The Ringed Castle (11 page)

The princes and boyars attached to the court, hearing the tale with a certain brooding interest from their wives, felt more than a spice of envy for the endowments which could call forth such favours. They were further gripped by what their wives could relay to them of Güzel’s experiences in the seraglio of the Sultan Suleiman, and all she had learnt there and from Dragut her lover, of the Turkish army and naval command.

Güzel knew a great deal, and it was not hard to persuade her, now and then, to tell what she knew, about the Spahis and the Janissaries, and their numbers and leadership; about their weapons and practices; about the Sultan’s advisers, and his policy towards the Tartars on Russia’s borders and towards Russia herself.

From Güzel, indirectly, the Boyar Council learned as much, in a few weeks, as the princes learned about western customs direct from her favourite Crawford of Lymond, the foreigner they called Voevoda Frangike. But to questions about Güzel, the Voevoda had proved politely uncooperative, proceeding thence smoothly to intolerance: whether the Voevoda was thus defending his mistress, his vanity or merely his right to possess a personal life was not entirely clear, either to his victims or to the men who were following him.

These, as it turned out, had little enough leisure to ponder it. Foiled over the house in the Kremlin, Lancelot Plummer exercised his talents as engineer and architect in designing a suitable home for
himself and his fellow officers in Kitaigorod, the merchant quarter of Moscow adjoining the swallowtail walls of the Kremlin, and walled itself in identical white-veined red brick. He made the building of brick: spacious and utilitarian, with room for their equipment and a disposition this time of steps, doors and windows which would make outside assault a very difficult proposition indeed. A chaste line of dog-tooth white stonework and a minor embellishment of the principal doorways was all he permitted of flourish.

The third building he made for St Mary’s was at Vorobiovo, the country suburb south of the river, and had no flourishes within or without. It was here that their training ground was laid out, and where he and the others would work and live beside the rough wooden huts of the Streltsi, Ivan’s only trained standing force, until the groundwork was done, and they had created the fighting arm which Russia needed.

Once it had begun, the swiftness of it surprised all of them; even those who remembered the start of the band of mercenaries known to Western Europe as St Mary’s. Some of it was directly due to the change, now unequivocally clear, in Lymond himself. The cleverness, the far-sightedness; the broadly imaginative grasp of basic essentials were there and identified, with mounting enjoyment, by Danny Hislop’s bright watching eyes. But the remembered other side, so shrewdly guessed at by Danny, had disappeared as damascening melts in the heat, leaving only the iron. They were led, as was their due, by an active and distinguished commander. But any warmth, any cameraderie, any cultivation of trifling pursuits and sharing of friendships and laughter must be engendered, they found, among the six men who were left, and the Muscovite soldiers to whom, by and by, they also gave office.

The Voevoda did not stand aside: he was involved on the contrary in the very fabric of all they were building. But to the members, old and new, of the company he had created, whom he worked, as he worked himself, with a disciplined and violent intensity, he showed a blank and courteous indifference. And nightly, when he could, he withdrew from their society to Güzel’s civilized house, with its books and its music and its well-prepared food, bringing them in the morning the lists and orders he had prepared for their daily conference, and a group of boyars, to visit the training ground and watch his men as, with bow and axe and lance and handgun, on foot and on horse, they recovered the skills blunted in long weeks of travelling.

Addressed with the deference and charm he knew, to the touch of a hairspring, how to exercise, they would watch, studying the fine, the new points, and encouraged, would take lance themselves, to be allowed to achieve small successes; to have their failures excused and explained to them.

Then, over a meal from their lavish kitchens, they would be shown the company’s maps, the details checked and drawn in by Adam the artist from the dog-eared rolls stored in the armoury workshops with their carefree and contradictory inkings of coastline and rivers, added to by Adam himself, riding through the forests of birch, oak, fir and maple and the light rolling plains around Moscow; checking the cornfields, the marshes, the river systems between the Upper Volga and Oka; noting the bridges and windmills and huddled settlements doublestaked with tall poles to turn aside melting ice at the thaw; the occasional guard-post, sometimes ruined, sometimes rebuilt by Ivan, which he dismounted and examined; the wooden churches like clumps of sweet clover which he passed by, without looking back.

