Russka

Ivan

1552

Very slowly. Very slowly.

The oars’ lilting refrain on the water.

Mother Volga, mighty Volga: the ships were coming from the east up the river.

High in the endless autumn sky, pale clouds passed by from time to time, as the ships, like their shadows, crossed the sullen waters, and the sun dipped slowly to the distant shore. Mother Volga, mighty Volga: the ships were coming from the steppe to the homeland.

Sometimes they hoisted sails, more often they rowed. From the bank of the huge river their oars could not be heard; only the boatmen’s faint rhythmic singing echoed plaintively across the stream.

Mother Volga. Mighty Volga.

Boris did not know how many boats there were. Only a part of the army had been left behind as a garrison in the east. The main force was returning to the frontier city of Nizhni Novgorod; and they were returning in triumph. For the Russians had just conquered the mighty Tatar city of Kazan.

Kazan: it was many days behind them now, on its high hill by the Volga where that huge stream at last turned southwards across the distant steppe and desert to the Caspian Sea. Kazan: by the lands of the ancient Volga Bulgars; gateway to the empire once ruled by mighty Genghis Khan.

Now it was Russian.

From dawn each day the boats travelled, until their shadows grew so long that they joined each vessel with the one behind so that, instead of resembling a procession of dark swans in the distance, they seemed to turn into snakes, inching forward on waters turned to fire by the western sunset ahead; while on the bank, the last red light from the huge sky eerily caught the stands of bare larch and birch so that it appeared as if whole armies with massed lances were waiting by the river bank to greet them.

Boris was sitting in a boat some way down the line. He was sixteen, of medium height with a frame that was still rather spare, a broad face with a hint of Turkish in it, dark blue eyes, dark brown hair and a wispy beard. Being a young cavalryman, he wore a quilted woollen coat, thick enough to stop most arrows. Over his shoulders he had draped a coat of fur, against the cold breeze on the river. Behind him was slung a short Turkish bow and at his feet lay an axe in a bearskin sheath.

He was of noble birth: his full name was Boris, son of David, surnamed Bobrov, and if asked where he came from he would answer that his estate lay by Russka.

No one paid any attention to him, but if they had bothered to do so, they would have observed a brooding, nervous excitement in his face, especially when he glanced at the first boat that was leading them back towards the west.

For in the first boat rode a twenty-two-year-old man: Tsar Ivan.

Ivan: Holy Tsar, Autocrat of all the Russias. No ruler before had taken such titles. And his capital was Moscow.

This was the state known to history as Muscovy, and it was already a tremendous power. One by one, in the process known as the Gathering, the mighty cities of northern Russia had fallen to Moscow and her armies. Tver, Riazan, Smolensk – even mighty Novgorod – had given up their ancient independence. And this new state was no federation: the Prince of Moscow was as great a despot as was once the Tatar Khan. Absolute obedience to the centre: this was the doctrine of the Moscow princes.

‘Only in this way,’ their supporters claimed, ‘will the state of Rus return to her ancient glory.’

There was still a long way to go. Even now, most of western Russia and the lands of ancient Kiev in the south, were still in the grip of mighty Lithuania. Further yet, across the Black Sea, a new Moslem power, the Ottoman Turks, had seized old Constantinople – henceforth called Istanbul – and their Ottoman Empire was expanding each generation. Catholics to the west, Moslems to the south. And to the east, the Tatars had regularly swept in from the steppes, over the Oka, past little Russka and even to the white walls of mighty Moscow itself.

It was not just that the Tatars looted and burned: it was the children they stole that made Boris hate them. He remembered how he himself as a boy had stood, quivering with fear and rage, inside the monastery walls as they came riding by, with huge panniers strapped to their horses, into which they tossed the wretched little boys and girls they caught. There were several lines of defence against them: the settlements of vassals – formerly hostile Tatars themselves – across the Oka; then there were little forts, wooden barriers and stout walled towns with garrisons. But no one had been able to control them.

Until this year, when they had found a master.

Boris smiled darkly. At his feet, with their hands manacled, lay two Tatars he had captured himself, and whom he was going to send down to his poor estate at Russka. That would teach the Tatars who was their lord.

Soon, he would get more. For this campaign was only the beginning. Kazan was the nearest of the Tatar Khanates. Far away to the south, by the Volga delta where once the Khazars ruled, lay another Tatar capital: Astrakhan. Astrakhan was weak. That would fall next.

And then would come the chief of all the western Tatars, down by the warm Black Sea – the Khan of the Crimea, at his stronghold: Bakhchisarai.

He was a terrible figure. The palace of Bakhchisarai was like the famous Topkapi Palace of the Turkish Sultan in Istanbul, and even the Ottoman ruler was glad to use the Crimean Khan as an ally. But in time he too would fall, and after that, eastwards across the Volga, the Kazaks, the Uzbeks, the Nogay horde – the fierce but fragmented tribes who dwelt in the Asian deserts – they too would fall: the power of Muscovy would crush them all.

This was the great destiny that Tsar Ivan had seen: that a Christian Russian Tsar would one day rule over the vast Eurasian empire of mighty Genghis Khan. Beside this even the largest ambitions of the western crusaders of old would look puny.

For the first time in all history, the men of the forest were going to conquer the steppe.

Indeed, even as they were leaving Kazan, Boris had heard some Tatars refer to Ivan as the White, that is western, Khan. No wonder therefore if he should gaze ahead at the young Tsar’s boat with such excitement.

Besides, he had another reason to be excited that day. That very morning, the young Tsar himself had spoken to him. Even now, Boris could hardly believe it. Tsar Ivan had not only spoken to him, but, it seemed, taken him into his confidence as well. Ever since, while those around him chatted, or gazed at the passing scenery, Boris’s mind had been full of the encounter with his hero.

And how heroic he was, this tall, dark young Tsar with his huge destiny. It had not been easy for him, Boris knew that. Yet he had overcome all obstacles. Only three years old when he inherited the crown, he had been forced to watch, humiliated, as the great princes and boyars fought to rule Russia in his place.

There were two mighty groups: the princes, descended either from the old Russian royal house or from the rulers of Lithuania; and the greatest boyar families – some thirty-five clans who made up the central core of the boyar duma.

These were the powerful schemers whom Ivan had overcome. They hated his mother because she was Polish; and they despised his wife. For when, like the ancient Khans, he had summoned fifteen hundred eligible girls to be brought before him, he had chosen this girl, from an ancient family, to be sure – but not from one of theirs. Yet Ivan had made them submit to his will. He had ruled through his own inner council of trusted, lesser men; and he had married his wife for love.

Anastasia. Boris had never seen the Tsar’s wife, yet he thought about her often. He thought about her because, when he got back to Moscow, he was due to marry himself and already, in his dreams, he had created for his wife the same role that everyone knew the lovely Anastasia played.

‘She comforts him in all his troubles. She is his rock.’ That was what they told him. ‘She is the one person in all the world he knows that he can trust.’

Her family might not be amongst the greatest magnates, but they were distinguished. Their name at that time was Zakharin. A little later they were to change it and call themselves by another: Romanov.

Boris had no love for the princes and magnates. Why should he support them when they wanted to take all the great positions and leave nothing but the scraps from their table for the mere gentry like himself? Under the autocratic princes of Moscow, however, men like him could rise.

For the rule of the autocratic princes gave hope to obscure families like the Bobrovs. While the Moscow rulers had set out to break the power of the mighty clans, they had advanced men of lesser family, like the great Morozovs and Pleshcheevs, to enormous fortune. Indeed in Russia the gentry, men like Boris Bobrov, instead of opposing autocrats, as they did in much of western Europe, welcomed them as providing their way to fortune past the princes and magnates.

Two years before, Ivan had chosen a thousand best men – ‘sons of boyars’ as the gentry were called, or even humbler fellows – and ordered that they be given estates near Moscow so that they should be close at hand. Boris, to his chagrin, had been just too young to be selected, for service began when you were fifteen; but he had been glad to see that not all those chosen had actually been found estates nearby. And Russka, though a minor place, was not so very far from the centre.

The estate I have is nearer Moscow than some of the thousand, he reminded himself with satisfaction. I’ll not be left behind for long.

These were the thoughts that filled the mind of Boris Bobrov as he moved up the river, and went over, again and again, his meeting with the Tsar.

The camp had been still asleep, the boats drawn up in long lines upon the bank, shadow merging into shadow in the silence before dawn. Nothing moved upon the water; the sky was empty. Not even the few birds of the night, it seemed, chose to infringe any longer upon the vast peace of the slowly fading stars.

Boris had stood by the river bank. Before him, the nearby water seemed black although, far out into the huge river, a swathe of silvery greyness across its surface gave a hint of the pale starlight above. He gazed towards the eastern horizon scanning it for the first signs of the dawn, but as yet there was nothing to see.

He had awoken early and got up at once. It was cold and there was a slight dampness in the air. Pulling on a fur coat, he moved quietly out of his tent into the darkness and began to walk towards the river.

He nearly always had a particular sensation at this hour. First, beginning in the pit of his stomach, began a sense of melancholia. In the silence, under the unending darkness of the sky, he experienced an extraordinary feeling of desolation. It was as if he had stepped from the close womb of sleep into another womb – that of the universe itself which, perhaps, had no end: so that he was at the same time for ever trapped, yet utterly alone.

He came down to the water, to the boats by the bank, the long line of shadows. Before him lay the river, vast, soundlessly proceeding on its way.

His melancholy was bittersweet. It was like a conversation in which no words were spoken aloud. It was as if he had said: ‘Very well. I accept that I am eternally alone – I shall wander for ever on the empty roads of the night.’

And yet, even in making this sad submission to the universe, even as he moved into this region beyond tears, rather like the relief after weeping, he felt a warmth in his stomach that spread with a tingling sensation. It was a secretion, deep inside him, of tremendous joy and even of love, that made itself known to him only in these silent times before the dawn.

As he stood in the shadows, his mind had turned to his parents.

Boris could only just remember his mother – a gentle presence who had faded from his life. She had died when he was five. For him, therefore, family meant his father.

It was a year since he had died, but for as long as Boris could remember, he had been a tragic figure, disabled by terrible wounds he had received fighting the Tatars soon after Boris was born. For ten years he had been a widower. Once, one could see, he had possessed a big, burly frame, but the blue eyes in his broad, rather Turkish face were sunken, with dark hollows under them. His broad chest showed the bones, and it was only by a great effort of will that he managed to hold his ravaged body together with some semblance of dignity, until his son came of age and could fend for himself in the world.

It was this feat of endurance, this drawing upon deep reserves, that had made its deep impression upon the boy. More than any vigorous warrior, his father’s fallen figure represented to him something heroic. It was almost as if the emaciated figure who cared for him was both a living father and, at the same time, an ancestor from beyond the grave. And though he was only of medium height, and sometimes rather clumsy, broad-faced Boris grew up with a single, towering passion: to fill the heroic role his father had been denied.

‘The family is in your hands now,’ his father told him. ‘Our honour rests upon you alone.’

If he closed his eyes, he could see them, his ancestors – tall, noble figures resting in their graves, figures receding into the mists of time, warriors of forest, steppe and mountain. And if they were watching him, he vowed that they would not be disappointed. The family of Bobrov, with its ancient trident tamga, would rise again to glory.

Either that or I will die, he had promised himself.

Gazing over the river under the huge, empty sky, he wondered – could his father see him in the darkness now? Did he know that they had triumphed over Kazan?

‘You are with me,’ he whispered, with a little rush of emotion.

It must be so. God would not deny to his father the knowledge that his son was restoring the family fortunes, completing the circle that would atone for his own broken life. It must be so. If it were otherwise, then God’s universe could never be perfect.

Surely the universe was perfect. Surely one day, whatever trials God made him undergo, he would be granted success, respite from his loneliness and – ah, the thought of what was soon to happen! – with his wife he would find the love and friendship he had dreamed about but never known. He would find it: perfect love.

It would be so. He smiled, and drank in the cold air before dawn.

A footfall, quite soft, came from somewhere behind him. He turned. At first he could not see anyone, but then he heard a faint rustle and saw another tall shadow move out from the line of boats.

He frowned, wondering who it could be. The shadow came forward slowly, but not until it was only three paces away could he clearly see this figure’s face; and when he did, he had gasped with astonishment, then bowed low, as he saw it was Tsar Ivan.

He was alone. Without speaking a word, he had advanced to the river bank and stood beside Boris for a minute or so before asking him his name.

How softly he spoke. Yet Boris thrilled to hear his voice. He asked the youth where he came from, who his family were and, though he did not comment, seemed satisfied, perhaps even pleased, with Boris’s answers. Having ascertained these facts, Ivan said no more but continued to stand silently by the young warrior staring at the broad expanse of water that stretched away, a pale glimmer, into the blackness.

What should he say? Boris wondered. Nothing perhaps, yet it seemed madness to lose this extraordinary chance to impress the Tsar. After a little time, therefore, Boris ventured to murmur: ‘Thanks to you, my sovereign, Russia is breaking free.’

Had it pleased him? Boris hardly dared to look, but when he stole a glance at the Tsar’s tall figure, he could see on his long, aquiline face only a faint frown as he continued to stare at the water. Not daring to say more, Boris waited in silence. The moving river, huge though it was, went by soundlessly.

It was some time before Ivan spoke, but when he did, it was in a deep, quiet murmur that was only just distinct enough for Boris to hear.

‘Russia is a prison, my friend, and I am Russia. Do you know why that is?’ Boris waited respectfully. ‘Russia is like a bear kept in a cage for men to mock at. Russia is trapped by her enemies – she cannot reach her own natural borders.’ He paused. ‘Yet it was not always so. In the days of Monomakh it was not so.’ He turned to address Boris directly. ‘In the days of golden Kiev, tell me, how did the men of Rus trade?’

‘From the Baltic to the Black Sea shore,’ Boris answered. ‘From Novgorod to Constantinople.’

‘Yet now the Turks occupy the second Rome; a Tatar Khan controls the Black Sea ports. And in the north,’ he sighed, ‘my grandfather Ivan the Great broke the Hansa merchants in Novgorod, yet still those German dogs control our northern coasts.’

Boris knew how Ivan the Great had ended the near cartel of the Hansa merchants in Novgorod. But alas, rich though Novgorod was, it still had to trade with the west through the Baltic ports which were mostly in the hands of the old German knightly orders or of German merchants. The only ports belonging to Russia herself were too far north, iced up for half the year.

‘Russia is landlocked,’ Ivan said bitterly. ‘That is why she is not free.’

How it touched Boris to hear these words. It was not just what the young Tsar said, but the pain that Boris heard in his voice that stirred him. This mighty sovereign, whom he already revered, suffered pain just as he did. He, too, felt a sense of indignity – in his case for Muscovy itself – just as poor young Boris suffered all the pangs of impotent fury when he considered his pitiful little inheritance at Russka. Truly, the Tsar in his noble and bitter rage was a man like himself and forgetting, for an instant, his own lowly position, he turned and whispered urgently: ‘But it is our destiny to be free, to be great. God has chosen Moscow as His third Rome. You will lead us!’

He meant it, passionately, every word.

Ivan turned and Boris felt his piercing eyes upon him, yet he was not afraid.

‘You truly believe what you have said?’

How could he not?

‘Yes, lord.’

‘That is good.’ Ivan nodded thoughtfully. ‘God led us to Kazan and gave it into our hands. He answered the prayers of His servant.’

Indeed the campaign to the Tatar city out on the eastern reaches of the Volga had resembled, at times, a mighty pilgrimage. Not only were the icons carried before the troops, but Ivan’s own crucifix, containing a piece of the True Cross, was brought from Moscow; priests had sprinkled holy water all over the camp to drive away the bad weather that was hampering the siege. And Ivan’s prayers had indeed been answered. He had prayed so long in his tent that some had even said he was afraid to join his troops, but Boris could not believe that. Was it not at the very moment in the liturgy when the priest had exclaimed: ‘Your enemies shall bow down before you,’ that the Russian mines had exploded and breached the stout oaken walls of Tatar Kazan? And was it not the feast of the Protection of the Mother of God when this had occurred?

He had never doubted the Tsar for a moment. Nor had he any doubt that Moscow was destined to lead the Christian world – she was the third Rome, until the end of days. God had given so many signs.

Sixty years before – in the year, by the western count, 1492 – the Russians had assumed the world would end. Indeed, it is a historical fact that for the year 1493, or 7001 by the old Russian count, the Orthodox Church had not even troubled to calculate the date of Easter. When, therefore, the millennium failed to arrive, there was genuine and official astonishment. What could it mean?

It meant, certain important churchmen decided, that a new age was beginning – an age which Moscow must surely be destined to lead. And so, in the reign of Ivan the Great and his successors, there began in the state of Muscovy the idea that Moscow was the third Rome.

After all, the imperial city of Constantinople, the second Rome, had fallen to the Turks. St Sophia was now a mosque. Though the Russian Church had waited patiently for the Greek Patriarch to assume his former authority, he had continued to be no more than a puppet of the Turkish ruler; and as the years passed, it became clear that the Metropolitan in Moscow was, for all practical purposes, the true leader of Eastern Orthodoxy.

An imperial destiny. The young Tsar’s grandfather, Ivan the Great, had married a princess of the old imperial family of Constantinople; from this date, the Russian royal family had proudly taken the double-headed eagle – the crest of the rulers of the fallen Roman city – as their own.

Boris looked across with reverence at the tall figure by his side. The Tsar had fallen silent and seemed to be lost in thought again.

Then he sighed.

‘Russia has a great destiny,’ he remarked sadly, ‘yet I have more to overcome within the borders of my land even than outside.’

How Boris felt for him. He knew how the bold Shuisky princes – of more senior descent than Ivan from Alexander Nevsky – had humiliated him as a boy; he knew how they and others had tried to undo the work of the great House of Moscow and replace the Tsar’s rule with that of the magnates. He thought of how, when a terrible fire had swept through Moscow only five years before, the Moscow mob had blamed Ivan’s mother’s Polish family and dragged his uncle out of the Assumption Cathedral itself and butchered him. They had even, he remembered, threatened to kill Ivan too.

Ivan’s enemies tried to block all he did; there were many, Boris had heard, who were even saying that the expedition to Kazan was a waste of money.

And now the young Tsar was turning to him – to him, Boris Bobrov from a miserable little estate by Russka – he was turning to him by the dark waters of the Volga and saying quietly: ‘I need such men as you.’ A moment later he had gone and Boris, trying to see him, could only whisper fervently after him, into the shadows: ‘I am yours,’ to which he added that most awesome of all tides: ‘Gosuda’ – sovereign, lord of all.

He had stayed there, trembling with excitement, as the faint dawn at last began to appear in the east.

As the boats continued their journey up the great River Volga that day, Boris was still just as excited by late afternoon as he had been early that morning. What might the meeting with the young Tsar lead to? Was this a prelude to a step forward for his family?

Boris, son of David, surnamed Bobrov. The custom of naming people had changed in recent generations. None, nowadays, but princes and the greatest boyars used the full form of patronymic, with its ending in – vich. Tsar Ivan, for instance, was Ivan Vasilevich but he, a humble noble, was only Boris Davidov, son of David – not Davidovich. To define his identity more precisely, however, a Russian might add to these two names a third – usually the name by which his grandfather was best known. Sometimes this was a baptismal name, like Ivan, so that the third name became Ivanova, shortened to Ivanov. Or it might be a nickname.

It was in this way, during the sixteenth century, that family names began to appear, somewhat late, in Russia. For this third name was sometimes held over to later generations – though the practice was still at the individual’s choice, and a family, having chosen a surname, might easily alter it several times.

Boris’s family were proud of their name. It was, they always insisted, Ivan the Great himself who had given Boris’s greatgrandfather the nickname ‘Bobr’, meaning beaver: though whether it was because he liked to wear a beaver coat, or that he was hardworking, or whether that awesome monarch decided this minor nobleman looked like a beaver, no one seemed to know. But Bobrov the family had decided to be called, and that was that. The Mighty Beaver, they called this ancestor respectfully. It was his father who had given the monastery at Russka its beautiful icon by Rublev, and the family saw to it, with progressively more modest donations, that both men were still remembered by the monks in their prayers.

For the family of Bobrov had fallen from what they had been in former times. The decline had been gradual and was entirely typical of Russian noble families.

In the first place, the estates had been divided many times over the generations, and the last three had failed to acquire new ones. The greatest blow had been when Boris’s grandfather, having become, like so many of his class, hopelessly in debt to the local monastery, had handed over to it the entire village of Russka, keeping for himself only the lands at Dirty Place. The family still had a house within the walls of Russka which the monastery let them have at a modest rent; and since Boris felt that the name of Dirty Place sounded undignified, he preferred to say that he came from Russka.

One day, he hoped, I’ll build Dirty Place up into something and then perhaps I’ll change its name to Bobrov.

But until that time it was just a shabby little hamlet and it was all he had.

In some ways he was lucky. The estate at Dirty Place, though rather reduced by subdivision, was still on good soil and he was the sole heir. It was also a votchina – it belonged to him absolutely by inheritance. In the last half century, less and less land was being held as votchina, and more and more was being held, either by impoverished landowners or by new men, as pomestie – that is, on condition of service to the prince. And though in practice pomestie land often passed to the next generation of a family, it only did so at the prince’s pleasure. Even so, Boris’s income was hardly enough to pay for horses and armour and support him through the year. If the family was ever to recover its former state, he must gain the favour of the prince.

The meeting with the Tsar had been the most important thing that had happened to him so far in his life. But even though the Tsar now knew his name, he must do more to attract his hero’s attention. The question was, what?

In late afternoon, they passed an area on the left bank where the woods gave way to a long strip of steppe; and it was while they went by that Boris saw a motley collection of houses about a mile away. He gave a faint snort of disgust as, staring at them, he saw that they were moving.

‘Tatars,’ he murmured.

The Tatars on Muscovy’s borders often lived in these strange, mobile houses – not so much caravans, like those used by the gypsies of western Europe, as wooden huts with small wheels underneath them. To the Tatars, the fixed abodes of the Russians, attracting rats and all kinds of vermin, were like pigsties. To Boris their mobile homes proved that they were shifting and untrustworthy.

The sight of these vagrants made him think about the two he had captured. He looked down at them. They were a pair of stocky, flat-faced fellows with shaved heads; when they spoke, their voices were deep and loud.

They bray like asses, he thought.

And they were Moslems.

Though the campaign had been a crusade, it was the Tsar’s policy that the Tatar populations he conquered should be converted to Christianity by persuasion, not by force. Indeed, to weaken their resistance, his emissaries were careful to point out to the Tatars that the empire of Muscovy already contained Moslem communities whom the Tsar allowed to worship in peace. But of course, if a Tatar wished to enter the Tsar’s personal service, he must be a Christian; for Ivan himself was strict and devout.

If I am to impress the Tsar, Boris considered, I must show that I too am devout.

The two Tatars would convert that night. And soon, he felt sure, he too would become one of the Tsar’s chosen few – his best men.

The afternoon was overcast, but ahead of them a break in the grey clouds had allowed mighty shafts of sunlight to descend, which lit up an area of broken forest causing it to shine with an almost unnatural gleam. And to Boris, gazing eagerly towards the west, it seemed as though this sunlit patch of land, aspiring to escape from the endless, dull stasis of the plain, had gathered itself together in a pool of golden fire, and was being drawn up into the sky like a huge pillar of prayer.

At dawn the next morning the two Tatars were baptized by one of the priests travelling with them. Following the Russian custom, they were fully immersed, three times, in the River Volga.

The young Tsar could not have failed to notice it.

Two days later, they arrived at the great frontier city of Nizhni Novgorod.

It lay on a hill, frowning over the junction of the Volga and the Oka, the last eastern bastion of old Russia. Eastward from Nizhni Novgorod lay the huge forests where the Mordvinians dwelt. Westward lay the heart of Muscovy. The city’s high walls and its white churches stared out over the Eurasian plain as though to say: ‘Here is the land of the Holy Tsar – unshakeable.’

At Nizhni Novgorod was the great Macarius Monastery, with its enormous fair. As he walked its streets, Boris smiled. It was good to be home.

The returning army was popular at Nizhni Novgorod. The Tatars had so often disrupted their affairs in the past – and besides, Kazan was their rival in the trade with the east. The people showed their gratitude in every way.

It was mid-afternoon, the end of the working day, when he met the girl. She was standing outside a long wooden building that contained a public bath house. She was typical of her kind. Whereas the women of the upper classes were kept in virtual seclusion and did not show their faces in public, the women of the people liked to make a display of themselves.

Her face was painted white, her lips bright red. Her eyes were set wide apart and shaped like almonds. She was at least half Mordvinian, he supposed. Her eyebrows were painted black. She wore a long embroidered gown that must have been expensive, and from under which peeped two bright red shoes that tapped out a little rhythm on the ground, from time to time, to keep themselves occupied. On her head was a red velvet cap. Her eyes looked bored, because nothing was happening, but when she saw young Boris staring at her, they became first watchful, then faintly amused. As he walked up to her she smiled, and he saw that her teeth were black.

It was done with mercury, this blackening of the teeth, and Boris had heard the custom was borrowed from the Tatars. The first time he had gone with one of these women, her black teeth had repelled him, but he had learned to get used to it.

They stopped, briefly, at a little drinking booth where they were serving vodka. He liked this spirit that went down one so easily, even though at this time it was mainly used by the lower classes. It was not a Russian drink at all, but had started to enter Russia from the west through Poland in the last century. Indeed, its very name was only the mispronunciation by Russian merchants of the Latin name it bore: aqua vitae.

They finished their drink. He felt a warm surge run through him as she took him to her lodgings.

She proved to be warm, and surprisingly supple.

Afterwards, when he had paid her, she asked him if he were married, and hearing he was about to be, laughed merrily.

‘Keep her locked up,’ she cried, ‘and never trust her.’ Then she moved lightly away, in her red shoes, humming to herself.

It was with a shock, at that very moment, that Boris turned to see that a group of people had just come out of a church opposite. They were dressed in furs and did not seem anxious to attract particular attention, but Boris immediately recognized the tall young figure in their midst.

He knew very well that Tsar Ivan could not even ride near a church without paying it a visit: obviously this had been another of his sessions of prayer. But had the devout sovereign seen him with the girl? He looked at him nervously.

It was obvious that he had. His piercing eyes shot after the girl then bored into Boris. The youth held his breath.

Then Ivan laughed – a sharp, rather nasal laugh – and his party moved rapidly away.

