The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [137]
The fair brows lifted. For a moment Chancellor looked into a chasm of such chilly surprise that, experienced as he was, he felt his heart close with a blow.
‘… No,’ Lymond said, his face astonished, his tone one of utter finality.
Chancellor did not argue. And a moment later, Güzel changed the subject.
Later, after Chancellor had disappeared into the darkness: ‘Your spring campaign?’ Güzel said.
‘Guthrie will finish the training. I shall be back in Moscow by then,’ Lymond said.
She made no comment. Whatever his absences, they were his own affair, as was the conduct of her life her own in the interval. Only, when he was at home, he came to her when the day’s work was over, and stayed with her through evening and night until she slept, brought to easement at last. When she woke, it was to find her bed her own, and herself her own woman again.
After a few weeks he had asked for, and received, the boy Venceslas as his servant again.
Chancellor had seen nothing. But not because there was nothing to see.
Chapter 8
The morning before the Feast of Epiphany, the people of Moscow took chalk and marked their doors and windows with crosses, lest the devils conjured out of the water should fly next day into their homes.
At four o’clock on the morning of Epiphany the Tsar rose as usual, and as usual was attended on rising by Francis Crawford, waiting silently through the prostrate devotions (Help me, O Lord my God; Lord comfort me, defend and keep me, a sinner, from doing evil …). Later, crowned with the shapka monomach and bearing on his wide shoulders the burden of a robe woven of jewel-encased metal, he sent to ask after the health of his wife and met her, briefly, in the middle chambers to salute her before walking slowly, his fingers sunk in the Voevoda’s steady shoulder, to meet his courtiers and lead the stately procession through the Sacred Vestibule and down the Red Staircase into the torchlit darkness of the Cathedral Square.
There he crossed the garlanded bridge erected over the packed snow between the Granitovaya Palace and the Uspenski Cathedral, where the Metropolitan and his clergy awaited him, their breath white in the air; their shadows stepped down over the bright snowy ground, while light and incense and the deeply choired notes of the liturgy filled the tall painted spaces behind them, glimmering with their ranked enrichments of gold.
During the service, Lymond waited outside with all his officers and the Streltsi, drawn up in columns, their arms gilded, between the bridge and the people lining the square in the darkness. Distantly through the closed doors came the drone of the readings: the Athanius Creed; the Ten Commandments; the chanting voice of the Metropolitan; the singing voice of a priest; the psalm, with its tenfold Alleluias. A chant began: six syllables repeated over and over by priests and congregation alike. Behind Lymond, Alec Guthrie said quietly, ‘What’s that?’
Lymond said, ‘Lord have mercy on us. The boys will answer thirty times, very fast, with the single word Praise. Listen.’
High-pitched and staccato, the sounds rattled dimly behind the towering walls, half drowned by the murmur of the crowds waiting outside. Behind the bell-tower there was an almost insensible lightening in the sky. It was approaching nine in the morning, and despite the faint clustered warmth of the square, the bones of the face ached with the cold. Ludovic d’Harcourt said, ‘They say the Tsar’s mother was Catholic. They say the priests are all quite unlearned and never preach, except for admonitions twice yearly against treason and rebellion and malice, and to remind about fasts and duties and vows. They say they do almost nothing but read the scriptures, and sing the liturgy, and administer the sacraments, and deck the ikons for church ceremonials. They barely know the Pater Noster, they say, or the Belief, or the Commandments. They say the priests are permitted to marry, and that abbots are