The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [158]
All was in order. He had turned back, the candle still in his hand, when he realized that something was different. The heavy stock in the corner was empty. Slata Baba, the eagle was missing, and her chain, jesses, and swivel as well.
In the ensuing slow avalanche of enlightenment, Chancellor realized that he knew where the lure was, and her spare chain and hood. He got them, running, and thrust out into the crowds, locking the door with a wrench of his hand; pushing and belabouring without mercy to reach the hard-frozen snow of the river. The sledges were there: the canoe-shaped Lapp pulkhas, light as the skins which fashioned them, sharp of prow and square of stern, with no runners beneath them. Through the crowds he could see they were lined up already: the antlers moved as the reindeer heads tossed; the pitch torches flared from their sterns. He could not distinguish Lymond. But one of the drivers, lying back, appeared to have gone temporarily to sleep. And another, cursing cheerfully in Russian, had not yet succeeded in tying the cord round his feet.
He was still fumbling with the safety lashing when the captain of Lampozhnya, losing patience, gave the signal to start off the race. Nine whips cracked. Chancellor, flinging people aside, arrived shouting just as the last of the sledges slid past the start: Lymond, when he saw him at last, was out of earshot, far over the snow, his white coat and deep fur hat blending with it.
The fool with the ropes still had not succeeded in tying them. Chancellor pulled him out of the sledge and jumped in, glimpsing Konstantin’s amazed face as he did so. He flung the lure on the floor and seizing reins, whip and stick, set off after the others.
He wasn’t good enough. My God, until a week ago, he’d never raced a sledge. And although some of these were drunk—all the soldiers and at least one of the Lapps and Samoyèdes—the others were not; or were drivers of such infinite calibre that, drunk or asleep, they could fly like the spume in a gale. Then he thought, I don’t have to beat them, or catch them. I only have to seize Crawford’s attention.
The moon filled the sky like a casement: a celestial snowfield on which shadowy armies stood blurred in strange order, and viewed the black night below, brightly knotted with torches; and the long, chequered shape of the island, barred with snowlight and shadow and smudged with the smoke of its buildings.
All along the edge of the island, the sheds and houses and stables and huts of Lampozhnya cast their black shadows on the silver-grey stretch of the river. The packed snow was more slippery there. If you drove close to the houses, and the banks where groups of people were watching, black shapeless spools stuck in the snow, the moon-shadow flickered, barring your eyes, and although the sledge might run faster, you found it harder to see ahead, where your rivals fled, a scouring of snow and of sound in the silence.
For the noise had all dropped behind. Chancellor realized it suddenly, so preoccupied had he been with his deer and his balance; with acquiring the feel of the light swaying framework beneath him, and the touch of the stick which, too much or too little, could overturn him in a second. And moreover, he had been enclosed in a world of private noise of his own: the harsh, tearing sound of the runnerless skins underneath him; the rumble and click of the cloven hooves; the snorting breath from the massive, misshapen nostrils. He lifted his head, drawing shuddering through his scarf the pinching of air that must furnish him and shouted, long and carefully. He then realized that the thin sound which echoed scratching through the wastes of the night was all that the air would permit of a bellow; and that the aviary sounds he heard, twittering at the edge of his hearing were also bellows, from better lungs than his, and to as little effect.
He could go on shouting, and would, but it was unlikely to do much