The Ringed Castle (45 page)

‘He was not without resource in the field,’ Lymond said. ‘He had all the pewter in Fort Lauder cast into balls, as I remember, before they relieved him. I think the heart of the matter lies there. He was a man of the land, whom the sea mystified, and eventually frightened. And whatever his inventiveness at the end, it would hardly have mattered. He had probably lost his authority.’

Lymond lifted his hands from his knees, and, stretching his arm, collected the small pot which stood at his elbow, half a measure of mead still standing in it. He said, ‘The sea demands a man who knows the sea and respects it. A man who is prepared to be lonely. There is no isolation like that of the helm in a storm, except the isolation when it is windless.’

Diccon Chancellor seized his drink, casually; slopping a little, in his firmness, on the straw floor. ‘It was merely a point,’ he said.

‘It was two points,’ Lymond said. ‘And I have them both. It will be known as Sir Hugh Willoughby’s expedition. There is nothing you or anyone else can do about it, and nothing you should. That was his epitaph. This is your beginning.’

He had risen, but not without courtesy. Chancellor rose slowly also. He said, ‘To you it is no problem. I don’t know whether I can sustain such isolation.’

There was a moment’s pause. Then Lymond said, ‘You have your sons.’

‘And you your mistress. But only one man can stand at the helm.’ Chancellor said abruptly, ‘I don’t want to go back.’

Lymond was studying him. He said, slowly, ‘These young men in Moscow and Vologda are creating a business against high odds in an alien land, and are drunk with it, as they should be. They will never do anything as exhilarating probably again. But in five years—less—the excitement will be gone, the business will be routine, the complaints will be growing. There will be a little cheating; a little
bickering; some slackness; some grasping for power. The Merchants will stay. The pioneers, the men of isolation will move on.’

Chancellor said, ‘Two years ago there was an ambassador in Moscow from the Siberian provinces. He said his father had been to see the Great Cham of Cathay, and that the city of Cambalu was all destroyed, by necromancy and magic. Kurbsky’s father has been to Permia and Pechora. You were right. You were right in what you said there, that night. I want to go there. I want to go to the Ob and beyond it.’

Lymond was watching him still. He said, using words Chancellor knew well,
‘The people are tawny and the men are not bearded, nor differ in complexion from the women. On the way lieth the beautiful people, eating with knives of gold
. If it is destroyed, there will be no trade.’

‘I wish to see it,’ said Chancellor.

‘If Henry Sidney is the man you say he is, you will see it,’ Lymond said. ‘If he and his merchants do not stake you to it, I will. But you must take the
Bonaventure
home first.’

Speech struck from him, Diccon Chancellor stared at the Voevoda Bolshoia of Russia, who had uttered those extraordinary words. Spoken crisply, as ever, with neither warmth nor any effusive emotion they were as incomprehensible as they were unexpected. He said, ‘But there may be no trade.’

Lymond said, ‘Then you will have to recoup by publishing a Commentary on Cathay. Richard Eden, I am sure, would be happy to collaborate.… I rather fancy Grey is expecting us. My offer stands, and you may wish to think about it. I needn’t tell you that with the Company’s backing you will be on slightly safer ground than with anyone serving the court of this Tsar, who may quite well be dead or deposed in a week. On the other hand, I should impose no obligations, except that of travelling as widely and as far as you can, and of returning to report on it. Write to me when you return to England, and tell me what you have decided.… And meanwhile, forget about it. Merchant adventurers should not only barter, but fraternize.’

They fraternized outside, round the roaring fires, sharing hard meat and horn cups of raw spirit in the thick of the smell and the noise and the buffeting, fur-bundled bodies. This time they mixed freely, in crammed huts and tents, where Lapps howled their songs to vie with the wolves and Lymond’s soldiers found their way, free for the night, and no more than partially drunk because the Voevoda was there, and they feared him before God and the Devil.

Grey, when they found him, was not drunk either, but exceedingly cheerful, with his face almost concealed under another man’s fur hat with ear flaps, and a battered stringed instrument in his arms.
Lymond took it from him and tuned it, sitting on the table edge in a primitive drink-hut, his hat pushed to the back of his head. His own soldiers, milling about him, made up perhaps half of the uproarious company: the rest were mainly incomers like themselves from Kholmogory. He struck up a Russian song, to which it was evident he knew all the words.

