The Ringed Castle

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Yet where was the succour when the grain was struck cold in the ground, and had to be gathered and ripened on Stovetops, and thawed in hot-houses, so that it might be ground? When the tinder-dry warehouses burned, and cities starved, and beggars, ragged and violent, roved the streets of Vologda, as he had seen them: Give me and cut me; give me and kill me.

  How, if you were the Church, did you justify a single gold-collared ikon, with two thousand five hundred diamonds set upon its thick hammered surface? How, if you were the Tsar, did you vindicate your annual tribute, bartered for rich cloths and finer jewels for your treasurehouse? How, if you were a man from a softer land, where debate was instructed and free, and all the scholars and books from antiquity were there to correct and advise you, could you accept in your turn such a tribute, and use it to clothe the body and house of your mistress?

  But he kept his thoughts to himself, and barely saw the Voevoda, except to exchange the slimmest of commonplace courtesies, until the day before their arrival in Kholmogory, when they stopped to eat in a church by the flat, snowfilled ice of the Dwina.

  It was a new church, wreathed with galleries, its steps dropping from level to level in uneven flights, canopied and jointed like parings of apple. Above, the spires were leaved with fresh, gilded kokoshniks, and the onion domes with their tall, tangled crosses stood bright as an odd, untimely budding.

  It was dark, even at noon, with the snow stretching white and stark to the violet slate of the sky. The frost, grown stronger and stronger, was an antagonist to be studied and countered, like a runagate thief with a knife. Stepping from the sledge, Chancellor pulled off his gloves and rubbed fresh snow on his nose and his fingers and cheekbones, and beat out the stiff, frozen mass of his beard. The rank airless heat of the church by contrast sent the thawed nerves flaring and the skin of his face felt like tallow inflamed: he knew from experience that his nose was haplessly running. He dried it, and began to pull off the shaggy, snow-powdered coat from his shoulders. Lymond, appearing suddenly said, ‘They tell of a stallion which went for a trot one cold day in Sslobodka and came back to its stable a gelding. They don’t say what became of the rider. Are you all right?’

  Chancellor nodded.

  ‘I have three cases of frost-bite. The monks say we can remain for the night, and I think we should do so. I shall send a man to warn the Governor of Kholmogory and your friend Grey to expect us tomorrow. Will your business take long?’

  Speed, and always more speed; because there was a campaign in the south, in the spring. Chancellor wondered which of the soldiers had suffered, and if it was serious. Not, to do him justice, that the Voevoda had travelled as he had, cushioned and canopied, with the warmth and bulk of the horses between him and the searing air from the north. Free of the forests, he had watched Lymond fly Slata Baba at her proper prey, as the Turkestan hunters did; or the Tartars who killed wild horses with hawks, lured to seize mane and neck with their talons, and with wing and claw, to terrify and blind and exhaust.

  In the same way, Slata Baba took deer, blinding with her powerful wings; sinking through eye and muscle and nerve with her razor-sharp talons, until the huntsman, with bow or spear, could ride to the kill. Diccon saw her swoop once, with her great, sooty brown pinions, and lift a calf from the ground, transfixed like rotten fruit, in passing.

  He could tell the sound of her dive, with its swishing moan of twice-compressed air, and the tranquil flight, beating slow as the waves of the sea, and the silly, weak chirrup, which was the only song she possessed. Seen from behind, her golden-tipped ruff pricked in cold, or anger, or preening, she looked like a ringleted girl-child. Then the pretty wigged shoulders would swivel, and there was the tearing beak, hooked below the soul-piercing stare. To hold her, Lymond had his arm gloved to the elbow, and even he, Chancellor saw, turned his head when the bird came to land. Then she was chained to her travelling post, since no man’s arm could bear the weight of a full-grown golden eagle, unsupported.

  Hunting, he supposed, was Lymond’s private pleasure: it gave them also fresh meat most days to cook. For the rest, the Voevoda had found business to do in each of the towns they had passed through; and when they were no longer near habitations, he would leave the train and disappear sometimes to follow some small beaten highway, taking no more than two or three of his men and using the light sleighs, which could take a man four hundred miles in three days drawn by a single fast horse, small and broad-chested and wild, with fox and wolf tails, grey and red and black, hoared with frost decking its neck.

