The Ringed Castle (44 page)

From solitary travellers in this icy white world of near-night the party from Moscow had become part of a concourse of people: Lapps, Karelians, Russians, Tartars, sailing fleet as seal-boats across the glazed snows in their high-sided sledges; trawling the black ice of the sky with their thin, shrilling tongues and the crack of their whip-lash.

Carriage had cost them four dengi a pood, and the cost of hire was ten altines per yoke for five hundred versts. Or so Grey reported. The information hung, like the frozen threads of his breathing, outside Chancellor’s head, and his dazzled mind perfectly disregarded it.

They flew, hissing, through the surgical cold of the air, the scythed snow spinning like glass from the runners. Their guides, laughing and calling above the snort of the deer and the rolling of bells from their shoulder-harness, vied with the drivers of other dark teams. And soldiers and traders streamed torchlit over the snow, their furs blowing, their faces muffled with scarves, and tumbled out at the post stations among the trampled snow and fires and log cabins and the long wooden sheds, and the hide tents of the Finns and the Lapps, where the white steam from the breath of the deer rose like the fountains of Geyseir.

Then they would eat, their men and their sledges in orderly ranks round about them, while their fires hatched the clangorous darkness and strange faces came to their circle and sat, shapeless in skins, chewing shanks from their generous cauldron, and talking in gutteral voices. It was there that Chancellor for the first time saw the flat, slant-eyed face of the Samoyèdes, the queer Artaic tribe who roved the Arctic shores far to the east, and who worshipped the Golden Old Woman Slata Baba, who stood at the mouth of the Obi, with music issuing from the mouths of trumpets around her. Men said they were cannibals. The Voevoda’s Slata Baba, hooded, sat on her perch in the covered sleigh, silent, and was not referred to by name.

Sometimes Lymond shared with Chancellor what he learned in these strange conversations: sometimes not. His Russian was perfect: the dry, astringent touch by which he directly controlled the violent and diverse men under his charge was by now very familiar to Chancellor. Travelling on his own, he had studied how it was done. In company with Richard Grey, he watched it being done at second hand, through the guides they had brought from Kholmogory: how Lymond addressed these queer, black-haired races directly, barely waiting for translation, and using the timbre and flexibility of his voice to convey his meaning. Chancellor had heard the same technique employed by an Italian priest among Arabs in Chios. He had tried it himself, among animals.

He saw that Lymond never visited the dark tents where the children
were wailing, or where the women moved, muttering, indistinguishable from the squat, smooth-chinned men but for the coarse black locks of hair worn hanging between ear and jaw. The men came uninvited: Finns, Karelians, Samoyèdes or Russians, with a strip of fish or an axed hunk of meat, driven by a bald instinct for barter and a child-like curiosity, oddly combined. Lymond would not do business, or allow Grey to unpack the sledges before Lampozhnya, and Chancellor saw the reasoning in it. Their customers and their rivals continued to watch and visit them, and seldom went away empty-handed. And meanwhile both Lymond and the Company were gathering the information they needed to have.

Once, a low drumming made itself heard among the thin sounds spread out under the frozen crust of the stars: the cries and barking and warbling song: the coughing and squealing of livestock; and Chancellor asked what it was.

‘The signal for massacre?’ Lymond said; and then, relenting: ‘The Samoyèdes are Shamanists, and worship Ukko as chief of the gods. The tribes are led by the Shamans, and the Shamans practise magic and medicine with the aid of their voices and drums. If you can manage an attack of the Marthambles, we could persuade one to say an incantation over you. You would then be anointed with infallible remedies—say, live earthworms mashed into alcohol.’

‘I shall avoid succumbing to the Marthambles,’ Chancellor said. ‘Are their remedies all so alluring?’

‘Take your pick,’ Lymond said. ‘For example, cornsilk and hot dough and live ants in warm oil for your joint pains. Celery water and goose fat massage for frost bite. That works, and you might as well make a note of it: the Company will have cases sooner or later. The voice and drum treatment is something again.’

‘Faith?’ said Richard Grey.

They were about to retire for the night. Lymond rose, as did his captain, a shadow behind him. ‘I don’t know. The Shaman will not come to me. He must invite me to his tent; and he has not done so yet.’

‘Acquire an attack of the Marthambles,’ said Chancellor.

‘I have them,’ said Lymond, ‘every time I think of George Killingworth sitting confidently over a wine pot with Viscovatu. Do you still regret that you came?’

He spoke to Chancellor, and Chancellor, after a long moment, answered him truthfully. ‘No,’ he said.

