The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [140]
‘Then we should have sleighs also,’ said Chancellor sharply. ‘Are the Tsar’s guests treated like moujiks in Russia? Do we walk from the river?’
As until this moment he had been prepared to do exactly that, there was no sleigh already commanded for them, and it took the combined pressure of Robert Best’s Russian and Killingworth’s formidable beard to impress the Pristafs enough to discover one. Even so, they were not far behind the massive stepped sleigh of the Tsar, passing with its accompanying Streltsi between the prone ranks of his subjects. The Metropolitan was sitting with him, and his household staff, including Viscovatu, Chancellor saw, in the sledge running behind. The boyars followed, and the army officers on horseback, while the remaining Streltsi fell back, preparing to escort the re-forming procession on foot.
It was day. The torches had been put out, and the lanterns. The sun floating high above the bright golden clusters of cupolas lit the dazzling white stretch of the river, and the struggling crowd which filled it from bank to bank, hiding the sanctified chasm, and the long, richly robed file of churchmen moving slowly away, its banners held blowing and high.
Ahead, climbing the slope from the river, the Tsar’s sledge moved slowly between the bobbing, morioned heads of the Streltsi, and the horsemen behind, talking among themselves, were allowing their mounts to find their own footing. Coming close, as the crowds thinned out Chancellor saw a group of faces he knew: Adashev and the Tsar’s confessor Sylvester, with Prince Kurbsky and Sheremetev. Then Danny Hislop, with Blacklock and Plummer and the Knight of St John, Ludovic d’Harcourt. No sign of the eagle he hated so much: no sign of Lymond.
High on their left, the sky was cut off by the castellated red wall of the Kremlin, with the empty ditch at its foot. On their right, they passed a scattering of houses and small churches, bulbous as mushrooms. Ahead, almost on the crown of the hill, was the scaffolding of the new church of St Basil’s, with the snow almost empty between it and the double rank of soldiers marking the Frolovskaya Gate into the Kremlin. Behind them, a trembling of bells told that one or two sleighs had freed themselves also from the ceremony and were running back home. As for the rest, the whole of Moscow, it seemed, was still on the river. And then, at last, Chancellor saw the Voevoda, riding one-handed beside the leading, slow-running sleigh, his head bent as the Tsar leaned over, speaking to him. Someone shouted.
It was unusual. In Russia cheering was rare. One showed respect for one’s Tsar by sinking on the knees and knocking the forehead three times, with reverence, on the ground. To foreigners, you shouted, ‘Carluke!’ an expression which had puzzled the Englishmen for days until, blandly, their tolmatch had translated it for them as ‘Crane-legs’. Which, to the breeched and trousered Russians, is what they probably seemed.
But this was not a cry of contempt. It was a shout of pure horror, mixed with a sort of ragged disbelief, and, as it was repeated, Chancellor realized that it was a man’s name which was being called in the thin air, and that the sound had come from the group of horsemen ahead. Then one of them wheeled, and disregarding all rule and order and, forgetting apparently even the presence of the Tsar in the sleigh just ahead, flung his horse over the snow to the white waste in front of St Basil’s.
It was Adam Blacklock. Calling still, he pushed his horse up the slope, his horse’s caulked feet throwing up the packed snow, and Chancellor saw he was riding straight to the only knot of people in the wide, scattered square: the group of officials round the Lobnoye Mesto, the stone tribune where the Tsar stood to address the gatherings of his people, and where criminals were executed, or put to the pudkey.
Some such thing was happening now. Chancellor could see two livid bodies strapped