  Sitting fidgeting under his bearskins, Chancellor watched him disappear on these explorations with increasing spasms of jealousy. With the winter’s hard training he lacked, Lymond could steer his sledge by bodily balance like a canoeist, the reins in his left hand and a spiked staff in his right, sparingly used, to hold the rocking sleigh steady.

  He also travelled with his feet strapped into artach, the slender pattens of wood nearly six palms in length which Chancellor had seen twice before, worn by Permians, but not like this, slicing free down the blue, hollow slopes, with the snow rising like steam in the sky. The Voevoda held a class once or twice, for his cavalry, and Chancellor, safely ensconced in his tent or his sledge or his chamber heard the distant commands and the shouts and the laughter and experienced all the violent, pent-up emotions which would have better suited the temper of his absent son Christopher. It made him angrier because he knew that none of it was expected to interest him, and that both the business and private life of his host were being conducted, with every reason, outside his presumed sphere of attention.

  Now, brief as ever, Lymond said, ‘Will your business take long?’ and Chancellor hardly heard him, because he was eyeing the strips of wood, long, snow-spattered and gleaming, which Lymond was carrying; and before he knew it, he said, ‘I should like to try that.’

  Lymond said, ‘Would you?’ The impersonal blue eyes, wet-lashed and narrowed with snow glare, surveyed Chancellor’s face and then, briefly and clinically, his body. ‘You would find it small trouble, I’m sure. On the other hand, if you break your neck, Robert Best will have my head cleft to my teeth for a murderer.’

  ‘… So?’ said Chancellor. The priest was approaching.

  ‘So I think Aleksandre should teach you. My captain. He is an excellent performer. I shall arrange it.’ And excising both him and the subject, Lymond walked forward, and engaged in the necessary business of organizing feeding and quarters for themselves and his men for the night.

  It was a small church, with limited room for the few monks and for passing travellers. Across the yard, there were arcaded sheds where the horses and men both could shelter till nightfall, with wood fires and braziers for company. Inside, Chancellor was given a room, holding no more than a crucifix, a stool and a board for his blanket and bolster. There was no stove, and it was not until he had settled down after the slender evening meal they had shared with the monks in the commonroom that it struck him to wonder, fleetingly, if the men who were to sleep where they ate hadn’t fared rather better.

  Waking later, shivering under the pile of his sleigh rugs and coat, he was sure of it. He was still fully dressed. Putting his arms through the sleeves of his heaviest robe and taking his thickest rug with him, he opened the cell door and went to seek the commonroom stove, that great block, three feet by four feet of black searing iron, with winged angels and priests marching hot-foot for all time round its plating.

  It was there, surrounded by sleeping heads resting on saddles. The centre board had been drawn, but even so, there was little enough room, on the benches or under them, for sixty men and their captain. Chancellor came in, treading carefully in the near-darkness. For the sake of warmth, he was prepared to lean against a wall until morning, despite the smell and the raucous noises of ungainly slumber. Someone, stirring below his feet, said in a whisper, ‘My lord?’

  It was the captain, Aleksandre, who was to instruct him next day, he remembered, in the art of sliding with art
ach. He answered, whispering also, ‘I am cold.’

  He had meant only to solicit help in finding a vacant space in the dark, and was irritated when he saw that the captain, rising, was about to give up to him his place on the floor. He saw himself embarking on a hissing exchange of self-denying courtesies when he was saved by Lymond’s voice speaking softly from somewhere beyond. ‘Chancellor? The chapel is warm.’

  The captain subsided. Touching his shoulder, Diccon Chancellor picked his way between the still bodies and through an archway to the narrow passage from which Lymond had spoken. The parvis was empty, but the low, carved door to the chapel stood open, and he could see the glow from the bronze lamps hung before the dark pictures of the iconostasis, and the bending glimmer of a circle of candles to the right of its doors. Somewhere, also, he could feel the gentle warmth of a stove. Lymond’s voice said, ‘If you close the doors, you will find it quite supportable. I shall send someone to cut fuel for them tomorrow.’

