The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [151]
‘Do the thrones of Europe have no need for security?’ Chancellor asked.
‘No. I shall stay in Russia. I am too far away now from it all,’ Lymond said. ‘And if we are going to be metaphysical, I have no sea card, or compass, or star.’
In the silence that followed, sleep finally overcame Chancellor, and when he woke, the candles had guttered almost into darkness, and he heard by the bustle that a new, sunless dawn had arrived, and it must be time to bestir himself. The Voevoda, he saw, had already gone.
Late that afternoon they ran into the scattered log town without walls called Kholmogory, and found Richard Grey snug in a large timber counting-house, pink cheeked and friendly and cheerful, and sporting a nascent grey beard thick as lichen. He was ready to travel. They spent a day loading and unloading chests and marking off invoices, and putting Killingworth’s precious goods into storage; then, making rendezvous again with the Voevoda, they joined their depleted sledges to his, and set off east for Pinega and Mezen. Grey, Chancellor was exasperated to see, was inclined to be respectful to the Voevoda, about whom he had heard: his eyelids fluttered every time Lymond spoke English, and Diccon gathered that he had not yet brought himself to believe that the Tsar’s Supreme Commander was not Russian. The only thing which seemed to worry him was Slata Baba.
Lymond, typically, exorcised his mistrust by flying the eagle at the first opportunity. After the first kill, a bloody one which brought her back to the lure, feet dripping and wings flapping like thunderclouds, Grey glowered, asked some belligerent questions and then surprised them, presently, by leashing her under direction, and putting her up later on, after a couple of hares. Then they had to stop, but a love affair, surprisingly, had been born, and he set himself the task of watching Slata Baba’s crop for her castings as tenderly, said Chancellor uncharitably, as a capon with another man’s egg.
Lymond grinned and then soared away, like the eagle, on his artach, which moved Chancellor to further complaint for, although he was learning, he had not yet attained the Voevoda’s undoubted competence.
But Diccon Chancellor’s sarcasm was a defence, for here, outside all probability, had come upon him something unlooked for and rare; something he had experienced only a handful of times since Christopher’s mother had died: which was the reason, although he would have told no one, for his adventuring.
They had left the horses behind. From Kholmogory to Lampozhnya their sledges were pulled by relays of reindeer, which could run post with an unloaded sleigh for two hundred miles in twenty-four hours without sleeping, and then, unyoked, return loose to their station. Who ran loose, herded by terriers. Who ran in herds of two hundred, each with its train of pack-sledges, made fast to one another. Reindeer blew like leaves across the white, blinding bowl of the landscape. The eye read them as script on a book-roll: the stretched neck, the tined bones of the antlers, the powerful, thick-pelted body; the long slurring stride with its snapping click as the cloven hooves met.
From solitary travellers in this icy white world of near-night the party from Moscow had become part of a concourse of people: Lapps, Karelians, Russians, Tartars, sailing fleet as seal-boats across the glazed snows in their high-sided sledges; trawling the black ice of the sky with their thin, shrilling tongues and the crack of their whip-lash.
Carriage had cost them four dengi a pood, and the cost of hire was ten altines per yoke for five hundred versts. Or so Grey reported. The information hung, like the frozen threads of his breathing, outside Chancellor’s head, and his dazzled mind perfectly disregarded it.
They flew, hissing, through the surgical cold of the air, the scythed snow spinning like glass from the runners. Their guides, laughing and calling above the snort of the deer and the rolling of bells from their shoulder-harness,