The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [184]
‘Yes. Oh, short of death, there is no quietus from this masterly errand,’ Lymond said. ‘I have made the Three Kneelings and I have made the Three Knockings, and, with this lord, there is nothing more to be done. It has taught me one thing. For exposing you to the conversation of Prince Dmitri Vishnevetsky, I had intended to bring you my apologies. Now——’
‘Now?’ Güzel said serenely.
‘Now he may even be worth your passing attention. Even if I leave now on the Edward, I cannot expect to set out from England sooner than next year’s spring sailing in May. The Tsar is obsessed. The army will be ten months—a year, maybe—without me.’
‘What will they do?’ Güzel said. ‘Veil their beards, and sell their arrows for spindles?’
He laughed, briefly, holding open the door of her room for her to pass rustling through. ‘It saddens me sometimes that you know so many Turkish expletives,’ he said. ‘I am not always in a mood for restraint.’
‘Are you not?’ Güzel said. He closed the door, and they stood, looking at one another. Güzel said, ‘Despite what you have said, you tried to see Ivan Vasilievich?’
‘I am an open book,’ said Lymond with weary irony. She sat; and crossing the room he seated himself, his face abstracted, opposite her, and leaned his head back among her silk cushions. ‘I tried to see him, and was refused.’
Güzel said, ‘It is for Russia. He yearns for you. He cannot sleep.’
‘I know,’ Lymond said; and she did not call him out of his silence.
Later, he looked up as if there had been no hiatus in their talk, and said, ‘I shall go as soon as I have made all my arrangements with Guthrie. They tell me that Chancellor has gone north, but that the ships have not yet arrived at St Nicholas. I have four to six weeks, I imagine, to get there.’
‘Osep Nepeja took his leave of the Tsar and went north in the last week of March,’ Güzel said. ‘You will find Makarov and Grigorjeff with him. I shall have what you need sent aboard.’ She hesitated. ‘They say you did not bring Slata Baba with you?’
‘She is dead,’ Lymond said. ‘Having turned cannibal, alas, like her masters. One cannot, to be sure, love an eagle.’
‘No,’ Güzel said.
*
Guthrie and the rest heard the news, when they came, with dumb disbelief verging on outrage. The Voevoda Bolshoia, his own temper under expert control, informed them concisely of the Tsar’s motives for depriving them, so irresponsibly, of his own sterling company. He explained the situation, in fact, in terms so well argued and simple that his journey began to seem after all quite inevitable. So they dismissed their surprise and settled down to listen, writing furiously, to the orders and dispositions which followed in a day and a half of strenuous meetings, during which the lines were laid down for the army’s development in his absence, and his authority until his return was invested in Alec Guthrie once more.
It was towards the end of the second day that Alec Guthrie, taking the Voevoda aside, told him that Hislop wished to sail for home also.
‘God. It’s a plague,’ Lymond said. ‘And the shapes of the Locusts were like unto Horses prepared unto Battle, and on their heads were as it were Crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men. The girl, I suppose?’
Many of them had returned from Ochakov to find a change in their somewhat elastic domestic arrangements, to which the Voevoda so far had turned a blind eye. But Danny Hislop had returned to find his Tartar girl neither dead nor stolen, but without warning made off to her yurt. He had, at the time, made light of it: Guthrie had not even guessed Lymond was aware of the matter. ‘Yes, the girl,’ he said. ‘He wanted to marry her.’
‘And she thought, I suppose, that he would make her change her religion. As he probably would. An experience he should have had, for the good of his character, about ten years ago. Is he aiming, do you know, at the Order of St John of Jerusalem with d’Harcourt, or at Hans Eworth’s studio with Blacklock?’ And, as Guthrie hesitated: ‘Ah, no.