  He had resumed the place on the floor which he had evidently chosen for himself, seated on a folded rug with his head pressed back against the coarse cloth draping the revetment, his legs stretched before him and his arms loosely folded. Like Chancellor, he was still fully dressed, with his sleeveless, furcaped coat spread about him. Chancellor, dropping his rug on the wooden floor, lowered himself against the opposite wall likewise. He was deeply depressed. But for the frostbite, he would now, he supposed, be enjoying the relative comfort of Kholmogory instead of being trapped in this mediaeval flickering gloom, for what disagreeable purpose he could only guess. He sat, breathing in dust and dead incense.

  But Lymond, to his relief, did not attempt even a standard exchange of civilities, far less a discourse or an apologia. He merely remarked, in the same prosaic voice, ‘The mortifying quality of cold,’ and then abandoned communication, leaving Chancellor wondering, for an unlikely moment, if he had read his mind. He waited, and then, as nothing happened, spread his rug more comfortably over the floor, and stretched himself full length to sleep.

  To a healthy, vigorous man in his thirties pursuing an open air life with a clear conscience and an active mind, this presented no problem.

  An hour passed, during which sleep surprisingly avoided him. Chancellor turned, twice, and settled down with a sigh, once more, for his night’s rest. At the end of a further hour he was, to his annoyance, still fully awake.

  So was Lymond. He discovered that, by a discreet glance, as he turned over yet again. The Voevoda was exactly as he had left him, his head resting against the wall, his body perfectly still, his face indistinguishable in the flickering candlelight. Only Chancellor could see the two points of flame, reflected in his dark, open eyes.

  The next time he looked, the place was empty. Then the door behind him was pushed quietly open and Lymond came in, carrying in each hand a pewter tankard from which steam was rising. He pressed the door shut, waited a moment, and then having made sure Chancellor was still awake, moved forward and placed one of the beakers beside him. It smelt of hot mead, with something else added of a distinctly alcoholic nature.

  ‘Drunk among the Scythian snows,’ Lymond said. ‘It is, sometimes, preferable to being sober.’

  It was Candy wine. Chancellor sat up slowly. To be drunk among the Scythian snows in their native purity and pleasantness was what Richard Eden had written about Candy wines, in the Russian coda to his book he and Chancellor had worked on, before he left England. There was a copy in his baggage. He looked up.

  ‘I have a copy, too,’ Lymond said. ‘Sent me from Danzig.’ He took his place again by the opposite wall, and, resting his arms on his knees, cradled the tankard in his two ringless hands. Below his candlelit hair, his face was in shadow. ‘It seemed a mischievous waste, to chain that observing brain to Moscow. In any case, no doubt Eden is planning to collaborate on a sequel.’

  ‘That is why I am here?’ Chancellor said. He did not believe it.

  ‘You intended to come,’ Lymond said. ‘An irrelevant emotional crisis could not be allowed to prevent it. I am not saying it was unimportant. Only that it should not affect this experience.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Chancellor. ‘Trade. The chief pillar to a flourishing Commonwealth.’ He had taken a deep draught of the mixture and fire, human and reviving, again flowed through his veins. ‘The Tsar commands that the Muscovy Company should see the best furs and buy the cheapest train oil, and in all things be satisfied. Why, I wonder?’

  ‘The Tsar’s counsel is his own,’ said Lymond. ‘All I can tell you is that he is not responsible for your journey to Lampozhnya. And that I am beginning to be singularly weary of peddling.’

  It struck, as it happened, a vibrating chord in Chancellor’s present mood, but he did not say so. He said, ‘It is a poor country. It needs trade, if only the Emperor would allow his people to benefit from it.’

  Lymond said, ‘It needs trade. It needs miners and metallurgists, architects, doctors and apothecaries. It needs good roads and schools and universities and first-class local government and a decent drainage and irrigation system and a stock improvement process and well-made bridges and a unified tax system. And security.’

  ‘Beginning with security?’ Chancellor said.

  ‘Because it is needed most, yes. Because it will impress the Tsar most, yes. Because it will create the climate in which other reforms may be contemplated, yes.’

  ‘And because the Voevoda Bolshoia, as a result, will be the most wealthy and powerful man in Russia?’ Chancellor said. He had not intended to descend to personalities, and was not sure why he did so, except perhaps to keep an articulate and beguiling tongue at a defensible distance.

  There was a moment’s flash of total anger, abruptly destroyed. Lymond said, ‘My dear Master Chancellor. You appear to have closed the conversation, don’t you?’

