The Ringed Castle

by Dorothy Dunnett

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.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Danny Hislop. ‘And a good proportion are trying to kill me. Excuse me while I protest.’ And lighting the first fire arrow he waited, and on Guthrie’s grim signal nocked, pulled, and loosed it to fly over the street with the others.

  *

  ‘You wish a house for your officers at Kitaigorod, and a military establishment also at Vorobiovo, where the Streltsi are already quartered. Should men and officers live then in two different suburbs?’

  ‘Three,’ said Lymond with flat-toned and lizard-eyed patience. ‘I require a house for myself in the Kremlin.’

  One of the princes said, hard-voiced and smiling, ‘The Kremlin is for the Tsar and his court and his treasure.’

  ‘Then it should have a lock,’ Lymond said. ‘And a key to turn in the lock.’

  The prince called Paletsky rose slowly to his feet. ‘An iron door needs an iron lock,’ he observed. ‘Not a lock of quick gold cast over with diamonds. You make the demands of a conquering nation.’

  ‘I thought I spoke to a conquering nation,’ Lymond said. He rose, and Adashev and the rest of the Chosen rose with him. Outside, a noise had begun to intrude on the notice: a distant noise, as if many feet were hurrying, half in regular march, over the flat paths of logs which linked corner to more distant corner of the triangular sloping hill of the Kremlin. A voice called an order.

  Lymond said, ‘Don’t you know yet what has happened while you lay under two hundred years of Tartar rule? Men have made such strides that you can hardly imagine them. Painting, science, writing, music and medicine, the rule of the sea and the stars, the working of metal, the making of ships and of engines … all the guidelines you once knew have vanished and new ones are being made. And it is with gold and with diamonds that the kings of the earth are acquiring them.’

  Lymond looked at Alexei Adashev, and pitched his voice above the nearing hubbub of men. ‘I come to sell the Tsar power. Without it, all the things I have mentioned are quite out of his reach and yours.’

  The double doors, crashing open, screamed on their hinges. Men with axes, pinning them back, allowed other armed men to thrust into the room, islanding in silence the single robed figure with chains and rings and tall sable-trimmed hat, who stood alone on the threshold against the jostling backdrop of his soldiers.

  ‘You have come to sell me despoilment and discord,’ said the Tsar Ivan Vasilievich, and, raising a powerful hand heavy with rings, pointed at Lymond. ‘Hang him.’

  There was a long knife in Lymond’s hand. It flashed there before the eyes of the Tsar, in whose city of Moscow no foreigner might walk abroad armed, and Andrei Kurbsky said sharply, ‘Treason!’ and flung himself from his knees. By the Tsar the halberdiers started to run, axe-blades glittering. But Ivan, grasping them, called harshly, ‘Stop!’

  For Lymond had not paused to bend his knee. Instead he had plunged his hand deep in the long earth-brown hair of the man kneeling beside him, and dragging back his head, presented the thin knife, sliding red across the soft bearded throat of the Tsar’s favourite. ‘Let us discover,’ said Lymond, ‘who wishes to see Alexei Adashev dead.’

  The princes froze. As if confronted with spells, the uplifted swords halted. Axes lowered; heads turned to the Tsar. The pale, china-blue eyes, rimmed with white, stared, speechlessly disbelieving, while the hinged knuckles closed white on each imperial hand. ‘May dogs defile your mother,’ Ivan Vasilievich said, deep in his chest. ‘Free my officer.’

  With a grip whose cracking power they could hear, Lymond drew the Tsar’s chief adviser to his feet, the knife steady throughout at his throat. Adashev, his hat fallen, his eyes slitted under creased brows, did not try to speak. Lymond said evenly, ‘I have no quarrel with Adashev. He is my security for justice. Or is it Russian justice to hang out of hand those who come to do her a service?’

  Under the dark sabled hat, a pulse beat in the Tsar’s blood-darkened skin and his bearded lips moved, unconsciously, as the air whistled like an organ bladder, clapped from his lungs. He raised his clenched fist and extended it, fingers rigid, in Lymond’s face. ‘Twenty of my men lie out there, killed by scourings of sewers; the animals you bring me to sell their abominations for gold. I listened to you,’ said Ivan, the breath tearing his chest, ‘and twenty Russians have died. It burns my soul as with aloes-wood.’ And clenching his fist, he gave a cry which burst upon the low-ceilinged room. ‘My people have died!’

  Untouched, his hands pressing the blade to the body of Adashev, the foreigner answered unmoving. ‘Twenty of your men would barely match three of my company. You should have sent more,’ he said.

  ‘Free my officer.’ The Tsar disembowelled the air with a splayed and whistling hand. ‘Free him!
If you touch this man I, Ivan, will knout you. I will roast your flayed back like dogs’ meat on charcoal. You will be seethed in the cauldrons of pig-keepers and your half-strung bones made to dance for the bears. I will harness you to my horses and harrow you over the teeth of a flintbed until your body is milled flesh and bone meal and your face as a boll of raw silk … Free him!’

