The Ringed Castle (51 page)

Riding north, through the sharp wind and the light warming sun, the conquering armies felt the quivering change of the season. They rode bare-headed, thrusting off helmet and shuba, so that their mail tunics sparkled like river water and the ikons gave off great flashes,
as if angel were speaking to angel, under the striding sword of St George.

The leaders hunted, Lymond with Slata Baba behind him, murmuring to her as he unstruck and drew off her hood, praising her with his voice as he fed her her bloody reward, watching her, head thrown back, as she stooped and struck and returned, perfectly manned, to stand behind him again with her half-mantled wings. ‘For the first reason,’ Lymond said to nobody in particular, ‘is that hunting causeth a man to eschew the Seven Deadly Sins.’

Then at night they made camp and the races began, and the contests on horseback, and the gambling round the fires with the small dice, like the English, flipped over the thumb, as booty changed hands, and bedfellows. For they had free people among them: Russians and Cossacks who had been slaves to the Turks, and captive Tartars: a chief or two, with a fiat face and a beard, and his black hair allowed to grow curling over his ears, unlike the polled heads of inferiors. These had earrings, which they would sell for a supper, and long, pleatless Hungarian coats, not unlike the Russians’ own, but buttoned Tartar-style to the left. There were horses and camels, bales of silk and strange eastern spangles, as well as young Tartar girls by the score. There was plenty to gamble for.

Mesmerized, Robert Best watched it: watched how far licence was permitted, and when Lymond chose to send round Guthrie, or Hoddim, or one of his newly trained captains and touch the wilder forces back into order again. Eating with the rest of St Mary’s in their neat tent on one such night, he found Danny Hislop’s pale eyes on him, gleaming. ‘Not,’ said Danny, ‘the way in which the 13th Lord Grey of Wilton would care to arrange it. But you cannot expect an untaught people to be wrenched from their toys in a twelvemonth. It is not quite the Bacchanal that it looks.’

A shout, splitting the night, arose from that part of the camp where Prince Vishnevetsky’s pavilion stood. His song, in quavering chorus, had accompanied them, fragmented, all the way from Ochakov.

‘Isn’t it?’ said Robert Best.

‘The Prince,’ said Danny Hislop agreeably, ‘is, you will accept, a law to himself. Like Caesar, a cock for all hens. Have you seen the Cossacks dancing?’

‘Like witches’ get on their hunkers,’ said Fergie Hoddim. ‘With all yon leg-jerking and spinning. It’s not natural. They’ll do themselves a disservice. And the lowping!’

‘You should try it,’ said Guthrie. ‘You’ll be getting as fat as a sty-pig, full of sour milk and malt, and d’Harcourt will have to discover a fast for you. I think we need some night marches.’

‘Do you? So do I,’ Lymond said from the door, and sat down without ceremony as servants closed around him, Best saw, swiftly bringing washing water and towel, beer and mead and vodka in snow-clouded flagons, and the first platters of meat. Lymond said, ‘I think we shall allow them a day more of sport, and then begin some forced marches. Devlet Girey is unlikely to trouble Moscow, but other mischief is not slow to breed.’

Hislop said, ‘You will disappoint your friend Baida.’

‘My friend Baida is leaving us shortly anyway,’ Lymond said. ‘He is planning to build a fort on the island of Khortitsa, below the Dnieper cataracts, to be a base against the Turks and the Tartars this summer.’

‘Oh?’ said Lancelot Plummer.

‘Without our interference, helpful or otherwise,’ Lymond said. ‘He has virtually committed himself to transferring allegiance from Sigismund-August to the Tsar, but his vanity on no account must be offended. Does anyone know how many women he actually has in his tent?’

‘I rather doubt,’ said Lancelot Plummer a shade self-consciously, ‘if he is at present dealing with women.’

‘The last time I passed his tent,’ said Alec Guthrie sourly, ‘there was a camel in it.’

A chorus of groans, accompanied by Danny Hislop’s high cackle derided him. Adam Blacklock’s light, sharpened voice, from the doorway of the tent, cut clean across it. ‘Voevoda!’

Almost before he had spoken the word Lymond was on his feet, staring at the man he had thrashed, with whom he had held none but formal conversation ever since.

Adam said, ‘Vishnevetsky has Slata Baba.’

‘And?’ said Lymond.

‘And he is flying her at the captives,’ Adam said. ‘Perhaps you suggested it.’

