The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [113]
Half-way through November, after the mildest autumn for three hundred years, the temperature in Moscow dropped thirty degrees. By the beginning of December, the days were bringing anything up to ten degrees of frost and the rivers became broad white highways along which moved eight hundred sledges daily, carrying corn and fish into the city. The winter ice market opened on the Moskva, outside the Kremlin, selling casks and earthenware pots and painted sledges and grain, and stiff-legged hogs and bullocks and poultry, frozen like boulders, and boys swooped and flashed on the crystalline ice, bones bound on their feet and iron-shod stakes in their hands, as staffs and as weapons. Tame bears danced, their teeth rubbed with vitriol, and wild ones crept close to the villages. The rest of the Muscovy Company’s wares set off by sledge at last from Vologda, and the sledge carrying the Tsar’s wine and sugar overturned and was lost.
Diccon Chancellor, sick of hunting and hawking and eating and drinking and witnessing crude entertainments unrelieved by the presence of women, took George Killingworth off to the Kremlin to present his apologies to the Tsar through his Chief Secretary Viscovatu, and to ask, for the fifth time, whether his highness was graciously disposed to reply yet to the Company’s humble petition. Master Viscovatu, faintly severe on the subject of the wine and the sugar, said an answer would certainly be supplied in due course, but that his highness was at present much occupied with affairs of war.
‘War!’ said George Killingworth, and broke off as Chancellor kicked him on the ankle.
‘Yes. It is the Emperor’s custom,’ said Ivan Viscovatu, ‘to hold a Triumph in the fields outside Moscow shortly after the St Nicholas’s Day banquet. It is the Tsar’s desire that you and your fellows will honour the Tsar and his commanders with your presence. Afterwards, it is possible that the Tsar’s time will be less circumscribed. I am sure you are anxious to visit trading centres other than Moscow.’
George Killingworth opened his mouth and shut it again, the golden beard drawn like a curtain. ‘We are honoured,’ said Chancellor, and got Killingworth out before he could say anything aloud about the Voevoda Bolshoia, whose fine touch would be detected behind every courteous sentence. They already knew that the Tsar was pleased with his army. It looked rather as if the Voevoda were pleased with it, too. It remained to be seen whether the Tartars would be pleased also. ‘And every man in it a gentleman,’ said Diccon Chancellor to himself, thoughtfully.
Later, when he understood what St Mary’s was, he realized that any soldier in Europe might have told him what to expect on that clear, cold day when he and Christopher and his quartet of impatient merchants finally stood on a field of snow outside Moscow, and watched marching past a thousand-long column of hackbutters in blue stammel and velvet ranked five abreast, each with his gun on his left shoulder and with his right hand holding his match. On beautiful Turkish horses and jennets, the Tsar’s boyars and nobles followed them in gold brocade, riding three by three. And lastly, there entered the Tsar in brilliant tissue, his scarlet cap hung with pearls and his high officials around him. At his right, grey furred and wholly calm, rode the Voevoda Bolshoia.
George Killingworth, as was his regrettable habit, spat.
Afterwards, they agreed it was a circus; a drama, a ritual dance; a precise entertainment designed and created by a clever and ruthless ringmaster. The silk pavilions; the flags; the rippling cloth which held back the crowds were all devices of western chivalry. The massed displays of drill and horsemanship were not. Only over the wide steppes of Russia was it necessary to move blocks of men by the thousand, riding hundreds of miles into battle; able to wheel and manoeuvre to distant, half-perceptible command.
It was a skill they had never possessed; just as they owned the endurance to sustain siege to the point