The Ringed Castle (50 page)

The chorus rose and fell through the air. Vishnevetsky smiled, stopping beside Slata Baba. ‘I do not see your Venceslas. Is this the eagle?’

‘Venceslas does not go to war. This is the golden eagle. Perhaps you will hunt her with me later. Or have you had hunting enough?’

They were inside the tent. On the hide floor rugs had been laid, Turkish-style, and Lymond and his guest dropped to sit on a long woollen bolster, surrounded by cushions. On these, Guthrie, Hoddim and Best ranged themselves in silence, sliding the
shubas
from their shoulders. Vodka was brought. Prince Vishnevetsky, brightly knowing, waited until his beaker was full and, raising it, toasted his host before he answered. ‘You observe we have prisoners.’

‘I observe you have Tartar women,’ said Lymond. ‘So you found the
yurt.’

‘I found the
yurt,’
the Lithuanian said. ‘It was fifteen miles to the south.’

Guthrie caught Hoddim’s eye. Without speech, Best knew what he meant to convey. The
yurt
was the moveable city, the heart of the nomadic horde. The Tartar tents, made of wattle and hide, were set on carts which spread over the steppe like a township, drawn by a thousand camels or more from pasture to pasture; set at night into streets swarming with women and children, chickens and cattle. By day the men hunted; shooting, fishing, hawking wild horses, raiding and stealing, for the Tartar had no money and no means of livelihood save barter, nor any art or science save war. And behind in the
yurt
, the women flayed the horsemeat and dried it, and sewed the sheepskins they wore, and milked the mares for the strong drink they lived on, while the old men taught the children to shoot, and denied them what food the
yurt
held, until they had hit the true mark.

From the
yurt
had come the menfolk that yesterday the Voevoda’s army had slaughtered. Without their young men, it was unlikely the tribe would survive. And Vishnevetsky, neatly forestalling Lymond,
had delivered the death blow. He said, ‘They had made a few raids. You would have been amazed. There was gold in the wagons, and one of the Ataman’s daughters was wearing sapphires.’

‘Have you brought her?’ Lymond asked.

‘No. She was ill-favoured. You need not wonder long why their maidens wear linen over their mouths, and breeches to muffle their ankles, or why the Tartar would link with a man or a horse as soon as a boy or a woman. The wives are not all as your formidable Turkish beauty.’

‘Greco-Italian,’ Lymond said. ‘But you have found some wenches worth keeping?’

The Lithuanian shrugged. ‘My men are content. Like the butcher’s hounds, they will eat anything.’ He emptied the silver beaker and leaned back, a long limbed, vivid, malicious young man with a cleft chin and soft, chestnut moustache. ‘Do you hear them throwing taunts at one another, your army and mine? How long since your men had a woman?’

Target of the dancing black eyes, neither of Lymond’s men offered anything. From his life in Turkey perhaps the Voevoda seemed more at ease than any save Vishnevetsky on the low, cushioned seat. Holding his cup on one knee, he studied it and not the Lithuanian, although his unsoftened face held somewhere the faint deepened grooves of amusement. His expedition to the north had brought about no change Best could see in the Tsar Ivan’s favourite. He remained spare and sharp and deadly as the claws of his eagle. And as he did not at once reply, Dmitri Vishnevetsky added something, in a soft voice, to his question. ‘And how long has the Voevoda remained uncomforted?’

Lymond smiled. He looked up, catching the eye of his servant, and then as the vodka was poured, turned the chilly blue eyes on Baida. ‘I gather that I am about to be signally favoured. I take it the other problem has already been solved.’

Vishnevetsky gave a brief shout of laughter. ‘You are right. There are fifty women between my five thousand: some will go hungry, and by God, we have none for your rutting pigs. My men have fought an action today. They need twelve hours’ indulgence. Take your troops down the Dnieper, and we will catch you up before you are free of the ice floes.’

