The Ringed Castle

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘I rather doubt,’ said Lancelot Plummer a shade self-consciously, ‘if he is at present dealing with women.’

  ‘The last time I passed his tent,’ said Alec Guthrie sourly, ‘there was a camel in it.’

  A chorus of groans, accompanied by Danny Hislop’s high cackle derided him. Adam Blacklock’s light, sharpened voice, from the doorway of the tent, cut clean across it. ‘Voevoda!’

  Almost before he had spoken the word Lymond was on his feet, staring at the man he had thrashed, with whom he had held none but formal conversation ever since.

  Adam said, ‘Vishnevetsky has Slata Baba.’

  ‘And?’ said Lymond.

  ‘And he is flying her at the captives,’ Adam said. ‘Perhaps you suggested it.’

  Before he had finished, Lymond was out of the tent with his weapons, and the others, rising, hurried to follow. Only Alec Guthrie, as he overtook Blacklock, struck his shoulder briefly and hard, as a bear might smack its thickheaded cub for correction. ‘That is not for thinking,’ said Guthrie. ‘But for saying what you are thinking.’

  The noise drew them, like an inhalement of steam, to the cockpit.

  It was no more than the bare mound of a hillock, not far from the camp and beyond Baida’s tent. Round it were gathered the Cossacks, their torches bright in a circle of fire, their shadows jerking and running before them, A little in front of them stood Dmitri Vishnevetsky, very drunk, with the golden eagle, hooded, weighing down his powerful arm. And thrusting past him, as he stood there, helplessly laughing, were two of his henchmen, not so drunk, and carrying something weakly moving between them, which they threw on the crown of the hill and cuffed into silence and then left, retreating a little, standing hands on their hips, waiting for their great leader Baida.

  A Tartar captive. A Tartar child, perhaps eighteen months old, with a piece of raw meat tied to its sunken, bruised belly.

  Baida pulled the tassel of Slata Baba’s elegant hood, and flung her high, flags beating, into the air.

  Lymond shot his eagle as she swept down: a high, perfect shot with the little birch bow and the short, Turkish fork-headed arrow. He nocked again as she fell. Before she lodged on the ground he killed Baida’s first henchman; he aimed and released the third arrow in the same sequence of deliberate movements, and the other henchman dropped, also shot through the heart. Then, as, screaming, the Cossacks surged up the hill, Lymond turned the fourth, cold shining arrow on Baida.

  Everything stopped. Watching, his heart shaking his rib-cage, Best heard the shouting diminish; saw the rush falter, watched Vishnevetsky, frowning, gather his resources and attempt, belatedly, to command himself, and the sudden, uncharitable turn of events. Through his nose, to Lymond, he said, ‘Damn you!’

  To Adam Blacklock, Lymond said, ‘If the child is alive, save it. If the eagle is alive, kill it.’ He had lowered the bow. But Baida he had never stopped watching.

  Already kneeling at the top of the mound: ‘She is dead,’ said Adam Blacklock, with the Tartar child on his arm.

  ‘How dare you?’ said Lymond softly to Prince Vishnevetsky. ‘How dare you teach my hunting fowl to turn rogue? Do I feed human flesh to your horse? Do I train your dog to pull the shaft from your leg as you stroke him at table? What do you offer me, to replace Slata Baba?’

  There was a growl. Vishnevetsky shouted, ‘You have killed my two men!’

  ‘Forgive me. I thought they were your servants,’ Lymond said. ‘You have slaughtered, without leave and without courtesy, six months of my time. I am waiting to hear what amends you will make.’

  Clear and savage and cold, the voice cut through all the confusion; the shouting dropped to a rumble and already there was a move backwards from the low hill, leaving Vishnevetsky isolated with the Voevoda near the top. Best thought, He has only to pitch his voice so, and they believe it. They believe the lives of two half-trained moujiks are nothing compared to the life of this bird.

  ‘If the fowl was your lapdog,’ said Dmitri Vishnevetsky at last, ‘I will get you another. Or this …?’ And, sobered now, he took the whip from his belt and, stretching it, hooked from the hands of an onlooker a cage, in which a terrified linnet chirped and fluttered and hopped. ‘This might please your child, who does not go to war, rather better.’

  Lymond said, ‘I want payment in full.’

  For a moment they stood face to face in the torchlight: the tall tousled man with the wide-striding boots and high colour, and the repressed and motionless foreigner, skin, clothes and hair bright and groomed and deadly as sharplings. The prince, staring at him, suddenly shrugged. ‘I cannot manufacture an eagle.’

