The Ringed Castle (49 page)

The Golden Horde had gone, but Russia still bled from the Tartars. In the Tartar wars under the Grand Duke Dmitri, they said, the ground for thirteen miles was covered with dead. When the Khan of the Tartars took Moscow, the dead were redeemed for burial at eighty bodies a rouble. Kazan had been overthrown, Astrakhan was almost subjugated: only the Crimean Tartars remained, vassals of the Turks and supported by them, selling them their Christian children, and depending on their Janissaries to defend them from Lithuanian and Russian alike.

The Tsar, who had accorded the English Company the privilege of sending one observer, had made it clear that the hour had not come
to send the full might of his army across the steppes south. This was a foray, a reconnaissance, a warning. But when the time came, a hundred thousand Russians would march rejoicing over the plains, and sweep the impious heathen into the sea.

George Killingworth, having no wish
to
find himself or his worsted on a stone stall in Caffa, thought it an excellent plan and without hesitation nominated Rob Best to be the Company’s representative with the Voevoda. Rob Best himself was not at all sorry. Of them all, he had the least share in setting up this outpost. His role as the most fluent Russian speaker was to collect information and take it back in the summer to London. He would not be needed at St Nicholas until May or June at the earliest. The fact that the Robert Best who returned was not at all the same as the vigorous and uncomplicated man who set out was hardly the fault of either himself or the Company.

Considering the time of year, it was a campaign of astonishing celerity. They left Moscow at last on the far edge of the winter. Already the market was vacating the Moskva and soon the breaking-up of the ice would be signalled, here and from river-forts everywhere, by the warning explosion of cannon. The rivers, rising swiftly, would bring down not only floes but logs and houses and cattle, and the streets of Moscow would be filled with labourers, axing ice and throwing it into the water.

A month later, and they could have travelled by water. Now, it was just possible to put their transport on runners, and, as the army advanced, Best was to see the runners give way to wheels over brushwood, and later to a flotilla of flat-bottomed river boats, with skin sails and leather thong ropes and a stone for an anchor, which awaited with Cossacks to guide them.

By then, it was becoming clear how much of this army was composed of Cossacks. All round the south borders of Moscow ran the chain of Ukrainy—the Riazan, the Tula, the Putivl and Severian frontiers whose Cossack settlements, part Russian, part Tartar, defended the Tsar. Companies of these were with the army when it set out; later another, of Putivl Cossacks, joined them under the Diak Rzhevsky; and later still a band of Cossacks under their own captain who were not from the Ukrainy settlements, but from the free Cossacks, the bands who owned no masters but pioneered into the steppes, hunting and fishing in company with seine and net, and selling their catch in Kiev.

Violent and playful, they crowded the campfires at night in the stopping-places selected with such care, so that the grazing horses were protected by bluff or wood or marsh or barricade of telegas, and the pavilions of the commander and his officers were as strategically placed to control the hard-trained Russian companies lying between them. The men, as was their tradition, slept in the open, in shelters
made of bent boughs covered with their own cloaks to protect themselves, their saddles and weapons. Their food, Best saw, was a departure from tradition: from the lump of dough mixed with water and pork meal, the Dutch-like dried fish and bacon, the onions and garlic carried or filched by each man for his food. The carts making up this pilgrimage contained not only hackbuts and cannon and slow-matches and powder, ladders and wheels and logs and the wherewithal to build shelters or stockades as needed. The Voevoda Bolshoia for the first time had brought food for his army, as well as for his officers.

Rob Best wondered, but could not find out, if the Tsar and his Chosen were aware of it. Fill a lazy man’s belly; give a life of plenty to a man who has known nothing but the most extreme hardship, and will such a man fight? If he is sated, why should he throw himself upon the brown, harsh-fleeced sheep of the Tartars? Why should he risk his life to shorten a war and dispatch himself all the sooner back to home and bare platters?

Applied to, Danny Hislop merely said, ‘My dear Best. It has been thought of. Everything has been thought of, by Wei-t’o, chief of the Thirty-two Heavenly Generals.’

