The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [150]
‘From a cataclysmic encounter with Nicolas de Nicolay?’ Chancellor said. He finished, obstinately, all that remained in his tankard.
The lines round Lymond’s mouth deepened for a moment. ‘His conversation, I agree, is entirely frivolous, but his mind is very admirable indeed. So are his charts. He became cosmographer to the King of France but he began, as I suppose you know, with a military career. Espionage and maps, I suppose, are natural bedfellows … John Elder, Edward Courtenay.… But that is by the way. Who else? De Villegagnon, who has gone to colonize Brazil, was a lawyer. I learned of Thevet from him and from Pierre Gilles, whom I met in Stamboul. Chesnau and Belon and Postel I heard of from d’Aramon, the French Ambassador to the Sublime Porte. Once, in Dieppe, I met Pierre Desceliers of the School of Hydrography, although not Ribault, who was in the Tower, I believe, at the time.
‘Rotz, too, was already in England. It was just after all the Huguenots had rushed over from France to the court of Henry VIII. They say there were more than sixty French pilots and mariners in his service at that time. And Spain and Portugal were dividing the unknown sphere between them while schoolmen in the Low Countries were studying and talking and publishing treatises on cosmography and in England there was nothing, except a few Bristol seamen. The fishing fleet sailed out to Iceland and fished off the banks of unknown country far to the west, but no one saw their charts or cared about them.
‘And then an English merchant living in Spain wrote to Henry VIII and suggested that Cathay might be reached by the route you have taken.’
‘It is very different in England now,’ Chancellor said.
‘Tell me about it,’ said Francis Crawford.
Later, Diccon Chancellor wondered how long he had been talking. He remembered beginning with John Dee, because he always began with John Dee, but then somehow much later he was arguing about Records’s Pathway of Knowledge and describing what Cabot had told him about the La Plata voyage and diverging from that to give his opinion on Rotz’s Differential Quadrant.
And later, also, he realized that what had occurred was not a monologue or an interrogation but an exchange, to more than a little degree, of ideas.
What they were discussing was not new to the Voevoda. He did know these men and had talked with them, and had read what they had written. Some of the questions he put had not occurred to Chancellor himself: much of the information he possessed about their ideas and their travels was novel. On a subject not his own, his experience and his interest together were enough to make, out of all expectation, a common ground between himself and Chancellor which had nothing to do with trading or warfare or, except indirectly, with Russia. He had said he understood something of the mind of a navigator, and this was true.
It was only when the little light they had started to fail that Chancellor realized that the night, once dreaded, was almost worn away without sleep; and that his body, neglected, was groaning with weariness. ‘The time!’ he said.
Channelled with sleeplessness the Voevoda’s eyes were clear still, and serene. ‘Where there is no cockerel, the camel crows at dawn,’ Lymond said. ‘There is still time to sleep. Aleksandre will awake you. And you must forgive me. I did not mean to inflict a white night upon you.’
‘It was, I think, worth the value of several dark ones,’ Chancellor said. He hesitated, wiser than he had once been. ‘Is it true what they say? That you mean to stay for your lifetime in Russia? Is it out of the question for you to return to your homeland?’
‘It is out of the question,’ Lymond said. ‘But not because of ambition. Like King Lewis of Hungary, who was immaturely born, came of age too soon and was immaturely