The Ringed Castle

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Lymond answered. He went on answering while Adam, the blood alternately flooding and leaving his veins, tried to stand at ease, without swaying or stiffening, and with mounting anxiety, to follow the mood of the exchange. On the Tsar’s side, there was, if anything, an added brusqueness by now. The questions came without cease: he had, it was clear, a precise catalogue in his mind of what he wanted to know and only once did the man on his right—Adashev?—with the cloudy brown beard lean forward to murmur to him.

  His next question was pointed. Lymond took a moment longer than he need have done to volunteer a reply. When he did speak, it was in Russian. He had been asked, Adam supposed, how he could hope to control thirty thousand assorted men through an interpreter, and with no humility had demonstrated his answer. It would also, he knew, be in excellent Russian. Given, single-minded, four months in which to learn a new language, he would back Lymond against any linguist on earth.

  In any case, it had given him at this moment the ascendancy he needed to change briefly the lead of the interview. Having begun, he went on speaking in Russian while the Tsar sat staring at him with those curious china-blue eyes. Elegantly scented with spice like his pistols, the requirements and demands of St Mary’s.

  The Tsar heard him out. If he had a reputation for violence, there was no sign of it here; but no sign either of a weak or a yielding personality. He received Lymond’s words without interruption, and, at the end, stared at him for a long time without speaking. Then, lifting his voice, he made a single harsh comment.

  Hard and fast as a ricochet, Lymond answered him, displeasure distinct in his face. The Emperor replied with three words; and then, turning his shoulder, began to address the black-attired man on his left. The secretary, approaching Lymond, spoke in a murmur of Latin. ‘You and your men are dismissed.’

  Lymond lifted his eyebrows, but made no audible rejoinder. Turning to the dais, he bowed, and Blacklock, Guthrie and Hoddim in turn did the same. The Tsar, still chatting, half lifted his right hand in acknowledgement. They had almost retired to the doors when he turned fully round, raised a finger and said something with mild force to Adashev. The courtier rose, bowed, and walking smoothly, caught up with Lymond. Adashev smiled, and spoke.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ said Adam under his breath, cut off like a deaf mute from all adult comprehension.

  Guthrie, beside him, grinned and murmured, but not loudly enough to be overheard, ‘It’s all right. Lymond has been commanded to Adashev’s house for further discussion, while we are to return to our quarters. You aren’t dealing with Scots or English or Italians, you know.’

  It was Guthrie also who enlightened them all, back in the building they shared, and answered Adam’s questions, and those of Plummer and d’Harcourt and the others who had not been present. ‘The contract is still open. Ivan won’t decide until after Adashev’s meeting with Lymond.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Danny Hislop, ‘with the Angry Eye?’

  ‘What?’ said Guthrie sharply.

  ‘Boyar Plummer here,’ said Danny, ‘was anxious to know. Were you in the Uspenski? Did you see the Rublev frescoes? The Virgin of the Don? Christ with the Angry Eye?’

  ‘Which was the Uspenski?’ said Fergie Hoddim with interest. ‘Yon tall, plain one at the end with the five gold-leaf onions?’

  ‘Fioravanti,’ said Lancelot Plummer, driven to intervene in the interests of culture. ‘The Uspenski Cathedral, redesigned seventy-five years ago by Aristotle Fioravanti from Bologna in white Kama sandstone and used for coronations and all State ceremonials. My God, you must have noticed it.’

  ‘From Bologna?’ said Fergie, surprised. ‘Think of the price! Had they no Russian architects?’

  ‘The Cathedral of St Michael Archangel,’ said Plummer kindly, ‘built by Alevisio of Milan. The Granovitaya Palace and the Kremlin walls, built by Marco Ruffo and Pietro Solario. They had Russian architects begin work on the new Uspenski before they called in Fioravanti. They called in Fioravanti when the new walls fell down.’

  ‘If,’ said Adam, ‘we could get back to the Tsar …?’

  ‘Well, you saw what happened,’ said Guthrie. ‘He asked the sort of questions any hard-headed statesman would think of. Where had we all learned our profession; how long had we been together; what nationality were we all; what battles had we taken part in, and whom had we fought for. What religion did we subscribe to. Were we traders. Why had we left France in the first place. And what had Lymond been doing in Turkey.’

  ‘Mon dieu,’ said Ludovic d’Harcourt gently.

  ‘À l’oeil fâcheux,’ said Danny Hislop. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘The truth,’ Guthrie said placidly. ‘More or less. That we owe allegiance to no single master. That we fight for money and France has not enough money to satisfy us. That we have never taken arms against the Scottish nation, to which many of us belong, or for the Turk, whose faith none of us holds, but that were we to be munificently paid, we might do even that. And that we have no interest in trading.’

  ‘Speaking for himself,’ said Lancelot Plummer.

  ‘Speaking for all of us,’ said Guthrie bluntly. ‘The English have opened up a new shipping route by the Frozen Sea to the north coast of Russia. Their pilot Chancellor was in Moscow last year. Ivan doesn’t want a hopeful new prospect blighted by local disputes with the natives. If the English want to trade here, we help them.’

  ‘There’s a point,’ said Fergie Hoddim, ‘that I’d advise ye to give suit and presence to before you argue much further. If Lymond has asked for more money than the Russians are willing to pay, you don’t suppose they’re going to stand by and watch us stroll away to offer our catholic services to Poland or Lithuania or Turkey?’

  ‘That, of course, is the risk,’ said Guthrie blandly. ‘It all depends on whether our friend has judged the market correctly. I won’t tell you the conditions he laid down. It would upset your digestion.’

  They were in their dining hall, sitting or standing about him as he leaned half-hitched against the long table. Adam said, ‘My digestion died on me as it is, somewhere in the Baltic. What went wrong? Why the bristle and snap at the end?’

  ‘The Tsar,’ said Alec forbearingly, ‘said that no high-born prince in his realm, or even the Blessed Head of his Most Holy Church, had ever laid claim to fees of such magnitude.’

  ‘And Lymond?’

  ‘Said that this was possibly why, as he had observed, the Crimean Tartars had been driven out neither by a princely campaign nor by a miracle.’

  ‘Oh Mary Mother of God.’ Adam closed his eyes.

  ‘He wished to make an impression,’ said Hislop, with a blandness quite equal to Guthrie’s. ‘Let us hope …’

  He broke off. Adam looked at him quickly.

  ‘… that he makes the right one?’ said Guthrie, smoothly filling the pause. He had risen from the table, raising his hand. At the unspoken signal, Plummer rose also and swiftly and silently took his place by the door to the staircase, while d’Harcourt and Vassey moved to the head of the steep inner stairs to the kitchens.

  Danny Hislop said, ‘What’s more, I suppose we have to wait dinner till his lordship returns?’

  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; a
nd 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.