‘No,’ Lymond said also. ‘Verily, God hath eighteen thousand worlds; and verily, your world is one of them, and this its bright axle-tree.’

The odd phrase stayed with Chancellor, through Pinega and beyond, where, ahead of soldiers and freight train, Lymond set him
alone on a post sledge, and Aleksandre and Grey on two others, to swoop and race with him behind the galloping reins. Then, they hung, weightless as gulls, and dipped surfing through white spray like fulmars. They swept through the dark day and were running still when moonlight unveiled the snow and the Dancers shimmered, green and white, in the limitless spaces above and streamed over the snowfields towards them, cold as alchemists’ fire.

On such a night, no one spoke. The four sledges soared through horizonless space, wreathed above and below with vapours of light, shot with trembling colour. Above the fear and his aching body and the pain of the pure and terrible air in his lungs Diccon Chancellor dwelled, with his heart on his wife and his sons, and his soul in a limbo far farther than that, and experienced happiness.

Lampozhensky Ostrov was an island, the southernmost and largest of a dozen in the wide frozen channel of the River Mezen, lying at the junction of a still smaller river, the Schuksa. And at the southern tip of the island lay the wooden town of Lampozhnya with its two churches, where twice yearly the Russian merchants brought their cloth and tin and copper for barter, and meal and bacon and butter, and salt and yeast and leather and oatmeal
tolokno
, and needles, and knives, and spoons, and hatchets.

In return, they bought furs. The sledges ran in from the east: from Pustozersk, with salmon and walrus and seal oil, with white foxes and feathers, with rattling bundles of yellowing tusks, two feet long and weighing up to twelve pounds apiece. Oil and hides and tusks and frozen fish came from Vaygach and Novaya Zemlya and the Kara Sea and Bolvanskiy Nos: trout and salmon, weighing three to a pood. Sables from Pechora, and white and dun fox, and the pelts of white wolves, and bearskins. From Siberia, red and black fox and the white fur of squirrels. Lynx and ermine. Wolverine, marten and beaver. What once lived and breathed and hunted through forest and snowfield piled now in stalls, fifty small skins between boards, sold as a timber. Sold in deep carpeted piles, what once played with its young round the ice floes. Sold, the flayed skins whose flesh edged the piled shores every summer, while the hide covered fresh boats for its hunters.

At the fair, one said nothing as the snow fell, driving in on the pelts in their rough sheds, and the smell of the fresh kill rose sweet and metallic into the air. One watched Richard Grey barter, with his interpreters, keenly and well, and lent one’s support as it was needed; and found the Voevoda at one’s side or did not find him, as his several absences dictated. Man must eat, or he would starve. Man must be clothed, or he would die. And good hunters killed with economy: the promuschlenniks blinded the walrus with blowpipes or buckets of sand, and then moved in to slaughter with lances. The Dwina men clubbed them on summer icefields, pressing together in fright; weighting the rafts under the water. The Lapp, artist that he was, shot his seal through the nostrils to leave unblemished the pelt. In six hours, they could account for eight hundred.

Grey was pleased. Elkhides would fetch sixteen shillings the skin back in England, with the hair clipped beforehand to save shipping space. He could depend on nine pounds a ton for train oil, in well hooped casks better than their own, from clean knotless timber,
seasoned with water and trimmed with pitch at head and seams. And oil from the top of the seal fat at that, pure enough to oil fine wool for weaving. Everything was a bargain: white grouse feathers at five altines the pood; duck down at seven to eight altines. Salmon … he had never seen such salmon: fifteen thousand at least, given away each for a couple of dengi. Richard Grey, merchant adventurer, was happy.

Chancellor thought of something he had once read in one of Ned Lane’s scribbled notebooks.
The princely ancient ornament of furs: they be for our climate wholesome and delicate: grave and comely; expressing dignity; comforting age. And of longer continuance and better with small cost to be preserved than these new silks, shags and rags, wherein a great part of the wealth of the land is hastily consumed
.

He repeated it to Lymond, in the rough hut with its three rooms which they shared, he and Grey and the Voevoda, while Aleksandre and his men were quartered more rudely elsewhere. And thought it odd, before he spoke, that of all the company, here or at Vologda or Moscow, Lymond was the only man who would understand him.

Lymond said, ‘You dream of a world where man kills like the eagle, for self-defence or survival. Discomfort without hope of betterment is not a great springboard.’

Chancellor said abruptly, ‘Neither is luxury. It ends in the Gulf of Arzina.’