Boris had no doubt he had been recognized: Ivan missed nothing. But had it altered the sovereign’s opinion of him – had it affected his prospects? There was no way of knowing.

It was two days before the end of October when they entered the mighty city of Moscow.

How thrilling the journey had been. They had come overland from Nizhni Novgorod, through the very heartland of Muscovy. First they had come to the ancient, high-walled city of Vladimir, where they learned that Tsar Ivan’s wife had just given him a son. Then, despite his eagerness to reach the capital, Ivan had taken a large party first to nearby Suzdal, and then across to the great Monastery of Trinity St Sergius, forty miles north of the capital, in order that he could give proper thanks to God at each place.

And as he followed the Tsar to these fortress monasteries and powerful old cities, deep in the forest and meadowland of Russia, it seemed to Boris that he saw God’s purpose and the destiny of the young Tsar more clearly than ever before.

Truly, he thought, the endless steppe will be conquered at last by Russia’s mighty heart.

There was the lightest snow in the air that day, so thin and sparse that it hardly seemed to be falling at all, but danced in the air instead, brushing carelessly against the rooftops without settling and only dusting the ground.

The city occupied a noble setting at the meeting of the Moskva and Yausa Rivers, with the long, low line of the Sparrow Hills behind. Boris still found its size overwhelming.

Indeed, though Boris did not know it, Moscow was then one of the greatest cities in all Europe – as big as sprawling London or powerful Milan. Its suburbs stretched so far out into the surrounding villages that it was hard even to say where the city began. First one encountered great monasteries with walls like castles, then the outer suburbs with their mills, orchards and gardens. And then one came to the great earth rampart that enclosed the Earth Town, where the humble classes lived; then the masonry walls of the White Town, the middle-class quarters; and at last the kitaygorod, the rich quarter, beside the towering walls of the mighty Kremlin itself.

Already, as they moved through the outer suburbs, there were crowds by the road. Everywhere, it seemed, bells were pealing through the snow. Huge shapes – walls, towers, the golden domes of the monasteries – loomed in the middle distance out of the grey haze of the snow-dusted sky.

And then, as they finally approached the citadel – as though in welcome – the snow died away and there before them, glowing strangely under the lowering orange light of the snow clouds, lay the mighty city.

Boris caught his breath at the sight. The cavalrymen in their pointed helmets or their tall, cylindrical fur hats rode so proudly towards the city gates; on each side of them marched the Tsar’s new crack infantry corps of musketeers – the streltsy – and other halberdiers who, Boris could see, were already having trouble containing the thickening and enthusiastic crowd that was streaming out of the gates in Moscow’s mighty walls.

How splendid, and how powerful. Great towers rose at intervals along the city walls – towers with high pyramidal roofs like pointed tents. And enclosed behind them lay the great sea of wooden houses, interrupted by stone towers and domes, that was the city.

Moscow: city of the imperial Tsars. When they had crowned Ivan, they had put a cap of fur and gold upon his head and claimed it had belonged to Monomakh, greatest of princes in the days of the ancient Rus. But the autocrats of Moscow went far beyond anything that Monomakh would have dreamed of in the ancient days of Kiev. Each time a city fell, its princely family was broken and made servants of the state; and its leading boyars were resettled in other provinces. When the young Tsar’s grandfather had taken over Novgorod, he had even taken away the bell they used to summon the veche, in order to mark that the citizens’ ancient freedoms were gone for ever. The Moscow family had invented a genealogy which traced their ancestry to the great Roman emperor Augustus, at the time of Christ. In the Kremlin now, splendid cathedrals by Italian architects had appeared beside the onion domes and towers of its older churches and monasteries so that, here in the heart of this northern forest empire, one might, for an instant, think oneself before a Florentine palazzo.

Moscow: city of Church and state. In the opinion of many churchmen, the state and religious authorities should rule together in perfect sympathy. This was the Byzantine ideal of the old Roman Empire of the east. And so it was in Moscow. Had not young Ivan already set out two great programmes of reforms, one for his administration and one for the Church? The young Tsar would not tolerate magnates who oppressed the people, nor clergy who were lax or immoral in their habits. Did not each great law code have a hundred chapters? For Ivan liked such mighty symmetry.

Moscow: heart and mind of Russia. Inside the great, stout walls that ringed the city, dwelt some merchants and others from abroad; but never were they allowed to defile the inner life of the mighty people of the north. Catholics and Protestants could visit but not make converts. Orthodox Russians knew better than to trust the treacherous people of the west. Though there were many Jews and other foreigners down in the southern lands of Kiev, here in the north none were allowed to come.

The state of Muscovy might yearn to possess the Baltic ports that would give them free access to the west but here at Moscow, her heart and mind would be safe, impenetrable, protected by mighty walls that should never be broken down. Neither Tatars with sword and fire, nor treacherous Catholic, nor cunning Jew should ever enter and conquer here. This was Russia’s protection against fear.

A great procession was moving from the city gates. The clergy was coming led by the Metropolitan. With banners, icons, shining vestments, they came from the huge walled city with its gleaming domes, under the heavy grey and orange sky, while the air was riven with a thousand crashing bells. They were coming to greet the Tsar.

‘Slava – all praise. Conqueror, saviour of Christians.’

And it was on this day that Boris heard the soldiers give a new name to the conquering Tsar Ivan. They were calling him Grozny – meaning ‘Awesome’, ‘Dread’, or, as it is usually if inaccurately rendered: ‘Terrible’.

The snows had already fallen when his wedding day arrived.

A few friends, all made in the last year, came to the little house in the White Town suburb to collect him; but despite their attempts at gaiety, he felt very much alone.

Already, though it was less than a month before, the triumphant return to Moscow seemed far away.

What a day that had been! After Metropolitan Macarius had made his speech of welcome, Ivan had replied, comparing the Tatar yoke to the captivity of the ancient Hebrews. Even Boris had felt like a hero as they passed through the city gates and came to Red Square and the mighty Kremlin.

He had felt like a hero as he drank in the taverns with the other young fellows. He had felt like a conqueror when he came out into the night and walked about the citadel admiringly.

The huge space of Red Square had been nearly empty. In summer, it was full of market stalls, though in winter the whole market moved down on to the frozen river below. The big open space stretched away before him like the empty steppe. Beside it rose the massive, impenetrable walls of the Tsar’s fortress with its vast, high towers. The tallest soared up two hundred feet into the starlit night and somewhere, in that vast, closed fort, dwelt the Tsar. Some day, he had thought contentedly, I’ll be asked to go inside those walls.

His elated mood had lasted until he had gone into the quarter just east of the Kremlin.

This was the kitaygorod – the so-called Basket Town – a walled area within which great nobles and the richest merchants dwelt. Here were big houses not only of wood but even of masonry too. The rich nobles were celebrating. The street was full of big sledges pulled by magnificent horses. The coachmen were drinking and talking together. Even by torchlight, he could see splendid furs and oriental carpets piled in the empty sledges, for the comfort of the burly, wealthy men who would in due course stomp out into the night.

His prospective father-in-law, he had realized, was probably in there somewhere. True, he did not live there – he had a substantial wooden house in the White Town – but he was sure to be at the feast of some powerful men in this noblest quarter. And this knowledge had reminded Boris of the central fact of his life. He was poor.

Indeed, as his future father-in-law Dimitri Ivanov had made clear, he was only giving Boris his third daughter as a favour to Boris’s father, who had been his friend in bygone years. Not that Boris was making such a brilliant marriage – though it was the best that his poor father had been able to arrange.

But for Dimitri, it was certainly a sacrifice. The possession of three good-looking daughters was an asset to a noble like him. They were kept in seclusion in the women’s quarters upstairs and could be used to make marriages that would benefit the family. Though young Boris was acceptable by his birth, that was all; and so the dowry that Dimitri gave his youngest daughter Elena was very modest and caused Boris sadly to realize a simple truth. ‘The richer you are, the more people think they ought to give you,’ he sighed.

As for his feelings about Elena, Boris was both excited and uncertain. His father had arranged the betrothal long before, and it was only when he had come to Moscow before leaving for the Kazan campaign that he had met her.

He would never forget it. He had entered the big wooden house late one morning. They had offered him bread and salt and, in the proper manner, he had gone to the icons in the red corner, bowed three times and murmured, ‘Lord have mercy.’ It was as he crossed himself from right to left and turned that the girl and her father had entered the room.

Dimitri was short, fat and bald. He wore a dazzling blue and gold kaftan. His face was broad and narrow-eyed, revealing the existence of a Tatar princess in his family some generations before, of which he was very proud. His beard was full, and red, and reached luxuriantly down his swelling belly over which it was carefully brushed outward like a fan.

Elena was at his side. She was wearing a long embroidered dress of pinkish red. Her hair was golden and plaited in a single braid down her back. On her head was a modest diadem, and over her face a veil.

With a faint grunt of satisfaction, Dimitri whipped off the veil and Boris found himself staring at his future wife.

She was not like her father at all. Her eyes were blue and soft: Boris noticed that at once. They were set rather far apart and were, perhaps, somewhat almond in shape; but that was the only hint that she might be related to this short, cruel-looking man. Her nose was narrow, yet slightly and nervously flared above her broad, rather full mouth. She seemed pale and tense. The muscles in her neck were standing out as she looked up at him.

She is afraid I may not like her, he saw at once, and this made him feel tender and protective. She does not realize that she is beautiful, he also shrewdly observed. That, too, was good.

And best of all, as he stared at her thoughtfully, he realized something else: he wanted her. He wanted her with the simple, definitive passion which says: She will be mine to order as I please, and I can make her beautiful.

‘I had a fine offer for her the other day,’ Dimitri told him frankly, ‘but I had kissed the cross on this with your father and there’s an end to it.’

Boris gazed at her. Yes, she was lovely. He started to smile.

And it was then that the little incident had taken place that caused him, on his wedding day, to be uncertain. It was nothing really. He told himself it meant nothing at all. Elena had looked down at the floor. Yet what was the expression that had flitted across her rather anxious face? Was it disappointment? Or could it conceivably have been disgust? He had looked carefully but been unable to see. Surely if she had utterly disliked him she would have said so to her father? He would not have held Dimitri to his oath in such a circumstance. Or was she remaining silent out of a sense of duty?

In the few meetings they had had since, he had tried to suggest to her that if she was unhappy in any way she should tell him, but she had modestly assured him that she was not.

All was well, he told himself, as the party came near Dimitri Ivanov’s house. All would be well.

And surely, he thought, as they stood together before the priests, surely this was meant to be.

The Russian marriage service was long. The tall tapers, decorated with marten skins, filled the church with brightness; the air was heavy with the smell of wax and the priests with their long beards and their heavy robes coated with pearls and gemstones seemed almost heavenly presences as they solemnly moved about and the choir chanted. Candlelight, incense, hours of standing: like every Orthodox ceremony, by the time it was over, ‘you knew you had been to church’.

Boris made his vows and gave the ring which, in the Russian Orthodox manner, was placed on the fourth finger of her right hand. But the most moving moment for him was the point, towards the end of the service, where his bride reverently went down on her knees and prostrated herself before him, lightly tapping his foot with her forehead as a token of her submission.

It was a very real submission. Like all women of the upper classes, she would be kept in near seclusion. Indeed, it was a point of honour with both of them that she should be. She will never demean herself by appearing in public, like a common working woman in the street, he promised himself.

And similarly, it was a point of honour with her that she should obey her husband. To disobey him would be, to her, as disloyal as if a soldier disobeyed an order from his commander. To contradict him before others would be the act of a mere plebeian.

Some men made a point of beating their wives and, Boris had heard, the wives took it as a sign of love. Indeed, the famous guide to family conduct, the Domostroi, which had been written by one of the Tsar’s close advisers, gave precise instructions as to how a wife should be whipped, but not beaten with a stick, and even told the husband how to speak to her kindly afterwards, so as not to damage their marital relations.

But as he looked down at this young woman at his feet whom he scarcely knew but now intensely desired, Boris had no wish to punish her. He wanted only to merge himself with her, to take her in his arms and, though he scarcely realized it himself, to receive from her the warm affection that he had never known.

So he now experienced a sudden, sharp emotion as, following the custom, he cast the bottom of his long gown over her as a sign of his protection.

I will love her and protect her, he swore in a silent prayer, and believed that in this moment, before the blazing candles, he had truly become a man.

At the end of the ceremony, the priest handed them a cup from which both drank and then, in the best Russian manner, he crushed it under his heel.

As they walked out the guests, who were almost entirely on her side, threw hops over them. They were married. He sighed with relief.

There was only one small episode which remained in his mind to mar the happy day. It took place at the wedding feast afterwards.

There were many guests and, as is usual on such occasions, they treated the young man kindly. This being an important family gathering, the women also attended the feast and he made a low obeisance before Dimitri Ivanov’s old mother who, it was said, ruled the whole family down to all her grandchildren from the splendid seclusion of her room on the upper floor. She gave him, he noticed, a nod but not a smile.

The tables were already piled high with food. At this season he knew there would be goose and swan, well seasoned with saffron. There were blinis served with cream, caviar, the meat pies made with eggs called pirozhki; there was salmon and all manner of sweetmeats – all the rich diet that caused the swollen figures of so many of the men and women crowding the room.

On a table set to one side, he noticed something else that impressed him – red and white wines from France.

For though the men of Moscow were not permitted to travel to other lands – indeed, to do so without permission might mean death – the nobles and rich merchants were as familiar with foreign luxury goods as they were ignorant of the way of life of the countries from which these came. To afford such wines at one’s table: this was to be upper class, Boris considered. In his own house he usually drank mead.

Poor as he was, proud as he was, and small as the dowry had been, Boris could not help feeling a sense of gratification that he had joined himself to these people who were so obviously rich.

The company sat down to the wedding banquet with the bride and groom put in a place of honour. At once, before the meal properly began, wine was served. Boris drank some and quickly felt a renewed surge of warmth. He had some more, looked at his bride with a little frisson of excitement, and smiled at those around him.

All was well. Almost. For though he had no great love for Dimitri Ivanov, there was only one person in the room that he hated, and for some reason he had been seated opposite him.

This was Elena’s brother Feodor. He was a strange creature. While the elder of her two brothers closely resembled his stocky red-headed father, Feodor, aged nineteen, was slim and fair-haired like Elena. His beard was clipped very short and was curled. The rumour was that he had had all his body hair plucked out. Sometimes his face was lightly powdered, but in honour of the occasion he had restrained himself that day; however, it was clear that his face had been massaged and patted with some unguent, and even across the table Boris could pick up the heavy smell of his scent.

There were many such dandies in Moscow: they were quite fashionable, despite the stern Orthodoxy of the Tsar. Many, though not all, were homosexual. But as Feodor had informed him at their first meeting: ‘I love what is beautiful, Boris: boys or girls. And I take whatever I want.’

‘Sheep and horses too, no doubt,’ Boris had replied drily. The practices of some of Feodor’s friends were said to be varied.

But Feodor had not been at all abashed. He had fixed his hard, shining eyes on Boris.

‘Have you tried them?’ he had asked in mock seriousness and then, with a harsh laugh, ‘Perhaps you should.’

Boris did not care for this, coming from the brother of his bride. There was something harsh and cruel in Feodor, despite his wit and occasional humour, and he had avoided him since.

For some reason Elena was fond of him. She did not seem to think that his nature was truly vicious – unless, which God forbid, she condoned him? Boris had tried not to think about this possibility.

But this was the wedding feast. He must try to love them all. Dutifully therefore he raised his glass and smiled when Feodor proposed a toast to him.

The blow, when it came, was completely unexpected.

It was halfway through the meal that Feodor, eyeing him calmly, remarked: ‘How nice you two look together.’ And then, before Boris could think of any reply: ‘You should enjoy sitting in your place, Boris. After this, I’m afraid, you’ll be sitting much further down the table from any of us.’ It was said, apparently, with ironic humour, but loud enough for many people to hear.

Boris started violently.

‘I do not think so. The Bobrovs are at least on a level with the Ivanovs.’

But Feodor only laughed.

‘My dear Boris, surely you realize, no one here could ever serve under you.’

It was an insult: the greatest and most calculated that could have been given. But it was not an idle taunt, as if he had said: ‘Let a dog puke on your mother.’ Boris could not get up and strike him for it. Feodor had made a highly technical statement about his family that could be verified in a book. And it was possible, Boris feared, that what he had said might be true.

For the entire upper class of Russia, even down to an impoverished little gentleman like himself, was recorded in an enormous and hotly disputed table of precedence. This was the all-important mestnichestvo. It was not a simple system though, like that still existing in England, where a clearly defined structure of office, rank and title allows, to all intents and purposes, the entire upper and official classes to be assigned a place about which there can be no reasonable argument. For the Russian system did not depend upon the position of the individual but of all his ancestors vis-à-vis the ancestors of another man. Thus a man might refuse to sit lower down the table than another at a banquet, or even to take orders from him as an army commander, if he could prove that, say, his great-uncle had occupied a higher position than the other’s grandfather. The mestnichestvo was huge; every noble family brought the most elaborate and impressive family tree they could to the officials who were in charge of it. This tiresome system, towards which most aristocracies are prone, had been developed over the last century or so and brought now to such a point of absurdity, that Tsar Ivan had ordered it to be suspended when the army went on campaign. To do so was the only way of getting any order obeyed.

At public functions, for instance, great magnates had been known to refuse to sit in the place allocated even when the Tsar commanded – to risk his displeasure and possible ruin rather than yield. For once a family yielded place to another, then that fact, too, became a precedent in the mestnichestvo system that might reduce a family’s standing for generations to come.

Boris had always understood from his father that the Bobrovs, thanks to their former service, need yield nothing to the Ivanovs although they were somewhat poor. Was it really possible that his father had been mistaken or had misled him? He had never made enquiries: he had just assumed.

Could it be that the clan of the three-pronged tamga, of warriors who went back to Kievan times, were of such small account in the state of Muscovy?

As he looked at Feodor, so confident, so quietly mocking, he began to lose confidence in his own position and started to blush.

‘This is no time for such matters.’

It was Dimitri Ivanov’s voice, cutting through the lull in the general conversation, and for once Boris was grateful to his father-in-law. But for the rest of the evening that sense of embarrassment, as if the ground had given way under his feet, remained with him.

Late that night the young men of the party escorted the couple back to Boris’s house. It was a small house which, because it had belonged to a priest, was painted white as a sign that the occupant paid no taxes. Boris had been lucky to find it.

Everything was ready. Following the custom, he had laid sheaves of wheat upon his nuptial bed. And now at last he found himself alone with Elena.

He looked at her. Did she look thoughtful? Did she look sad? She smiled, a little nervously. He realized that he had not the remotest idea what was in her mind.

And what was she thinking, this rather quiet, shy fourteen-year-old with the golden hair?

She was thinking that she could love this young man: that he seemed to her better, if a little slower-witted, than her brother. She was afraid that, being young and inexperienced, she might not know how to please him.

She saw that he was lonely; that was obvious. But she also perceived that there was something brittle in him. While she wanted to comfort him, and help him grow out of what she sensed was a morbid state, her instinct told her that, as he came up against an unyielding world, he might turn back into his loneliness and demand that she share it. And it was this sense of danger, this dark cloud on the horizon, that made her a little hesitant to subjugate herself to him too quickly.

But the simple discoveries of passion, in two very young people, were enough to form the beginning of their marriage on that and the succeeding nights.

In two weeks’ time, they were due to visit Russka.

It was a sparkling winter morning as Boris and Elena, wrapped in furs, and in the first of two sleds each drawn by three horses, approached the little town of Russka.

Meanwhile, in the market place at Russka, a small but significant meeting was taking place.

To look at them, one would not have guessed that the four men – a priest, a peasant, a merchant and a monk – were cousins; and of these four, only the priest knew that he was descended from Yanka, the peasant woman who had killed Peter the Tatar.

It was Mikhail, the peasant from Dirty Place, who was especially anxious. He was a squarely built, broad-chested fellow with soft blue eyes and an aureole of wavy, dark brown hair that rose almost upright from his head. Now, his usually placid face looked worried.

‘You are sure her dowry is small?’

‘Yes,’ the tall priest replied.

‘That’s bad. Very bad.’ And the poor man stared at his feet miserably.

Stephen gazed down at him sympathetically. For four generations, ever since his great-grandfather had been named after the old monk, Father Stephen the icon painter, to whom they were related, the eldest sons in his family had been called Stephen and had entered the priesthood. His own wife was also the daughter of a priest. Stephen was twenty-two, a tall, imposing figure with a carefully trimmed dark beard, serious blue eyes and an air of quiet dignity that made him seem older. His information about Elena was sure to be good. He had contacts in Moscow, and since he could read and write – an unusual accomplishment in the priesthood at this time – he could even correspond with the capital.

‘A wife with no money – just think what that means for me!’ Mikhail lamented. ‘He’ll squeeze me till he breaks my bones. What else can he do?’

The question was asked without any rancour. Everyone understood the problem. Dirty Place was all Boris had. With a wife, and soon a family to keep, the only way he could possibly survive would be to get more from his estate and the peasants on it. Under his ailing father, things had been lax; but who knew what might happen now?

‘You two are lucky,’ he remarked to Stephen and the monk. ‘You’re churchmen. As for you,’ he turned to the merchant with a rueful smile that contained a trace of malice, ‘what do you care? You live in Russka.’

Lev the merchant was a stout man of thirty-five, with thin black hair swept back over his head and a hard, Tatar face. His beard was thick. His Mongol eyes were black and cunning although, as now, they could soften with faint amusement when simple-minded men like his cousin Mikhail assumed that his elementary business practices were some kind of fiendish cunning.

He dealt chiefly in furs, but he had extended his activities into several ventures, and in particular had prospered as a lender of money.

As was often the case in Russia, the largest moneylender in the area was the monastery, which had by far the greatest capital. But the expanding economy of the last hundred years had created opportunities for many merchants to supply credit as well, and in Russia all classes borrowed. A prosperous small-town merchant like Lev might be owed money even by a magnate or a powerful prince. Interest rates were high. Some loan sharks even charged a hundred and fifty per cent and more. Mikhail was sure that his rich cousin would go to hell when he died, but meanwhile he envied him. They were all the same, he thought, the people who lived in Russka – rich and heartless.

Since Russka had been taken over by the monastery, it had grown. There were now several rows of huts of which some were quite large, with their main rooms upstairs to keep them dry throughout the year. Over five hundred people lived within its walls which, like those of the monastery across the stream, had been strengthened. Over the gateway, now, there was a high tower with a tall tent roof made of wood. This served as a watchtower for town and monastery, to give them warning of the approach of the Tatars or the bandits who had appeared in the area several times in recent years.

There was a busy, prosperous and orderly air about the little town. In the market place, beside which there was now a stone church as well as an older wooden one, bright stalls were regularly set up. People came from all the nearby villages and hamlets. There was a tax collector in the place who received the customs dues from the traders, but the original impetus for the market was the fact that the goods supplied by the monastery were exempt from taxes. Here one could buy salt, brought in shallow draft boats from the north, and caviar. Local pork, honey and fish were all excellent. Wheat came upriver from the Riazan lands to the south.

But above all, Russka was known for its icons. The monastery had a regular little workshop. There were no less than ten monks, working with assistants, producing a constant flow of icons which were sold in the Russka market. A number of artisans, brought in by the monastery, were housed in Russka where they turned out handicrafts, some religious, others not, for sale on the stalls. People came from Vladimir, and from Moscow itself, to buy.

Now Lev turned to Mikhail and put his arm round him.

‘I shouldn’t worry,’ he counselled. And then he spoke aloud the thought that only Mikhail, amongst the four of them, had failed to grasp. ‘Don’t you realize – if this fellow has his way,’ he indicated the monk beside him, ‘young lord Boris won’t have his estate much longer anyway.’

The gentle, joyful hiss of the sleds. They ran down the gleaming road of the frozen River Rus, between the lines of soft, snow-laden trees until, round a curve, the banks opened up to several broad, white meadows.

In the first sled rode Boris and Elena. In the second, the five Tatar slaves, Elena’s maid, and a huge quantity of baggage.

And now at last, there lay Russka before them, with the monastery below it. How quiet it was. Under a clear, light blue sky the wooden tent roof of the tower, glistening in the sun, reminded Boris of a tall sheaf of wheat or barley, tied just below the top, standing in a field after harvest. He squeezed Elena’s hand and sighed with pleasure at the familiar, childhood sensation of being enveloped in the peace of the Russian countryside.

The tower, it seemed to him, was like a token of summer and of fulfilment, hanging in the bright winter sky.

Elena, too, smiled. Thank God, she was thinking, that the place was not quite as small as she had feared. Perhaps there might be a few women here that she could talk to.

In no time they were gliding up the slope and round to the gate. As they entered the main square, she noticed the four men standing together near the centre. Seeing the sleds, they turned and bowed respectfully. It seemed to her that they were also observing her carefully. They appeared friendly enough. She pulled the furs up to cover her face as the sled came towards them; she noticed that one was a priest and one a monk.

It was impossible to see the expression on the face of Daniel the monk, because his thick black beard covered so much of it that one could really only make out the two small bright eyes that looked out watchfully at the world, and the top of what were obviously broad, pock-marked cheeks.

He was on the short side, stockily built, but with slightly rounded shoulders. His quiet, stooping manner suggested a submissiveness proper to his religious calling. He spoke rather quietly, yet there was something about his hard brown eyes, an occasional suddenness in his movements, that suggested a passionate nature either repressed or concealed.

He was watching the young couple intently.

Stephen the priest, observing both, felt sorry for Boris and Elena. He had liked Boris’s father, admired his long fight with sickness, and buried him with a sense of personal loss. He wished young Boris well.

As for Daniel the monk, Stephen did not approve of him.

‘People say that I love money,’ Lev had once remarked to him, ‘but I don’t come near that little monk.’

It was true. The merchant’s rapaciousness had bounds; there was the ordinary give and take of the market place in his dealings. But Daniel the monk, though he had nothing of his own, seemed to be obsessed with acquiring wealth: he wanted it for the monastery.

‘He is greedy for God,’ Stephen had sighed. ‘It’s a crime.’

The great battle between those who thought the Church should give up its riches, and those who thought it should keep them, had been fought for generations. Many churchmen believed the Church should revert to a life of poverty and simplicity – especially those followers of a saintly monk named Nil Sorsky, who lived in the simple communities in the forest hinterland beyond the northern loop of the Volga. This faction, encouraged by these stern Trans-Volga Elders, became known to history as the Non-Possessors; though most people in Russka, and many in the capital too, referred to them affectionately as the Non-Greedy.

