The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [86]
This was what, last time, Willoughby had been chosen to do and what he, with common sense only to guide him, had had to manage somehow, alone. And manage so well, be it said, he thought with a twinge of wry self-congratulation, that at least he had been elected to carry out both tasks again. Through all this winter, he was to stay in Moscow, the figurehead of the new English traders now settling in Muscovy. And come the spring, with the cloth sold and the merchants well established, he would leave them there and, with Christopher, sail back with the new cargo to England, to tell the Company all he had learned, and to persuade the Company to send him once more, and untrammelled, to try for the route to Cathay.
But meantime, there were the lighters to load and a journey to get under way through which, like two threads, sometimes competing, would run his office as spokesman and ambassador, and the work of the merchants; the trading for which they had voyaged to Russia. Diccon Chancellor had no quarrel with commerce: it had paid for his ship and his voyage. But he was not, and never would be, a merchant.
Slow, ungainly, and not very comfortable, the great overland Odyssey began on the broad River Dwina, with a long halt to load goods at Kholmogory, the first market town of size on the river. There they were to lose Dick Johnson, who was returning to England and who would see the new cargo safely north to the Edward.
Christopher found Kholmogory boring. There were a lot of meetings, and solemn pacings round warehouses full of stinking barrels of train oil and crates of walrus tusks and heaps of glistening salt. Some of the Russians came and pulled at the pieces of cloth Mr Lane picked out from the Edward’s cargo, and then began offering roubles and altines with their fingers: Mr Lane packed the cloth away and just laughed.
There was nothing much to do in the town, which was very old, and stuck on an island in the Dwina. There were no brick buildings at all: only log houses with carved eaves and windows, and a ramshackle church made like a toy out of spills, and the ships in the river. The Edward’s cargo was in flat-bottomed river boats with their decks lined with bark and caulked with tarred moss, with a long, heavy rudder. They were like Gravesend barges, and had a mast and a sail each to use if there was a following wind, which there wasn’t.
As it was, they would have to be towed all the way upstream, Christopher reckoned. He thought of the Edward. He wondered if Mr Johnson and the purser would remember to check off the marks before loading, and whether Mr Buckland would put oatmeal and butter on the Kamen Woronucha, and if they would see any whales. He rather wondered what Nicholas was doing at Penshurst, and then stopped wondering as Judde and Hawtrey came to find him and carry him off to someone’s house to try caviare, which Hawtrey had just learned was an aphrodisiac.
Christopher asked someone later what an aphrodisiac was, and was convulsed with shame when the whole party exploded in laughter. Best patted him on the shoulder. ‘Know-alls,’ he said. ‘You should hear George Killingworth when his poods are giving him trouble.’
They stayed an interminable time in Kholmogory. But at last there came a day when Dick Johnson set off north with the new cargo, and Christopher’s father and his friends made their farewells and took to the boats, to be pulled south up the broad, dazzling reach of the Dwina. The magistrate Makaroff and Grigorjeff, his fellow merchant, came with them, while a light boat rode ahead to the Peremines, the towpath relay stations to arrange for food and drink and new bargemen. Before them lay a sail of seven hundred miles. And after that, two weeks of riding to Moscow.
It took forty days, in clear summer heat, which blistered George Killingworth’s tender, gold-bearded skin and turned the rest of them every shade from vermilion to russet. The bargemen sang as they pulled them past the short ochre scrub blocked