The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [36]
‘All right,’ Guthrie said. ‘They put one man like that in the field, and he can live, after a fashion. But in God’s name, what do they give him to fight with?’
‘A pea-shooter,’ said Danny. ‘With terribly hard Russian peas.’
‘Not exactly,’ said d’Harcourt. ‘The trouble is, they will overdo it. You’d expect a sword and a bow and a quiver. They’ve got lances and hatchets as well, and half a dozen knives and the kesteni, that stick with a spiked ball on a thong. They have the knives hanging on to their elbows, and their reins and whipthong looped on to their fingers, and so far as I can gather, expect to ride in to the attack with the bridle, the bow, the short sword, the javelin and the whip all in their hands at the same time.’
‘With their kettle, their food and their tinder box bumping along at their sides,’ Danny said. ‘I’m sure the enemy simply run off in droves; but my loving heart bleeds for their horses. The August Personage of Jade won’t be at all pleased about that.’ Danny Hislop was retraining the Streltsi, which was extremely hard work, and had mellowed his tongue not at all.
Adam Blacklock wished, not for the first time, that Lymond had seen fit to stay with them during this spell in the house at Kitaigorod, instead of abandoning them for his mistress. True, it was in the Kremlin that he was able to speak with the duma and the princes and engage their attention and support for what he was doing, and with d’Harcourt, make assessment of their varied ability and experience and the degree of their probable co-operation. To Vorobiovo he brought from the Kremlin Prince Kurbsky, who the previous winter had put down the rebellion at Arsk, fighting a running battle against the Votiaks, the heathen Finnish tribe driven north from Kazan by the Tartars.
A clever, ambitious man in his late twenties with a great deal of experience behind him, Kurbsky had not yet shown more than a guarded interest in what Lymond was doing, but he was prepared to talk of the wolf road to the north with its nomads and settlers, and bring with him merchants who imported walrus tusks and seal oil and salmon, beluga and feathers and white foxes and snow larks and silver and sables at the fair at Lampozhnya, and could tell of the Samoyèdes, who worshipped the Slata Baba, the Golden Old Woman, and the people of Lucomoryae, who died in November and came to life again like the frogs in the following spring, and the races of Lapland, who know neither fruits nor apples, nor yet any benignity of either heaven or earth.
From them, the men of St Mary’s learned of the northern frontiers of Russia, from which the tribes did not invade, but might revolt against paying tribute to church or to state; might ally with the enemy Tartars; might and did murder travellers and destroy the tenuous pathways of trade. And they learned of the snow and the cold, and the ways of travelling fast on a frozen network of rivers. They heard how to use snow to track and to assault the enemy, and how to defend themselves and their weapons from freezing.
They all attended these sessions. Among them, sometimes, were others: the beautiful boy called Venceslas who had suddenly appeared as Lymond’s body-servant, and the elderly German physician called Gorius Grossmeyer, with his worn lambskin stomacher and his old Brunswick hat with the brass band pinned round it, who belonged to the Mistress’s household and talked, in his ponderous way, good sense in medical terms.
On the western frontier, bordered by Lithuania, Livonia and Poland, the problems were different and entirely political. The most senior men of the Council, Adashev and the monk Sylvester and the secretary Viscovatu, came to Vorobiovo for