The Ringed Castle: Fifth in the Legendary Lymond Chronicles

by Dorothy Dunnett

  The beautiful, clear face was grey-white as water-filled glass. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘And you wonder if you are to be whipped, or if I will bear with the frailty and unadvisedness of your youth. The answer is that I will not bear with it, but I shall not whip you either; nor shall your mistress. Go back to your room, and make no more assignations until you are a man. There will be time enough then. Too much time.’

  The eyes were pools of darkness: the fingers ran up and down. ‘Go!’ said Lymond sharply; and the boy jumped, and clutched his cloak, and turning, ran down the gallery.

  Lymond watched him go. Long after Venceslas had vanished he stood there unmoving, looking at nothing. Unlike those of the boy, his hands were quite still, their knuckles discoloured with bruising. His body was drying within the wet fur of the robe: his hair had sprung wet from its combing and his face, almost unmarked, was set in an expression of familiar indifference under which was something frighteningly different: the face of a man who once looked upon the dead body of an archer he did not love, called Robin Stewart. Then he turned to the door beside him, which was that of Güzel, and knocked.

  The walls were thick, and she had heard nothing. When she called ‘Enter’ and he opened the door gently, she sat up in her lamplit drift of lace pillows, her black hair ribboned loose from her shoulders, her arched, henna-laced feet crossed like a nun’s below the fine white Egypt robe, banded with coloured silk braiding. There was kohl on her eyes, and every fold of her body was scented, but she wore no jewels save a thread of gold which spanned her neck as if drawn by a quill, and ran between her breasts under the cuff of her robe. Held between cream and honey, the muted colour was exact from the undyed raw silk of the hangings to the sarsanet cover on which she was lying, woven in buff silk with spears and flowers and trees and Saracen horsemen. In all that lamplit mosaic within the dark warmth of the room, the only delicate accents were the darkness of her smoky black hair; and the stain on her lips.

  Her cheeks had no flush of colour. The smooth olive of her skin did not change, nor did she move after her first sudden rising, except to lay her hands softly before her in her lap. Then she said, ‘You have something to say to me? If you lock the door, we shall not be interrupted.’

  He did as she asked, and when he looked up she was smiling. She said, ‘Your hands.… Whose bones have thoughtlessly blemished them?’

  Lymond spread his palms, smiling a little as he glanced down at the ruined caftan. ‘Dmitri Vishnevetsky’s. I have been removing the dross which bars his spiritual progress. I fear you must avoid the winter garden for the next few days.’

  Straight-backed and wholly composed, she considered it. ‘Poor Lancelot Plummer. And how is Vishnevetsky?’

  ‘Wet,’ said Lymond, ‘but unimpaired, mark you, even in dignity. He has decreed that we are worthy of his Cherkassy Cossacks.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Güzel. ‘The note called Coquetry and the note called True. Was it necessary to make your point with your fists?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lymond said. ‘It was what he wished; and because he is a romantic, he is satisfied. The rewards of immaturity. Others do not have the same requital.’

  A flicker of colour ran through her even skin, and was gone. She said, ‘The mature are not incapable of making their wishes known. It is a matter of choice.’

  ‘It is a matter of dignity,’ Lymond said. ‘And patience. And reticence.’ He had moved half-way into the room and had come to rest on the arm of a couch, his hand laid like a fan upon the carved wood of the back. He said, ‘Did you know that for the first hundred years after Mohammed, the King of Persia always kept a horse saddled for his return, and one of his daughters reserved for the Prophet? I wonder if the Prophet laughed, or wept for them.’

  ‘They would be honoured,’ Güzel said. She moved, giving a small sigh, and slipping her feet down the bed-skirts stood for a moment on the silk carpet, her linen robe straight as the robe of Osiris. She said, ‘Life has many strands. You will take some wine?’

  The swan-necked flagon with its silver chain stood beyond the circle of lamplight, where the paintings and the figured hangings and the diapered silver-gilt of the haunch pots reflected all the mosaic reds of the brazier. Flat-backed as a caryatid, her beautiful Greek face without expression, the mistress of all the Voevoda’s great establishment laid her hand on the flask and found it taken from her, gently, by the Voevoda’s hand from behind. ‘Life has many strands,’ said Francis Crawford, ‘but with one lacking, it is a lame thing. I have been absent too long. I have come to ask forgiveness.’

