The Ringed Castle (5 page)

Alec Guthrie said, ‘I should have got rid of Hislop.’

‘No,’ said Lymond. ‘We’ve had the cleverness thrust down our throats. Let’s see what other quality he has. Where have you been fighting?’

There was a year and more to describe, telling of the long power struggle between Henri of France and the failing Emperor Charles with his over-extended possessions in Spain and Burgundy, Italy and Peru, Sicily and the Netherlands. Guthrie reported, and Lymond asked all the questions. ‘And the Pope?’ For between these two empires the Pope, of design, held the balance.

Dryly, Alex Guthrie quoted the words of the Emperor. ‘Our custom has always been to speak with respect and moderation to Popes, whose goodwill we need on account of concessions and other favours we are frequently obliged to demand.’

‘Where did you pick up that jewel?’ Lymond said.

‘Hercules Tait. You remember. He’s in Venice now, and has a very dear friend in the Council of Ten. From his letters you’d think he helps the Doge with his spelling. He says the Emperor Charles will marry his son to Queen Mary of England.’

‘It seems unfortunate,’ said Lymond idly. ‘… I wonder if Hercules Tait would write to me? I have a great deal of time for the right kind of gossip.’

‘Yes,’ said Guthrie after a moment. ‘I believe that he would.’ He paused. ‘I thought you were confident that the Tsar would want our services, and for some time, at that?’

‘I am still confident,’ said Lymond briefly. ‘But we have a virgin nation here on our hands, with no more than two generations of cohesion behind it. Nothing is going to be quick. And what happens in west Europe meantime may well determine what happens to us here in Moscow. When we are called to the Tsar, I shall let you know. If you want me, this is how you can reach me.’

Alec Guthrie looked at the paper he was being given. ‘You are not living here?’

‘No. I saved to the last,’ Lymond said, ‘my piece of gossip, which you can retail later for the undoubted edification of Hislop and d’Harcourt and the rest. I have no financial resources. Your journey to Moscow has been paid for by a woman now living in Moscow. She is no concern of yours, but she is in partnership with us in so far as we are in her debt until our present expense is repaid. Her house is mine, and that is the direction.’

Alec Guthrie’s eyes remained bent on the paper. ‘And her name?’

‘Her name is Güzel,’ Lymond said. ‘But you will refer to her, if you please—you will enjoy referring to her, I am sure—as the Mistress.’

He was smiling, Guthrie found, although he did not greatly care for the smile. He said, ‘As you say, it is none of my business.’ And then, because of what had once been between them, Alec Guthrie said, ‘She’s Dragut’s woman, and she’s a kingmaker. You know what Graham Malett became. You know why he wanted St Mary’s.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Lymond, ‘it escaped your notice, but we have already covered the subject. You are a mercenary. I am a mercenary. If you object to my money, my rule or my ethics, you have a remedy. You simply open that door and walk out of it.’

‘No,’ said Alec Guthrie grimly. ‘I knew the risks when I came. I’ll stay with you. If they accept us.’

‘But you didn’t know about the woman, dear Alec,’ said Danny Hislop at supper that night, when Lymond had walked down to his horse and departed. ‘Nobody told us about the woman. Güzel. The Mistress. What if they have a tiff and she withdraws all her assets before the Tsar has decided to keep us? What,’ said Danny dreamily, ‘if she takes against our coarse ways when she meets us? Or decides she’d prefer one of us to sweet Francis?… Jesus?… Sir?’

‘Presumably,’ Plummer said languidly, ‘it will keep him at least off your neck, Danny Dare-all. My saints, it’s a dedicated hunt for experience. Remember Joleta?’

‘Joleta?’ said d’Harcourt.

‘Graham Malett’s sister Joleta. Lymond bedded her before he killed her and her brother; did you know that, I wonder, dear Ludo? And her baby went the same way in Turkey.’

‘My God,’ said Alan Vassey with reverence.

‘Now then,’ said Fergie Hoddim. ‘Ye want to be careful with that sort of pronouncement, or ye can find yourself in the middle of a fine juicy action. Lymond killed Graham Malett. He engineered the death of Joleta, but didna just hold the sword personally. And he had to choose between Joleta’s boy and his own. Or so Jerott Blyth says. So he saved his own, and that’s only human.’

‘So it is,’ Danny said.

Ludovic d’Harcourt, looking somewhat dazed, said, ‘Do I gather there were two children at risk?’