‘And the women?’ said Lymond.

‘They will be no problem,’ Baida said.

Then the talk turned to Ochakov and how to so singe Devlet Girey and his horde that Moscow and Lithuania both might be spared his attacks in the summer.

They talked a long time, and ate, and Guthrie and Hoddim, when permitted, gave their cogent and less than subservient opinions, and Robert Best listened. And when the plan of campaign was completed, Lymond had the final word. ‘We avoid the Turks, and we take no Turkish prisoners.’

‘What?’ Dmitri Vishnevetsky, as the song ran, had drunk deeply of liquor, but he was not so far confused as to let this stricture pass. ‘Are you crazy? A kidnapped Pasha will fetch thirty thousand pieces of gold in ransom.’

Lymond said coolly, ‘A kidnapped Pasha will be returned by the Tsar to the Sultan. I regret it as you do. But I gave this undertaking before I left Moscow.’

Vishnevetsky stood up, swaying slightly and smiling. ‘As the Tsar’s Tsaritsa, you give undertakings. The Tsar is not my master.’

The jibe made no impression. ‘He pays me and my Cossacks,’ Lymond said. He had not risen, nor were the small graven rings of his armour, each with its legend of faith, in the slightest disturbed. ‘Who pays yours?’

The Lithuanian stood without moving. Then throwing back his smooth chin, he gave a great bellow. ‘Why, my sickly Sigismund surely. My great king and his courtiers, who spend their time in dancing and masks, and not in war with the Tartars. Who … what does Kurbsky say? Who stuff their gullets and bellies with costly buns and marzipans, pouring down wines as into leaky casks, and in
their drunkenness promise not only to capture Moscow and Constantinople, but even if the Turk were in the sky, to drag him down with their enemies …’

Pleasantly, Lymond’s voice took him up. ‘… who lie on their beds between thick down quilts, and get up barely alive and racked with’ drunken headaches, so timorous and exhausted by their wives that on news of invasion they shut themselves up in their fortresses, and put on armour and sit at table before their cups and tell tales to their drunken women: drinking from great full alabaster jugs …’

‘… filled not with wine but with the very blood of Christians. I came without the King’s sanction,’ said Vishnevetsky. ‘You guessed as much.’

‘And need the goodwill of Moscow,’ said Lymond.

‘When we have scoured Ochakov of its filth, I shall have it,’ the Lithuanian said.

‘And if you bring back Turkish prisoners,’ Lymond said calmly, ‘you will forfeit it. Your mother is of the blood of the Tsaritsa Anastasia and you are of the appanaged princes of Yaroslavl, but you will forfeit it. Be quite sure of that.’

The Prince Vishnevetsky regarded him with an attempt at a frown. ‘As the Tsar himself was told on a famous occasion, the fulfilment of unwise promises, Voevoda, is not acceptable to God.’

‘But,’ said Lymond, ‘we are not speaking of God. We are speaking of the Tsar of all Russia. And there was talk, what is more, about comfort …?’

Best had forgotten the exchange about women. He saw the prince’s handsome face break into laughter, and he stepped to the door of the tent and gave someone a command. Best did not see the girl when they brought her, for he was invited to leave while Guthrie and the rest made their dispositions for immediate marching, and shortly afterwards Baida also appeared from Lymond’s tent and prepared his Cossacks, as the rest left, to make camp for the day with their booty.

The last thing Best heard, as he found his horse and prepared with the others to move, was the final stanza of that mocking, rollicking song:

That night they made their last camp on land before taking again to the Dnieper. Robert Best, healthily tired, snored his way through the night and did not hear the scuffle and cry from the principal tent, which brought the guard running, to halt as the Voevoda appeared in the candlelit doorway, unhurt, unamused and fully dressed as they had seen him last. He surveyed them, commended their speed, and sent them for Ludovic d’Harcourt.

