The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [123]
Only afterwards, when he was standing barefoot in the dressing-room with the servant placing over his shoulders the short, furlined caftan he used as a nightgown, and binding round his waist the thin fringed silk of the girdle, did Lymond motion him suddenly to be still, and in the silence, cock his damp head, listening.
The servant waited, obedient. Far out in the mews, the man who tended the eagle was whistling. The calidarium boilers murmured. The iced fountain ran, distantly, like a song. Above them all, faintly, swooped the ctesiphon sound of thin fluting.
‘It is the doves,’ the servant said; and stopped, aghast at his own temerity.
‘I know,’ said Lymond; and catching sight of the man’s ashen face, said curtly, ‘Had I wanted a deaf-mute, I should have bought one.’
Colour crept back into the man’s face and then left it. For the Voevoda, stirring the day garments he had discarded, had transferred to the waist of his caftan a small, glittering knife one could not have guessed that he carried, and then, unhurriedly placing each foot into the thin, curling slipper presented him, said, ‘I am going up to the winter garden. If I do not call for you within the next five minutes, you may retire.’
The slippered feet made no sound. The furlined caftan, calf-length, did not drag on the steps. As Lymond mounted, the golden light from the sconces lit the fine coloured silks, full of pagan motifs: sirens and monsters and Alconosts, the birds with human heads who inhabit Paradise, where they delight the virtuous with their songs. He opened the door of the winter garden.
A dove fell like a flower at his feet.
They lay like orchids, veined and tender with wings queerly cloven, on the pool and the trees and the bushes, and on the blue Isnik tiles of the floor. As he stood, another flute-note cascaded, gentle as sallow, and bright feathers touched his slipper, and a drop of thick blood. Then the bird fell: a rare one, brought with long hardships from the islands of Java. ‘How generous is your mistress,’ said the light, mocking voice of Prince Dmitri Ivanovich Vishnevetsky, ‘who said that as your guest I might hunt where I pleased.’
Half veiled by the blossom, he leaned against the opposite wall: a man strongly made with cleft chin and soft chestnut hair and moustache, and all the arts of a courtier. In his hands was a small Turkish bow; and across the spangled silk of his shirt hung a quiver. He smiled as he ceased speaking, and bending the bow, took aim, lightly, at a fluttering host of birds calling from the cherry tree over his head.
The Voevoda smiled. ‘I am more generous still,’ he said, and drew back his arm, the fingers brushing his girdle. A flick of silver, arching through the air, touched Vishnevetsky’s bow with a click, and the Prince made a sound, cut off at once, as he stumbled off-balance, the sliced wood and hemp whipping about him: his arms flung involuntarily apart. Lymond’s knife, its chased hilt gold in the lamplight, lay on the cracked tiles at his feet. Lymond said, ‘I give you both weapon and quarry.’
Vishnevetsky bent, watching him, and picked up the knife. Then he unbuckled and laid down the quiver. ‘You visit the birds,’ he said. ‘Then by all means, let us spare them. Crassus, they say, adored a marine eel which came to feed from his hand, decked with pearl collar and earrings. And when it died, he wore mourning. Let us spare the birds, if they are your passion. You have thrown your mistress often enough in my path.’
He moved as he spoke, between the thin, fruiting trees, treading the long, jade-pale stems of carnations. Lymond, empty-handed and calm, eased between the branches, never quite coming into view, while above the birds jostled still, shrilly piping, and displaced from a leaf, a plucking of white down rocked through the air to their feet. Lymond said, gently, ‘I should test a Tartar Cossack, for courage and honesty. A Lithuanian prince I should have to accept, from what I know of him.’
Dmitri Vishnevetsky moved closer, but slowly. ‘And what do I know of Scotland,