Before he had finished, Lymond was out of the tent with his weapons, and the others, rising, hurried to follow. Only Alec Guthrie, as he overtook Blacklock, struck his shoulder briefly and hard, as a bear might smack its thickheaded cub for correction. ‘That is not for thinking,’ said Guthrie. ‘But for saying what you are thinking.’

The noise drew them, like an inhalement of steam, to the cockpit.

It was no more than the bare mound of a hillock, not far from the camp and beyond Baida’s tent. Round it were gathered the Cossacks, their torches bright in a circle of fire, their shadows jerking and
running before them, A little in front of them stood Dmitri Vishnevetsky, very drunk, with the golden eagle, hooded, weighing down his powerful arm. And thrusting past him, as he stood there, helplessly laughing, were two of his henchmen, not so drunk, and carrying something weakly moving between them, which they threw on the crown of the hill and cuffed into silence and then left, retreating a little, standing hands on their hips, waiting for their great leader Baida.

A Tartar captive. A Tartar child, perhaps eighteen months old, with a piece of raw meat tied to its sunken, bruised belly.

Baida pulled the tassel of Slata Baba’s elegant hood, and flung her high, flags beating, into the air.

Lymond shot his eagle as she swept down: a high, perfect shot with the little birch bow and the short, Turkish fork-headed arrow. He nocked again as she fell. Before she lodged on the ground he killed Baida’s first henchman; he aimed and released the third arrow in the same sequence of deliberate movements, and the other henchman dropped, also shot through the heart. Then, as, screaming, the Cossacks surged up the hill, Lymond turned the fourth, cold shining arrow on Baida.

Everything stopped. Watching, his heart shaking his rib-cage, Best heard the shouting diminish; saw the rush falter, watched Vishnevetsky, frowning, gather his resources and attempt, belatedly, to command himself, and the sudden, uncharitable turn of events. Through his nose, to Lymond, he said, ‘Damn you!’

To Adam Blacklock, Lymond said, ‘If the child is alive, save it. If the eagle is alive, kill it.’ He had lowered the bow. But Baida he had never stopped watching.

Already kneeling at the top of the mound: ‘She is dead,’ said Adam Blacklock, with the Tartar child on his arm.

‘How dare you?’ said Lymond softly to Prince Vishnevetsky. ‘How dare you teach my hunting fowl to turn rogue? Do I feed human flesh to your horse? Do I train your dog to pull the shaft from your leg as you stroke him at table? What do you offer me, to replace Slata Baba?’

There was a growl. Vishnevetsky shouted, ‘You have killed my two men!’

‘Forgive me. I thought they were your servants,’ Lymond said. ‘You have slaughtered, without leave and without courtesy, six months of my time. I am waiting to hear what amends you will make.’

Clear and savage and cold, the voice cut through all the confusion; the shouting dropped to a rumble and already there was a move backwards from the low hill, leaving Vishnevetsky isolated with the Voevoda near the top. Best thought, He has only to pitch his voice so, and they believe it. They believe the lives of two half-trained moujiks are nothing compared to the life of this bird.

‘If the fowl was your lapdog,’ said Dmitri Vishnevetsky at last, ‘I will get you another. Or this …?’ And, sobered now, he took the whip from his belt and, stretching it, hooked from the hands of an onlooker a cage, in which a terrified linnet chirped and fluttered and hopped. ‘This might please your child, who does not go to war, rather better.’

Lymond said, ‘I want payment in full.’

For a moment they stood face to face in the torchlight: the tall tousled man with the wide-striding boots and high colour, and the repressed and motionless foreigner, skin, clothes and hair bright and groomed and deadly as sharplings. The prince, staring at him, suddenly shrugged. ‘I cannot manufacture an eagle.’

Lymond said, ‘Take your bow.’

The other man had none with him. Before he could open his mouth, Alec Guthrie had leaned over, bow and quiver in hand, and was offering his. Frowning, Prince Vishnevetsky grasped it, while Guthrie took and held the small cage in its place.

‘You have booty,’ Lymond said. ‘So have I. Whichever man of us clean kills that linnet, wins all the other may have in his tent.… Release it, Guthrie.’

Guthrie opened the cage.

The bird darted out while Vishnevetsky, still watching Lymond, grasped suddenly what was happening and, whirling, strung and nocked his first arrow. Lymond, holding back, had restrung and nocked his in rhythm. Both bows swung expertly upwards.

In its first beat, the bird had risen above the swirling blaze of the cressets. Rising, darting, hovering in the night, it fanned its desperate wings like a humming bird, sometimes flushed, like a fragment of cloud, by the fires down below, sometimes only a space, a dark scrap of sky against the stars of Aldebaran, whose flocks pasture the luminous grass of the night.