  Lymond said, ‘Take your bow.’

  The other man had none with him. Before he could open his mouth, Alec Guthrie had leaned over, bow and quiver in hand, and was offering his. Frowning, Prince Vishnevetsky grasped it, while Guthrie took and held the small cage in its place.

  ‘You have booty,’ Lymond said. ‘So have I. Whichever man of us clean kills that linnet, wins all the other may have in his tent.… Release it, Guthrie.’

  Guthrie opened the cage.

  The bird darted out while Vishnevetsky, still watching Lymond, grasped suddenly what was happening and, whirling, strung and nocked his first arrow. Lymond, holding back, had restrung and nocked his in rhythm. Both bows swung expertly upwards.

  In its first beat, the bird had risen above the swirling blaze of the cressets. Rising, darting, hovering in the night, it fanned its desperate wings like a humming bird, sometimes flushed, like a fragment of cloud, by the fires down below, sometimes only a space, a dark scrap of sky against the stars of Aldebaran, whose flocks pasture the luminous grass of the night.

  The arrows hissed into the air; and hissed; and hissed; and curving fell where the crowd, talking and shouting, were moving like weed to and fro, to let the archers take aim. But it was, as Best knew it would be, an arrow from Lymond’s bow which pierced the fluttering fragment and brought it down, a morsel in someone’s rough hand, and Baida’s tent to which they all marched, laughing and singing, for the prize to be apportioned as had been agreed.

  They walked past the flap of the tent, Lymond, Best and his officers, and the noise of the crowd was cut off. The silence inside, after the first moment, was quite as decisive. Within Baida’s tent were no maidens, or valets, or camels. Shackled each to each, their rich clothes torn, their turbans broochless, their dark eyes filled with a world of contempt, lay a group of kidnapped Turkish pashas.

  Lymond lost his temper. With furious joy, exacerbated by the evening’s aggravations, Dmitri Vishnevetsky also lost his. Lymond’s words, of intent, even at the height of his anger, did not penetrate beyond the confines of the tent, but what he said turned Best’s stomach, and the rolling voice of Vishnevetsky, replying, gladdened the hearts of the avid listeners crowded outside.

  Even so, it was in a white heat of rage, the blood mantling his skin, that the Starosta of Kanev and Cherkassy saw wantonly freed five men who embodied thousands of roubles’ worth of Turkish gold pieces, and saw them given horses, and food and weapons, and turned south out of his power. Indeed, when the first order was given, Baida lifted his arm, his head tilted, his eyes on the Voevoda’s empty hands and bare head.

  Then Lymond said, ‘If you strike me, there will not be a man of your Cossacks alive to speak of it tomorrow.’ And Best, for one, knew without doubt that he meant it, and that he could do it, and would.

  Vishnevetsky knew it also. He said none the less, breathing hard, ‘You would lose every Cossack in Russia.’

  Lymond’s cold voice remained steady. ‘And what use would they be, to me or to Russia, once they knew that one of their leaders could strike me with impunity? If you have a private quarrel with me, pursue it off the field, privately. You cannot challenge me here and now without challenging the Tsar and his army.’

  The black eyes glittered. ‘I do challenge you.’

  ‘With five thousand Cossacks?’ said Lymond.

 
‘With the army of Sigismund-August, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania,’ said Dmitri Vishnevetsky, with fair clarity and a great deal of venom.

  There was a short, weighty silence during which the unfortunate fatuity of this became expansively clear, and Lymond recovered his temper. He said dryly, at length, ‘The Tartars, I am sure, would be delighted. I am not sure what we are disputing about. Did we not make a wager, and did I not win it?’

  Prince Vishnevetsky grunted.

  ‘Then your prisoners are mine, to do as I like with. I choose to set them free, because Russia is not yet prepared for full-scale war with the Sultan.’

  His dignity salved, Baida’s tone became again smoothly caustic. ‘And this of course, is what the Tsar sent Mr Best here to learn.’

  ‘Mr Best is very well aware,’ Lymond said, ‘that we have neither the men nor the munitions so far to fight Suleiman the Magnificent. Our first objective is to drive out the Tartars. You claim to hate them. Help us.’

  ‘Is it worth my while?’ Baida said. Relaxed, he crossed to the chest where the vodka flasks stood, and, splashing heavily, filled every cup on the board. ‘What arms will England send you, if you make no effort to occupy Turkey’s attention? And without arms, what hope have I of ever making a living from rich Turkish pashas? Tell me that?’