  ‘When you have heard me,’ Lymond said. Behind him, slowly, Paletsky was moving, his hands open and ready. There was a sharp movement. Prince Kurbsky had stopped him, his hand falling hard on Paletsky, his eyes on the Tsar. No one else in the room stirred. Let us discover, Lymond had said, who wishes to see Alexei Adashev dead.

  Francis Crawford did not turn round. But on the long, inflexible mouth there rested the faintest trace of a smile. Ivan said, ‘Do strangers enter my city and hack down my Streltsi unpunished?’

  ‘Twenty killed,’ said a deep voice behind him. ‘And as many more injured.’ Sylvester, the Tsar’s other adviser, had also entered.

  ‘It is the privilege of your men to die for the Emperor,’ Lymond said. ‘It is the licence of mine to defend themselves.’

  The black-robed figure of the monk stepped forward to the Tsar’s side. ‘My sovereign lord speaks of a killing. He does not speak of twenty men slaughtered by eight as an act of defence.’

  ‘My sovereign lord,’ said Lymond, ‘does not know my officers in the execution of their orders. I will make three assertions. My men were attacked unprovoked by the Streltsi. They were outnumbered ten times by the Streltsi. And even now they have neither been taken alive nor surrendered.’

  Behind him the princes said nothing. The halberdiers, standing uneasily, stared across from wall to wall of the room. The chief counsellor Adashev, his throat straining, swallowed and choked in the silence, and blood ran down, a bright thready stream, where his skin moved on the knife. The Tsar said, his neck and wide shoulders rigid, ‘And did they act by your orders when they set fire to my city of Moscow?’

  The moan ran round the room, invisible, from every throat, and movement followed: a recoil; a slow undulation of horror from men whose dreams still burned red in the night with the nightmare of seven years before, when Moscow flamed like a basket of coals. Lymond said, clearly, in Russian, ‘They acted under my orders.’

  The ring of men moved in on him sharply. The Tsar himself took a stride forward, and for a moment the hard fingers threatening Adashev’s life tightened their grip on the dagger. The Emperor’s wide nostrils stretched, and he drew in bubbling air like a child who had been weeping. And in his voice, when he spoke, there was a sob. ‘Alexei, forgive me. Forgive me, Alexei, but he must die.’

  Lymond said, ‘Alexei Adashev must die because my men are not milksops or cowards? Because they are trained as no other soldiers in Europe are trained? Because they are resourceful; because they obey orders? Yours had no skill to trap them—how should they have? They have never been taught. Were mine to wait like women to be overrun as the Tartar overran you, and die in their flower for nothing?’

  The rolling voice of Sylvester cried out. ‘Can eight men murder a city?’

  ‘There is no limit to what we can do,’ Lymond said, ‘if you make us your enemy. There are no bounds to what we may achieve, if you call us your servants and friends. How widely spread is the fire?’

  Sylvester answered. ‘In two streets of Kitaigorod.’

  ‘And where are my men?’

  ‘There in the house. Those that are living.’

  ‘Then,’ said Lymond, ‘I will lead you to them, if you desire it. And we shall put this fire out, if you will protect us. When it is out, we shall require no protection, for the people will know us. They will see that we have your confidence; they will observe how you reward the services we perform for you: they will come to us to be fashioned as the men who today held off the Streltsi, the best of your troops. And they will thank their prince who provides them with such watchdogs, and the hunter who gives them such hounds.… Will my sovereign lord call Alexei Adashev?’

  The Tsar stood very still. Only the big ringed hand, moving up and down jerkily, rasped on the jewelled brocade of the long over-robe. Then the hand fell to his side and he spoke deep in his throat.’ Alexei?’

  Lymond’s knife moved slowly down. For a moment the counsellor stayed where he was. Then he straightened, his eyes shut, his fingers laid over his throat while Lymond’s iron grip held him. Then he sighed, open-mouthed, and unclosing his eyes, walked forward while Lymond’s hand fell and Lymond’s arms were seized, instantly, by Kurbsky. Francis Crawford looked down, once, at the alien grasp on his elbows and then stood still, contempt on his face, and watched the Tsar only.

  Alexei Adashev reached his master, and the Emperor’s two arms stretched out to grasp him. For a moment they stood, face to face; then Adashev spoke. ‘Let him go free.’

  The Tsar’s bearded face stared at him without speaking. Then he said, ‘You say so?’

  Alexei Adashev slowly dropped his blood-spotted hand from his collar. ‘I say so,’ he said. ‘For there is an effrontery which will bring us to maggots; or to conquest sweet as the magic well which shall never want water.’

