The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [144]
‘Did he die?’ Chancellor said.
Lymond walked forward. With one fastidious finger he lifted the blankets and counterpane of the navigator’s meagre bed and flung them back sharply, revealing, spread in anger, his sinewy body in its chaste white cotton nightgown. ‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘I hate travelling with a man who wears lace in bed. Did you know that you may beat the Devil, but your whip must be drawn from a winding sheet? So far as I know Blacklock lives, breathes, and is being sprinkled with aqua vite and marigold water. It does not affect your forthcoming journey.’
Diccon Chancellor stayed where he was, his eyes steady, his arms folded hard on his chest. ‘You will excuse me,’ he said. ‘I do not go to Lampozhnya.’
None of the expected expressions, of anger, of annoyance, of impatience crossed Lymond’s face. He said simply, ‘If I order it, there is very little you can do about it. Your cargo is loaded, and the sledges are waiting below. You may travel dressed or in your nightshirt, as you please.’
Christopher had wakened. Chancellor saw his son’s stiff, outraged face in the doorway and said slowly, ‘I am in no position to resist you, of course. But you, in your turn—do you think this is a moment to abandon your officers?’
The handsome blue eyes opened. ‘Do you think they burn to expel me? They don’t. And if they did, they would have even less chance of it than you have. The bow and arrow, as they say, commands with a fine and delicate voice.’
Christopher said, ‘It isn’t the bow and arrow you shelter behind. It’s the Tsar.’
Lymond turned. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘And you find that despicable? But you are wrong, you know. Aut Caesar, aut nihil. It is the Tsar who is sheltering behind me.’
An hour later, having kissed Christopher and shaken hands with his silent compatriots, Diccon Chancellor took his place in the sledge-train, and, escorted by a band of sixty fully armed cavalrymen from the barracks at Vorobiovo, swept out of the Neglinna Port and across the six-arched wooden bridge to turn north, along the Wolf Road, the great frozen highway to the sea. Ahead, enclosed in furs, Lymond rode with his captain, with Slata Baba on the sledge just behind him.
So, their estrangement complete, the two men, Lymond and Chancellor, entered a strange world of sleigh bells and silence. The sledges ran day and night, served by the post-stations, and Chancellor found that, supported by cushions, with the curtains drawn and bearskins heaped about him, he could sleep, and read his maps, and make his notes frozen-fingered in the daytime as he could not do two years before, shepherding his nervous merchants from post to unknown post from the Frozen Sea down to Moscow.
As far as Kholmogory their present journey was the same, but infinitely faster, and with every care removed from his shoulders. Food appeared, or hospitality in fortress or village or monastery. Or failing all else, they carried tents, and the men would make windbreaks and shelter from the upturned sledges themselves.
The Streltsi were swift, obliging and cheerful. He grew used to the sound of Russian constantly spoken, and began to catch and understand the coarse, half-heard jokes, and enjoy their deep, throaty voices when they were permitted to sing. They were the élite of their corps, he began to realize; already stringently trained, and chosen to escort the Voevoda Bolshoia. That they were afraid of him to a man took nothing, he saw, from their zest, or the sparkling tension which clothed them like frost. He had seen that once before, in a company under the Duc de Guise, about to go into battle. It was the sign of success; the fire and stamp of natural leadership.
He found it disturbing. And leaving Vologda behind him, with its lightly drunken, arguing oasis of confident English voices and futile English problems, he