  Lymond took the drink offered him, as did the rest, and saluted his host, and drank, sealing unspoken the reconcilement. ‘What arms do Cossacks need?’ he said. ‘Except to make love and gamble. Please the Tsar, and you will be rich enough. Make your fort at Khortitsa, and we shall help you sweep round the Dnieper and send the Song of Baida clean through the steppelands and hills of the Krim.’

  They left him, still drinking, presently, and went back to their tent more slowly than they had left it, through the quietening camp. Lymond, beside Adam Blacklock, said, ‘Before you sleep. Take one of your men and see to the burial.’

  ‘Of the eagle?’ Adam said.

  ‘Naturally,’ said Lymond. ‘And, if you can bear it, of the child.’

  He had known, or guessed, Adam took it, all about those illegal Turkish captives. And despite Baida’s own crapulous efforts, he had saved the prince’s face and the kidnapped pashas as well. Out of an unfortunate slaughter, a prize of exceptional sweetness. Adam said, ‘Konstantin has already seen to it. The mother belongs to him. He is, more than ever, your dazzled and most humble acolyte.’

  ‘They come in sets,’ Lymond said. ‘With two small pi drums and a set of stone chimes. You are going to tell me that you want to leave St Mary’s.’

  They had stopped outside his tent. ‘Yes,’ said Adam. ‘Was it so obvious?’

  ‘The lack of enthusiasm has been obvious. To leave before the campaign, I suppose, would have looked like pique, or like cowardice. So, you have discovered that your conscience will not let you put soldiering before other things. I wish you had found it out before.’

  ‘I did not know it before,’ Adam said. ‘I can’t stay. Plummer can use all his arts, and they will let him teach them, and follow him eagerly. I cannot stand silent.’

  ‘No,’ Lymond said. ‘Then you are better away.’

  Adam Blacklock said, ‘There is one thing.’

  ‘Yes?’ A steaming horse was being led away from the Voevoda Bolshoia’s tent, and there was the dark shadow of a man, standing waiting beside the guards.

  ‘You refused me opium, I was told.’

  ‘It is possible,’ Lymond said, ‘to bear pain without it. If I can do so, then I expect it of you. Is that all?’

  ‘Ludovic d’Harcourt wishes also to leave,’ Blacklock said.

  The dark figure had come forward. Stained with travel; his beard uncombed, his face splashed with mud, he did not at first seem what he was: one of the Tsar’s principal couriers. Lymond greeted him, and in a few words provided for his comforts, and, before he let him go, opened and read by the torchlight the rolled dispatch he had brought in his pouch.

  The questions he then asked the messenger were swift, brief and pointed, and the answers, as he turned back to Blacklock, had not, Adam saw, pleased him at all.

  ‘D’Harcourt too?’ Lymond said. ‘Our evangelist. I wonder who else is pining for the role of Feodorit, the Enlightener of the Lapps? Whoever they are, if you will round them up, they had better all travel with me. I have been called back to Moscow. I shall be leaving the bulk of the army with Guthrie, and riding back to the Kremlin tomorrow.’

  Without the army. A recall, therefore, direct by the Tsar.… ‘Why?’ said Adam.

  ‘I have no idea. Perhaps the forces of winged retribution. The prophet Elijah being fed to the ravens. Like Baida, I have killed my three pigeons.’

  ‘Two,’ Adam said.

  ‘Two died instead of Vishnevetsky. One died instead of my brother. Long ago. Attar, the Persian poet, saw the destiny of souls as a flight of birds across the seven valleys of Seeking, Love, Knowledge, Independence, Unity, Stupefaction and Annihilation, before at last being lost in the divine Ocean and thenceforth happy. A charming, if sterile, conceit. Next time, the bird may escape,’ Lymond said. ‘Happy pigeon. Next time, the archer may die.’

  ‘Happy archer,’ said Adam; and shut his lips, and went off.

  *

  As once before, the Chosen stood in support round Ivan Vasilievich when he received in audience his Voevoda Bolshoia, and the white-robed guard with their silver axes lined the coloured walls of the anteroom and did not salute him, since Supreme Commander to Ivan Vasilievich was as Ivan Vasilievich to Christ, our most merciful Tsar. And in the Golden Chamber, adorned with Sylvester’s disputed frescoes: The Baptism of Vladimir, The Destruction of the Idols, The Deeds of Vladimir Monomach, stood all the familiar faces: Adashev and Kurbsky and Sheremetev, Palestsky and Kurlyatev, Vyazemsky and Pronsky-Shemyakin. And the small group of priests, including Sylvester himself and the Metropolitan Makary, his two fingers upraised in blessing as the Voevoda saluted the ikon and the Tsar.