  Her hands dropped to her sides, she stared without turning at the brazier. She said, ‘You have been absent too long. You are forgiven your debt.’

  She could feel his warmth behind her, but he did nothing to touch her. He said, ‘You must be more generous than that. You must say my debt is paid.’

  ‘It is paid,’ she said.

  They were speaking in English. He was so close that she could see his hand leave the flask and rest on the table, the light from the silver lacing the bruised and capable fingers. He said, ‘And what of your obligation?’

  She turned then, to see his face. ‘Mine?’

  In the loose, glimmering play of the light his gaze was direct and blue and, for once unequivocal. ‘You dragged out of Greece a sorry carcass, rotten with opium, and barred against every assault of the senses. You have destroyed the weak places and undermined, one by one, all the bastions.… They are all open, Güzel.’

  ‘And my obligation?’ she said with composure, while the thread round her throat ran with sudden, shimmering light.

  ‘To walk through,’ said Francis Crawford, and raising his hands to her shoulders bent and kissed her for the first time, softly, full on the lips.

  Her lids fell closed. Her breath, issuing, made a short sound, without words. Then her lessoned mouth opened and her body, trained and pliant as honeysuckle, joined its hard warmth to his. After a while, without speaking, he carried her to the lamplit pillows where she lay within the wick-black smoke of her hair, and putting up her fingers, threw back the abused, furlined folds of his night robe.

  The fathomless eyes, searching up into his, possessed all the old secrets and mysteries, and had practised them. The concupiscent tongue, the soliciting fingers, the flexible body had owned many men, and had admitted few masters outwith her own implacable will.

  But this time, her arts scarcely hid what her senses demanded. His hands wooed her, gleaning her body. And bringing to this his own long experience, every breath he took was a caress, designed only to please her. While her fingernails strayed and her lips changed beneath their long, unceasing engagement the jewel between her spired breasts jumped and jumped with her high, suppressed breathing until abruptly she found herself ultimately on that blind plateau from which there is no retreating. Her hands opened, stricken. Then, hard and sudden and sure, Lymond impacted the jewel between them.

  Her needs over the years had become complex. Her passions, over the years, had found such force that one fulfilment could hardly assuage them. Couch to cushion to carpet became soft and desperate stations, moving from urging to torment to investment once again. And with an odd, detached insight, giving and withholding, exciting and loitering, he knew how to find her appetite, and force it into violence and withstand it without mercy, until she was aware of nothing in the whole moaning world but her famine. And then of nothing in the world but the exquisite act which occluded it. And towards dawn hunger, fed and fed, at last allowed her to lie dispossessed in dreaming calm, satisfied.

  It was after that, when Leila had been sent from the locked door, that Güzel stirred from a half-sleeping trance to say, ‘Do you never sleep? They say you don’t.’

  ‘And so they should.’ Hands behind his head, Francis Crawford was gazing up at the tester, not at her. His hair, hazed by the sun from the window, was dry now and loose on the pillow. His lids were long and clear like the embroidered face on the cloth at her side, with its
border of tall branching letters and its long figure, the mailed feet like willow leaves. He said, ‘Commanders never slumber, nor share the common pursuits of the vulgar. In fact, I prefer to sleep alone. It is an indulgence you will have to permit me.’

  She closed her eyes smiling, and then opened them, to study his face once again, fair and smooth and burnished like ivory, with no lax muscle in it. She said, ‘I have brought you across many years for this night,’ and watched his mind awake, and his mouth deepen a little at the corner. He did not look at her.

  He said, ‘Since Djerba?’

  ‘Since long before Djerba. I had heard of you.’

  He turned on his elbows in a sudden, swift movement and cast her one of the wide, blue looks she could not yet understand. ‘I hope,’ he said, ‘that whatever you heard, you have not been disappointed.’

  She smiled at him. ‘I heard of your ability. I heard enough to know you could do what you are achieving in Russia today. As for the rest——’

  ‘There has been no rest,’ said Lymond, ‘that I can remember.’

