The Ringed Castle: Fifth in the Legendary Lymond Chronicles

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘In his teens. He was on travaux forcés for two years. He is also a Bachelor of Arts of Paris University.’

  There was a brief, overturned silence. Then Best’s voice, joining in on the other side, said, ‘What?’

  ‘What indeed,’ said Danny, recovering. ‘A two-year test course for schoolboys in logic. Added, we all know, to a liberal self-education. Big words and Latin. But no mathematics.’

  Adam said, ‘He studied under Orontius Finaeus when he was fifteen.’

  ‘You know all about him, don’t you, Adam?’ said d’Harcourt’s voice thoughtfully. ‘We find him, all of us, a subject for ceaseless conjecture. Do you realize that? Do you realize that since we’ve been here, none of us has thought of ourselves; of home and work and all the plans we were making? Is it a form of common subjection that holds us all together?’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ said Danny Hislop. ‘I’m held together by intellectual curiosity. So are we all. We were wonderfully specious at Novgorod—Best will remember—about our reasons for staying in Russia. No one gave the correct one. You can hate a man and stay in his company because of his sheer, God-given, irresistible powers to stimulate. We all liked fighting, and we liked talking about fighting. With Lymond you don’t talk about fighting; you discuss the art of warfare, and then its philosophy, and then ten dozen other subjects all through the night, or for as long as he has patience to stay with you. I thought, God help me, that you were all trailing through Europe because you were enamoured of him. It wasn’t that in the least.’

  ‘We loved his mind,’ said Adam Blacklock, with sudden terrible bitterness, and Robert Best drew in his breath. After a moment’s silence, they realized that Blacklock had got to his feet, and an instant later, the door opened and closed behind him. Danny Hislop said, ‘Daniel Hislop, you are a bloody fool.’

  Robert Best said, ‘I don’t understand.’

  In the dark, Danny was silent. Then he said, ‘It’s Adam’s story. But it begins a long time ago, when he was in St Mary’s in Scotland, and began to take drugs. He bore no grudge over that flogging, you know. It had to be done, and Lymond did it, sparing him as no one else could. And came straight from the Tsar and sat beside him till daylight afterwards, except when he was being sick. An unheroic and unpublicized scene.’

  ‘Why, sick?’ Robert Best said.

  ‘A crise de nerfs,’ Danny said. ‘Or, according to Guthrie, because the Voevoda had been playing chess.’

  ‘And what,’ said Robert Best, irritably sleepy, ‘on earth has chess got to do with it?’

  ‘Ask Alec Guthrie, next time you see him,’ said Danny. ‘But I hope you take the point vis-à-vis Adam. He is impelled by that wasteful fuel, love. That is why he is leaving. To stay would harm St Mary’s, or the Voevoda, for whom living, as you have seen, is an exact science to be pursued with the brain.’

  ‘And d’Harcourt and you?’ Robert Best said.

  ‘Ludo?’ said Hislop. ‘Why are you leaving? In case, perhaps, you came to like it too well?’

  ‘I think he has too strong a hold over you,’ d’Harcourt said. ‘I think you might come to forget, too, that life is more than a science.’

  ‘Then dispute it with him,’ Danny said. ‘He is not immutable. No man can be. I am here because I find in him a reason for thinking, and at present I want to think, and not, like Adam, to feel.… Does fog induce the confessional atmosphere? Ludo, devise us our penance.’

  Robert Best said, ‘None of you has spoken of Russia.’

  ‘No,’ said Danny. His voice, not without effort, came through the darkness, lightly jocular. ‘And do you know why? Because, of all of us, only one man is thinking of Russia, and he is thinking of it to the exclusion of you and me and Ludo and poor Adam out there, which is why poor Adam is out there.… Lymond is thinking of Russia, and if Ivan Vasilievich were not three-quarters crazy, he should never, never, have allowed him to go.’

  The next day, there was frost in the shrouds. Through the morning, the mist broke a little and the four ships could see one another as Chancellor took them ahead slowly, rounding the great bulk of the Kola Peninsula on their left, which would take them out to the wide, foggy expanse of the Frozen Sea itself, and their clear passage west. A wind rose and freshened, north by east as they came up to Cape Orlov, while the temperature dropped so that the straining sails sparkled with ice and the seamen, reducing sail as the short vessels blundered and pitched, found their hands ripped and raw with the sheets. Then, backing with a shriek north by west, the wind turned into their faces and blew a full gale.

