The Ringed Castle (7 page)

And Adam heard again what had barely reached him before: the finest paring of sound from the inner chamber: the long room where their bedding and all their possessions were stored, and whose high casement windows gave on to the back yard alone.

When they had all gathered here, they had left the inner room empty. A thief, then, after the foreigners’ money? Or the weapons left in their store-chests?

Except that they were wearing their weapons, and wore them day and night, wherever they were, muffled under their cloaks and their clothing, since the day when Danny Hislop had propounded a certain hypothetical scheme of defence and Lymond, not hypothetically at all, had desired them to keep it before them.

So now, Danny Hislop, his hazel eyes sparkling, took up his position on one side of that closed, inner door, with Fergie Hoddim grim at the other; and Adam himself, keeping out of the line of the windows, edged beside Plummer and looked down through the small opaque casement, at the outside steps which led to their door.

The steps were deserted, and so was the yard. But as he watched, the cold spring light glinted, for a second, on something hard and metallic which glanced past the balustrade and then vanished. Then the sun struck through the cloud and he saw, for an instant, a dancing pattern of light on the rough brick wall of the yard, which made him throw up his hands to draw Guthrie’s attention through the covering patter of chat, and then open his fingers to denote numbers. Not a sneak-thief. Not a raid by underprivileged Muscovites. But a full-scale attack by three to four dozen men under arms.

And the only armed men in Moscow were the Streltsi, the hackbutters of the Sovereign Grand Prince of Russia.

Plummer, sighing, left his post at a signal and helped them lift the oak dining table against the outer door he had been guarding. ‘I fear,’ he said, ‘our dear commander has committed some blunder.’

Their hackbuts were in the inner room—all except one, with its stand and charges which had been hidden with care in this chamber. It was already out and charged and d’Harcourt was standing beside it, match in hand, when Guthrie gave the signal, and Fergie flung open the door.

Their handgun looked straight into the mouth of another, already set up in their sleeping chamber, with half a dozen fully armed men crowded about it, and more climbing in through the windows. Then Guthrie said, ‘Fire!’ And in that first shattering moment of surprise d’Harcourt’s hackbut exploded, blowing up the Muscovite weapon in a roar of red flame, and hurling the helmeted Streltsi back shouting against the walls and the beds. Then Guthrie sprang through the doorway, and, followed by the small silent team from St Mary’s, set upon the intruders with dagger and sword.

They were trained to kill. They were trained to fight at close quarters against curved swords and straight; and against no weapons at all. They were trained to study other men’s minds; to watch their eyes; to forestall their actions. They fought, guarding each other’s backs, with heavier swords and faster dagger hands: they trusted one another to fight, choosing and passing on victims as fitted the chance of the moment; and reached and cleared the window in the first three minutes of action, thrusting down the tall ladder which scaled it and sending the last climbers shouting into the yard. And at the same time, they watched and listened behind them, so that when Plummer called they were ready for brisk part-withdrawal, leaving four of their men fighting the dwindling numbers in the bedchamber while the rest raced back into the dining hall.

‘Another dozen, perhaps, on the steps,’ Plummer said, his face quite composed. ‘And a group of archers have appeared in the yard. Waiting for us to rush out with our foreign tails burning.’

The sound of fighting was less in the inner room. Fergie Hoddim appeared, with the clacking of swordblades behind him, and said, ‘That’s them all, just about. The other two jumped out the window. Danny Hislop’s getting the hackbuts.’

And so it came about that when the Streltsi swept up the steps and launched their first open attack on the main first-floor doorway, they were met with the thundering mouths of St Mary’s hackbuts at each casement window, followed by the whistling flight of their arrows, so that they withdrew, pulling their wounded men with them, and reformed out of range for the next move.

They had a dozen handguns between them, and a fair store of matches and powder; their swords and a bow each, with arrows.
Alec Guthrie recharged the hackbuts and set bows to guard every window, pushing the Muscovite dead and wounded out of the way and clearing the shattered remains of the hackbut, while they reviewed the situation between them.

They had suffered no serious casualties. Unless the Streltsi brought heavy-bore cannon, they could hope to beat off meantime any attack from the front or the rear. No attempt had been made to enter from below, and there seemed no point in trying themselves to descend to the kitchens: it was certain death to step into the yard. And even if they could fight their way to the horses, there were still the streets to get through, and three sets of gateways, all of them guarded. How well, they had good reason to know.

