The Ringed Castle: Fifth in the Legendary Lymond Chronicles

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Fergie, busy importing Permian yew and surveying Polish and Flemish cloth bales for his soldiers, disliked weighing in slotniks and poods and counting his journeys in versts instead of two-thirds of a mile. It disturbed him that the Russian calendar put the creation of the world at the 5508th year B.C. and that it was therefore never the year that he thought it was. Apart from this, although he would not have admitted it, he was having the time of his life.

  Ludovic d’Harcourt, their Christian hospitaller, was engaged on a different matter. Having mastered the Slavonic tongue quicker than any save Lymond, he was compiling his own register of Pomeschiks, those who had been given land on condition that they supplied one equipped horseman per obja of earth until death. He also, with discretion, interviewed the princes. Equipment, he found, consisted of food for one to two months: a bag three spans long with millet flour and up to eight pounds of dried powdered pork, along with a bag of salt mixed with pepper, if the man could afford it. Together with a hatchet, copper kettle and fire box, this made him self-supporting. D’Harcourt reported to base.

  ‘All right,’ Guthrie said. ‘They put one man like that in the field, and he can live, after a fashion. But in God’s name, what do they give him to fight with?’

  ‘A pea-shooter,’ said Danny. ‘With terribly hard Russian peas.’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said d’Harcourt. ‘The trouble is, they will overdo it. You’d expect a sword and a bow and a quiver. They’ve got lances and hatchets as well, and half a dozen knives and the kesteni, that stick with a spiked ball on a thong. They have the knives hanging on to their elbows, and their reins and whipthong looped on to their fingers, and so far as I can gather, expect to ride in to the attack with the bridle, the bow, the short sword, the javelin and the whip all in their hands at the same time.’

  ‘With their kettle, their food and their tinder box bumping along at their sides,’ Danny said. ‘I’m sure the enemy simply run off in droves; but my loving heart bleeds for their horses. The August Personage of Jade won’t be at all pleased about that.’ Danny Hislop was retraining the Streltsi, which was extremely hard work, and had mellowed his tongue not at all.

  Adam Blacklock wished, not for the first time, that Lymond had seen fit to stay with them during this spell in the house at Kitaigorod, instead of abandoning them for his mistress. True, it was in the Kremlin that he was able to speak with the duma and the princes and engage their attention and support for what he was doing, and with d’Harcourt, make assessment of their varied ability and experience and the degree of their probable co-operation. To Vorobiovo he brought from the Kremlin Prince Kurbsky, who the previous winter had put down the rebellion at Arsk, fighting a running battle against the Votiaks, the heathen Finnish tribe driven north from Kazan by the Tartars.

  A clever, ambitious man in his late twenties with a great deal of experience behind him, Kurbsky had not yet shown more than a guarded interest in what Lymond was doing, but he was prepared to talk of the wolf road to the north with its nomads and settlers, and bring with him merchants who imported walrus tusks and seal oil and salmon, beluga and feathers and white foxes and snow larks and silver and sables at the fair at Lampozhnya, and could tell of the Samoyèdes, who worshipped the Slata Baba, the Golden Old Woman, and the people of Lucomoryae, who died in November and came to life again like the frogs in the following spring, and the races of Lapland, who know neither fruits nor apples, nor yet any benignity of either heaven or earth.

  From them, the men of St Mary’s learned of the northern frontiers of Russia, from which the tribes did not invade, but might revolt against paying tribute to church or to state; might ally with the enemy Tartars; might and did murder travellers and destroy the tenuous pathways of trade. And they learned of the snow and the cold, and the ways of travelling fast on a frozen network of rivers. They heard how to use snow to track and to assault the enemy, and how to defend themselves and their weapons from freezing.

  They all attended these sessions. Among them, sometimes, were others: the beautiful boy called Venceslas who had suddenly appeared as Lymond’s body-servant, and the elderly German physician called Gorius Grossmeyer, with his worn lambskin stomacher and his old Brunswick hat with the brass band pinned round it, who belonged to the Mistress’s household and talked, in his ponderous way, good sense in medical terms.

