The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [35]
Displaying the total Alec Guthrie conveyed, tactfully, a qualified satisfaction. It was not the moment to mention the fact that most of the weapons were of a certain antiquity, nor that it had become gradually clear that none of the Tsar’s relatives, boyars, boyars’ sons, courtiers, service princes, palace guards, merchants, burghers or frontiersmen knew what to do with them.
He did not discuss the other, private lists he and Lymond were compiling: of foundry and shot tower capacity, of raw material resources of iron and copper and salt and silver and potash: the plethora of timber and dressed leather; the disastrous scarcity of lead and corn powder and sulphur. They knew what stores of meat and fish, fresh, frozen and salted, the Tsar and his merchants kept in their warehouses, and what daily consumption of flour the Neglinnya corn mills could grind.
They had learned weights and coinage and were making costings for the best sources of army supplies: barrels, ladders and horse-carts; saddles of wood and Saphian leather; flax, soap and mats from Novgorod; elkskins from Rostov; bows and arrows at five marks apiece from Smolensk; sledges costing a poltina each. They surveyed the supply of tall Argamaks, the Turcoman horses, crossed with Arab stock, whose long necks and fine legs made for great speed over the flat plains of the south, but who could not endure long riding over rough country. They found they could buy for three roubles the small, short-necked Pachmat horses of the Tartars, who were used to wooden saddles and stirrups and could live for a lifetime on sawdust.
Coinage was a matter for tact. There was no gold in Russia: for that they used Hungarian coins. The silver Novgorod rouble was worth twice the silver Moscow rouble, and that was worth sixteen shillings and eightpence English money, but less converted to bullion. And, as Fergie Hoddim complained with some bitterness, half the time the seller hardly knew how to set a price on his product, being accustomed to barter.
‘Will I tell ye the price of a hatchet?’ snarled Fergie at their once-daily assembly at supper, tearing apart a wild goose helped down with gobbets of rye bread and spirit. ‘You try handing over an altine and they’ll spit on your uppers. A tied bunch of sable skins drawn through the hole where the haft enters, that’s the price of a hatchet. Forbye,’ said Fergie austerely, ‘if they’re going to count they wee dengi in fifties, I wish they wouldna use their big mouths as pouches. I clapped one lad on the shoulders last Monday, and it was Thursday before he was able to pay me.’
Fergie, busy importing Permian yew and surveying Polish and Flemish cloth bales for his soldiers, disliked weighing in slotniks and poods and counting his journeys in versts instead of two-thirds of a mile. It disturbed him that the Russian calendar put the creation of the world at the 5508th year B.C. and that it was therefore never the year that he thought it was. Apart from this, although he would not have admitted it, he was having the time of his life.
Ludovic d’Harcourt, their Christian hospitaller, was engaged on a different matter. Having mastered the Slavonic tongue quicker than any save Lymond, he was compiling his own register of Pomeschiks, those who had been given land on condition that they supplied one equipped horseman per obja of earth until death.