The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [22]
‘You think us backward,’ said Andrei Kurbsky. ‘Alas, what can we show to the contrary, except perhaps the small success of Astrakhan and Kazan?’
‘I wish to learn from you,’ Lymond said. ‘There is nothing about the military art in the west that my officers are ignorant of. They do not know how to fight in the cold. They do not know how to speak to the mind of a Muscovite. I want the help and advice of every commander who has fought for the Tsar. And I want those who have never yet fought for the Tsar to join me in learning. You spoke of Peresvetov the reformer. He came to you from Lithuania, Wallachia, Bohemia. He had even fought on the side of the Turk. I want Prince Vishnevetsky.’
‘The Cossacks?’ Adashev said.
‘Would you rather they fought with the Tartars?’ Lymond said.
There was a little pause. Adashev, stirring himself, raised a finger and the tall-hatted servant moving forward filled Lymond’s stemmed cup yet again, and that of his master and guests. Lymond raised his, savouring it, and then, tilting it, drank it straight off, the gem on his hard fingers flaring blue with the movement. Kurbsky, smiling, and Adashev more slowly, did the same. ‘And the boyars?’ said Kurbsky.
‘Leave the boyars to me,’ Lymond said. ‘They have had enough of the hayrack. I shall show them the scourge. When I have finished with the Streltsi the boyars will curtsey like girls when they pass in the street.’
*
By afternoon there were six of them left, but only five of them standing. Fergie Hoddim, his leg broken by hot flying metal, was dragging himself from window to window, his hackbut resting propped on the sill. Ludovic d’Harcourt, his shoulder pierced a long time ago by an arrow, had bled, moving about, till he fainted. Plummer and Guthrie were whole, though scarred as they all were with flying fragments and blistered into the bargain. The debris had come from the gaping holes in the side of the building, where they had survived several balls from a field-piece. The blisters had come from the inner doorway, held by Adam and one of his fellows, which had burst suddenly open and exposed them to a long, shuddering canopy of glistening, bubbling oil.
One man, Brown, had died under it. Adam, the skin sloughed off his arm, was fighting with his teeth sunk in the raw flesh which closed them, and the pallid skin dark round his eyes. Ludovic d’Harcourt lay beside him, the extent of his wound still unknown.
‘More,’ said Alec Guthrie.
Adam forced himself to look up. The men in the yard had been reinforced once already. Inside, they might have suffered; but the dying and the dead on the steps and at the foot of the windows told that St Mary’s had inflicted the damage that, against odds, they had been taught how to do. But against fresh fodder, bigger guns, the frenzy of men who, failing their ruler, would strangle themselves over their cannon, there was no prospect now except death. ‘Your godly and marvellous leader,’ said Danny Hislop, rising like a cold smiling ghost at his elbow, ‘has made a masterly ruin of this one. I have six arrows left, and there’s nothing more we can do with the hackbuts. I have a suggestion. We have oil. We have tinder. We have bed sheets. And the houses of this quaintly old-fashioned city are constructed almost entirely of wood.…’
‘But …’ said Adam.
‘There is,’ said Fergie Hoddim plainly from the floor, ‘a choice, ipso facto, of action. If we have merely been put to the test we can parley.’
‘You’re mad,’ Plummer said. ‘You still think this is a trial?’ He stopped, arrow in hand. ‘I wonder if Blacklock and d’Harcourt think it’s a trial. Or Vassey or Brown, come to that. I hope it is. I hope they ring a bell soon. We’re running out of people and stamina.’
Guthrie turned. He said, ‘Do you want to surrender and risk it?’
Plummer hesitated. Danny Hislop answered for him. ‘No,’ he said through his teeth. ‘Bloody hell, no. We don’t surrender. If it’s a test, we don’t surrender. And if it’s a slaughter, we give them as good as we get. I say, fire the arrows.’
‘It’s a city of wood,’ Adam said. ‘There