The Ringed Castle: Fifth in the Legendary Lymond Chronicles

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘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.’

  A wordless noise answered him. With a jerk, the Tsar laid his hands, without touching Lymond’s, on the book also. ‘Why did you not tell me?’

  ‘You knew,’ Lymond said. ‘And because you are Tsar, you had to ignore what you knew. As, because you are Tsar, you will now hold by it.

  ‘I fear. But I must face my fear. And when I return, I shall have conquered it. Nor is it of moment. A fragment of a dead self, better buried. I shall bring your arms, if I can.’

  ‘I know that,’ said the Tsar. ‘But how shall I sleep?’

  ‘One will read to you,’ Lymond said. ‘See, what have you here? This perhaps?’

  The book he drew from the others was in Latin, but the poems were noble; their rhythms subtle and varied: their cadences, in the light, practised voice, were beguiling and soft. Lymond read from it as if it were music; as the Shaman had done while his own heart had calmed and the blood from Slata Baba’s sprawled and haemorrhaging lacerations had pulsed slower and slower, and stopped.

  Now, as he read, the ragged breathing stilled on the pillows, the grasping fingers relaxed; the thick lids met in each shadowed socket. Lymond read on, and knew soon by the silence that the man on the bed, pitiful and tempestuous and tormented, and brought to the stark edge of greatness, was now at last sleeping in peace.

  Before the Tsar wakened, his Voevoda Bolshoia had left Moscow.

  The last man to see him was Alec Guthrie, waiting alone and unheralded at the Nikólskaya Gate as the brief cavalcade left the Kremlin: the sumpter horses and the servants; the compact group of armed men to protect them. He waited until Lymond came into view, and catching sight of him reined; then at a gesture approached and walked his horse with him. ‘We shall do what we can. I hope your business speeds well.’

  Lymond said, ‘Alec.’

  He was, Guthrie saw, staring frowning ahead. Guthrie said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Güzel is on close terms with the Tsaritsa. Listen to what she tells you. It is most important that you do.’

  ‘About the Tsar?’ Guthrie said.

  ‘Without me, I cannot tell how he will move. Between us all, we have steadied him. But if it goes wrong, it will be such a holocaust as you have never imagined. If that happens, you must leave, and take the rest with you. Güzel will tell you how.’

  Alec Guthrie, a man not easily disturbed, found it necessary to deepen his voice in order to steady it. ‘I cannot see such an extreme of danger developing in such a short time. But if it does, we shall see that Güzel comes safely to you.’

  For the first time, his brows raised, Lymond glanced at him. ‘I rather fancy it will be the other way round. Wild bears become meek for St Thekla.’

  The grey-bearded face remained grim. ‘You called me Alec just now,’ Guthrie said. ‘If I have dispensation to do the same, let me say it. Francis Crawford, I wish you away from this country; and if I had the hearing of a friend, and not that of the Voevoda Bolshoia, I would tell you never to come back.’

  Abandoned by artifice, Lymond’s face exposed, for an instant, his astonishment. ‘Of course you may speak,’ he said. ‘At this moment … but why? I cannot see why?’

  ‘I know you cannot see why,’ said Alec Guthrie. ‘You saw it when you fought Graham Malett. You saw it in France and in Malta. You saw it clearest of all at home among your own people.’

  Lymond said sharply, ‘That will do.’ After a moment, he said pleasantly, ‘Whatever motives of squalid self-interest you seem to be hinting at, there must be some credit accruing in heaven. You have served this Tsar, and so have I, for nearly two years through some pains and some peril.’

  ‘With your brain,’ Guthrie said.

  Lymond glanced at him, with a touch of the familiar hauteur. ‘Who expected a crusade: Ludovic d’Harcourt? Intelligence is the only indispensable commodity in life or in warfare. If you think otherwise, go live in a hut with a poet. The rest of us will do our best to defend you.’

  ‘Man is not intellect only,’ Guthrie said. ‘Not until you reject all the claims of your body. Not until you have stamped out, little by little, all that is left of your soul.’

  The emotive, squalling words, thin as a hare pipe, sank and were lost in the hearty, masculine noises: the chink of stirrup and buckle, the squeak of leather, and thunder of unshod, rapid hoof-beats around them. No one answered them. Lymond rode on as if he were alone, and did not trouble to speak any more.

