The Ringed Castle

by Dorothy Dunnett

  The limpid gaze was full of encouragement. ‘How exciting,’ said Lymond. ‘I had no idea that we had declared war on each other.’ A thought illuminated the untrustworthy contours of his shadowless face. ‘Or do you think the Countess of Lennox will come on the Edward?’

  ‘We are not at war with Scotland,’ said Chancellor curtly.

  ‘And I am no threat to Flaw Valleys so long as I remain safely in Russia, which I have every intention of doing. I cannot see, Mr Chancellor,’ said Lymond agreeably, ‘that my affairs constitute a serious problem, either to my bride’s courting, or to the security of England, or to you. Meanwhile, we are imposing unimaginable tedium upon our kind hosts.’

  And bowing, he turned to his neighbour, breaking into a murmur of Russian; nor did he speak English at any point for the rest of the meal.

  On a sudden impulse, Diccon Chancellor crossed to the Troitsa Cathedral on his own late that evening, and lit a candle before the sparkling Trinity, and made a brief and private prayer to do with his ship and his sons. On the way back across the dark paths under the trees, he found his way barred by six armed men, one of whom addressed him in Russian, demanding that he should come with them quietly.

  Unarmed and unescorted, attack was the last thing he had expected within the confines of the monastery. Diccon Chancellor ducked and ran, opening his mouth to shout as he did so, and was brought up like a galloping calf by the grip of men’s arms round his shoulders, and the flat of a man’s sweaty palm on his mouth.

  He bit the flesh at his lips and almost tore himself free at that; then the men closed round him tighter than ever, and as he drew breath to call out once more, one drew a club and hit him, briefly and expertly, at the nape of the neck. He slid to the ground, into blackness.

  He woke in bed, in a small, whitewashed room hung with dark, jewelled ikons, and two silver lamps whose glow touched the bright hair and calm face of the man kneeling beside him, a wrought metal dipper smelling of aqua-vite in his hands.

  ‘My apologies,’ Lymond said. There was no one else in the room.

  Diccon Chancellor dug in one elbow, and sat up, with elaborate care. Speech eluded him.

  Lymond held out the koush. ‘But you shouldn’t have tried to eall out.’

  Chancellor sipped, and the power of speech returned, quickly. ‘In the dark, with six armed men at my back? What in hell’s name are you playing at?’

  ‘They were in my livery,’ said Lymond mildly. ‘Rumour said the Pilot General was observant. Since it failed, I can only say again, My apologies. I wanted to speak to you.’

  Astonished fury invaded Chancellor’s chest and made speech again a matter of will-power. He said, ‘So I had to be brought here unconscious?’

  ‘A crudity,’ said Lymond, ‘that you would expect from the spawn of a naive and barbarous régime. I am sorry I was unable to issue a written invitation. You are watched, and so am I. By the monks, the grooms, the merchants. Grigorjeff has fluent English, learned from a German trader, as Best learned his Russian from the Tartars of the Queen’s stables. Makaroff has also more than you suspect although Nepeja, bless his patriotic heart, has no gift for languages. Only my soldiers are sentimentally loyal.’

  ‘So even your masters don’t trust you?’ said Chancellor. He finished the aqua-vite, and bent to dip the ladle again in the wine pot while Lymond came to rest on the floor, his hands relaxed round his knees. The ends of his girdle, Chancellor saw, were worked with Ceylon pearls and bright, twisted silks, and his tunic was clasped with pale, bulbous stones, high in the collet.

  ‘Why should they?’ said Lymond. ‘They don’t trust anyone. When you get to Moscow you’ll find that, as before, you will be confined strictly to your house, and allowed out by appointment, and firmly escorted. You will not be invited to Muscovite homes, and you will not be allowed to entertain on your own account. One reason is that, as a representative of royalty, your person is sacred and must be guarded from all untoward incidents. Another is that, as representative of a western and civilized power, you should be allowed to see and describe only those things which reflect Russia’s culture and power. And the last reason is that you yourself shall not infect the Russian, peasant or noble, with the enchantments of an evil religion, or the practices of other, corrupt peoples as regards food and justice and government, domestic freedom and taxes, clothes and climate and culture. Villages are emptying already round Moscow. The land cannot afford to lose all its people.’

  ‘It is a corrupt rule then?’ said Chancellor. He had forgotten the ache in his head.

