The Ringed Castle

by Dorothy Dunnett

  The Tsar, braced to counter resistance, was visibly solaced; the brow lighter; the deep-set eyes anxious instead of majestic. ‘You were right,’ Ivan said. ‘The Muscovy merchants would accept no commissions. They would give no undertaking to carry our demand to their mistress: that if her people wish to stay here and trade, they must supply me with what my people must have: skilled artisans to teach us, and arms and munitions to defend ourselves from Antichrist and Mammon, the wolves on our borders.’

  ‘They fear you mean to attack,’ Lymond said. ‘And that the Teutonic League, Livonia and Poland and Lithuania, the German princes and the Hanseatic trade, all dear to the Emperor Charles, would then suffer.’

  The Tsar’s hand was tight on his rod. ‘I have told them,’ he said. ‘I have told them that if there is to be peace and not bloody war, if they desire calm seasons to trade in, they must see that my poor weakened country can defend herself against those who would run burning and scourging across her. I have told them that if we take arms against any man in aggression, it will be against the heathen, the Tartar. For how can I repeat in my prayers the words I and the people given to me by Thee if I do not save them from the ferocity of our age-long enemies?’

  They are obstinate,’ Lymond agreed. He considered the matter, without undue haste. ‘Chancellor is no politician. Robert Best, who returns with him, is little more than a draper. But Best has seen what our intentions are against the Tartar; he can report what we do with the resources under our hand, he can surely envisage what we might do, better armed. Why not let him support the case for you, and have the argument laid before the monarch of England by a Russian? Choose one of your councillors here to carry your prayer to Mary of England, and not a Scot, a former employee of France, a man whose countrymen are the foes of Charles and her traditional enemies. And while he is gone, I shall show you that without English armour, we may still take the Crimea.’

  There was a little silence. Then the Tsar lifted his hand. Ivan Viscovatu said, ‘A Russian Ambassador has already been appointed to sail with the English Pilot Ritzert. A merchant from Vologda who can answer well the questions the English may ask about trading, and who knows what privileges we require in England in our turn. This man is Osep Nepeja. But of martial matters, he cannot speak. And you will not ask us to entrust business of such delicacy to the two disaffected of your own company who, it seems, are also to be of the party. Only one man has the ability, the knowledge, the persuasiveness to carry weight in such a transaction. And that man, our wise and noble Tsar has rightly decreed, is yourself.’

  The Tsar said, ‘You will tell England that if we receive these arms, I shall declare war on Turkey.’

  The sudden words fell on silenced air. Lymond drew a long, slow breath, standing still, the great collar of jewels steadily shining, his eyes holding, without mercy, those of the Tsar. ‘And what arms,’ he said, ‘and what Commander will you ask for which could make such a war anything but the self-immolation of Russia?’

  The Tsar sprang to his feet, arm outflung, and the heavy cross by his chair, rocking, crashed to the ground. He said softly, against the hissing groan of his courtiers, ‘You give your sovereign monarch the lie?’

  Lymond’s voice was as soft. ‘I have said that, with or without arms, I shall clear your land of the Tartar. I know Suleiman’s strength. There is not a nation on earth, Christian or infidel, which could overthrow Turkey at this moment. Your Highness knows that. Your Highness had ordered, for this reason, that no Turkish prisoners should be taken.’

  ‘I also know,’ said the Tsar forcefully, ‘that the campaign to Ochakov was a test. Was it not? It did damage—of course, for you are the finest soldier in Russia. I tell you this. My Council cannot deny it. It showed the way for a greater attack later on. It did something else. It plumbed the depth of the Turk’s displeasure, that his vassals should so be distressed. We shall know, by the end of the summer, what force of janissaries Suleiman will give Devlet Girey when next he makes his attack. What we do not know is how Turkey will answer Devlet Girey’s overthrow.

  ‘I say to Mary Tudor of England that I shall make war against Turkey. I say to you that whether or not we declare war, we may finish with war on our hands. You say that, even with arms, we cannot prevail. I say that, with arms, we have English interest, we have the support of the Emperor Charles: we may have even the armies of the King of the Romans to help us, if by so doing he believes the Turk may be overthrown.… I say you underrate your powers as a commander. And I would ask you what will happen if, without guns and without armour or powder, we have to face the might of Suleiman’s army. Then no friends would come to our aid. Then our enemies would stand by and laugh, while Russia died, and the heretic rabble exhausted itself.’