He had not meant to speak of Willoughby, and was thankful that Grey had left their evening meal early, and had gone out into the crowded, flickering darkness with his interpreter and an adequate bodyguard. Lymond, the soup bowl still in his hands, said, ‘Was life at Robertsbridge so meagre?’

They had not spoken together in this way since that night in the church outside Kholmogory. And even then, Lymond had not asked, and he had not talked, of his personal life.

Seated now like the other man, on the least luxurious of hide-covered crates, Chancellor looked across the stove at him and made a decision.

‘The point is that I was, and am, a pensioner. I was schooled and brought up in the household because I had a head for mathematics and a mind to be interested in more than the household accounts. When Cabot came back from Spain I had already been studying navigation. I’d read Pedro de Medina and examined all the maps Sir William could get. I went to Cabot for instruction. He was seventy-three and Grand Pilot of England and I was twenty-eight. Three years later I sailed with Bodenham in the
Aucher
for Chios and Candia. We fought the Turks, and we brought home a cargo of wines. I studied; I worked for the Sidneys. Sir William died. My wife had died when Nicholas was born. The boys were being brought up as I had been, as part of the household. The Panningridge farm brings in
something; but even if I had wanted to, I could hardly deprive them of that. When Sir Henry moved to Penshurst, I went with him.’

‘And two years later, were proposed for the Muscovy voyage,’ Lymond said.

Chancellor looked at him. ‘I learned all there was to know about the route to this sea before Clinton had issued his orders to levy the seamen. I had every map; I had read every book; I had made every calculation. Othere the Norman came to the Frozen Sea, seven centuries ago, and Cabot had the notes Alfred King of England made on it. You know about Herberstein. We had some other German accounts, and a Piedmontese map and information from ships at Vardȯ. Your Scottish herald called David had left notes of his visits for Denmark to Russia. Cabot and I went over them all.’

Lymond said, ‘You were chosen then for the first voyage by Cabot?’

Chancellor said, ‘Willoughby was chosen by Cabot. And I to serve under him.’ It was not said pettishly: he was not a callow young man. But it was said.

Lymond said, ‘He owed Willoughby a favour, I would fancy.’

Of course, it was true. It was through a relation of Hugh Willoughby that Sebastian Cabot had been received at the start of his fortune into the court of Ferdinand, King of Aragon. But he, Chancellor, had had just enough pride, thank God, not to say so. He said, ‘It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I had my way to make in the world, and a faith to justify, and a debt to pay, so I strove to the uttermost limits to do my work, and I succeeded.’

Lymond said, ‘You were navigator and he was Captain General. To sail the ship he had, as you had, a sailing master. To navigate the fleet, he had you. The storm which drove your ship and his two apart was hardly his fault.’

‘We waited a week for him at Vardȯ,’ said Chancellor. ‘All he had to do was reach Vardȯ. It was agreed: so soon as we lost touch, any of us. A common port, a fishing station, a harbour every boat used … it was full of Scotsmen, did I tell you that? And they told us if we went farther east we were crazy, for ships did not sail to the east. But Vardȯ was common to every ship. And he could not find it.’

‘Why?’ Lymond said.

Diccon Chancellor knew by heart the log of the
Bona Esperanza:
the contrary winds; the chartless wanderings. And how finally, they found the bight at the west side of Nokuyef Island, and, sailing up it, anchored off the mouth of the River Arzina. ‘It was six weeks after they had left us, and they had arrived more or less where they had departed,’ he finished. ‘They thought perhaps they were in the Lofotens. Willoughby lived, it seemed, longer than any of them.’

It was very quiet. A serving-man moved in the inner room where he and Grey slept. And in the unheated part at the back they heard the
eagle shift, rasping its talons. Lymond had long since laid his meat aside, and was sitting, hands clasped and head bent, his face half lit from the open door of the stove. He said dryly, ‘A tribute to his superior nourishment. So. They had charts but they failed to read them. Their logging was faulty and their sightings must have been consistently bad. That is navigational, and none of it is Willoughby’s fault. But having wasted six weeks and got himself frozen into the fjord at Arzina, the matter ceased to be nautical at all. It was Willoughby’s job, and no one else’s, to see that they survived. The sea doesn’t freeze without warning. And even when it has frozen, it is still possible to cut canals and warp a ship out of an inlet. And if that failed, they had lying under them food for eighteen months and the equal in ton-tight weight of eight hundred oaks and three hundred beech trees. Yet they froze …