The Ringed Castle Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 passages; suffering gross meat and sour wine, stinking drink and filthy straw for a bedding; travelling in small barks and loose, jolting wagons. There was not one of them who had not been forced to fight for his money, his life or to preserve his fictitious identity: Plummer had a cracked rib; Guthrie a scar from a Janissary run drunk-wild with a mace. They had been blackmailed by ferrymen and cheated by inadequate guides and faced philosophically the unpleasantness of travelling at night through forests harbouring boar and plains ranged by wild cat or wolf.
    By comparison, this was harbour and comfort. They had perhaps hoped for more, but they had been promised nothing. And being professional men they made, caustically, the best of it with the help of Danny Hislop’s sharp tongue. They threw down their saddles and baggage; they moved about, examining the appointments and stood at the windows, discussing what they could see. There was no sign of other quarters attached to the lodging, and no sign at all of the manthey had been summoned to meet. But presently a door opened somewhere and the smell of hot meat filtered up from the steep kitchen staircase. And a moment later a tousled head rose from it and they were offered unexpectedly a tray full of rough bowls of broth.
    They had breakfasted already at the monastery, but none the less it was decidedly welcome. They kicked stools up to the long oaken table or ate standing, their exuberance quieted, so that they became aware of the noise of the city; of the broken rumble of wagons on the long laddered paving of timbers; of the discordant clanging of bells and the whining of vendors and the harsh spoken artillery of the Russian voice, with its scooping vowels and hard bitten consonants.
    Adam Blacklock found it soothing. He spooned his broth, absorbing it, thinking of nothing, and suddenly among the sounds in the yard was another voice, light and clear and demanding, which he had not heard for a year and a half. It spoke in Russian, once, and then again, giving an order. And then was followed almost at once by a quick running step, scaling the stairs outside the house.
    There was time to glance once at the others, sitting arrested, and then the door opened and Francis Crawford stood on the threshold.
    For a moment Lymond remained there, surveying them. His eight officers, staring edgily back, saw a delicate-looking gentleman in a pretty paned and pinked tunic with the finest voile shirt bands and a link-belt of Italian enamel work. A man whose yellow hair, dry and light and unevenly tipped, eclipsed the sunlight behind him, and whose attic profile and unoccupied, long-shafted hands caused a small moan of ecstasy to burst, very