The Ringed Castle (42 page)

Christopher said, ‘It isn’t the bow and arrow you shelter behind. It’s the Tsar.’

Lymond turned. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘And you find that despicable? But you are wrong, you know. Aut Caesar, aut nihil. It is the Tsar who is sheltering behind me.’

An hour later, having kissed Christopher and shaken hands with his silent compatriots, Diccon Chancellor took his place in the sledge-train, and, escorted by a band of sixty fully armed cavalrymen from the barracks at Vorobiovo, swept out of the Neglinna Port and across the six-arched wooden bridge to turn north, along the Wolf Road, the great frozen highway to the sea. Ahead, enclosed in furs, Lymond rode with his captain, with Slata Baba on the sledge just behind him.

So, their estrangement complete, the two men, Lymond and Chancellor, entered a strange world of sleigh bells and silence. The sledges ran day and night, served by the post-stations, and Chancellor found that, supported by cushions, with the curtains drawn and bearskins heaped about him, he could sleep, and read his maps, and make his notes frozen-fingered in the daytime as he could not do two years before, shepherding his nervous merchants from post to unknown post from the Frozen Sea down to Moscow.

As far as Kholmogory their present journey was the same, but infinitely faster, and with every care removed from his shoulders. Food appeared, or hospitality in fortress or village or monastery. Or failing all else, they carried tents, and the men would make windbreaks and shelter from the upturned sledges themselves.

The Streltsi were swift, obliging and cheerful. He grew used to the sound of Russian constantly spoken, and began to catch and understand the coarse, half-heard jokes, and enjoy their deep, throaty voices when they were permitted to sing. They were the élite of their corps, he began to realize; already stringently trained, and chosen to escort the Voevoda Bolshoia. That they were afraid of him to a man took nothing, he saw, from their zest, or the sparkling tension which clothed them like frost. He had seen that once before, in a company under the Duc de Guise, about to go into battle. It was the sign of success; the fire and stamp of natural leadership.

He found it disturbing. And leaving Vologda behind him, with its lightly drunken, arguing oasis of confident English voices and futile English problems, he gave his mind and his eyes instead to the land,
the mother of whiteness; to the falling snow, a host of dove-grey particles against the pale downy sky; a rush of white against the dark trees and bushes. To the sunlit snow, golden white against blue on the roofs of the villages, and the bright lime green and umber of the trunks of the thinning forests, their snow-white profiles lost to the vaster white space of the sky. The twin churches, for summer and winter, set like pine cones in the snow by the hamlets. The scrubbed wooden floors of the houses, the truss of foot-wiping hay by the threshold, the box of wood and barrel of water placed just inside.

There were no beasts to be seen but the wild ones: the hare in her milk-white coat, and the grey squirrel and the stoat with its snowy-tipped tail. In the woods there were wolves, and bears, and elks: they saw their prints, and the horses shied at the smell. But the stock, the small, runted cattle and lean hogs were killed and frozen, or sharing with their owners the unstable log izbas, built up so assiduously against the snow, which the thaw might so easily bring slipping to disaster again. Inside, the ikon; the wall-plank for bedding. The stove-room with its bundles of birch-slivers where twice weekly the steam bath was taken, for cleanliness and to ward off disease. A diet of roots and garlic and onions and cabbage and too much time to sleep, or to toil under the stinking tapers at your painstaking craft: the working of skins and furs, the shoemaking and woollen embroidery; the making of wooden bowls and stools and sledges and hanging cradles and chests, painted raspberry red, and yellow, and black; the shallow gingerbread moulds, with their cocks and their pigeons patterned in the white wood; the beehive tooled like a bear, with flight-entries formed in its muzzle. The harsh drink; the coarse clothes; the grey, crackling pile of hard fish, culled for soup with a hammer.

Poverty. Poverty in the presence of starving cold and great, earth-cracking heat, and life lived in the shadow of the wolf and the bear, and tribes more cruel and avaricious. For it was the land which was implacable, far more than its masters. An obja, tilled by one horse, could be rented for two or three roubles or its equal in labour, and a fee of perhaps half of the rotated crop of rye or of oats. In law, the peasant might be hanged, where the boyar was only whipped or imprisoned, but discrimination was less than he had expected; serfdom was almost unknown.

