The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [21]
No one answered him, for the arrows had started again to arch through the windows and a call from Fergie behind told that the archers, protected now by a rampart of benches, had spread out to ring the whole house. Then the hackbut fire started again from the yard, and Plummer cursed and Alan Vassey, leaning out with his bow, fell back suddenly without a sound and was caught by his friend Ludovic d’Harcourt and lowered uselessly to the ground; the first of the eight men to die.
*
‘And so,’ said Alexei Adashev, ‘you have small interest in us as a nation?’
‘I had small interest in France,’ Lymond said. ‘I have none in Russia, save to study the minds of the men I have to serve, and the habits of those I must train to serve me.’
‘The only man you must serve,’ said Adashev, ‘is the Sovereign Grand Prince Ivan Vasilievich.’ With half a dozen of the Chosen Council he was sitting within the painted walls of his large timber house in the Kremlin, his ringed fingers holding the embossed standing-cup of clear liquid with which they had all been served. Richly but soberly dressed in cuffed hat and high-buttoned robe, he lacked the restless vitality of the princes: Kurbsky, Kurlyatev, Paletsky in their cut velvet and fur and glossy, insolent beards.
Instead, he turned his pock-marred face with its soft earth-brown beard towards Lymond and added, ‘You have heard, no doubt, how the Tsar suffered as a motherless boy from the arrogance of the boyars, and how he took his revenge as a lad. All that is behind him. When the fire came seven years ago, the people said it was caused by his mother’s family, the Glinsky, who had sprinkled the streets with human hearts soaked in water. Incited by the boyars hostile to the Glinksy, they demanded the execution of the Tsar’s people: they hunted Yuri Glinsky, his uncle, and killed him in the Uspenski Cathedral, here in the Kremlin, where he had fled to the altar for sanctuary. Our Sovereign Prince put down that rising. Then he confessed the sins of his boyhood, and asked the forgiveness of the clergy; and granted forgiveness in turn to the princes and boyars who had crossed him. He spoke to his people, whom he called from all the towns of Muscovy two years later, and promised them, henceforth he would be their judge and their defender.’
Prince Kurbsky stirred. ‘You should,’ he remarked, ‘quote our friend Peresvetov. In whatever realm there is justice, there God abides and gives it great aid; and God’s wrath is not visited on that realm.’
‘Ivashka Peresvetov,’ said the princely voice of Kurlyatev, with equal suavity, ‘is one of our best-known reformers. He has equally said, There cannot be a ruler without terror. Like a steed under the rider without a bridle, so is a realm without terror. The people agreed with him. The boyars less so. And you, Mr Crawford of Lymond?’
Viscovatu was there, but Lymond had not so far needed his services. Except for the long-installed merchants; the trading colonies of German and Flemish on the western edges of Russia, he was the first alien with whom they had thus been able to converse in their own language at first encounter. It was none of their business to show any awareness of the richness and style of his clothing, or the lack of any shade of the supplicant in his answers, his manner, his voice.
They had given him nothing to eat, but had refilled his cup over and over again with berozevites, the delicate drink drawn from the root of the birch tree. And since custom demanded it, they had drunk cup for cup with him themselves.
Only in Alexei Adashev, perhaps, the lightest sheen on the skin so far betrayed it. The princes, pressing a little now with the chilly, delicate probing, might have been empty of all things but malice. Lymond, with years of experience behind him, showed nothing he did not wish to show. He raised his silvery brows. ‘Some respond to the goad,’ he said, ‘and some to the hayrack. The art of ruling is to know which is which. As the art of teaching is to know