The Ringed Castle (35 page)

‘They’ve never seen an oil painting,’ said Adam. ‘They have plate from Germany and Persia and Italy, and fabric from China, and engineers and architects from Padua and Germany——’

‘Thank you,’ said Plummer.

‘… but they’ve hardly seen anything later than Egyptian tomb portraits. No hellenistic painting, and hardly any classical sculpture. Russian art is frozen. It’s been frozen for three hundred years, and men like Viscovatu are using force to keep it that way. Lifetimes are being wasted: all that skill and devotion squandered on nothing—on something which has already been done, and better, by painters now dead.’

There was a passionate silence. ‘You see?’ said Güzel gravely. ‘All this frustration and ill will because no one has thought of separating
art from religion. I wondered if Mr Blacklock had noticed my Egyptian portraits?’

Adam, caught off-balance, stared at her, and then in the direction of her amused glance. Chancellor turned his head also. There had been a sarcophagus, now he remembered, in one of the rooms they had passed through before supper. An old one, painted with lotus-flowers.

This was not a sarcophagus, but a statue perhaps nine inches high, delicately made, of a man’s body with the head of an eagle. It was formed of pure gold. ‘Thoth, the God of music and letters,’ said Güzel, and Prince Vishnevetsky, rising, stood with the thing in his hands and looked at his hostess with interest.

He said, ‘What gave me the impression these coffins held spices?’

‘Because I told you so,’ said Güzel. Rising in her turn, she took the small statue from him and replaced it carefully on the inlaid chest from which he had taken it. ‘You may ask the officers of the Tsar’s Customs. Despite my protestations, they opened the next coffin sent me.’

‘Then …?’ said Vishnevetsky. Carefully groomed, his hands loaded with rings, he looked what he was, a romantic leader from an old princely family, once Russian and now long settled in the Volynia, with behind him the ancient culture of Lithuania, where the palaces were garnished with books and paintings and sculpture, and the Italian court of Queen Bona had accustomed her nobles to luxury.

‘They did not open the bodies,’ said Güzel. ‘The Egyptians also married their art to their religion. Below the skin, under the breastbone; within the cage of the pelvis, they left precious tokens, for the use of the dead. The comforts of this room were bought with gold which travelled to me from Egypt in a stronger casket than any smith could devise: a wrapping of dried skin and bone dust. Does it console you?’ she said, smiling, to Adam.

He shrugged his shoulders and sat back, smiling in turn against his will as the interlude slackened his outrage. Prince Vishnevetsky said, to no one in particular, ‘And who knows this man Viscovatu? He is Clerk of the Council, and a priest, and a painter. Is he a man, blessed in the eyes of the Almighty, who puts before all else the strict and terrible service of God?’

There was a decent silence. ‘This is a man who detests Sylvester,’ Lymond remarked.

Prince Vishnevetsky opened one dark eye.

‘… and who complained to the Stoglav about Sylvester’s new four-part commission for the Blagoveschensky Cathedral to such effect that the Council laid down the right to supervise the ethical content of any other work Sylvester might negotiate. Sylvester being priest of the Blagoveschensky and the Tsar’s adviser and confessor.’

‘I know,’ said Vishnevetsky. ‘So religion is merely an excuse?’

‘It seems likely,’ said Lymond.

Prince Dimitri Vishnevetsky glanced round. His gaze rested on the candlesticks and the silver-gilt brazier; on the crystal dishes of ginger, and orange in sugar; on the little sewn cushions of roses, pressed behind Güzel’s velvet shoulders. ‘And the Voevoda Bolshoia is afraid of Viscovatu?’ he said.

‘He controls the fate of the Muscovy Company,’ Lymond said. ‘Mr Chancellor and his friend Mr Killingworth would not be at all happy if the Tsar took against Catholics. And an attack on the Russian Orthodox religion would be taken as a Catholic attack. No one will pay the least heed to the grotesque inner springs of Blacklock’s spiritual mechanism: they have never heard of the freedom of the artist and couldn’t imagine what it meant anyway. They would merely recognize, and very readily recognize, that the heretic is hacking at one of the dearest roots of their foundation. Then they fling us all out and march into Lithuania.’

Güzel, smiling, said nothing. Christopher had shifted his position merely because he found he had cramp, but had still not taken his eyes from the lazy, lamplit face of his host. Plummer was looking at Adam Blacklock, and Adam, his lips tight, was gazing at the floor. Prince Vishnevetsky said gracefully, ‘Really?’

