The Ringed Castle (48 page)

Richard Grey said, ‘Why shouldn’t the Company do it?’

‘Do what?’ Chancellor said. ‘Send founders and hammermen and refiners? We haven’t got them. We have to conduct half our business at Robertsbridge in French as it is.’

‘But not all of it,’ said Grey. ‘There are some ironmasters who would come. And what does Sir Henry Sidney expect for his steel—five or six pounds the firkin? We could freight it from Tula for four pounds, and make a profit if the quality were improved.’

He was deep in figures. Chancellor, the mathematician, left him to it, and in due course, having completed his business, Gregory Stroganov left, followed, after an ink-stained and well-lubricated interval, by Richard Grey, to close his affairs at Lampozhnya. Lymond, whose papers were already in order and cleared, offered the vodka jug once more, gravely, to Chancellor, who accepted it somewhat grimly. Lymond said, ‘I doubt if Sir Henry’s affairs will be seriously disturbed by an influx of steel gads from Muscovy.’

Diccon Chancellor took a long drink and stared at the other man. ‘So the Voevoda Bolshoia wishes help to create foundries,’ he said. ‘To make steel with the strength of the Persians’. Because the Tsar is going to ask me to send him shiploads of armour and weapons, and I am going to refuse.’

‘He is also going to ask you for an apothecary,’ Lymond said. ‘And we should like one of those. But I fear, as you say, that his hopes of munitions from England will return to him lame in both
elbows. He will ask you for sulphur and lead and powder and saltpetre also. I hope you will be tactful.’

‘Or we shall not be allowed to take our goods out of the country?’ Chancellor said, descending to bluntness.

‘I don’t think you need fear that,’ Lymond said. ‘Unless you deal with him too curtly.’

Chancellor said, ‘I am hardly likely to do that. But what undertaking can I possibly make? The last time a party of skilled German workmen was about to travel to Muscovy, Livonia stopped it with the Emperor Charles’s backing. The Polish Ambassador has already been promised that no arms or military engineers will go to Russia. Sweden will feel the same. So will Cologne and Hamburg: England might find her own imports of weapons cut off. And Sigismund-August will continue to protest like clockwork, as you may well expect, against all such traffic to the Muscovites,
enemy to all liberty under the heavens.’

Lymond, who had conducted the meeting sitting in comfort on his bed, closed his eyes and recited
. ‘
Our enemy is thus instructed by intercourse and made acquainted with our most secret counsels. We seemed hitherto only to vanquish him in this, that he was rude of arts and ignorant of policies. If so be that this trade shall continue, what shall be unknown to him? The Muscovite made more perfect in warlike affairs with engines of war and ships, will slay and make bound all that shall withstand him, which God defend
. The author is Sigismund-August, the source is an excellent correspondent of mine in Venice.… I think you may promise the Tsar what you like, for I do not think for a moment that Mary Tudor will agree. The Tsar needs munitions, but he needs trade and communication with the west even more. By now the Company know this as well as I do. He may conceivably reduce your privileges, but the Tsar will never totally sever the bond, unless you anger him out of reason.’

Chancellor said, ‘Why tell me this? Even with the Company’s help, it will be a long time before your own cannon-founders and forgers can supply all the arms that you need.’

Lymond opened his eyes. ‘I wasn’t sure if you knew which way the wind was blowing. By the time you have your last interview with the Tsar, I shall be in the south with the army. When he puts the matter before you, as he is likely to do then, you will be ready to answer him softly. I shall not be there to help matters if you don’t.’

Chancellor said, ‘Is he mad?’ and received a long, half-veiled look he did not understand.

Then Lymond said, ‘No.’

There was a long and curious silence. Then Chancellor said, as if following a long explanation which had never been given, ‘But that is why you are staying.’

‘If the reasons for my staying,’ said Lymond, ‘could be said to have any but negative qualities, that is one of them.’

They left two days later, their business finished, their compensation paid and their debts discharged by the Voevoda himself; the God of Salaries, as he pointed out, his symbol a deer.

Their last act before leaving Lampozhnya was to attend the burial of one of the Christian Lapps of the sleigh race. It took place not as Chancellor had expected in some crypt or through some elaborate melting of ice, but consisted merely of a church service, followed by a procession in thick falling snow to the belfry with its flaring log roof and wide eaves.

