Russka

The Cossack

1647

Freedom: freedom was everything.

The steppe lay all around him. How quiet it was – golden, brown, violet at the horizon, stretching forever eastwards. A single hawk hovered in the sky; a tiny marmot scurried into the cover of the long, dry stalks. There was no breeze. Here and there, unexpectedly, an ear of wheat whose seed, no doubt, had been dropped in that place by the wind in bygone years, grew amongst the myriad wild grasses of the endless plain.

Andrei Karpenko rode his horse slowly, making a large, lazy curve out from the big wheat field, past the little kurgan that marked its end, and away some two miles out into the wild plain before returning slowly in the direction of the little River Rus that flowed down towards the mighty Dniepr in these ancient Kievan lands.

The young man took a deep breath, so full of contentment that it was almost a sigh. How sweet was the scent of the grasses – the cornflower and broom, the wild hemp and milkwort, and, always, the unending, now withered feather grass that covered all. It was as though all these, and thousands of varieties more, had been thrown by the hand of God into a huge, flat basin, burnished by the sun all summer long, moistened with dew each day and then heated in the glowing pan once more until they gave off in their last extremity a final quintessence that arose from the land like a shimmering haze on this slow, late-summer afternoon.

His father’s farm lay just inside the line of trees, about a mile from the little settlement still known, after all these centuries, as Russka.

Andrei smiled. His father, Ostap, had been amused by the name of the place when he first came to it. ‘Russka – that’s where my father Karp ran away from, in the north,’ he had often told his son. It was from this runaway that they had been given the typically Ukrainian family name of Karpenko. But the fact that he had returned to the home of far earlier ancestors was something old Karp never knew.

Freedom: the birthright of every Cossack. Freedom and adventure.

And now Andrei’s turn had come. It was a thrilling prospect. Only the day before, the two men had appeared at the farm. They were disguised as wandering monks, and so Andrei had taken them to be; but the instant old Ostap set eyes on them he had given a broad grin and conducted them inside.

‘Vodka!’ he shouted to his wife. ‘Vodka for our guests! Andrei, listen and attend. And now, gentlemen,’ he continued in a businesslike way, the moment they were seated, ‘what news from the south – from the camp?’

They were Cossacks, and when they had announced their exciting news, old Ostap slapped his thigh and cried out: ‘It’s time you were off, Andrei. What an adventure! The devil – I’ve a good mind to go too!’

To ride the steppe with the Cossacks – it was what young Andrei had been dreaming of since he was a boy. His horse, his equipment, everything was ready.

There was just one problem.

He was a handsome young fellow of nineteen, recently returned from the Academy at Kiev where the Orthodox priests had taught him to read and write, some simple arithmetic, and even a smattering of Latin.

His hair was jet black, his skin dark, but smooth rather than swarthy; his beard was thin, like that of a Mongolian, and mostly sprouted on his chin, but he was growing a long, fine, drooping moustache. His face was round, with high cheekbones, and he had handsome, brown, almond-shaped eyes. Though some of these features came from the beautiful Tatar wife that his grandfather Karp, the runaway, had taken, Andrei’s tall frame and graceful bearing were Karp’s exactly. Slavic charm and ruthless Tatar eyes – it made him magnetic to many women.

Since he was still young enough to believe that human nature was consistent, it sometimes puzzled Andrei that he seemed to have two souls at war within himself: one devoted to his family and their farm; the other a wild, free spirit with neither home nor conscience, which yearned to roam the steppe to the horizon and beyond. He was a perfect young Cossack.

And how he longed to go with those men, to the south. He could set out the very next day. Only one thing held him back – the question his worried mother had asked.

‘If you go, Andrei, what will become of the farm?’

Slowly and thoughtfully he rode back to the little kurgan where he paused for a few moments, to gaze around the fields and the steppe.

What wonderful land it was, with its long summers and its rich black earth! Some time ago now, this ancient Kievan territory had acquired another name, for this was the Ukraine.

The rich Ukraine: the golden land. Why then should old Ostap, as he surveyed his swaying wheat, complain?

‘God gave us the best fields and then sent a plague of locusts to devour them.’

It was because the Ukraine was ruled by the Catholic King of Poland.

Four centuries had passed since Ostap’s ancestress Yanka and her father had fled from the Tatars to the north. Since then, the Tatars had slowly lost their hold over the old Kievan territories and mighty Lithuania had moved down to take their place. But the lands round the Dniepr, rich though they were, had been half-deserted. Only very gradually had settlers moved back into the countryside and the shells of the once-great cities.

