The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [96]
Astonished fury invaded Chancellor’s chest and made speech again a matter of will-power. He said, ‘So I had to be brought here unconscious?’
‘A crudity,’ said Lymond, ‘that you would expect from the spawn of a naive and barbarous régime. I am sorry I was unable to issue a written invitation. You are watched, and so am I. By the monks, the grooms, the merchants. Grigorjeff has fluent English, learned from a German trader, as Best learned his Russian from the Tartars of the Queen’s stables. Makaroff has also more than you suspect although Nepeja, bless his patriotic heart, has no gift for languages. Only my soldiers are sentimentally loyal.’
‘So even your masters don’t trust you?’ said Chancellor. He finished the aqua-vite, and bent to dip the ladle again in the wine pot while Lymond came to rest on the floor, his hands relaxed round his knees. The ends of his girdle, Chancellor saw, were worked with Ceylon pearls and bright, twisted silks, and his tunic was clasped with pale, bulbous stones, high in the collet.
‘Why should they?’ said Lymond. ‘They don’t trust anyone. When you get to Moscow you’ll find that, as before, you will be confined strictly to your house, and allowed out by appointment, and firmly escorted. You will not be invited to Muscovite homes, and you will not be allowed to entertain on your own account. One reason is that, as a representative of royalty, your person is sacred and must be guarded from all untoward incidents. Another is that, as representative of a western and civilized power, you should be allowed to see and describe only those things which reflect Russia’s culture and power. And the last reason is that you yourself shall not infect the Russian, peasant or noble, with the enchantments of an evil religion, or the practices of other, corrupt peoples as regards food and justice and government, domestic freedom and taxes, clothes and climate and culture. Villages are emptying already round Moscow. The land cannot afford to lose all its people.’
‘It is a corrupt rule then?’ said Chancellor. He had forgotten the ache in his head.
For a while, Lymond was silent. Then he said, ‘How can one answer that? Parliament consists of the Tsar, twenty boyars and twenty clergy also. The people are told of the Tsar’s decisions after he has made them. He’s never spoken to a peasant in his life, except to ride him down in the street as a boy. The Empire is Majesty, and above that Majesty stands the Sovereign in his Empire, and the Sovereign is above the Empire.
‘A state of mind not exclusively the Grand Duke’s. But, you know, with abuses wherever he looks, and no experience behind him, he has tried to do something. He’s revised the law. He’s put some restraints on the appointment of unpaid, single-term governors, who milk a province and run at the end of the year. He’s thought of the Zemsky Sobor, the wider assemblies of gentry and boyars and church representatives. They still don’t include peasants or merchants—and merchants, you already know, have no status at all outside Novgorod—but it’s something. He’s laid down clear rules for the landowners about raising an army.…’
‘Yes?’ said Diccon Chancellor, as the other man paused.
On Lymond’s face, bare of all but the courtesy emotions, a touch of resignation appeared. ‘You will discover it when you reach Moscow, so you may as well become used to it now. The Russian Army is my affair. I am supreme commander: Voevoda Bolshoia.’
Slowly, Richard Chancellor sat up, his eyes on the other man’s face. ‘A foreigner? But what of the boyars? The princes?’
Francis Crawford smiled and rose, in the single, enviable movement of the remorselessly trained gymnast. ‘One day, when I have given them Ochakov and they are loading their cargoes at Riga, someone will no doubt pass a sword through my decaying sinews. At present, they dare not.’
‘Yet they watch you? You cannot speak to me openly?’
‘The Tsar watches me,’ Lymond said.
‘It is the Tsar himself, then, who distrusts you? What future, what