The Ringed Castle (47 page)

‘Now strip to the waist,’ Lymond said.

He didn’t do it. He had fallen, Chancellor conjectured, waiting and wondering, into some kind of daze, brought on by the lateness and the drink and the long and strenuous trials of the night. He saw Konstantin, with a glance at Lymond, reach out and touch Aleksandre on the arm. And he saw that Aleksandre, like a man frozen, still stood unmoving. Lymond said,
‘Captain.’

Aleksandre said, ‘I have an old wound. It is not very pleasant to look on.’

Lymond continued, calmly, to hold his eyes. ‘Konstantin. How many soldiers outside?’

‘Four, my lord. I thought it as well. There is much drunkenness.’

‘If they are sober,’ said Lymond, ‘bring them in. Then help the captain to undress.’

Diccon Chancellor saw, disbelieving, that Aleksandre’s face had quite changed. For a long moment he stood glaring at Lymond; then as the door opened and his men began to come in, he dodged suddenly and ran head down, straight for the door. He fought so hard that they had to half stun him before they had him, arms spreadeagled, in front of the Voevoda, and Konstantin peeled off his tunic.

The shirtsleeve beneath was marked by a bloodstain. Konstantin ripped it off. Below, covered with scraps of rags, were three deep, livid punctures, as well as some patches of red, roughened skin stretching from shoulder to forearm of the limb with the sprain.

Slata Baba had left her own finger-prints. Lymond said, ‘Who paid you to do this?’

Gripped by his bare arms, the captain spat on the floor. ‘Son of a whore,’ he said. ‘Why should I tell you?’

Taking his time, Lymond studied him. ‘Self-interest,’ he said eventually. ‘The question is not whether you die, but how you die. Tell me who paid you.’

Aleksandre smiled.

Konstantin struck him on the face. ‘Speak!’

And Aleksandre laughed through bleeding lips. ‘You teach well. You teach me how to withstand torture,’ he said. ‘I am not afraid. And meanwhile, you will wonder: who is it? Is it Prince Kurbsky who wishes ill to the Voevoda, that he may be the Tsar’s undisputed Commander? Is it Dmitri Vishnevetsky who has decided to leave Lithuania and throw in his lot with the Tsar, given a suitable office? Is it the priest Sylvester who hates you because you flayed your officer for attacking his frescoes, or Chief Secretary Ivan Mikhailovich Viscovatu, who fears you are too close to the ear of the Tsar? After I am gone, you will live for a short while I think, wondering. And then one of them will pay someone else to kill you, and they will do it.’

Chancellor saw, raw with shock, the eyes of the soldiers and Konstantin meet. Lymond studied Aleksandre. At length, ‘It sounds well,’ he said. ‘I cowered, almost, to hear you. Save that rivers must break from their courses before a Russian dares lay hands on me. Or any man whose life depends on the favour of the Tsar. And if you doubt it, let me tell you this. If you do not tell me the name of the foreigner who thinks he can kill the Voevoda, I shall give you to the Tsar’s courts for judgement. Who was it?’

Chancellor’s mind’s eye was awake, and witnessing the subtle, boundless range of the Tsar Ivan’s judgements and its weapons: fire and ice, the knife, the axe and the stake; the cunning abuses by snow and by water; the execution by animal. He said, ‘Judge and sentence and execute him here. You surely have powers.’

‘He is tried,’ Lymond said. ‘And sentenced. And will be executed when he has told me what I want to know; but not before. Konstantin and any four men he chooses will be his persuaders. When he has spoken the name of the man who has paid him, Konstantin will report it to me, and I, if I am satisfied, will give the order which will award his body to death. Konstantin?’

‘I understand, my lord.’

‘Aleksandre?’

‘I understand, my great lord,’ said the captain, with hideous irony.

They were about to take him away when Lymond spoke to him unexpectedly. ‘If you had attempted this solely for money, you would have been thankful to shorten your punishment. What grudge do you have, that is worth suffering for?’

For a long time, Aleksandre stood looking at him. Then he said, ‘I am a Lithuanian. What I learned from you I would have used against you, in Lithuania.’

Lymond said, ‘I see. But I am attacking the Tartars, not the Lithuanians.’

‘I hear differently,’ Aleksandre said. ‘I hear the great Emperor Charles is dying, leaving one inadequate son tied to Mary of England. I think when the Emperor is dead, the Tsar will think it safe to make Lithuania and Livonia his own, and the Tartar war will be forgotten. And with the Voevoda Bolshoia dead, he will fail.’