But they lost. A little after 1500 the Church council, led by the formidable Abbot Joseph, declared that the Church’s lands and wealth gave her a power on earth that was wholly desirable. Those who thought otherwise were in danger of being called heretics.

Stephen the priest privately favoured poverty. His cousin Daniel, however, had shown such diligence in everything relating to business that the abbot of the Peter and Paul Monastery had made him the supervisor of the monastery’s activities in the little trading town. To hear Daniel talk about the fall of Kazan, you might have mistaken him for a merchant or a tax collector. ‘We can pick up some of the extra trade through Nizhni Novgorod and from the south,’ he would explain eagerly in his soft voice. ‘Silk, calico, frankincense, soap…’ He would tick them off on his fingers. ‘Perhaps we can even get some rhubarb too.’ For some reason this luxury was still imported from the east.

But above all, Daniel’s secret mission in life was to help the abbot enlarge the monastery’s lands.

He would probably succeed. For generations the Church had been the one section of the community which had continuously increased its landholdings. Two years before Tsar Ivan had tried to limit the scale of this growth by insisting that the monasteries and churches must have his permission before they accepted or bought any more land. But these rules were always hard to enforce. In the central regions of Muscovy, at this time, the Church owned about a third of the land.

There were two desirable estates close by. One was just to the north and east, a tract of land that had passed back into the hands of the Moscow princes. Perhaps Ivan would grant them this: for despite his recent attempts to limit them, he was still a huge giver of land to the Church himself. And then there was Dirty Place.

Boris’s father had held on to his estate, but would the young man with his wife and small dowry be able to? Daniel smiled. Probably not. They would either give the land to the monastery in return for a life tenancy: this was often done. Or they could sell it outright. Or they could get themselves ever deeper into debt until the monastery took the estate over. Boris would be well treated. His family’s long connection with the monastery would ensure that. He would live out his life with honour. The monks would pray, after his death, for this noble benefactor who gave his lands to the service of God. We’ll look after him,’ he would say.

There was only one problem the monk foresaw. Knowing the monastery’s intentions, the young man would try very hard to keep his independence, as his father had done. He would do everything he could to avoid borrowing money from the monastery. ‘Which is where you come in,’ Daniel had told Lev the merchant the day before. ‘When the young man wants to borrow, offer to lend to him and I’ll guarantee the loan,’ he suggested. ‘I’ll see that you don’t suffer by it.’

At which Lev had laughed, and his Tatar eyes had shown a flicker of amusement.

‘Ah, you monks…’ he had replied.

And now the young man was approaching.

Elena was surprised, as the sled crossed the square, to hear her husband mutter a curse. What a strange, moody fellow he was, this young man. But when she glanced at him, he gave her a rueful grin.

‘My enemies,’ he whispered. ‘They’re all cousins.’ The four men looked harmless enough to her. ‘Beware especially of the priest,’ he added.

Boris’s fear of the priest was founded upon a single fact: that Stephen could read. He himself could make out a few words. There were many nobles at court, he knew, who read; and the monks and priests in the great monasteries and churches read and wrote in their own, rather stylized, church language. But what was this parish priest, in a little village, doing with books? To Boris it seemed foreign and suspicious. Catholics, or those strange German Protestants who traded in Moscow, probably read books. Worse yet – so did Jews.

For there was always the Jewish danger: Boris knew about that. By this, however, he did not mean the Jewish faith as such, nor Jewish people. He meant the Christian heretics known as Judaizers.

They were a strange group. They had appeared rather briefly in the Orthodox Church the previous century and been rooted out in the reign of Ivan the Great. Some of them, like the Jews, considered Christ a prophet rather than the Messiah. But even at the time the exact nature of the heresy had been confused. What was clear though, to succeeding generations of faithful Russians like Boris, was that these people relied on logic, subtle arguments and books – and were therefore not to be trusted.

Boris knew that Daniel the monk was after his land: that he could understand. But Stephen – who knew what he might be thinking?

The little group greeted the new arrivals politely. They smiled respectfully at Elena. Then the sled moved on towards the little house, just past the church at the far end of the square, where the steward, his wife, and the servant girls would be waiting for them.

Elena smiled, trying to make her husband happy, but she felt uneasy.

Boris inspected the estate at Dirty Place the next morning.

The old steward conducted him round. He had been there since Boris was a child and was not a bad fellow. Small, quiet, close-knit, his thick hair was all grey now and the lines on his brow were so deep that it looked as if someone had scored them there with half a dozen blows from an axe. He was honest, so far as Boris knew.

‘It’s all in good order, just as your father left it,’ he remarked.

Boris looked around thoughtfully.

In certain ways he was lucky. When the Tsar’s land assessors, after Ivan’s recent tax reforms, had visited Russka, they had carefully inspected the Bobrov estate. It contained a little over three hundred chetverts, or some four hundred and ten acres of land.

The Bobrovs had been lucky on two counts. Firstly, the assessors had kindly decided that some of the land was low quality, which lessened the taxes. And secondly, the area of the estate was just a little larger than their standard measurements allowed for.

For the Russian land assessors could not compute fractions. Certain ones they knew: a half, an eighth, even a thirty-second; a third, a twelfth, a twenty-fourth. But they could not express, for instance, a tenth; nor could they add or subtract fractions with different divisors. So when they discovered that the good land at Dirty Place consisted of almost two hundred and fifty-four chetverts, which came in tax terms to a quarter of a plough plus another fifteenth, they contented themselves with a quarter plus a sixteenth – the nearest fraction they knew – thus leaving over four acres free of tax.

Thus, as they so often did, the Russians made ingenious accommodations where their expertise failed them.

Compared to many of those to whom the Tsar had granted the service, pomestie, estates, Boris was not badly off. Most of these had only half what he had. The present income from the estate however was ten roubles a year. To go on campaign cost him seven roubles for himself and his horses; his armour and equipment he already owned. He owed four roubles a year in taxes though, and he had some modest debts in Russka, including one to Lev the merchant. As things stood, therefore, he would slip slowly into debt over a few years unless the Tsar did something for him.

Yet he was not discouraged. In time, he was determined to win Ivan’s favour: and who knew what wealth that might bring him? As for the present…

‘I think we can double the income from the estate,’ he announced to the steward. ‘Don’t you?’ And when the old man hesitated, Boris merely snapped: ‘You know very well we can.’

Which was exactly what poor Mikhail the peasant had feared.

There were two kinds of payment that a peasant could make to his lord. He could pay rent, in money or kind; this was termed obrok; or he could work his lord’s land: this was boyar-service, called barshchina. Usually peasants gave a combination of both.

The peasants at Dirty Place worked only one or two days on the land which Boris retained in his own hands – the demesne. In addition, they paid him obrok for the land they held. During the last twenty years, the estate had lost three tenants: one had left for another lord; one had died without heirs and one had been sent away. They had not been replaced and thus an extra hundred acres of good land had been retained by Boris’s father. And while rents had been increased several times, they had not quite kept up with the steady rise in prices over recent decades.

Mikhail paid twenty-four bushels of rye, the same of oats, a cheese, fifty eggs, eight dengi of money and a wagonload of firewood. He also had to work nearly three acres of Boris’s land, which took him rather under one day a week. His agreement with Boris did not stipulate how his obligations were to be organized. If Boris wanted to change them, he could. And the price of grain was rising.

‘So,’ Boris remarked cheerfully, ‘we can reduce the peasant’s obrok and increase their banhchina.’

The grain he could produce on the spare land, if the peasants worked it two or three days a week, would be worth far more than the rents they currently paid. He would gain hugely. The peasants, of course, would lose.

‘We’ll start with two days right away,’ he said.

With the extra work from the peasants, and the two Tatar slaves, things would soon begin to look up.

It was two months later that Lev the merchant, upon Boris’s request, paid a respectful visit to his house. He knew the reason.

The sky was grey, the street a greyish-brown. Only the snow that rimmed the wooden fences gave a pale reminder that not all the world was dreary.

It surprised Lev that the young man and his bride had not already returned to Moscow. He supposed it must be dull for them here. Not that Boris had been idle in the country: he had carried out a thorough review of everything the estate possessed.

The merchant’s poor cousin Mikhail had lamented to him: ‘His father was never like this. He seems to miss nothing. He’s a Tatar like you, Lev.’

Though the merchant sympathized with his cousin, he admired Boris for this. Perhaps he’ll surprise them all and keep his estate yet, he thought with wry amusement.

Not that he cared. As he walked along the street, Lev knew very well where he stood in all these intrigues. He had no deep ties to any of the parties, nor did he intend to have. He was a survivor. The times were good for merchants like himself. And with this energetic young Tsar, who knew what new opportunities might open up? One had only to look at the Stroganovs up in the north, for instance, a family descended from peasants just as he was, yet who had already built themselves a huge merchant empire and, it was said, had the ear of the Tsar himself. They were people to watch and emulate.

And the way to survive was to keep on good terms with everyone. First, in Russka, that meant the monastery who owned the place. But even there one had to be careful. For if there was one part of the Church’s possessions that the Tsars in Moscow coveted, it was these valuable little towns; and sometimes the government found excuses for taking them over. If ever that happened, the young lord of Dirty Place, who served the Tsar, might be a figure of importance. You never knew.

It was in this cautious frame of mind that he arrived at the stout, two-storey wooden house with its broad outside staircase, and was shown into the large main room where Boris was waiting for him.

He seemed a little pale, held himself rather tensely; he did not waste time.

‘As you will know, the income from Dirty Place will go up sharply this year. But in the meantime, I need a loan.’

‘I am glad you came to me,’ Lev answered politely, as though he were not aware that Boris had already approached two other lesser merchants who had offered him terms he did not like.

‘I think I need five roubles.’

Lev nodded. It was quite a modest sum.

‘I can lend it to you. Your estate, of course, is ample security. The interest rate would, on this loan, be one rouble for every five.’

Twenty per cent. Boris’s mouth opened in astonishment. These were lenient terms indeed – less than half what the others had offered; that very winter in Moscow he had even heard of one fellow who had been charged one per cent a day!

Lev smiled.

‘My calculation is that I prefer friends to enemies, lord,’ he said disarmingly. ‘I trust the lady Elena Dimitreva is well?’ he added politely.

‘Yes, indeed.’ Did he see a faint look of strain appear on the young face which, a moment before, had been flooded with relief? He was not sure. The reports in the town were that Boris’s young wife was a kindly, gentle creature. Few people in Russka saw her besides the two servants and the priest’s wife who called upon her. She did not go out in public and, quite rightly, Boris summoned the priest to say the service to her rather than subject her to the prying eyes of ordinary people in church.

After a few more polite expressions Lev withdrew, and soon afterwards was crossing the market place again.

And it was when he was halfway across that he stopped in surprise, seeing two large sleds, pulled by handsome horses, come jingling into the square and make towards the house he had just left. Something about the cries of the driver and the rich furs he detected within told him that they had come from Moscow.

Life at Russka had seemed strange to Elena. It was so quiet. Yet she hardly knew herself what she had expected.

The priest’s wife who called on her was a pleasant young woman of twenty called Anna with two children of her own. She was a little plump, had a pointed nose and slightly red face, and when she spoke of her husband it was with a little smile that let you know she was entirely happy with the tall man’s physical attentions.

Boris did not seem to mind her visits, and she would often sit with Elena in the upstairs room as the afternoons closed in. From her Elena soon got a good picture of the local community and was even able to reassure Boris that he need not be quite so suspicious of the priest, who in fact wished him well.

But it was so quiet. Somehow she had supposed that being married, sharing a house with her husband, she would find her days occupied. And there were things for her to do, managing the house. Yet with Boris often out at the estate or in Russka, time hung heavily on her hands. She had paid three visits to the monastery her husband’s family had founded. She had been warmly and respectfully received by the monks. She had also gone with Boris to look at Dirty Place. She had been welcomed with low bows and a few small gifts. But it was obvious that the inhabitants of the stout huts in the hamlet regarded her as the cause of their new obligations, and she had not been anxious to go there again.

And that was all. How far away the bustle of Moscow seemed, and the busy life with her family. Why did he not take her back there? Surely he must have finished his business in Russka now: what could he do here anyway, in mid-winter?

Boris still puzzled her. She was used to her father’s often dark moods, when he would become withdrawn and sullen. She knew that most men were subject to sudden changes of temper which one must accept, and even admire. Her own mother had often said of her husband, with some pride: ‘He can throw such rages!’ as though this were an athletic accomplishment. She would not have been shocked if Boris had exhibited these features, or even if he had beaten her occasionally. That was to be expected. Lev the merchant, she now knew, beat his wife, on principle, once a week. ‘And look how many children they have,’ Anna had remarked to her, with a wry laugh.

But Boris’s moods were quite different. He was always kind. If he grew gloomy, he would retire to the stove or the window by himself; if she asked what was the matter, he would only smile wanly. When she tried to characterize his behaviour to herself, she could only think: It’s as though he is waiting.

That was it: he was waiting, always waiting. But for what? For something wonderful, or something terrible? She knew that he was waiting for her to be his perfect bride, the Anastasia to his Ivan. Yet what did that mean? She did all she could please him; she would put her arms round him when she saw him troubled. Secretly, though she did not tell him this, she even planned to go to her father and ask for extra money to help him, as soon as they got back to Moscow.

But something about her, it seemed, disappointed him, and he would not let her close enough to discover what he wanted. She was not sure if he knew himself.

And then he was waiting for disaster too – for things to go badly at Dirty Place, or for some trickery from the monastery, or some other trouble. True, when things went well, he would return home elated, full of great plans for the future, confident of the Tsar’s favour. But then hours later, he would be expecting ruin or betrayal again. It was as though the spectre of his father kept rising up before him – encouraging him one moment, then exhibiting his own slow ruin the next.

Some time after mid-winter, disturbing news had come from the east. The city of Kazan had been left with too small a garrison and now all the territory around the conquered Tatar city was in a state of revolt. ‘Tsar Ivan has called the boyar duma together, but they won’t act,’ a merchant from the capital had told Boris. ‘Half of them never wanted to take Kazan in the first place.’

It was this event that had caused the first friction between Boris and his wife.

‘Those damned boyars,’ he had cursed. ‘Those magnates. I wish the Tsar would crush them all.’

‘But not all the boyars are bad,’ she had protested. Her father had friends and patrons in those circles. Indeed Dimitri Ivanov himself did not altogether approve of the vigorous young Tsar, and had taught his daughters to be cautious of him too.

‘Yes, they are,’ Boris had snapped defiantly. ‘And we’ll teach them their place one day.’ He knew there was a covert insult to her father in these words, but he could not help himself, and when Elena looked down at the ground sadly, it only irritated him.

After this however, several weeks had passed with no definite news and she supposed the incident had passed from his mind. And now only one question obsessed her: how much longer before they returned to Moscow?

It was strange that, despite her understanding his financial position fairly well, she did not realize that the real reason he delayed was expense. He never told her, because he did not want to discuss his finances with her; and for her part, living in her father’s comfortable house in Moscow, she had never realized what a burden the social life of the capital might be to a man of modest means like Boris. As January ended and February began, she knew only one thing: that she was still at Russka and that she was lonely.

Which was why she had sent the message to her parents.

It had been quite easy. Anna had taken the message, and given it to a merchant travelling to Vladimir. He in turn had given it to a friend of his who was going to Moscow. The two women had not even needed to tell Stephen about this arrangement. The message itself was quite simple: Elena had not complained of being unhappy, but just let them know that she was by herself. Could they not send her someone – she had suggested a certain poor female relation – for company?

So it was with a cry, first of joy, and then astonishment, that she saw on the grey February day of Lev’s visit, not one but two sleds draw up by the house and realized that they contained not her poor relation, but her mother and sister!

They stayed a week.

It was not that they behaved unkindly. Elena’s mother was a tall, imposing woman, but she treated Boris with a friendly politeness; her sister, a stout married woman with children of her own, was full of laughter, seemed delighted with everything she saw and paid two visits to the monastery, making flattering remarks about its church, the icon by Rublev, and the other benefactions from his family, each time.

Of course, there were the extra expenses of providing wine for them, and extra fodder for six horses. A week of entertaining them, and Boris knew that his loan from Lev the merchant would not be quite enough. But even that was not so bad.

It was that he felt excluded.

On the simplest level, Elena insisted on sleeping beside her sister, while her mother occupied the other upstairs room and Boris slept downstairs on the big stove. The two sisters seemed to find this a great joke, and he could hear them chattering half the night. He could, he supposed, have forbidden this, but it seemed pointless. If she prefers her sister’s company to mine, he thought gloomily, let them chatter away all night.

But it was the daytime that was worse. The three women were always together, talking in whispers upstairs. He supposed they were talking about him.

Boris’s ideas about women were similar to those of many men at that time. There were many essays by Byzantine and Russian authors in circulation amongst those who could read, which testified to woman’s inferior nature. All Boris knew came from people under these influences, and from his father during his long widowhood.

He knew that women were unclean. Indeed, the Church only allowed older widows to bake the Communion bread, not wishing younger, profane female hands to contaminate the loaves. Boris always washed himself carefully after making love to his wife and even avoided her presence as much as possible when her time came each month.

But above all, women were strangers to him. He might have his little adventures from time to time, like the girl at Nizhni Novgorod, but when he came upon women as a group, he felt a certain awkwardness.

What were these women doing here in Russka? Why had they come? When he had politely asked them, Elena’s sister had answered gaily that they had come to look at the bride and at her husband’s estate and that they would be gone ‘in the twinkling of an eye’.

‘Did you ask them to come?’ he asked Elena, on one of the few occasions he could catch her alone.

‘No,’ she answered. ‘I did not.’ It was, after all, the truth. But he noticed a slight awkwardness about her when she said it. She is not mine, he thought. She is theirs.

At last they left. As they were leaving Elena’s mother, thanking him kindly for his hospitality, said pointedly: ‘We look forward to seeing you soon in Moscow, Boris Davidov. My husband and also his mother await you anxiously.’

It was a clear enough message – a promise of possible help from Dimitri together with a suggestion that the old lady would consider it disrespectful if he did not present himself before her soon. He smiled wanly. Their visit had cost him almost an entire rouble. If this was any hint of what married life in Moscow might cost, he would take his time before returning.

But what had these untrustworthy women been up to while they were eating him out of house and home? What had they done to his wife?

At first, all seemed to be well. Once again, he joined her at nights, and their lovemaking was passionate. His hopes rose.

It was two weeks later that he happened to suffer a change of mood. There was good reason for it. He had discovered certain deficiencies in the farm equipment and in the grain stores that had apparently escaped the steward. At the same time, one of the Tatar slaves had sickened and suddenly died. What little hired labour there was in the area was all contracted to the monastery. So he would either have to buy another slave or farm less land that year. He could see that a second loan from Lev the merchant was going to be needed. Whichever way he turned, it seemed that all his efforts were being thwarted.

‘You’ll work something out,’ Elena told him.

‘Perhaps,’ he had replied gloomily. And he had gone to the window to be alone with his thoughts.

It was a few hours later that she had come to talk to him.

‘You worry too much, Boris,’ she had begun. ‘It’s not so serious.’

‘That’s for me to judge,’ he told her quietly.

‘But look at your gloomy face,’ she went on. There was something in the way she said this, something faintly mocking as though she were trying to laugh him out of his mood. Where did she get this new boldness from? Those women, no doubt. He glowered.

He was perfectly right, Elena had several times asked her mother and sister what they thought of Boris, and it was her sister who had assured her: ‘When my husband gets moody, I let him see it doesn’t bother me. I just go on cheerfully and laugh him out of it. He always comes round.’

She was a busy young woman, rather pleased with her role as older adviser. It did not occur to her to notice that Boris and her own husband were entirely different.

And so now, when Elena made clear to Boris that she did not take his mood seriously, when she continued, a little smugly, to look cheerful in his presence, it made him think only: So, they have taught her to despise me.

He had been brooding angrily about this for several hours when she made her greatest mistake. It was only a casual remark, but it could hardly have been worse timed.

‘Ah, Boris,’ she said, ‘it’s foolish to be so downhearted.’

Foolish! Was his own wife now calling him a fool? In a sudden flash of frustrated rage, he leaped to his feet, his fists clenched.

‘I’ll teach you to smile and laugh at me when I am worried,’ he roared.

And as he took a step towards her he hardly knew what he might do, when a hammering on the door, followed by the sudden entrance of Stephen the priest, distracted him.

The priest, looking deeply concerned, hardly noticed Elena, and before even crossing himself before the icons, delivered a message that drove everything else from Boris’s mind.

‘The Tsar is dying.’

Whichever way Mikhail the peasant looked, he could see only trouble.

Young lord Boris was away in Moscow with his wife, though he paid brief visits from time to time. But no doubt he would return for another protracted stay before long, and who knew what he would think of doing next?

The new barshchina was a heavy burden. In addition to this service and some small payments to Boris, he also had to pay the state taxes, which usually cost him about a quarter of his grain crop. It was hard to make ends meet. His wife wove bright, cheerful cloths decorated with red bird designs, which she sold in the Russka market. That helped. There were small ways of cutting corners too: he was allowed to pick up any dead timber in the landlord’s woods and like everyone else, he ringed a tree here and there to kill it. But there was no money left over at the year’s end and he had only enough grain of his own stored to get him through one winter after a bad harvest. Those were his total reserves.

Then there was the problem of Daniel the monk. More than once Daniel had hinted to him that if his work on the estate was poorly done – if, to put it bluntly, he discreetly sabotaged Boris’s efforts – it would be no bad thing.

But in the first place, he didn’t care to do it, and secondly, if the steward caught him, the consequences could be serious.

‘We could leave,’ his wife reminded him. ‘We could leave this very autumn.’

He was considering it. But there was nothing he could do yet.

The laws that now regulated when a peasant could leave his lord had been drawn up by Ivan the Great fifty years before, and renewed by his grandson the present Tsar.

No longer could a peasant go at any time, but only at certain dates stipulated by his master – the most common of which was a two-week period centred on the autumn St George’s Day: November 25. There was logic to this – the harvest was all in by then – but it was also the bleakest time in the year for the peasant to travel. There were conditions, of course: heavy exit fees had to be paid. But all the same, once he had given notice and paid his dues, the peasant and his family were free to go, to put on their Sunday best and present themselves to a new master. Whence came the ironic Russian expression for a fruitless enterprise: ‘All dressed up for St George’s Day, with nowhere to go.’

Yet here was Mikhail’s dilemma. Even if he could ever afford to leave, where should he go to?

So much of the land now was pomestie – service estates. They were small, and the men who held them often bled their peasants dry and neglected the land which was only theirs conditionally. At least an old votchina owner like Boris had more care for the place. Alternatively, there were the free lands up in the north and east – but who knew what life might be in those distant hamlets beyond the Volga?

Or there was the Church. ‘If the monastery doesn’t get the estate, we could always go and take a tenancy on the lands they have,’ his wife suggested. Yet he wondered, would he be so much better off? He had heard of other monasteries raising rents and increasing the barshchina. ‘Let’s wait a bit and see,’ he said.

His wife would wait patiently. He knew that. She was a stout, heavy-legged creature who always made a point of glaring at any stranger; yet behind this rather harsh façade was a gentle soul who even felt sorry for Boris and his young wife who were oppressing them.

‘He’ll be dead or ruined in five years,’ she prophesied. ‘But we’ll still be here, I dare say.’

Mikhail was not so sure about his two sons though. The elder, Ivanko, was a stolid young fellow of ten with a fine singing voice, who reminded him of himself. But Karp, his little boy, was an enigma to him. He was only seven, a dark, sinewy, athletic little creature who already had a mind that was entirely his own.

‘He’s only seven, and yet I can’t do anything with him,’ he would confess with puzzled wonder. ‘Where does he get it from, the little Mordvinian? Even if I beat him, he does whatever he wants.’

There was no place for a free spirit like that on the estate at Dirty Place. There wasn’t room. As Mikhail the peasant looked about him, and did not know what to do next, he decided to consult his cousin Stephen the priest.

Boris gazed at the city of Moscow from the Sparrow Hills above. The message from Stephen the priest had said that he would call upon him that evening. There was plenty of time before he need ride down. Therefore he gazed, with neither bitterness nor, he supposed, any other strong emotion at the great citadel spread out below.

Moscow the centre: Moscow the mighty heart. On that warm September day, even the chattering birds in the trees seemed hushed.

The summer had been slow, and silent, and large, as only Russian summers can be; it had browned the whispering barley in the fields all around; it had made the silver birches gleam until they seemed as white as molten ash. Around Moscow, in high summer, the leaves of the trees – the aspen, the birch, even the oaks – were so light, so delicate, that their tiny shivering in the breeze rendered them translucent, so startlingly green that they might have been so many emeralds and opals glittering in the sun that danced through them. Only in Russia, surely, were the leaves able to say in this manner: See, we dance in this fire, infinitely fragile, infinitely strong, with no regrets at the constant message of this huge blue sky, which tells us every day that we must die.

Now, as autumn approached, the trees, and the heavy-set city itself were left with a light covering of the finest dust as, like a silent shining cloud that has hovered half a lifetime, summer now began to depart, drifting away into that huge, ever present, ever receding blue sky.

Over the thick walls of Moscow, over the huge Kremlin whose long battlements frowned above the river, everything was quiet. And who would have guessed that only months before, within those walls, death and treachery had ruled?

Thick-walled city of treachery; darkness within the huge heart of the great Russian plain.

They had betrayed the Tsar. No one was talking, but everybody knew. There was a watchfulness, a fear, in every street, at every gathering. Boris saw it in the way Dimitri Ivanov stroked his beard, or passed his hand over his bald head, or occasionally winked his rather bloodshot eyes.

He understood. They had wanted the Tsar dead: and now he was alive.

It had been close. In March, struck down with what was probably pneumonia, Ivan had been dying, almost unable to speak. On his deathbed, he had begged the princes and boyars to accept his baby son. But most had been unwilling.

‘Then we shall have another regency, run by the mother’s family, those damned Zakharins,’ they argued.

What was the alternative? Strictly speaking there was, on the outer fringes of the court, the harmless but pathetic figure of the Tsar’s younger brother – a weak-headed creature, seldom seen. Even when the boyars remembered his existence, he was generally dismissed again as unfit. But what about the Tsar’s cousin Vladimir? Of all the many princes, none was more closely related to the reigning monarch and he was a man of some experience. Here was a better candidate than this baby boy.

