The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [24]
Untouched, his hands pressing the blade to the body of Adashev, the foreigner answered unmoving. ‘Twenty of your men would barely match three of my company. You should have sent more,’ he said.
‘Free my officer.’ The Tsar disembowelled the air with a splayed and whistling hand. ‘Free him! If you touch this man I, Ivan, will knout you. I will roast your flayed back like dogs’ meat on charcoal. You will be seethed in the cauldrons of pig-keepers and your half-strung bones made to dance for the bears. I will harness you to my horses and harrow you over the teeth of a flintbed until your body is milled flesh and bone meal and your face as a boll of raw silk … Free him!’
‘When you have heard me,’ Lymond said. Behind him, slowly, Paletsky was moving, his hands open and ready. There was a sharp movement. Prince Kurbsky had stopped him, his hand falling hard on Paletsky, his eyes on the Tsar. No one else in the room stirred. Let us discover, Lymond had said, who wishes to see Alexei Adashev dead.
Francis Crawford did not turn round. But on the long, inflexible mouth there rested the faintest trace of a smile. Ivan said, ‘Do strangers enter my city and hack down my Streltsi unpunished?’
‘Twenty killed,’ said a deep voice behind him. ‘And as many more injured.’ Sylvester, the Tsar’s other adviser, had also entered.
‘It is the privilege of your men to die for the Emperor,’ Lymond said. ‘It is the licence of mine to defend themselves.’
The black-robed figure of the monk stepped forward to the Tsar’s side. ‘My sovereign lord speaks of a killing. He does not speak of twenty men slaughtered by eight as an act of defence.’
‘My sovereign lord,’ said Lymond, ‘does not know my officers in the execution of their orders. I will make three assertions. My men were attacked unprovoked by the Streltsi. They were outnumbered ten times by the Streltsi. And even now they have neither been taken alive nor surrendered.’
Behind him the princes said nothing. The halberdiers, standing uneasily, stared across from wall to wall of the room. The chief counsellor Adashev, his throat straining, swallowed and choked in the silence, and blood ran down, a bright thready stream, where his skin moved on the knife. The Tsar said, his neck and wide shoulders rigid, ‘And did they act by your orders when they set fire to my city of Moscow?’
The moan ran round the room, invisible, from every throat, and movement followed: a recoil; a slow undulation of horror from men whose dreams still burned red in the night with the nightmare of seven years before, when Moscow flamed like a basket of coals. Lymond said, clearly, in Russian, ‘They acted under my orders.’
The ring of men moved in on him sharply. The Tsar himself took a stride forward, and for a moment the hard fingers threatening Adashev’s life tightened their grip on the dagger. The Emperor’s wide nostrils stretched, and he drew in bubbling air like a child who had been weeping. And in his voice, when he spoke, there was a sob. ‘Alexei, forgive me. Forgive me, Alexei, but he must die.’
Lymond said, ‘Alexei Adashev must die because my men are not milksops or cowards? Because they are trained as no other soldiers in Europe are trained? Because they are resourceful; because they obey orders? Yours had no skill to trap them—how should they have? They have never been taught. Were mine to wait like women to be overrun as the Tartar overran you, and die in their flower for nothing?’
The rolling voice of Sylvester cried out. ‘Can eight men murder a city?’
‘There is no limit to what we can