  ‘You wish to provoke Turkey then?’ Lymond said.

  The Tsar was still standing, but in his shining eyes there glowed visions. ‘When I have arms,’ he said. ‘When England sends me what I ask for. Then you shall strike a blow against the Tartar which will make Turkey rock. And even Sigismund-August himself will send his armies to march by our side. Baida has told me.’

  ‘I see,’ said Lymond. After a moment, he said, ‘He did not say he had received the honour of an audience.’

  ‘At Tula,’ the Tsar said. ‘The day after the army had left. He came to give me his loyal assurances.’

  ‘And to suggest that I should go to England,’ Lymond said.

  ‘He said, and wisely, that only by threatening Turkey could we hope to attract English support. All the world knows the danger in that. You have just spoken of it. He said only you could persuade the English that such is our plan.’

  Lymond said, ‘Great as you are; great as your army is, you cannot declare war on Turkey. The English know this. You cannot use this argument with them.’

  ‘So Baida said,’ the Tsar answered. ‘If you say so also, then it rests in your hands to find other means of persuasion. Only you have the knowledge, as Viscovatu says. Only you have the tongue. Only you have the trust of us all, absolutely and implicitly. I have ordered you to go to England. Now I, your Tsar, beg it of you. Sail to London, the home of this strange, married Queen, and speak to her in her own tongue, but with the heart of a Russian. Bring me what I want.’

  There was no escape. No loophole; no answer, no argument; no excuse.

  ‘Then of course, Lord, I shall go,’ Lymond said.

  *

  It seemed as if Güzel already knew of the mandate. At least when Lymond greeted her in his house in the Kremlin after his audience, and conveyed to her its substance in five minutes’ quiet conversation, she betrayed no alarm or surprise.

  ‘If he gave you this audience in Council, it is because he does not mean his judgement to be shaken. And if you do so, he will hate you for it afterwards.’

  ‘Yes. Oh, short of death, there is no quietus from this masterly errand,’ Lymond said. ‘I have made the Three Kneelings and I have made the Three Knockings, and, with this lord, there is nothing more to be done. It has taught me one thing. For exposing you to the conversation of Prince Dmitri Vishnevetsky, I had intended to bring you my apologies. Now——’

  ‘Now?’ Güzel said serenely.

  ‘Now he may even be worth your passing attention. Even if I leave now on the Edward, I cannot expect to set out from England sooner than next year’s spring sailing in May. The Tsar is obsessed. The army will be ten months—a year, maybe—without me.’

  ‘What will they do?’ Güzel said. ‘Veil their beards, and sell their arrows for spindles?’

  He laughed, briefly, holding open the door of her room for her to pass rustling through. ‘It saddens me sometimes that you know so many Turkish expletives,’ he said. ‘I am not always in a mood for restraint.’

  ‘Are you not?’ Güzel said. He closed the door, and they stood, looking at one another. Güzel said, ‘Despite what you have said, you tried to see Ivan Vasilievich?’

  ‘I am an open book,’ said Lymond with weary irony. She sat;
and crossing the room he seated himself, his face abstracted, opposite her, and leaned his head back among her silk cushions. ‘I tried to see him, and was refused.’

  Güzel said, ‘It is for Russia. He yearns for you. He cannot sleep.’

  ‘I know,’ Lymond said; and she did not call him out of his silence.

  Later, he looked up as if there had been no hiatus in their talk, and said, ‘I shall go as soon as I have made all my arrangements with Guthrie. They tell me that Chancellor has gone north, but that the ships have not yet arrived at St Nicholas. I have four to six weeks, I imagine, to get there.’

  ‘Osep Nepeja took his leave of the Tsar and went north in the last week of March,’ Güzel said. ‘You will find Makarov and Grigorjeff with him. I shall have what you need sent aboard.’ She hesitated. ‘They say you did not bring Slata Baba with you?’

  ‘She is dead,’ Lymond said. ‘Having turned cannibal, alas, like her masters. One cannot, to be sure, love an eagle.’

