The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [164]
Chancellor stood up rather carefully, his black-bearded face stolid. ‘Having seen how the first fared, I had rather forget it.’
Lymond lifted his eyebrows. ‘God hateth murder.’
Chancellor said, ‘Punishment is one thing. Foul retribution is another. I can guess how Konstantin will try to drag the truth from that man.’
‘I doubt if you can,’ Lymond said. ‘In some directions the Russian is peculiarly inventive. The Tsar, however, would have been more whimsical still. I take it you mean to sleep, or do you intend to hold wassail till morning?’
If Lymond was minded to be corrosive, Chancellor, blind with weariness, was not minded to match him. He caught Grey’s eye, and stooping to gather up the stained remnants of his outdoor clothing, he dragged his feet to the door and, with the other man, entered with relief the warm, candlelit quiet of their own inner room. He glanced back once as he went, and saw that Lymond, alone, had already forgotten him, and was welcoming with what looked like elaborate courtesy the shapeless, skin-padded figure which must be the Samoyèd Shaman and his interpreter. From which he deduced, without pleasure, that the lit de parade had no particular importance for Lymond, who had merely wished to discuss the knottier points of the Tsar’s compensation with the principal claimant in peace.
In that he was wrong. The two men entering the room might, to an onlooker, have seemed nervous. They were dressed in sewn tunics and breeches of deerskins, and both had the large head and broad olive face of the true Samoyèd, the eyes small and obliquely set; the chin smooth and beardless.
The younger and squatter of the two had pulled off his rough sleeveless fur and his hat, showing a crow’s wing of coarse, straight black hair down his cheek. The older, wearing a long coat of rubbed and stained sables, and a deep, shapeless hat of the same, made no move to disrobe but walked forward, quietly, until he was standing before the Voevoda Bolshoia. And although his manner, like the other’s, was alert and wary and to a degree diffident, there lay behind it something which was the reverse of diffidence, and which made it easy to look at him, and guess that here was the leader of his tribe. The door closed behind them and he stood and looked, without speaking, at Lymond.
For the first time since he had entered the hut, Lymond rose. He stood, his back to the wall, and said, ‘On the river …’ in English, and then, with an obvious effort, changed it to Russian. ‘On the river this evening, you saw the power of Slata Baba and spoke to me. You offered me help.’
The older man spoke. His voice, deep and grating, curried the silence: Chancellor, hearing the sound but not the words, shivered as he drew the bearskin over his shoulder. The interpreter, in stilted Russian, said, ‘We offer it still.’
There was an odd pause, during which the Voevoda was certainly searching for words. Then he said, also in Russian, ‘Then in the name of the respect I bear for your creed, and for the bird who carries in her the nobility of both your god and your race, I accept it.’
Then, since he could not stand any longer, nor find, groping, polysyllables of suitable majesty for any conceivable coda, the Voevoda Bolshoia of Russia subsided, not without grace, on his bed and from there, quite unwittingly, to the floor.
*
The foreign party slept late the next morning. The last thing Chancellor had heard, before sleep entirely claimed him, was a subdued bustle of some sort in the next room, and the resumption of the deep voice he had heard earlier: the Samoyèdes were taking time, it appeared, over their argument. The voice rose and fell, changed and modulated almost like music: it was extraordinarily soothing. Chancellor thought, vaguely, that he must learn the language and then, even more vaguely, that it must be simple, to need no interpreter.
He wished the Voevoda well from the monologue and there entered his mind, like a foul taste, the thought of Aleksandre,