  For a while, Lymond was silent. Then he said, ‘How can one answer that? Parliament consists of the Tsar, twenty boyars and twenty clergy also. The people are told of the Tsar’s decisions after he has made them. He’s never spoken to a peasant in his life, except to ride him down in the street as a boy. The Empire is Majesty, and above that Majesty stands the Sovereign in his Empire, and the Sovereign is above the Empire.

  ‘A state of mind not exclusively the Grand Duke’s. But, you know, with abuses wherever he looks, and no experience behind him, he has tried to do something. He’s revised the law. He’s put some restraints on the appointment of unpaid, single-term governors, who milk a province and run at the end of the year. He’s thought of the Zemsky Sobor, the wider assemblies of gentry and boyars and church representatives. They still don’t include peasants or merchants—and merchants, you already know, have no status at all outside Novgorod—but it’s something. He’s laid down clear rules for the landowners about raising an army.…’

  ‘Yes?’ said Diccon Chancellor, as the other man paused.

  On Lymond’s face, bare of all but the courtesy emotions, a touch of resignation appeared. ‘You will discover it when you reach Moscow, so you may as well become used to it now. The Russian Army is my affair. I am supreme commander: Voevoda Bolshoia.’

  Slowly, Richard Chancellor sat up, his eyes on the other man’s face. ‘A foreigner? But what of the boyars? The princes?’

  Francis Crawford smiled and rose, in the single, enviable movement of the remorselessly trained gymnast. ‘One day, when I have given them Ochakov and they are loading their cargoes at Riga, someone will no doubt pass a sword through my decaying sinews. At present, they dare not.’

  ‘Yet they watch you? You cannot speak to me openly?’

  ‘The Tsar watches me,’ Lymond said.

  ‘It is the Tsar himself, then, who distrusts you? What future, what security can there be for you there?’ Diccon said.

  There was a short silence. The man to whom, out of all likelihood, that lively, normal young creature had allowed herself to be tied stood in thought by his bedside, the light showing no tremor on his still, hard-moulded face. Then Lymond said, ‘You will see when you come to Moscow. It makes no difference to what I said there at table. I am staying in Russia. I want to know one thing only. Why does Margaret Lennox wish to force through a divorce?’

  Margaret Lennox, noted the watching brain behind Chancellor’s clear, blue-black eyes. He said, ‘I mentioned a letter, purely because the Russians were present. Lady Lennox does not wish you to write releasing Mistress Philippa from her promise. She says that Holy Church will not grant a divorce on written evidence only. She says you must come to England.’

  The lamp-lit face was merely attentively polite. ‘Or …?’

  The threat to himself, Diccon Chancellor had long since decided, was the affair of Diccon Chancellor and no one else. He said, ‘Or Flaw Valleys would have to be guarded in the only way possible.’ He drew breath, but Lymond spoke first.

  ‘Kate?’ he said. ‘If I don’t return and Philippa can’t remarry, then Kate must marry to make Flaw Valleys safe? Is that it?’

  Diccon Chancellor stared at the other, fair face which was smiling.

  He said, ‘If Kate is Mistress Somerville’s mother, then that is the threat. She shall be made to wed a loyal English citizen, for the sake of herself and her family.’ And at something, a question, in Crawford�
�s face, he elaborated. ‘There is a boy, I believe: a lovechild who stays with her also?’

  Lymond laughed. He laughed slowly and softly, turning away from the bed, and the sound of it, in the quiet night, made the hairs prick between Chancellor’s flesh and his clothes. Then turning suddenly he lifted the dipper, presented it smiling to Chancellor, and, when he had done, tipped it twice down his own throat.

  ‘A lady of classical impulses,’ said Lymond. ‘The weaklings may hold to the Rule of Zosima: without women, how should we sharpen our wits?’ He paused a moment, and said pleasantly, ‘The child is not Kate’s or Philippa’s, but mine. A threat of such nicety deserves to be appreciated.’

  ‘Why does the Countess of Lennox want you back?’ Chancellor said.

  ‘To play with,’ said Lymond.

  ‘Will you go?’ Chancellor said.

  Lymond smiled. Like a painting in gesso the lamplight caught the moment of pleasure: lit the ridged brows and gold feathered hair, the tips of the thick, open lashes; the sapphires glowing like oil on his doublet.