They were dangerous, frontier lands. Every few years, huge raiding parties of Tatars from the Crimea would come sweeping in from the steppe to take slaves; smaller raids were constant. Like all the other settlers, when Ostap and his men went out to plough, they took their muskets with them.

Yet they were free lands. The rule of Lithuania was generally easy-going. In the countryside, land was there for the taking. As for the towns, the greater ones like Kiev and Pereiaslav were allowed pretty much to govern themselves under the long established free burgher system from the west, known as the Magdeburg Law.

And so this part of the Ukraine might have remained: a rich frontier inhabited by Cossacks, Slav peasants, free townsmen and Lithuanian petty gentry, who nearly all followed the old Orthodox faith of ancient Rus.

Until some eighty years before. For at the Treaty of Lublin, in 1569, the two states of Poland and Lithuania, though they had long been linked, were formally merged into one. The gentry began to convert to Catholicism; great Polish magnates started to take over huge tracts of land around the Dniepr; and though the cities kept their Magdeburg Law, the rest of the Ukraine discovered what it meant to live under contemptuous Polish lords.

How dare a Polish noble despise a Cossack! Were not the Cossacks free?

There were three main sections of their great fraternity. Four hundred miles away to the south-east, where the great River Don came down to the Black Sea shore, dwelt the Don Cossacks in their many settlements. Here, in these southern Kievan lands, lived the Dniepr Cossacks, proudly independent men like Ostap on his little farm by Russka. And lastly, far to the south, in the wild steppe below the Dniepr rapids, lay the Cossack horde – the Zaporozhian host – wild, unpredictable, living in a huge camp where no women were allowed, thousands strong and answerable to no man.

That was where the two fellows disguised as monks had come from.

How proud Andrei was to be a Cossack! He had learned their exploits at his mother’s knee. Who had been hired by the powerful Stroganovs, late in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, to explore and conquer the huge wilds of Siberia? Ermak the warrior and his brother Cossacks. Indeed, though Andrei did not know it, other Cossack adventurers, at this very time, were reaching those distant shores, five thousand miles away, that stared across the narrow straits to cold Alaska.

It was the Don Cossacks who had seized the great fortress of Azov, by the Black Sea, from the mighty Ottoman Turks. And it was the Zaporozhian Cossacks who had not once, but twice, taken their long boats down to Constantinople and burned the Ottoman fleet under the very noses of the Turks.

Everyone feared the Cossacks. The Tatars in the Crimea feared them, so did the Turks who were the Tatars’ overlords. Poland had needed their services again and again. Even the Pope had sent an envoy to the Zaporozhian camp. ‘And without us Cossacks,’ the old Ostap always said, ‘the Tsar and his family would never have gained the throne of Muscovy.’

Even this boast was half-true.

Poor Muscovy. What awful torments the northern land had suffered. Soon after Ivan the Terrible’s death the ancient ruling house of Muscovy had ended. For a time a great boyar related to the royal house – Boris Godunov – had tried to hold the land together, but had sunk under the burden. Then had come those dismal years – the Time of Troubles – when plague and famine swept the land, when one after another false claimant to the throne seized power, until it was hard at times to say if any Tsar ruled in Russia. Other powers had seen their chance; Sweden had invaded and worst of all, using every kind of treachery and guile, the Polish King had tried to take the throne of Muscovy and make her Catholic.

And then, at last, great Russia had risen. She had suffered the terror of Ivan, plague and famine and foreign invasion but now, having suffered, she arose. It was not the great princes and magnates, not the leading gentry, who turned like an irresistible tide against the Poles. It was the simple peasants, the small landholders, and the grim, bearded elders of Orthodoxy from beyond the Volga River who massed with spears and axes to sweep the Catholics out. ‘And we Cossacks helped them, our Orthodox brothers,’ Ostap would say with truth, and with rather less truth: ‘Without us, they would have lost.’

The Poles had been driven out. A great meeting, a Zemsky Sobor, had been called, and a popular boyar family had been chosen to found a new dynasty.

In this way the family of Ivan the Terrible’s first, kindly wife, who had been despised by the great magnates only fifty years before were, in the year 1613, chosen to be rulers, and the new Romanov dynasty was begun.

Andrei had mixed feelings about the Muscovites. Like most Ukrainians, he thought them crude. With all Cossacks, he was suspicious of any authoritarian ruler like the Tsar. But the Russian people were his brothers, for a very simple reason: they were Orthodox. ‘They drove the Catholic Poles out of their land. Perhaps one day we can drive them out of ours too,’ he sometimes said.