Off duty, the former Knight of St John was asleep reprehensibly in his small-clothes: by the time he had flung on tunic and breech hose and boots, Lymond was in no mood to be gracious. D’Harcourt received the unpleasant dressing-down he knew he deserved for lying unprepared in the land of the enemy, no matter how recently vanquished, and then was bidden to go into the tent and dispose of what he would find there.

What he found there was a dead Tartar girl, still clothed, but with her veil ripped back from her face. She lay among the cushions where Rob Best’s powerful haunches had so lately rested, and she had been stabbed to the heart.

Rising from his knees, he looked round at Lymond, who had picked a finely chased knife from the floor and was carefully wiping it. From the turquoises on the hilt, d’Harcourt recognized it as the Voevoda’s own.

‘She tried to kill me,’ Lymond said. ‘Outraged maidenhood perhaps, but I doubt it. I rather think I have had a little gift from Prince Vishnevetsky. But I should not like anyone to lose confidence in me or in him. The less known about this episode the better, which is why I have sent for you. Mr Guthrie isn’t interested in women, and neither is Plummer, for different reasons. Mr Hoddim’s legal conscience would trouble him and poor Mr Blacklock is not yet strong enough, I feel, to make the thing plausible. So——’

‘Mr Hislop?’ said d’Harcourt woodenly.

The uncomfortable blue eyes opened fully on his. ‘The sparrows know it, so why should it be hidden from me that Hislop has a Tartar wench at Kitaigorod? So you will roll her in the rug she is blemishing, and dispose of her how you will, provided that it is secretly, and sufficiently far from this tent. She is a murderess, and a heretic, an upholder of the faith you took vows to destroy. It appears therefore to be a task which befits you better than any other. Don’t you agree?’

Ludovic d’Harcourt did not answer. But he did as he was told, and most efficiently, so that soon the Voevoda’s tent was vacant and ordered once more, and the Voevoda was able to retire, as he preferred, without company; but with the final verse of the Song of Baida remaining, freakishly repeating itself in his mind.

But of that, naturally, he said nothing at all to his underlings.

The combined armies of the Voevoda Bolshoia and Prince Dmitri Vishnevetsky sailed down the Dnieper, causing damage to every major settlement on the way, and finally raided the Tartar stronghold of Ochakov, lying in the spring sunshine on the Euxinian Sea to the west of the Crimean Peninsula. Using fire, using decoys, employing the cannon concealed in their carts, they felled ramparts and broke wooden walls, killed and looted, freed prisoners and took them and confounded the violent defence of the enemy with all these and one measure more—the touch of flamboyant genius, the unexpected exploitation of the obvious which was the mark of St Mary’s. Into the streets of Ochakov, where the children screamed and the scimitars flashed through the swaying strings of dried fish, all furred and buzzing with flies, Lymond released a double cartload of swine, the abomination of the Musselman, and set the Streltsi firing their hackbuts over their heads.

The Khan of the Krim Tartars was not taken, and not a tenth of his horde was lost in the raid: the numbers to achieve that needed a different season and a different campaign. But that night, in his round reeded house on the steppes, Devlet Girey prostrated himself on his carpet, and tears from his hollow eyes sank into his beard as he mourned his dead, and promised vengeance, and considered, gnawing his lips, the new offence and the new menace offered by Moscow.

Far to the north, on their way home, the combined armies of Russian and Cossack raced across the fresh grass of the steppes, hunting, singing and shouting in a clamour of wind-pipe, drum and brass while their banners flew reeling across the endless blue skies of the
Chernoziom
.

They were on the verge of the riches of spring, when deer and antelope would run to the bow, and wild boars frequent the thicket, and foxes and beavers. When the stork would come back and geese and heron, swan and pheasant and partridge would stand in the brush, when honey would spill through the trees and there would be pike and perch, tench, roach and carp free to take in the unfrozen rivers, and the birchwoods would smell fresh and sweet under the melting spring sun, and the nightingale sing.