Yet where was the succour when the grain was struck cold in the ground, and had to be gathered and ripened on Stovetops, and thawed in hot-houses, so that it might be ground? When the tinder-dry warehouses burned, and cities starved, and beggars, ragged and violent, roved the streets of Vologda, as he had seen them:
Give me and cut me; give me and kill me
.

How, if you were the Church, did you justify a single gold-collared ikon, with two thousand five hundred diamonds set upon its thick
hammered surface? How, if you were the Tsar, did you vindicate your annual tribute, bartered for rich cloths and finer jewels for your treasurehouse? How, if you were a man from a softer land, where debate was instructed and free, and all the scholars and books from antiquity were there to correct and advise you, could you accept in your turn such a tribute, and use it to clothe the body and house of your mistress?

But he kept his thoughts to himself, and barely saw the Voevoda, except to exchange the slimmest of commonplace courtesies, until the day before their arrival in Kholmogory, when they stopped to eat in a church by the flat, snowfilled ice of the Dwina.

It was a new church, wreathed with galleries, its steps dropping from level to level in uneven flights, canopied and jointed like parings of apple. Above, the spires were leaved with fresh, gilded kokoshniks, and the onion domes with their tall, tangled crosses stood bright as an odd, untimely budding.

It was dark, even at noon, with the snow stretching white and stark to the violet slate of the sky. The frost, grown stronger and stronger, was an antagonist to be studied and countered, like a runagate thief with a knife. Stepping from the sledge, Chancellor pulled off his gloves and rubbed fresh snow on his nose and his fingers and cheekbones, and beat out the stiff, frozen mass of his beard. The rank airless heat of the church by contrast sent the thawed nerves flaring and the skin of his face felt like tallow inflamed: he knew from experience that his nose was haplessly running. He dried it, and began to pull off the shaggy, snow-powdered coat from his shoulders. Lymond, appearing suddenly said, ‘They tell of a stallion which went for a trot one cold day in Sslobodka and came back to its stable a gelding. They don’t say what became of the rider. Are you all right?’

Chancellor nodded.

‘I have three cases of frost-bite. The monks say we can remain for the night, and I think we should do so. I shall send a man to warn the Governor of Kholmogory and your friend Grey to expect us tomorrow. Will your business take long?’

Speed, and always more speed; because there was a campaign in the south, in the spring. Chancellor wondered which of the soldiers had suffered, and if it was serious. Not, to do him justice, that the Voevoda had travelled as he had, cushioned and canopied, with the warmth and bulk of the horses between him and the searing air from the north. Free of the forests, he had watched Lymond fly Slata Baba at her proper prey, as the Turkestan hunters did; or the Tartars who killed wild horses with hawks, lured to seize mane and neck with their talons, and with wing and claw, to terrify and blind and exhaust.

In the same way, Slata Baba took deer, blinding with her powerful wings; sinking through eye and muscle and nerve with her razor-sharp talons, until the huntsman, with bow or spear, could ride to the kill. Diccon saw her swoop once, with her great, sooty brown pinions, and lift a calf from the ground, transfixed like rotten fruit, in passing.

He could tell the sound of her dive, with its swishing moan of twice-compressed air, and the tranquil flight, beating slow as the waves of the sea, and the silly, weak chirrup, which was the only song she possessed. Seen from behind, her golden-tipped ruff pricked in cold, or anger, or preening, she looked like a ringleted girl-child. Then the pretty wigged shoulders would swivel, and there was the tearing beak, hooked below the soul-piercing stare. To hold her, Lymond had his arm gloved to the elbow, and even he, Chancellor saw, turned his head when the bird came to land. Then she was chained to her travelling post, since no man’s arm could bear the weight of a full-grown golden eagle, unsupported.

Hunting, he supposed, was Lymond’s private pleasure: it gave them also fresh meat most days to cook. For the rest, the Voevoda had found business to do in each of the towns they had passed through; and when they were no longer near habitations, he would leave the train and disappear sometimes to follow some small beaten highway, taking no more than two or three of his men and using the light sleighs, which could take a man four hundred miles in three days drawn by a single fast horse, small and broad-chested and wild, with fox and wolf tails, grey and red and black, hoared with frost decking its neck.

Sitting fidgeting under his bearskins, Chancellor watched him disappear on these explorations with increasing spasms of jealousy. With the winter’s hard training he lacked, Lymond could steer his sledge by bodily balance like a canoeist, the reins in his left hand and a spiked staff in his right, sparingly used, to hold the rocking sleigh steady.

