The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [40]
‘They fight like Tartars,’ said Lymond. ‘You have used them before. Lithuania uses them still. Do you want them for you, or against you?’
‘They are half Tartar,’ said Sylvester with distaste.
‘Then,’ said Lymond, ‘let us make them wholly Russian at heart.’
The pale eyes of the Tsar had not left him. Ivan allowed silence to fall, his beard on his chest; his long Byzantine face moist with choler; his long staff, gleaming steel at the tip, in his hand. At length, ‘Approach,’ he said to his foreign Voevoda. And as Lymond walked slowly close to his chair, the Tsar raised his thin stick like a cantilever until the metal point pressed hard into the leather of his chest. Holding it there, Ivan spoke softly. ‘By my orders Andrei Shuisky was strangled by dog-handlers. My boyars rode over the importunate people of Novgorod. I bound the Pskovians when they made indecent complaint and had hot spirit poured on them, and fired it. Mishurin was skinned alive by the children of boyars, and for a passing error of boldness, I had the tongue of the boyar Afanasy Buturlin cut out here, where you are standing. I speak of these things with sorrow, for God has given me a nature which will brook insolence from none, high or low. My hand smites, although afterwards I may sorrow for it.…’
He let another long pause develop while his big-boned hand fondled the stick, its shod point grinding through the soft leather. Lymond said nothing, and the half-dozen men in the room held their breath. In the quietness the sound of feet passing up and down the stone steps came to them perfectly clearly, and muted voices, and in a while, the bell of one of the monasteries jangling from among its rooftops and trees. Ivan said, ‘Twice you have been unwise. Twice you have been insolent. I demand that you lie down before me in terror.’
‘I fear you,’ said Lymond.
‘You fear pain?’ Ivan said.
‘I fear, as any man would, the indignity of pain. I fear more to inflict on your highness the sufferings of a noble remorse, should you smite your jester too harshly. We are here to watch you deliver yourselves from the years of thraldom and oppression. There lies about us so much that is weighty,’ said Lymond. ‘Forgive us if sometimes we try in our poor way to be merry, and to lighten your burden. In his complaint, did Prince Vyazemsky remember to mention that on the occasion of every encampment he had in his tent the Khan Yam-gurchei’s five Tartar wives?’
The Tsar’s eyes and mouth opened, and his hand became still on the staff-wood. ‘You say?’ he exclaimed.
‘To remove his dagger and bow as we did, and even, be it said, his boots and his white linen breeches was therefore an exploit, I wished humbly to claim, of some merit?’
A rod between the two men, the staff remained still, but the ferrule had withdrawn, imperceptibly, from the glazed and burst skin of the jerkin. ‘And the wives?’ the Tsar said. ‘You failed to steal off the wives? Was there no Cossack leader, no promising pioneer hot for pleasure to whom you could have presented them?’
‘Alas,’ said Lymond. ‘None who has not heard already whistled abroad the prince’s liberal habit of life, and the unhappy reward of his ardours.’
‘Ho!’ said the Tsar Ivan, and repeated it, a good deal more loudly, suddenly dropping the point of the staff to the floor. His mouth open and working he stared into the unflinching blue eyes of the Voevoda; then lowering his head, he laid his cheek upon his two folded hands on the staff-end and began to breath noisily, the saliva blowing rainbow-spotted into the air. ‘Oh,’ said Ivan. ‘Oho. Oho. Oh. Oh.’
Gasping, he raised a blind hand and unclosed, shut and opened the fingers. ‘Come nearer. Kneel. Let me see you.’
Lymond knelt. The Tsar lifted his head and unlooking, let the staff go. It fell unregarded, with a crack, bouncing on the thin carpet. Ivan leaned forward