Chancellor caught some of them, but not all, because of the noise: what he did hear shattered his own belief that he was unshockable. The music was unwestern in cadence and not to his taste, but it hit exactly, he saw, the mood of the Russians. They howled at the end, begging for more, and when Lymond, his cup at his side, began playing again they joined in raggedly, and then in full force, stamping and shouting and pushing forward as more pressed in the low door and thrust in to watch. In a corner, Chancellor could see the man Aleksandre, a pot in one hand, trying the strength of his arm with a Russian, and getting the worst of it. A jug of liquor passed from hand to hand over their heads; the stove belched; the tallow smoked and sweating faces blossomed like water plants above the compressed turgid weed of their clothes. Transfixed, overwhelmed, his head throbbing in the intolerable heat, Diccon Chancellor grinned and endured it.

It lasted a long time, and Grey finally got impatient. ‘There are Englishmen here who want a Christian song with a tune to it!’

Luckily, loud as he yelled, the shouting of others was louder and Lymond, his face bright as butter with sweat was too far away, too occupied and too mellow also, Chancellor suspected, to have heard him. He tightened his grip of Grey’s arm and said, ‘No, don’t. Don’t draw their attention.’ The chorus roared to an end and he winced with the earsplitting pain of it. Before he could draw breath, the strings spoke again, among the clatter of drinking cups, and a voice sang, with neat economy:

Chancellor caught, as Grey did not, the solitary, far spark of irony as Lymond ceased, and turning back to his audience, took vociferous communion and launched into primitive song once again. The half-drunk army of the Voevoda Bolshoia had conceived that the Voevoda
Bolshoia, drunk this night, was their brother. Chancellor knew that he was not, and was not.

The sleigh race was run later that night, when the moon was up, whitening the snowfields, and making plain the post a mile off up the islanding river, round which each team of man, sledge and reindeer was to turn.

Ten reindeer were yoked amid indescribable confusion. Chancellor, long since returned to his cabin, heard the noise from the inner room where he sat trying to make notes by candlelight. He knew more about the roads through Siberia than he had even hinted to Lymond. He had talked all day, with his interpreters, to men from the Kara Sea and beyond. So, while Richard Grey snored in his blankets behind him, and the torches outside flickered dimly through the thick mica, he wrote until a hammering on the door made him shift back his stool and get up.

Grey turned over, snorting. The rest of the house sounded empty. The two men who served them were still outside then, as was Lymond. Chancellor walked through to the outer room, which was Lymond’s, and drew back the bolts of the door.

It was the lieutenant, Konstantin, respectfulness vying in his face with undisguised excitement. There had been a challenge, and the Voevoda was to take part with some of his men in a sleigh race. Did the Englishmen not wish to come and watch?

One Englishman was beyond watching, and Chancellor said so, wondering if a common language made it imperative that he alone should put on his wet furs again and struggle out into the cold. As far as etiquette went, the bond was closer than that of nationality: the Voevoda was in some sort, he supposed, their escort and host. And earlier in the evening, he had proposed to go further than that, and become his personal sponsor.

He could not yet decide why, and asked to give his reply tonight, he would have refused. The man was too clever; too singular; too well endowed with all the obvious talents. He knew Lymond could use a sleigh well. He did not especially want to see him prove it.

Chancellor sighed and said, ‘I’ll come. Go ahead and I’ll follow after. Who suggested the match? The Voevoda?’

His Russian must be getting much better. The lieutenant lifted a hand in acknowledgement and grinned. ‘No. There was an argument. Only ten sledges are running, three of them driven by rather incapable soldiers to uphold the honour of the Tsar against the tribes of the north. The Pustozerskers challenged the Voevoda and he accepted. I fear he is angry.’

‘Can no one else uphold the honour of the Tsar?’ asked Chancellor rather sourly; and then remembered that Konstantin himself still had a hand bandaged from frostbite, and that Aleksandre had been
today’s casualty, in his stupid trial of strength in the drinking-hut. He added, ‘I suppose the others are all too drunk. Never mind. Go on. I’ll find you.’

