The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [175]
Pleasantly, Lymond’s voice took him up. ‘… who lie on their beds between thick down quilts, and get up barely alive and racked with’ drunken headaches, so timorous and exhausted by their wives that on news of invasion they shut themselves up in their fortresses, and put on armour and sit at table before their cups and tell tales to their drunken women: drinking from great full alabaster jugs …’
‘… filled not with wine but with the very blood of Christians. I came without the King’s sanction,’ said Vishnevetsky. ‘You guessed as much.’
‘And need the goodwill of Moscow,’ said Lymond.
‘When we have scoured Ochakov of its filth, I shall have it,’ the Lithuanian said.
‘And if you bring back Turkish prisoners,’ Lymond said calmly, ‘you will forfeit it. Your mother is of the blood of the Tsaritsa Anastasia and you are of the appanaged princes of Yaroslavl, but you will forfeit it. Be quite sure of that.’
The Prince Vishnevetsky regarded him with an attempt at a frown. ‘As the Tsar himself was told on a famous occasion, the fulfilment of unwise promises, Voevoda, is not acceptable to God.’
‘But,’ said Lymond, ‘we are not speaking of God. We are speaking of the Tsar of all Russia. And there was talk, what is more, about comfort …?’
Best had forgotten the exchange about women. He saw the prince’s handsome face break into laughter, and he stepped to the door of the tent and gave someone a command. Best did not see the girl when they brought her, for he was invited to leave while Guthrie and the rest made their dispositions for immediate marching, and shortly afterwards Baida also appeared from Lymond’s tent and prepared his Cossacks, as the rest left, to make camp for the day with their booty.
The last thing Best heard, as he found his horse and prepared with the others to move, was the final stanza of that mocking, rollicking song:
‘Take that, O Sultan!
For chastising Baida.
You should have known
How to punish him.
You should have cut off his head,
And buried his body,
Taken and ridden his jet-black horse
And given your affection to the boy.’
That night they made their last camp on land before taking again to the Dnieper. Robert Best, healthily tired, snored his way through the night and did not hear the scuffle and cry from the principal tent, which brought the guard running, to halt as the Voevoda appeared in the candlelit doorway, unhurt, unamused and fully dressed as they had seen him last. He surveyed them, commended their speed, and sent them for Ludovic d’Harcourt.
Off duty, the former Knight of St John was asleep reprehensibly in his small-clothes: by the time he had flung on tunic and breech hose and boots, Lymond was in no mood to be gracious. D’Harcourt received the unpleasant dressing-down he knew he deserved for lying unprepared in the land of the enemy, no matter how recently vanquished, and then was bidden to go into the tent and dispose of what he would find there.
What he found there was a dead Tartar girl, still clothed, but with her veil ripped back from her face. She lay among the cushions where Rob Best’s powerful haunches had so lately rested, and she had been stabbed to the heart.
Rising from his knees, he looked round at Lymond, who had picked a finely chased knife from the floor and was carefully wiping it. From the turquoises on the hilt, d’Harcourt recognized it as the Voevoda’s own.
‘She tried to kill me,’ Lymond said. ‘Outraged maidenhood perhaps, but I doubt it. I rather think I have had a little gift from Prince Vishnevetsky. But I should not like anyone to lose confidence in me or in him. The less known about this episode the better, which is why I have sent for you. Mr Guthrie isn’t interested in women, and neither is Plummer, for different reasons. Mr Hoddim’s legal conscience would trouble him and poor Mr Blacklock is not yet strong enough, I feel, to make the thing plausible.