The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [103]
‘You were with the Tsar’s army?’ said Chancellor.
‘We were all with the Tsar’s army,’ said Hislop. ‘It was sad to miss all the fighting. But we did rather better at Wyborg.’
‘Against Gustavus Vasa of Sweden?’ said Chancellor. Braced for an evening of stilted Russian conversation while plodding through uncongenial Russian food, he had expected nothing as fascinating as this.
‘He felt,’ said Danny sorrowfully, ‘that we were encroaching on his possessions on the Gulf of Sweden. He hadn’t heard, I am afraid, of the slight changes in the Tsar’s defence forces. We laid siege to Wyborg and dealt fairly bracingly with the villages round it. There were so many prisoners that Swedish girls were going for a shilling.’
Chancellor said, ‘The Tsar and his Council would be grateful.’
The lashless eyes opened. ‘Oh, so were the princes,’ said Danny. ‘Everyone is grateful. Adashev. Sylvester. Viscovatu. Sheremetev. Prince Kurbsky, the other great hero of Kazan. We are to be permitted to mount an exploratory campaign against the Crimean Tartars next summer. With the Voevoda Bolshoia in command.’
‘And that God-damned eagle,’ said a distant voice, unexpectedly.
‘Ludo doesn’t like Slata Baba,’ said Danny cheerfully. ‘On Malta, they have no sense of drama. It is the double-headed eagle, my boy, which will demolish whole Tsardoms of blood-drinking Mussulmen.’
‘I thought you didn’t mind Tartars,’ said the man pointed out as Ludovic d’Harcourt. A large man, Chancellor saw, with a round, cheerful face, freshly scrubbed.
‘What I said,’ replied Danny, ‘was that I didn’t mind the women of polygamous tribes, reared to please men upon the marriage couch or off it. Tartars are nasty, especially when raiding near my property. Stripping ikons for earrings; raping nuns; drinking from sacred goblets. They filled the monks’ boots with live coals at one monastery, and made the poor bastards dance about frying. Tartars have rude impulses.’
He sounded disarmingly earnest. ‘And the Russians?’ Chancellor asked.
Shocked, the clever gaze turned on him. ‘Pure with the pure, unsullied with the unsullied,’ said Danny Hislop with simplicity. ‘Inclined to shoot off their arrows at flying poultry and stripped peasant women, poor Sheremetev, but proud to march against the Ishmaelite foe, singing divine liturgies.’
‘And yourselves?’ Chancellor said. ‘The Swedish girls, sold for a shilling?’
‘They went,’ said Danny, ‘to the very best homes. Holy Mother of God, he’s elected to send round the wine.’
It arrived, in six-gallon basins of silver, and soon after that, the royal pledging began. Three times, Diccon Chancellor was sent malmsey, or mead, or Greek wine by the Sovereign Prince of all Russia, and in his turn he watched as each of the Tsar’s courtiers was called up by name to receive wine or meat. The feat of memory was beyond anything he had seen at court in Europe and its effect, he thought, was incalculable. It told the people that their Tsar knew and recognized them. It told the court, by the names unspoken, who might be out of favour. He waited, drinking as little as he might, and watching his colleagues from the edge of his eye do the same, until he was summoned to rise and go to the carved ivory chair.
The Tsar had changed again. On his head was a different diadem: on his shoulders a robe of dark blue and green velvet on a crimson silk ground, all wrought with gold and coloured silk pomegranates. The cup he held out was baroque mother-of-pearl set in silver.
‘Ritzert,’ he said. ‘Thou hast come from a great sovereign to a great sovereign; thou hast made a great journey. After thou hast experienced our favour it shall be well with thee and thy countrymen, Drink, and drink well, and eat well even to thy heart’s content, and then take thy rest, that thou mayest at length take my greetings back to thy mistress.’
This time no