The Ringed Castle (46 page)

The animal pulling him, whip-cracking or not, had settled down to its gait, and although God knew it was as fast as he ever wanted to travel again, it was not fast enough. Diccon Chancellor, a decent and clear-thinking man, lifted the iron-shod stick in his hand, and jabbed the powerful, hairy beast in its haunches. The deer bucked and the sledge skidded, jumping and rocking; touched another and swung
back once and then twice like a leadline; and finally shot forward, throwing him clean off his balance, and continued to race forward, as the reindeer took to his heels.

Chancellor lunged for the reins. His stick was gone. His ribs felt bruised on one side where he had fallen. He was aware of that not at all. His gaze was painfully ahead, at the dark huddle of sledges even now skimming up to the spina, a flash of white which was the Voevoda among them. He would never overtake them but sooner than he had hoped—in seconds—he would be face to face with them, and able to give Lymond his warning. A warning which now, half-way through the race began to seem faintly silly. A warning he might have killed himself just now in a feverish endeavour to give, when of course the whole notion was fantasy. Chancellor’s mind, at last taking control over his imagination, caused his grip of the taut reins to slacken, although the deer, alarmed and resentful, still galloped on.

And in that moment, high, unseen above that vast yellow moon, Slata Baba swept hunting down.

They did not know until later how hungry she was: how for days her food had been stinted. Or how angry; thrown from an inexpert fist from the dark lee of a shed on the island to rise one, two, three hundred feet into the moonbright searing cold of the night and hang, looking down at the white, frozen river, and the animals which fled across it, thick, long-legged and ungainly, their rhizomed shadows flowing beside them.

Deer. Her prey and her quarry, which she alone of the hunting birds had the power to attack; whose blood she would taste and whose flesh she would tear until the beast stumbled and fell and her master would come with his knife and throw her her portion. She picked the victim she wanted among the bunched animals in the front of the concourse, banked a little, her wings half open and rigid, and then, her talons cupped, fell like a knife.

In the last moments of her fall Lymond saw her and, shouting, swept his stick in the air. Had she been aiming for his deer, he might have diverted her. But she was not. As the men racing beside him glanced round there was a long, echoing hoot, followed by a chain of high, panting squeals mixed with a hissing and something else, like the sound of a cloak thrown about by the wind. The antlered head of the deer next to Lymond’s was invested with a demoniac presence, dark and vengeful as the Stymphalian Bird with wings, beak and claws of iron; piercing eye and brain with its spears; sucking out sense, air and life with the bat of its murderous pinions.

The deer screamed, tossing its head, bowed with the terrible weight and twisting, ran maddened straight across the course of the oncoming sledges. As it did so its own sledge overturned, throwing the Lapp it was carrying under the oncoming hooves. The sledge jumped,
freed of its weight; cracking against the stamping legs round about it; throwing them off balance in turn while the reindeer, grunting and mewing, ran jarring directly into another beast’s shoulder.

The shock of it dislodged the eagle. As its victim crashed back sinking, and the other deer, thrown off balance, skidded and fell, taking the turning sledge with it, Slata Baba flapped the eight-foot spread of her wings among the shying, scattering animals, the sharp, golden head jerking, and heard at last the voice of her master.

Driving one-handed, wildly tipping; jostled among the frantic bodies around him, Lymond had been calling from the start, his free arm high, his reins forcing the deer inwards, away from escape and towards the plunging centre of the still-moving morass of sledges and bodies. Three sledges broke from it and fled upriver, their drivers shouting, their reindeer crazily galloping. The eagle, baulked and malevolently angry, rose a little higher and considered the upraised arm she knew, without the lure to which she was accustomed. With deliberation, she took three, steady flaps of her towering wings; and flew straight at Lymond.

Chancellor saw it. He had cast the lure as Slata Baba made her first swoop; but he was too far behind; and with living flesh underneath her, the eagle ignored it, if she saw it at all. After that, he had found it hard enough merely to force the sledge closer to the wild, slithering concourse ahead. The
pulkha
trembled with the battle between himself and his terrified animal. Bearing his whole weight on the reins, he kept it running, wider and wider from the dark mass in front of him. He saw the three sledges break free and run straight ahead, out of control. He saw Slata Baba lift, pause and then suddenly fly towards Lymond, while Lymond’s deer, flinching and swerving, turned against his one-handed grip and set on a new, panicked course sideways, towards Chancellor, alone far to its left. His own deer turned, against all the aching, ebbing strength of his arm and fled for the bank of the river as Slata Baba braked and closed on her landing-place.

