and laughter must be engendered, they found, among the six men who were left, and the Muscovite soldiers to whom, by and by, they also gave office.
The Voevoda did not stand aside: he was involved on the contrary in the very fabric of all they were building. But to the members, old and new, of the company he had created, whom he worked, as he worked himself, with a disciplined and violent intensity, he showed a blank and courteous indifference. And nightly, when he could, he withdrew from their society to Güzel’s civilized house, with its books and its music and its well-prepared food, bringing them in the morning the lists and orders he had prepared for their daily conference, and a group of boyars, to visit the training ground and watch his men as, with bow and axe and lance and handgun, on foot and on horse, they recovered the skills blunted in long weeks of travelling.
Addressed with the deference and charm he knew, to the touch of a hairspring, how to exercise, they would watch, studying the fine, the new points, and encouraged, would take lance themselves, to be allowed to achieve small successes; to have their failures excused and explained to them.
Then, over a meal from their lavish kitchens, they would be shown the company’s maps, the details checked and drawn in by Adam the artist from the dog-eared rolls stored in the armoury workshops with their carefree and contradictory inkings of coastline and rivers, added to by Adam himself, riding through the forests of birch, oak, fir and maple and the light rolling plains around Moscow; checking the cornfields, the marshes, the river systems between the Upper Volga and Oka; noting the bridges and windmills and huddled settlements doublestaked with tall poles to turn aside melting ice at the thaw; the occasional guard-post, sometimes ruined, sometimes rebuilt by Ivan, which he dismounted and examined; the wooden churches like clumps of sweet clover which he passed by, without looking back.
The results were impressive. So was their list of arms and munitions, compiled painstakingly with the help of the duma, and less meagre than they had feared. Ivan possessed brass Italian guns and pieces from Germany. There were brises, falcons, minions, sakers, culverins, double and royal basilisks and six great pieces with shot three feet high, as well as muskets, hackbuts and mortars, potguns for wild fire and bows for stone shot as well as the usual kind. There were the traditional hooked swords and pikes and ryvettes and iron maces, coats of mail and brigantines and steel targets and the characteristic spired helms. There were stocks and wheels for gun carriages and high mobile gun towers and all the appurtenances of siege and pioneer work, fashioned for them fifty years ago by engineers brought in from Germany.
Displaying the total Alec Guthrie conveyed, tactfully, a qualified satisfaction. It was not the moment to mention the fact that most of the weapons were of a certain antiquity, nor that it had become gradually clear that none of the Tsar’s relatives, boyars, boyars’ sons, courtiers, service princes, palace guards, merchants, burghers or frontiersmen knew what to do with them.
He did not discuss the other, private lists he and Lymond were compiling: of foundry and shot tower capacity, of raw material resources of iron and copper and salt and silver and potash: the plethora of timber and dressed leather; the disastrous scarcity of lead and corn powder and sulphur. They knew what stores of meat and fish, fresh, frozen and salted, the Tsar and his merchants kept in their warehouses, and what daily consumption of flour the Neglinnya corn mills could grind.
They had learned weights and coinage and were making costings for the best sources of army supplies: barrels, ladders and horse-carts; saddles of wood and Saphian leather; flax, soap and mats from Novgorod; elkskins from Rostov; bows and arrows at five marks apiece from Smolensk; sledges costing a poltina each.
The Voevoda did not stand aside: he was involved on the contrary in the very fabric of all they were building. But to the members, old and new, of the company he had created, whom he worked, as he worked himself, with a disciplined and violent intensity, he showed a blank and courteous indifference. And nightly, when he could, he withdrew from their society to Güzel’s civilized house, with its books and its music and its well-prepared food, bringing them in the morning the lists and orders he had prepared for their daily conference, and a group of boyars, to visit the training ground and watch his men as, with bow and axe and lance and handgun, on foot and on horse, they recovered the skills blunted in long weeks of travelling.
Addressed with the deference and charm he knew, to the touch of a hairspring, how to exercise, they would watch, studying the fine, the new points, and encouraged, would take lance themselves, to be allowed to achieve small successes; to have their failures excused and explained to them.
Then, over a meal from their lavish kitchens, they would be shown the company’s maps, the details checked and drawn in by Adam the artist from the dog-eared rolls stored in the armoury workshops with their carefree and contradictory inkings of coastline and rivers, added to by Adam himself, riding through the forests of birch, oak, fir and maple and the light rolling plains around Moscow; checking the cornfields, the marshes, the river systems between the Upper Volga and Oka; noting the bridges and windmills and huddled settlements doublestaked with tall poles to turn aside melting ice at the thaw; the occasional guard-post, sometimes ruined, sometimes rebuilt by Ivan, which he dismounted and examined; the wooden churches like clumps of sweet clover which he passed by, without looking back.
The results were impressive. So was their list of arms and munitions, compiled painstakingly with the help of the duma, and less meagre than they had feared. Ivan possessed brass Italian guns and pieces from Germany. There were brises, falcons, minions, sakers, culverins, double and royal basilisks and six great pieces with shot three feet high, as well as muskets, hackbuts and mortars, potguns for wild fire and bows for stone shot as well as the usual kind. There were the traditional hooked swords and pikes and ryvettes and iron maces, coats of mail and brigantines and steel targets and the characteristic spired helms. There were stocks and wheels for gun carriages and high mobile gun towers and all the appurtenances of siege and pioneer work, fashioned for them fifty years ago by engineers brought in from Germany.
Displaying the total Alec Guthrie conveyed, tactfully, a qualified satisfaction. It was not the moment to mention the fact that most of the weapons were of a certain antiquity, nor that it had become gradually clear that none of the Tsar’s relatives, boyars, boyars’ sons, courtiers, service princes, palace guards, merchants, burghers or frontiersmen knew what to do with them.
He did not discuss the other, private lists he and Lymond were compiling: of foundry and shot tower capacity, of raw material resources of iron and copper and salt and silver and potash: the plethora of timber and dressed leather; the disastrous scarcity of lead and corn powder and sulphur. They knew what stores of meat and fish, fresh, frozen and salted, the Tsar and his merchants kept in their warehouses, and what daily consumption of flour the Neglinnya corn mills could grind.
They had learned weights and coinage and were making costings for the best sources of army supplies: barrels, ladders and horse-carts; saddles of wood and Saphian leather; flax, soap and mats from Novgorod; elkskins from Rostov; bows and arrows at five marks apiece from Smolensk; sledges costing a poltina each.
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