‘Really,’ affirmed Lymond dryly. ‘Who is more Catholic than the Emperor Charles? Neglect the Tartars; strike a blow at the Baltic countries and you strike a blow at the Emperor. If the Tsar pushes right through to the sea, he won’t even need England, and her precious Frozen Sea route.’

Chancellor said, clearing his throat, ‘You told us to act as if there had been no change of religion. The Tsar knows we have a Reformed Church.’

‘The Tsar knows the late King Edward had a Reformed Church,’ Lymond said. ‘And he also knows that the present Queen Mary is the stoutest upholder of Roman Catholicism in Europe, because I told him myself. The device worked well enough for the first weeks, and, once confirmed in his plans for the Company, he is capable of ignoring unpleasant facts, so long as he feels they are not being subtly withheld from him. But a formal protest from the Council of the Hundred Chapters and the Metropolitan Makary would be a little hard to ignore. Thus the future of nations hangs on Blacklock’s compulsion to paint St Theodore Tiron, legs astride, in a feathered bonnet, a smirk and a surcoat. Mr Chancellor does not believe it.’

‘No one would believe it, put like that,’ said Güzel.

‘No one believes me anyway,’ Lymond said. ‘I am kept to be ornamental: a Cypriot sheep combed for my myrrh. In Stamboul it was simpler. There is no monkery in Islam.’

‘And no profit either,’ said Vishnevetsky.

It was almost over. Before they left, Güzel led them to see Plummer’s masterpiece: the winter garden enclosed on the rooftop, and warmed with tall stoves in glazed tile. Here were rose trees in tubs, and plum and cherry trees and all kinds of flowers, and in the centre a pool with carp swimming, in dressed stone lined and bottomed in lead, and fed by a fountain with gargoyles.

Even this they hardly distinguished for the moment, because of the birds. These flew freely without cages among the flowering trees: doves and linnets, chaffinches and siskins, the rare white goldfinch, and vivid aliens Chancellor had heard nothing of. He saw peacocks.

Christopher was mute, but Best exclaimed aloud and so did Chancellor, turning to Plummer to praise it. Prince Vishnevetsky, by Güzel’s side, surveyed it in silence, and then spoke reflectively. ‘And does the Tsar sit content in the small white box of the Granovitaya Palace, his vainglorious Bologna; his second Ferrara? Or have you not shown him this?’

Plummer’s high-coloured, handsome face was smooth with food and wine and merited commendation. ‘If he wishes, I may build him a palace with ten times the opulence of this one. Twenty times. He has only to ask me.’

‘Remembering,’ said the Voevoda’s cool voice, ‘that the annual revenue of an architect is a round forty roubles in Russia. Building is your pleasure but soldiering, I would remind you and Blacklock, is your business and profit.’

Chancellor said, ‘You said the Tsaritsa had been here. Perhaps she will persuade the Tsar to house his court more stylishly. Or even to purchase some secular paintings.’

Güzel smiled. A dove, its wings drenched with the seaweed and roses of ambergris, flew to her shoulder, and he became aware that the thin, arching flutings he heard were not from some mysterious, unseen consort but from wings with silver flutes bound to their feathers. Güzel said, ‘The Tsaritsa Anastasia is beautiful, and has borne him a living son, after the deaths of three children. I have a copy below of the ikon they made for him: the
Mernaya
of St John Climacus, which they make to the size of the newly born baby. It is seventeen inches long.’ She paused smiling, and lifted the dove on her fingers, and threw it gently from her into the spray of the fountain: the sweet, wavering note of its music rose and vanished.

‘She was chosen from fifteen hundred, as the Orientals choose, and has been a good wife to him, as Oriental wives are. But she will persuade him of nothing.’

‘He despises women,’ said Prince Vishnevetsky. ‘Alas? There will be no Diane de Poitiers, no Mary, Regent of Flanders, no Medici Queen, no child Queen or Dowager Regent of Scotland, no Tudor
Queen ruling in Russia? In a hive of Queens, Russia holds the last masculine cell. The Athos of the world’s monarchy. The Tsardom which does not admit the power of women.’ He lifted the orange-tipped fingers of Güzel’s small, perfect hand and looked at them. ‘And that is dangerous.’

The dark, painted eyes returning his smile were profoundly decorous. ‘A queen does not need to be crowned,’ said Güzel, ‘in order to rule.’

