The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [8]
They left at the end of the week: eight well-balanced and reasonable mercenaries, who had made up their minds to this exploit before ever finishing that laconic letter. And Fergie Hoddim was one of their number.
They were bound, it seemed, for an unknown and barbarous country, ignorant of modern warfare and backward in weapons and tactics, there to offer their specialized services for what they were worth to the Emperor.
The recompense might be large. It might be more than they dreamed of. Or they might be spurned by the boyars. Or never reach Russia at all, through the ring of unfriendly lands which surrounded her. So the letter had said; nor had its summing-up any message of feverish bonhomie. There is a prospect of employment, entertainment and riches, but I can guarantee none of it, and least of all your personal safety. You have the facts. I merely place the proposal before you. And it was signed, CRAWFORD OF LYMOND AND SEVIGNY.
‘Sevigny?’ had inquired Ludovic d’Harcourt.
And Guthrie had answered. ‘He has a French comté.’
‘But no scent,’ Danny Hislop had said, and had withdrawn his tip-tilted nose from the pages. ‘This is a clever bastard, my friends. I like that word entertainment, for instance.’
And d’Harcourt had said, ‘We thought you would,’ and tripped him up with casual competence.
But the four who knew and had been trained by Francis Crawford had been tactfully silent. To Danny Hislop, they were aware, the word conveyed Tartar maidens in wolfskins. To Lancelot Plummer, a land where he could preside, an architect among builders of cabins; to Alex Guthrie, a scholar and Latinist, a new nation to study in genesis, all patched together from snatched states and princedoms. To Brown and Vassey and d’Harcourt, their Knights of St John, a high church which called itself Christian but spurned so far both the advances of the Protestant lords and the Pope. And for Adam Blacklock the artist, older, wiser, and perhaps less vulnerable than once he had been, a chance to assess from maturity a person whose maturity was and always had been a thing disconcerting to witness.
For what, after these violent years, would entertain or even interest Francis Crawford, Blacklock found he had no idea.
They travelled each in his own way to Muscovy, the eight chosen men summoned by Lymond. They came by sea and by road; through Lübeck and Riga, by Vienna, Silesia and Moravia, across the Danube and past the walled city of Vilna in its high wooded hills. They traversed forests and marshes and rivers and saw bison and buffalo, and herds of light-footed wild horses, and the small sheep of the mountains with their high-stretched ringed horns. And at length they foregathered in the oak fortress town of Smolensk on the western extremity of Russia.
There they found lodging prepared for them, and guides waiting who gave them little respite but hurried them on their journey, answering their queries with nothing more than sign language and smiles. Which was something, as Fergie Hoddim was heard to remark sourly. But he would be damned glad when their meat, their fleabites and Danny Hislop’s ill-organized appetites could be dealt with in civilized English.
It was after they had left the insect-ridden banks of the Dnieper that Danny Hislop reined up beside his friend d’Harcourt and said, ‘What intelligent remedy, like jumping in the river, do you suggest if we find this man Lymond irreconcilably dreadful?’
Ludovic d’Harcourt was not the man for extravagant phrases. He smiled and said, ‘I assume that if Alec Guthrie serves under him, then he is better than Alec Guthrie.’
‘In the field maybe,’ Danny said. ‘But I suspect the passion with which they don’t discuss him.’
‘They are afraid of him?’ D’Harcourt raised his comedian’s eyebrows.
Danny