For several generations Dniepr Cossacks had served the Polish King. Some had been given special officer status and entered on a service register which entitled them to regular pay. But the majority had been ignored. Moreover, as non-Catholics, they had fewer rights anyway. More than once they had revolted to improve their conditions. But the revolts had been crushed and in recent years the service Cossacks had not even been allowed their own leaders. Their chief, the Hetman, had been a Polish appointee, and many of their officers came from the Polish lesser nobility, the Szlachta. No wonder even the better-off Cossacks were discontented.

And now, it seemed, some kind of new campaign was afoot. That was the message the two Cossacks from the Zaporozhian camp had brought. They were going to teach the Poles a lesson. The question was: could Andrei go?

The sun was still high, the afternoon deliciously warm as he walked his horse towards the farm. He could not help breaking into a smile of joy as he looked at it.

A broad clearing in the trees, which approached the buildings closely on three sides. Outhouses, some of timber, some of wattle: and in their midst, the broad, stout farmhouse with its shady porch, and whose whitewashed clay walls and bright red and green shutters gleamed brightly in the afternoon sun. All the buildings had thick, overhanging thatched roofs which resembled so many haystacks gathered from the endless steppe before them. On the dusty turf before the farm, some chickens, half a dozen geese, a cow and a goat picked at the ground in a desultory way: to right and left the long grass was still, in the heat.

And there was his father, in front of the porch. Andrei smiled with affection.

He was a little taller than his father, but even now, strong as he was, Andrei was not sure the old man might not best him in a fight.

‘He’s so quick,’ he would remark proudly to his friends.

One could see instantly that they were father and son, though old Ostap’s face was a little broader than Andrei’s. He shaved his chin, but had a splendid drooping moustache, all grey, that hung almost to his chest. He was dressed in wide, baggy trousers and a shirt, both of linen, tied with a silk sash rather than a belt. On his feet were silk embroidered shoes with long, curling toes; on his bald head a silk cap. His face was cheerful but florid, his nose mottled. He was smoking a short Cossack pipe.

For some reason his strength, and his quick rages, seemed all the more formidable to Andrei because he knew that at any moment the old man might suddenly breathe his last. The red face, the tell-tale signs of breathlessness – the old warrior would not live long. He knew it, they all knew it, but with the bravado of a true Cossack he would look his son in the eye and then, quite deliberately, to challenge fate, lose his temper over some trifle. Andrei loved him for it.

But what will happen to the farm when he goes? the young man wondered. He would be the only one left. His two sisters were long since married. His brother had died a brave Cossack death, fighting, six years before. ‘Died like a man,’ old Ostap would say, raising his glass in salute, as if he did not regret it. ‘Mind you do the same, if things so fall out,’ he’d add sternly to Andrei, lest the handsome young man should think he feared to lose his last son too.

But it was not only the prospect of Ostap dying that worried his son. There were debts.

Ostap liked to live well, as befitted a Cossack gentleman: for that was how he saw himself. He liked to drink. All Cossacks drank. When he went into Pereiaslav on a market day, he’d be sure to enjoy himself. For though, as a good Cossack, he despised most townsmen, he’d usually encounter some brother-in-arms and drink the night away with him. Nor could he ever resist a fine horse. He had only to see it to buy it.

‘Where does he get the money?’ Andrei would sometimes ask his long-suffering mother.

‘The Lord knows, but he casts his net broadly,’ she would reply.

There were the itinerant merchants in Pereiaslav and even Kiev who went out to join the caravans that followed the ancient salt route across the steppe to the Crimea. They lent money. So did a merchant in Russka. And so did the Jews. And they all lent to Ostap, on the security of his farm.

It was a fine farm. There were excellent crops of wheat and millet. There was part of the big wood, upstream, where Ostap owned a hundred beehives. ‘But we need you,’ his greying mother had told Andrei frankly. ‘Because if someone doesn’t manage the farm – and your father – we’ll lose everything. And I can’t do it.’

He wanted to go. He longed to go. Yet, as he reached the farm, Andrei was still uncertain what to do. He was a little disconcerted therefore when, as he dismounted, the old man abruptly said: ‘You’re leaving in the morning. I’ve prepared all you’ll need.’

Even as Ostap spoke, Andrei saw his mother coming out of the house looking worried. He glanced at them both while his father sucked contentedly on his pipe.

‘Andrei!’

It was all she said.

He paused. The prospect of going thrilled him, but he looked at his father with concern.

‘What about the farm, Father?’ he brought himself to ask.

‘What about it?’

‘How will you manage?’

‘Very well, damn you! Are you ready to leave?’ Sensing opposition, Ostap was starting to grow red.

Andrei hesitated. He caught his mother’s eye, saw her pleading look.