The black talons, the muscular legs breeched with feathers, struck Lymond’s head, and sinking down, closed on his shoulder and arm. A foot lifted, clogged with deer blood and flesh and a gouging of fur from his coat and he dropped the reins, speaking to her, his gloved left hand up and protecting his face while his right stayed outstretched, a path for her to walk down to her proper place, where the hooked, scissored beak might look outwards, and the slashing talons might settle six inches, a foot farther off from his head and his eyes.

With vindictive perversity, she stayed where she was. She flapped her wings once, bearing hard on his shoulder and then, leaving them loose in great eaves over her gold-ruffled hackles, she felt for and gripped the lower part of the thick of his arm with her free claw. As the sledge rocked and the deer careered blindly on, behind and
parallel with Chancellor’s, Lymond stayed very still, balancing, and bracing his gloved hand at his hip, held her steady. Chancellor, his left arm nearly dragged from its socket, picked up the lure with his other and flung it.

The eagle turned, glared and rose. Chancellor’s deer gave a great swerve, pulling the reins out of his hand and sending the sledge slurring towards the high snowy bank of the river. He saw Slata Baba pin the chipped lure in the air, and Lymond’s sledge turn on its side as his frightened deer bucked and stumbled, its feet trapped in the reins. He did not see Lymond thrown out because his own sleigh struck the bank at that moment, and crumpled, soft as the skin of a hare, and flung him straight into the glittering pile of ice blocks and snow and sheared glacial debris. There was a violent coloured explosion inside his head, and his mind ceased to function.

He woke on Lymond’s mattress, back in the hut, with Grey, unevenly flushed, kneeling on the floor by his pillow. Behind, his two aides moved purposefully backwards and forwards with steaming kettles and handfuls of cotton: he could see the backs of two soldiers pressed against the window, outside which there appeared to be a great many people, incomprehensibly talking. His shoulder ached, and he felt very sore. He saw that the hand holding a cup under his nose for the second time belonged to the Voevoda, sitting with composure beside him.

Anger, deep, shaking and resentful swept over him, recalling all the resentment of the Troitsa. ‘Only a bloody, arrogant bastard,’ said Richard Chancellor, ‘would choose a born killer to cut a bloody, arrogant figure with.’

The cup remained. Lymond said coolly, ‘Who freed her?’

Grey said, ‘I was asleep. I didn’t see anybody. I was asleep until you woke me just now.’

Lymond repeated, without turning, what he had said. ‘Who freed her?’ He was still in his torn furs, spattered with deer blood. A scarlet handkerchief had been stuffed inside his coat, to one side of his neck.

Chancellor took the cup and sat up. His shoulder was wrenched, and his ribs hurt, and two fingers of his left hand were swollen and reddened. His head throbbed. He said, ‘There was no one in the house when we came back from drinking. Grey fell asleep right away, and no one came in until the captain came and told us about the race. I found the eagle gone then, and the jesses and chain.’

Lymond said, ‘I have sent someone to look for them, on the shore where we first saw the eagle. A faint hope. They will be safe in someone’s cabin by now.’

Grey, willing but not yet quite awake, said, ‘Would she not simply slip the thong from the swivel and fly out?’

Chancellor stared at him with equal dislike. ‘And take her hood?’ he suggested. ‘Anyway, she had no jesses on her. No. Someone must have taken her when we were out drinking. Someone with a right to come in, or a key, or access to a key.’

‘The two men behind us came in,’ Lymond said. He was speaking in English, extremely clearly: it suddenly penetrated Chancellor’s senses that he was in a towering rage: and that this harsh, level tone was a mark of the force he was at this moment using to control it. Lymond added, ‘They say they were called out later by Konstantin, but locked and barred the front door behind them. Konstantin had a key. So had
Aleksandre. Master Grey was here alone before you, Chancellor, came. Any one of the soldiers may have stolen and replaced one of the keys. They will all be questioned, when they are sober enough to be frightened. Meantime the field, unfortunately, is extremely wide open.’