He also travelled with his feet strapped into artach, the slender pattens of wood nearly six palms in length which Chancellor had seen twice before, worn by Permians, but not like this, slicing free down the blue, hollow slopes, with the snow rising like steam in the sky. The Voevoda held a class once or twice, for his cavalry, and Chancellor, safely ensconced in his tent or his sledge or his chamber heard the distant commands and the shouts and the laughter and experienced all the violent, pent-up emotions which would have better suited the temper of his absent son Christopher. It made him angrier because he knew that none of it was expected to interest him, and that both the business and private life of his host were being conducted, with every reason, outside his presumed sphere of attention.

Now, brief as ever, Lymond said, ‘Will your business take long?’ and Chancellor hardly heard him, because he was eyeing the strips of wood, long, snow-spattered and gleaming, which Lymond was carrying; and before he knew it, he said, ‘I should like to try that.’

Lymond said, ‘Would you?’ The impersonal blue eyes, wet-lashed and narrowed with snow glare, surveyed Chancellor’s face and then, briefly and clinically, his body. ‘You would find it small trouble, I’m sure. On the other hand, if you break your neck, Robert Best will have my head cleft to my teeth for a murderer.’

‘… So?’ said Chancellor. The priest was approaching.

‘So I think Aleksandre should teach you. My captain. He is an excellent performer. I shall arrange it.’ And excising both him and the subject, Lymond walked forward, and engaged in the necessary business of organizing feeding and quarters for themselves and his men for the night.

It was a small church, with limited room for the few monks and for passing travellers. Across the yard, there were arcaded sheds where the horses and men both could shelter till nightfall, with wood fires and braziers for company. Inside, Chancellor was given a room, holding no more than a crucifix, a stool and a board for his blanket and bolster. There was no stove, and it was not until he had settled down after the slender evening meal they had shared with the monks in the commonroom that it struck him to wonder, fleetingly, if the men who were to sleep where they ate hadn’t fared rather better.

Waking later, shivering under the pile of his sleigh rugs and coat, he was sure of it. He was still fully dressed. Putting his arms through the sleeves of his heaviest robe and taking his thickest rug with him, he opened the cell door and went to seek the commonroom stove, that great block, three feet by four feet of black searing iron, with winged angels and priests marching hot-foot for all time round its plating.

It was there, surrounded by sleeping heads resting on saddles. The centre board had been drawn, but even so, there was little enough room, on the benches or under them, for sixty men and their captain. Chancellor came in, treading carefully in the near-darkness. For the sake of warmth, he was prepared to lean against a wall until morning, despite the smell and the raucous noises of ungainly slumber. Someone, stirring below his feet, said in a whisper, ‘My lord?’

It was the captain, Aleksandre, who was to instruct him next day, he remembered, in the art of sliding with artach. He answered, whispering also, ‘I am cold.’

He had meant only to solicit help in finding a vacant space in the dark, and was irritated when he saw that the captain, rising, was about to give up to him his place on the floor. He saw himself embarking on a hissing exchange of self-denying courtesies when he was
saved by Lymond’s voice speaking softly from somewhere beyond. ‘Chancellor? The chapel is warm.’

The captain subsided. Touching his shoulder, Diccon Chancellor picked his way between the still bodies and through an archway to the narrow passage from which Lymond had spoken. The parvis was empty, but the low, carved door to the chapel stood open, and he could see the glow from the bronze lamps hung before the dark pictures of the iconostasis, and the bending glimmer of a circle of candles to the right of its doors. Somewhere, also, he could feel the gentle warmth of a stove. Lymond’s voice said, ‘If you close the doors, you will find it quite supportable. I shall send someone to cut fuel for them tomorrow.’

He had resumed the place on the floor which he had evidently chosen for himself, seated on a folded rug with his head pressed back against the coarse cloth draping the revetment, his legs stretched before him and his arms loosely folded. Like Chancellor, he was still fully dressed, with his sleeveless, furcaped coat spread about him. Chancellor, dropping his rug on the wooden floor, lowered himself against the opposite wall likewise. He was deeply depressed. But for the frostbite, he would now, he supposed, be enjoying the relative comfort of Kholmogory instead of being trapped in this mediaeval flickering gloom, for what disagreeable purpose he could only guess. He sat, breathing in dust and dead incense.