The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [9]
Adam Blacklock, thus addressed, said quietly, ‘Undoubtedly gorgeous.’
Ludovic d’Harcourt bent his innocent gaze on his companion. ‘Hislop,’ he said. ‘Adam is humouring you. But be careful. I do not think the Russians will humour you.’
Danny Hislop shook his fluffy head of sparse hair. ‘Where, gentlemen, is your backbone? You see someone before you who is not afraid to say what he thinks, provided he is in a position of ascendancy with a door open behind him and a knife gripped in each hand. Besides, I love gorgeous people: they make me feel gorgeous as well.’ And he kissed Adam, who had been expecting it and did not flinch.
‘I think you should settle down,’ said Alec Guthrie’s dry voice just behind them. ‘These are the towers of Moscow.’
They had stepped out of the forest. Around them flowered the silk skies of sunset. The air, clear and warm, slipped against the clogged wool and sour metal and scuffed, sweaty leather of tired men and horses, and brought them the smell of spring grass and fresh earth and the still, breathing leaves of thin birch trees, the new stars like birds in their branches.
On the horizon, palisaded in wood, enclosed in long walls of russet-red brick and enthroned in the elegant scrolls of her rivers, rose the small hills of the city of Moscow, larger than London; the second Rome; the refuge and shrine of the church which the infidel drove from Byzantium. And within the walls, leafed and spiralled and knopped with bossed gold like an ikon, the Kremlin towers, globe thick upon globe, hung burning upon the iconostasis of the whole airy sky.
*
That night, by order, they spent outside the walls. The next day, a bright morning in the middle of May, they crossed the ditch and were led by their escort through the several walled suburbs of Moscow, the gates opening smoothly before them.
Riding over the grey wooden logs, they Were silent. They saw a city, mellow, irregular, low, of weathered log houses, thatched, or roofed with layers of silvered wood battens, undercarved and flocked over with a wandering of vine and fruit tree and tangled greenery, assorting with swine and thin poultry and bushes of heavy, washed linen in the wooden fenced yards. There were shop booths, and buildings of board, and on the slope of the ground to the river, a handful of taller brick mansions set among the high walls, red and white, of rich convents and the squat shapes of churches, with their deep painted doorways and buttoning of assorted gold domes. Below them, half the width of the Thames, was the busy blue stream of the Moskva. And on the banks of the river the triangular wall with its twenty fortified towers which they had seen from a distance: the russet fifty-foot wall of the Kremlin, the High City where the Tsar lived.
They were taken not to a khan but to a smaller square building of brick, with stables lining two sides of its yard. There, men in wide, booted breeches came to lead off the horses and others to unload the packmules and show the way up the staircase, built Scottish-style on the outside, which gave on to their rooms on the first floor.
These were not luxurious, consisting of no more than two parallel chambers with a door in the long wall between them. The front room, with windows on to the yard, was entered direct from the staircase, and contained inside it another flight of steep stairs which appeared to lead down to the kitchens. In the room was very little: stove, table and an assortment of benches and stools. Here no doubt they were meant to take meals.
The inner room, of identical size, had no outside door and its windows looked out to the rear. Typically, it was lined with a wood sleeping-bench, supplemented by some chests and a number of new-made and un-Russian beds.
They had come a long way, through foul and difficult