  ‘No,’ Güzel said.

  *

  Guthrie and the rest heard the news, when they came, with dumb disbelief verging on outrage. The Voevoda Bolshoia, his own temper under expert control, informed them concisely of the Tsar’s motives for depriving them, so irresponsibly, of his own sterling company. He explained the situation, in fact, in terms so well argued and simple that his journey began to seem after all quite inevitable. So they dismissed their surprise and settled down to listen, writing furiously, to the orders and dispositions which followed in a day and a half of strenuous meetings, during which the lines were laid down for the army’s development in his absence, and his authority until his return was invested in Alec Guthrie once more.

  It was towards the end of the second day that Alec Guthrie, taking the Voevoda aside, told him that Hislop wished to sail for home also.

  ‘God. It’s a plague,’ Lymond said. ‘And the shapes of the Locusts were like unto Horses prepared unto Battle, and on their heads were as it were Crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men. The girl, I suppose?’

  Many of them had returned from Ochakov to find a change in their somewhat elastic domestic arrangements, to which the Voevoda so far had turned a blind eye. But Danny Hislop had returned to find his Tartar girl neither dead nor stolen, but without warning made off to her yurt. He had, at the time, made light of it: Guthrie had not even guessed Lymond was aware of the matter. ‘Yes, the girl,’ he said. ‘He wanted to marry her.’

  ‘And she thought, I suppose, that he would make her change her religion. As he probably would. An experience he should have had, for the good of his character, about ten years ago. Is he aiming, do you know, at the Order of St John of Jerusalem with d’Harcourt, or at Hans Eworth’s studio with Blacklock?’ And, as Guthrie hesitated: ‘Ah, no. I see,’ said Lymond. ‘He wishes to salve his self-esteem by puncturing mine. And what urgent reason will you and Hoddim and Plummer now find for returning to England?’

  Alec Guthrie did not trouble to reply. Instead, ‘You may well find,’ he said, ‘that Hislop stays with you and comes back to Russia. He’s the best we’ve had since Jerott Blyth.’

  ‘In other words, humour him,’ Lymond said. ‘How dangerous it is when the shepherd cannot find the pastures, the leader of the expedition cannot tell the road, and the vicar knows not the will of God. How you are going to enjoy presiding over St Mary’s, Guthrie, while I am away.… I have told them to pass all the dispatches from Europe into your hands, to keep for me. The last one from Lychpole had an enclosure missing: see if it can be traced. There should be no more after September: I have asked Brussels and Applegarth and Hercules Tait in Venice to write direct to me in the care of Lychpole in London. It may be that the success of the Muscovy mission depends rather more than they know on what is happening in Europe.’

  ‘I am told,’ Alec Guthrie said carefully, ‘that the English have expressed some interest in your movements as well.’

  ‘A heart-to-heart talk with Master Chancellor?’ Lymond said. ‘The Lennoxes want me back, I imagine, to demonstrate their power to the Catholic faction and the monarch, using the Somervilles as a lever. Which will fail. I imagine the talkative Diccon has already mentioned my much-disputed divorce. The Lennoxes claim that without my presence, I cannot be disjoined from my child bride. I have enlisted the help of the Grand Prior of France and the Grand Master of the Order in Malta to prove them wrong. By the time I land at London, I should be free of Philippa Somerville and she of me, as the romantic phrase no doubt will incline. God knows who could conceive it had ever been otherwise.’

  ‘Except on paper,’ Guthrie said dryly.

  ‘Except on paper. A stratagem,’ Lymond said, ‘I hope I am not going to have cause to regret.’

  That night was his last with Güzel, and he gave it to her, minute by minute as his parting present, with all the sureness, the elegance, the strange and delicate reticences she had come to know and respect. And her gift to him was no less.

  Next morning, dressed, he took leave of her in her chamber, where she stood clothed as if for a wedding in her robe of white Persian silk damask with bands of small winged creatures and animals, and the sleeves and hem inscribed in gold Kufic lettering: In the name of God, the Merciful, the Gracious. There is no God but God. Her hair, reeled with pearls, stranded her ears and hung at her white nape like ash buds. The glossy lids were open and clear; the scented lips smiling. She said, ‘You gave me Russia. And now Russia is taking you away.’