The arrows hissed into the air; and hissed; and hissed; and curving fell where the crowd, talking and shouting, were moving like weed to and fro, to let the archers take aim. But it was, as Best knew it would be, an arrow from Lymond’s bow which pierced the fluttering fragment and brought it down, a morsel in someone’s rough hand, and Baida’s tent to which they all marched, laughing and singing, for the prize to be apportioned as had been agreed.

They walked past the flap of the tent, Lymond, Best and his officers, and the noise of the crowd was cut off. The silence inside, after the first moment, was quite as decisive. Within Baida’s tent were no maidens, or valets, or camels. Shackled each to each, their rich clothes torn, their turbans broochless, their dark eyes filled with a world of contempt, lay a group of kidnapped Turkish pashas.

Lymond lost his temper. With furious joy, exacerbated by the evening’s aggravations, Dmitri Vishnevetsky also lost his. Lymond’s words, of intent, even at the height of his anger, did not penetrate beyond the confines of the tent, but what he said turned Best’s stomach, and the rolling voice of Vishnevetsky, replying, gladdened the hearts of the avid listeners crowded outside.

Even so, it was in a white heat of rage, the blood mantling his skin, that the Starosta of Kanev and Cherkassy saw wantonly freed five men who embodied thousands of roubles’ worth of Turkish gold pieces, and saw them given horses, and food and weapons, and turned south out of his power. Indeed, when the first order was given, Baida lifted his arm, his head tilted, his eyes on the Voevoda’s empty hands and bare head.

Then Lymond said, ‘If you strike me, there will not be a man of your Cossacks alive to speak of it tomorrow.’ And Best, for one, knew without doubt that he meant it, and that he could do it, and would.

Vishnevetsky knew it also. He said none the less, breathing hard, ‘You would lose every Cossack in Russia.’

Lymond’s cold voice remained steady. ‘And what use would they be, to me or to Russia, once they knew that one of their leaders could strike me with impunity? If you have a private quarrel with me, pursue it off the field, privately. You cannot challenge me here and now without challenging the Tsar and his army.’

The black eyes glittered. ‘I do challenge you.’

‘With five thousand Cossacks?’ said Lymond.

‘With the army of Sigismund-August, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania,’ said Dmitri Vishnevetsky, with fair clarity and a great deal of venom.

There was a short, weighty silence during which the unfortunate fatuity of this became expansively clear, and Lymond recovered his temper. He said dryly, at length, ‘The Tartars, I am sure, would be delighted. I am not sure what we are disputing about. Did we not make a wager, and did I not win it?’

Prince Vishnevetsky grunted.

‘Then your prisoners are mine, to do as I like with. I choose to set them free, because Russia is not yet prepared for full-scale war with the Sultan.’

His dignity salved, Baida’s tone became again smoothly caustic. ‘And this of course, is what the Tsar sent Mr Best here to learn.’

‘Mr Best is very well aware,’ Lymond said, ‘that we have neither the men nor the munitions so far to fight Suleiman the Magnificent. Our first objective is to drive out the Tartars. You claim to hate them. Help us.’

‘Is it worth my while?’ Baida said. Relaxed, he crossed to the chest
where the vodka flasks stood, and, splashing heavily, filled every cup on the board. ‘What arms will England send you, if you make no effort to occupy Turkey’s attention? And without arms, what hope have I of ever making a living from rich Turkish pashas? Tell me that?’

Lymond took the drink offered him, as did the rest, and saluted his host, and drank, sealing unspoken the reconcilement. ‘What arms do Cossacks need?’ he said. ‘Except to make love and gamble. Please the Tsar, and you will be rich enough. Make your fort at Khortitsa, and we shall help you sweep round the Dnieper and send the Song of Baida clean through the steppelands and hills of the Krim.’

They left him, still drinking, presently, and went back to their tent more slowly than they had left it, through the quietening camp. Lymond, beside Adam Blacklock, said, ‘Before you sleep. Take one of your men and see to the burial.’

‘Of the eagle?’ Adam said.

‘Naturally,’ said Lymond. ‘And, if you can bear it, of the child.’

He had known, or guessed, Adam took it, all about those illegal Turkish captives. And despite Baida’s own crapulous efforts, he had saved the prince’s face and the kidnapped pashas as well. Out of an unfortunate slaughter, a prize of exceptional sweetness. Adam said, ‘Konstantin has already seen to it. The mother belongs to him. He is, more than ever, your dazzled and most humble acolyte.’