The results were impressive. So was their list of arms and munitions, compiled painstakingly with the help of the duma, and less meagre than they had feared. Ivan possessed brass Italian guns and pieces from Germany. There were brises, falcons, minions, sakers, culverins, double and royal basilisks and six great pieces with shot three feet high, as well as muskets, hackbuts and mortars, potguns for wild fire and bows for stone shot as well as the usual kind. There were the traditional hooked swords and pikes and ryvettes and iron maces, coats of mail and brigantines and steel targets and the characteristic spired helms. There were stocks and wheels for gun carriages and high mobile gun towers and all the appurtenances of siege and pioneer work, fashioned for them fifty years ago by engineers brought in from Germany.

Displaying the total Alec Guthrie conveyed, tactfully, a qualified satisfaction. It was not the moment to mention the fact that most of the weapons were of a certain antiquity, nor that it had become gradually clear that none of the Tsar’s relatives, boyars, boyars’ sons, courtiers, service princes, palace guards, merchants, burghers or frontiersmen knew what to do with them.

He did not discuss the other, private lists he and Lymond were compiling: of foundry and shot tower capacity, of raw material resources of iron and copper and salt and silver and potash: the plethora of timber and dressed leather; the disastrous scarcity of lead and corn powder and sulphur. They knew what stores of meat and fish, fresh, frozen and salted, the Tsar and his merchants kept in their warehouses, and what daily consumption of flour the Neglinnya corn mills could grind.

They had learned weights and coinage and were making costings for the best sources of army supplies: barrels, ladders and horse-carts; saddles of wood and Saphian leather; flax, soap and mats from Novgorod; elkskins from Rostov; bows and arrows at five marks apiece from Smolensk; sledges costing a poltina each. They surveyed the supply of tall Argamaks, the Turcoman horses, crossed with Arab
stock, whose long necks and fine legs made for great speed over the flat plains of the south, but who could not endure long riding over rough country. They found they could buy for three roubles the small, short-necked Pachmat horses of the Tartars, who were used to wooden saddles and stirrups and could live for a lifetime on sawdust.

Coinage was a matter for tact. There was no gold in Russia: for that they used Hungarian coins. The silver Novgorod rouble was worth twice the silver Moscow rouble, and that was worth sixteen shillings and eightpence English money, but less converted to bullion. And, as Fergie Hoddim complained with some bitterness, half the time the seller hardly knew how to set a price on his product, being accustomed to barter.

‘Will I tell ye the price of a hatchet?’ snarled Fergie at their once-daily assembly at supper, tearing apart a wild goose helped down with gobbets of rye bread and spirit. ‘You try handing over an altine and they’ll spit on your uppers. A tied bunch of sable skins drawn through the hole where the haft enters, that’s the price of a hatchet. Forbye,’ said Fergie austerely, ‘if they’re going to count they wee dengi in fifties, I wish they wouldna use their big mouths as pouches. I clapped one lad on the shoulders last Monday, and it was Thursday before he was able to pay me.’

Fergie, busy importing Permian yew and surveying Polish and Flemish cloth bales for his soldiers, disliked weighing in slotniks and poods and counting his journeys in versts instead of two-thirds of a mile. It disturbed him that the Russian calendar put the creation of the world at the 5508th year B.C. and that it was therefore never the year that he thought it was. Apart from this, although he would not have admitted it, he was having the time of his life.

Ludovic d’Harcourt, their Christian hospitaller, was engaged on a different matter. Having mastered the Slavonic tongue quicker than any save Lymond, he was compiling his own register of Pomeschiks, those who had been given land on condition that they supplied one equipped horseman per obja of earth until death. He also, with discretion, interviewed the princes. Equipment, he found, consisted of food for one to two months: a bag three spans long with millet flour and up to eight pounds of dried powdered pork, along with a bag of salt mixed with pepper, if the man could afford it. Together with a hatchet, copper kettle and fire box, this made him self-supporting. D’Harcourt reported to base.

‘All right,’ Guthrie said. ‘They put one man like that in the field, and he can live, after a fashion. But in God’s name, what do they give him to fight with?’

‘A pea-shooter,’ said Danny. ‘With terribly hard Russian peas.’

‘Not exactly,’ said d’Harcourt. ‘The trouble is, they will overdo it.
You’d expect a sword and a bow and a quiver. They’ve got lances and hatchets as well, and half a dozen knives and the kesteni, that stick with a spiked ball on a thong. They have the knives hanging on to their elbows, and their reins and whipthong looped on to their fingers, and so far as I can gather, expect to ride in to the attack with the bridle, the bow, the short sword, the javelin and the whip all in their hands at the same time.’