  Until the Neglinna Bridge, where the column slowed to clatter over the planks between the crowded wood houses and Guthrie, slowing in turn, reined aside and, waiting, prepared to be passed, ignored, by his commander. But the Voevoda reined suddenly also, and turned to him.

  ‘We part here. I value your good wishes. I value the consideration that brought you to meet me. For two years and more St Mary’s has been upheld by your staunchness, and so have I.’

  He paused, and Guthrie, grimly watching, saw that he was choosing his words with some care. Lymond said, ‘On the other matter … the terms of reference by which I live are my own, and those who dislike them must leave, as Blacklock and d’Harcourt have done. I have said the intellect is all that can matter. I haven’t said it is easy—or painless … to rid oneself of all that is left.’

  Guthrie said, ‘You are destroying yourself. You are destroying all that makes common cause with your fellows.’

  ‘Some of it,’ said Lymond calmly. ‘It is my parting gift to you all. You are free, and so am I. There are no bonds between us, except those of the intellect.’

  ‘And the intellect,’ said Alec Guthrie, ‘will bring you back to us?’

  ‘Self-interest,’ Lymond said, ‘will bring me back to you. And intellect, I trust, will maintain me.’ The bridge was clear. The men were waiting for him on the other side. He gathered his horse and, for the last time on Russian soil, Alec Guthrie looked into the domineering, incongruous eyes which showed something of impatience and something of regret and something, blatant and wounding, of sharp self-derision.

  ‘Abandon your quest,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘What you are looking for, dear Alec, is buried. And no leech in London is going to revive it.’

  And wheeling, he turned his horse’s head to the north, where a thousand miles off lay waiting the four ships for England.

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  On her sixth and last voyage through the Frozen Sea, the Edward Bonaventure drew away from the mouth of the Dwina, her sails brimmed with the sweet air of summer, her holds laden with furs and choice foods and delicate gifts, with a cargo worth twenty thousand pounds and three people of consequence to the pattern of her age: Richard Chancellor, Francis Crawford, and the Tsar of Muscovy’s first Ambassador to the Queen of England, Osep Grigorievich Nepeja. It was the second of August, the month in which the small fleet of Hugh Willoughby had been scattered, and two of its ships later locked in the Arzina to die.

  The season was advanced, but not impossibly so. The weather seemed settled. Oats and barley stood yellow round the four mouths of the Dwina, full of fat blackcock with their green shimmering bodies; the white strand of Rose Island burned the feet under the sun, and the fields of wild white briar exhausted the air with their scent. There were gnats.

  Balancing at last on the forward deck, with the wind fresh on the cheek, Chancellor forgot those last anxious weeks in the heat of Kholmogory, waiting for the news that the Edward and the Philip and Mary had returned from their winter in London, bringing with them the extra crews to man Willoughby’s two frozen ships. Now the small fleet sailed briskly beside him: the Philip and Mary with Howlet and Robins, the little Bona Confidentia and the Bona Esperanza, Willoughby’s flagship, carrying a six-thousand pound cargo and the two Kholmogory merchants, Makaroff and Grigorjeff, with eight of their friends.

  All the ships had been scraped free of barnacles and checked a
nd reloaded, to the satisfaction of himself, his masters and his pursers. Only he had made sure that the lightest cargo was carried by the two Arzina ships. One could not always see the harm done to the stoutest ship’s timbers by a winter in ice.

  It had been clear, when he came back from Lampozhnya, that the Russian merchants not only wished to barter their goods: they wished to trade direct on their own part in London. Ten of them, after discussion, had been chosen, and were to sail with their cargo to do so. It was only after his last round of visits in Moscow, including a formal audience with the Sovereign Grand Prince, hedged about with Viscovatu and Adashev, that Chancellor learned that, beside merchants, he was to carry an ambassador and his suite.

  The reasons were plausible in the extreme. Goodwill should be exchanged. If direct trading was to take place, then reciprocal privileges would be required. The fact that with no seagoing ships Russia could make little use of them without the courtesy of the Muscovy Company was not one which anyone stressed.