Over the dying man, they argued. Even Ivan’s most trusted friends, the close councillors he had made himself, were skulking in corners, whispering. They were all betraying him as he watched and listened, scarcely able to speak. And what would happen to Muscovy after he was gone? Anarchy, as they fought each other for power, these cursed, treacherous magnates.

But then he had recovered. The veil, having been lifted, descended once again. His courtiers bowed before him and greeted him with a smile. The subject of his cousin Vladimir’s succession was not spoken of, as though it had never been. And Tsar Ivan said nothing.

Yet all around the court, there was an air of gloom. In May, Ivan had taken his family to the far north, to give thanks for his life at the very monastery where his own mother had gone when she was pregnant with him. It was a long way: far, far into the forests towards the Arctic emptiness. And there, in a distant river, his nurse had accidentally dropped Ivan and Anastasia’s baby son who had died in a few moments.

Over the warm, dusty citadel that summer, the sun had hung, like a silent companion to the dry, parching sadness within its massive walls. In the north-west, at Pskov, there was plague. In the east, at Kazan, the troubles with the conquered tribesmen were getting worse.

And for Boris, too, these long months had been touched by a kind of sadness.

He and Elena had hurried back to Moscow in March and taken up their modest quarters in the little house in the White Town.

Elena would make daily visits to her mother or her sister. Whispered news of the dark developments in the court would reach them each day, either through Elena’s father or from her mother, who had friends amongst the elderly ladies granted quarters near the royal women in the palace. Boris found himself often alone and with not much to do. To fill the time he took to walking about the capital and visiting its many churches, often hovering for some time before an icon, and saying a perfunctory prayer before moving on.

Yet although their life was quiet, he could not avoid expense. There were the horses to be stabled, the giving of gifts, and above all the yards of silk brocade and fur trimming for kaftans and dresses required to visit those who, he was assured, might be useful to him.

He could not help it: he resented these expenses which he could not really afford. Sometimes, when his wife arrived back happily from a visit to her mother, full of the latest news, he felt a kind of sullen anger, not because she had behaved badly towards him in any way, but because she seemed always to believe that all was well. Then, when they lay together at night, he would lie almost touching her, wanting her, yet holding back, hoping by this little show of indifference to worry her enough to break through the wall of family security that seemed to surround her. How can she really love me, if she does not share my anxiety? he wondered.

But to young Elena, these little shows of indifference only made her fear that her moody husband did not care for her. She would have liked to cry but instead her pride made her shrink from him, or lie there surrounding herself with an invisible barrier so that he, in turn, thought: See, she does not want me.

It was a particular misfortune that he should have encountered a young friend in the street one day. They had retired to a booth to drink for a time, and after asking about his health and that of his wife, this world-weary and unmarried young worthy had remarked: ‘All marriages turn to indifference, and most to hatred, they tell me.’

Was it so? For weeks this foolish little sentence preyed on his mind. Sometimes he and Elena made love several nights running, and all seemed well; but then some imagined slight would interrupt the uncertain course of their relationship and as he lay beside her in secret fury, the words would come back to Boris’s mind and he would decide: Yes, it is so; and he would even will it to be so, as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So it was that the young Russian stood on the edge of the chasm of self-destruction, and gazed into it.

Sometimes, in front of the icons in the churches he visited, he would pray for better things; he would pray that he might love his wife always, and she him, forgiving each other’s faults. But in his heart, he did not really mean it.

It was on one of these occasions, as he was standing before a favourite icon in a small local church, that he happened to fall into conversation with the young priest named Philip. He was about the same age as Boris, but very lean, with red hair and a hard, intense face that seemed always to be bobbing forwards as though, like a chicken looking for food, he could seize the subject under discussion with a few quick dabs beyond his beard. When Boris had expressed an interest in icons, and told him that his own family had given a work by the great Rublev to the monastery at Russka, Philip had become wildly enthusiastic.

‘My dear lord, I make a particular study of icons. So, there is a Rublev at Russka? I did not know it. I must go there, to be sure. Perhaps you would allow me to journey with you one day? You would? You are very kind. Yes, indeed.’

And before he knew it he had acquired, it seemed, a friend for life. Philip never failed after that to meet him, at least once every two weeks. Boris thought him harmless enough.

Elena did not tell him she was pregnant until July. She expected the baby at the end of the year.

He was excited, of course. He must be. Her family all congratulated him. It seemed that this news must make all the women busier than ever.

And when he thought of his father, and realized that this might be the son who would continue their noble line, he felt another rush of emotion; a determination that, at all costs, he must succeed, hand the estate on in good condition, and more.

Yet as he sat beside Elena he would look across, see her smiling at him as though to say: ‘Surely now he must be pleased,’ and think: She is smiling at me; yet it is also her treasure that she guards in there. This child just completes her family: it will be theirs more than mine. And, anyway, what if it’s a girl? That will be no good to me, yet I shall have to pay for it. In this way, often, the joy they told him he must feel turned to secret resentment.

He did not make love to Elena once he knew she was pregnant. He could not. The womb suddenly seemed to him mysterious, sacred – both vulnerable, and for that reason, rather frightening. Like a pea in the pod: sometimes, that was how he saw it; and who but a monster would break open that pod, disturb the little life inside, or destroy it? At other times, it made him think of something darker, subterranean, like a seed in the earth that must be left in the warm, sacred darkness before, at its season, emerging into the light.

In any case, Elena was often away these days. Her father had an estate just outside the city. She often went there, in the weeks of late summer, to rest with her family.

As Boris gazed over the city now, on this warm September afternoon, he told himself that he must accept what fate had in store. Elena was due back the following morning with her mother. He would be kind to her. The afternoon was wearing on. There was a heaviness in the golden haze; yet at the same time, in the blue sky, a slight hint of the autumn chill ahead. At last he sighed.

What the devil did Stephen the priest want with him, though? It was time to go and find out.

The tall young priest was polite, even respectful.

He had come to Moscow to visit a distant relation, a learned monk, and before leaving the city he had requested a brief audience, as he rather elaborately put it, with the young lord.

The matter was very confidential. It concerned the peasant Mikhail.

Boris was slightly surprised, but told him to go on.

‘Might I ask, Boris Davidov, that you will not mention this conversation to anyone at the monastery?’ the priest asked.

‘I suppose so.’ What was the fellow up to?

Then, very simply, Stephen outlined poor Mikhail’s dilemma. He did not tell Boris that the peasant had actually been encouraged to sabotage the work on the estate, but he did explain: ‘The monastery may well be tempted to take him from you. They would gain a good worker, and you would lose your best peasant – which in turn would make it harder for you to keep up the estate.’

‘He can’t leave,’ Boris snapped. ‘I know very well he can’t afford the fees.’

Under the law, a tenant wishing to depart upon St George’s Day not only had to clear any debts he had to his landlord, but had also to pay an exit fee from the house he had occupied. The rates for this were stiff – more than half a rouble – that was more than the value of Mikhail’s entire yearly crop, and Boris was quite right in thinking he could not pay it.

‘He can’t afford it, but the monastery can,’ Stephen quietly reminded him.

So that was it. An underhand way of stealing another man’s peasants was to pay their exit fees for them. Would Daniel the monk do such a thing to him, a Bobrov? Probably.

‘So what are you suggesting, that I should remit some of my peasant’s service?’

‘A little, Boris Davidov. Just enough to help Mikhail make ends meet. He’s a good peasant, and I can tell you, he has no wish to leave you.’

‘And why are you telling me this?’ Boris demanded.

Stephen paused. What could he say? Could he tell the young man that, like many churchmen, he disapproved of the monastery’s growing wealth? Could he tell Boris that he felt sorry for him and his rather helpless young wife? Could he tell him that, as things were, he was worried that Mikhail’s sons, if they did not eat enough, might be tempted towards a life of crime when they were older, or towards some foolish act? He could not.

‘I am only a priest, an onlooker,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘Let us say it is my good deed for the day.’

‘I shall bear what you have said in mind,’ Boris answered non-committally, ‘and I thank you for your concern and the trouble you have taken.’

With this they parted, the priest believing that he had done both the peasant and his lord a Christian service.

After he had gone, Boris paced about the room, going over the conversation carefully until he was sure he had got it straight in his mind.

What kind of fool did they think he was? Did that tall priest think he had not noticed the little smile of cunning on his lips? On the face of it, he had come to help, but Boris had learned better than to believe that. He thought of Tsar Ivan, betrayed by all. He thought of the four cousins, standing together on the day he had arrived with Elena at Russka. He thought of his wife, too, who sometimes shrank from him in bed. No, they were none of them to be trusted, none. ‘I must stand alone,’ he murmured, ‘and I must be cleverer, more ruthlessly cunning, even than they.’

What was the priest up to then? Why, he was baiting a trap: an obvious trap too, damn him. For if he reduced Mikhail’s service, who would benefit? The peasant, of course – Stephen’s cousin. And what would be the effect? To leave him, Boris, short of money: so that he would have to borrow more and bring himself a step closer to losing the estate to the monastery.

‘They just want to ruin me,’ he muttered.

The cunning priest. Only one thing he had said might be true. It was possible that the monastery, if it couldn’t get the estate yet, might try to steal Mikhail.

How, he wondered, could he prevent that?

All that month he considered the matter; yet surprisingly, of all people, it was the curious priest Philip, with his bobbing head and his passion for icons, who gave him his answer. It lay in a palace intrigue.

The strange business began in the Kremlin – in the dark recesses of the Tsar’s innermost court. It had been festering there for a long time, and it concerned the Church, and the fact that one of Ivan’s advisers hated another.

For with the increasing need for pomestie estates for Ivan’s loyal followers, some of his closest counsellers wanted him to support the Non-Possessors and take the Church’s lands. The Metropolitan was looking for a way to head them off. And that year he found it.

The fellow who was leading this campaign, a priest named Sylvester, was foolish enough to be friends with a man who could be accused of heresy. From this small beginning, the Metropolitan saw, a huge intrigue could be put together. Other, worse heretics were found: the accusers constructed a chain showing that if one man knew a second, the second a third, the third a fourth, then, to be sure, the first man and the fourth were plotting together. Better yet, a link between some of these conspirators and the family of Prince Vladimir, Ivan’s cousin and possible successor, could be discovered.

The Metropolitan was delighted. The dangerous Sylvester could now be shown to be the friend of heretics and of Ivan’s enemies. A show trial could be called as a warning, a shot across Sylvester’s bows.

Admittedly, some of the evidence was a little weak. While two defendants were clearly heretics, a third could only be accused of going to a meeting to argue the case for Orthodoxy against some Roman Catholic. Even that was enough, though.

‘For if this man had to argue about the matter,’ the prosecution pointed out, ‘if he did not know the answer, then how can he be of the true faith?’

A trial was called for late October. All Moscow was buzzing with speculation. The Metropolitan, the Tsar, the high dignitaries of the Church and court would all be there. Already the party of Sylvester and his friends were badly frightened. The talk of Church land reform had subsided into a nervous silence.

And this show trial might have been enough for the Metropolitan, but it was not enough for Sylvester’s rival in the council. Suddenly, now, a second case was brought – this time directly against Sylvester himself. The subject of the charge was: icons.

They were in the great Cathedral of the Annunciation, in the very heart of the Kremlin; they had been recently executed under Sylvester’s authority and, the charge said, they were heretical.

Even though Boris did not understand the details of the charge, like everyone else in Moscow, he knew how serious it might be. To speak heresy was dangerous, but a work of art that was heretical… that was something permanent, a matter of record: it was like erecting a totem, a statue of a pagan god from olden times in front of the Holy of Holies itself.

It was some days before the show trial was due to start that Philip the priest offered to take Boris into the Kremlin to look at the icons in question. He accepted eagerly.

The day was heavy, grey and sombre. The clouds were as thick and as solid as the ramparts of the city as the two men made their way across the emptiness of Red Square. They passed through the tall, grim gateway, under the watchful eyes of the streltsy guards, and made their way between barracks, armouries and other thick-walled buildings until they came finally to the central square of the Kremlin. It was a medium-sized stone square, on each side of which loomed the high, thickset, grey-white presences of the cathedrals and palaces. The Cathedrals of the Assumption, the Archangel Michael, the Annunciation; the Italianate Palace of Facets; the Church of the Deposition of the Robe; the Bell Tower of Ivan the Great: here they all were, with their massive walls and high, gleaming domes in this innermost heart of the vast empire of the Eurasian plain.

‘Come, I will show you the throne first,’ Philip said, as he turned towards the simplest and most stately of the buildings, the Cathedral of the Assumption.

It was amazing how he seemed to be able to gain admittance everywhere. He spoke a few words to the priest at the door, and a moment later they were ushered in.

It was a splendid building, made for the Tsar’s grandfather by an Italian architect, but modelled on the splendid old cathedral at Vladimir – a simple, pale stone Byzantine cathedral with five domes. Here, Boris knew, the Metropolitans were buried; with awe he looked around at the huge, high bare walls and round columns with their layers of enormous frescoes staring out into the airy spaces they owned. In this cathedral was housed the most sacred of all Russian icons, the Virgin of Vladimir, Our Lady of Sorrows, which had given the men of Moscow their great victory over the Tatars at Kulikovo, back in the time of the great St Sergius.

But to Boris even this great icon seemed less important than the narrow, canopied golden throne that stood to one side.

‘So this,’ he murmured reverently, ‘is where my Tsar was crowned.’

And he stayed there, staring at it for several minutes, until at last Philip had to drag him away.

They crossed to the Cathedral of the Annunciation.

The icons in question, which had caused such fear and trembling, did not look so unusual to Boris. Indeed, until Philip started to speak, he could not see anything wrong with them at all. But the intense young priest soon disabused him.

‘Look at that: did you ever see such a thing?’

Boris looked. Before him was a figure of Christ, with wings, and with his palms closed.

‘It’s perhaps unusual,’ he ventured uncertainly.

‘Unusual? It’s outrageous! Idolatry. Don’t you see, the artist has invented that? Invented it for himself? There is no authority for depicting Our Lord in such a way. Unless,’ he added darkly, ‘it comes from the Catholics in the west.’

Boris looked carefully. It was true. There was something markedly individual about the thing if one considered it. He was still doing so when he heard a gasp of outrage from Philip.

‘See here.’ He was in front of another icon. ‘Our Lord depicted as David, dressed like a Tsar. And over there – ’ he had glanced across at another – ‘the Holy Spirit depicted as a dove. Never! Never in Orthodoxy.’

He turned to Boris confidentially.

‘There are frescoes in the palace, they say, that are even worse. Heretics! Cunning fiends!’ His head bobbed so violently it was as if he feared contamination. ‘I tell you,’ he said, with his eyes, it seemed, focused angrily upon the tip of his beard, ‘I tell you, young Lord Boris, those accursed Catholics in the west may be rascals, but they have one good idea, and that is the Inquisition. That’s what we need in Russia. Root them out.’

They left quietly, but all the way back to the Kremlin Gate and beyond the priest would mutter, every few paces: ‘Root them out. Root and branch.’

And just as they came out into Red Square, Boris had his idea.

‘I think,’ he said quietly, ‘that they make icons like that in Russka.’

On an overcast day in early November, the two visitors appeared in Russka. There was a cold, wet wind biting into their faces that threatened to bring heavy rain, or possibly snow at any time; and if Boris had not been anxious to make the journey at once, Philip the priest would have preferred to wait until a better travelling season.

They went straight to Boris’s house and the young lord of Dirty Place soon sent a friendly message to Stephen the priest asking him to call. Meanwhile Boris had sent his servant scurrying to summon a pair of plump chickens from his steward, a bottle of wine, and anything else he could think of for their comfort.

Despite the fact that they were both rather chilled, Boris was elated in a nervous way.

Within two hours, they were dining, and while Philip was still eating, which he did with the same, emphatic bobbing motion that he used for everything else, Stephen arrived.

He was glad to see Boris, and wondered if this visit could signal something good for the unfortunate Mikhail. Boris’s slightly nervous gaiety suggested to him that the young man might have been through some kind of minor crisis in his thinking recently; since he had brought a priest with him, Stephen hoped it had been of a religious nature.

Under the influence of the wine, apparently, both men were very affable. Boris informed him that his friend had kindly agreed to spend a few days with him while he attended to his business in the country and he ventured to hope that Stephen would show him the village and the monastery. ‘For if he has to stay with me at Dirty Place all the time, I’m afraid he’ll be awfully bored,’ Boris explained with a boyish grin. ‘He’s a learned fellow, like you,’ he added amiably.

During this conversation, Philip said little, concentrating on his eating. But now he began to talk a little. He asked Stephen a few ordinary enough questions about the little town, said a few words about his own humdrum life, and spoke with veneration, but very little understanding, about the icons in his own church.

A pleasant, rather simple-minded fellow, Stephen thought, of no great education. He promised to show him round the next day.

Two days, and the trap was set. Boris sent for Daniel the monk. And when their conversation was over, the young lord reflected that, including even the best moments of his brief marriage, these were the most exhilarating and most satisfying minutes he had ever passed in his life.

‘I find myself,’ he began, with perfect insincerity, ‘in a most difficult position.’

He was sure, yes he was sure, that the monk did not know what was coming. Above the thick beard he saw Daniel’s eyes gleaming with their burning light.

‘It might not matter,’ Boris went on, ‘but for recent events in Moscow.’ He paused. It seemed that the monk’s face was frowning in puzzlement. ‘I am referring, of course, to the heresy trials,’ he said sweetly.

The first trials had taken place on 25 October, and they had been a triumph for the Metropolitan. The evidence, such as it was, had been enough to secure for all the accused torture and life imprisonment; and now all Moscow was terrified.

As a staunch supporter of the Metropolitan’s line, Daniel was delighted. But what could these trials have to do with this young landlord and himself at Russka? He looked up at Boris enquiringly.

‘It seems,’ Boris said, with apparent concern, ‘that we have heresy in our midst – right here.’ And he tapped the table reprovingly. Daniel stared at him.

It had been so easy – though he had been astonished at how neatly and cleverly the priest Philip had played his part. Bobbing his head, asking rather simple-minded questions, the devious fellow had gone round Russka all day with the obliging Stephen. Never once had he asked the local priest’s opinion on any but the most trivial matters. He had been shown the icons for sale in the market, had visited the monastery and walked round the big fields near the monastery walls. Now and then, it appeared, he had been struck with disapproval by something he had seen, and then tried to hide it. Only towards sunset, as they stood by the gate of the town and gazed down at the rich monastery below, did he seem to forget himself and burst out bitterly: ‘A rich little monastery.’

‘You find it too rich?’ Stephen enquired curiously.

At once Philip became guarded and looked at him nervously.

Stephen had smiled, then taken his arm gently.

‘I understand.’

Philip looked relieved.

‘One must be careful nowadays, my friend,’ he said softly.

‘Of course. You are a Non-Possessor then?’

The priest from Moscow bobbed his head in acknowledgement.

‘And you?’ he asked Stephen.

‘I too,’ the simple-minded Russka priest confessed.

They had walked quietly back together to Boris’s home where they had embraced before Stephen returned to his home.

The next day Philip had inspected the icons in the market and at the monastery carefully. Then he had given Boris his opinions.

‘The priest is a Non-Possessor. At present it’s not clear whether he’s a heretic, but he reads too much and he’s a fool. There’s no knowing what heresy he might easily tumble into. As for the icons, I find four designs that are a disgrace.’

‘Heretical?’

‘Absolutely. As bad as anything I’ve seen from Novgorod.’

In the minds of some purists, the products of that city were always suspect, because of its proximity to the Baltic ports and to Lithuania with their dangerous Catholic and Protestant influences from the west.

‘So I could prosecute?’

‘I think you should.’

Boris had smiled.

‘I promise you, the matter will receive my full attention,’ he replied.

And so now, to the astonished monk, he blandly outlined his conclusions.

‘It seems, Brother Daniel, that the icons that the Peter and Paul Monastery is producing are heretical. They are being sold in the market under your direction.’ Seeing Daniel look baffled, he continued quietly: ‘I’m afraid that it is so. I have it on very good authority, and as you know, in the current climate… it places the monastery – or some of those in it – in danger.’

There was no question about it, Daniel was beginning to look nervous. For the matter of the heretics having been disposed of, the charge concerning the icons was still under consideration in Moscow. Who knew what would happen?

‘If this is so,’ Daniel began, ‘of course we should take advice.’

‘Certainly,’ Boris agreed. ‘Although, of course, by raising the matter with higher authorities, you also run a risk.’

‘But surely no one could think we intended…’

‘Brother Daniel,’ Boris cut in, ‘I have come from Moscow. I must tell you that the atmosphere there…’

It was true. The atmosphere was electric. Already the condemned heretics, under the customary torture, were starting to denounce anyone they could remember talking to. Search parties were going out to arrest supposed heretics amongst the Volga Elders far out in the forests of the distant north.

‘Besides,’ Boris explained smoothly, ‘I am very much afraid your own family connections may be linked to the business.’

‘My family?’

‘Of course. Your cousin Stephen our priest. He is, I suppose you know, a Non-Possessor.’

Even under the thick beard, it was possible to see Daniel blanch. He had long ago guessed, of course, that his cousin had these feelings.

‘But I am utterly opposed to such views – if he has them,’ he added cautiously.

‘I know that as well as you. But we also both know that at times like this, when the authorities are looking… It is not the truth that counts but what may be perceived, what may be said. They will look at you, the icons, and your cousin – with whom you are often seen – and they will create a pattern that will speak the word “heresy”.’

The beauty of the thing, the exquisite irony. Though monk and priest were exactly opposed in their central beliefs, it was possible by a neat analysis and synthesis to bind them together like a pair of felons.

There was a long pause.

‘I do not need to tell you of my regard for you both, nor for my family’s regard for the monastery to which we gave its most cherished icon.’

Daniel bowed his head. The icon by Rublev was certainly the best thing they had. He could not deny that the founder’s family had been steadfast. He also saw clearly that Boris was offering an opening.

‘How might we proceed?’ the monk enquired.

Boris took a long breath and looked thoughtful.

‘The question is,’ he mused, gazing at the ends of his fingers, ‘whether I can persuade my friend, a priest from Moscow, that this matter does not require reporting. ‘

‘I see.’

‘It is he who has pointed all this out to me, and he is zealous.’

‘Perhaps if I spoke with him?’

‘Unwise. He would take it as an admission of guilt.’ He paused a moment. ‘I have also my own position to consider.’

He allowed silence to settle upon the room.

‘I should certainly be sad,’ Boris remarked after a time, ‘to see misfortune fall upon a family – a large family, with many members – whom we wish well.’

Many members. He watched as Daniel worked this out. Himself the monk, Stephen the priest, then there was Lev the merchant and then, ah, yes, of course, Mikhail the peasant was also his cousin. Boris waited until he saw that Daniel had thoroughly understood.

‘I am sure we all wish yourself, and the estate at Dirty Place, well,’ the monk murmured carefully.

They understood each other.

‘Well, I shall see what I can do,’ Boris remarked briskly. ‘Let us say no more of this for the present.’

But as the monk was leaving, he said casually: ‘By the way, Brother Daniel, if you chance to see Lev the merchant, would you send him to me?’

And later that afternoon, with perfect equanimity shown by both sides, Boris borrowed another eight roubles from the merchant at the derisory interest rate of only seven per cent.

Before returning to Moscow the next day with Philip the priest, he assured him that the offending icons would be altered at once and that Stephen the Non-Possessor had been sternly warned. He also made him an interest-free loan of a rouble which, as he had foreseen, the stern enemy of heresy accepted with alacrity.

How sweet was the taste of victory. He departed in great good humour.

He did nothing for Mikhail the peasant. There was no need, now that he had nowhere to go.

In the winter of that year, when the snow lay on the ground, a huge expedition set out from Moscow led by Ivan’s best men, including the brilliant Prince Kurbsky. They were going to Kazan.

Amongst the ambitious young men who went with it was Boris.

He had been gone a month when Elena went into labour. It was a long labour, but as she suffered, she prayed: Surely now, if I endure all this pain, God will make him love me.

When the child was born, it was a girl.

In the Year of Our Lord 1553, from the kingdom of England, with a message of universal brotherhood from their boy king to any they might encounter, there set sail three ships under the command of a brilliant member of one of England’s most illustrious aristocratic families: Sir Hugh Willoughby. His pilot general was the skilful Richard Chancellor. They were looking for a trade route round the north-east coast of Eurasia that might lead them to Cathay.

Sadly, in those treacherous northern waters, two of the three ships were separated; for months Willoughby and his men wandered the northern seas until, at last, trapped on an island off the Lapland coast, they froze to death in the terrible darkness when the sun completely departs for the months of Arctic winter.

But while Willoughby wandered, lost, a very different fate befell the remaining ship, the Edward Bonaventure, in which Chancellor sailed.

For in the summer months he proceeded north – so far north that he entered a strange region where, at that season, the sun never went down at all. And it was here, in the month of August, that he put ashore in a curious land where the local fishermen prostrated themselves at his feet.

So it was that the first Englishman in centuries came to the land now called Muscovy.

George Wilson liked Moscow. No one had ever taken much notice of him before, but in this place he seemed, along with his shipmates, to be something of a celebrity.

He was a ratty little man: small, thin, sinewy, with a narrow face, hard, cunning eyes set too close together, and a shock of yellow hair which these strange Russian folk would sometimes pat in their curiosity. Indeed, in Muscovy, where most men and women were stout, he looked rather like a jackal in a company of bears. He was thirty years old. He had only come on this voyage because, after a small business failure as a draper, he had been rather at a loose end.

His cousin, a sea captain, had warned him about these northern waters. There were ice floes big as mountains, he had said. No place for a skinny little fellow like him. Well, here he was, halfway to Cathay, in a land of men like bears. And, as far as he could see, things were looking up. For his narrow eyes glinted as he saw how much money there was to be made.

How immense the land was: hundreds of leagues from town to town. How cheap was human life. When they had arrived in summer, he had watched the great barges being dragged upriver from the northern estuary by parties of men with ropes tied round them. He had heard their mournful singing; he had seen the overseers cut with whips those who fell. He wondered how many of these unfortunates survived the long journey.

Yet how fabulously rich it was, too. Since no one knew who these visitors were or where they came from, the English party had been kept almost in confinement in the north while their hosts awaited instructions from the capital.

‘These people’s hospitality is so great I can hardly tell if we are guests or prisoners,’ Chancellor had ruefully remarked to him.

