The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [183]
The Tsar sprang to his feet, arm outflung, and the heavy cross by his chair, rocking, crashed to the ground. He said softly, against the hissing groan of his courtiers, ‘You give your sovereign monarch the lie?’
Lymond’s voice was as soft. ‘I have said that, with or without arms, I shall clear your land of the Tartar. I know Suleiman’s strength. There is not a nation on earth, Christian or infidel, which could overthrow Turkey at this moment. Your Highness knows that. Your Highness had ordered, for this reason, that no Turkish prisoners should be taken.’
‘I also know,’ said the Tsar forcefully, ‘that the campaign to Ochakov was a test. Was it not? It did damage—of course, for you are the finest soldier in Russia. I tell you this. My Council cannot deny it. It showed the way for a greater attack later on. It did something else. It plumbed the depth of the Turk’s displeasure, that his vassals should so be distressed. We shall know, by the end of the summer, what force of janissaries Suleiman will give Devlet Girey when next he makes his attack. What we do not know is how Turkey will answer Devlet Girey’s overthrow.
‘I say to Mary Tudor of England that I shall make war against Turkey. I say to you that whether or not we declare war, we may finish with war on our hands. You say that, even with arms, we cannot prevail. I say that, with arms, we have English interest, we have the support of the Emperor Charles: we may have even the armies of the King of the Romans to help us, if by so doing he believes the Turk may be overthrown.… I say you underrate your powers as a commander. And I would ask you what will happen if, without guns and without armour or powder, we have to face the might of Suleiman’s army. Then no friends would come to our aid. Then our enemies would stand by and laugh, while Russia died, and the heretic rabble exhausted itself.’
‘You wish to provoke Turkey then?’ Lymond said.
The Tsar was still standing, but in his shining eyes there glowed visions. ‘When I have arms,’ he said. ‘When England sends me what I ask for. Then you shall strike a blow against the Tartar which will make Turkey rock. And even Sigismund-August himself will send his armies to march by our side. Baida has told me.’
‘I see,’ said Lymond. After a moment, he said, ‘He did not say he had received the honour of an audience.’
‘At Tula,’ the Tsar said. ‘The day after the army had left. He came to give me his loyal assurances.’
‘And to suggest that I should go to England,’ Lymond said.
‘He said, and wisely, that only by threatening Turkey could we hope to attract English support. All the world knows the danger in that. You have just spoken of it. He said only you could persuade the English that such is our plan.’
Lymond said, ‘Great as you are; great as your army is, you cannot declare war on Turkey. The English know this. You cannot use this argument with them.’
‘So Baida said,’ the Tsar answered. ‘If you say so also, then it rests in your hands to find other means of persuasion. Only you have the knowledge, as Viscovatu says. Only you have the tongue. Only you have the trust of us all, absolutely and implicitly. I have ordered you to go to England. Now I, your Tsar, beg it of you. Sail to London, the home of this strange, married Queen, and speak to her in her own tongue, but with the heart of a Russian. Bring me what I want.’
There was no escape. No loophole; no answer, no argument; no excuse.
‘Then of course, Lord, I shall go,’ Lymond said.
*
It seemed as if Güzel already knew of the mandate. At least when Lymond greeted her in his house in the Kremlin after his audience, and conveyed to her its substance in five minutes’ quiet conversation, she betrayed no alarm or surprise.
‘If he gave you this audience in Council, it is because he does not mean his