  ‘… as for the rest, I think we have been to the same school, you and I; and to the same trade thereafter. Man has an animal appetite, or I would be nothing. I too have had my Margaret Lennox and my Agha Morat and my child-whore Joleta Reid Malett … more of each, and for longer. It has destroyed neither of us. And now nothing can hinder us.’

  She could not see his eyes, but his lips were smiling. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Excellent the recompense and goodly the resting-place. Now nothing can hinder us.’

  He did not turn. For a moment, she lay without speaking and then, her thought turning again to the pleasure of the night, she lifted her hand, and ran its fingers, peacefully, down the suppleness of his skin. She remarked, ‘Do you know what you said?’

  He turned, his chin in his hand. ‘What did I say? When?’

  ‘Last night.’

  ‘I seem,’ said Lymond, ‘to remember saying a great many things last night. The manifest fool is known by every ninth word he says requiring verification. Was it ungallant?’

  His mistress dropped her fingers and lay back in her turn. Through the hangings, the snow-light touched kindly the black-browed face with its deep eyes and hard-boned, beautiful nose. ‘You said, “I must apologize for the faint smell of fish.”‘

  For a moment he looked at her, then he began to laugh softly. He buried his face in the pillow and went on laughing for quite a long time until it ran down, like a clock, and he said, ‘I didn’t think that you heard that.’

  ‘Fish?’ said Güzel.

  He turned round, his fine skin flushed a little with laughter. ‘The carp in the winter garden. I do apologize. Lover never came to his mistress in the state I did yesterday …

  ‘… I can only say,’ said Francis Crawford tolerantly from the high ravaged bed, ‘that whoever slept with Dmitri Vishnevetsky fared much, much worse.’

  Chapter 7

  I believe we carry on our ships someone paid to kill you.

  So Diccon Chancellor had found himself saying to Lymond. And as he toiled through those dark months of winter, exercising his spurious authority and disentangling the assorted affairs of his drapers, Chancellor found himself no nearer discovering which of them he could trust.

  What of the four whom on the surface he had learned to know so well in Moscow—statuesque, bearded Killingworth; burly Rob Best, Ned Price, the young, clever wits of Harry Lane? Or the two company sons, Judde and Hawtrey, who dashed back and forwards, overturning sledges, from Vologda; or Barnes’s protégé Christopher Hudson, the first to get through with the delayed stock from Yaroslavl, and the man with the keenest nose for a bargain? It was Hudson who picked up sturgeons at seven altines each, which would cost nine marks for worse bought in Danzig. It was Hudson who reported that hemp was cheaper too, by two shillings and sixpence a hundred than in Danzig, and that George had been right to refuse twelve roubles for his cloth at Vologda, but should have jumped at the price for his sugar. As it was, Hudson had scraped up enough of the Tsar’s spilled chest to make a small profit, and had even sold the empty cask seasoned with Holland, largely because of the crest on the bung.

  Diccon thought Hudson was too keen to have much care for English politics. He thought the same of Richard Grey, who had gone back from Vologda to Kholmogory to arrange for the storage of their unsold goods and those ready for shipment in the spring, and to set up a counting-house, with invoices, ledgers and cipher books, helped at intervals by his two veterans, Sedgewick and Edwards.

  What did any of them have to do with a petty feud two thousand miles behind them in London? For they had got their charter. It had come from the Tsar’s lordly house and castle the Moskva, grandly cased, with a small red seal depicting a naked and stunted Saint George demolishing a no doubt Roman Catholic dragon. The wording had a sycophantic English ring about it, largely because it had been drawn up with his tongue in his cheek by Fergie Hoddim, and retranslated twice since, gaining drama as it progressed:

  Considering how needful merchandise is, which furnisheth men of all that which is convenient for their living and nourriture, for their clothing, trimming, the satisfying of their delights, and all other things convenient and profitable for them, in such sort as amity is thereby entered into, and planted to continue; and the enjoyers thereof be as men living in a golden world …

  It granted to all members of the Fellowship and successors for ever the right to buy and sell without tax or levy or safe conduct, to choose and discipline shippers and packers, weighers, brokers, measurers and wagoners; to govern and rule any Englishmen in Russia, and to deal with lawbreaking and complaints. It promised redress in case of injury, reparation for robbery; and enthusiasm for all the Company’s pious practices: in every possible particular, it was unspeakably generous. On paper.