  The Edward fired off a cannon before she turned about, and making south-east, pennant streaming, led her three labouring vessels to the safety of Tri Ostrava Point, six miles to the south, where they anchored. Once secure, the conferences in the pilot’s cabin went on, Chancellor writing this time to Buckland’s dictation. Three and a half leagues north of Cape Orlov, Latitude 67°10’, twenty-two fathoms. Big broken shells and stony sand on the tallow.… Lymond, standing beside him, struck tinder quietly and lit the lantern.

  Chancellor looked up. ‘Christ, what time is it? I ought to go and see to the Russians.’

  ‘I have,’ Lymond said. ‘They are Pskov green. There is nothing anyone but God the Great Navigator can do about it.… I suppose we are convinced that it is possible to get past North Cape at this time of year, in this weather?’

  Buckland was staring down at his notes. ‘It shouldn’t have broken so soon. When this blows itself out, we shall know better.’

  Chancellor said, ‘We have to try, because of the cargo.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Lymond. ‘No cash, no Swiss. I merely make the point that I do not wish to spend the winter in a driftwood hut shooting barnacle geese and jumping through small hoops with Laplanders.’

  Chancellor laughed. ‘Eden. It was a figure of speech.’

  ‘Then what about Herberstein?’ Lymond said. ‘He says Lappian hunters like to leave their wives with visiting merchants for safety, and if the wife is cheerful on his return, the hunter will give the merchant a gift. If you hadn’t seen a Lapp lady, it would almost persuade you to merchanting. Ah, well. Take heart. At least, gentlemen, the gnats have all perished.’

  The wind from the north blew for three days, and, when it finally changed, the weight of ice on the rigging held them stationary one day longer until it was shed, while a fair south wind blew maddeningly outside the anchorage. The following day, they called the shore parties on board and set sail again with a light north wind for Cape Orlov, which they had passed five days previously. It was Saturday, 15 August, and they were barely out of the Bay of St Nicholas.

  And so there unrolled before them, although only one of them recognized it, the slow and terrible course they were to follow, without either the clear light of heaven or the curses of Malacoda, Alichino or Calcabrina; Ciriatto, Graffiacane or Rubicante.

  Instead, lost in whiteness, enclosed in snow, whirled by storms and floating in sparkling mists, the flotilla moved; touching, swirling, floating haphazard as river ice from point to point, with the two ghost ships of Willoughby riding silently with them, who had been this way before, and had been lost in it, and were to be lost again, not to rise. And because death was a friend, the one man who was made to receive, like a tuning-fork, the whispering omens of fate did not recognize it, until too late.

  It was not their navigator who failed them. From Orlov they set course for Gorodetsky Point, which they called Corpus Christi, where the abrupt grey cliffs, split and fissured, rose from the sea with misty snows on their crowns, and the soft russet landscapes of scrub trees and low Lapland cottages lay far behind them. They passed Lumbovska Bay, and then thrust round the great headland at Sweetnose, where, fourteen months previously, Christopher had made his light-hearted offering of oatmeal and butter.

  There, snow fell upon them with a gale out of the north, and Christopher worked with the others to clear it without mentioning the whirlpool; helping to melt frozen blocks wi
th a candle; to fold and stow the deadweight, crackling sails; to take the soundings as they crept from anchorage to anchorage behind the small islands along the north Lappian coast; saying nothing as they passed Nokuyev Bay and the River Arzina where masters and mates, carpenters, cooks, pursers, coopers and surgeons, gunners, seamen and merchants, sixty-seven English souls strayed perhaps in that black howling air, and watched their living ships sail slowly by.

  He had ceased to resent his father’s companion. At anchor; or during the absence of parties ashore, seeking water and wood, the obscure discussions in Chancellor’s cabin would continue, but at other times Lymond became without argument one of the team that ran the ship as Buckland liked to have it; safe and clean, with rules for prayer and rules against fire; regulating the course by signal of his three fellow vessels, and conferring with their captains daily. He had time to spare for Christopher, and showed him once, between squalls, where great patches of ambergris were lurching on the steep seas, and at another time whales, pursued and tormented by threshers, the plunging dolphins nicknamed by Nepeja kossatka from the twisting scythe-tails which betrayed them.

