The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [177]
Then at night they made camp and the races began, and the contests on horseback, and the gambling round the fires with the small dice, like the English, flipped over the thumb, as booty changed hands, and bedfellows. For they had free people among them: Russians and Cossacks who had been slaves to the Turks, and captive Tartars: a chief or two, with a fiat face and a beard, and his black hair allowed to grow curling over his ears, unlike the polled heads of inferiors. These had earrings, which they would sell for a supper, and long, pleatless Hungarian coats, not unlike the Russians’ own, but buttoned Tartar-style to the left. There were horses and camels, bales of silk and strange eastern spangles, as well as young Tartar girls by the score. There was plenty to gamble for.
Mesmerized, Robert Best watched it: watched how far licence was permitted, and when Lymond chose to send round Guthrie, or Hoddim, or one of his newly trained captains and touch the wilder forces back into order again. Eating with the rest of St Mary’s in their neat tent on one such night, he found Danny Hislop’s pale eyes on him, gleaming. ‘Not,’ said Danny, ‘the way in which the 13th Lord Grey of Wilton would care to arrange it. But you cannot expect an untaught people to be wrenched from their toys in a twelvemonth. It is not quite the Bacchanal that it looks.’
A shout, splitting the night, arose from that part of the camp where Prince Vishnevetsky’s pavilion stood. His song, in quavering chorus, had accompanied them, fragmented, all the way from Ochakov.
In the market place of the Khanate
Baida drinks his mead …
‘Isn’t it?’ said Robert Best.
‘The Prince,’ said Danny Hislop agreeably, ‘is, you will accept, a law to himself. Like Caesar, a cock for all hens. Have you seen the Cossacks dancing?’
‘Like witches’ get on their hunkers,’ said Fergie Hoddim. ‘With all yon leg-jerking and spinning. It’s not natural. They’ll do themselves a disservice. And the lowping!’
‘You should try it,’ said Guthrie. ‘You’ll be getting as fat as a sty-pig, full of sour milk and malt, and d’Harcourt will have to discover a fast for you. I think we need some night marches.’
‘Do you? So do I,’ Lymond said from the door, and sat down without ceremony as servants closed around him, Best saw, swiftly bringing washing water and towel, beer and mead and vodka in snow-clouded flagons, and the first platters of meat. Lymond said, ‘I think we shall allow them a day more of sport, and then begin some forced marches. Devlet Girey is unlikely to trouble Moscow, but other mischief is not slow to breed.’
Hislop said, ‘You will disappoint your friend Baida.’
‘My friend Baida is leaving us shortly anyway,’ Lymond said. ‘He is planning to build a fort on the island of Khortitsa, below the Dnieper cataracts, to be a base against the Turks and the Tartars this summer.’
‘Oh?’ said Lancelot Plummer.
‘Without our interference, helpful or otherwise,’ Lymond said. ‘He has virtually committed himself to transferring allegiance from Sigismund-August to the Tsar, but his vanity on no account must be offended. Does anyone know how many women he actually has in his tent?’
‘I rather doubt,’ said Lancelot Plummer a shade self-consciously, ‘if he is at present dealing with women.’
‘The last time I passed his tent,’ said Alec Guthrie sourly, ‘there was a camel in it.’
A chorus of groans, accompanied by Danny Hislop’s high cackle derided him. Adam Blacklock’s light, sharpened voice, from the doorway of the tent, cut clean across it. ‘Voevoda!’
Almost before he had spoken the word Lymond was on his feet, staring at the man he had thrashed, with whom he had held none but formal conversation ever since.
Adam said, ‘Vishnevetsky has Slata Baba.’
‘And?’ said Lymond.
‘And he is flying her at the captives,’ Adam said. ‘Perhaps you suggested it.’
Before he had finished, Lymond was out of the tent with his weapons, and the others, rising, hurried to follow. Only Alec Guthrie, as he overtook Blacklock, struck his shoulder briefly and hard, as a bear might