  ‘Ask me in Moscow,’ he said.

  Chapter 3

  Four days later, through gentle country of yellowing birches and sunlit scarlet berries of rowan, they reached the joined wood walls and log bridges of Moscow, and passed between the izbas and churches to reach the inner city, ringed by its wall of rose brick, where Lymond conducted them to a modest, shingle-roofed house and introduced them to the two Pristafs, with their company of soldiers, who would be responsible for their lodging and food. Then he left them.

  The following day, they received a summons from the Chief Secretary to bring to him all their official missives for translation, and did so, finding Master Ivan Mikhailov Viscovatu prepared to be most cordial, and being conducted on their return to a larger house in a different district where they waited in total seclusion for almost a week, playing cards and trying to engage the Pristafs in frivolous conversation. Seven days after their arrival, they were advised by Master Viscovatu that the Tsar felt a desire to accommodate them in still greater comfort, and, with a great deal of bowing and baring of teeth, were escorted to a still larger house, hung with red serge, which had beds in it. Here they received daily eight hens and a portion of mead, together with an allowance of five and sixpence in cash, and a man to clean house and serve. Two days after that, the letters were returned, and they were warned that they would be called to the Tsar’s presence in the morning. Christopher was sick.

  ‘It’s that drunken land-hog’s unspeakable cooking,’ said Best.

  ‘No, it isn’t. It’s the detention and the silence,’ Chancellor said. ‘I give you leave to imagine what it was like the first time. We waited twelve days before he sent for us.’

  ‘Cleaning the silver,’ said George Killingworth, who had finished working on his boots and was brushing his beard, which was long, curling and golden and smelt of badly cooked rabbit. ‘According to Crawford. D’you still think he’s not to be relied on, Diccon? Maybe the Army thinks Englishmen ought to live in big houses.’

  ‘I imagine the Army is far too busy consolidating its own position to have any charity left over for foreigners,’ Chancellor said. ‘No. The climate is different. Moscow is different. They’ve had another fire. They had one eight years ago. There wasn’t a post left you could tie a horse to, and two years ago you could still see the mess. But this one has been cleared up, and the spaces between the houses are bigger, and there are water troughs and broom hooks at the street-ends. The buildings are better. There’s more brick. More glass and less mica. Look at the studs on this door. Look at the work in that chest.’

  Harry Lane said, ‘But no beds. No chairs. No trenchers. No metal-ware for the table: beech cups and a case of wood spoons at your girdle. And the drink is God-awful.’

  ‘Kvass,’ said Chancellor reflectively. ‘Described as water turned out of its wits, with a little mash added. Christopher …’

  ‘Drink,’ said Christopher aggressively, ‘has no effect on me at all. You said so yourself. It was the stewed hare.’

  ‘I said at Penshurst,’ said his father calmly, ‘that you could start drinking beer. English beer. Not mead sodden with hops and fermented in God knows what uncured receptacle. Tomorrow, God help us, we have to present our credentials to the Tsar of this country and ask for his favour, remembering that the present we intended to give him is still in Vologda, and will stay in Vologda apparently until the ground freezes over. We shall be bidden to dine. After dinner, there is only one test of manhood, and none of us, surprising though it may seem, is looking forward to it. You are not coming.’

  ‘But——’ said Christopher.

  ‘You heard your father,’ said Killingworth. ‘You can’t hold enough liquor.’

  ‘Can you?’ said Christopher, goaded.

  ‘No,’ said George Killingworth, after a moment’s reflection. ‘But who else is going to help us to bed?’

  So Christopher was not among the five men who rode out next morning, with a gaudy escort of boyars, and pressed their way to the gates of the Kremlin through the cleared market place with its closed shops and sealed taverns: cleared so that the people of Moscow, and the soldiers and the lower though valuable nobility, could suitably congregate, and impress with their numbers and vigour; and so that the people in turn could witness the honour done to their country by distant and powerful kingdoms.

  Tricked out in new Russian gowns of branched velvet and gold, furred with sable and squirrel and ermine, and edged and faced with black beaver, Diccon Chancellor and his four English gentlemen rode through the ranks of packed faces, sweating slightly under the mild sun of early October, and over the rise, past the scaffolding of the Tsar’s new Cathedral of St Basil, and dismounted at the Frolovskaya Tower, the ceremonial entrance to the Kremlin, where yet another company of soldiers awaited them at the bridge, in damascened helmets and coats of mail, with blue and silver tunics laid over them.