It had been winter before they were taken to the capital, and so Wilson had seen the cargoes from these barges off-loaded on to a thousand sleds to be carried from the collecting points to the inner cities. He had never seen such a concourse of vehicles. Every league, every day, hundreds of sleds passed them on their way to or from the cities that rose out of the snowy wastes. Goods, all manner of goods, passed by: grain, fish, but above all he saw furs, furs, and more furs. Could there be so many sables, ermines, beavers and bears in all the world? This forest hinterland, he thought, must be greater than all the lands he had ever heard of.

But above all, one huge realization opened in his mind – an understanding that grew greater, more insistent, more awesome with every league they went: they were going further and further from the sea. This is the hugest country in the world, he thought, yet it has no shores.

How utterly different from his English home in London: nowhere in England were you far from its indented coastline; how utterly unlike the French, the Germans, the other folk who plied the busy North Sea and Baltic ports. These people in their vast, landlocked world of forest and snow were different, cut off, a race apart.

‘Truly, this is a rude and barbarous people,’ as Chancellor had remarked to his companions.

Yet their welcome in Moscow had been astounding. It had made an unforgettable impression on George Wilson. For no sooner had they arrived than they were summoned to attend the Tsar.

Even George Wilson, cunning and cynical little fellow that he was, found his knees shaking as they were ushered into the royal presence. He had already heard that, in this huge land, all men were the Tsar’s slaves: now he understood what that meant.

Ivan stood at the end of a great hall in the Kremlin Palace. On each side of him stood the huge forms of his boyars, in their heavy, rich kaftans. How tall he was – made taller by the high pointed hat he wore, trimmed with fur. A pale, hawk-like face; a terrible, piercing eye. He commanded all, dominated this heavy, Asiatic magnificence. The party were awestruck. As Ivan meant them to be, for he was anxious to impress these merchants from this strange and distant country. They might be useful to him.

He was friendly. Their letter of recommendation, written in Latin, Greek, German and other languages, was explained to him. Then they were invited to a feast.

It surpassed anything they could have imagined. A hundred sat down: they ate off solid gold. Stuffed fish, great roasts, strange delicacies like elk’s brains, caviar, blinis; wine served in goblets encrusted with gems. Everything was lavish, splendid, heavy. Tsar Ivan sat apart from the mere mortals he was honouring. From time to time he sent a morsel of food to one of the guests as a mark of his favour. Each time, all stood, while the name of the recipient was called out, and the Tsar’s own long title was proclaimed. Wilson noticed that the pious Tsar crossed himself, from right to left, each time he raised food to his own mouth. He also noticed that it was the fashion, amongst these huge, bearded people, to drink off a goblet of wine at a single draught.

The banquet went on for five hours.

‘I think we are at the court of Solomon himself,’ he whispered to one of his companions.

‘Or the court of Babylon,’ the other replied.

But it was only afterwards, when they were escorted round the royal palace, that Wilson truly appreciated that this strange, mighty empire was like no other.

For how splendid, yet how barbarous it was. Room succeeded cavernous room. It was like being in some endless succession of antechambers to a Russian church. Candles lit up the gloom. By their soft, gleaming light he saw walls painted with riotous patterns of plants, winding around each other like snakes, and with dancing animals –in reds, ochres, greens. No mirrors reflected the light, but everywhere hung icons that glimmered sadly with gold. There was little of the furniture that would have been found in an English palace: only plain chairs and benches, great studded trunks and huge stoves; but rich oriental carpets and hangings of silk and brocade more than compensated. It was a noble palace. And yet… And yet there was something else that made him fearful. It was a feeling of heaviness, of dark power. In this church-like gloom, the painted passages seemed to Wilson like tunnels, the chambers like halls in a labyrinth. As they went in, further and further, it made him think of something deep, subterranean, like a womb where a man might hide; and who knew what other passages, what chambers there might be, behind thick walls that would muffle any cry? He was glad when they came out.

Life for the English merchants was sunny, though. They were in the Tsar’s favour. Nor did it take them long to get to know the huge market into which they had accidentally come.

For Moscow, with its great fairs upon the ice, was a huge emporium. From the east, up the Volga and the Don, came cotton, sheep, spices. Each year, the Nogay tribesmen from the Asian steppe arrived with huge herds of horses. From Novgorod came iron, silver, salt; from other cities leather, oil, grain, honey and wax.

‘The opportunities are endless,’ Chancellor said excitedly.

Although Russia was rich in these raw materials, except for the arms she made, she had few manufactured goods. Wilson could think of any number of luxury items he could sell here. They could use a good English broadcloth, too, he considered. As for the return voyage home: This wax is no cheaper than I can buy in England, he calculated, but their furs… He could get a fortune for those furs.

Despite their powerful, burly appearance, his own shrewd intelligence soon detected that the big Russian merchants were essentially passive.

‘They only know their own country,’ he remarked to Chancellor. ‘In a way, they are like eager children.’

‘I agree,’ the leader replied, ‘but, remember, our first customer is the Tsar himself.’

For, they had quickly discovered, the Tsar had the monopoly of many of the chief goods in the market, including liquor. Every drop of vodka sold to the eager people at the little drinking booths belonged to him. All sables, all raw silk, all grain for export, was in the hands of his agents. And foreign merchants like themselves had to offer all their goods to him first.

Such was the all-pervading power of the centralized Muscovite state.

‘The Tsar wants chemicals, too, for explosives,’ Chancellor told him, ‘and he wants us to bring him men of learning. I have already promised to come again with doctors and men skilled in mining.’

At first some of these requests puzzled Wilson. He had already made the acquaintance of several German merchants who were allowed to reside in the city. He had seen there was a German doctor, too. Why, he wondered, should the Tsar want men from distant England when others could be found closer to his borders?

It was one of the Germans, a large, burly man who spoke some English, who explained it to him.

‘About six years ago, my friend, a German fellow offered to bring the Tsar all kinds of experts. He collected more than a hundred and brought them to the Baltic ports. If he’d got them into Muscovy, I dare say the Tsar would have made him a rich man indeed.’

‘And why didn’t they get here?’

The German grinned.

‘They were stopped, that’s why. Arrested by the authorities.’ He looked at Wilson seriously. ‘And the highest powers were behind it – the very highest.’

‘Because?’

‘Do you suppose, my friend, that the Livonian Order, which controls many of the Baltic ports, is anxious to strengthen Ivan’s hand? He’s longing to walk in there and take over those Latvian and Estonian lands. Do you think Lithuania and Poland, or the Emperor of Germany want to see Russia any stronger than she is?’

He gazed around the market place.

‘Look at these people,’ he went on. ‘You can see for yourself: they’re backward. They have few industries, no learning at all. They eat and and drink, they whore and pray to their icons. And thats it. Their army is huge, but badly trained. When they try to get to the Baltic ports, the well-trained Swedes and Germans can cut them down in no time. And that’s how we like them. Who needs a civilized Russia? That’s why Tsar Ivan is so pleased to see you. You came round by the extreme north. It’s a long and inconvenient way, frozen half the year, but it still suits him very well. He can circumvent the Baltic that way and get the skilled men he knows he needs. You’re gold to him.’

While the English might be useful to the Tsar, he in turn could be very useful to them.

‘We sought a passage to Cathay by sea,’ Chancellor told Wilson, ‘yet it seems to me we can reach the east by land. Down the Volga, beyond the lands of the Tatars, lies the orient. Below the deserts lies Persia. With his protection, our merchants might reach such places after all.’

George Wilson soon decided that this strange, huge land was the best opportunity he would ever have to make his fortune. But he found it a disquieting place all the same.

It was not the violence, the crudity, or even the cruelty of the people. He cared nothing about any of these. It was their religion.

It was all-pervading. There seemed to be priests and monks everywhere. People crossed themselves for, it seemed to Wilson, no reason at all; and in every house there were icons to which people bowed.

‘’Tis like popery,’ he remarked, ‘only the idolatry of the Russians is even greater.’

Like most of his compatriots, George Wilson was a Protestant. He had been a boy when Henry VIII of England broke with the Pope in Rome. Now Henry’s son was on the throne, and all good Englishmen were supposed to be Protestant. This was a faith which suited Wilson very well, not from any profound religious conviction, for he had none, but rather because he had a rooted if secret dislike of all authority, and also because a certain harsh pride made him enjoy reading the tracts that attacked the abuses, and theology, of the old religion with fierce logic.

‘These Russians are fools,’ he concluded. But since he thought that of most people anyway, it did not greatly signify.

And when, in January, Chancellor told him that, after their return to England that spring, he intended to lead another expedition to Muscovy, and asked him if he wished to join it, Wilson insistently replied: ‘I do.’

He would make his fortune here. Besides, he had another reason in mind, too. The German merchant, also a Protestant, had an unmarried daughter, and no son. The girl was a little heavy, but handsome. A nice, plump girl, he thought.

He would return.

To Elena, it seemed that Boris had slowly grown another skin, on top of his own.

That, at least, was how she came to think of it.

Sometimes she had the impression that he was still moving about, rather uncomfortably, inside this carapace; that if she could find a way to break through, she would still find him within. At other times, it would be as if this new, ever thicker layer were stuck fast, glued on to his own skin and all of one piece with it. Then, even when he came to her intimately, it felt as if she had in her hands a strange animal with a thick hide, whose mind she did not know.

Not that, in the succeeding years, she saw him very often.

For three years the armies of Russia, led by Kurbsky and others, smashed the Tatar revolts around Kazan. They went further, across the eastern Volga into the land of the Nogays; even the distant Tatar Khan of West Siberia, beyond the Urals, acknowledged Ivan as his overlord. Twice, huge fleets went south down the mighty Volga, through the steppe to the desert lands of Astrakhan and took that city too.

Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Astrakhan: how exotic Ivan’s new titles proclaimed him to be. Huge new chronicles were prepared, glorifying the Tsar and his family, and where necessary rewriting history so that the sacred mission of the Russian royal house should be clearly understood. All references that even hinted at former cooperation of the Russian princes with their Tatar overlords were removed.

It was now that, at one end of Moscow’s Red Square, the Metropolitan ordered the building of that fantastic collection of exotic towers apparently grafted together to make a new Russian life form. Unlike any other, the building later became famous in history as St Basil’s Cathedral.

Ivan would have liked, next, to defeat the mighty Khan of the Crimea as well; but for the present, that was too tough a nut to crack.

So it was that Tsar Ivan, trying to open the doors of his landlocked prison, turned northwards to threaten his neighbours – those rich Livonian ports he needed so much on the shores of the Baltic.

At first it seemed he might succeed.

No wonder, then, that Elena saw little of her husband. The life of the servitor was hard. Often there was little to eat. Blistering heat or tremendous cold: these were his lot. Before leaving for the north Boris had returned from Astrakhan with some modest plunder – a few roubles’ worth, that paid off some of his debts – and a hardened man.

His relationship with her father, never warm, now became distant. This was not a personal matter – indeed, Dimitri was pleased with his son-in-law’s career – it was a question of politics.

The trouble had begun when Boris had returned from Astrakhan. Beneath the new harsh exterior, Elena sensed a kind of elation in him. For while his armies had been subduing the steppe and desert by the Volga, Ivan and his inner counsellors had been pressing through another kind of victory at home: the reform of the realm.

Once again, in common with all the centralizing rulers of the era, it was the magnates and their clients that he was determined to crush. The old rewards for service, though they were not what they had once been, were curtailed. Instead of a boyar or serving prince being given a city to feed off, local men, chosen by the gentry and merchants, were to administer each locality. But most important of all, it was now decreed that all holders of estates – whether the service pomestie or the privately inherited votchina – must give the Tsar military service when summoned.

‘That will teach those lazy devils who is master,’ Boris grimly remarked in front of his father-in-law. ‘Do you know that half the estate holders in Tver were giving no service to anyone?’

‘Then tell me,’ Dimitri Ivanov asked acidly, ‘exactly what is the difference now between your estate, which you inherited, and a mere pomestie? Since the Tsar usually allows the son to carry on after the father on the service estates.’

Boris considered.

‘There’s a legal difference, technically; but in practice you’re right. There’s no difference. If you don’t serve, the Tsar will take your estate away.’

‘And you are happy with that?’

‘Yes. Why should I not want to serve the Tsar? Don’t you want to?’

It was a wicked question for he knew very well that his wife’s family held several estates and that, at present, none of them was actually serving.

Dimitri said nothing, but passed his hand over his bald head with obvious irritation.

‘If a man doesn’t want to serve the Tsar,’ Boris went on coolly, ‘I personally would have to conclude that he must be the Tsar’s enemy.’

‘You should conclude no such thing, young man,’ Dimitri thundered.

‘I am glad to hear it,’ Boris answered drily.

Elena’s mother had managed to separate the two men after that. But the damage had been done.

Nor was it just a dispute between two men. Elena knew very well that the bad feeling between her husband and her father represented a growing divide between those who were behind the reforming Tsar, and the members of the old ruling classes, great and small, who disliked the whole tone of his rule.

Indeed, there were whispers in her father’s house now – things said that she would never have told Boris about – but which made her wonder if the young Tsar would last.

And so their life had proceeded, with brief visits from Boris, and an increasing hint of suspicion in the air around them.

If only he were not so distant when he came. If only she could break through his armour of reserve.

There was only one way to do so – only one way to make her husband happy. If only she could give him a son! Why was it denied her?

There had been a boy, David, who had died when he was a week old, while Boris was away on the first campaign in the north. And after that, try as she might, nothing.

Perhaps if they could win a great victory in the north. If Russia signed a peace treaty and Boris returned home for a longer period: perhaps then there would be a son. She was still young. She prayed for sunnier days.

But after some early successes, things started to go badly in the north. The Baltic cities looked for protection from Sweden, Lithuania, Denmark. It seemed the conflict might go on forever.

Then, in August 1560, Anastasia, the Tsar’s beloved wife, the light of his life, died.

And when she heard this, Elena’s heart sank. For she had a woman’s premonition that a time of greater darkness was ahead.

1566

October. A cold, dank, windswept day at the little town of Russka; the vaporous clouds so low that sometimes their skirts seem almost to touch the tent roof of the watchtower.

A single figure is approaching, riding slowly up to the gates. His horse is black; on the front of its saddle are two little emblems: a dog’s head, because the rider is watchful, and a broom, because he will sweep away his master’s enemies.

The rider, too, is dressed in black. He looks carelessly from side to side, because he is master of all in this region. A monk by the monastery gates, seeing him, ducks out of sight nervously. Even the abbot is awkward in his presence. In the town, and in nearby Dirty Place, they are terrified of him.

It is over a year since he took his vows. They were biblical in tone, for he swore to love his master more than mother or father, son or daughter. He also swore to inform, instantly, upon anyone he suspects of disloyalty to his master, the Tsar.

The figure in black is powerful, and feared. It is true, as his wife knows, that he is not happy. But it has never occurred to him to be so.

It is his wife, now, that this grim figure has come to visit: for this is his home. His name is Boris Bobrov.

For at last Ivan had struck at all his enemies. The blow was devastating and took them completely by surprise.

In December 1564, without a word of explanation, he had left the city of Moscow with a huge baggage train and by St Nicholas’s Day had turned up at a fortified hunting lodge known as Alexandrovskaya Sloboda some forty miles north-east of the capital. No one knew what this evacuation meant.

Then in January, word came: he had abdicated.

Was it just a ruse?

‘In my opinion,’ Elena’s father told her, ‘the Tsar hasn’t been quite right in the head since Anastasia died. He’s decided the boyars poisoned her and he wants to get back at them. All the same,’ he added grimly, ‘there’s a kind of cunning in this business.’

There was. The boyars, fearing the people, had to ask him back. And when he came, it was on his own terms.

They were astounding. No ruler, perhaps, in all the world, had ever done such a thing. For after receiving a solemn oath from the boyars and the Church that he was free to rule exactly as he pleased and punish whom he would, Tsar Ivan split his realm in two. The greater part he left to be ruled in his name by boyars he trusted. But the smaller part he turned into a vast private estate, under his personal rule and peopled by his own handpicked servants.

This personal fief he called, with dark irony, the Oprichnina – which meant the widow’s portion, the land a widow received for her upkeep after the husband died. His servitors were called Oprichniki; they formed a closed order, like the old Livonian and Teutonic orders of German knights, and they dressed in black.

It was a state within a state. It was a police state. The Oprichniki could only be tried by their own courts – in effect, they were above the law. Part of Moscow was included; so was Suzdal and pockets of land above the Oka and south-west of Moscow. Most of the Oprichnina, however, lay up in the north, in the huge forest lands that spread above the loop of the Volga up to the distant northern port where the English mariners had landed. It was away from the old princely towns, a land of icebound monasteries, furs, huge salt beds, and rich northern traders. The mighty Stroganov family, those former peasants turned merchant princes, immediately petitioned the Tsar to be included in his state within a state.

And only those loyal to Ivan might live there. At every estate, the Tsar’s inquisitors held court. If the landlord were loyal, he might remain; but if he had any connection with a magnate or one of the many princely families, he would almost certainly be thrown out, and given a poorer estate, if he were lucky, outside the Oprichnina instead.

In this manner, the Oprichniki could be given the vacant estates for their upkeep, which they held, naturally, as service pomestie.

The town of Russka was included in the Oprichnina; and so it was that inquisitors had come to interview the young landlord of Dirty Place.

It was exactly what Boris wanted.

‘I serve the Tsar,’ he told them, ‘in all his wars. Let me, I beg you, be one of the Oprichniki. What could I desire more?’ And as he saw them make a note of this he added: ‘The Tsar himself may remember me. Let him know that he spoke with me, at dawn one morning, when we were returning from Kazan.’

At this the inquisitor smiled grimly.

‘If that is so, Boris Davidov, the Tsar will remember you. The Tsar forgets nothing.’

They continued to examine him carefully. They found no fault with his family. Though old, it boasted no great connections that might make it suspect. But there was one problem.

‘What of your wife’s family?’ they now asked him. ‘Your father-in-law has friends in quarters whose loyalty we are not sure of. What can you tell us about him?’

And now Boris considered carefully. He did not, however, have to consider for long.

‘What,’ he asked quietly, ‘would you like to know?’

A week later Boris was summoned to Moscow and after a brief interview was told he could keep the estate on service tenure and that he was accepted into the Oprichniki.

‘The Tsar remembered you,’ they said.

Soon afterwards, though she did not know why, Elena heard that her father was deeply worried.

The wind had dropped and the afternoon was already drawing to its close when Boris was served his meal.

As soon as he sat down, the old serving man placed before him a plate of rye bread and a little jug of vodka. Staring straight in front of him, Boris steadily poured himself three small cups, throwing back his head as he downed each at a single draught. Elena said nothing. To her it seemed a rather vulgar habit which, no doubt, he had picked up from the other Oprichniki.

He ate, for the most part, in silence. Elena sat at the other side of the heavy table and picked lightly at a few vegetables. It appeared that neither quite had the courage to start the conversation.

It was not surprising. For the matter they would have to discuss was, if the rumours from Moscow were true, too terrible to speak about.

The silence continued. Occasionally Boris, a little guardedly, allowed his eyes to rest on her, as though he were mulling over some abstract calculation of which she might, or might not, be a part. Once he turned to her and quietly asked after the health of Lev the merchant. On hearing that he was well he nodded his head, but said nothing. Lev was in charge of the collection of local taxes now and was therefore a fellow servant of the Oprichnina with Boris. They acted together in all official matters.

‘And our daughter?’ she asked him at length.

The girl had been given in marriage to a young noble at the start of the year; he did not live within the Oprichnina, but he was modestly well-off and Boris had satisfied himself of the family’s loyalty. Elena suspected that he had been glad to get the girl – who was only twelve – out of his house and into that of her in-laws. Though he was always kind to his daughter, Elena knew that Boris had never really accepted her existence in place of the son he should have had.

‘She is well,’ he answered briefly. ‘I spoke to her father-in-law.’ It was not much; but she did not pursue the subject. From time to time, Boris glanced at her.

Elena seldom went to Moscow now. Despite the fact that her family were there, she did not care to, nor did Boris encourage her to do so.

Since the Oprichnina began, the atmosphere in the capital had been tense and often frightening. Right from the start there had been disappearances and word of executions. From the old princely cities came news of wholesale confiscations, great princes and magnates losing all their lands and being sent to miserable little farms on the distant frontiers of Kazan. ‘The whole business is disgusting,’ Elena’s father told her on one of her few visits to the city. ‘Half the people being executed have done nothing at all.’ She had heard that, the other day, one brave fellow called Gorbachev, following his father to the block, had picked up his father’s head and told the people watching: ‘I thank God we both die innocent.’

‘You know what’s most frightening?’ her father had continued. ‘People think he’s kicking these people out to make room for his henchmen, these cursed Oprichniki! Forgive me, I know your Boris is one. But look carefully and you’ll see that’s not what he’s doing. Most of these confiscations haven’t been in Oprichnina lands at all. The Oprichnina is full of his supporters. He’s actually destroying the opposition outside; then he’ll turn these black-shirts loose upon all the rest of us. It’s a plot to destroy us all.’

She had found the Oprichniki terrifying. Some were nobles and gentry but many were little more than peasants. ‘Some are even foreigners – just common mercenaries,’ her mother exclaimed in disgust. ‘They have no ties, nothing.’

Indeed, in their black uniforms and cloaks they looked to Elena like some strangely vicious order of monks.

There was something else her father told her, too.

‘Do you know what the latest orders from the Tsar have been? That if any foreigner asks about what’s happening, we are to deny that the Oprichnina exists. Can you imagine it? I was in a magnate’s house the other day, and an envoy from Lithuania was there. “What about this Oprichnina?” he asks our host. “Never heard of it,” says he. “But the Tsar’s holed up in a fort outside the city,” the fellow protests. “And what about those fellows in black shirts?” “Oh,” says the magnate, “that’s just a summer residence, and those are some of his servants, a sort of new regiment.” There were thirty of us in that room and none of us knew which way to look. But we all kept mum, of course.’

That spring there had been a reprieve for a few of the exiles. But two Metropolitans had resigned, or been forced out, because they couldn’t stomach this new terror state.

And now had come this latest, appalling news.

As he looked at Elena, Boris tried to analyze what he saw. She was still the same girl he had married: quiet, a little nervous, anxious to please, yet at the same time capable of taking refuge from him in the web of family and women’s relationships from which he felt himself excluded. But there was something else now: suffering had given her a certain quiet dignity, a self-sufficiency that sometimes made him admire her and sometimes made him angry. Was her dignity a reproach to him; was it, even, a sign of scorn?

Only when Boris had finished eating, only when to delay the question any longer would have been absurd, did she finally ask, very quietly: ‘So what really happened in Moscow?’

What indeed? It had been Ivan’s own idea to call the great council of the people – the Zemsky Sobor. And to Boris and everyone else, it had seemed a good idea. Not of course that it was representative in any true sense. They had just collected together nearly four hundred of the gentry, clergy and some leading merchants into an assembly. But even so, that such a body existed at all was a remarkable concession to the people.

For the war in the north had not been successful. Russia needed those Baltic towns, the Poles were opposing them, and the Tsar needed money. The idea of the Zemsky Sobor was to get approval for the war, and the tough new taxes needed, and to show the enemy that the whole country was behind it. The great assembly had met that July. They had agreed to all the Tsar proposed.

There was just one problem. The impertinent assemblymen, supported by the new Metropolitan, petitioned Ivan to give up the Oprichnina. The Tsar was furious. And then…

Elena watched her husband thoughtfully. It seemed to her that he hesitated. Did he feel guilty? Was he uncomfortable inside his protective skin?

‘They were traitors. The Tsar treated them like traitors,’ he said gruffly. ‘There are still many traitors, many Kurbskys to be rooted out.’

Ah yes, she thought: Kurbsky. Of all the things that had turned the mind of Ivan on its present, dark path, perhaps nothing – at least since the death of Anastasia – was more important than the desertion of Prince Kurbsky. For in 1564 this commander, who had been one of those Boris had followed to Kazan, had suddenly defected to Lithuania.

It was not that Kurbsky was so important in military terms: he wasn’t. But he had been a friend of Ivan’s since childhood. It was a desertion that had struck him to the heart.

Historians have since studied a lengthy correspondence between Tsar Ivan and this exiled prince. It has been the centrepiece of several biographies. Recent scholarship reveals that this correspondence, like that other great classic of early Russian Literature, The Lay of Igor’s Host, may be a later forgery; but forgery or not, it is significant that the terror of Ivan began only months after the departure of this minor prince.

‘Is it true that the Tsar locked up the whole assembly?’ she asked quietly.

‘Only for six days.’

‘How many were executed?’

‘Only three.’

‘In public?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Then in front of all the people he had the tongues of all the others cut out?’

‘No. Fifty of them were beaten, that’s all. And quite right too.’

‘They had their tongues cut out?’

‘No. Only some of them.’ He paused, his face still giving nothing away. ‘There was a plot, you know. They had plotted treason.’

‘Was it proved?’

‘There was a plot. That’s all.’ He got up from the table. ‘There’ll be no more assemblies, I can tell you that,’ he added with a short, awkward laugh.

Elena did not ask any more. She did not ask if he had taken part. She did not want to know. What could she say? What could she do? Slowly, a little tentatively, she went over to him and put her arm around him in the hope that, perhaps, her love might cure his evil. But he knew that her love included forgiveness, and, being unable to submit to that, turned silently away. Only by the just perceptible hunching of his shoulders did she know that he was protecting himself from her. If only she could help him, and help herself in this darkening night. Indeed, she secretly decided in her inner heart, she would even sacrifice herself to save what she saw – how could she not? – as his lost soul. But saving a soul, perhaps, took more skill than she had.

That night, when they were lying together, she tried to give herself. Yet he, like an animal that has tasted blood, wanted no other diet. How could she abandon herself to the simple, wild passion, the exercise, as she saw it, of a cat in the night, when it was just this animal in him that she feared? And how could he, seeking escape, seeking a companion who could match her strength to his, how could he find solace in her love which came with a prayer?

He slept fitfully. She, having given herself but knowing instinctively that it was not enough, pretended to sleep.

He moved about. At dawn she saw him gazing through the parchment that covered the window, at the grey light of dawn.

He turned and, seeing her awake, knowing her to have been long awake, remarked: ‘I go back to Moscow tomorrow.’

Should she beg him to stay? She did not know. Besides, a feeling of failure, of lassitude, began to overtake her.

‘Stephen the priest’s wife is sick,’ she remarked dully. ‘I forgot to tell you.’

Whenever Mikhail the peasant surveyed his family, he knew that his plan was right. His eldest son was married now, and living at the other end of the village: he was not worried about him.

He also had another son and a daughter living, both under ten.

And then there was Karp: there was the problem.