  On the western frontier, bordered by Lithuania, Livonia and Poland, the problems were different and entirely political. The most senior men of the Council, Adashev and the monk Sylvester and the secretary Viscovatu, came to Vorobiovo for these sessions, which were held strictly in private. Sigismund-August, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, thirty-four years old and shakily lost in high living, wanted no war, and Livonia, under the declining feudal Order of Teutonic Knights, was the weakest of Ivan’s neighbours. But the town of Pskov on Livonia’s borders, reconquered forty-four years before by his father, was Russia’s only station towards the western sea, other than the frozen coast of Ingermanland on the Gulf of Finland. It was a dream of the Tsar’s, more than either of his chief ministers, to acquire part of the Baltic seaboard, and to recover the lands inhabited by Orthodox Russians and seized by his western neighbours when the Golden Horde held the whole of Russia in its grip.

  So, vouchsafing no political opinions, Lymond with Guthrie’s stolid presence beside him elicited the strength and the weakness of Ivan’s westerly neighbours and then turned to the subject nearest Adashev’s heart and Sylvester’s too: the fending-off and eventual conquering of the children of Ahmed, the heretic remains of the great Golden Horde which had ruled for two hundred years: the war against the last of the Tartars.

  Danny Hislop, temporarily seconded from wounding the feelings of the Streltsi, became their expert on Tartars. He visited the prisoners from Kazan and the renegades already working for Ivan: he found where the Tartar settlements were and in what numbers, and how they lived, camped, fought, ate and rode. He found the dangers were two. Across seven hundred miles of wild steppeland to the south-west of the Volga lay the Tartar Khanate of Crimea, vassals of Ottoman Turkey, who lived on raids into southern Lithuania and Muscovy, and sold jewellery, church gold and slaves into Egypt and Stamboul.

  To the south-east lay the Horde of the Nogai, led by two brothers. ‘Ismail likes Ivan, but Jusef breaks out in pustules at the thought of him,’ Danny reported, sitting with his feet on the desk between Lymond and Guthrie. ‘Luckily, Tartars don’t much like other Tartars, and the ones who are sitting in Astrakhan at the mouth of the Volga are the least liked of all, especially by God’s Keybearer and Chamberlain, Ivan of Russia, who would like to possess the whole of the River Volga, including the mouth. There’s a Khan called Yamgurchei in Astrakhan, and Ismail has offered to join his part of Nogai to the Russians to fling Yamgurchi out.’

  ‘And hand the town over to Russia?’ Guthrie asked.

  ‘Not exactly. A former Khan called Derbysh is the current favourite. Everyone hopes that if he is brought back, he will show Ivan a proper gratitude. Two of the Kremlin princes, Pronsky-Shemyakin and Vyazemsky, went south in the spring to attack Yamgurchei with the help of the Nogai, and when they get back, if they get back, they are going to be the mascots of Muscovy. I’m tired of training,’ Danny complained. ‘Couldn’t we plunder something, such as decadent idols with emerald eyes and a lot of clean, unspoiled village maidens?’

  But instead, he was sent with Plummer to conduct a survey with Adam’s maps of a proposed chain of fortified points to extend those already defending the hundred-mile zone about Moscow. He rode through Tver and Rzhev and Staritsa, Serpukhov, Kashire and Kolomna, Ryazan and Zaraisk and Kaluga; Mosaisk and Cheboksari and Sviajsk to the rumble of Plummer’s unceasing voice, and the squeak of the clerk taking notes for him. At every second location Danny said monotonously, ‘You can’t do that,’ and Plummer bridled and said, ‘They built Sviajsk three years ago in four weeks. They felled the timber at Uglich and floated the logs down the Volga——’

  ‘Th
e cost. The cost, you fool!’ Danny would scream.

  ‘Four thousand five hundred roubles. From the foundations. My God,’ Plummer would cry. ‘Can’t you get it into your head that it’s a carpentry culture? Houses cost three roubles each. They buy them ready-made in the market from numbered stacks of standardized timbers, already tenoned and mortised. The buyer states the number of rooms, gets the logs loaded on carts and has them dragged out and built where he wants them. That’s how the burned districts get replaced so quickly. Cheap wood, cheap labour and only one tool—the hatchet. Hence the uniform look of the Izbas.’

  Lancelot Plummer had expected to undertake this survey with Adam, but had been foiled calmly in passing by Lymond. ‘Ah, no. One aesthete and one philistine are what we require.’ There could have been few philistines, thought Plummer acidly, as insistently common as Hislop.

  Then they stopped making lists. For four days, Lymond was absent, in conference with the Chosen in some retreat in the Kremlin. When he returned, he carried between two boards the programme to which he had committed them.