‘So?’ said Danny Hislop. ‘Our powder and arrows are going to run out on us some time. And so are our food and water and joie de vivre and good books and everything. Why not walk out now and get made into somebody’s favourite slave?’

Alec Guthrie said, in his brittle, lecturer’s voice. ‘It’s simple. If the Tsar isn’t going to accept us, then we’re expendable, and nothing can save us. If, on the other hand, he is not yet decided …’

‘Then the way we act here will decide him,’ said Danny Hislop. ‘We’re on exhibition?’

Guthrie’s craggy, grey-bearded face looked at him. ‘Pray,’ he said, ‘that we are on exhibition. And that when the time comes, someone out there has authority to declare the demonstration concluded.’

‘Lymond?’ said Danny Hislop. ‘No, of course; he’s spending the morning with Adashev. After we’re dead, will they keep him, do you think, as a keepsake? Or do you think he suggested the whole splendid idea in the first place?’

No one answered him, for the arrows had started again to arch through the windows and a call from Fergie behind told that the archers, protected now by a rampart of benches, had spread out to ring the whole house. Then the hackbut fire started again from the yard, and Plummer cursed and Alan Vassey, leaning out with his bow, fell back suddenly without a sound and was caught by his friend Ludovic d’Harcourt and lowered uselessly to the ground; the first of the eight men to die.

*

‘And so,’ said Alexei Adashev, ‘you have small interest in us as a nation?’

‘I had small interest in France,’ Lymond said. ‘I have none in Russia, save to study the minds of the men I have to serve, and the habits of those I must train to serve me.’

‘The only man you must serve,’ said Adashev, ‘is the Sovereign Grand Prince Ivan Vasilievich.’ With half a dozen of the Chosen Council he was sitting within the painted walls of his large timber house in the Kremlin, his ringed fingers holding the embossed standing-cup of clear liquid with which they had all been served. Richly but soberly dressed in cuffed hat and high-buttoned robe, he lacked the restless vitality of the princes: Kurbsky, Kurlyatev, Paletsky in their cut velvet and fur and glossy, insolent beards.

Instead, he turned his pock-marred face with its soft earth-brown beard towards Lymond and added, ‘You have heard, no doubt, how the Tsar suffered as a motherless boy from the arrogance of the boyars, and how he took his revenge as a lad. All that is behind him. When the fire came seven years ago, the people said it was caused by his mother’s family, the Glinsky, who had sprinkled the streets with human hearts soaked in water. Incited by the boyars hostile to the Glinksy, they demanded the execution of the Tsar’s people: they hunted Yuri Glinsky, his uncle, and killed him in the Uspenski Cathedral, here in the Kremlin, where he had fled to the altar for sanctuary. Our Sovereign Prince put down that rising. Then he confessed the sins of his boyhood, and asked the forgiveness of the clergy; and granted forgiveness in turn to the princes and boyars who had crossed him. He spoke to his people, whom he called from all the towns of Muscovy two years later, and promised them, henceforth he would be their judge and their defender.’

Prince Kurbsky stirred. ‘You should,’ he remarked, ‘quote our friend Peresvetov.
In whatever realm there is justice, there God abides and gives it great aid; and God’s wrath is not visited on that realm.’

‘Ivashka Peresvetov,’ said the princely voice of Kurlyatev, with equal suavity, ‘is one of our best-known reformers. He has equally said,
There cannot be a ruler without terror. Like a steed under the rider without a bridle, so is a realm without terror
. The people agreed with him. The boyars less so. And you, Mr Crawford of Lymond?’

Viscovatu was there, but Lymond had not so far needed his services. Except for the long-installed merchants; the trading colonies of German and Flemish on the western edges of Russia, he was the first alien with whom they had thus been able to converse in their own language at first encounter. It was none of their business to show any awareness of the richness and style of his clothing, or the lack of any shade of the supplicant in his answers, his manner, his voice.

They had given him nothing to eat, but had refilled his cup over and over again with
berozevites
, the delicate drink drawn from the root of the birch tree. And since custom demanded it, they had drunk cup for cup with him themselves.