  The Tsar listened. The Tsar put aside the counsellor and standing once more still in his place, spoke to Lymond. ‘Franzei.’

  It was the term given to all foreigners: to the Italians who had rebuilt the Kremlin: to the rare ambassadors who had been suffered to approach the sovereign lord. Prince Kurbsky released Lymond’s arms, and slowly Lymond moved forward; paused; and knelt.

  ‘You may kiss my hand,’ Ivan said, deep in his throat.

  Brazen and bright in the sunlight, Lymond’s burnished head bent, and his lips brushed Ivan’s outstretched hand.

  ‘You may kiss my foot,’ said the Tsar.

  Unstirring, Lymond remained for a moment, head bent. Then, smoothly stooping, he kissed also Ivan’s red slippered foot.

  ‘Remain,’ said the Emperor; and his voice thickened suddenly. He held out his hand. ‘An axe.’

  Adashev made to speak, and was still. It was the monk who took from an escort his silver, long-handled axe and placed it with care within the Tsar’s heavy, imperious hand. Lymond, kneeling, did not look up.

  Ivan Vasilievich lifted the axe with both arms. The sun sent a shaft like sea-dazzle to blaze on the silver, and lit the gathered silk robe of the still, kneeling man and the curved head and the pale, unprotected arch of the neck. Then the Tsar cried out and swung the blade down with all the strength of his powerful shoulders.

  It bit through the skin of the floor, as into chickenskin, not an inch from Lymond’s unmoving body. It had shuddered itself into stillness before Lymond stirred and in silence lifted his eyes to the mantled face of Ivan Vasilievich.

  ‘You are forgiven,’ said Ivan.

  *

  Through the black, clouded air and the glare of fire and the distant screaming of voices, four men of St Mary’s saw their commander ride into the yard, and the bright helms of the Tsar’s guard behind him. And Danny Hislop, with a handful of arrows, fitted one with exhausted care to his bow and, raising it, aimed straight at Lymond. Then Guthrie’s hand leaned on his shoulder, but still, he did not lower the barb.

  It was in his hands still when Lymond came up the brick staircase, and when Plummer, in silence, cleared the door and opened it for Francis Crawford, every man on his feet held his sword still unsheathed in his grasp.

  Lymond looked round at them all, and then walking inside, said, ‘Brown and Vassey?’

  ‘Dead,’ said Alec Guthrie. ‘D’Harcourt and Hoddim are in the other room, wounded.’

  The Indian silks, flecked with charcoal, were otherwise as fresh as in the morning: the seed pearls-glimmered creamily. Lymond said, ‘How many men came against you?’

  ‘Forty, perhaps,’ Plummer said. ‘It was hard to see.’

  ‘We were busy,’ said Hislop.

  Alec Guthrie said slowly, ‘Who sent them? They were Streltsi.’

 
‘The Tsar,’ said Lymond. He opened the inner door, glancing at the wreck of the room and d’Harcourt, lying unconscious on one of the beds. On another, covered with rubbish, Hoddim was staring at him. Lymond turned back. ‘He wanted to see if you would jump when he pricked you. The excessive zeal, I rather imagine, was the work of the boyars. Not everyone wants to see the Tsar with his own private army. Considering the odds, you seem to have achieved quite a massacre.’

  ‘Do you mind?’ Hislop said; and the impersonal blue eyes travelled to him.

  ‘Politically speaking, it was a mistake. It makes it impossible for the Tsar to take his own people to task.’

  Guthrie said suddenly, ‘Will you tell me something? Did you know this was going to happen?’

  ‘What are you asking me?’ Lymond said. ‘Did I know something of the sort was likely to happen? Yes, I did. I was under the impression that I had warned you. Did I know it was to happen this morning? No, I didn’t: I have been informed only this moment. Did I have a fruitful morning drinking wine with the Council? Certainly, I did: and I have promised that those of you still surviving should come with me now, and as a gesture of forgiveness and goodwill, put out the fires which you started.’

  ‘And be damned to that!’ said Adam Blacklock into the silence.

  ‘Because …?’ said Alec Guthrie with patience.

  ‘Because you are the new officers in charge of the Streltsi, as of this moment. The contract is for five years. For each of these five years the Tsar will house you, feed and clothe and equip you and pay you in gold or in kind the equal of four thousand roubles. If it was a trial,’ Lymond said, ‘you have apparently passed it. If it was an action, you have undoubtedly won it. If we have had losses, the fault is the nation’s, and that is what we are going to remedy. What happened this morning can never happen again. And whatever we think of the boyars, we cannot afford to sacrifice, at this moment, the goodwill of the city of Moscow.’

  Plummer said, ‘Four thousand roubles!’

  ‘Quite,’ said Danny Hislop with a terrible brightness. ‘It makes quite a difference, Maeve, doesn’t it?’