The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [23]
‘Fair enough,’ said Danny Hislop. ‘And a good proportion are trying to kill me. Excuse me while I protest.’ And lighting the first fire arrow he waited, and on Guthrie’s grim signal nocked, pulled, and loosed it to fly over the street with the others.
*
‘You wish a house for your officers at Kitaigorod, and a military establishment also at Vorobiovo, where the Streltsi are already quartered. Should men and officers live then in two different suburbs?’
‘Three,’ said Lymond with flat-toned and lizard-eyed patience. ‘I require a house for myself in the Kremlin.’
One of the princes said, hard-voiced and smiling, ‘The Kremlin is for the Tsar and his court and his treasure.’
‘Then it should have a lock,’ Lymond said. ‘And a key to turn in the lock.’
The prince called Paletsky rose slowly to his feet. ‘An iron door needs an iron lock,’ he observed. ‘Not a lock of quick gold cast over with diamonds. You make the demands of a conquering nation.’
‘I thought I spoke to a conquering nation,’ Lymond said. He rose, and Adashev and the rest of the Chosen rose with him. Outside, a noise had begun to intrude on the notice: a distant noise, as if many feet were hurrying, half in regular march, over the flat paths of logs which linked corner to more distant corner of the triangular sloping hill of the Kremlin. A voice called an order.
Lymond said, ‘Don’t you know yet what has happened while you lay under two hundred years of Tartar rule? Men have made such strides that you can hardly imagine them. Painting, science, writing, music and medicine, the rule of the sea and the stars, the working of metal, the making of ships and of engines … all the guidelines you once knew have vanished and new ones are being made. And it is with gold and with diamonds that the kings of the earth are acquiring them.’
Lymond looked at Alexei Adashev, and pitched his voice above the nearing hubbub of men. ‘I come to sell the Tsar power. Without it, all the things I have mentioned are quite out of his reach and yours.’
The double doors, crashing open, screamed on their hinges. Men with axes, pinning them back, allowed other armed men to thrust into the room, islanding in silence the single robed figure with chains and rings and tall sable-trimmed hat, who stood alone on the threshold against the jostling backdrop of his soldiers.
‘You have come to sell me despoilment and discord,’ said the Tsar Ivan Vasilievich, and, raising a powerful hand heavy with rings, pointed at Lymond. ‘Hang him.’
There was a long knife in Lymond’s hand. It flashed there before the eyes of the Tsar, in whose city of Moscow no foreigner might walk abroad armed, and Andrei Kurbsky said sharply, ‘Treason!’ and flung himself from his knees. By the Tsar the halberdiers started to run, axe-blades glittering. But Ivan, grasping them, called harshly, ‘Stop!’
For Lymond had not paused to bend his knee. Instead he had plunged his hand deep in the long earth-brown hair of the man kneeling beside him, and dragging back his head, presented the thin knife, sliding red across the soft bearded throat of the Tsar’s favourite. ‘Let us discover,’ said Lymond, ‘who wishes to see Alexei Adashev dead.’
The princes froze. As if confronted with spells, the uplifted swords halted. Axes lowered; heads turned to the Tsar. The pale, china-blue eyes, rimmed with white, stared, speechlessly disbelieving, while the hinged knuckles closed white on each imperial hand. ‘May dogs defile your mother,’ Ivan Vasilievich said, deep in his chest. ‘Free my officer.’
With a grip whose cracking power they could hear, Lymond drew the Tsar’s chief adviser to his feet, the knife steady throughout at his throat. Adashev, his hat fallen, his eyes slitted under creased brows, did not try to speak. Lymond said evenly, ‘I have no quarrel with Adashev. He is my security for justice. Or is it Russian justice to hang out of hand those who come to do her a service?’
Under the dark sabled hat, a pulse beat in the Tsar’s blood-darkened skin and his bearded