The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [186]
‘Greater than the woman of Doubtance,’ she said. ‘Greater.’
And slid her hands away to stand, stately and cool, while, hands light on her shoulders, he held her quite still for a long time, his gaze locked in hers, without speech. Then he kissed her lips and, without farewells, left.
The Tsar saw him at last, in his darkened room, while all round in the Kremlin the princes slept after dinner. He received his Voevoda Bolshoia alone, as he was once used to do; and from his bed, where he lay in his white jewelled shirt against the high duck-down pillows, a single candle in silver alight by the books at his side. He said, ‘I do this for my people.’
Lymond knelt, formal and sober beside him. ‘Little father.’
Ivan smiled, his beard and lashes damp in the candlelight. ‘Who will play chess? I cannot sleep.’
Lymond said, ‘The winter will pass. And a ruler with good counsellors, Solomon says, is like a city strengthened with towers. What has been built up cannot be destroyed in a season.’
‘You say so?’ said Ivan Vasilievich. ‘But I smell fear. Why are you frightened?’
Lymond stood, his eyes steady, his hands still on the bed. ‘Superstition.’
‘The prophecy you once spoke of? That was a fate, true or false, that lay waiting in Scotland. You will not die in London. Nor will your brother.’
‘I have many fears,’ Lymond said. ‘But death is not one of them.’
‘I fear it,’ the Tsar said. ‘When Mongui Khan died, the Emperor of the Tartars, there were slain three hundred thousand men, whom those who bore him to burial met on the way, to serve him in the other world.…’
On the coverlet, the large, square-nailed hands suddenly moved. Lymond rose, and, filling smorodina into the Tsar’s golden pineapple cup, brought it to him. ‘You need not ask,’ he said. ‘Although in this world I cannot promise to do the work of three hundred thousand. Meanwhile, what is your wish?’
The Tsar stared at him, his lips pursed, the veins standing red at his temples. The cup dropped, and rolled clanging over the wood of the floor. ‘Stay!’ said the Tsar. ‘Stay! They ask too much. I will not have it. Stay!’
‘The Tsar has spoken,’ Lymond said steadily.
The man in the bed sat up, suddenly rigid. ‘You want to go!’
Lymond did not move. ‘I do not wish to stay, to be known as the man who can make the Tsar doubt his own wisdom. Little father, if I stay, you discredit me.’
The bony, silken-haired face looked flatly at his. ‘You wish to go.’
Beside the books on the table, covered now with rich velvet, was the gospel Lymond had brought back from Ochakov. Slowly and carefully, Lymond crossed to the table, and, sliding the thick silver book from its shelter, laid it upon the Tsar’s bed, and his own hands upon it, his eyes open and blank on the cloudy eyes opposite.
‘More than my life, more than my soul, more than my hopes on earth or beyond it, I wish to stay in this place; I wish to be released from this journey.’
A wordless noise answered him. With a jerk, the Tsar laid his hands, without touching Lymond’s, on the book also. ‘Why did you not tell me?’
‘You knew,’ Lymond said. ‘And because you are Tsar, you had to ignore what you knew. As, because you are Tsar, you will now hold by it.
‘I fear. But I must face my fear. And when I return, I shall have conquered it. Nor is it of moment. A fragment of a dead self, better buried. I shall bring your arms, if I can.’
‘I know that,’ said the Tsar. ‘But how shall I sleep?’
‘One will read to you,’ Lymond said. ‘See, what have you here? This perhaps?’
The book he drew from the others was in Latin, but the poems were noble; their rhythms subtle and varied: their cadences, in the light, practised voice, were beguiling and soft. Lymond read from it as if it were music; as the Shaman had done while his own heart had calmed and the blood from Slata Baba’s sprawled and haemorrhaging lacerations had pulsed slower and slower, and stopped.
Now, as he read, the ragged breathing stilled on the pillows,