The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [156]
Chancellor said, ‘Two years ago there was an ambassador in Moscow from the Siberian provinces. He said his father had been to see the Great Cham of Cathay, and that the city of Cambalu was all destroyed, by necromancy and magic. Kurbsky’s father has been to Permia and Pechora. You were right. You were right in what you said there, that night. I want to go there. I want to go to the Ob and beyond it.’
Lymond was watching him still. He said, using words Chancellor knew well, ‘The people are tawny and the men are not bearded, nor differ in complexion from the women. On the way lieth the beautiful people, eating with knives of gold. If it is destroyed, there will be no trade.’
‘I wish to see it,’ said Chancellor.
‘If Henry Sidney is the man you say he is, you will see it,’ Lymond said. ‘If he and his merchants do not stake you to it, I will. But you must take the Bonaventure home first.’
Speech struck from him, Diccon Chancellor stared at the Voevoda Bolshoia of Russia, who had uttered those extraordinary words. Spoken crisply, as ever, with neither warmth nor any effusive emotion they were as incomprehensible as they were unexpected. He said, ‘But there may be no trade.’
Lymond said, ‘Then you will have to recoup by publishing a Commentary on Cathay. Richard Eden, I am sure, would be happy to collaborate.… I rather fancy Grey is expecting us. My offer stands, and you may wish to think about it. I needn’t tell you that with the Company’s backing you will be on slightly safer ground than with anyone serving the court of this Tsar, who may quite well be dead or deposed in a week. On the other hand, I should impose no obligations, except that of travelling as widely and as far as you can, and of returning to report on it. Write to me when you return to England, and tell me what you have decided.… And meanwhile, forget about it. Merchant adventurers should not only barter, but fraternize.’
They fraternized outside, round the roaring fires, sharing hard meat and horn cups of raw spirit in the thick of the smell and the noise and the buffeting, fur-bundled bodies. This time they mixed freely, in crammed huts and tents, where Lapps howled their songs to vie with the wolves and Lymond’s soldiers found their way, free for the night, and no more than partially drunk because the Voevoda was there, and they feared him before God and the Devil.
Grey, when they found him, was not drunk either, but exceedingly cheerful, with his face almost concealed under another man’s fur hat with ear flaps, and a battered stringed instrument in his arms. Lymond took it from him and tuned it, sitting on the table edge in a primitive drink-hut, his hat pushed to the back of his head. His own soldiers, milling about him, made up perhaps half of the uproarious company: the rest were mainly incomers like themselves from Kholmogory. He struck up a Russian song, to which it was evident he knew all the words.
Chancellor caught some of them, but not all, because of the noise: what he did hear shattered his own belief that he was unshockable. The music was unwestern in cadence and not to his taste, but it hit exactly, he saw, the mood of the Russians. They howled at the end, begging for more, and when Lymond, his cup at his side, began playing again they joined in raggedly, and then in full force, stamping and shouting and pushing forward as more pressed in the low door and thrust in to watch. In a corner, Chancellor could see the man Aleksandre, a pot in one hand, trying the strength of his arm with a Russian, and getting the worst of it. A jug of liquor passed from hand to hand over their heads; the stove belched; the tallow smoked and sweating faces blossomed like water plants above the compressed turgid weed of their clothes. Transfixed, overwhelmed, his head throbbing in the intolerable heat, Diccon Chancellor grinned and endured it.
It lasted a long time, and Grey finally got impatient. ‘There are Englishmen here who want a Christian song with a tune to it!’
Luckily, loud as he yelled, the shouting