Grey was too far gone to waken, and anyway wouldn’t be interested. Neither, thought Chancellor, would he be much use for guarding the hut, and the bales in the storeroom behind it. He wished he had asked Konstantin to send along two of his less incapable soldiers, or to find the two young men who served them. He could do that as soon as he saw him. Meanwhile, he walked through to cookroom and storehouse, to check that they were secure before he locked up and left.

All was in order. He had turned back, the candle still in his hand, when he realized that something was different. The heavy stock in the corner was empty. Slata Baba, the eagle was missing, and her chain, jesses, and swivel as well.

In the ensuing slow avalanche of enlightenment, Chancellor realized that he knew where the lure was, and her spare chain and hood. He got them, running, and thrust out into the crowds, locking the door with a wrench of his hand; pushing and belabouring without mercy to reach the hard-frozen snow of the river. The sledges were there: the canoe-shaped Lapp
pulkhas
, light as the skins which fashioned them, sharp of prow and square of stern, with no runners beneath them. Through the crowds he could see they were lined up already: the antlers moved as the reindeer heads tossed; the pitch torches flared from their sterns. He could not distinguish Lymond. But one of the drivers, lying back, appeared to have gone temporarily to sleep. And another, cursing cheerfully in Russian, had not yet succeeded in tying the cord round his feet.

He was still fumbling with the safety lashing when the captain of Lampozhnya, losing patience, gave the signal to start off the race. Nine whips cracked. Chancellor, flinging people aside, arrived shouting just as the last of the sledges slid past the start: Lymond, when he saw him at last, was out of earshot, far over the snow, his white coat and deep fur hat blending with it.

The fool with the ropes still had not succeeded in tying them. Chancellor pulled him out of the sledge and jumped in, glimpsing Konstantin’s amazed face as he did so. He flung the lure on the floor and seizing reins, whip and stick, set off after the others.

He wasn’t good enough. My God, until a week ago, he’d never raced a sledge. And although some of these were drunk—all the soldiers and at least one of the Lapps and Samoyèdes—the others were not; or were drivers of such infinite calibre that, drunk or asleep, they could fly like the spume in a gale. Then he thought, I don’t have to beat them, or catch them. I only have to seize Crawford’s attention.

The moon filled the sky like a casement: a celestial snowfield on which shadowy armies stood blurred in strange order, and viewed the black night below, brightly knotted with torches; and the long, chequered shape of the island, barred with snowlight and shadow and smudged with the smoke of its buildings.

All along the edge of the island, the sheds and houses and stables and huts of Lampozhnya cast their black shadows on the silver-grey stretch of the river. The packed snow was more slippery there. If you drove close to the houses, and the banks where groups of people were watching, black shapeless spools stuck in the snow, the moon-shadow flickered, barring your eyes, and although the sledge might run faster, you found it harder to see ahead, where your rivals fled, a scouring of snow and of sound in the silence.

For the noise had all dropped behind. Chancellor realized it suddenly, so preoccupied had he been with his deer and his balance; with acquiring the feel of the light swaying framework beneath him, and the touch of the stick which, too much or too little, could overturn him in a second. And moreover, he had been enclosed in a world of private noise of his own: the harsh, tearing sound of the runnerless skins underneath him; the rumble and click of the cloven hooves; the snorting breath from the massive, misshapen nostrils. He lifted his head, drawing shuddering through his scarf the pinching of air that must furnish him and shouted, long and carefully. He then realized that the thin sound which echoed scratching through the wastes of the night was all that the air would permit of a bellow; and that the aviary sounds he heard, twittering at the edge of his hearing were also bellows, from better lungs than his, and to as little effect.

He could go on shouting, and would, but it was unlikely to do much more than puzzle his reindeer. If he wanted Lymond’s attention, he was going to have to catch up.

The slower sledges were sawing in front of him. He cracked his whip, passing one; and was nearly caught between the second and third as they veered blearily towards a collision. He saw, looking back, that the reindeer, with more sense than their drivers, had separated them. And looking ahead, that he had almost caught up with two others, but that the four flying sledges in front were farther off than they had ever been, and nearly at the spina, the turning-post of the race.