  ‘For a winter,’ Lymond said. ‘You said that nothing could hinder us.’

  As a spring, brimming, swirling and waning, her smile ebbed and flowed with her thought. ‘They say we deserve one another. I have no exhortations to give you. I understand what is happening. Perhaps I understand better than you do. You are not going to Scotland, so no vows will be broken.’

  ‘And if I were?’ Lymond said. ‘You say I have given you Russia, but your gifts to me have been of a different order. The prize of your body. The companionship of your mind. The fruits of your experience. You have taught me hardihood and it is for me now to exercise it. Indeed, Güzel.…’

  She looked up at him, with the familiar, fathomless eyes. ‘I wonder,’ said Francis Crawford, ‘if it is not for this that I have been taught.’

  She stirred. ‘I have given you nothing. I have shown you what was there in you already, and you have been man enough to destroy what is weak and to foster what is strong until it is unassailable. There is only one country in the world now fit for your sovereignty, and that country is here.’

  ‘I know it,’ he said. He took her hand and bending his head, kissed and held it. ‘Kiaya Khátún, your power is great.’

  She smiled, a flashing spasm wide and queer as the Dancers on snow which began with her eyes and ended, trembling, in the fingers she closed hard over his, holding them warm, smooth and hidden as if in a glove.

  ‘Greater than the woman of Doubtance,’ she said. ‘Greater.’

  And slid her hands away to stand, stately and cool, while, hands light on her shoulders, he held her quite still for a long time, his gaze locked in hers, without speech. Then he kissed her lips and, without farewells, left.

  The Tsar saw him at last, in his darkened room, while all round in the Kremlin the princes slept after dinner. He received his Voevoda Bolshoia alone, as he was once used to do; and from his bed, where he lay in his white jewelled shirt against the high duck-down pillows, a single candle in silver alight by the books at his side. He said, ‘I do this for my people.’

  Lymond knelt, formal and sober beside him. ‘Little father.’

  Ivan smiled, his beard and lashes damp in the candlelight. ‘Who will play chess? I cannot sleep.’

  Lymond said, ‘The winter will pass. And a ruler with good counsellors, Solomon says, is like a city strengthened with towers. What has been built up cannot be destroyed in a season.’

  ‘You say so?’ said Ivan Vasilievich. ‘But I smell fear. Why are you frightened?’
/>   Lymond stood, his eyes steady, his hands still on the bed. ‘Superstition.’

  ‘The prophecy you once spoke of? That was a fate, true or false, that lay waiting in Scotland. You will not die in London. Nor will your brother.’

  ‘I have many fears,’ Lymond said. ‘But death is not one of them.’

  ‘I fear it,’ the Tsar said. ‘When Mongui Khan died, the Emperor of the Tartars, there were slain three hundred thousand men, whom those who bore him to burial met on the way, to serve him in the other world.…’

  On the coverlet, the large, square-nailed hands suddenly moved. Lymond rose, and, filling smorodina into the Tsar’s golden pineapple cup, brought it to him. ‘You need not ask,’ he said. ‘Although in this world I cannot promise to do the work of three hundred thousand. Meanwhile, what is your wish?’

  The Tsar stared at him, his lips pursed, the veins standing red at his temples. The cup dropped, and rolled clanging over the wood of the floor. ‘Stay!’ said the Tsar. ‘Stay! They ask too much. I will not have it. Stay!’

  ‘The Tsar has spoken,’ Lymond said steadily.

  The man in the bed sat up, suddenly rigid. ‘You want to go!’

  Lymond did not move. ‘I do not wish to stay, to be known as the man who can make the Tsar doubt his own wisdom. Little father, if I stay, you discredit me.’

  The bony, silken-haired face looked flatly at his. ‘You wish to go.’

  Beside the books on the table, covered now with rich velvet, was the gospel Lymond had brought back from Ochakov. Slowly and carefully, Lymond crossed to the table, and, sliding the thick silver book from its shelter, laid it upon the Tsar’s bed, and his own hands upon it, his eyes open and blank on the cloudy eyes opposite.

  ‘More than my life, more than my soul, more than my hopes on earth or beyond it, I wish to stay in this place; I wish to be released from this journey.’