*

‘They’ve got forty siege guns and fifty small cannon,’ said Christopher, on their way down the stairs.

‘Oh?’ said his father.

‘They’ve got six thousand horse and foot under training. You should see the stables. They’ve got a tilt-yard. They run at the ring, and they have the quintain and squills and trick riding and hippas.

 … They put me on a man’s shoulders and we ran at another man on a man’s shoulders and tried to knock the man off.’

‘And did you?’ said Diccon, when he had followed this.

‘No. They have a steam room and when they’re tired with exercise they lie there till they sweat, and then go and jump in the river.’

‘And did you?’ said Diccon.

‘Yes,’ said his son.

And looking at his bright eyes Diccon Chancellor apologized, silently, to the absent person of Ludovic d’Harcourt.

Güzel was downstairs, when Lymond returned from seeing them off. He found her in the room where they had been sitting, replacing in its box the blue and gold oblong of the child Ivan’s
Mernaya
. She said, without looking round, ‘Were you content?’

‘Heliogabalus,’ Lymond said, ‘would have had the banquet spoons engraved with the lot of each guest. Ten pounds of gold or else ten pounds of lead. Ten flies or ten dromedaries.… It did, I think, all that was required.’

Güzel closed the box and moving back, leaned on the carved golden back of a chair. ‘I have a feeling,’ she said, ‘that Master Best has marched off to rouse the rabble to storm the homes of the decadent.’

‘He won’t get far,’ said Lymond peacefully. ‘The rabble live in small villages separated by miles of unamenable forest, and have never been instructed in the art of storming, or even of resisting unfriendly invaders.’

‘But you are teaching them,’ Güzel said. ‘From all those forts you and Plummer have created, you are teaching them.’

‘The land must be defended,’ Lymond said. He picked up the Persian book Adam had looked at, and stood, weighing it between his long fingers. ‘Is that a bad thing?’

‘Bad for the peasants, perhaps,’ Güzel said. ‘And Master Chancellor was taciturn. Or so I thought. He remained a great length of time in your writing room.’

‘He was watching me write,’ Lymond said. ‘They are sending dispatches by post through to Danzig. I gave him a letter to France and a letter to Malta. And another, direct to Philippa Somerville, freeing her on my part from the formal contract of marriage.’

Her ringed hands, hanging laced from the chair back, made no movement at all. She said, ‘I thought they demanded your presence.’

Francis Crawford looked up, with lucid blue eyes, from the book. ‘Master Chancellor was good enough to say flatly that he realized the proposal was foolish. And that he would report to the English authorities that the only prospect of dissolving this marriage was to accept my written statement. He said he recognized that I had found my home and my life-work in Russia.’

Behind the calm, painted face there was still no discernable emotion. ‘Perhaps then he will reassure the Tsar,’ Güzel said.

Lymond shrugged. ‘The Tsar will be reassured when the ships sail next summer without me. I have told him I am staying. I don’t intend to labour the point.’

I have a word of advice
, Diccon Chancellor had said.
Defer your public decision. Don’t announce categorically that you are not leaving Russia. For if you do, I believe we carry on our ships someone paid to kill you
.

But Francis Crawford said nothing of that to the woman who had brought him to Russia, but drew the talk into minor cadenzas, and kissed her hand, and took his leave for the night.

It was late. Replacing the inkhorn and casing his papers, and marshalling his wide, impeccable desk, he made a decision of no importance, and instead of returning to his room sent his body-servant, one of the anonymous changing team who served his person, to warn the bath keeper that he was coming.

The baths in Güzel’s house were Turkish in fashion. No one sweated at bath stoves, and, like the Streltsi, jumped naked into the river. The dressing-room was silk-hung, with Persian rugs on the floor, and low cushioned sofas lining the walls. The tepidarium and calidarium were in marble, with wall fountains and a stepped marble bath, from which the steam, with inspired ingenuity, rose straight to furnish the winter garden with warmth.

Above all, it was silent. The servant who disrobed his master; the masseur who oiled the scarred, highly trained body lying still on the marble after the bath, knew better than to comment on their work. The masseur’s powerful hands moved kneading over the spider-white whip marks; the old wounds, gained in battle and out of it; the flourished white brand of the galleys. Strong and balanced and limber, the flesh warmed and eased to his moulding. What teemed within the still, arm-cradled head was the Voevoda’s own affair: he looked asleep, but the masseur knew from bitter past experience that he was not.