The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [167]
Chancellor said, ‘Why tell me this? Even with the Company’s help, it will be a long time before your own cannon-founders and forgers can supply all the arms that you need.’
Lymond opened his eyes. ‘I wasn’t sure if you knew which way the wind was blowing. By the time you have your last interview with the Tsar, I shall be in the south with the army. When he puts the matter before you, as he is likely to do then, you will be ready to answer him softly. I shall not be there to help matters if you don’t.’
Chancellor said, ‘Is he mad?’ and received a long, half-veiled look he did not understand.
Then Lymond said, ‘No.’
There was a long and curious silence. Then Chancellor said, as if following a long explanation which had never been given, ‘But that is why you are staying.’
‘If the reasons for my staying,’ said Lymond, ‘could be said to have any but negative qualities, that is one of them.’
They left two days later, their business finished, their compensation paid and their debts discharged by the Voevoda himself; the God of Salaries, as he pointed out, his symbol a deer.
Their last act before leaving Lampozhnya was to attend the burial of one of the Christian Lapps of the sleigh race. It took place not as Chancellor had expected in some crypt or through some elaborate melting of ice, but consisted merely of a church service, followed by a procession in thick falling snow to the belfry with its flaring log roof and wide eaves.
Richard Chancellor walked there with Lymond beside him, while the crowd wept and howled, and the candles guttered and blew in the snow. In front, uncoffined, they carried their dead, grey and hard on a board, in the sheepskin tunic and cap, the crucifix and skin boots he was accustomed to wearing. And when they took him inside the belfry and lowered him stiff on his feet, Chancellor saw round him a leaning stack of dead and stony companions, staring out, head upon head at the living. And in the hand of each rigid monolith of humanity was clenched a scrap of birch bark for St Nicholas, affirming that this old wrinkled Lapp in his furs, that young Russian woman, this hairless baby, its half-made eyes open on nothing, had died devout and shriven in Christ.
‘Even in Moscow,’ Lymond said, ‘they store them like billets all winter, until in the spring each man takes his friend, and buries him. Before, the ground is too hard. It is the crown of dead men to see the sun before they are buried. Or so they say. And each has new shoes on his feet because, they say, he hath a great journey to go.’
‘I find no indignity there,’ Chancellor said. The belfry blessed, the wood doors were closing. ‘The soul has gone, and what is left is nothing but humbling. Although I should, like the Muscovites, prefer to see the sun before I am buried.’
‘And I,’ said Richard Grey in a voice of bottomless gloom, ‘should merely like to see the sun.’
His conversation, all the way back to Kholmogory, was about the ninety-foot tar house he hoped to build in Kholmogory, in which eight workmen would spin hemp into cables and hawsers: two to turn wheels and two to wind up, at seven pounds per annum per spinner. By the time they reached Pinega, he had decided that three boys would be sufficient for spinning. By the time they reached Kholmogory, he had convinced himself that five Russians would do just as well, and would cost less than seven pounds together.
Chancellor was not listening and neither, he suspected, was Lymond, who spent the journey writing and reading in the big sleighs, and did not travel on artach at all. For Chancellor was now aware that,