  He read it through to them in Kitaigorod all that evening, instead of returning as he usually did, straight from Vorobiovo to the Kremlin. In it were the provisions for all Fergie’s supplies; the foundries to make Guthrie’s new weapons, the forts for Plummer to build and the musters, district by district, of all the men owing horses, weapons and service, for d’Harcourt and Hislop to train.

  They listened to him in silence, fired in spite of themselves by the scale of it. But for the sake of their pride they kept quiet, and only at the end did Guthrie move, and say growling, ‘And so they agreed? Even the cost?’

  The Voevoda Crawford of Lymond laid down the last page, picked up and tapped the stack on a desk to align it, and handed the bundle and boards to the boy Venceslas to bind and hold ready to carry. He looked at Guthrie. ‘I have on record,’ he said, ‘the Tsar’s public pronouncement that the only riches he cares for are peace with honour for Russia.’

  ‘My God,’ said Danny Hislop. ‘He said that for effect, after the fall of Kazan.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Lymond. ‘But he said it. Peace and honour he shall certainly have, in due course. And those most deserving, no doubt, will be granted the riches.’

  The letter from Philippa Somerville arrived at the end of the month when, in the field or out of it, they were working eighteen hours and more in every day and the messages from Rome and Venice and Brussels and London and Paris lay on Lymond’s desk, waiting until he chose to step aside for an hour from the machine, and give them his due and orderly attention.

  Even when he returned, he did not go at once to Güzel’s house, but was stopped, passing through the Nikólskaya Gate, and asked to call at Ivan Milkhailov Viscovatu’s office. He went there on foot, dismissing his men and his horses, and found the secretary fondling the thick metal plate of his crucifix. ‘My sovereign lord wishes to see you. Your riding dress will be excused. You may leave your weapons with me, Voevoda.’

  His sheath, worked in the Turkish style, was inlaid with coloured enamels and had turquoises in it, set firm as apples. Lymond drew his sword and laid his dagger beside it. Then Viscovatu, darkly smiling, gave a clap of his hands, and the door opened on a file of tall headgear and ranked silver axes. The guard closed about them as Lymond with the secretary stepped into the open, and taking one of the wide boarded walks of the Kremlin, escorted both men to the west, behind the network of houses which backed the Uspensky Cathedral and the Church of the Robe of the Virgin and into the square containing the old church of St Saviour in the Wood, behind which lay the steps to the women’s buildings, the Terems. And from that upper terrace, trodden almost daily by Güzel, was a doorway into the maze of connected pavilions which represented the Tsar’s private apartments.

  Ivan of Russia this time wore neither of his worked golden crowns, but merely a tall hat in velvet over a banded cap of black sable and an Ispahan gown in crimson and indigo, with long slit sleeves brushing his footstool. Adashev was with him and a handful of others, seated on a long bench hung with red fringed brocade. There was a table with books and an ikon hung with gold cloth in the room corner, before which an oil lamp glimmered scarlet. The lower walls were painted to simulate marble.

  Lymond walked to the ikon, hat in hand, and crossing himself three times said aloud, ‘O Lord, have mercy.’ He then turned to the Tsar and made a reverence deeper yet.

  Ivan’s arms stiffened on the knobs of his chair. ‘Hah!’ he said on a shout. ‘Protestant strumpet, you ape us?’

  Lymond stood, deferential and barely tinged with reproachful surprise. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The will of the Prince is the will of God. In the enlargement and tranquillity of his dominion, let us live quietly and peaceably in all goodness and purity, and follow him in all things.’

  ‘The coronation service?’ said the confessor Sylvester. ‘The Voevoda is indeed a fountain of knowledge.’

  The Tsar’s voice, full of purpose, overruled his words without ever hearing them, ‘Enlargement and tranquillity! Enlargement, Voevoda, yes: although I have not witnessed my domain increase itself by one pebble since you and your mess of ill-mannered dogs so used my city of Moscow that I came near having nothing to reign over but a city of ashes and carcasses. You have brought no enlargement, and are thieving from us every tranquillity. My princes spit on you.’

  ‘I cannot detect it,’ said Lymond with diffidence. ‘I should like to be excused from returning the courtesy.’

  The Tsar did not speak. Only, stirring a hand, he signalled to the boyar standing nearest to Lymond. And the counsellor, lifting his heavy gloved hand, delivered two blows across the Voevoda’s bland face which left it marked across, reddened and bleeding. Lymond said, without moving, ‘I speak the truth. I always speak truly. What is your princes’ complaint?’