  After enjoying his golden world for a week or so, George Killingworth fell into the habit of quoting it, with a coda entirely his own.

  ‘Russians! Vipers! The cunning, wicked progeny of vipers!’

  And Lane and Price and Best, holding him down, would talk him into a rational mood again. Hold a daily meeting of agents and factors, the Company instructions had said, and have the secretary note the decisions in his books of proceedings. A weekly vetting of reckonings is to be made by the agents, and the ledgers are to be accurate monthly. All possible information is to be collected on customs, coins, weights, manners and wares so no harm may be done or dispute caused by ignorance. You shall avoid all quarrelling, fighting or vexation; abstain from all excess of drinking as much as may be, and in all use and behave yourselves as quiet merchants doeth …

  ‘It’s war!’ shouted George Killingworth, and dented the committee table with his fist. ‘They treat trading like warfare, and think every stratagem justified. If a lie will be swallowed, they’ll use it. From the biggest to the smallest, they disbelieve what I say, and what they say themselves you would trust like the tongue of Beelzebub. What dishonesty will they not practise? Fraud and misrepresentation! They cheat me over the quality; they falsify the origin; they juggle with weight. What I buy is not what they deliver … look at that flax! They delay sales, and raise prices and argue. The more they swear and protest honesty, the greater the knavery.’

  ‘It works the other way,’ Harry Lane said ill-advisedly. ‘Don’t trust them if they agree too promptly, either.’

  George Killingworth, who had just bought five hundredweight of flax yarn at eightpence farthing a pound, and who had since learned from the indefatigable Mr Hudson that hemp at Novgorod, had he waited, would cost him one and a half roubles the bercovite compared with two and a half anywhere else, lifted his beard above the table edge and turned a snow-bloodied eye on Mr Lane. ‘What’s a pood?’

  ‘Thirty-six pounds,’ said Mr Lane, obediently.

  ‘An areshine?’

  ‘A Flanders ell.’

  ‘A bercovite?’

  Mr Lane was tactfully forgetful.

  ‘You se
e?’ said George Killingworth, and slammed shut the minute book. ‘If you don’t know your facts, you can’t blame the Russians for taking advantage of you.’

  There was silence, as they all digested this remarkable volte face. ‘Anyway,’ said Harry Lane, ‘we’re selling them cloth for three times what it’s worth.’

  George Killingworth looked at him coldly down the magnificent beard.

  ‘That’s different,’ he stated. ‘They need it.’

  Chancellor conducted his battling merchants to Novgorod. He had been there before, but not as fast as this, travelling non-stop with their fleet of sledges, and changing horses in droves at the yams on the way. The first night they by-passed Klin and St Elias and drove ninety miles straight through to Tver, where they got food and fresh horses, and raced on their way, past Volochek and the deep-frozen Msta, to complete the six-hundred-verst journey in three remarkable days.

  Two of Lymond’s men were with them: Chancellor was not sure why, except that Lymond had ordered it. He had seen the Voevoda only once since receiving their charter: he was much out of Moscow, and only occasionally Christopher reported seeing the powerful sledge, with its team of six horses, flying up to the gates of the Kremlin, or out across the river ice and into the flat, snow-filled country, to guide his commanders and visit his strongholds and garrisons. In their one brief meeting, in the big merchants’ hall near the Kremlin, Lymond had asked his plans, shaking the snow from his cloak, and on hearing them said, ‘I see. A town of price, like Paradise.’

  ‘Novgorod?’ had asked Chancellor, faintly surprised.

  ‘No. Ipswich, in fact. Who are you taking?’

  George was going, and Rob Best. He thought he would take Christopher.

  Lymond listened. ‘You’ve been there before. The merchants carry much more weight than they do in the east. You’ll find a good many Swedes and Livonians and Germans. The Germans are rarely sober in the daytime, but the Flemings may give you trouble. They have no privileges since they incurred the displeasure of the Tsar, and you’re going to be milking off at Vologda all the Russian goods they used to be offered at Novgorod. By the same token, the Dutch have just paid thirty thousand roubles to have their Customs indemnity restored: and you’re going to be odious to them as a toad.… I think you might find Fergie Hoddim useful. And Plummer. No, he would bore you to death. Danny Hislop, and he can tell you all the gossip.’