  So these two men, so close in age, so far apart in birth and training and temperament confronted one another. Against the black gowns of his churchmen the Tsar’s robes of brocatelle and cloth of gold and raised velvet knotted with silk glowed like enamel: the brooched alkaben over the ferris, the caftan over the shepon, and the shepon over the shirt with its collar, four fingers deep, of jewels and pearls. On his head, a deep kolpak concealed his short auburn hair, and his feet were in soft velvet shoes, the toes curled and jewelled.

  Cap in hand the Tsar’s favourite knelt, in caftan and tunic, while Ivan Mikhailovich Viscovatu smiled and intoned. ‘Great master, and King of all the Russians, the Voevoda Bolshoia strikes his forehead before thee, for thy great favour in receiving a gift.’

  Behind Lymond were two of the changing band of Russians who travelled with him and served him. Each of them held a box wrapped in silk, and each box was passed in turn to the Chief Secretary Viscovatu, who handed them in his turn to the Tsar. Ivan Vasilievich, without looking at his Supreme Commander, opened them.

  The first held an ikon, dressed with an embossed silver mounting which hid nearly all but the calm tempera face with its arched brows and pouched, close-set eyes and long, reeded nose above the thin, drooping moustache. In the second box was a gold gospel cover, with its figures threaded and outlined with uneven pearls, and blue sapphires and crimson almandines set high in the filigree. For a long time the Tsar studied them, then, giving them to other hands, he looked at last at Lymond.

  Lymond said, ‘Wrested by the Tartar from a Christian altar, and now to be restored there by Christ’s friend, the Tsar of all Russia.’

  ‘Give me your hand,’ Ivan said. And receiving it, held it, while Lymond stood by his footstool. ‘Hast thou travelled well?’

  ‘Through the mercy of God and your grace, very well,’ Lymond said. ‘God give your grace good health.’

  Releasing him slowly, the Tsar laid his powerful hand again on the shaft of the sceptre of crystal and gold in his lap. ‘They say,’ he sa
id, ‘you bring me a victory.’

  ‘They say kindly,’ Lymond said. ‘We have burned twelve Tartar settlements and raided Devlet Girey’s town of Ochakov, killing many and releasing many Christian souls, with almost no loss and no harm to your servants. I bring you an army high in heart to defend you against all your enemies. I bring you the allegiance of Prince Dmitri Ivanovich Vishnevetsky, at present in Cherkassy, who is to build a fort below the cataracts of the Dnieper against the Perecop Horde, and who will join us, when we are prepared, to remove Devlet Girey and his host as your Highness removed the Khan of Kazan. The way to the Crimea is known to us, and its strength. In one year, if you will trust me, it shall be yours.’

  He spoke, as he always spoke, in the clear, unequivocal cadences of the Slavonic tongue. And he listened, as he always listened, to the rumour, the voiceless burden of thought in the room.

  An ear less finely tuned than his would have told that something was wrong. The silence when he had spoken confirmed it. Then the Tsar said, ‘For what you have done, we know how to reward you. Receive now our token. As for the future, it is time for our plans for you to be made known.’

  Adashev, the soft-spoken Councillor with the pleasant, pockmarked face carried the Tsar’s gift to Lymond. It glinted in his hands: a necklet of pendant medallions linked with gold, openwork beads; each plaque bearing an image in cloisonné enamel, set with blue and green sapphires and garnets. He laid it over Lymond’s bent head and over the caftan, where it sparkled, a major artefact, close to the sacred barmi of princes; an unwise, a violent token of favour. The Tsar Ivan Vasilievich said, ‘It is our wish that you should travel to England.’

  Lymond stood up. Because he knew Viscovatu was smiling; because he sensed the satisfaction on Kurbsky’s face, he did so smoothly but his eyes, wide and cold, were scanning that big, raw-boned face with its jutting nose and soft, reddish beard; and saw that there was colour on the high cheekbones, and a deeper furrow on the heavy, ridged brow. Lymond said, ‘As close as the shadow and the stile are the Tsar’s wishes, and his servant’s deeds to fulfil those wishes. I am to travel with Chancellor?’