The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [152]
Then they would eat, their men and their sledges in orderly ranks round about them, while their fires hatched the clangorous darkness and strange faces came to their circle and sat, shapeless in skins, chewing shanks from their generous cauldron, and talking in gutteral voices. It was there that Chancellor for the first time saw the flat, slant-eyed face of the Samoyèdes, the queer Artaic tribe who roved the Arctic shores far to the east, and who worshipped the Golden Old Woman Slata Baba, who stood at the mouth of the Obi, with music issuing from the mouths of trumpets around her. Men said they were cannibals. The Voevoda’s Slata Baba, hooded, sat on her perch in the covered sleigh, silent, and was not referred to by name.
Sometimes Lymond shared with Chancellor what he learned in these strange conversations: sometimes not. His Russian was perfect: the dry, astringent touch by which he directly controlled the violent and diverse men under his charge was by now very familiar to Chancellor. Travelling on his own, he had studied how it was done. In company with Richard Grey, he watched it being done at second hand, through the guides they had brought from Kholmogory: how Lymond addressed these queer, black-haired races directly, barely waiting for translation, and using the timbre and flexibility of his voice to convey his meaning. Chancellor had heard the same technique employed by an Italian priest among Arabs in Chios. He had tried it himself, among animals.
He saw that Lymond never visited the dark tents where the children were wailing, or where the women moved, muttering, indistinguishable from the squat, smooth-chinned men but for the coarse black locks of hair worn hanging between ear and jaw. The men came uninvited: Finns, Karelians, Samoyèdes or Russians, with a strip of fish or an axed hunk of meat, driven by a bald instinct for barter and a child-like curiosity, oddly combined. Lymond would not do business, or allow Grey to unpack the sledges before Lampozhnya, and Chancellor saw the reasoning in it. Their customers and their rivals continued to watch and visit them, and seldom went away empty-handed. And meanwhile both Lymond and the Company were gathering the information they needed to have.
Once, a low drumming made itself heard among the thin sounds spread out under the frozen crust of the stars: the cries and barking and warbling song: the coughing and squealing of livestock; and Chancellor asked what it was.
‘The signal for massacre?’ Lymond said; and then, relenting: ‘The Samoyèdes are Shamanists, and worship Ukko as chief of the gods. The tribes are led by the Shamans, and the Shamans practise magic and medicine with the aid of their voices and drums. If you can manage an attack of the Marthambles, we could persuade one to say an incantation over you. You would then be anointed with infallible remedies—say, live earthworms mashed into alcohol.’
‘I shall avoid succumbing to the Marthambles,’ Chancellor said. ‘Are their remedies all so alluring?’
‘Take your pick,’ Lymond said. ‘For example, cornsilk and hot dough and live ants in warm oil for your joint pains. Celery water and goose fat massage for frost bite. That works, and you might as well make a note of it: the Company will have cases sooner or later. The voice and drum treatment is something again.’
‘Faith?’ said Richard Grey.
They were about to retire for the night. Lymond rose, as did his captain, a shadow behind him. ‘I don’t know. The Shaman will not come to me. He must invite me to his tent; and he has not done so yet.’
‘Acquire an attack of the Marthambles,’ said Chancellor.
‘I have them,’ said Lymond, ‘every time I think of George Killingworth