The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [7]
Far from his troublesome homeland of Scotland, and from the courts and battlegrounds, boudoirs and souls he had ravaged, Philippa’s husband Francis Crawford of Lymond was riding. If the climate had affected him at Volos, it did so no longer. If he remembered friends or family, wife or commitments, it was quite unapparent. Instead he led his mistress’s caravan and ordered it in every rigorous detail; using his many tongues, and the new one he had in seven weeks already half mastered.
With Prince Vishnevetsky, Güzel had employed her beauty and her experience, and had let him feel her strength, both of wit and of will.
With the man who was known simply as Lymond, she used none of these. They rode together in company, but spoke rarely, and then on affairs of the journey. Their meals were formal. They slept and took their leisure at all times apart.
She knew her household, watching, were mystified and, self-sufficient that she was, it gave her no concern. To be with her, Francis Crawford had come a long way, in mind and in body, and had to travel still farther yet. A patient woman, Güzel was content to wait and to watch, and to allow him what power he wished to exert.
They were then no more than a week’s journey from their destination. Spring was coming. The sun dried the quagmires and ditches and the bogs platformed with fir trees. Birds whistled in the thick, reeded rivers and women stood watching outside the thatched villages of wood-pinned bark houses, with their ditch-and-stake fence against bear and boar and the marauding bands of wild horsemen, who rode by with undressed furs on their mares’ buttocks, and chains of silver and gold swinging bright from their ears.
They were nearly there, and she could be forebearing as she had been after this man had joined her, as bidden, at Volos. When at length, since he had not asked, she had told him the name of the land he was bound for.
Or rather, she had described it all, watching him. ‘A land other than yours, baptised and blessed by St Andrew. A place of black wolves and white bears, of marshes, rivers and forests, of wide skies and fiat vales of cherries and tall trees all running with honey: the sweat of heaven, the spittle, they say, of the stars. The sleeping cold of the north, which is the mother of whiteness. The land whose Emperor is Ivan Vasilievich of Vladimir, Novgorod, Pskov, Tver, Yogorsk and Smolensk, Duke of Muscovy and Tsar of all Russia.
‘My friend, you are going to Moscow.’
And he had been acquiescent and civil as ever, at which she had concealed every trace of relief.
For greater than all her gold or her spices was this gift she was bringing to Muscovy.
Chapter 2
‘Russia! Christ!’ said Danny Hislop. ‘What in hell is he doing in Russia?’
‘Waiting for us,’ said Alexander Guthrie in the level tone of precarious patience exercised over the years with lesser scholars and fighting men both.
It took more than that to deter the band of free fighting men known as St Mary’s, at present concluding an engagement in France. It took a great deal more than that to put off Danny Hislop. ‘I thought,’ said Danny Hislop emotionally, ‘that I was the mother ship and he was the bloody dove with the twig in its beak?’
Elbowing off the heavy-breathing crush of his officers, Alec Guthrie looked again at the astonishing communication from their absent and unaccommodating commander. After twelve months of private vendetta, Francis Crawford had been reminded, it seemed, of the fighting force he had left under Guthrie, on lucrative hire to the monarchs of Europe.
Lymond had left Turkey, it transpired, for Moscow. And now was inviting the pick of his captains to follow him.
‘Well?’ said Guthrie. ‘He says the prospects for trained men seem excellent.’
The legal mind in the group was