  The Tsar, his colour high, was breathing a little more thickly. ‘Where,’ he said, ‘Where are the treasures of Astrakhan? Where are the carts, the slaves, the spices you stole from my captains? Exhausted from fighting——’

  ‘They were perfectly fresh,’ Lymond said. ‘The Nogai did most of the fighting.’

  ‘Box by box!’ exclaimed the Tsar. ‘By night and by day! Shall I tell you the merchandise which they lost from the boats, coming upstream on the Volga? What was taken between Kazan and Morum? What was stolen by land from Morum to this city—the Shemakha silk, the swords, the bows, the cotton wool, the walnuts, the ambergris and the musk which the new Khan Derbysh made free to my men for a pittance? Prince Vyazemsky tells me he found his own bow and dagger sheath empty. Prince Yuri Pronsky-Shemyakin declares the very camp fires were put out one by one with no warning. Are you a madman?’ said the Tsar. ‘For whom are you fighting? Are you a minion of Sigismund-Augustus and his master the Emperor Charles who wishes to see us a nation of peasants?’

  ‘No,’ said Lymond, his voice undisturbed. ‘I am making you an army which can fight against Tartars. Your princes did well at Astrakhan, and Yamgurchei has been punished for breaking his oath of allegiance. But elated with their success, your army took no pains to protect themselves on the long journey northwards. They gorged themselves on sturgeon and kvas, and played tricks and were hearty. The Tartars stayed in their yurts, but they might well have done far more damage than we did. This your people must learn.’

  ‘While you make yourselves rich?’ Adashev said. ‘You who already have tasted from us a generosity unprecedented?’

  Standing still in his sashed tunic and splashed riding coat, Lymond showed neither insolence nor improper humility. ‘The salt, the spices, the cloth and the personal goods of your distinguished princes have by this time been returned to await each in his palace,’ Lymond replied. ‘The other weapons and the three bags of silver, of which perhaps you have not yet been told, have been put to a purpose I considered would serve my sovereign lord better.’

  ‘They are to be offered in expiation to our Most Holy Church?’ said Sylvester with bitter derisio
n.

  ‘They have bought three Cossack leaders,’ said Lymond calmly. ‘And engaged the interest of several more.’

  Adashev said, ‘You have given arms to the Cossacks of the steppes? These are robbers; outlaws; stateless men without settlements who rove the Tula, the Putivl, the Severian Ukrainy and live off wild beasts and honey, fish and herbs and sweet roots. They raid the weirs of our fishermen, and sail their fast chaiki to rob and murder those who would pass peacefully down the Tanais to Azov.’

  ‘They fight like Tartars,’ said Lymond. ‘You have used them before. Lithuania uses them still. Do you want them for you, or against you?’

  ‘They are half Tartar,’ said Sylvester with distaste.

  ‘Then,’ said Lymond, ‘let us make them wholly Russian at heart.’

  The pale eyes of the Tsar had not left him. Ivan allowed silence to fall, his beard on his chest; his long Byzantine face moist with choler; his long staff, gleaming steel at the tip, in his hand. At length, ‘Approach,’ he said to his foreign Voevoda. And as Lymond walked slowly close to his chair, the Tsar raised his thin stick like a cantilever until the metal point pressed hard into the leather of his chest. Holding it there, Ivan spoke softly. ‘By my orders Andrei Shuisky was strangled by dog-handlers. My boyars rode over the importunate people of Novgorod. I bound the Pskovians when they made indecent complaint and had hot spirit poured on them, and fired it. Mishurin was skinned alive by the children of boyars, and for a passing error of boldness, I had the tongue of the boyar Afanasy Buturlin cut out here, where you are standing. I speak of these things with sorrow, for God has given me a nature which will brook insolence from none, high or low. My hand smites, although afterwards I may sorrow for it.…’

  He let another long pause develop while his big-boned hand fondled the stick, its shod point grinding through the soft leather. Lymond said nothing, and the half-dozen men in the room held their breath. In the quietness the sound of feet passing up and down the stone steps came to them perfectly clearly, and muted voices, and in a while, the bell of one of the monasteries jangling from among its rooftops and trees. Ivan said, ‘Twice you have been unwise. Twice you have been insolent. I demand that you lie down before me in terror.’