The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [170]
The Tsar, who had accorded the English Company the privilege of sending one observer, had made it clear that the hour had not come to send the full might of his army across the steppes south. This was a foray, a reconnaissance, a warning. But when the time came, a hundred thousand Russians would march rejoicing over the plains, and sweep the impious heathen into the sea.
George Killingworth, having no wish to find himself or his worsted on a stone stall in Caffa, thought it an excellent plan and without hesitation nominated Rob Best to be the Company’s representative with the Voevoda. Rob Best himself was not at all sorry. Of them all, he had the least share in setting up this outpost. His role as the most fluent Russian speaker was to collect information and take it back in the summer to London. He would not be needed at St Nicholas until May or June at the earliest. The fact that the Robert Best who returned was not at all the same as the vigorous and uncomplicated man who set out was hardly the fault of either himself or the Company.
Considering the time of year, it was a campaign of astonishing celerity. They left Moscow at last on the far edge of the winter. Already the market was vacating the Moskva and soon the breaking-up of the ice would be signalled, here and from river-forts everywhere, by the warning explosion of cannon. The rivers, rising swiftly, would bring down not only floes but logs and houses and cattle, and the streets of Moscow would be filled with labourers, axing ice and throwing it into the water.
A month later, and they could have travelled by water. Now, it was just possible to put their transport on runners, and, as the army advanced, Best was to see the runners give way to wheels over brushwood, and later to a flotilla of flat-bottomed river boats, with skin sails and leather thong ropes and a stone for an anchor, which awaited with Cossacks to guide them.
By then, it was becoming clear how much of this army was composed of Cossacks. All round the south borders of Moscow ran the chain of Ukrainy—the Riazan, the Tula, the Putivl and Severian frontiers whose Cossack settlements, part Russian, part Tartar, defended the Tsar. Companies of these were with the army when it set out; later another, of Putivl Cossacks, joined them under the Diak Rzhevsky; and later still a band of Cossacks under their own captain who were not from the Ukrainy settlements, but from the free Cossacks, the bands who owned no masters but pioneered into the steppes, hunting and fishing in company with seine and net, and selling their catch in Kiev.
Violent and playful, they crowded the campfires at night in the stopping-places selected with such care, so that the grazing horses were protected by bluff or wood or marsh or barricade of telegas, and the pavilions of the commander and his officers were as strategically placed to control the hard-trained Russian companies lying between them. The men, as was their tradition, slept in the open, in shelters made of bent boughs covered with their own cloaks to protect themselves, their saddles and weapons. Their food, Best saw, was a departure from tradition: from the lump of dough mixed with water and pork meal, the Dutch-like dried fish and bacon, the onions and garlic carried or filched by each man for his food. The carts making up this pilgrimage contained not only hackbuts and cannon and slow-matches and powder, ladders and wheels and logs and the wherewithal to build shelters or stockades as needed. The Voevoda Bolshoia for the first time had brought food for his army, as well as for his officers.
Rob Best wondered, but could not find out, if the Tsar and his Chosen were aware of it. Fill a lazy man’s belly; give a life of plenty to a man who has known nothing but the most extreme hardship, and will such a man fight? If he is sated, why should he throw himself upon the brown, harsh-fleeced sheep of the Tartars? Why should he risk his life to shorten a war and dispatch himself all the sooner back to home and bare platters?
Applied to, Danny Hislop merely said, ‘My dear