The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [180]
‘Is it worth my while?’ Baida said. Relaxed, he crossed to the chest where the vodka flasks stood, and, splashing heavily, filled every cup on the board. ‘What arms will England send you, if you make no effort to occupy Turkey’s attention? And without arms, what hope have I of ever making a living from rich Turkish pashas? Tell me that?’
Lymond took the drink offered him, as did the rest, and saluted his host, and drank, sealing unspoken the reconcilement. ‘What arms do Cossacks need?’ he said. ‘Except to make love and gamble. Please the Tsar, and you will be rich enough. Make your fort at Khortitsa, and we shall help you sweep round the Dnieper and send the Song of Baida clean through the steppelands and hills of the Krim.’
They left him, still drinking, presently, and went back to their tent more slowly than they had left it, through the quietening camp. Lymond, beside Adam Blacklock, said, ‘Before you sleep. Take one of your men and see to the burial.’
‘Of the eagle?’ Adam said.
‘Naturally,’ said Lymond. ‘And, if you can bear it, of the child.’
He had known, or guessed, Adam took it, all about those illegal Turkish captives. And despite Baida’s own crapulous efforts, he had saved the prince’s face and the kidnapped pashas as well. Out of an unfortunate slaughter, a prize of exceptional sweetness. Adam said, ‘Konstantin has already seen to it. The mother belongs to him. He is, more than ever, your dazzled and most humble acolyte.’
‘They come in sets,’ Lymond said. ‘With two small pi drums and a set of stone chimes. You are going to tell me that you want to leave St Mary’s.’
They had stopped outside his tent. ‘Yes,’ said Adam. ‘Was it so obvious?’
‘The lack of enthusiasm has been obvious. To leave before the campaign, I suppose, would have looked like pique, or like cowardice. So, you have discovered that your conscience will not let you put soldiering before other things. I wish you had found it out before.’
‘I did not know it before,’ Adam said. ‘I can’t stay. Plummer can use all his arts, and they will let him teach them, and follow him eagerly. I cannot stand silent.’
‘No,’ Lymond said. ‘Then you are better away.’
Adam Blacklock said, ‘There is one thing.’
‘Yes?’ A steaming horse was being led away from the Voevoda Bolshoia’s tent, and there was the dark shadow of a man, standing waiting beside the guards.
‘You refused me opium, I was told.’
‘It is possible,’ Lymond said, ‘to bear pain without it. If I can do so, then I expect it of you. Is that all?’
‘Ludovic d’Harcourt wishes also to leave,’ Blacklock said.
The dark figure had come forward. Stained with travel; his beard uncombed, his face splashed with mud, he did not at first seem what he was: one of the Tsar’s principal couriers. Lymond greeted him, and in a few words provided for his comforts, and, before he let him go, opened and read by the torchlight the rolled dispatch he had brought in his pouch.
The questions he then asked the messenger were swift, brief and pointed, and the answers, as he turned back to Blacklock, had not, Adam saw, pleased him at all.
‘D’Harcourt too?’ Lymond said. ‘Our evangelist. I wonder who else is pining for the role of Feodorit, the Enlightener of the Lapps? Whoever they are, if you will round them up, they had better all travel with me. I have been called back to Moscow. I shall be leaving the bulk of the army with Guthrie, and riding back to the Kremlin tomorrow.’
Without the army. A recall, therefore, direct by the Tsar.… ‘Why?’ said Adam.
‘I have no idea. Perhaps the forces of winged retribution. The prophet Elijah being fed to the ravens. Like Baida, I have killed my three pigeons.’
‘Two,’ Adam said.
‘Two died instead of Vishnevetsky. One died instead of my brother. Long ago. Attar, the Persian poet, saw the destiny of souls as a flight of birds across the seven valleys of Seeking, Love, Knowledge, Independence, Unity, Stupefaction and Annihilation, before at last being lost in the divine Ocean and thenceforth happy. A charming, if sterile, conceit. Next time, the bird may