The emotionless blue eyes stared and stared, mordant in their contempt, until at last, Aleksandre dropped his. ‘With me or without me,’ said Lymond; ‘with the Tsar or without him, the army I am making will not fail, in any thing it may set its hand to. Konstantin, you will have the truth from him by the morning. Take him away.’

Richard Grey moved and then stopped, as the small cortège marched out. Chancellor, hastily attended to by the two half-dressed servants, began to push himself off the mattress. From his makeshift seat, shoulders on the wall, Lymond surveyed him. ‘Ah. The lit de
parade is being vacated. Thank you. Which reminds me. I have another and pleasanter debt to pay off.’

Chancellor stood up rather carefully, his black-bearded face stolid. ‘Having seen how the first fared, I had rather forget it.’

Lymond lifted his eyebrows. ‘God hateth murder.’

Chancellor said, ‘Punishment is one thing. Foul retribution is another. I can guess how Konstantin will try to drag the truth from that man.’

‘I doubt if you can,’ Lymond said. ‘In some directions the Russian is peculiarly inventive. The Tsar, however, would have been more whimsical still. I take it you mean to sleep, or do you intend to hold wassail till morning?’

If Lymond was minded to be corrosive, Chancellor, blind with weariness, was not minded to match him. He caught Grey’s eye, and stooping to gather up the stained remnants of his outdoor clothing, he dragged his feet to the door and, with the other man, entered with relief the warm, candlelit quiet of their own inner room. He glanced back once as he went, and saw that Lymond, alone, had already forgotten him, and was welcoming with what looked like elaborate courtesy the shapeless, skin-padded figure which must be the Samoyèd Shaman and his interpreter. From which he deduced, without pleasure, that the lit de parade had no particular importance for Lymond, who had merely wished to discuss the knottier points of the Tsar’s compensation with the principal claimant in peace.

In that he was wrong. The two men entering the room might, to an onlooker, have seemed nervous. They were dressed in sewn tunics and breeches of deerskins, and both had the large head and broad olive face of the true Samoyèd, the eyes small and obliquely set; the chin smooth and beardless.

The younger and squatter of the two had pulled off his rough sleeveless fur and his hat, showing a crow’s wing of coarse, straight black hair down his cheek. The older, wearing a long coat of rubbed and stained sables, and a deep, shapeless hat of the same, made no move to disrobe but walked forward, quietly, until he was standing before the Voevoda Bolshoia. And although his manner, like the other’s, was alert and wary and to a degree diffident, there lay behind it something which was the reverse of diffidence, and which made it easy to look at him, and guess that here was the leader of his tribe. The door closed behind them and he stood and looked, without speaking, at Lymond.

For the first time since he had entered the hut, Lymond rose. He stood, his back to the wall, and said, ‘On the river …’ in English, and then, with an obvious effort, changed it to Russian. ‘On the river this evening, you saw the power of Slata Baba and spoke to me. You offered me help.’

The older man spoke. His voice, deep and grating, curried the silence: Chancellor, hearing the sound but not the words, shivered as he drew the bearskin over his shoulder. The interpreter, in stilted Russian, said, ‘We offer it still.’

There was an odd pause, during which the Voevoda was certainly searching for words. Then he said, also in Russian, ‘Then in the name of the respect I bear for your creed, and for the bird who carries in her the nobility of both your god and your race, I accept it.’

Then, since he could not stand any longer, nor find, groping, polysyllables of suitable majesty for any conceivable coda, the Voevoda Bolshoia of Russia subsided, not without grace, on his bed and from there, quite unwittingly, to the floor.

*

The foreign party slept late the next morning. The last thing Chancellor had heard, before sleep entirely claimed him, was a subdued bustle of some sort in the next room, and the resumption of the deep voice he had heard earlier: the Samoyèdes were taking time, it appeared, over their argument. The voice rose and fell, changed and modulated almost like music: it was extraordinarily soothing. Chancellor thought, vaguely, that he must learn the language and then, even more vaguely, that it must be simple, to need no interpreter.

He wished the Voevoda well from the monologue and there entered his mind, like a foul taste, the thought of Aleksandre, and what at this moment was happening to him. Then the thick, undulating voice claimed his thoughts, and led him soon wholly to slumber.