So were Grey’s bloodshot eyes. He said incredulously, ‘Seriously? Do you seriously think it would cross my mind to walk back there and free your damned bird? Someone stole it. Someone freed it. Someone maybe doesn’t like you or it. Diccon was right. The fault for those deaths on the ice was three-quarters your own for having her with you.’

Lymond had stopped listening to him. He said, staring at Chancellor, ‘The ironic thing is that I suspected that race from the start. I tested every inch of the reins and had a look at the shafts and the terrets. But it wasn’t the sledge he had tampered with.’

So, against all appearances, he had taken seriously after all the warning Chancellor had been instructed to convey to him. Not excluding even Grey from his suspects. Too seriously to be perfectly rational on the subject, perhaps. Probably few people could be called rational, once they had been warned that their lives were in danger. Chancellor said, ‘There are less devious ways, equally secret. Such as poison.’

‘Except that I would have discovered it. Over the years,’ Lymond said, ‘a great many people have persuaded themselves that the world would be a brighter place if I were not in it. When I am given a warning, I never ignore it. Besides, this is the third attempt since Kholmogory.’

‘The …?’ said Chancellor. Someone had brought hot water and, displacing Grey at his side, was unlacing his shirt prior to pulling it off. He wondered if he had put out his shoulder, and decided that he probably had, and someone had wrenched it back into place, none too gently. The door rattled, and Grey went to open it.

The young Russian lieutenant Konstantin came in, his unbandaged hand holding a fragment of blue which he laid on the mattress. It was Slata Baba’s hood.

‘Where?’ said Lymond.

‘In the trampled snow between huts, a little upriver from where the eagle attacked you. There was nothing else there: it was the footsteps and sledge marks on the new snow which guided us. It lay in the moonlight.’

‘So careless?’ said Chancellor.

‘The spheres move,’ Lymond said. He was still looking at Konstantin. ‘Nothing else?’

Konstantin said, ‘Only stains. Some small stains of fresh blood on the snow.’

Richard Grey, his face shocked, had said nothing since the conversation had taken this murderous turn. Now, hesitating, he offered, ‘A lure? Some meat offered the eagle?’ And then as no one answered, took confused thought himself. ‘No. Not if they wished her to hunt.’

Lymond was still looking at Konstantin. ‘Not meat,’ he said. ‘But flesh. We want a man who is bloody, as any novice handling Slata Baba would be bloody. Strip. Strip to the waist. Coat, waistcoat, tunic and shirt. Unwind your bandage.’

The lieutenant was white. He said, standing upright, ‘I was here. I called the Boyar Chancellor. I could not have taken the eagle so far off in time.’

‘You might have taken her there. You might have paid an accomplice to fly her,’ Lymond said. ‘Strip. And you, Master Grey. And every other man in this hut.’

Grey jumped to his feet.

‘Do it,’ Chancellor said. ‘He is the Voevoda Bolshoia. Perhaps he will think I am stripped enough.’

The prick brought no recognition. Nor did the promptitude with which he was obeyed. Grey, the serving men and Konstantin were all without blemish, save for the dead flesh in Konstantin’s fingers. Grey had begun to rewind the bandage for him when Lymond said, ‘I want each of the soldiers stripped and examined, one by one. And Aleksandre brought here at once. Where is he?’

‘Outside,’ said the lieutenant. ‘There is a Samoyed Shaman with him who has been asking to see you. The tolmatch says that two of his tribe ran in the race.’

Lymond said briefly, ‘That has been dealt with. The Tsar accepts the blame, and the Tsar will be generous.’

Konstantin said, ‘He still wants to see you.’

‘Later, then. Call in Aleksandre.’

He came in; a short and burly young man, the deftest and most intelligent of all the new Streltsi Danny Hislop had trained. He said, ‘My lord——’ and stopped against the unyielding wall of Lymond’s face. Lymond said, ‘We are endeavouring to reach the truth; always a tedious proceeding. You will humour us by baring the sprain you received in the tavern tonight.’

The lieutenant looked at nothing, and the captain did not glance at him, but flushed in an angry awareness of his audience. ‘I, my lord?’

Lymond said dryly, ‘You are not alone in your predicament. Every other man in this room has also obliged. Unwind the bandage.’

The fur coat came off, with stiff obedience. The narrow sleeve underneath was rolled up, with some trouble. The bandage, unwound, revealed a bloated patch, red and misshapen, on the upper part of the wrist. There was no doubt that it was a severe sprain, and painful.