And that was, Robert Best was prepared to believe, no more than the truth. He had watched the man Lymond leave for the north after the thrashing of Blacklock, and had waited, as predicted by Danny, for the slackening of the reins, a simple human reaction to the despotic personal rule of the winter; to the outrage of that scene at the Kremlin.

Instead he saw nothing except, possibly, a brighter glitter on the troops at Vorobievo; a still greater order and smoothness in the exercise of their professional duties. And at Kitaigorod, the officers too were active and silent.

Turned in upon itself in some curious way, the Company found no release in discussing Lymond either with Best or, so far as he could gather, among themselves. The act for which Adam Blacklock had been flogged was disobedience: disobedience to an order already given and already secretly flouted, which offended the nation upon whose bounty they were living, and placed at risk the employment and freedom of every one of his fellows. This much, briefly, Alec Guthrie was prevailed upon to convey.

Adam Blacklock himself had apparently neither sought nor avoided Lymond’s company since his return: their relationship on the present campaign was uneventfully formal, as was indeed Lymond’s relationship with all his staff:
in St Mary’s we prefer to use surnames
. Thinner perhaps, Blacklock went about his duties, carrying the red scar of the whip on his face, but with no other visible trace of his punishment, and Hislop and Hoddim, d’Harcourt and Plummer
and Guthrie performed their offices also with cold and steady distinction.

It was their training, Robert Best realized. In place of emotion, their leader had given them intellectual pride: a pride in themselves and their work not far short of arrogance. And pride, too, was what upheld this whole assorted army of untutored stock, and left them untouched by the flamboyant excesses of their Cossack allies, and made the Cossacks eye them sideways in the midst of their bluster: the hideous Cossacks, with the shaved heads and topknots under the tall sheepskin hats, the greasy moustaches, the shapeless skins tied round the waist, the breeches stuffed into the heavy sewn boots.

They were given food with moderation, and drink, with economy; and Lymond’s casual, carrying voice cut into the obscenity round one camp fire and then another with a phrase, a story, a riddle that made them slap their knees and shout belching with laughter. The aide at his side carried both a mace and a knout, and on the same round a man caught stealing another man’s saddle was flogged on the spot, and a man who spoke lightly of the Tsar had his arm broken. At which, Robert Best noted, Russians and Cossacks alike rolled and laughed even more, their faces grinning at Lymond. A man born to lead men. A man of no gentleness, whose mistress had slept in the bed of the Turk.

East of Kanev they had their first clash with Tartars: a reconnaissance party routed and killed to a man, while the scouts moved to and fro, skilfully tracing the main body of Tartars. For two nights, no camp fires were allowed, and they ate food kept warm in straw while the enemy was located and their number assessed. Robert Best, forbidden under pain of expulsion to take part in the fighting, questioned Ludovic d’Harcourt, who was brief and not particularly explicit. ‘It’s a fairly large raiding party, based on a
yurt
, we think, within twenty miles’ radius. Not Devlet Girey’s advance troops from Ochakov. We don’t want to lose men, and we want to make as deep an impression as possible, Voevoda’s orders. So we are resorting to trickery.’

Deceit, the Tartars’ traditional weapon. Once, by pretending to attack Russia in Lithuanian dress, a company of Tartars under the Circassian leader Tascovitz had induced the Russians to lay waste in revenge a great tract of Lithuanian land, and on their return triumphant, the Russians had been ambushed and killed to a man by the Tartars.

Lymond’s method, Best afterwards learned, was simpler by far. A squadron of fast horse, in the tall hats and long dress of merchants showed themselves, briefly to the enemy’s outposts, and then apparently taking fright, fled to the north, leaving their laden carts stranded behind them. In the carts, packed still in half-melted ice, was a sacrificial offering of part of the army’s provisions: mutton, poultry;
carcasses of stiff, watery beef. That night, deployed with muffled harness on either side of the Tartar encampment, the Voevoda’s army swept in on the gorged and slumbering men and overran them with the loss of scarcely a man. No prisoners were taken.

Best saw the booty come back: the fence coats and hooked Persian swords; the cloaks of white felt which was so different from English cloth; which could keep armour from rusting and lock, piece and match dry in the Russian climate. And the droves of tough, short-necked horses which could live on roots and birch-bark and branches, with their wooden stirrups and saddles, and leaves for a horsecloth.

