The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [153]
He spoke to Chancellor, and Chancellor, after a long moment, answered him truthfully. ‘No,’ he said.
‘No,’ Lymond said also. ‘Verily, God hath eighteen thousand worlds; and verily, your world is one of them, and this its bright axle-tree.’
The odd phrase stayed with Chancellor, through Pinega and beyond, where, ahead of soldiers and freight train, Lymond set him alone on a post sledge, and Aleksandre and Grey on two others, to swoop and race with him behind the galloping reins. Then, they hung, weightless as gulls, and dipped surfing through white spray like fulmars. They swept through the dark day and were running still when moonlight unveiled the snow and the Dancers shimmered, green and white, in the limitless spaces above and streamed over the snowfields towards them, cold as alchemists’ fire.
On such a night, no one spoke. The four sledges soared through horizonless space, wreathed above and below with vapours of light, shot with trembling colour. Above the fear and his aching body and the pain of the pure and terrible air in his lungs Diccon Chancellor dwelled, with his heart on his wife and his sons, and his soul in a limbo far farther than that, and experienced happiness.
Chapter 10
Lampozhensky Ostrov was an island, the southernmost and largest of a dozen in the wide frozen channel of the River Mezen, lying at the junction of a still smaller river, the Schuksa. And at the southern tip of the island lay the wooden town of Lampozhnya with its two churches, where twice yearly the Russian merchants brought their cloth and tin and copper for barter, and meal and bacon and butter, and salt and yeast and leather and oatmeal tolokno, and needles, and knives, and spoons, and hatchets.
In return, they bought furs. The sledges ran in from the east: from Pustozersk, with salmon and walrus and seal oil, with white foxes and feathers, with rattling bundles of yellowing tusks, two feet long and weighing up to twelve pounds apiece. Oil and hides and tusks and frozen fish came from Vaygach and Novaya Zemlya and the Kara Sea and Bolvanskiy Nos: trout and salmon, weighing three to a pood. Sables from Pechora, and white and dun fox, and the pelts of white wolves, and bearskins. From Siberia, red and black fox and the white fur of squirrels. Lynx and ermine. Wolverine, marten and beaver. What once lived and breathed and hunted through forest and snowfield piled now in stalls, fifty small skins between boards, sold as a timber. Sold in deep carpeted piles, what once played with its young round the ice floes. Sold, the flayed skins whose flesh edged the piled shores every summer, while the hide covered fresh boats for its hunters.
At the fair, one said nothing as the snow fell, driving in on the pelts in their rough sheds, and the smell of the fresh kill rose sweet and metallic into the air. One watched Richard Grey barter, with his interpreters, keenly and well, and lent one’s support as it was needed; and found the Voevoda at one’s side or did not find him, as his several absences dictated. Man must eat, or he would starve. Man must be clothed, or he would die. And good hunters killed with economy: the promuschlenniks blinded the walrus with blowpipes or buckets of sand, and then moved in to slaughter with lances. The Dwina men clubbed them on summer icefields, pressing together in fright; weighting the rafts under the water. The Lapp, artist that he was, shot his seal through the nostrils to leave unblemished the pelt. In six hours, they could account for eight hundred.
Grey was pleased. Elkhides would fetch sixteen shillings the skin back in England, with the hair clipped beforehand to save shipping space. He could depend on nine pounds a ton for train oil, in well hooped casks better than their own, from clean knotless timber, seasoned with water and trimmed with pitch at head and seams. And oil from the top of the seal fat at that, pure enough to oil fine wool for weaving. Everything was a bargain: white grouse feathers at five