‘Turning twenty and not yet married,’ he would comment ruefully. ‘What am I to do with him?’

‘More to the point, what are half the husbands in the region going to do to him?’ the old steward had remarked.

He was undeniably attractive to women. Slim, dark-haired, athletic, it was not only that he moved with such ease and grace, that he rode a plough horse and made it seem like a charger; it was not even his bold, rather smoky brown eyes that scanned any crowd for a pretty face. It was something inside him, something wild and free that did not belong in the confines of the village. Many women experienced a little frisson when they saw him. A few girls in Russka had allowed themselves to be seduced. Several more of the married women had secretly made themselves available. It delighted him first to conquer, then to search out, which he did neatly and deftly, what would give pleasure.

In a way, worried as he was, Mikhail was not sorry to have Karp in the house, for he was certainly a help. Despite the difficult conditions and the extra labour he had had to give Boris, the peasant and his son had managed to produce good profits from their grain.

There was also one other, quite unexpected source of income which had come their way.

It had come three years before when Mikhail had found, in the forest nearby, a little bear cub whose mother had been killed by some hunters. Seeing the poor creature, only a few weeks old, he had not the heart to leave it or kill it, and to the amusement of the village had brought it home. His wife had been furious. ‘Am I supposed to feed it?’ she cried.

But to his surprise, Karp had been delighted. He had an extraordinary way with animals; by the time the bear was eighteen months old, Karp had taught it to do a little dance and to perform several tricks. He would happily unchain the animal to let it perform better.

Often he could earn a few coins for the bear’s performances in the little Russka market. Twice, already, he had gone up the river all the way to Vladimir and returned with several dengi.

‘He won’t make our fortune,’ Karp had remarked, ‘but he pays for his keep, with a tidy profit besides.’

By this and other means, very secretly so as not to arouse jealousy or suspicion, Mikhail had been putting by money. His aim was simple.

‘I’ll make enough to buy myself out from the lord Boris. And I’ll leave some over so that Ivanko can follow us in a year or two if he wants,’ he told his family.

For things in Russka were going to get worse. His cousin Lev, who collected the taxes locally, admitted as much to him. ‘The Tsar would like to tax the rest of Muscovy and let the Oprichnina lands off,’ the merchant said. ‘But the fact is, he needs money desperately. It’s going to be hard.’ No doubt Boris would squeeze him further too. It was time to leave.

‘And where will we go?’ Karp had asked.

That was easy.

‘East,’ his father had replied, ‘into the new lands where people are free.’

It made sense. In the new settlements far out in the northern forests, authority was still far away and people lived under fewer restrictions.

‘As you like,’ Karp had obligingly replied.

In the spring of 1567, the wife of Stephen the priest died.

Under the rules of the Orthodox Church, he was not allowed to marry for a second time but had, instead, to join the order of monks.

This he did, giving up the little house he had occupied in Russka and taking up quarters in the Peter and Paul Monastery across the river. He continued, however, to officiate at the little stone church in Russka where he was greatly respected. As for his views on Church lands, whatever Stephen might think, he certainly was not so foolish, nor so impolite, as to say anything about them when he entered the monastery, though for some weeks Daniel kept his ears open, in case his cousin should say anything objectionable.

Elena missed her friend, who had so often kept her company, and felt sorry for the priest, now monk.

By that September, it was clear that a new campaign in the Baltic was imminent, and Boris was looking forward to it.

During the summer he had made numerous visits to Russka and even spent some calmer, happier times with Elena. Perhaps, yet, there might be a son.

He had also paid a visit to the Tsar at Alexandrovskaya Sloboda.

It was a strange place, about fifty miles north of Moscow, just east of the road up to ancient Rostov; not far away lay the great monastery of Trinity St Sergius. And, indeed, the Tsar’s headquarters was run rather like a monastery itself.

His first evening inside the heavily guarded enclosure, he was shown to a small hut where two other Oprichniki were sleeping and offered a hard bench.

‘We shall be up early,’ they told him with a grin.

But even so, he had not expected to be awoken long before dawn, by the harsh clanging of a bell.

‘To prayer,’ they muttered, and then, with more urgency, ‘you’d better hurry.’

In the blackness of the large courtyard he could see only his two companions, one on each side of him, and a distant square of light which he took to be an open church door. But as they crossed he heard from somewhere high above a harsh, ringing voice accompany the clanging of the bell.

‘To prayer, dogs,’ it cried out. ‘To prayer, my sinful children.’

‘What foolish old monk is that?’ he whispered.

But he had hardly got the words out before he felt a hand clapped over his mouth and his companion breathe in his ear: ‘Shut up, you fool. Didn’t you realize? That’s the Tsar himself!’

‘Pray for your souls,’ the voice cried and, though he had been party to executions himself, and had cut down traitors without a second thought, there was something eerie in the cry from the tall, invisible figure in the darkness above that sent a chill of fear down Boris’s back.

It was three in the morning; the service of matins lasted until dawn. He realized that the Tsar was there amongst them, watching him perhaps, yet did not dare turn round to look. After a time, however, there was a rustling sound, and the tall, dark figure moved quietly past him to the front. Looking neither to right nor left he walked to the head of the men at prayer and stood there silently, occasionally stroking his long reddish beard that was streaked with black.

Then, at a certain moment, he slowly prostrated himself on the floor and knocked his forehead firmly on the ground.

Never, since that dawn on the Volga, had Boris been so close to the Tsar. It filled him with awe.

But that was nothing to his feelings when, later that day, after mass and the mid-morning meal, he was summoned into the presence of the Tsar, all alone.

Ivan was dressed in a simple kaftan, black in colour but lightly embroidered in gold and trimmed with fur. His tall, lean figure and long aquiline face were as Boris remembered from the days of Kazan; but how much older he looked. It was not just that his hair had grown thin so that the upper part of his face had a bony, almost skull-like appearance. It also seemed to Boris that, under his long, drooping moustaches, Ivan’s mouth had assumed the shape of a thin crescent moon, downturned, strangely animal. Half Russian prince, half Tatar Khan and… something else: Boris was not sure what.

And yet, within moments, it was as though he were with the young Tsar again; once more Boris felt that same melancholy charm, that inner passion that belonged to another, mystical world. When he smiled at Boris, rather sadly, there even seemed to be kindness in the Tsar’s dark eyes.

‘So, Boris Davidov, it is many years since we met, you and I, on the bank of the Volga.’

‘It is, Gosudar.’

‘And do you remember what we said to each other then?’

‘Every word, lord.’ He could even hear it now, that quiet, mournful, thrilling voice and the faint lapping sound of the water.

‘I, too,’ the Tsar confessed. He paused.

Boris felt himself tremble, and a wave of almost choking emotion ran from his gorge down to his chest. Tsar Ivan remembered their words. Once more, he and the sovereign were sharing the religious destiny of mighty Russia.

‘And tell me, Boris Davidov,’ the Tsar went on quietly, ‘do you still believe now what you said then, about our destiny?’

‘Oh, yes, lord.’

Yes, for all the terrible times of recent years, for all the treachery, the violence – he passionately desired to believe it. Without that holy destiny, then what was he? An empty husk, dressed in black.

Ivan gazed at him thoughtfully, sadly it seemed, as though perhaps in Boris he was remembering something in himself.

‘The path to Russia’s destiny is hard,’ he murmured. ‘The straight and narrow way is hemmed in by thorns. Sharp thorns. We who travel that noble path, Boris, must suffer. There must be shedding of blood. We must not shrink from it. Is it not so?’

Boris nodded.

‘The duties of the Oprichniki are often stern.’ He looked at Boris carefully. ‘Your wife does not like my Oprichniki,’ he remarked softly.

It was said as a statement, yet clearly, since Ivan was now silent and watchful, Boris was being given an opportunity to deny it. He had an instant urge to do so and yet, at the same moment, a little warning voice told him to say nothing.

Ivan waited in silence. Could it be that, far from being a friendly conversation, this meeting had been arranged so that the Tsar could make his accusation in person: was this the end? Boris waited.

Then Ivan gave him a slight nod.

‘Good. Never lie to me, Boris Davidov,’ he said quietly. He turned, went to gaze at the icon in the corner and, without turning round, went on in a deep, melancholy tone: ‘She is right. Do you think, Boris Davidov, that the Tsar is unaware of what kind of servants he has? Some of these men are dogs.’ Now he turned back. ‘But dogs can catch and kill a wolf. And there are many wolves to be destroyed.’

Boris nodded again. He understood.

‘It is not for the servants of the Tsar to think, Boris Davidov,’ Ivan reminded him quietly. ‘It is not for them to say – “I wish this”, or “I will not”. It is for them to obey. Do not forget,’ he concluded, ‘that the Tsar is set to rule over you by the grace of God, not by the changeable will of men.’

Since Ivan said no more, it seemed that the interview was at an end. His eyes were wandering back towards the icon. Boris realized he should go.

But before he left, there was one thing he wanted to ask.

‘May I stay here, Gosudar?’ he enquired. ‘Until the next campaign?’

To be here, with the Tsar, and at such a time, was what he wanted more than anything.

Ivan looked back at him once more. The interview being at an end his eyes had begun to glaze over as he entered some other world of his own. How quickly, Boris thought, the great man could bring down a curtain that separated him from the rest of the world. It was something which, in another man, he might have taken for caution or awkwardness: as though there were things he did not wish Boris to see.

‘No,’ he said quietly, ‘things are quiet here today but… this is not the place for you.’

A little sadly, Boris withdrew.

That afternoon the Tsar went riding. In the evening there were more prayers. Then, the next morning, the same summons to church before dawn. By mid-morning, some prisoners were brought into the fort and led quickly away to a stout building at the far end of the enclosure. Soon after this, Boris left.

As he had made his way back to Moscow he had experienced a wonderful lifting of the spirits, as if his whole being and his commitment to the cause had been renewed.

It was in Moscow, on a clear September day, that Boris came upon the Englishman. They met near the Kremlin wall.

He was a thin fellow, with narrow-set eyes, and when Boris saw him, he was standing by the Neglinaia River gazing curiously across it.

The sight that greeted George Wilson’s eye was a recent addition to Moscow, specially constructed for the increased safety of the Tsar. It was the Oprichnina Palace.

It lay opposite the Kremlin, only a gunshot away – a fearsome fort with twenty-foot walls massively built of red brick and stone. The gate opposite them was sheathed in iron; above it a lion statue raised its paw angrily at the outside world. On the battlements they could see some of the several hundred archers who guarded the place.

As Wilson gazed at this sight wonderingly, Boris in turn looked at him with curiosity. He had heard a lot about these English merchants who were now to be found in several northern cities. They were a troublesome collection, but the Tsar apparently thought they could be useful to him. This fellow was so thin he might be a poor monk.

In fact, at that moment, Wilson was thinking of breaking the law.

Life had treated him well. He had married the German girl. Her plump young body had delighted him; her placid round face, he had soon discovered, could turn to a lecherous hardness that made him laugh for pleasure. They had two children now and he had become rather contented.

He was still a militant Protestant. He always carried some printed tracts inside his cloak as a sort of talisman against the all-pervading presence of the Orthodox churchmen with their incense and icons. Occasionally he would be stopped, usually by a black-shirt, who would demand to know what these sheets of paper were. They especially did not like the fact that they were printed. He knew that when Ivan had introduced a modest printing press a few years before to promulgate his laws, an angry mob led by the scribes had broken it up. The simple barbarism of these people amused him. When challenged about the tracts, however, he would always solemnly reply that they were his prayers, a penance for his wickedness, and this usually satisfied them.

He had undertaken a number of profitable deals, but none so profitable as the one he was contemplating now. It was a pity that, strictly speaking, it was illegal.

The problem was not the Russians, but the English. For since Chancellor’s return to Russia in 1555, the English trade had been organized as a monopoly under the charter of the Muscovy Company. Trade had been excellent. Wilson had been active in the trading depots from Moscow to the distant northern seas, and would have had nothing to complain of but for two things: the fact that Ivan had now managed to get his hands on some of the Baltic shore, especially the port of Narva; and that a few years back a cunning Italian had managed to sow ugly rumours about the English traders in Moscow, on behalf of a group of Antwerp merchants. As a result, the English trade through the distant northern sea was not quite so easy as it had been.

‘And the fact is,’ he told his father-in-law, ‘if I break the Company rules and ship some goods through Narva on my own account, the profits could be excellent.’ He would not be the only English merchant to do so.

Wilson had no great love of his fellow countrymen. In recent years, half the fellows they had sent out had been wild young men, who seemed to the Russians, and to Wilson, to be searching for women and drink as much as for trade. The question was, where could he get goods undetected by his fellow traders?

There was an added urgency about this business, too. For Wilson was nervous for the future. The war in the north was sure to continue. When the chief representative of the Muscovy Company had last returned to England, it was with an urgent request from the Tsar that he should bring back both skilled men and supplies for the war in the north with Poland. They had recently arrived. If he was to make a shipment out through the Baltic, the sooner the better, before the trouble started.

But there was another piece of news, a whispered rumour that had gone through the English community like a shock wave in the last few days; and it was this which had caused him to look at the Tsar’s stout fortress so carefully.

For to the departing Company envoy Ivan had given a secret message, which had at once been shared with the tight-knit English community. He had asked Queen Elizabeth of England for asylum, should he ever wish to flee Russia.

‘Is he in such danger?’ ‘Are there things we do not know?’ the merchants asked one another.

Whatever Ivan’s reasons for this strange request, it cast a cloud over the sky. Wilson wondered what to do.

And here was one of the black-shirts, standing right beside him. Wilson had learnt to speak passable Russian: one had to in a country where no one spoke any foreign languages. As an English merchant, he was not especially afraid of the Oprichniki. He decided to address the fearsome figure in black, therefore, and see what he could find out.

Boris was surprised to be addressed by the merchant, but answered him politely enough. Indeed, pleased to find that the foreigner spoke Russian, he conversed with him for some time. Wilson was cautious. He gave no hint to the black-shirt of what he knew, but by careful questioning he soon satisfied himself that Boris, who had recently been at the Tsar’s headquarters outside Moscow, had no sense of impending disaster. And for his part, Boris made a great discovery. This Englishman wanted a cargo of furs, and he wanted to obtain them discreetly. Boris did not have many, but he was sure he could find more. What a stroke of luck.

‘Come to Russka,’ he said. ‘None of your English merchants has ever been there.’

That autumn and the following spring were busy times for Daniel the monk. They were also disturbing.

The fact of the matter was, he was losing the abbot’s favour.

It was his fault. In his zeal to make money for the monastery, he drove the traders in Russka too hard. Nothing they did escaped him; and as a consequence, they tried all the harder to cheat him. The net result of this was that both the monk and the traders were in a state of irritation with one another and the monastery’s profits benefited very little.

Though discreet complaints were made to the monastery from time to time, the abbot, who was an elderly man, did little more than half-heartedly reprove Daniel. And when, in reply, Daniel assured him that the townspeople were all rogues, the old man usually found it easier to believe him.

And so matters might have continued indefinitely, if Stephen the priest’s wife had not died, forcing him to enter the monastery.

For it did not take long for the traders to suggest that things would go better if Stephen, whom they liked, were to be put in charge of Russka.

The abbot was loath to act. He was, truth to tell, a little nervous of the determined monk. ‘He’s very efficient, you know,’ he lamented to an old monk who was his confidant. ‘And if I took Russka away from him,’ he sighed, ‘one never knows what he might do. He’d make a fuss, I’m afraid.’

All the same, he began to drop small and not very subtle hints. ‘You have done good work in Russka, Daniel. One day we must find you a new challenge.’ Or: ‘Are you tired, sometimes, Brother Daniel?’

It had only taken one or two such conversations to whip Daniel up into a fever of anxiety and activity, which had made the abbot in turn more afraid of offending him, and at the same time to wish, still more, that he could find some way of getting rid of him.

Stephen, for his part, was aware of these developments but did nothing to encourage them. He was not afraid of Daniel and privately disapproved of him but, he concluded, he had enough souls to pray for, including his own.

Besides, he had other and more personal problems to deal with.

It was the greatest pity for him, however, that he did not realize the strength, and desperation, of Daniel’s passion.

Stephen was still the priest at the little church in Russka. The people of the town still looked to him for spiritual guidance, just as people in the area had looked to his father and grandfather before him. It was also only natural that he should continue to minister to Elena in her own home and, perhaps, to visit her a little more often than he had before, simply because her former companion, his wife, was no longer there to do so. God knows, he often thought, her life must be lonely enough.

And so it was. She had even made two visits to Moscow that autumn to see her mother; she had gone back the second time because she had sensed her mother was worried about something – though what, she would not say. At one point her mother had suddenly asked: ‘Your Boris, is he still our friend?’ And when she had hesitated, because she did not know herself, her mother had quickly said: ‘No matter. It’s of no consequence.’ And then a moment later: ‘Do not tell him I asked you.’

‘Would you like me to stay here for a while?’ she had asked. Little as she now liked Moscow, it seemed to her that her mother needed company at present.

But her mother had put her off. ‘In the spring, perhaps,’ she had said absently.

Elena was lonely, and concerned. How, therefore, could she help smiling with pleasure to hear that the priest had arrived to see her?

It was not long before there existed between them a friendly intimacy that could safely last as long as neither allowed it to be established, by any word or gesture, that they were half, perhaps more than half, in love.

The tall, dark-bearded priest, in his late thirties, was showing the first streak of grey hair in his beard which if anything, in her eyes, added to his attractiveness. She admired him: indeed, he was to be admired, for he was a fine man. And they experienced the passion of those who have first come to terms with suffering, which is more measured and therefore potentially more powerful than the instantaneous passion of the young.

He would read the service to her. She would pray. At other times they would talk, though never of personal matters.

And this, had it been possible, would have been the courtship of two serious people, amidst the gathering storm of events which their own decency prevented them from fully anticipating.

What extraordinary good fortune it was, Daniel thought, that God had given him the gift of observing two things at once.

Had it not been so, he might have missed one or other of the highly significant though small events that took place in the market place on an early October afternoon that year.

The first concerned the English merchant, Wilson, who had arrived the evening before with Boris. After spending time with Lev the merchant, the two men had ridden off to Dirty Place, and the monk had not seen either of them again until he had chanced, when he was taking the little ferry across the river to the monastery, to see the Englishman coming along the path deep in conversation with Stephen.

He had waited, and then taken the ferry back again, so that he could follow them. What might they be up to?

In fact, they had met by chance – Wilson returning ahead of Boris to Russka, and Stephen going for a walk. The priest, curious to meet an Englishman, had plied him with questions and Wilson, who was a good judge of character, soon decided that this literate fellow was safe to talk to and told him what he wanted to hear.

It was not long before the subject turned to religion. Here Wilson was cautious, but the priest reassured him.

‘I know about you Protestants. There are people like the Trans Volga Elders who are a little like you in Russia. Our own Church needs reform too, though it’s unwise to say so at present.’

And it was after quite a long talk on the subject that Wilson had finally shown the priest one of his printed pamphlets.

Stephen was delighted.

‘Tell me what it says,’ he begged. And so, to the delight of the normally solemn priest, Wilson translated it as best he could.

The little tract was vituperative. It called the Catholic monks vipers, leeches, robbers. It said their monasteries were rich and vain, their ceremonies idolatrous, and much else besides.

‘It’s against the Catholics, of course,’ Wilson assured him, but the priest only laughed.

‘It applies to us, too,’ he said, and he made Wilson go over the sheet with him once again, memorizing it.

Before they reached the town, Wilson had wisely secreted it under his cloak again, but it was as they reached the far end of the market square, where the priest took his leave, that Wilson as a little gesture of friendship, put his hand into his cloak and slipped the piece of paper into Stephen’s hand.

What does it matter? he thought. They couldn’t understand a word of it even if they could read.

This was the gesture that Daniel saw.

And it was at the same moment that he noticed, at the other side of the market place, another tiny movement.

It was Karp, the son of that foolish fellow Mikhail the peasant who made it.

He and his bear had just done a few tricks to amuse some merchants who had come down from Vladimir to buy icons. They had thrown a few small coins on the ground, and Karp had just scooped them up and handed them to his father who was standing nearby.

That was all. Nothing more. The handing of the coins had taken place at the very same moment that the Englishman handed Stephen the piece of paper. Why should it have been significant?

Because – and here, in all its glory, was the near genius of the observant monk – because he had noticed the expression on the faces of Mikhail and his son.

He could not have put it into words. Was it a look of complicity? Perhaps, but more than that. It was something about the way Mikhail stood and looked about him: a sort of defiance. No, it was not just that. It was that the sturdy peasant had, just for an instant, taken on the character of his son. He had looked, thought Daniel, like a man who is free. Indefinable. Unmistakable.

And in a flash he guessed. They were hoarding money.

He stored both these pieces of information in his mind, and decided to learn more.

In November 1567, just after he had set out northwards across the winter snows, Tsar Ivan abruptly cancelled his new campaign against the Baltic and hurried back to Moscow. Boris returned with the rest of the army.

A new plot had been discovered. The conspirators were hoping to kill Ivan in the northern snows, with the connivance of the King of Poland. There was a list of names; and who knew how many more might be implicated in this business?

In December the Oprichniki went to work. With axes under their cloaks and a list of names in their hands, they rode about the streets of Moscow making house calls. Some were exiled. Some impaled.

At the end of the second week in December, a party of Oprichniki came to the house of the bald, stout nobleman Dimitri Ivanov. His son-in-law Boris was not one of them. They conducted him to a chamber in the armoury in the Kremlin. There they had prepared a huge iron pan, underneath which was a fire. In this they fried him.

His death was recorded briefly in a secret list prepared for the Tsar. In common with over three thousand others who died in the coming months, the names upon this list, since known as the Synodical, were consigned to oblivion and it was forbidden to mention them.

At the same time, all the monasteries in the land were instructed to send their chronicles to the Tsar for inspection. By this means, Ivan ensured that no records of events were kept for these terrible years.

Daniel the monk was confident, even cheerful.

Thank the Lord that a century and a half ago, the monks had made such a good job of writing the chronicle. There was little in it that could possibly embarrass the Tsar. Throughout, the references to the Tatars were offensive and the Moscow princes were treated as heroes in the struggle against them.

Five years ago, to celebrate Ivan’s victories over the Moslem Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, the monastery had added crescent moons under the crosses above the church domes in the monastery itself and in Russka, as symbols of the triumph of Christian armies over Islam.

Our loyalty cannot be questioned, he thought contentedly.

The new purge in Moscow had had a satisfactory side-effect for him. The old abbot had been so distressed by the whole business that he had been scarcely capable of conducting ordinary business, and the question of the Russka administration seemed entirely to have slipped his mind.

Besides, Daniel was more confident than before that he could defend his position there.

Once again therefore, in early spring, his mind turned to the old question: how could he enlarge the monastery’s estates?

Boris’s land, now that he was one of the Oprichniki, was of course out of the question. That left one other piece of land, a little to the north, that now belonged to the Tsar himself. Might Ivan be persuaded?

It was not a foolish idea. Despite his restrictions on the Church acquiring new land, Ivan himself had remained a generous donor.

‘He strikes down his enemies; then he gives the Church some more land, to save his soul,’ one of the monks had cynically remarked.

Might this latest purge in fact be a good time to approach him?

It was with this in mind that Daniel the monk went to the brother who had been keeping the chronicle, and set to work.

The document which they produced, and which, in the month of February, they persuaded the nervous abbot to sign, was a splendid concoction. It reminded the Tsar of the many privileges granted to the Church in the past, even under the Tatars. That some of these were Church forgeries Daniel himself did not know. It pointed out the loyalty of the monastery and the purity of its chronicles. And it begged for much-needed land. Written in the high ecclesiastical style it was long, bombastic, and somewhat ungrammatical.

If it succeeds, Daniel thought, my position in the monastery will be unassailable.

Before sending it, the abbot rather doubtfully showed it to Stephen who read it, smiled, and said nothing.

On the morning of March 22 1568, in the Cathedral of the Assumption in Moscow, a terrifying event took place.

The Metropolitan Filip, while celebrating the Eucharist, suddenly turned and, in the presence of a large congregation of boyars and Oprichniki, publicly rebuked the Tsar for his murder of innocents in the latest purge.

Ivan, in a fury, struck his iron-tipped staff upon the rostrum, but Metropolitan Filip stood his ground.

‘They are martyrs,’ he announced.

It was an act of huge moral courage. The boyars trembled.

‘Soon,’ Ivan responded, ‘you will come to know me better.’

Within days, the Metropolitan took refuge in a monastery and Ivan began to execute members of the brave churchman’s staff.

And it was unfortunate for Daniel that it should have been on the very day following this event that a clerk brought to the Tsar the Russka monastery’s request for land.

Tsar Ivan’s response was immediate, and frightening; and when Daniel saw it, neither he, nor the terrified abbot, were sure what they should do.

St George’s Day had come.

Mikhail the peasant, his wife, his son Karp, Misha the bear, and the peasant’s two other children were ready.

The work of the year was done. The harvest was long in. Indeed, there had been little enough to do since, as if in punishment for the terrible deeds of its ruler, God had sent Russia that year a dismal crop.

Over the brown and grey landscape a chill wind was bringing with it light flurries of snowdust that were speckling the wet, now hardening ground. The stout wooden huts of Dirty Place smelled dank; bare trees, bare fields having shed their last covering, waited gauntly for the snow to submerge them. St George’s Day, harbinger of the bleak winter to come.

Mikhail and his family were ready to go. The exit money was all there in the peasant’s hand. Unlike many other peasants in the area, he had no debts, having discreetly cleared them the month before. He had a good horse and journey money besides. He was a free man. Today, he could leave.

The peasants’ plan was ambitious, but quite simple. They would go across country, through the woods, to Murom. There they would stay until, probably in the spring, they could take a boat up the Oka to Nizhni Novgorod. From there they would find a boat that was travelling out to the east on the mighty Volga to the new lands where settlers lived free.

It would be hard. He was not sure how they would find money to survive the whole journey; but they could find a way. Misha the bear would help them by earning a few kopeks here and there.

Yet, though the family was all packed up and ready to leave, they had not departed. For a week now, they had sat in the little hut and waited. Each day, either Mikhail or Karp would go into Russka, and each day would glumly return.

It was Karp’s turn that day. He came sadly along the path.

‘Well?’

Karp shook his head.

‘Nothing. No sign.’ He suddenly kicked the door violently, but though it made him jump, Mikhail did not reprove him. ‘Cursed swindlers!’ the young man cried.

‘Perhaps another day,’ his mother said, without conviction.

