The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [105]
Adashev was asleep. Among the four men on duty, he recognized Lancelot Plummer, who bowed without speaking. He could not at once recall what was making the engineer peevish, but rightly assessed it as trivial. The guards on either side of the Tsar’s door were expecting him: as he approached, they swung their silver halberds at the salute, and made way. He did not awake Adashev, but instead knocked himself; and when the Tsar’s voice called, ‘Enter!’ Lymond pushed open the carved double doors and went in.
The Tsar Ivan Vasilievich was in bed. The chamber priest, his office performed, was retreating, holding the crushed sprig of basil and the silver bowl of blessed water, sent each day by the abbots of the Tsar’s scattered monasteries. As Lymond paused and bowed, the Tsar waved his hand, dismissing his household officers also. The door shut.
The Voevoda had come to know the room well. The walls hung with elaborate fabric and fish-scaled with dazzling ikons. The painted vaults. The silver shrine with its strange sculpted figures: the book of the gospels boarded with gold foil and jewels, and alive with the brooched forms of saints. The jewelled censer; the silver lamps and sconced tapers; the tall silver ewer and basin in which the Tsar washed his fingers clean of the handgrip of heretics. The Tsar’s deep voice said, ‘I wish to be told if you completed your errand.’
The bedcover was of fox fur and the bolster of drawn threadwork; the bed was new, with a canopy of changeable taffeta lined with sarsanet and tasselled with silk and gold. In it the Tsar sat in a loose gown and shirt over fine linen hose, his pocket ikon still in his hands. Lymond said, ‘My errand was of no moment. But it is completed.’
‘You obeyed me,’ said the Grand Duke of Russia. ‘I wonder how often you obey me? Your churl Blacklock is not obedient. Ivan Mikhailov Viscovatu has complained of him. You know the frescoes in the Golden Chamber are not painted according to the canonical rules. Near to the figure of Our Saviour a woman is shown, dancing nonchalantly, and the inscription on it is Lechery and Jealousy.’
Lymond gave no appearance of being disturbed. ‘If Mr Blacklock appears to take Sylvester’s part, it is purely on aesthetic grounds. Mr Blacklock is an excellent soldier.’
‘The part of an excellent soldier,’ said Ivan Vasilievich, ‘is to obey orders and avoid matters which have no bearing on warfare. Such niceness of taste may lead him into strange pathways. Perhaps he will find he appreciates the art of Sigismund-Augustus better than ours, or the heretical painting of England.’
‘Perhaps then,’ said Lymond, ‘you should have him followed, also.’
The bony fingers turning the ikon case became suddenly still. Lymond did not move. The Tsar stared at him, the trailing auburn hair concealing his lips, his arched brows drawn down over the large, pale eyes staring at his commander. He said, ‘You jest with me?’ and the figured gold crumpled, like a walnut shell, under his fingers.
Lymond said, ‘Your dagger is under your pillow.’
The bearded lips smiled. With a sudden movement, the Grand Prince cast away the crushed ikon and slid his hand searching under the pillow. When he sat up, the long blade of a dagger lay still and blue in his hands. The Tsar said, ‘But you have a knife in your shirt-breast. Before I could move, you will kill me.’
‘Then I should lose my life,’ Lymond said. ‘Alexei Adashev and your guards would cut me to pieces.’
‘They would draw your ribs out with red heated pincers. They would sew you in a bearskin and set my hounds on you. They would drive a soaped stake …’ The Tsar stopped, his flecked lips shining between the hairs of his beard. ‘But your men are of the guard. They would save you. They would flee to the terems and take my son Ivan hostage.’
‘Your cousin Vladimir would avenge you,’ Lymond said. He drew off his gloves. The Tsar’s knife, quivering, flashed as he turned the point outwards. Lymond said, ‘If you will allow me?’
The Tsar made no reply. The knife quivered, and the room