‘That’s right,’ said Fergie Hoddim approvingly. ‘The mutes were going to kill one or the other, so he chose to keep his own boy. God, it’s a terrible system. Consuetudo, consuetudo, consuetudo, and no’ a good statute law on the ledger. The Court of Session would never be happy in Turkey.’

‘And then by all accounts,’ said Plummer sweetly, ‘he married.’

Six heads shot up. Adam Blacklock said,
‘Married!’
and Guthrie, who had been minding, at some cost, his own business, put down his spoon and said, ‘Yes, married. What does it matter? It’s nothing to do with our prospects here.’

‘A bath girl?’ said Danny. His eyes were shut, his expression deeply seraphic. ‘A duchess? A very rich Mother Superior? How do you know?’

Guthrie said, ‘It was in Hercules Tait’s latest letter. Crawford spent a night with the girl in Stamboul. She was caring for one of the children you talked of. Her people will have it dissolved.’

Joleta Malett had been—what? Sixteen? Adam, his appetite gone, said, ‘Who was it?’

And Plummer said, ‘Philippa Somerville. Do you remember, Adam, in England? The girl from that big steading near Hexham. She followed him, poor dear, out to Turkey.’

Adam got up from the table. He said, ‘She’s too young to bed with.’

‘Not quite,’ said Guthrie dryly.

*

Later, lying on his extremely hard bed, Danny Hislop thought it all over and produced, for his own satisfaction, a verdict.

‘Gorgeous I called him and
that
he is, Maeve: you’d be surprised. And nasty I called him, and that, Maeve, was a shrewd piece of insight, for nasty he certainly is. And a clever bastard, I called him.… Not to his face, dear. We’re not all born to be heroes. But what he may not know, Maeve, is that I’m a clever bastard as well.’

The summons from the Sovereign Grand Prince Ivan Vasilievich, Duke of Muscovy and Tsar of all Russia, reached Lymond three days after the appearance of his eight officers in Moscow, an unusually brief interval. In the preceding three days the eight had talked, eaten, rested, viewed with unconcealed curiosity and some foreboding the amenities of Moscow, city of churches, and had discovered, by dint of some highly skilled shadowing, just where Lymond was living and—curiosity being equally potent in east and west Europe—what Güzel, Dragut’s mistress, looked like.

‘A handsome woman,’ Fergie Hoddim had opined, stroking the sad brown moustache he had been attempting to cultivate ever since Lübeck.

‘Going by what?’ Lancelot Plummer had inquired. ‘She was wearing a veil and a cloak to her ankles. I grant you the jewellery was handsome all right.’

‘Enough to keep us another few days?’ asked Danny Hislop. ‘I thought they had a light hand with the mutton at supper. Did she look exhausted?’

‘She looked,’ said Alec Guthrie dryly, ‘like a clever woman who was not unaware that five ill-dressed passers-by were displaying an unhealthy interest in her personal life.’ But he spoke without rancour, because he shared the concern of the others. In this unknown country their standing and fortune and future were precarious enough as it was, without depending as well on the whim of a well-furnished hetaera.

They were not present however at the brief encounter between Francis Crawford and Güzel when, on the day of the audience, he took leave of her on his way to collect Guthrie, Blacklock and Hoddim, who were to accompany him to the Kremlin.

He wore a doublet her tailor had fashioned for him from woven Indian silks of all colours; and over it a sleeveless coat cut with cunning, the seed pearls glimmering as he moved in the warm morning sun. She came to meet him and considered him, standing in silence, while he watched her with unmoved, cornflower eyes. ‘The word,’ he said, ‘is gorgeous.’

She raised her arched eyebrows.

‘… But it is axiomatic to select the right armour, whatever the battle. An overplus of rings, would you consider?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘The Tsar is the supplicant.’

‘I trust he knows it,’ said Lymond. ‘But you have no doubts.’

Her smile, cool and subtle, was celebrated.

‘No. Neither have I,’ Lymond said. ‘Which is fortunate, perhaps, for us both. If you want Russia, mistress mine, you shall have it.’

*

Alec Guthrie had paid fifteen gold florins for a boyar’s cap trimmed in black fox, and wore it doggedly, his short beard combed, above a new velvet cloak with gold braiding. Fergie and Adam Blacklock likewise had spent the morning, to the marked admiration of their less fortunate fellows, struggling with new clasps and unfamiliar belts until Hoddim offered, red-faced, to replace an oral process with a physical one. Then, joining Lymond in the cavalcade of liveried horses waiting outside, they trotted, stiffly correct, up to the drawbridge which led to the square red Frolovskaya Tower, the principal entrance to the Kremlin.