‘Perhaps,’ Mikhail said.

But he knew it was hopeless. He had been cheated.

The rules of departure from Boris’s estate were simple. The peasant must be free of debt and, a week on either side of St George’s Day, he might inform his lord that he wished to leave and pay his exit fees. That was all.

But there was one small catch. The lord, or his steward, must be there to receive the request to depart, and the necessary moneys.

A few days before the allotted time, Boris and his wife had abruptly departed for Moscow, and the house in Russka had been shut up. Mikhail had at once gone into Russka to seek out the steward, and had returned pale with shock.

For the old fellow and his wife had mysteriously disappeared too.

They had never left the town before; no one knew they were going, nor where they might be. Their house was empty.

Even then he had scarcely been able to believe it. He had heard stories of such trickery, to be sure, but here in Russka, beside a monastery, could such things be?

They could. As the days passed, there was no sign of the steward.

‘But don’t think they’ve all left the area,’ Karp said furiously. ‘That steward’s about somewhere, he’s hiding nearby. And if we try to leave without paying our dues, he’ll appear out of nowhere with half a dozen men. You see if he doesn’t. He’s waiting to follow us and arrest us as runaways. Then he and our cursed landlord will take more from us than ever. I’ll bet you we’re being watched right now.’

He was exactly correct. The only thing that neither Mikhail nor Karp guessed was that it was their cousin Daniel the monk who was behind it all.

For Daniel, the whole thing had been a simple matter.

After the Tsar’s terrifying message, it was clear that the monastery, and he in particular, would need friends wherever they could find them. The obvious first choice was the Tsar’s servitor Boris.

It had not taken the cunning monk long to discover that Mikhail was quietly paying off his debts. Early that morning he had sought out Boris himself and discreetly warned him that his best peasant was planning to leave. He had also reminded him of how he could prevent him.

Boris had been duly grateful.

‘I am always your lord’s friend,’ Daniel had said, and though Boris was not deceived by that, he nonetheless concluded that the heavily bearded monk might be useful to him.

‘Very well,’ he had remarked. ‘Keep me informed of anything else I should know.’

So St George’s Day passed. And the next day. And the next.

On the seventh day after, when he woke up a little after dawn, Mikhail was shocked, but not altogether surprised, to find that Karp and the horse had gone. On the table lay a little pile of money.

Three days later a man from a village five miles down the river arrived at the door with a message.

‘Karp passed through our village the other morning. He has gone. He said he left money for the horse. He’s sorry it wasn’t more.’

Mikhail nodded.

‘Did he say where he was going?’

‘Yes. Into the wild field.’

Mikhail sighed. It was what he had suspected. Perhaps it was where, after all, his son belonged.

The wild field: the open steppe: the land where, in recent decades, other wayward young fellows like Karp had gone to join those bands of half-brigands, half-warriors who had nowadays taken to calling themselves Cossacks.

Yes, he belonged in the wild field. They would never see him again.

‘He said please to look after the bear,’ the fellow concluded.

It was later that day that another, chilling piece of news reached Russka.

Tsar Ivan’s men had carried off the Metropolitan.

Elena kept her faith. She could still have a son.

It was Stephen who encouraged her. Though she had never spoken a word to him about Boris, the priest thought he could guess what their life must be like. He felt sorrier than ever for her, the more he knew her; yet he always advised her correctly as a priest. ‘It is not by seeking for personal happiness that we are rewarded by God,’ he reminded her. ‘It is by denying ourselves. The meek shall inherit the earth, as Our Lord told us. Therefore we must forgive; we must suffer; and above all, we must have faith.’

Elena had faith. She had faith that, after all, God would give her a son; she had faith that, one day, her husband would turn from his path. For a time, after her father’s disappearance, she had had faith that he, too, might be saved. But Boris, who had investigated the matter, informed her that he had been executed. He did not say how. It seemed to Elena that this event had shocked her husband.

Perhaps this, she hoped, would turn him back towards the paths of righteousness. So at least she prayed, though as yet in vain.

How to have a son? There was a remedy the village women used, that the priest’s wife had once told her about. It consisted of rubbing the body, and especially her intimate parts, with oil and honey.

‘They say it never fails,’ her friend had assured her.

And so now, while the man she truly loved gave her spiritual comfort, she prepared herself, as best she could, as a sacrifice for the husband whose darkening soul it was her duty to save.

The spring of 1569 brought cold weather and the promise of another poor harvest. From the Baltic came news that the enemy had snatched a fortress town. Everyone seemed depressed.

It was in early June that Daniel the monk had another talk with Boris.

By now the monk was worried. Things at Russka were looking bad. Not that he was entirely to blame. The events of recent years – the ever higher taxes for the northern war, the disruption of the Oprichnina and the land confiscations – had hurt the Russian economy. That, with the failed harvest, was causing a grim recession. The revenues from Russka were sharply down, and the old abbot seemed to be at a loss, complaining to him one day about the shortfall, yet the next suggesting: ‘Perhaps we are too harsh with our people in these difficult times.’

He had several times seen the old man looking appealingly at Stephen after these conversations. Something had to be done.

And then there had been the business with the Tsar the previous spring. That had not helped Daniel’s reputation either.

For instead of agreeing to or refusing their request for land, Ivan had sent a strange but insulting message. It was an oxhide: no more, no less. The messenger who brought it, a young black-shirt, obviously following the Tsar’s instructions to the letter, threw this object derisively at the old abbot’s feet, in front of all the monks, and cried out: ‘The Tsar says to you: “Lay this hide upon the ground and the land within it he will give you.”’

‘Is that all?’ the terrified abbot had asked.

‘No. The Tsar himself promises to visit you and give you the land you have chosen, and anything else you deserve.’

‘It is you, Daniel, who have brought this upon us,’ the abbot sadly remarked, after the messenger had gone. ‘As for this oxhide,’ he sighed, ‘I suppose we shall have to keep it.’

The hide had remained, ever since, in the abbot’s room – an uncomfortable reminder that Ivan would be coming to see them one day.

The first task for Daniel, therefore, was to put Stephen in his place. It was not difficult.

‘I think you should know,’ he told Boris, ‘that the priest spends more time at your house, now that his wife has died.’ And for good measure he added: ‘You once told me he was a heretic. I saw him taking something from that Englishman you brought here. The English are all Protestants, I hear, and this was a piece of paper.’

It was enough. He was sure of it. Boris had said not a word; but he was sure it was enough.

Already for Boris it was a year of evil portent. In the north, there was doubt about the loyalty of the cities of Novgorod and Pskov. Far in the south, in the Crimea, the Ottoman Turks with the Crimean Tatars were reported to be preparing an offensive against the lower reaches of the Volga. And now, this summer, word had come that the two powers of Poland and Lithuania, though they had acted together for generations, were being formally unified into one kingdom, ruled by a Catholic Polish King.

‘And that means one thing,’ he had told Elena. ‘It means that we shall have Catholics from Kiev to Smolensk – right at our doors.’

And now the monk was telling him that his wife might be unfaithful with the priest. He said nothing, but for long hours he brooded about it.

He hardly knew what to think. Part of him was filled with rage and with a loathing of both the heretic priest, whom he had never liked, and his wife. Yet if Daniel had thought that this was a good way to get Stephen disgraced, or at least banned from Russka, he was to be disappointed.

For Boris decided to take no action for the present, except to have the two of them discreetly watched.

There were two reasons for this. The first was that, having mastered the first wave of his jealousy, his intelligence told him that the suspicion might not be true. The fact that the priest saw his wife was hardly proof of anything. The second was a more devious thought: for if he could prove she was unfaithful, he could, with good conscience, divorce her.

Look at Tsar Ivan, he thought. He had married again and had had sons by both marriages. The Tsar had an heir. Perhaps with another wife, who did not secretly shrink from him…

And so began a new phase in his marriage.

Elena was entirely unaware of the pattern of his thoughts. How could she guess, when he was always something of a stranger to her? The idea that she might be unfaithful both hurt and enraged him; and yet, at the same time, it made her seem more desirable so that he found himself completely torn between the desire to keep her – a contaminated woman – at a distance, and the desire to possess her.

And poor Elena could only think: He suffers his black moods and yet, after all, he sometimes finds me attractive.

Sometimes, lying beside her, enclosed in this, the armour of his secret rejection of her, he would even, scarcely knowing that he did so, will her to be unfaithful. Though whether it was to be free of her, or to satisfy some deep, destructive tendency in his own nature, he himself would have been quite incapable of analyzing.

In this way he passed the month of June.

The weather had been changeable after late frosts in the spring. The harvest would be ruined.

On a hot and unusually sultry afternoon in late July, when even the breeze had stopped, as though realizing the futility of doing anything, Boris had ridden back from Dirty Place to Russka; and he had just come into the dusty little square when he saw, a hundred yards away, Stephen the priest slowly coming down the staircase from the upper floor of his house. He must have been seeing Elena.

His heart missed a beat.

The square was empty. The wooden houses around it and the stone church seemed to be held in a kind of empty stasis, as if they were awaiting a breath of wind that, with its gentle kiss, might bring them back to life.

As Boris approached his house, Stephen was walking away from him, his head sunk in meditation. He rounded a corner and disappeared.

Quietly Boris went up the stairs and opened the door.

She was there, by the open window. She was gazing out at the street, at the place where Stephen had been a few moments before. Her fingers, he noticed, were resting on the wooden frame of the window and a shaft of sunlight fell just across them as they lay there, very still. She was wearing a simple dress of light blue silk. He, having been in the fields, was for once not in black but in a white linen smock, tied with a heavy belt, like one of his peasants.

Although his heart was pounding, he breathed very quietly; he wondered how long she would stand there, gazing after the man. He tried, without moving, to see the expression on her face. A minute passed. Then another.

At last she turned. Her face was very calm; but she started when she saw him and, when he did not speak but only looked at her, she blushed a little.

‘I did not hear you come in.’

‘I know.’

Had she made love to him? He looked for some tell-tale sign: a faint glow about her, perhaps; some disarrangement in her dress or in the room. He could not see anything.

He stared at her.

‘You love him.’

He said it very quietly, not as a question but as a statement – as though it were something they were both quite agreed upon. Then he watched her.

She blushed deeply now, swallowed hard, looked miserably confused.

‘No. Not as a man. As a priest.’

‘Is he not a man?’

‘Of course. He is a fine man. A pious man,’ she protested.

‘Who makes love to you.’

‘No. Never.’

He stared at her. Did he believe her?

‘Liar.’

‘Never!’

She had said never. She could have used other words. She might have denied that she even wished it. But she had said: ‘Never.’ That meant she had desired it. As to whether she had or not… who knew? His reason told him she probably had not, but he was too proud to trust her, in case he was deceived.

Had he not wanted her to be unfaithful so that he could divorce her? Suddenly all that was forgotten as he looked at this modest, rather ordinary woman he had married, and who had committed these crimes against his pride.

She was pale now. She was trembling, afraid.

‘Never! You insult me.’

Very well. It might be so. But then he saw in her eyes, a little look that he had never seen before: a flash of contempt, of anger.

He would show her. He stepped forward suddenly, swung his hand and struck her with the open palm across the face. Her head jerked violently; she cried out, gasped. Turned back to him in rage and terror. He struck her with the other hand.

‘Bully!’ she screamed suddenly. ‘Murderer.’

It was enough.

He struck her. Again and again. Then he raped her.

He left for Moscow the next morning.

In September 1569 Tsar Ivan’s second wife died. The next month his cousin Prince Vladimir, still a possible successor to the throne, was accused of conspiracy and made to drink poison. The unlucky prince’s family were then killed, including his elderly mother, who lived in a convent.

But these events were followed by something far more terrible. For late in the year Ivan discovered another conspiracy: the cities of Novgorod and Pskov were planning to break away.

There may, in fact, have been some truth in it. To this day, the details are not quite clear. These once independent centres, near to the Baltic ports, may well have been tempted to escape the increasing taxation and tyranny of Muscovy by joining the newly united and formidable Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. They had always been closer to the busy Baltic shores than to the slow, deep heartland of Moscow.

Whatever the facts of the case, at the end of 1569, and accompanied by a large force of Oprichniki, Ivan the Terrible set out in great secrecy for Novgorod. He did not want the city to know he was coming. Even the commander of the advance guard did not know where they were going. Any passing traveller they met was immediately killed, so that no news of the advance would travel.

In January Novgorod was punished.

Exactly how many died in the torture, burning and executions that followed is not clear. They certainly numbered thousands. The city of Novgorod, so valuable to Russia over the previous centuries, was so utterly devastated that it never recovered. Having already killed most of its more important citizens on the road, Ivan only executed forty people at Pskov and burned a few priests at the stake. Then he returned to Alexandrovskaya Sloboda.

It was just after this that two small events of interest took place at Russka.

The first was the birth to Elena of a baby son. Boris had still not returned from the Novgorod campaign and so she and Stephen the priest had to choose a name. They chose Feodor, and so Stephen baptized him. That same day, the priest sent a letter to Boris to let him know what he had done.

The second event centred upon Daniel the monk. For in April 1570, still anxious to enrich the monastery, he hit upon a plan.

It concerned the oxhide that the Tsar had sent. It was so cunning, and so daring, that for centuries afterwards it would be known as ‘Daniel’s Ruse’.

When the abbot first heard of it, he went white with terror.

1571

Boris scowled, as well he might. The snow in the market place at Russka had long since been trampled and packed down until it was hard as stone. The few stalls in the market place that had opened out of habit were now being shut. No chink of sunlight had appeared in the cloud cover and none had been expected; and now the short day, like the stalls, was closing down.

He scowled because he saw Mikhail and his family. They were standing beside the remains of the single fire that had been lit in the centre of the market place. Mikhail did not answer his look, but stared at him without hope. What was there to hope for, after all?

There was a week to go before the beginning of Lent; yet what could the Lenten fast mean that year, when the harvest had failed for the third time running the summer before? That morning, in Dirty Place, he had seen a family eating ground birch bark. Bark from the trees – the peasant’s last resort when the grain was all gone. Few had supplies to last them through two failed harvests. None could get past three.

The monastery had helped feed the worst cases, but even its reserves were running low. There had been plague in some of the northern areas. Two of the families in Dirty Place had run away last year. There had been greater desertions in other villages.

‘The people are leaving the land,’ a fellow landlord had remarked to him, ‘and there’s nothing we can do.’

Where did they go? East, he supposed. East to the new lands by the Volga. But how many of them, he wondered, ever got there in the mighty, icy winter?

Mikhail and his cursed family. How they must hate him.

Since Karp had gone off with their horse, the family had not recovered. They had replaced the horse, and got through the second bad harvest; but they had had to dig into their money reserve to keep going. There was no more talk of buying their freedom. As for running away, like the others, he guessed that Mikhail had concluded he was safer with his young children near a monastery than trying to survive out in the great eastern wilds.

Now the peasant spoke to him.

‘Spare a kopek, Boris Davidov. At least for the bear.’

He noticed the bitter irony in the request. Let my children starve but take pity on the animal – that was the message.

‘Damn your bear,’ he said, and walked on.

The bear was as gaunt as the peasants now. It had never performed its tricks for Mikhail the way it had for Karp; in its raging hunger it would probably turn nasty. It stood there, haggard in its chains. Why on earth didn’t they kill it?

Boris turned to look up at the watchtower that rose, tall and grey, over the gateway. He had been going up there every day of late. For on top of all their troubles, word had come that an attack was expected from the Crimean Tatars from the south. So far, nothing had come, but Boris scanned the horizon anxiously, each day.

He had just come down from there now. Up in the high, pointed tent roof, gazing out through the eastern window at the huge, flat spaces, he had been alone with his thoughts. Out there, far away, lay the Volga and distant Kazan. Out there lay the huge eastern empire of the Tsar. Why, after their holy crusade, had the heartland been turned to icy stone, famine and dejection? As he stared out at the endless greyness, it had seemed to Boris that Russka was swallowed up and lost in the long half-night of winter. Nothing moved upon the landscape. The sky, though always overcast, was empty. The snow, which he usually thought of as a protection for the earth, now seemed to him like a coating of misery that had been hardened by the biting winter wind. Everything was grey. From his high place, he could make out the big field at Dirty Place which that day looked like a large, unmarked grave.

And then he had thought about his own little family, and the boy, Feodor. And that had made him scowl, too.

Was the boy his? It was a question that had been exercising his mind for nearly a year and a half. It was possible, of course. It might be that on that afternoon when he had struck her and forced himself upon her – it could be that then she had conceived. But what if it were not that day? What if the priest had already been with her, or if he had called the next day, or the next?

As the months passed, he had brooded upon this, frequently. When the child had arrived, he had received the message not from his wife, but from the priest, who had chosen the boy’s name. It was the name, moreover, of Elena’s brother whom he had hated. Was there irony in that? When he had finally returned, he had examined the child minutely. Who did it look like? It was hard to say. It did not seem to him to resemble anyone. But time would tell; features would appear which would tell him the truth: he was sure of it.

Meanwhile he had observed them both. The priest had congratulated him with a smile. Was there a trace of mockery in it? His wife had smiled faintly at the priest, who had stood beside her in a manner that, to Boris, appeared protective. Was there complicity between them?

The more he allowed, even encouraged, these thoughts to linger in his mind, the more luxuriantly did they grow, like some morbid but fantastic plant which, as it bloomed, took on in Boris’s imagination a kind of dark beauty, like one of those wondrous, magical plants that were said to flower only at night, in the depths of the forest. He watched the flower, he nurtured it; in a strange way he even came, in the dark recesses of his mind, to love it like a man who learns to feed upon poison and then, even, to crave it.

It was in December, when the baby was nine months old, that he had begun to feel sure it was not his. Whether this was the natural outcome of his speculation; whether the dark flowers of this plant he had nurtured required this belief in order that he might more completely admire their beauty; or whether something exterior had prompted him, he now became convinced. The child’s face, at certain angles, started to seem long, like the priest’s. The eyes looked solemn. The ears, above all, were neither his nor his wife’s. They were not the same as Stephen’s either, but they were more like his than Boris’s. Or so it appeared to the landlord on one of his routine, secret inspections of the little boy.

He had stayed up the high watchtower that day, alone with these thoughts, gazing out at the endless wastes until he had definitely decided that it was so. The little fellow who crawled across the wooden floor and smiled up at him, was not his. He had not yet decided what he would do.

He had just come level with the church when he heard a shout from the gates, and turned to see what it was.

Daniel the monk saw them first: two large sleds, whisking down the frozen river from the north. They were each drawn by three magnificent black horses.

They sped over the bank and came straight towards the monastery gate.

Only as they drew close did he see that the men in the sleds were all dressed in black. And they were almost at the gate before he clearly saw the face of the tall, gaunt figure wrapped in furs who sat in the first sledge.

And then he crossed himself and, in stark terror, fell to his knees on the hard snow.

It was Ivan.

As usual, he had come from Alexandrovskaya Sloboda secretly, without warning, his swift horses eating up the miles as he sped, sometimes by day, sometimes by night, from monastery to monastery in the icy silence of the forest.

The party did not waste any time. They drove straight into the centre of the monastery courtyard, and the monks were still looking out in surprise when the tall figure rose from his sled and began to stalk slowly towards the refectory. He wore a high, conical fur hat. In his right hand he carried a long staff with a gold and silver top and a pointed iron tip that pierced deep holes in the snow as he advanced.

‘Call your abbot,’ his deep voice echoed around the icy yard. ‘Tell him his Tsar is here.’ And the monks trembled.

About five minutes passed before they were all assembled in the refectory. The old abbot stood at their head, some eighty monks behind him, including Daniel. The dozen Oprichniki with the Tsar were stationed by the door. Ivan had seated himself in a heavy oak chair, and was facing them gloomily. He had not removed his fur hat. His chin was sunk upon his chest, so that his long nose partly obscured his mouth. His eyes, glinting under his heavy brows, looked up at the monks, darting suspiciously from one to the other. His long staff rested beside him, leaning at a sharp angle over the back of the chair.

For a little time he said nothing.

‘My loyal servant, Boris Davidov Bobrov: where is he?’ he quietly enquired.

‘Up at Russka,’ someone said, and then shut his mouth as though he had not spoken.

Ivan looked neither to right nor left.

‘Fetch him,’ he intoned.

One of the Oprichniki vanished through the door. Several long moments of silence followed. Then the piercing eyes fell upon the abbot.

‘You were sent an oxhide. Where is it?’

If the old abbot looked terrified, his fear was no worse than that which now came over Daniel. Suddenly, in this new and awful light, face to face with the Tsar, the plan which once had seemed so daring now appeared pitiful. It was also impertinent. His legs suddenly felt cold. He wished he were hidden at the back of the room.

‘Brother Daniel was put in charge of it,’ he heard the abbot say. ‘He can explain to you what he has done.’

Now he felt the Tsar’s eyes upon him.

‘Where is my oxhide, Brother Daniel?’

There was nothing else for it.

‘As you said we might, Gosudar, we used it to mark out a patch of ground, which, if Your Majesty is so gracious, might be granted to your loyal monastery.’

Ivan stared at him.

‘You ask for no more?’

‘No, great lord, it is enough.’

The Tsar rose. He seemed to tower over them all.

‘Show me.’

The idea had been nothing if not ingenious. After all, the Tsar’s message had been quite explicit: they were to use the oxhide to enclose the land. Why not, then, cut it into strips? Better yet, why not subdivide the strips? Or even better still…

It had been at the end of the summer that Daniel had set the monks to work. Using sharpened combs and knives they had proceeded, day after day, to take the oxhide apart, making from it not just fine strips of leather but a thread. With care and ingenuity this thread, now wound carefully round a block of wood, could be unravelled to enclose no less than a hundred acres. The area had been staked out by Daniel on St Nicholas’s Day.

Now, with the spindle of thread in his hand, he trudged across the snow, followed by Ivan, the abbot and the Oprichniki, to the place where the stakes began. He had just begun to unwind the thread when he heard Ivan’s voice.

‘Enough. Come here.’

This was it then. Death, he supposed. He went and stood before the Tsar.

Ivan reached forward his long hand and took Daniel by the beard.

‘A cunning monk,’ he said softly. ‘Yes, a cunning monk.’ He looked bleakly at the abbot. ‘The Tsar keeps his word. You shall have your land.’

The two monks bowed low, both praying fervently.

‘I shall remain here tonight,’ Ivan went on. He nodded his head thoughtfully. ‘And before I depart, you shall learn to know me better.’

He turned; and now he smiled. For hurrying across the snow came a figure in black.

‘Ah,’ he cried, ‘here he comes, a loyal servant. Boris Davidov,’ he called, ‘you shall help these cunning monks to know me better.’ Then, gazing down at the abbot, he announced: ‘Come, it is almost time for Vespers.’

It was already dark outside when, amidst the bright glow from all the candles they could muster, the trembling monks sang the service of Vespers.

Facing them, having donned the golden robes used on the highest feast days, Tsar Ivan stood and, with a strange, grim smile, conducted them with his staff. Once, a terrified young monk sang a wrong note and Ivan, his eyes suddenly boring into the malefactor, brought down the iron tip of his staff with a crash upon the stone floor and made them start the hymn again.

So the service continued. Twice, as though suddenly attacked by a spasm, Ivan turned away, let his staff fall with a crash to the ground, and prostrated himself, beating his head upon the stone and crying out: ‘Gospodi Pomily: Lord have mercy.’

But a moment later he would rise, pick up his staff and, with the same grim half-smile as before, conduct the singing as though nothing had happened.

At last the service ended. The shaken monks dispersed to their cells, and Ivan returned to the refectory where he ordered food and drink to be brought for himself, Boris, and the other Oprichniki.

He also sent for the abbot, and for Daniel, who, when they arrived, were told to stand just inside the door.

There was something strange about the Tsar, Daniel noticed, as Ivan sat down to eat. It was as if the service had excited him in some way. His eyes were a little bloodshot, yet seemed to be slightly vacant, as though he had entered another realm while his body, almost derisively, went through the motions of its existence in this world.

They had given him their best wine, and whatever food they could find. For a few minutes he ate and drank thoughtfully, the Oprichniki beside him carefully tasting everything first, to make sure it was not poisoned. The other black-shirts ate silently, including Boris, whom Ivan had seated opposite him.

After a time the Tsar looked up.

‘So, abbot, you have cheated me out of a hundred acres of good land,’ he remarked calmly.

‘Not cheated, Gosudar,’ the abbot began tremulously.

‘You and this hairy-faced dog beside you,’ Ivan continued. ‘You shall learn now that the Tsar raises up and casts down; he giveth and he taketh away.’ He looked at them with contempt. ‘On my way here, I was hungry,’ he intoned. ‘Yet in the forests I found no deer. Why not?’

The abbot looked baffled for a moment.

‘The deer have been scarce this last winter. People are hungry…’

‘You are fined a hundred roubles,’ Ivan said quietly.

He turned to Boris.

‘Is there no entertainment here, Boris Davidov?’

‘I had a fellow who could play and sing well, lord, but he died last spring.’ Boris paused. ‘There’s a fellow with a performing bear,’ he said doubtfully, ‘but he’s not very good.’

‘A bear?’ Ivan suddenly brightened. ‘That’s better. Take a sled and bring them, good Boris Davidov. Bring them now.’

Boris rose and went to the door. He had just reached it when Ivan, having taken a draught of wine, suddenly called out: ‘Stop!’ He looked round for a moment to observe the reaction of the others in the room. ‘Take two sleds, Boris Davidov. Take mine and the second. Put the bear in the first. Dress him up in my furs. Let him wear the cap of the Tsar.’ And taking off his high hat he threw it to Boris. ‘Let the Tsar of all the bears come to visit the Tsar of all the Russias.’

At this he roared with laughter and the Oprichniki, following suit, banged their plates upon the table.

‘And now,’ he said, turning to the abbot – and Daniel saw with amazement that every trace of mirth, in a split second, had completely vanished from his face – ‘tell that hairy-faced rogue beside you to bring me a jar of fleas.’

‘Fleas, lord?’ the abbot mumbled. ‘We have no fleas.’

‘A pot of fleas, I said!’ Ivan suddenly rose and strode over to them, his staff held in his hand at a rakish angle, tapping upon the floor.

He stood, towering over them both. Daniel noticed, in his terror, that the Tsar was a little stouter than he had thought. It only made him more frightening.

‘Fleas!’ he roared. ‘When your Tsar commands, it is treachery to disobey. Fleas!’ He struck his staff a tremendous downward blow on the floor in front of the abbot. ‘Fleas! Seven thousand. Not one less!’

