The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [34]
These, as it turned out, had little enough leisure to ponder it. Foiled over the house in the Kremlin, Lancelot Plummer exercised his talents as engineer and architect in designing a suitable home for himself and his fellow officers in Kitaigorod, the merchant quarter of Moscow adjoining the swallowtail walls of the Kremlin, and walled itself in identical white-veined red brick. He made the building of brick: spacious and utilitarian, with room for their equipment and a disposition this time of steps, doors and windows which would make outside assault a very difficult proposition indeed. A chaste line of dog-tooth white stonework and a minor embellishment of the principal doorways was all he permitted of flourish.
The third building he made for St Mary’s was at Vorobiovo, the country suburb south of the river, and had no flourishes within or without. It was here that their training ground was laid out, and where he and the others would work and live beside the rough wooden huts of the Streltsi, Ivan’s only trained standing force, until the groundwork was done, and they had created the fighting arm which Russia needed.
Once it had begun, the swiftness of it surprised all of them; even those who remembered the start of the band of mercenaries known to Western Europe as St Mary’s. Some of it was directly due to the change, now unequivocally clear, in Lymond himself. The cleverness, the far-sightedness; the broadly imaginative grasp of basic essentials were there and identified, with mounting enjoyment, by Danny Hislop’s bright watching eyes. But the remembered other side, so shrewdly guessed at by Danny, had disappeared as damascening melts in the heat, leaving only the iron. They were led, as was their due, by an active and distinguished commander. But any warmth, any cameraderie, any cultivation of trifling pursuits and sharing of friendships and laughter must be engendered, they found, among the six men who were left, and the Muscovite soldiers to whom, by and by, they also gave office.
The Voevoda did not stand aside: he was involved on the contrary in the very fabric of all they were building. But to the members, old and new, of the company he had created, whom he worked, as he worked himself, with a disciplined and violent intensity, he showed a blank and courteous indifference. And nightly, when he could, he withdrew from their society to Güzel’s civilized house, with its books and its music and its well-prepared food, bringing them in the morning the lists and orders he had prepared for their daily conference, and a group of boyars, to visit the training ground and watch his men as, with bow and axe and lance and handgun, on foot and on horse, they recovered the skills blunted in long weeks of travelling.
Addressed with the deference and charm he knew, to the touch of a hairspring, how to exercise, they would watch, studying the fine, the new points, and encouraged, would take lance themselves, to be allowed to achieve small successes; to have their failures excused and explained to them.
Then, over a meal from their lavish kitchens, they would be shown the company’s maps, the details checked and drawn in by Adam the artist from the dog-eared rolls stored in the armoury workshops with their carefree and contradictory inkings of coastline and rivers, added to by Adam himself, riding through the forests of birch, oak, fir and maple and the light rolling plains around Moscow; checking the cornfields, the marshes, the river systems between the Upper Volga and Oka; noting the bridges and windmills and huddled settlements doublestaked with tall poles to turn aside melting ice at the thaw; the occasional guard-post, sometimes ruined, sometimes rebuilt by Ivan, which he dismounted and examined; the wooden churches like clumps of sweet clover which he passed by, without looking back.
The results were impressive. So was their list of arms and munitions, compiled painstakingly with the help