Richard Chancellor walked there with Lymond beside him, while the crowd wept and howled, and the candles guttered and blew in the snow. In front, uncoffined, they carried their dead, grey and hard on a board, in the sheepskin tunic and cap, the crucifix and skin boots he was accustomed to wearing. And when they took him inside the belfry and lowered him stiff on his feet, Chancellor saw round him a leaning stack of dead and stony companions, staring out, head upon head at the living. And in the hand of each rigid monolith of humanity was clenched a scrap of birch bark for St Nicholas, affirming that this old wrinkled Lapp in his furs, that young Russian woman, this hairless baby, its half-made eyes open on nothing, had died devout and shriven in Christ.

‘Even in Moscow,’ Lymond said, ‘they store them like billets all winter, until in the spring each man takes his friend, and buries him. Before, the ground is too hard. It is the crown of dead men to see the sun before they are buried. Or so they say. And each has new shoes on his feet because, they say, he hath a great journey to go.’

‘I find no indignity there,’ Chancellor said. The belfry blessed, the wood doors were closing. ‘The soul has gone, and what is left is nothing but humbling. Although I should, like the Muscovites, prefer to see the sun before I am buried.’

‘And I,’ said Richard Grey in a voice of bottomless gloom, ‘should merely like to see the sun.’

His conversation, all the way back to Kholmogory, was about the ninety-foot tar house he hoped to build in Kholmogory, in which eight workmen would spin hemp into cables and hawsers: two to turn wheels and two to wind up, at seven pounds per annum per spinner. By the time they reached Pinega, he had decided that three boys would be sufficient for spinning. By the time they reached Kholmogory, he had convinced himself that five Russians would do just as well, and would cost less than seven pounds together.

Chancellor was not listening and neither, he suspected, was Lymond, who spent the journey writing and reading in the big sleighs, and did not travel on artach at all. For Chancellor was now
aware that, after Kholmogory, his way and Lymond’s would part, and that he would not see the Voevoda again. With half his troop, Lymond was leaving for Moscow, while Chancellor waited behind at Kholmogory, helping Grey load the furs into their warehouse, and making dispositions against the arrival of his small fleet from England.

Konstantin and half his company were to remain behind here to protect him, and to escort him when the time came to Moscow, to consult for the last time with Killingworth, and to speak for the last time with the Tsar.

But by the time he had arrived at Moscow, Lymond would have left on his campaign against the Crimean Tartars. And by the time Lymond came north from that, Chancellor would be at St Nicholas with Robert Best and his son, preparing to sail home to England.

To sail home to ruin, and possibly death. He had been told at all costs to bring Francis Crawford home with him, and this he had not done. He knew that, so far as high-powered soliciting could make it, Philippa’s divorce from her spouse was secure. He knew that to bring Lymond home, even if it were possible, would involve extirpating a difficult and clever and dangerous man from his own chosen and brilliant setting, and throwing him instead into all the small, insidious intrigues which throttled the court of Queen Mary.

There was no place for him there or in Scotland, compared to the one he held in Russia. And although Diccon Chancellor once had thought, wistfully, of a land where likeminded friends might meet and might talk and might make new and astounding discoveries, free of fear, he knew that it was not to be found yet in England. And that if it were, and he brought Lymond to it, he might find that he had not brought to England the Francis Crawford who had talked in the church, or in the small wooden hut at Lampozhnya, but the man who had flailed Adam Blacklock, and who had had Aleksandre put to the torture. Who flew Slata Baba and lay with a corsair’s late mistress and who had become what he was by unceasing servility to his Tsar.

So, for all these reasons, he said farewell to Lymond without asking again for his company; without begging; without referring at all to the threat under which he now lay himself. Only he said, ‘You remember the message I brought you. Your wife and your wife’s mother were threatened. You made light of it when we met in the Troitsa. I have no reason to think you have changed your mind now. But when I return, I shall be asked for my answer.’

