the Huguenots had rushed over from France to the court of Henry VIII. They say there were more than sixty French pilots and mariners in his service at that time. And Spain and Portugal were dividing the unknown sphere between them while schoolmen in the Low Countries were studying and talking and publishing treatises on cosmography and in England there was nothing, except a few Bristol seamen. The fishing fleet sailed out to Iceland and fished off the banks of unknown country far to the west, but no one saw their charts or cared about them.

‘And then an English merchant living in Spain wrote to Henry VIII and suggested that Cathay might be reached by the route you have taken.’

‘It is very different in England now,’ Chancellor said.

‘Tell me about it,’ said Francis Crawford.

Later, Diccon Chancellor wondered how long he had been talking. He remembered beginning with John Dee, because he always began with John Dee, but then somehow much later he was arguing about Records’s Pathway of Knowledge and describing what Cabot had told him about the La Plata voyage and diverging from that to give his opinion on Rotz’s Differential Quadrant.

And later, also, he realized that what had occurred was not a monologue or an interrogation but an exchange, to more than a little degree, of ideas.

What they were discussing was not new to the Voevoda. He did know these men and had talked with them, and had read what they had written. Some of the questions he put had not occurred to Chancellor himself: much of the information he possessed about their ideas and their travels was novel. On a subject not his own, his experience and his interest together were enough to make, out of all expectation, a common ground between himself and Chancellor which had nothing to do with trading or warfare or, except indirectly, with Russia. He had said he understood something of the mind of a navigator, and this was true.

It was only when the little light they had started to fail that Chancellor realized that the night, once dreaded, was almost worn away without sleep; and that his body, neglected, was groaning with weariness. ‘The time!’ he said.

Channelled with sleeplessness the Voevoda’s eyes were clear still, and serene. ‘Where there is no cockerel, the camel crows at dawn,’ Lymond said. ‘There is still time to sleep. Aleksandre will awake you. And you must forgive me. I did not mean to inflict a white night upon you.’

‘It was, I think, worth the value of several dark ones,’ Chancellor said. He hesitated, wiser than he had once been. ‘Is it true what they say? That you mean to stay for your lifetime in Russia? Is it out of the question for you to return to your homeland?’

‘It
is
out of the question,’ Lymond said. ‘But not because of ambition. Like King Lewis of Hungary, who was immaturely born, came of age too soon and was immaturely married, my age is out of joint with my phenomenal destiny. I shall not go back.’

‘Do the thrones of Europe have no need for security?’ Chancellor asked.

‘No. I shall stay in Russia. I am too far away now from it all,’ Lymond said. ‘And if we are going to be metaphysical, I have no sea card, or compass, or star.’

In the silence that followed, sleep finally overcame Chancellor, and when he woke, the candles had guttered almost into darkness, and he
heard by the bustle that a new, sunless dawn had arrived, and it must be time to bestir himself. The Voevoda, he saw, had already gone.

Late that afternoon they ran into the scattered log town without walls called Kholmogory, and found Richard Grey snug in a large timber counting-house, pink cheeked and friendly and cheerful, and sporting a nascent grey beard thick as lichen. He was ready to travel. They spent a day loading and unloading chests and marking off invoices, and putting Killingworth’s precious goods into storage; then, making rendezvous again with the Voevoda, they joined their depleted sledges to his, and set off east for Pinega and Mezen. Grey, Chancellor was exasperated to see, was inclined to be respectful to the Voevoda, about whom he had heard: his eyelids fluttered every time Lymond spoke English, and Diccon gathered that he had not yet brought himself to believe that the Tsar’s Supreme Commander was not Russian. The only thing which seemed to worry him was Slata Baba.

Lymond, typically, exorcised his mistrust by flying the eagle at the first opportunity. After the first kill, a bloody one which brought her back to the lure, feet dripping and wings flapping like thunderclouds, Grey glowered, asked some belligerent questions and then surprised them, presently, by leashing her under direction, and putting her up later on, after a couple of hares. Then they had to stop, but a love affair, surprisingly, had been born, and he set himself the task of watching Slata Baba’s crop for her castings as tenderly, said Chancellor uncharitably, as a capon with another man’s egg.

Lymond grinned and then soared away, like the eagle, on his artach, which moved Chancellor to further complaint for, although he was learning, he had not yet attained the Voevoda’s undoubted competence.

But Diccon Chancellor’s sarcasm was a defence, for here, outside all probability, had come upon him something unlooked for and rare; something he had experienced only a handful of times since Christopher’s mother had died: which was the reason, although he would have told no one, for his adventuring.

They had left the horses behind. From Kholmogory to Lampozhnya their sledges were pulled by relays of reindeer, which could run post with an unloaded sleigh for two hundred miles in twenty-four hours without sleeping, and then, unyoked, return loose to their station. Who ran loose, herded by terriers. Who ran in herds of two hundred, each with its train of pack-sledges, made fast to one another. Reindeer blew like leaves across the white, blinding bowl of the landscape. The eye read them as script on a book-roll: the stretched neck, the tined bones of the antlers, the powerful, thick-pelted body; the long slurring stride with its snapping click as the cloven hooves met.