  The underlying motive was obvious also. He had been warned of it by Francis Crawford, but, ignoring the warning, had listened unmoved when the Tsar, addressing him kindly, had asked him to desire the sovereign princess his mistress to send him the materials of war through the Muscovy Company, and skilled men to operate and produce them.

  Chancellor had listened, and he had spoken softly, but he had refused. Refused without prevaricating, as Lymond advised, because his business was navigation, not politics, and because trading, not politics, was the concern of the company which paid him. He had hoped that there, perhaps, it would end. The appointment of Osep Nepeja had enlightened him.

  So his ships were to be full of Russians. And Robert Best, to his fury, had disappeared south with the army. And yet, waiting for the incoming vessels had tried Nepeja’s patience even more than his own; and long before Best finally arrived with Blacklock and d’Harcourt, surprisingly, behind him Chancellor realized that the Tsar had picked the wrong man for his mission; that Nepeja was anxious about the effects on his trade of this sudden condition appertaining to arms; that perhaps in all Russia there was no man except the Tsar himself who could have placed his views with conviction before this alien sovereign.

  It was therefore with a strange sense of foreknowledge that he received a crested packet at the end of July from the hands of a weary courier from Moscow, and learned that the Voevoda Bolshoia was on his way north to join him, together with his servants and Daniel Hislop as henchman. Christopher Chancellor, standing by his father when that message came, was shocked to see on his face an expression which had in it nothing of the disgust he had expected.

  Adam Blacklock’s reception of the news was even odder: he stood, blankly, staring at Chancellor and then said, his eyes brilliant, ‘Thank Heaven.’ And d’Harcourt, behind him, said, ‘Amen to that,’ very softly.

  Christopher’s angry ‘Why?’ was not answered, and remained unanswered after the lighters had come with the Voevoda’s luggage and servants to be followed in due course by Lymond himself, self-contained and efficient and hard as Hislop behind him with the sun and the tempestuous ride by post-horse from Moscow. To Nepeja, he was charming, to Best, formal; to Blacklock and d’Harcourt, lightly abrasive. Chancellor introduced him to his sailing master, and Lymond shook Buckland by the hand and turned back to Chancellor.

  ‘And so,’ he said, ‘I have to carry out your sordidous errands.’

  ‘Not my errands,’ Chancellor said. ‘Those of Nicephorus your ruler, the pale death of the Saracens. How many did you impair?’

  ‘Men or women?’ said Lymond. ‘Why in the name of the Muscovy Company, refugium quorum in Deo est, could you not have accepted the commission?’

  ‘Because I have to come back to Russia,’ said Chancellor bluntly.

  ‘So you have,’ said the Voevoda Bolshoia. ‘Bringing me and Nepeja. You will have gathered, I take it, what a merry bundle of fun he is. You have not yet discovered what happens to Russians at sea.’

  ‘The same thing, I suppose, that happens to Englishmen,’ Chancellor said. ‘Scots, I take it, are immune.’

  ‘To sarcasm, yes,’ Lymond said. They had cleared a cabin for him below Chancellor’s own, in the poop, next to the master’s. Arriving there, he glanced round and then turned to the Englishman. ‘What honours will the Lennoxes and their friends heap upon you?’

  Chancellor was wise enough to hide the anger which filled him, and even, a little, to quench it. He said, after taking thought, ‘They will lift the promised arraignment for heresy.’

  Lymond said, ‘You mentioned nothing of this until now.’

  ‘It was my affair,’ Chancellor said. ‘I could hardly become a peddler of arms. I imagined the Tsar would give the commission to Nepeja.’

  There was a short silence. Then Lymond said, ‘For what it is worth, I believe you. It is not on your account I am sailing for England.… Did your sons know that you faced the stake if you came home without me?’

  ‘No,’ said Chancellor irritably. He added, ‘No free man should be coerced by such means. However close to the Queen, this family must learn that such things do not lie in their power.’

  ‘They lie in Gardiner’s power,’ Lymond said. ‘Where would you have fled? France? She is an enemy of England, and you are not. Spain? Portugal? Brussels? Spain and her friends control the other highways of the world, and Spain is married to England. No. With Cheke in Strasburg, with Mercator at Duisburg; among John Dee’s friends at Louvain; among the mathematicians and chart and instrument makers, where the newest books can be found from all the German and Swiss Universities; among all the scholarly Protestant exiles; among all the theorists who do not sail, and do not want to sail, and have no vessels even if that were their deepest desire, you would settle and live out your life. Perhaps that is what you want?’