When he finally stumbled into the outer room half-way through the next morning, Lymond was sitting fully dressed in clean clothes on his mattress with pen, ink and a litter of papers spread all around him. He looked, as Richard Grey looked, like cheese lightly set in the chissel. A linen pad showed discreetly above one rim of his high stiffened collar, and there was another dressing in the thick of his hair. Chancellor said, ‘We may find it difficult to explain the quality of the ale in Lampozhnya.’

The look he received was wide, pure and cool as the ice. ‘I am in no discomfort at all,’ Lymond said, ‘and so do not qualify, I fear, for the olive branch. Konstantin has just reported that the captain Aleksandre unfortunately failed to recover from questioning.’

Chancellor’s bearded cheek jumped as his teeth came together. He said, ‘So the next captain is Konstantin.’

‘It was the inherent danger in the arrangement,’ Lymond said with a trace of regret. ‘I come to thee, little water-mother, with head bowed and repentant. So such exquisite knowledge of the hellish squadrons
of Lennox is denied us.’ He paused. ‘On another matter. You have heard of the Stroganovs?’

Richard Chancellor stared back at him and felt suddenly quite exhausted.

He had heard of the Stroganovs. On the journey north, the meeting between Lymond and Yakob Stroganov, whose father Onyka had established the forty-year-old saltworks at Solvychegodsk, had not escaped Chancellor. He knew, from hearsay, that the family traded with the Samoyèdes, far beyond the River Ob. He even knew that his brother, Gregory Anikiev Stroganov, had established some kind of trading-post on the River Kama in Permia, where dogs carried bales and drew sledges, and men ground roots for their bread, and the white rind of fir trees. He had not expected, in the short span of time now left him, to be able to meet them and question them.

Not until now, when he heard Lymond calmly arranging a meeting for their last day in Lampozhnya. And even then, he disbelieved it until next day he came in with Grey from their huckstering, and entering Lymond’s room, saw the burly, grey-haired man in fine furs sitting at ease there, and was introduced to Gregory Stroganov.

Afterwards, he wondered at his surprise, for the Tartar
yurts
of the Siberian princes were spread far and wide beyond the Pechora, and although many, like Ediger, owed the Tsar allegiance and tribute and many others, quarrelling among themselves, were glad to call the Tsar brother, there were still tribes like the heathen Votiaken who found it more tempting
to
raid rich Russian settlements than to share the problematical benefits of a ruler so far away.

Successful settlers brought Ivan rich dividends in furs and in salt. It was in his interest to protect his Siberian frontiers. And Lymond was his Voevoda Bolshoia.

So one could understand this meeting, which had brought Gregory Stroganov from his Permian home, and had already lasted, from the look of the empty tankards and strewn, crumpled papers, a good part of the day. Its purpose so far as the English were concerned was not immediately clear. Then Lymond, bringing more vodka and discoursing, in amiable fashion, on the distinguished nature of the navigator Chancellor’s public career and in his interest in the world’s unexplored quarters, led Stroganov to question Chancellor, politely, on his specific interests and allowed Chancellor, for thirty intense minutes, to ask all the questions whose answers he so burningly wanted to know. After that, by a means he witnessed with nothing but admiration, the talk turned insensibly to the discussion of iron.

Richard Grey, already intent, became avid. From Vologda to Moscow to Kholgomory had travelled the acrimonious letters, attempting to decide what course to follow about Russian iron. Their
ore, smelted with charcoal, was less good than the Tula
uklad
, the Tartar steel they had found in small samples. None so far approached the quality of Persian forgers, who could make plates for light armour like silk, or the strength of a Turkish blade, which could cleave a skull to the brains like a mushroom. And yet London was desperate for cheap steel: had been in need of it for four years, since the Steelyard monopoly was abolished, and the price of German steel rose higher and higher. And here, to talk about iron, was one of the family who might know what was true and what fable of the tales they had heard of rich iron deposits, about copper and zinc, lead and tin lying far to the east.

Blandly, Gregory Stroganov told them what he knew: there was iron, in Karelia, Cargapolia, Ustug Thelesna, but imperfectly founded; there was silver and copper on the River Pechora, but little of it had so far made its way west. He said, ‘For good steel, we should fire it as the Voevoda tells me you do, with stone coal. But our workmen are ignorant. We need metallurgists to find our ores and show us best how to mine them. Men come from Germany, from Italy, and then they leave us. We need ironfounders to teach us how to refine the metal, and forge it. Then we would have the best and cheapest steel in the world.’