The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [114]
To simulate these things, with wooden forts and moveable towers, was only spectacular play-acting, just as the drill carried out on the pressed snow, on foot and on horseback, by hackbutters and boyars alike, with brands and pennons and flashing silk cords, was to the eye merely a brave coloured pattern shifting like shaken mosaic on the glaring white sheet of the snow.
But even to the eye of a seaman or a clerk, or a merchant, it said something more. It spoke of brutal discipline. It told of a control based on skill, as well as on fear. And it showed a pride, in themselves and their training, which was reflected, in spite of himself, in the Tsar’s austere, bearded face.
The last of the demonstration belonged to the gunners. Mounted on their long wooden platform, the hackbutters gave first their traditional display. Their target, sixty yards off, was a bank of pure ice, built six feet high and two thick, and stretching for a quarter of a mile before the chain of orderly, liveried men. The gunfire, rapping hard on the ears, seemed to be shot from the thin, glassy sky. Sound exploded around them like gorse-pods, striking their eyes and vibrating their finger-ends while the blue wall turned frosty and crumbled, and broken ice jumped like mirrors and cast long swathes hissing like salt to spangle the pale tender blue of the air.
The wall lay flat. Beside it, two earth-filled houses thirty feet deep faced the long row of cannon, gold baguettes beading the snow. A match flared, a flag lifted and fell, and the guns fired: brises, falcons, and minions; sakers, culverins and cannons, double and royal; and lastly in order of size, the great cannon: Kazan, a year old, and Astrakhan, cast only three months before, each over a thousand pounds’ weight, with their black mouths more than a foot in diameter.
They fired the ordnance three times in all, from the least to the largest in order, and as the last round went off, the small-bellied pot guns shot wild fire into the smoke, rising in flashes of scarlet and gold among the reeking black clouds, as the fields shuddered to the mounting explosions. Where the houses had stood, there was nothing.
It was over. Unable to hear his own voice, Chancellor obeyed the Tsar’s summons to join him, and tried to express, in serviceable Russian, his ecstatic admiration for what he had seen.
‘It is the might of Russia,’ said Ivan Vasilievich. ‘The Voevoda Bolshoia can answer your questions.’
‘I have none,’ said Chancellor. His ears ached. A young, bearded man in an incredible robe lined with white ermine smiled, and raised his eyebrows at Lymond.
‘I have,’ said Christopher under his breath.
The Voevoda, unhappily, had heard it. ‘What is your interest? The guns?’ Lymond said.
Christopher had gone scarlet. He said. ‘Yes. No. I wondered how the men were trained.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Lymond, ‘he would like to visit our training quarters at Vorobiovo, His father and friends might find it instructive indeed to accompany him. My own house is nearby, and I should be honoured to offer you all hospitality.’
Diccon Chancellor said, ‘We are only merchants and seamen. I am afraid we should not know how to appreciate what we saw. But Christopher would enjoy it.’
‘Then let Christopher go,’ Lymond said. ‘Master Hislop will take him, and bring him back to my house, where you may take wine and await him in comfort. And, of course, your friends …?’
But George Killingworth, mumbling into his golden beard, cravenly declined and so did Harry Lane and Ned Price. Only Best, who had so nearly smuggled the Voevoda’s wife on to the Edward Bonaventure to join her soldier husband in Russia, accepted almost before he was asked. A marriage of convenience was what Philippa Somerville had called it. And Rob Best did not need any convincing that the Voevoda’s domestic arrangements were very convenient indeed. He did not ask