  Of intention, the Russians were no longer separate, but joined with Best and the men of St Mary’s for as much of the day as was possible, talking Russian among themselves, and sleeping and gambling, or playing long, inconclusive games of chance or of chess. It was Danny, instructed by Lymond, who browbeat them up on to deck and tried to teach them, in the white sparkling cold, some simple truths about the forces of wind and of water, but they listened, livid and uncomprehending, and fled as soon as might be to the dark creaking squalor below.

  Fear was their great enemy. Buckland was everywhere, and Chancellor, when he could leave the deck also, below decks, working with and talking to seamen, for this time they had no minister with them. Often they found Lymond had been there before them. Buckland, walking up from the waist of the ship, remarked on it to his pilot.

  ‘Handling men is his profession,’ Chancellor said. ‘You should be thankful for it. You’ve seen what he is doing up here.’

  ‘I’ve seen him take sightings for you. I take it you trust him to do it. I’ve found something he won’t do.’

  ‘What?’ said Chancellor.

  ‘Take over the bloody jerfalcon. I thought he knew all about birds. He had an eagle, they tell me.’

  ‘And he killed it, they tell me,’ Chancellor said. ‘Why doesn’t Nepeja look after it? It’s his master’s royal gift to Queen Mary.’ Six timbers of sables they carried, from the Emperor to the monarchs of England. Twenty entire sables, exceeding beautiful, with teeth, ears and claws. Four living sables, with chains and with collars. Thirty lynx furs, large and beautiful, and six great skins, very rich and rare, worn only by the Emperor for worthiness. And a large and fair white jerfalcon for the wild swan, crane, geese and other great fowls, with a drum of silver, the hoops gilt, for a lure for the hawk.

  ‘Because,’ said John Buckland wearily, ‘he spends all his time vomiting. In Russian.’

  ‘I’ve noticed that,’ Chancellor said. ‘Give him an interest. Give him the sables to feed. My God, you don’t want any harm to befall the Emperor’s presents?’

  His sailing master grunted, without responding to the cursory irony. The gifts, for all they were discussing them, occupied the bulk of their thoughts not at all. All they hoped for, all they were striving to do, was to bring these four ships somehow to London.

  They rounded Cape Teriberskiy, which the sailors called Sour-beer, and passed the Kildin islands, where the reindeer graze in herds all through summer; and the mouth of the River Kola, empty now of its crowded boats of a few weeks before, when was held the great St Peter’s Day Mart, and watched by customars from Denmark and Muscovy, English cloth would change hands for salmon and cod, oil and furs. Robert Best wondered aloud if John Brooke was earning his salary at the new English station on Vardȯ.

  They were making for Vardȯ. One of three little islands, two miles off the north coast of Finland, Vardȯ had a castle, church and garrison and was the most easterly of the King of Denmark’s possessions. The natives lived only by fishing, and raising a small store of fish-fed cattle, but boats of all nationalities put into its bight, and John Brooke, the Muscovy Company’s new agent, would be there with news and letters and fresh stores and goods perhaps to be loaded.

  Also, there would be news of the Searchthrift, the pinnace dropped by the Edward on her April journey back to the Dwina. Chancellor knew Buckland was tired of questions about the Searchthrift, so he had stopped asking, but not before he had heard in detail all Buckland could tell him. Stephen Burrough was in charge of the pinnace, and Richard Johnson was sailing with him. And they were on a voyage dear to Diccon Chancellor’s heart: a voyage of pure exploration: to go farther east than any of them yet had been, and, passing Vaygach and Novaya Zemlya, to sail past the mouth of the Ob. They said the way past was land-barred, but he didn’t believe it. He believed the coast sloped south-east to Cathay, and the Searchthrift might find it, not Richard Chancellor.

  They said old Master Cabot had boarded the ship at Gravesend, and had given alms to the poor, and prayed for them, and then swept them off with a great concourse of men and women to the sign of the Christopher and given Burroughs and his company a great banquet, at which the old man had danced himself half the night, as lusty as any young seamen there, in his black cap and his long, forked white beard.