It was a favourite trick of his to demand the impossible. Though the abbot did not know it, Ivan had used this demand for fleas before. The old man quaked and Daniel thought that, perhaps, he was about to have a heart attack and die.

‘We do not possess them, lord,’ Daniel said. He tried to keep his voice steady but it came out as a hoarse whisper.

Ivan turned to him.

‘Then you are fined a hundred roubles, Brother Daniel,’ he remarked calmly.

For a second, just for an instant, Daniel opened his mouth to protest. But then he remembered that recently the Tsar had tied a monk, like himself, astride a small keg of gunpowder before lighting it, and he fell silent, praying that his impulse had not been noticed.

Tsar Ivan returned to his table, indicating to the two monks that they were to remain where they were.

Now, ignoring them completely, he began to talk and laugh with the black-robed Oprichniki. He made some reference to another monastery, something – Daniel could not hear what – he had done to a monk there, which made them all roar with laughter, and sent a chill down Daniel’s spine.

Half an hour passed. Tsar Ivan drank steadily, but was obviously in control of himself. Each time his hand raised the goblet to his lips, Daniel noticed the dull flash of the big jewelled rings on his fingers. His eyes, every few minutes, darted suspiciously round the big room, piercing the shadows.

‘Bring more candles,’ he commanded. ‘Let there be light.’ He did not seem to trust the darkness.

So they brought candle stands from the church and set them up in the corners.

It was just as they were doing so, that there was a commotion at the door and one of the Oprichniki announced that the bear was arriving. Led by the Tsar, they all went to the entrance to watch.

It was a grotesque sight. Preceded by four men with burning torches, the sled came into the courtyard. The terrified monks peeped out of windows and doorways.

In it sat the bear. His gaunt frame had been hung with a magnificent sable coat. On his head was the Tsar’s conical hat. Around his neck Boris had hung a golden crucifix he had taken from the chapel.

With a baffled Mikhail guiding him, the bear was coaxed to walk on its hind legs from the sled into the refectory.

‘Bow!’ Ivan cried in a loud voice to the monks in the doorways. ‘Bow to the Tsar of all the bears!’

He himself conducted the bear to his own chair on which it was persuaded to sit. Then, with mock ceremony, the Tsar made them all, including the abbot, bow low to the bear, before they removed the hat and coat.

‘Come then, peasant,’ the Tsar said sharply to Mikhail. ‘Show us your tricks.’

It was not much of a performance. While the Tsar and his men sat, Mikhail led the animal through its routine. It stood up, danced ponderously, clapped its paws together. The creature was a sad sight, its skin hanging loosely for want of food. After a little time Ivan grew bored and banished Mikhail and the animal to a corner.

Outside, the night grew deeper. The cloud cover broke so that, here and there, a few stars could be glimpsed. Within, Ivan sat, apparently brooding, telling Boris to fill his goblet, and his own, with wine from time to time.

‘They say,’ he murmured softly, ‘that I may retire and become a monk. Have you heard that?’

‘Yes, lord. Your enemies say that.’

Ivan nodded slowly. In the early days of the Oprichnina many of the boyars had suggested this solution.

‘And yet,’ he went on quietly, ‘it is true. Those whom God chooses to rule over men are given not freedom, but a terrible burden; not a palace, but a prison.’ He paused. ‘No ruler is safe, Boris Davidov. Even I, chosen by God to rule over men according to my will – even I must watch the shadows on the wall: for any one of them may possess a knife.’ He drank thoughtfully. ‘Better, perhaps, the life of a monk.’

Boris, too, as he sat with Tsar Ivan, felt the oppressive silence of the shadows. He had drunk deeply, but his head was still clear; instead of confusion, he felt within him a slowly rising melancholy as he entered into the twilight world of this ruler he revered. He, too, in his small way, knew what it was to be troubled by the treacheries and phantasmagoria of the night. He, too, knew that a terrible phantom may, in the cold light of dawn, turn out to be real.

They will kill him, he thought, if he does not first kill them.

And here he was, sitting opposite this great and troubled man, his Tsar, who was taking him once again into his most intimate confidence. How he longed to share the life of this mighty figure, so close yet so all-powerful, so terrible yet so deeply wise, who saw into the dark hearts of men.

They drank in silence.

‘Tell me, Boris Davidov, what shall we do with this rascal priest who has stolen land from the Tsar?’ Ivan asked at last.

Boris thought. He was honoured to be asked. He had no love for Daniel, but he must make a wise answer.

‘He is useful,’ he said at last. ‘He loves money.’

Ivan looked at him thoughtfully. His eyes were more bloodshot, but still piercing. He reached out his long hand and touched Boris’s arm. Boris felt a thrill of excitement.

‘Well answered.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Let us beat some money out of him.’ He signalled to two of the other Oprichniki, and whispered instructions. They went over to where the monks were still standing and quietly conducted Daniel out.

Boris knew what they would do. They would tie him up, probably upside down, and beat him until he told them where all the monastery’s money was hidden. Priests and monks always had money and usually disgorged it fairly soon. Boris did not feel sorry for him. It was the smallest of all Ivan’s chastisements. The fellow probably deserved worse.

But now the Tsar’s long evening had begun.

It was by a little sign, an involuntary winking of Ivan’s left eye, that Boris understood what was to come. He had heard of it from other Oprichniki and he knew that it frequently followed a church service. The sign meant that Ivan was in a mood to punish.

‘Tell me, Boris Davidov,’ he now said in a quiet voice, ‘who is there here who is not to be trusted?’

Boris paused.

‘Remember your oath,’ Ivan murmured gently. ‘You have sworn to tell your Tsar all that you know.’

It was true. He had no reason to hesitate.

‘I am told there is one,’ he said, ‘who is guilty of heresy.’

It took Stephen quite by surprise when the four strange men came to search his cell.

They were thorough. Systematically, with the skill of long practice, they ransacked the box that contained the few possessions he had brought from his former home; they investigated the bench on which he slept, his few clothes, they examined the walls and would have torn up the floor had not one of them, in the gap between the thick logs of the wall, discovered what he was looking for: the little pamphlet.

How strange. Stephen had almost forgotten the existence of the English tract. He had not even looked at it for months, and only kept it in order to remind himself, from time to time, of what might be said about rich monks by those who were free to do so.

He might even have pretended he did not know what it was, but for one thing: the very day that Wilson had given it to him, while it was fresh in his mind, he had written down the Englishman’s translation in the margin.

When they had dragged him to the refectory, it was this that they showed to the Tsar.

Ivan read it slowly; he read it aloud. From time to time he would stop, and, in a deep voice, point out to Stephen the precise nature of the disgraceful heresies written down in his own hand.

For though some Protestants, like the English merchants, were tolerated because they were foreigners – and better at least than Catholics – Ivan was deeply affronted by the tone of their writings. How could he, the Orthodox Tsar, condone the insolent, anti-authoritarian arguments they used? Only months ago, the previous summer, he had allowed one of these fellows, a Hussite from Poland, to expound his views before him and all his court. His reply had been magnificent. It had been written out on parchment pages and delivered to the ignorant foreigner in a jewelled box. In rolling phrases the Orthodox Tsar had crushed the impertinent heretic for ever.

‘We shall pray to Our Lord Jesus Christ,’ he had ended, ‘to preserve the Russian people from the darkness of your evil doctrines.’

And now here was this tall, solemn monk, hiding such filth in a monastery.

When he had finished reading the pamphlet he glowered at Stephen.

‘What have you to say to this?’ he intoned. ‘Do you believe these things?’

Stephen looked at him sadly. What could he say?

‘They are the views of foreigners,’ he said at last.

‘Yet you keep them in your cell?’

‘As a curiosity.’ It was true, or near enough.

‘A curiosity.’ The Tsar repeated the word with slow, deliberate contempt. ‘We shall see, monk, what other curiosity we can find for you.’

He glanced at the abbot.

‘You keep strange monks in your monastery,’ he remarked.

‘I knew nothing of this, lord,’ the old man miserably answered.

‘Yet my faithful Boris Davidov did. What am I to think of such negligence?’ He paused for a moment. ‘I need no church court to deal with this,’ he remarked. ‘Isn’t that so, abbot?’

The old man looked at him helplessly.

‘You did well, Boris,’ Ivan sighed, ‘to expose this monster.’

And indeed, even Boris had been astounded by the pamphlet Ivan had read out.

‘How shall we punish him then?’ the Tsar wondered aloud, his eyes moving round the room.

Then, when he saw what he wanted, he rose from his chair.

‘Come, Boris,’ he said, ‘come help me mete out justice.’

It took some time, yet even so, Boris did not feel pity. In that terrible night, heavy with wine, swept up in the Tsar’s hypnotic power, what they did seemed to him a final, fitting vengeance for the wrongs that he had suffered.

Let the priest die, he thought. Let the viper – a heretic too – die a thousand deaths.

He had seen many worse deaths than this. But the particular method seemed to amuse the Tsar that night.

Softly, almost gently, he had crossed the floor to where Mikhail was standing and taken out of his hand the chain by which the bear was led.

‘Come, Misha,’ he had said softly to the bear. ‘Come, Misha, Tsar of all the bears; the Tsar of Russia has something for you to do.’ And he led him over to the priest.

He had nodded to Boris, and Boris had quickly attached the other end of the chain to Stephen’s belt, so that now bear and man were linked together with just two paces between them.

Putting his long arm round Boris’s shoulder, the Tsar led him back to the table; then he called to the other Oprichniki: ‘Now let the good Tsar of the bears deal with this heretic!’

At first they had had some difficulty. Stephen, saying nothing, had gone down on his knees, touched his head to the ground and then, crossing himself as he rose, stood quite still before the bear with his head bowed in prayer. The wretched animal, starved and miserable though it was, had merely looked from side to side in confusion.

‘Take my staff,’ Ivan had commanded, and the black-shirts had circled the pair, prodding first one and then the other, pushing the priest at the bear from behind, jabbing at the animal with the sharp iron tip of Ivan’s staff.

‘Hoyda! Hoyda!’ Ivan cried. It was the cry of the Tatar drivers to their horses – his favourite encouragement. ‘Hoyda!’

They struck beast and man; they goaded the bear until, at last, confused, enraged, stung by the pain, it began to strike out at the man chained to it, since there was no other object within reach. And Stephen, bleeding from the blows from the mighty claws, could not help trying to ward them off.

‘Hoyda!’ cried the Tsar. ‘Hoyda!’

But still the bear did not finish the business in hand and, in the end, Ivan signalled his men to drag Stephen out and complete the execution in the yard.

Yet still the night was not over. Tsar Ivan had not done.

‘More wine,’ he commanded Boris. ‘Sit close by me, my friend.’

It seemed as if, for a time, the Tsar had forgotten the others in the room, put out of his mind, perhaps, even the priest he had just killed. He gazed moodily at the rings on his fingers.

‘See, here is a sapphire,’ he said. ‘Sapphires protect me. Here is a ruby.’ He pointed to a huge stone set in the ring on his middle finger. ‘A ruby cleanses the blood.’

‘You have no diamonds, Gosudar,’ Boris remarked.

Ivan reached out and took his hand gently, giving him a smile of surprising intimacy and frankness.

‘Do you know, they say that diamonds keep a man from rage and voluptuousness, but I have never liked them. Perhaps I should.’

Boris almost needed to pinch himself to make sure he was not dreaming – that it was really the Tsar sitting here, side by side with him, talking to him like a brother; as intimately, as sweetly as a lover?

‘Here.’ Ivan took a ring off another finger. ‘Hold it in your hand, my Boris. Let us see. Ah, yes.’ He took the ring back after a few moments. ‘All is well. That is a turquoise. If it loses colour in your hand, it means your death. See,’ he smiled, ‘the colour is still there.’

He said nothing for a minute or so. Boris did not interrupt his thoughts.

Then suddenly Ivan turned to him.

‘So,’ he asked, ‘why did you hate that priest?’

Boris caught his breath. It was not said unkindly, rather the reverse.

‘How did you know, lord?’

‘I saw it in your face, my friend, when they brought him in.’ He smiled again. ‘He really was a heretic, you know. He deserved to die. But I would have killed him for you anyway.’

Boris stared down. Hearing such words from the Tsar he felt a welling of emotion. The Tsar, terrible though he was, was his friend. He could scarcely believe it. Tears started to his eyes. He himself had no real understanding of how lonely he had been all these years.

Suddenly he had a great urge to share his unhappy secrets with the Tsar who cared for him. Whom else should he tell, if not God’s representative upon the earth, the protector of the one true Church?

‘You have a son, Gosudar, to continue your royal line,’ he began. ‘I have no son.’

Ivan frowned.

‘You have time to beget sons, my friend, if it is God’s will,’ he murmured. ‘Have you then no son?’ he asked, surprised.

Boris shook his head slowly.

‘I hardly know. I have a son. Yet I think I have not a son.’

Ivan looked at him carefully.

‘You mean… the priest?’

He nodded.

‘I think so.’

Ivan said nothing for a little while, raising the goblet of wine to his lips.

‘You could get other sons,’ he said, and looked at Boris meaningfully. ‘I have had two wives. Both gave me sons. Always remember that.’

Boris pursed his lips. Emotion closed his throat. He nodded.

Ivan’s eyes travelled round the room slowly. They were a little glazed. His mind seemed far away.

After a little time he rose. Boris hastened to rise also, but Ivan motioned him, with a single, royal gesture, to prostrate himself before him on the ground. Then he gently lifted the hem of his long robe and cast it over Boris’s head, just as a bridegroom covers his bride at the marriage service.

‘The Tsar is your only father,’ he quietly intoned. Then, turning to the other Oprichniki, he called out: ‘Bring us our cloaks, and then await us here,’ And having put on his sable coat and his tall fur pointed hat, he said to Boris in a low voice: ‘Come, follow me.’

There were more stars now, in the depth of the night. Grey, ragged clouds passed slowly over the monastery as Tsar Ivan, his staff tapping on the frozen snow, made his way like a ship with unfurled sails across the empty yard and out through the gate towards the River Rus. Boris followed just behind.

Solemnly the high Tsar strode, down the path, over the river’s thick ice, and up the track to the little town above.

How silent it was. The high tower, with its sharp, pointed tent roof, stood out boldly against the patches of starry sky behind.

Still speaking no word, Ivan led him up the path from the river to the gateway. The little gate at the side, manned by a single night watchman, was still open. Ivan passed through, into the starlit market square. And now he turned.

‘Where is your house?’

Boris pointed and was about to lead the way, but already the Tsar had faced round again and was striding on, across the open space, his long staff’s tap, tap, the only sound in the town except for the faint rustle of his long robes.

Boris wondered what he intended.

The Tsar did not pause as he came level with the little church whose dome shone softly in the starlight; he continued down the street until Boris ran to open the door of his house. Here, before the door, Ivan halted.

‘Call down your wife. Let her come without delay,’ he ordered in a deep voice.

Not knowing what was to follow, Boris ran up the staircase and opened the door.

A single lamp was burning in one corner. Elena lay dozing, with the baby boy in her arms. She started to see Boris’s pale face, in such a state of nervousness, suddenly at the door. But before either of them could utter, they both heard Tsar Ivan’s deep voice below: ‘Let her come down at once. The Tsar is waiting.’

‘Come,’ Boris whispered.

Still not fully awake, utterly mystified, Elena got up. She was dressed only in a long woollen shift and felt slippers. Holding the sleeping infant in her arms, she came out to the top of the staircase, scarcely understanding what was going on.

As she came out, she stared at Boris and, glancing down at his hands, her eyes suddenly opened wide in horror. He, too, looked down.

He had not noticed before; it must have happened when he was goading the bear.

‘Your hands are covered in blood,’ she cried.

‘I stabbed your dogs; they barked too loud at a late guest,’ came the deep voice from below. It was an old, bitter Russian jest. ‘Come down,’ the voice went on.

She turned to Boris.

‘Who is this?’

‘Do as you are told,’ he whispered urgently. ‘Hurry.’

Uncertainly, she descended the stairs.

‘Now come to me,’ the Tsar’s voice softly commanded.

She felt the icy night air on her face and tried to cover the child. She walked over the frozen snow to where the tall figure stood, not knowing, in her confusion, how she should salute him.

‘Let me see the child,’ Ivan said. ‘Put him in my arms.’ And, letting his staff rest against his shoulder, he stretched out his long hands.

Hesitantly, she passed over the child. He took it gently. It stirred, but did not wake. Nervously, under a dark stare from his eyes, she stepped back a pace or two.

‘So, Elena Dimitrieva,’ Ivan said solemnly, ‘did you, too, know that the priest Stephen was a heretic?’

He saw her start violently. There was, at that moment, a large gap in the clouds and the whole of the sky above Russka was clear. A quarter moon, now visible over the gateway, sent a pale light along the street. He could see her face clearly. Boris was standing to his left.

‘The heretic priest is dead,’ he said. ‘Even the bears could not abide him.’

There was no mistaking it. He saw her face. It was not just the horror which some weak women felt at hearing of a death, even a grisly one. It seemed as if she had received a body blow. There was no doubt: she had loved him.

‘Are you not pleased to hear that an enemy of the Tsar is dead?’

She could not answer.

He transferred his gaze to the child. It was a small, fair infant, not yet a year old. Miraculously, it was still sleeping. He looked at it carefully in the moonlight. It was hard to tell anything by its features.

‘What is the child’s name?’ he murmured.

‘Feodor,’ she whispered back.

‘Feodor.’ He nodded slowly. ‘And who is the father of this child?’

She frowned. What was he talking about?

‘Was it my faithful servant, or was it a heretic priest?’ he gently enquired.

‘A priest? Who should the father be if not my husband?’

‘Who indeed?’

She looked innocent, but she was probably lying. Many women were deceitful. Her father, he remembered, was a traitor.

‘The Tsar is not to be deceived,’ he intoned. ‘I ask you again: did you not love Stephen, the heretic priest I have rightly killed?’

She opened her mouth to protest; yet, because she had loved him, because this tall figure terrified her, found herself unable to speak.

‘Let Boris Davidov decide,’ he said, and looking towards Boris asked: ‘Well, my friend, what is your judgement?’

Boris was silent.

Now, standing between them both, and with this child, half a stranger to him, in the freezing night, an extraordinary mixture of ideas and emotions crowded into his brain. Was Ivan offering him a means of escape, a divorce? No doubt the Tsar could arrange such a thing: the abbot, to be sure, would do whatever the Tsar said.

What did he believe? He scarcely knew himself. She loved the priest; she shrank from her husband. She had, by this and other means, humiliated him, tried to destroy the pride which was – should it not be? – at the centre of his being. Suddenly all his resentment of her over the years came together in a single, overpowering wave. He would punish her.

Besides, if he gave way now, if he acknowledged the child which might not be his, then she had won. Yes: her final triumph over him. She would laugh to all eternity and he, the bearer of the ancient, noble tamga of the trident, would lay it down in the dust at her cursed feet. Not only he, but all his ancestors. At this thought, another wave of rage went through him.

And what had the Tsar told him? What had he said, with such meaning?

‘You can have other sons.’ Of course, that was it. Other sons, with another wife, to inherit. As for this boy… whoever his father was, let him suffer – for that way, infallibly, he would hurt her.

He would punish her, the child, even himself. That, he now saw, in this deep, dark night – that was what he wanted.

‘The child is not mine,’ he said.

Ivan said not a word. Taking his staff in his right hand, holding the infant, who now began to cry, in his other, pressed against his dark, flowing beard, he turned and began to walk, with the same tap, tap of his staff, towards the gate.

Boris, uncertain what to do, followed at a distance behind.

What was happening? Only gradually, in her confusion and fright, had Elena understood what was being said. Now, shivering in the snow, she stared after them in horror.

‘Feodor!’ Her cry ran round the icy market place. ‘Fedya!’

Slipping in her felt shoes, almost falling, she threw herself wildly after them.

‘What are you doing?’

Neither man looked round.

She came up with Boris, seized him, but he pushed her aside so that she fell.

And now Tsar Ivan reached the gateway where the frightened keeper, his hand on his heart, was bowing low in mortal fear.

Ivan pointed to the door to the tower.

‘Open it.’

Still bearing the child, he went inside. Slowly he began to mount the steps.

They were barring her way. Her husband and the foolish gatekeeper: they were barring her way at the foot of the tower.

She understood now: instinctively, she understood them, and the terrors that lay in the dark labyrinths of their minds.

Forgetting everything, she clawed at the two men, fought them like an animal and, with a sudden rush, burst past them, slamming the heavy door behind her and shooting the bolt.

She ran up the wooden stairs.

She could hear him now, somewhere in the darkness above her: the creak of his footfall on the stairs, the tap, tap of his iron staff on every second step. He was high above.

Desperately, her heart sinking, she ran up after him. She could hear her baby crying.

‘Gospodi Pomily: Lord have mercy.’ The words came involuntarily on her breath. Still he was high above her, so high.

It was halfway up, at the point where the tower steps came out on to the battlement that ran along the wall, that she realized she could hear nothing from above.

Ivan was already up there, in the high chamber in the tent roof where the look-out windows faced over the endless plain. She stared up at the tower that rose sheer, harsh and silent above her, and whose wooden roof made a dark, triangular shadow across the night sky. For an instant, she was uncertain what to do.

And then she heard it, her child’s cry, high in that great roof above; and looking up she suddenly saw a pair of hands hold out a small white form which then, as she herself cried out with a cry, she thought, that must have reached the stars, they tossed, like a piece of jetsam, out into the night.

‘Fedya!’

She threw herself against the battlements, reaching out, in a futile gesture, into the blackness, as the small white form, shocked into silence, fell past her into the deep shadows beneath where she heard its faint thud upon the ice.

At dawn the Tsar left. Before doing so he insisted that he receive the traditional blessing from the frightened abbot.

He added two sleds to his little cortège: one contained a substantial quantity of the monastery’s coin and plate; the other contained the bell which Boris’s family had given the monks in former times, and which he intended to melt down for the extra cannon he was making.

Soon afterwards, word came that the Crimean Tatars were indeed approaching the Russian lands. The Tsar, giving credence once more to the belief that he was a physical coward, absented himself in the north. The environs of Moscow were ravaged.

It was two weeks after the death of her child that Elena discovered, to her astonishment, that she was pregnant. The father of the child in her womb, as it had been before, was Boris.

There is, in the service books of the Orthodox Church, a very beautiful reading.

It is an address of the great St John Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed, and it is read only once a year, in the late-night vigil that welcomes in Easter Day.

It was with some surprise during the Easter Vigil at the Monastery of Peter and Paul in the year 1571 – at which most of the diminished population of Russka and Dirty Place were present – that the congregation noticed a single figure enter, very quietly, at the back of the church a little after the vigil had begun.

Since the beginning of Lent, Boris had not been seen out of doors. No one was sure what was going on.

It was said that he was fasting alone. Some also said that his wife would not see him; others that they had heard him addressing her.

Again, some declared that he had tried to stop the Tsar killing his son; others that he had stood by.

So it was hardly surprising that people glanced back at him now, every few minutes, to see what he was doing.

Boris stood with his head bowed. He did not move from the back of the church, the place reserved for penitents, nor did he look up or even cross himself at the many points in the service where this is called for.

The Easter Vigil, celebrating as it does the Resurrection of Christ from the tomb, is one of mounting joy and excitement. After the long fast, almost total in the final days of Passion Week that follow Palm Sunday, the congregation is in that state of weakened, cleansed emptiness which is conducive to receiving a feast of spiritual rather than material food.

The Vigil begins with Nocturne. At midnight, the royal doors of the iconostasis are opened to signify the empty tomb and, with tapers in their hands, the congregation makes the Easter procession round the church. Then begins the service of Matins, and the Easter Hours, which rises towards that climactic point where the priest, standing before all the people, proclaims:

‘Kristos voskresye: Christ is risen.’

And the people cry back:

‘Voistino voskresye: He is risen indeed.’

Since Stephen had gone, a young priest had taken his place. This was the first time that he had stood, cross in hand, before the Holy Doors.

His own knees felt weak from fasting, but now, as he faced the congregation with their lighted tapers and smelt the thick incense that filled every corner of the church, he had a sense of exaltation.

‘Kristos voskresye!’

‘Voistino voskresye!’

Despite their hunger, despite everything, it seemed to the priest that a wonderful joy was filling the church. He trembled a little. This, truly, was the miracle of Easter.

‘Kristos voskresye!’ he cried again.

‘Voistino voskresye!’

He saw that the solitary figure at the back of the church, too, was mouthing the joyous response, but was unaware that no sound proceeded from Boris’s throat.

And then came the Easter kiss when, one by one, the people come forward to kiss the cross, the Gospels and the icons, and then, greeting the priest himself, they kiss him, saying: ‘Kristos voskresye’; and he to each of them replies, with a kiss: ‘Voistino voskresye!’ Then the people kiss one another, for this is Easter, and this is the simple, affectionate way of the Orthodox Church.

But Boris, of all the people, did not come forward.

And it is then, after the Easter kiss, that the priest begins that most lovely sermon of Chrysostom.

It is a sermon of forgiveness. It reminds the congregation that God has prepared for them a feast, a reward: it speaks of the Lenten fast, by which is also meant repentance.

‘If any have laboured long in fasting, let him now receive his reward,’ the priest read out, in his gentle voice. How kindly the sermon was. If any have delayed, it said, let them not despair. For the feast of the Lord is not denied to sinners so long as they come to Him. For He shows mercy to the last, just as the first.

‘If any have wrought from the first hour,’ he read out, ‘they should be rewarded. If any have come at the third hour, they too. If any have arrived at the sixth hour, they should not now fear. If any have delayed until the ninth hour, let them approach. If any have tarried…’ Ah, that was it, even until the very last… ‘If any have tarried,’ the priest glanced towards the back, ‘even until the eleventh hour, let him come…’

Whatever had been passing in his mind – whether it was that he now understood that his wife was innocent; whether it was from guilt for the deaths of Stephen and Feodor; or whether it was that, being unable any longer to sustain the burden of evil that his pride, and fear of the loss thereof, had placed upon him – it was certain that, as he stood in the place reserved for penitents, Boris, when he heard these lovely words, at the eleventh hour sank to his knees and, at last, entirely broke down.

In the year 1572, the dreaded Oprichnina was officially ended. All reference to its existence was forbidden.

In the year 1581 came the first of the so-called ‘Forbidden Years’ during which peasants were forbidden to leave their landlords even on St George’s Day.

In that same year, Tsar Ivan, in a fit of anger, killed his own son.