It has been thought of
, Danny Hislop had said, when he had questioned the wisdom of lavishing food on this army. And Best realized that this had been thought of as well. That, at the turn of the season, the Tartar who quenched his thirst with fermented mares’ milk and the blood cut warm from the veins of his horses; who thought horse-head as great a delicacy, they said, as boar’s head in England, would be hungry from a long winter’s deprivation, during which a man might travel four days and nights without food, and think it nothing out of the way. And that, given food, he would eat his fill and the worth of four days, as an insurance.

That night the fires burned brightly and food was plentiful and hot. And next day they crossed the steppes, riders and sumpter horses, like dancers, to the sound of trumpet and schawm and the thud of the little brass saddle drums until, mysteriously to Rob Best, the order came to draw up and stand, and they did so, under a clear, warming sky with the flag of St George reeling and clapping lazily over them, while another flag appeared far on the horizon, and another company of men, smaller it seemed than their own, came advancing over the melting snow of the grasslands towards them.

Best glanced at Daniel Hislop, mounted beside him. ‘Baida. Prince Dmitri Ivanovich Vishnevetsky,’ Hislop said. ‘Starosta of Kanev and Cherkassy, with five thousand Cossacks. Our scouts encountered his yesterday evening.’

‘I thought,’ said Robert Best, ‘that the Grand Duke of Lithuania was very far from a friend of the Tsar’s?’

Danny Hislop glanced airily round him. Of them all, perhaps, he looked least like a hardened campaigner, although he wore, like his fellows, the furlined coat and chain mail over his padded silk tunic, and the shining spired helmet with its neck-curtain of rings. He said, ‘On the other hand, news takes rather a long time to travel from Cherkassy to Vilna. I rather fancy that by the time the Grand Duke hears that his Starosta has been in action, it will be too late to do much about it. Or Prince Dmitri may simply mention a productive joint action with the Putivl Cossacks. I hope you note,’ Hislop said, ‘that
we are going to endless discomfort in order to mortify the allies of Turkey. The Queen, poor thing, should be pleased.’

‘The Queen?’ said Robert Best, with fairly artistic confusion.

Danny Hislop surveyed him. ‘Well, my God, that’s why you are here; why else did you imagine? To keep our dear Voevoda company?’

‘Well, he’s got company now,’ said Robert Best. Waves of song, half drowned by whooping and shouting, the banging of drums and the rumbling of thousands of soft, unshod hooves reached them from the streaming mass now advancing towards them. They heard a shouted command, and a single horse moved from the line as the rest slowed and stopped; a horse whose trappings were gilded leather glinting with jewellery, and whose high saddle was plated with deep beaten silver and dressed with a horse cloth, somewhat splashed, of silken fringed velvet.

The Starosta of Cherkassy, who during their last encounter had been thrown into the roof-garden pool at Vorobiovo, dismounted and striding forward met Lymond, also on foot, with his mighty gold-mantled arms widely spread. They kissed each other on both cheeks and stood, gripping hands, while the Song of Baida bellowed over their heads.

‘Listen to them,’ said the Prince, and pulled the fur hat from his tangled brown hair. ‘I drink mead as a sick bear eats ants, in default of a better remedy.’

Lymond said, ‘I cannot conceive you mean vodka?’ and stood still as he was embraced yet again.

‘A man of saintly perception! I hear you held a feast for our blood-drinking Besermani neighbours, which they attended in two parts, polled head on one side of the field and crossed legs on the other.’

‘Rumour exaggerates,’ said Lymond politely. Walking towards his own spreading pavilion, where Slata Baba sat hunched, her hooked bill exploring her mailes, he paused where Hislop and Best stood, politely erect by their horses. ‘You met, I think, Richard Chancellor, the Master Pilot of the Muscovy Company. This is Robert Best, one of the Company’s servants. If you will allow him to join us, he will, I am sure, be as impressed as my Tsar by the original of the legend. Hoddim? And Guthrie.’

The chosen joined the small procession.