  He must be well into his eighties. Chancellor knew the sign of the Christopher. It didn’t matter if Burroughs found the way to Cathay. He was a good man. Not a mathematician, but a good man, whom Dee had taught well. Not like the man he had found here, whose first name he could not even use, and whose mind was like the star over their heads.

  They struggled, sluggish with ice, towards Vardȯ. The Ribatsky Peninsula, across whose narrow neck you could drag your ship if, for example, you were sailing a pinnace, but which otherwise you must laboriously round. The sounding, Christopher said, was like the scurf of a scalded head: his spirits must therefore be rising. They anchored in thirty-three fathoms and rode out yet another storm in a bay west of Point Khegore, with a group of Norwegian boats including a big one from Trondheim. He remembered afterwards thinking longingly of Trondheim, and wishing to God they were round the North Cape and so far safely home.

  Then Buckland came back to tell him the peninsula was seething with Russians and Danes and Lapps with fish to barter, and even some Dutch. They had nothing to sell, but they went on shore, and had some strong Dutch beer over a stove in a worm-eaten log shed, and borrowed someone’s ovens to make a good batch of bread. Two of the Russians refused to get up and had to be carried by main force back to the ship. They were still thirty miles south-east of Vardȯ.

  Then the Varanger Fjord, which the sailors had named Dommes-haff, because of the little round hill on it, five hundred feet high. There was a monastery, on the south shore, founded twenty years ago to convert the Lapps. They turned their backs on it, and on Lapland, and sailed north-west to Vardȯ.

  They reached it with the wind in their favour. So, instead of the haven it might have been, it became a place for garbled talk and quick loading: Brooke had gone to Bergen, they said, with the captain, and they had to glean what news they could from his deputy. The Searchthrift had been at sea during all May and June, and had left Vardȯ again after a brief stay in July: the captain’s deputy did not know where they were going. The snow blew like burst flock on the shutters and Buckland, getting to his feet with the meal hardly over, said he ought to be getting back, and dragged Chancellor and the rest with him.

  He was right. The days were shortening; the cold had not lifted, and would never lift now. And the bays and inlets and fjords which were shallow would begin to fill with a thick, shining gruel of ice, against which their arms would crack, rowing the pinnace; into which their ships would sail, and never move afterwards. While the bays which were not shallow would give them no holding, but would let them rock and spin pa
st on the wind like the keys of an ash tree, to seed their profitless souls on a reef. So they sailed, knowing they must now trust only to God and their pilot.

  And Chancellor did not let them down. A quiet man with a quick sense of humour, he stamped no menacing mark on his company. Only the observant eye, the lively brain, the pure, canalized flair of the mathematician had made him what Henry Sidney always said he was: the supreme man of his time on the sea.

  He took the Edward on compass and chart out of Vardȯ, and sailed her on instruments, on instinct, on geometry for a month while the wind drove the fleet on bare poles from one point of the compass to the next; into and out of the sight of land; in quarters where he had no charts and no books of reference, and could only trust to his work, to his tables, to his and Dee’s calculations. And where Willoughby’s pilot, lost and weary and desperate, had fallen at last uncaring on land, and had dragged himself and his two ships towards it, regardless of where and what it was, or what fate it might bring, Chancellor kept to the sea, marshalling his ships through darkness and mist by every means Buckland and the rest could devise; by drum and beacon, by cannon and trumpet. And they kept together, and sailed round North Cape, and at length, in the last days of October, started south down the high crumbling coastline of Finmark.

  Forty miles west-south-west of the Cape, in the sound of the island of Ingȯy, the wind dropped for a day. For a few brief hours of daylight the tired, patched ships, heavy with seawater floated together, and men stood on the decks under the bearded ice of the rigging, unshaven and hollow eyed, and called to one another: greetings, and messages, and obscene, rueful jokes. They tried for fish in the flat, gelidous waters and came up with glistening netfuls of cod: a matter for weeping when the milch cows and sheep are long since slaughtered and eaten, the eggs and cheese finished, the onion and garlic rotten, the butter rancid, the bread moulded and hard as the bacon and peas. They ate them half raw, because there was neither water nor wood to spare for their cooking, and thought them finer than saffron cakes and white bread, or oysters wooed down with claret. Then, that night, the gales sprang up again, from the north and the west, and the last struggle began.