‘With their kettle, their food and their tinder box bumping along at their sides,’ Danny said. ‘I’m sure the enemy simply run off in droves; but my loving heart bleeds for their horses. The August Personage of Jade won’t be at all pleased about that.’ Danny Hislop was retraining the Streltsi, which was extremely hard work, and had mellowed his tongue not at all.

Adam Blacklock wished, not for the first time, that Lymond had seen fit to stay with them during this spell in the house at Kitaigorod, instead of abandoning them for his mistress. True, it was in the Kremlin that he was able to speak with the duma and the princes and engage their attention and support for what he was doing, and with d’Harcourt, make assessment of their varied ability and experience and the degree of their probable co-operation. To Vorobiovo he brought from the Kremlin Prince Kurbsky, who the previous winter had put down the rebellion at Arsk, fighting a running battle against the Votiaks, the heathen Finnish tribe driven north from Kazan by the Tartars.

A clever, ambitious man in his late twenties with a great deal of experience behind him, Kurbsky had not yet shown more than a guarded interest in what Lymond was doing, but he was prepared to talk of the wolf road to the north with its nomads and settlers, and bring with him merchants who imported walrus tusks and seal oil and salmon, beluga and feathers and white foxes and snow larks and silver and sables at the fair at Lampozhnya, and could tell of the Samoyèdes, who worshipped the Slata Baba, the Golden Old Woman, and the people of Lucomoryae, who died in November and came to life again like the frogs in the following spring, and the races of Lapland, who know neither fruits nor apples, nor yet any benignity of either heaven or earth.

From them, the men of St Mary’s learned of the northern frontiers of Russia, from which the tribes did not invade, but might revolt against paying tribute to church or to state; might ally with the enemy Tartars; might and did murder travellers and destroy the tenuous pathways of trade. And they learned of the snow and the cold, and the ways of travelling fast on a frozen network of rivers. They heard how to use snow to track and to assault the enemy, and how to defend themselves and their weapons from freezing.

They all attended these sessions. Among them, sometimes, were
others: the beautiful boy called Venceslas who had suddenly appeared as Lymond’s body-servant, and the elderly German physician called Gorius Grossmeyer, with his worn lambskin stomacher and his old Brunswick hat with the brass band pinned round it, who belonged to the Mistress’s household and talked, in his ponderous way, good sense in medical terms.

On the western frontier, bordered by Lithuania, Livonia and Poland, the problems were different and entirely political. The most senior men of the Council, Adashev and the monk Sylvester and the secretary Viscovatu, came to Vorobiovo for these sessions, which were held strictly in private. Sigismund-August, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, thirty-four years old and shakily lost in high living, wanted no war, and Livonia, under the declining feudal Order of Teutonic Knights, was the weakest of Ivan’s neighbours. But the town of Pskov on Livonia’s borders, reconquered forty-four years before by his father, was Russia’s only station towards the western sea, other than the frozen coast of Ingermanland on the Gulf of Finland. It was a dream of the Tsar’s, more than either of his chief ministers, to acquire part of the Baltic seaboard, and to recover the lands inhabited by Orthodox Russians and seized by his western neighbours when the Golden Horde held the whole of Russia in its grip.

So, vouchsafing no political opinions, Lymond with Guthrie’s stolid presence beside him elicited the strength and the weakness of Ivan’s westerly neighbours and then turned to the subject nearest Adashev’s heart and Sylvester’s too: the fending-off and eventual conquering of the children of Ahmed, the heretic remains of the great Golden Horde which had ruled for two hundred years: the war against the last of the Tartars.

Danny Hislop, temporarily seconded from wounding the feelings of the Streltsi, became their expert on Tartars. He visited the prisoners from Kazan and the renegades already working for Ivan: he found where the Tartar settlements were and in what numbers, and how they lived, camped, fought, ate and rode. He found the dangers were two. Across seven hundred miles of wild steppeland to the south-west of the Volga lay the Tartar Khanate of Crimea, vassals of Ottoman Turkey, who lived on raids into southern Lithuania and Muscovy, and sold jewellery, church gold and slaves into Egypt and Stamboul.