The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [109]
She was flown at the hare hunt, which the Tsar led with his princes and boyars, and to which Chancellor and his friends were invited. Danny Hislop was not there, nor the artist called Blacklock. Riding between Lymond and the fresh-faced Knight of St John who did not like eagles, Chancellor asked after them. Ludovic d’Harcourt glanced at Lymond without answering. Lymond said, ‘They are undergoing a course of correction. If in the event they are either correct or in the least chastened, I shall be surprised. You say you have hunted.’
‘With Sir Henry. At Penshurst,’ said Chancellor. The eagle had a ruby in its feathered hood, and its swivel and chain were of gold. He had told Christopher to stop staring at it.
‘Giacque automne autre fois oubliait en Ferrare, Avec quelques oiseaux le poids de la tiara. Yes. Well, this is different,’ said Lymond.
Diccon Chancellor said, ‘I see that.’
Lymond followed his gaze with perfect calm. ‘She does her office well and busily, as a good hunter should. She is pagan, Slata Baba: the golden idol of the Samoyèdes, a people who eat one another, so I am told. You should visit the fair at Lampozhnya. They bring sledges of furs from Pechora which would drag down crosses, like that boisterous gown of black velvet. I intend to go to the Mezen at Lent. If you wish, you may come with me.’
Far to the north, the River Mezen flowed to the Lacus Cronicus, the Frozen Sea, farther than any Englishman had yet gone. Chancellor said, ‘Your master trusts you?’
‘Ask him,’ Lancelot Plummer had said, nudging up to his horse when he had asked the same question, ‘why he left the Emperor on the night of the banquet with blood on his shirt.’ But Chancellor had not asked him and neither, he was quite sure, had Plummer.
‘My master and I,’ Lymond said, ‘understand each other very well.’
Presently, the Tsar called Chancellor to his presence, and greeted him with his bare hand, and allowed him to present his son Christopher, who bowed as he had been taught, and tried not to look at the cloth-of-gold robe and the knives and daggers hilted with rubies, or the plated gold cap fringed with chained jewels. Around them rode the boyars in their furred brocades running with gold, on Turkish horses with necks curved each like a palm branch, coloured wolf grey, and the grey of lilac and starling, and red bay and gold-brown and russet. And between them thronged the grooms in black and gold and the dogs, pouring in spate like a brown mountain river over the sunlit field, towards the wide thicketed meadow where they were to hunt.
It was a preserve of hares, a simple cachement of animals as arbitrary as a byre or a dovecote or a warren of coneys, and the sub-boys of maple and sallow and blackthorn were man-made to furnish it. While Chancellor watched, the horsemen with the Tsar deployed themselves round the whole area, with men on foot, black and yellow, interleaving between them, and the dogs, hard-held, milling and tugging at the Tsar’s side. He had been allotted two, with two men to hold them, and Lymond likewise. No one else, he noticed, was permitted hounds but a handful of princes appointed by the Tsar. Then Ivan Vasilievich cried aloud, and the mastiffs were released.
It was not a long business. Afterwards, they were allowed to change their dress at a tower five miles from Moscow where pavilions had been raised, and where the Tsar later received them seated on his ivory throne and talked in Russian to Chancellor, while kneeling men presented them with confections of coriander and almonds and aniseed, and a pyramid of coloured sugar, on which Chancellor made no comment.
The marks of favour, so desirable for his business, were unexpected and plain. Merchants had been summoned, and his meetings with them and the Chief Secretary Viscovatu were to begin in the Kremlin tomorrow. The Tsar’s councillors Alexei Adashev and Sylvester and the staff of his Voevoda Bolshoia would lend their aid as became needful.