  Their commander, a grey-bearded man with a face neither Slav nor Tartar, delivered a grave bow to Chancellor, and Chancellor saluted both him and the ikon over the gate, and crossed over the ditch into the Kremlin. The soldiers marched stiffly before him, and more of them stood at attention, lining the rising ground where he was to walk. (Every soldier in Russia is a gentleman, and does nothing else. Who had said that? It was true. These were not the inbred faces of high western culture, but neither were they the faces of peasants.)

  Princes and elders, to greet and walk with him, robed in figured velvet on tissue, with twisted silk frogging and gold filigree chains, and tall seamed caps on their heads. The faces of others; monks, boyars’ sons, servants, pressing between the ranks of the guard.

  The palace square he remembered so well, with its lean churches hand-wrought like rizas above the dwarfed coloured forms of the people. The St Michael Archangel, with its clear fluted shells. The tulip-bed of the Blagoveschenski’s golden towers; the tall painted hoods of the Uspenski and its thin-mortared ivory stones. And the winged golden crosses and cupolas crowding behind.

  George Killingworth, beside him, had never seen it before, nor Henry Lane, nor Ned Price nor Rob Best, his broad shoulders laden with sables. The last time he had been here, he had carried with him the Tsar’s reply to his King’s letter, written in Russian and Dutch: We, greatest Lord John Vasilievich, by the grace of God Emperor of all Russia … sent by your true servant Hugh Willoughby, the which in our domains hath not arrived … Whereas your servant Richard is come to us, we with Christian true assurance in no manner of wise will refuse his petition.…

  Well, Hugh Willoughby had arrived in the domains of Ivan Vasilievich: he was there now, on the Esperanza, floating under the banner of St George west of Nenoksa, with the log of that last, frozen voyage no longer where he had laid his handsome head by it, his final words blurred under the brittle, manicured fingers. Alas, Hugh Willoughby.

  The stairs up to the terrace, with robed figures moving forward to greet him. The doorway to the Ves
tibule and the long room he remembered, with silent, deferential figures moving about. He heard George Killingworth, looming beside him, give a muffled snort in the midst of the tension, and knew he had caught sight of the wash of gold light from the walls, laden with burnished parcel-gilt on broad shelves: pitchers, ewers and basins, plates and salt cellars and tankards, flagons and standing cups, fat pineapple and thin knotted Gothic. Someone had cleaned the silver.

  He must not let his mind wander. In unknown waters, you kept your lead going and sounded every half-glass. It was the second time that you sailed on the sandbar that bilged you. Then it would be alas, Diccon Chancellor.

  The painted ante-room, with a silent revetment of sitting, gold-mantled Councillors and above them, the frescoes chosen by the priest Sylvester to edify and instruct his young Tsar: The Wise Son is the Mother’s and Father’s Joy. The Fear of God is the Beginning of Wisdom. The Heart of the Tsar is in the Hand of God.

  Leading from that was the Chamber of Gold, which had once had golden frescoes under Tsar Vasily, but which Sylvester had caused to be covered with more vigorous stuff. The Ten Battles and Victories of Joshua, Chancellor remembered, and a number of prominent successes in Russian history, with the princes of the Rurik dynasty gazing inscrutably down from the vaults, and Christ Emmanuel where the lights were. At the doorway, recalling the previous occasion, he said, ‘Do we wait?’ and an English voice whose owner he could not see said, ‘The lord Ivan Vasilievich is prepared to receive you.’ Then the doors opened, and they were inside.

  The figured vaults, prismatic with colour, chambered the room like a honeycomb, in which sat the Tsar’s golden princes, like bees in the cell. And facing them across the empty, tapestried floor, the Tsar sat on his raised golden throne, foiled and jewelled as the ikon above his crowned head, the brocade of his gown seeded with pearls and plated with deep-moulded orphrey. His hair was more auburn than Chancellor had remembered: the nose long and slender; the eyes blue and cloudy under the brow prematurely lined. Chancellor swept off his hat, as did the four Englishmen with him, and the courtiers rose, in a flash of gold tissue, and bared their heads likewise.