The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [171]
And that was, Robert Best was prepared to believe, no more than the truth. He had watched the man Lymond leave for the north after the thrashing of Blacklock, and had waited, as predicted by Danny, for the slackening of the reins, a simple human reaction to the despotic personal rule of the winter; to the outrage of that scene at the Kremlin.
Instead he saw nothing except, possibly, a brighter glitter on the troops at Vorobievo; a still greater order and smoothness in the exercise of their professional duties. And at Kitaigorod, the officers too were active and silent.
Turned in upon itself in some curious way, the Company found no release in discussing Lymond either with Best or, so far as he could gather, among themselves. The act for which Adam Blacklock had been flogged was disobedience: disobedience to an order already given and already secretly flouted, which offended the nation upon whose bounty they were living, and placed at risk the employment and freedom of every one of his fellows. This much, briefly, Alec Guthrie was prevailed upon to convey.
Adam Blacklock himself had apparently neither sought nor avoided Lymond’s company since his return: their relationship on the present campaign was uneventfully formal, as was indeed Lymond’s relationship with all his staff: in St Mary’s we prefer to use surnames. Thinner perhaps, Blacklock went about his duties, carrying the red scar of the whip on his face, but with no other visible trace of his punishment, and Hislop and Hoddim, d’Harcourt and Plummer and Guthrie performed their offices also with cold and steady distinction.
It was their training, Robert Best realized. In place of emotion, their leader had given them intellectual pride: a pride in themselves and their work not far short of arrogance. And pride, too, was what upheld this whole assorted army of untutored stock, and left them untouched by the flamboyant excesses of their Cossack allies, and made the Cossacks eye them sideways in the midst of their bluster: the hideous Cossacks, with the shaved heads and topknots under the tall sheepskin hats, the greasy moustaches, the shapeless skins tied round the waist, the breeches stuffed into the heavy sewn boots.
They were given food with moderation, and drink, with economy; and Lymond’s casual, carrying voice cut into the obscenity round one camp fire and then another with a phrase, a story, a riddle that made them slap their knees and shout belching with laughter. The aide at his side carried both a mace and a knout, and on the same round a man caught stealing another man’s saddle was flogged on the spot, and a man who spoke lightly of the Tsar had his arm broken. At which, Robert Best noted, Russians and Cossacks alike rolled and laughed even more, their faces grinning at Lymond. A man born to lead men. A man of no gentleness, whose mistress had slept in the bed of the Turk.
East of Kanev they had their first clash with Tartars: a reconnaissance party routed and killed to a man, while the scouts moved to and fro, skilfully tracing the main body of Tartars. For two nights, no camp fires were allowed, and they ate food kept warm in straw while the enemy was located and their number assessed. Robert Best, forbidden under pain of expulsion to take part in the fighting, questioned Ludovic d’Harcourt, who was brief and not particularly explicit. ‘It’s a fairly large raiding party, based on a yurt, we think, within twenty miles’ radius. Not Devlet Girey’s advance troops from Ochakov. We don’t want to lose men, and we want to make as deep an impression as possible, Voevoda’s orders. So we are resorting to trickery.’
Deceit, the Tartars’ traditional weapon. Once, by pretending to attack Russia in Lithuanian dress, a company of Tartars under the Circassian leader Tascovitz had induced the Russians to lay waste in revenge a great tract of Lithuanian land, and on their return triumphant, the Russians had been ambushed and killed to a man by the Tartars.