And Lymond, standing hat in one hand with his loaded sleigh waiting outside, said, ‘Philippa will have her divorce. Of that I am sure, and the danger to Kate will be gone. If you see them both, wish them both happy. As for Lady Lennox, you may give her my explicit refusal.… And when she has spoken to you, Master Chancellor,
she will realize that she has the better part. You do not want me in England.’

Chancellor returned the blue stare. Then he said, ‘There is a man in you I would want, but I think Muscovy has half consumed him. You will take care. Somewhere, here or Vologda or Moscow, is the man who bribed Aleksandre to kill you.’

‘I shall take care,’ Lymond said. ‘If I am dead I cannot sponsor your travels. Except, clearly, in a direction you will never be called on to follow. I wish you God speed.’

And he left, swiftly, so that Grey, craning out of the window, lost his last, wistful glimpse of the eagle.

It was not until Chancellor entered the office and began going through all the papers awaiting him that he found among them a sealed packet from Danzig. It was addressed to himself and proved to contain several letters from London including one whose direction he could not read, because it was quite spoiled by sea water or weather. The seal was already broken, so he flattened it open and scanned it.

He knew by the first line what he was reading, and by the time that, without conscience, he had got to the last, he was troubled enough to fold it on hearing Grey’s incoming footsteps, and to keep it inside his purse until later, he could ponder it, and decide how in God’s name to treat it.

What he held was a letter from Philippa Somerville to Francis Crawford of Lymond, her husband. And what it contained was the unequivocal proof of his bastardy.

After the birth of Richard, Sybilla had no more children.… You and your sister were born to your father in France, of mother or mothers unknown.…

And swiftly as he had read it, he could see still the words of its ending.
This is an affair of yours on which I embarked perhaps childishly, since it seemed to me that by ignoring it, you were doing yourself and your folk a disservice.… The people among whom you grew up are your dearest charge, and ought to remain so.… I am sure you know this without being told by a schoolgirl.…

Honest, sensible Philippa. Who was giving benevolent thought to the middle-aged man she was shackled to. And who had no notion of the public holocaust which might be touched off by the private one contained in these words.

He read it again that night and thought about it for several days before reaching a considered conclusion. Then he took Philippa’s letter and placed a new wrapper, sealed and signed, over the old water-stained one. He did not send it to Lymond. Instead he put it among his own things in his sea chest, closed and ready to take back to England.

He was not sure for whose sake he did it. If he sent it to Lymond,
he felt, without knowing why, that only the blameless would suffer. And the only time in his long deliberations when, for a moment, he wavered was when he remembered that clear, icy journey to Lampozhnya, and the sledges arching and hissing across the glittering axle tree of world.

For a few days, what he had felt was pure happiness. And what Lymond had known, he now saw, was freedom.

The spring engagement between the Muscovite army and the Crimean Tartars was witnessed in every absorbing detail by Robert Best, the burly London draper who had so nearly become the Company’s champion with Danny Hislop and Fergie Hoddim at Novgorod.

He was there, invested in borrowed helmet and cuirass, when the Tsar and his nobles issued with ikons, trumpets and drums from the Kremlin and took their place, a bobbing procession, plumed and tasselled and surcoated in gold cloth and ermine, at the head of the troops drawn up in files in the market place, the banner of Joshua at his side.

The Tsar and his princes accompanied the army as far as Tula, and there remained, a bulwark protecting the capital from raid, recoil, or counter-attack. The rest of the army, led by its foreign commander, and under him all the officers of St Mary’s, set off to cross the seven hundred miles of steppeland which lay between Moscow and the ravaging hosts of the Tartars of Krim. There, in the peninsula breasting the Euxinian Sea, lay the strongholds of the last fragment of the Golden Horde, and of its master, the Turk. From Perekov and Ochakov rode the Tartar armies, dressed and armed like the Turks, sometimes in hordes two hundred thousand strong, sometimes in small raiding companies, running about the list of the border, they said, as wild geese fly.

They lived by raiding. They swept into the small towns of Lithuania and up to the walls of Moscow itself, burning and stealing and seeking above all captives to drive south to Caffa and sell for shipment to Turkey or Egypt, the adults lashed to the saddle, the children in reed baskets like bakers’ panniers. Or so Best had heard. And if a child fell ill on the way, they would dash out its brains on a tree, and leave it for the wolves.