  ‘Perhaps that is what I should want,’ Chancellor said. ‘But I don’t. Any more than you do.’

  He had been wrong to read understanding into the Voevoda’s face or his voice, or any of the softer emotions. ‘But you do not know me,’ Lymond said. ‘Whereas I know you exceedingly well. You should be glad. I may well find it tedious; but you should have an extremely interesting journey.’

  The interesting journey began smoothly enough, with the traversing of the great Bay of St Nicholas from Foxnose, which the Russians called Cape Kerets, to Sosnovets Island, its crowded timber crosses already robbed by foreign seamen for fuel. From Point Krasni, known as Cape St Grace, to the River Ponoy it was calm, although becoming colder, so that Adam’s hands turned blue, holding the charcoal, and even below in the cabin he shared with Best and Hislop and d’Harcourt he had to huddle in his sheepskin to draw out his chart.

  They were reasonably patient. But Hislop wanted to read, and Best and d’Harcourt played interminable games with worn cards. When he felt he had monopolized the lantern long enough, Adam found there was always daylight enough somewhere on deck: the strange grey light which persisted most of the night, as the sun dipped, sootily red, into the west and, red and lightless, rose again almost at once. Past the River Ponoy, on the Lappian coast, they ran into thick fog.

  For part of that night they were hove to, and Buckland did not go to bed. Neither did Lymond. Danny Hislop, lying awake long after the others, heard his quick step on the stairs to his cabin well towards morning, after a brisk, subdued exchange with someone who sounded like Chancellor.

  Since they set sail, Lymond had spent most of his time on the quarter-deck, or in Chancellor’s cabin, writing or talking. All the company with quarters in the stern castle had grown used to the murmur of voices, and the sight of Christopher Chancellor standing on deck alone, or walking by Buckland, or finding out Best or d’Harcourt, because he would not share his cabin with Lymond.

  Danny Hislop had been there when the quartermaster, to keep his luff, had ordered the spritsail taken in and had seen Lymond calmly lay hands on the sheets to strike sail, and after, vault round to help pull on the mainsheet so that t
he helm could go down and the Edward come close to the wind. It was done with no fuss and an unthinking dexterity, so that Buckland turned and Chancellor said, ‘You have sailed.’

  ‘I have rowed,’ Lymond said. ‘It is not a fact of life with which I edify all my underlings. And three years ago I took a galley from Marseilles to Stamboul, for France. I have never handled a caravel. I know less, I imagine, than d’Harcourt does.’

  ‘Surely not,’ said Ludovic d’Harcourt. ‘The Voevoda has been in Malta. I believe he has even fought for the Knights.’

  ‘Was that——?’ said Chancellor, and Lymond removed his eyes from d’Harcourt’s whimsical ones.

  ‘Where I met Nicolas de Nicolay? Yes it was; and also in Scotland. My stay on Malta was brief; and if you will follow d’Harcourt’s tone, instead of his words, you will gather that I did not fight for the Knights, or if I did, it was purely for my own ends.’

  ‘It has a likely ring about it,’ said Chancellor gravely. ‘And the exhibition just now?’

  ‘Because I could sail the Edward, I think. I can use compass and astrolabe; I know what Plummer knows about the practical side of surveying. But I do not know how in God’s name you are steering in these bloody waters.’

  ‘Come to my cabin,’ Chancellor said.

  And so the sessions began which so riled Christopher and surprised Best and roused Danny Hislop’s bright-bladed, excoriating curiosity. Lying now in the damp, foggy cabin, listening to those competent footsteps, he said aloud, ‘You know, and I know, that without astronomy and the mechanical arts, and most especially without the most rigorous training in advanced mathematics, a navigator is only a seaman. Why, then, is Master Chancellor gulling the Voevoda, and why is the Voevoda ready to be gulled?’

  Adam Blacklock, as he had suspected, was awake. ‘Is he being gulled?’ he said in a murmur, out of the darkness.

  ‘You don’t learn mathematics as a galley slave. He was a galley slave, I take it, and not merely the River Forth ferryman?’