The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [108]
‘You are generous,’ Lymond said. ‘But I cannot accept. I am married already.’
There was a silence. Then the Tsar said, ‘She is here? Your wife?’
‘No. She is in England. The marriage was one of convenience, and will be annulled.’ The pleasant, undisturbed voice did not alter in timbre. ‘It has not been consummated.’
‘Then it is true,’ the Tsar said. His big hands lay loose on the fox fur, so deep was his interest and his curiosity. ‘You are a virgin?’
Lymond’s gaze dropped. For a moment, head bent, he appeared to be collecting his thoughts, or composing his answer, or even perhaps controlling an answer more natural to his temper. Then he looked up and said, ‘No. The delights of the flesh do not interest me, but not because they have never done so. Rather the contrary.’
The pale eyes stared. Slowly the ridged forehead cleared. The Tsar bared his teeth in delight, and flung back his thick beard, and laughed. ‘The pox? I shall send you my doctors.’
‘A night with Venus and a month with Mercury?’ said Lymond dryly. ‘No. The sickness, whatever it is, is not subject to doctors, I fear.’
The Tsar fingered his lips. ‘There is a soothsayer from Kola …’
‘Nor a soothsayer,’ said Lymond. ‘I have had my fill of deadly harbingers.’
‘You fear them, Frangike Gavinovich? Why? Whom have you consulted? What doom have they told?’
‘I have met only one,’ Lymond said. ‘In France. A woman famed for her sayings. She prophesied that my father’s two sons would never meet in this life again. She spoke the truth, I believe.’
‘And,’ said the Tsar, ‘how many sons has your father?’
‘Myself and another,’ said Lymond. ‘My older brother, who still lives in Scotland. You see, therefore, there is no need to follow me. I shall not be seduced from my post by the Englishmen or overcome with a yearning for the land of my fathers. Nor shall I give my mistress cause to regret that she and I have come to Russia, and stayed in Russia to serve you. Until you send me away, I shall serve you.’
Through and through, the pale eyes searched the other, unwavering gaze of flowerlike blue. ‘You do not smile,’ said the Tsar, ‘when I give you my robe. When I have given you plate and jewels, rents and land, the handkerchief from my sash, you do not smile.’
Lymond stood up. ‘My lord … I receive them, because you take pleasure in giving, but I do not serve you for gifts. I serve you for friendship.… And until that day comes when I cannot defeat you at chess, and you will no longer ask me to play with you.’
Ivan Vasilievich shouted. His laugh rang round the close, pictured room and drew chimes from the glass and the silver: he leaned forward among the heaped fur and struck Lymond’s arms to his sides with the grip of two powerful hands. ‘You will not leave me,’ he said.
‘No,’ said Francis Crawford.
Chapter 4
The next day, Lymond flew Slata Baba, and Chancellor, mute on his horse, saw the eagle, a speck in the sun, plunge to her kill like a storm of Saracen arrows and then, opening her great ragged wings, soar three hundred feet to hang, bank, and dive yet again.
She killed in the air, wings backswept; muscled legs braced like forearms before her, and the hooked talons struck the crow or the grouse or the ptarmigan as knives into straw, crumpling bone and feathers and flesh into a broken cake of white and soft brown and scarlet. She killed on the ground and stood round-shouldered over her prey, held in the grip which could paralyse a man’s hand, before stooping to tear with the open, hooked bill. Then she would rise again, the eight-foot