The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [138]
Lymond said, his voice murmuring, ‘You sound surprised. The abuses are those the late King Henry complained of in England. And in England, unless they have burned him, the Primate himself has entered the holy condition of matrimony. The difference is that here the monasteries still flourish, levying their own taxes, making their own major investments, producing and storing their liquor. The Metropolitan’s annual income is three thousand roubles while the Archbishops earn two and a half thousand and the bishops are worth a thousand apiece. By courtesy of the Tsar, it is a rich church in a destitute nation.’
‘Living on superstition,’ said Adam Blacklock. ‘They have plenty of privileges, but what duties do they perform? The Troitsa will give hospitality to the Tsar and his courtiers, but the poor are barely allowed to enter its doors.’
‘The Tsar has given sanction for church schools to be opened,’ Guthrie said.
‘The Tsar gave sanction for printing presses to publish the liturgies,’ Adam said through his teeth. ‘And what happened? The presses were burned overnight. By the clergy.’
‘Has it been proved?’ Lymond said.
‘Have the new schools so much as opened their doors?’ Adam shot back. ‘And d’Harcourt is right. This sacred orthodoxy, on the distaff side, is hardly one generation old. Elena Glinskaya was a civilized woman brought up in Lithuania.’
‘The Tsar’s grandmother was an equally civilized woman, brought up as a ward of the Pope,’ Lymond said. ‘Unhappily, you are dealing with the only surviving independent Greek Orthodox state, and a culture wholly intolerant of gynarchy. They don’t know what they are missing.… It is nearly time, gentlemen.’
Guthrie had already moved to give orders. When the bells rolled in the dark over their heads and the Cathedral doors burst open, casting golden light from end to end of the square, the Streltsi were already deployed and waiting, the horses saddled; the ornate, gilded sleigh standing awaiting the Tsar. Then the mile-long procession wound, singing, down the steps and set off through the Kremlin and downhill by the houses of Kitaigorod, to hold the Kreshenea of the River Moskva, and hallow the water.
The five Englishmen and one boy had already arrived, and stood, protected by soldiers, in the forefront of the jumping, hand-flapping crowd waiting there on the river-ice in the dark. People jumped because they were cold, and their torches, whirling sparks in the air, gave off stinking smoke and a flickering manic light which touched the greased furs and the broken-backed hats and the broad, heavy faces, sallow with winters of thick, stove-heated air. There were children, and somewhere Chancellor glimpsed a grown man being carried. And women by the hundred: the discreet embargoes of the courtier did not seem to apply to the peasant. Hundreds of women, some with babies; most with some sort of vessel: an earthenware pot, or a pail of leather or wood clutched in their powerful arms.
Where the market was held, they had cut a square twenty-foot hole in the ice, lined and edged with white boards, and had set a staging beside it, on which the Metropolitan’s tall gilded chair had been erected. Beside it, lit from within, was a small, spired pavilion of mica, with a chair and footstool inside for the Tsar, and the household guard, in white fur and velvet standing around it. Beyond the guard were the Streltsi, forming a double line on the ice as far as the Beklemishevskaya Tower, at the south-east point of the red Kremlin wall, round which the procession was coming. Soon after the bells of the Kremlin rang out, the Englishmen could hear a rumour of noise from the city and presently, over the dark mass of heads on the ice, a moving river of fire as, led by tapers and lantern, the banners came, of St Michael and Our Lady, floating crimson and blue in the dark; and then the great silver-gilt cross, bright as drawn-wire on the tender tinged clouds farther east. Behind, in books of gold as transparent and thin as the