Only in Alexei Adashev, perhaps, the lightest sheen on the skin so far betrayed it. The princes, pressing a little now with the chilly,
delicate probing, might have been empty of all things but malice. Lymond, with years of experience behind him, showed nothing he did not wish to show. He raised his silvery brows. ‘Some respond to the goad,’ he said, ‘and some to the hayrack. The art of ruling is to know which is which. As the art of teaching is to know where to learn.’

‘You think us backward,’ said Andrei Kurbsky. ‘Alas, what can we show to the contrary, except perhaps the small success of Astrakhan and Kazan?’

‘I wish to learn from you,’ Lymond said. ‘There is nothing about the military art in the west that my officers are ignorant of. They do not know how to fight in the cold. They do not know how to speak to the mind of a Muscovite. I want the help and advice of every commander who has fought for the Tsar. And I want those who have never yet fought for the Tsar to join me in learning. You spoke of Peresvetov the reformer. He came to you from Lithuania, Wallachia, Bohemia. He had even fought on the side of the Turk. I want Prince Vishnevetsky.’

‘The Cossacks?’ Adashev said.

‘Would you rather they fought with the Tartars?’ Lymond said.

There was a little pause. Adashev, stirring himself, raised a finger and the tall-hatted servant moving forward filled Lymond’s stemmed cup yet again, and that of his master and guests. Lymond raised his, savouring it, and then, tilting it, drank it straight off, the gem on his hard fingers flaring blue with the movement. Kurbsky, smiling, and Adashev more slowly, did the same. ‘And the boyars?’ said Kurbsky.

‘Leave the boyars to me,’ Lymond said. ‘They have had enough of the hayrack. I shall show them the scourge. When I have finished with the Streltsi the boyars will curtsey like girls when they pass in the street.’

*

By afternoon there were six of them left, but only five of them standing. Fergie Hoddim, his leg broken by hot flying metal, was dragging himself from window to window, his hackbut resting propped on the sill. Ludovic d’Harcourt, his shoulder pierced a long time ago by an arrow, had bled, moving about, till he fainted. Plummer and Guthrie were whole, though scarred as they all were with flying fragments and blistered into the bargain. The debris had come from the gaping holes in the side of the building, where they had survived several balls from a field-piece. The blisters had come from the inner doorway, held by Adam and one of his fellows, which had burst suddenly open and exposed them to a long, shuddering canopy of glistening, bubbling oil.

One man, Brown, had died under it. Adam, the skin sloughed off his arm, was fighting with his teeth sunk in the raw flesh which closed them, and the pallid skin dark round his eyes. Ludovic d’Harcourt lay beside him, the extent of his wound still unknown.

‘More,’ said Alec Guthrie.

Adam forced himself to look up. The men in the yard had been reinforced once already. Inside, they might have suffered; but the dying and the dead on the steps and at the foot of the windows told that St Mary’s had inflicted the damage that, against odds, they had been taught how to do. But against fresh fodder, bigger guns, the frenzy of men who, failing their ruler, would strangle themselves over their cannon, there was no prospect now except death. ‘Your godly and marvellous leader,’ said Danny Hislop, rising like a cold smiling ghost at his elbow, ‘has made a masterly ruin of this one. I have six arrows left, and there’s nothing more we can do with the hackbuts. I have a suggestion. We have oil. We have tinder. We have bed sheets. And the houses of this quaintly old-fashioned city are constructed almost entirely of wood.…’

‘But …’ said Adam.

‘There is,’ said Fergie Hoddim plainly from the floor, ‘a choice,
ipso facto
, of action. If we have merely been put to the test we can parley.’

‘You’re mad,’ Plummer said. ‘You still think this is a trial?’ He stopped, arrow in hand. ‘I wonder if Blacklock and d’Harcourt think it’s a trial. Or Vassey or Brown, come to that. I hope it is. I hope they ring a bell soon. We’re running out of people and stamina.’

Guthrie turned. He said, ‘Do you want to surrender and risk it?’

Plummer hesitated. Danny Hislop answered for him. ‘No,’ he said through his teeth. ‘Bloody hell, no. We don’t surrender. If it’s a test, we don’t surrender. And if it’s a slaughter, we give them as good as we get. I say, fire the arrows.’

‘It’s a city of wood,’ Adam said. ‘There are thirty thousand houses out there, full of men and women and children.’