The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [99]
Princes and elders, to greet and walk with him, robed in figured velvet on tissue, with twisted silk frogging and gold filigree chains, and tall seamed caps on their heads. The faces of others; monks, boyars’ sons, servants, pressing between the ranks of the guard.
The palace square he remembered so well, with its lean churches hand-wrought like rizas above the dwarfed coloured forms of the people. The St Michael Archangel, with its clear fluted shells. The tulip-bed of the Blagoveschenski’s golden towers; the tall painted hoods of the Uspenski and its thin-mortared ivory stones. And the winged golden crosses and cupolas crowding behind.
George Killingworth, beside him, had never seen it before, nor Henry Lane, nor Ned Price nor Rob Best, his broad shoulders laden with sables. The last time he had been here, he had carried with him the Tsar’s reply to his King’s letter, written in Russian and Dutch: We, greatest Lord John Vasilievich, by the grace of God Emperor of all Russia … sent by your true servant Hugh Willoughby, the which in our domains hath not arrived … Whereas your servant Richard is come to us, we with Christian true assurance in no manner of wise will refuse his petition.…
Well, Hugh Willoughby had arrived in the domains of Ivan Vasilievich: he was there now, on the Esperanza, floating under the banner of St George west of Nenoksa, with the log of that last, frozen voyage no longer where he had laid his handsome head by it, his final words blurred under the brittle, manicured fingers. Alas, Hugh Willoughby.
The stairs up to the terrace, with robed figures moving forward to greet him. The doorway to the Vestibule and the long room he remembered, with silent, deferential figures moving about. He heard George Killingworth, looming beside him, give a muffled snort in the midst of the tension, and knew he had caught sight of the wash of gold light from the walls, laden with burnished parcel-gilt on broad shelves: pitchers, ewers and basins, plates and salt cellars and tankards, flagons and standing cups, fat pineapple and thin knotted Gothic. Someone had cleaned the silver.
He must not let his mind wander. In unknown waters, you kept your lead going and sounded every half-glass. It was the second time that you sailed on the sandbar that bilged you. Then it would be alas, Diccon Chancellor.
The painted ante-room, with a silent revetment of sitting, gold-mantled Councillors and above them, the frescoes chosen by the priest Sylvester to edify and instruct his young Tsar: The Wise Son is the Mother’s and Father’s Joy. The Fear of God is the Beginning of Wisdom. The Heart of the Tsar is in the Hand of God.
Leading from that was the Chamber of Gold, which had once had golden frescoes under Tsar Vasily, but which Sylvester had caused to be covered with more vigorous stuff. The Ten Battles and Victories of Joshua, Chancellor remembered, and a number of prominent successes in Russian history, with the princes of the Rurik dynasty gazing inscrutably down from the vaults, and Christ Emmanuel where the lights were. At the doorway, recalling the previous occasion, he said, ‘Do we wait?’ and an English voice whose owner he could not see said, ‘The lord Ivan Vasilievich is prepared to receive you.’ Then the doors opened, and they were inside.
The figured vaults, prismatic with colour, chambered the room like a honeycomb, in which sat the Tsar’s golden princes, like bees in the cell. And facing them across the empty, tapestried floor, the Tsar sat on his raised golden throne, foiled and jewelled as the ikon above his crowned head, the brocade of his gown seeded with pearls and plated with deep-moulded orphrey. His hair was more auburn than Chancellor had remembered: the nose long and slender; the eyes blue and cloudy under the brow prematurely lined. Chancellor swept off his hat, as did the four Englishmen with him, and the courtiers rose, in a flash of gold tissue, and bared their heads likewise.
Beside the Tsar, his brother Yuri did not rise; or the boy Tartar prince either. But Chancellor saw the