Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [168]
It was the climate, of course, which reminded him. The unusual winter, bringing stinging rain and wet snow even to the palmy shores of the Crim, had frozen the steppes of the north and iced its rivers, so that, in place of mud-swaddled oxen, canopied sledges skimmed over the whiteness, swallowing space as if it were smoke. He had seen them burst through the sunlight of morning in a dazzle of spume; men and sledges and horses encrusted with sparkling frost; beards and manes sheathed and flashing like mirrors.
He had heard tales of the fishing here since he was an apprentice in Bruges: seamen’s accounts of the mythical four-hundredweight sturgeon of the River Yaik, forging up from the Caspian to breed; and of the beluga eighteen feet long, white as veal, sweet as marrow, that could hardly be carried by thirty strong men from the Dnieper. In the spring, men would launch boats to spear them, and to gather in carp and pike bream and chub as they swarmed to their nets. In winter, as now, the fishing was done from holes hewn in the ice by men who travelled in caravans of powerful sledges, with the great frozen rivers their highway.
The tales of these were cautionary too: of unskilled steering which could overturn horse and sledge on clear ice; of the fights between rival fishermen, and the chance attacks from war-bands of Tartars, come to unearth the salt and caviare buried under the snow, and — timber-starved — to burst apart the boxes, the barrels, the temporary shacks and take them away to make houses and wagons.
With Dymitr Wiśniowiecki there was not much fear of that, although the sledges carried weapons, as well as twenty men and their servants, food and drink and utensils, fuel and stoves, and their fishing and hunting equipment, with their spare horses and dogs running beside. To a man of Dymitr’s race, the frozen marshes and steppes to the north were familiar ground, and his practices were already half Tartar. His had not been the inept party which, travelling from Moscow, had lost Anna her furs — although, like his fellow merchants, he was the poorer for it.
No one troubled to speak of that; there was no time. Already, exploring the country, Nicholas had found his way to some of its rivers, and to the channel which led from the sterile Black Sea to the vast stretch of the Sea of Azov, Palus Maeotis: so rich in fish that both Venice and Genoa had chosen to command it from its northernmost point, where the walled double city of Tana lay on the banks of the Don. But Nicholas knew it only from the soft time of the year, when the Genoese ships crowded the havens, ready to enter and cross the Black Sea with their cargoes of fish and honey and furs, and the traffic in slaves was at its height. The traffic which, of course, Ochoa de Marchena was engaged in.
No ships moved now, but there was life on the steppes: elk and deer and high-leaping wild sheep to be shot, and fat birds to fall to their falcons, and later shrivel and brown on the spit. They ate as they travelled, as Tartars did, until they came to the fish: then they gorged as they worked on mighty salmon, cooked in the gloss of near-life, with the curd thick as cream between the pink flakes of flesh. And of course they wrestled, and roared out their ballads, and flung themselves into violent, joint-wrenching dances, howling over the wheeze of the pipes (they had learned a dirty song about bagpipes) and the twang of someone’s chipped, eight-stringed lute. And naturally, they drank. But it reminded Nicholas of that other country in the north because among the badinage, the talk was not without purpose: it was concerned with the land and its bounty, and the ways of the people who lived on the land. And at night, round the crackling blue fire in the makeshift shelters they found or created, they would fall silent and listen to the ruminative, rumbling voice of the elderly priest from Bologna,