  Chancellor stared at him, his wits shocked awake. He said, ‘How can you complain? It is the impression you give without stint.’

  It looked as if he would receive no reply. Lymond put down his tankard and, stretching his legs, tilted back his bare head so that the light rested on his face and the length of his throat. His eyes were closed. ‘I don’t complain,’ he said. ‘I merely try to fill time with an exchange of views on a subject I supposed common to us both. You receive the impression that I am personally ambitious. I receive the impression that you are a draper. We may both be right. I had not expected to quarrel about it this evening.’

  Chancellor said, without removing his eyes, ‘I am paid by the Muscovy Company. And you are paid by the Tsar.’

  Lymond looked at him. Astonishingly, the brittle, high-tempered face had altered again. ‘And what do you see when you stand at the wheel,’ he said, ‘and face all the liberality of the ocean? A bolt of fine violet at eighteen pounds six shillings and sixpence the piece?’

  In his turn, Chancellor was looking into his tankard. ‘Cloth builds the vessel,’ he said. ‘And launches her; and pays for her crew.’

  ‘But you do not travel by cloth,’ Lymond said. ‘But by sea card and compass and star. I say again. That is why you are here, on your way to Lampozhnya. That is why you have exhausted every merchant in Muscovy with your questions: about Sarai and Urgendj; about Bokhara, Samarkand and Otran. You will travel with trinket and parchment, but you will have no patience for huckstering. Your eyes are on the Ob and the Euxinian Sea: your heart, Master Chancellor, is in Cambalu.’

  ‘You are pleased to be caustic,’ Chancellor said. ‘I am not a Mandeville. I am the servant of Sir Henry Sidney and Master Cabot. I have some aptitude for navigation and I have been trained for it, most rigorously. I am told where to go by the Company and I am taught how to go by John Dee and Dr Records and Digges. That is all.’

  ‘Herbestein came here as an ambassador,’ Lymond said. ‘And left his writings, as Ibn-Fodhlan did six hundred years ago. Priests travel, dispatched by the Pope to make their conversions. Marco Polo became a trader of such wealth he was known as Il Milione. Pilgrims
travel, and colonists, to escape persecution, and men sent by their monarchs to collect rarities: manuscripts or animals or evidence of natural phenomena. There is always a reason, a primary reason to start with. But a man who faces such dangers as the unknown world still offers must have, within himself, another compulsion. An agitation, as Nicolas de Nicolay would put it. Why should it not be spoken of?’

  ‘To fill an idle moment?’ Chancellor said. He refused the lead.

  ‘To learn,’ Lymond said. ‘We have cross-staffs and astrolabes at Vorobiovo. War means cannon, and cannon means a system of range-finding. Measurement is a basic science which we need for our forts and our buildings; map making is another, for our campaigns. Plummer and Blacklock are our experts: you know that; they have picked your brains often enough.’

  ‘And you would pick my brains also?’ Chancellor said. ‘Or do you have something to offer me?’ And again, before he could stop himself: ‘An appointment if Adam Blacklock should die?’

  But this time there was no answering anger. His arms folded, Lymond waited a moment, and then said without moving, ‘I cannot discuss my disciplines with you. But it is all too recent, I gather, to make it possible to talk about anything else. It is a pity, because we may not meet after this expedition, and I understand perhaps better than you think.’

  ‘From a cataclysmic encounter with Nicolas de Nicolay?’ Chancellor said. He finished, obstinately, all that remained in his tankard.

  The lines round Lymond’s mouth deepened for a moment. ‘His conversation, I agree, is entirely frivolous, but his mind is very admirable indeed. So are his charts. He became cosmographer to the King of France but he began, as I suppose you know, with a military career. Espionage and maps, I suppose, are natural bedfellows … John Elder, Edward Courtenay.… But that is by the way. Who else? De Villegagnon, who has gone to colonize Brazil, was a lawyer. I learned of Thevet from him and from Pierre Gilles, whom I met in Stamboul. Chesnau and Belon and Postel I heard of from d’Aramon, the French Ambassador to the Sublime Porte. Once, in Dieppe, I met Pierre Desceliers of the School of Hydrography, although not Ribault, who was in the Tower, I believe, at the time.