Adam Blacklock, riding behind his commander’s uncompromising back and the swaying gold fringe of his horse-harness, wavered between a savage excitement and a deadly desire to be safely in Renty, speaking bad French and facing the guns of the Emperor.

He recited to himself, and saw by Fergie’s set face that he was doing the same, the remarkable briefing they had received from Francis Crawford:

‘Ivan Vasilievich has been Tsar since he was three. He is secure on his throne: has dealt harshly with the boyars who repressed him as a youth and has turned his attention to this inheritance. After more than two centuries of Tartar subjection, Greater Russia has come into being, largely through Ivan’s father and grandfather.

‘There remained three Tartar kingdoms unconquered. Two of these, Kazan and Astrakhan, Ivan has successfully dealt with. The third, the kingdom of the Crimean Tartars, still remains a marauder within his southern frontiers whose raids have the support of Ottoman Turkey. Ivan must conquer the Crimean Tartars. He also wants to recover those lands lived in by Orthodox Russians and seized by western neighbours while the nation was engaged with the Tartars. Then he wishes to enter Europe and the civilized world through trade to the west through the Baltic.

‘Some of this he has done. He took Novgorod, and brought back to Moscow three hundred sledges of treasure. Three years ago he conquered Kazan. Soon he will turn to Lithuania, Livonia and Poland, and for that he must have a trained army.

‘In Russia none has ever been organized. The Tsar appoints a general, or Voevoda, who may be a leading member or even the chairman of the council, the boyar duma. For his officers, he counts on the Moscow boyars and his own many relatives, who appear on
demand, and on the service princes, who occupy estates in return for their duty. Also, after Kazan, the Tsar created the Streltsi, the first permanent force of hackbutters. He recruits men of ability, and gives them in return grants of confiscated land. And sometimes he can call on the Cossacks, free settlers, who live under their own chiefs on the frontiers.

‘Since he lacks artisans and engineers, he has tried to import these from the west, together with armour and weapons and powder, but most of this traffic has been blocked, as we know, by the western states on which he will use them. The people have valour and endurance, but no discipline, no method and no drill. Nor, by tradition, is the Tsar himself a leader in battle. Since the days of Dmitri Donskoi, no Duke of Muscovy has gone into battle. The tradition has been the oriental one until now: to save face, and to delay by negotiating.

‘We are negotiating now to become the first foreign paid leaders of the Russian army,’ Lymond had said coolly. ‘Bear in mind that you are not dealing with an Englishman, an Italian or a Scot. You are dealing with a nation more accustomed to the traditions and commerce of the east, and with a man whose upbringing has left him distrustful of people. He is given to violent outbursts: his brother Yuri is an idiot The greatest restraining influence in his life is his wife, and his young family. He is educated and widely read, but irrationally so. He thinks quickly, and expects it in others. He has great personal wealth. He is deeply and romantically religious, and sees his country as the custodian of a sacred trust—
Two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and a fourth there will not be
. But though there is a Metropolitan, there is no powerful church with secular powers. There is no social system; no feudal arrangement; no chivalry. Only the boyars, corrupt and violent whenever the Tartar threat is removed, and the descendants of the old appanaged princes.

‘He is to be cultivated as the hawk is to be cultivated. We have also to enforce the friendship and confidence of his favourite, Alexei Adashev, risen from the minor gentry to become keeper of the Tsar’s bedchamber and of his personal treasury, and the Tsar’s chief adviser, in council and out of it. Together with him you must impress the monk Sylvester, who succeeded the Metropolitan Makary as the greatest influence, until last year, in the Emperor’s life. And after them, you must deal with the Russian commanders—Princes Mikulinksy and Pronsky-Shemyakin and Vyazemsky, Mstislavsky and Andreevich, Peter Morozov and Ivan Sheremeter and the most learned, idiosyncratic and skilful of them all, Prince Andrei Kurbsky, Adashev’s particular friend.…’

Sweat broke out on Adam Blacklock’s pale brow, and he reined in abruptly, just in time to avoid the hindquarters of Lymond’s horse. Lymond had dismounted and, pulling off his flat cap, was
saluting the ikon over the gateway. Adam, without looking at anyone, did the same; and remembered to keep his hat in his hand as he walked, with Hoddim and Guthrie, over the threshold. There, Viscovatu met them: the monk who was Ivan’s Chief Secretary, and led them past the ranked guards and up the slight, crowded rise of the hill.