‘I’m not sure. Perhaps I should leave later.’

‘What!’ his father roared. ‘Are you disobeying me?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Silence, you young cur. You’ll obey your father.’ Suddenly Ostap’s heavy brows knitted and his eyes gleamed with anger. His whole body seemed to grow rigid. ‘Or is it,’ he asked menacingly, ‘that I’ve bred a coward? Is that it? Are you a coward?’ The last word was said with such apparent contempt and loathing, it was such a calculated insult, that Andrei felt his own body tense and his face go white with anger. It seemed, at any moment, that father and son might fly at each other’s throats.

The cunning old fox, the youth suddenly thought. He’s goading me deliberately so that I won’t do as Mother wants. And even though I know what he’s up to, I’m still getting angry.

‘Well?’ Ostap thundered. ‘Have I bred a coward? Are you really afraid to fight? Must I go and die in shame?’

‘Die as you please,’ Andrei cried in frustration.

‘So that’s how you talk to your father!’ Ostap was now beside himself. He glanced to left and right for something to strike Andrei with.

And who knew what might have happened next if, at this moment, three figures had not come riding out of the woods straight towards the little group. For the sight of them reduced both men to silence.

One was splendidly dressed, and rode a magnificent bay. The other two, dressed in long black coats, rode smaller horses. The first was a Polish noble; the other two were Jews.

That a Polish noble should ride in such company was no particular surprise. For generations now, the Polish Commonwealth was the one country in eastern Europe where the Jews could live at peace. Indeed, the authorities there even allowed Jews to carry swords like noblemen.

They drew up in front of the porch without dismounting. The Pole glanced down at the family before him coolly, then surveyed the farm thoughtfully. Andrei noticed that the gold brocade on the nobleman’s beautiful coat glinted in the sun; his long, aristocratic hands rested easily upon the saddlebow. His face was oval, pale, and except for a thin, dark moustache, clean-shaven. His eyes were large, blue and rather luminous. A kinsman of the great Lithuanian-Polish magnate, Vyshnevetsky, who owned vast tracts of land in the eastern Ukraine, Stanislaus was the local official of this region, overseeing numerous little forts like Russka, which Vyshnevetsky owned, on the edge of the steppe.

He remained silent for a few moments, but when he finally spoke, Andrei could only stare at him dumbfounded.

‘Well, Ostap,’ he remarked casually, ‘we’re taking over the farm.’

For several moments there was complete silence. They were all too astonished to speak.

‘What do you mean – taking over?’ Andrei suddenly burst out. ‘This farm is ours.’

Stanislaus looked at him with mild interest.

‘No, it isn’t. It never was. You are just tenants.’

Andrei was so astonished that he even forgot to wait for his father to speak.

‘We pay nothing to anyone for our land,’ he burst out.

‘Correct. It was granted you for thirty years free of obligations, and now the time is up.’

Andrei looked at his father. Old Ostap for a moment appeared confused.

‘That was thirty years ago,’ he mumbled.

‘Exactly. And now the Vyshnevetskys have sold the estate to me. You owe me service.’

It was not an unusual situation. In order to attract settlers to the frontier lands, the Polish magnates of the past had often granted lands with exemptions for ten, twenty, or even thirty years. Men like Ostap took such lands and then, as the years passed, came to think of them as perpetually free: so much so that Ostap had entirely omitted to mention the original condition of his tenure to Andrei, even if he had remembered it himself.

‘I’ve been here thirty years,’ the old man now stated angrily, ‘and that means I own it.’ As far as he or many like him were concerned, this statement was correct.

‘Have you a charter that says so?’

‘No, damn you. My charter is this.’ And he held up his clenched fist as though wielding a sword.

Stanislaus watched him calmly.

‘You owe labour service for this land,’ he remarked.

‘Labour?’ Ostap now erupted.

‘Naturally,’ the Pole replied.

Andrei gasped. Labour! The Pole was suggesting that his father, a man of honour, should work for him in the fields like a common peasant, a serf.

‘I have worn the white coat, you Polish dog,’ the old Cossack fumed. ‘I am an officer. A registered Cossack. No man can make me work in the fields.’

Stanislaus shook his head.

‘You were on the register. But not now.’

Nothing was more vital to the Dniepr Cossacks than the register. Normally it contained about five thousand names of the Cossacks recognized as military servitors by the King of Poland. These were the free men treated, roughly speaking, as an officer class. Sometimes, after a Cossack rising, the register had been enlarged. But then it would be contracted again. Ostap had once, briefly, figured in the white coat of a registered officer, but had since lost his place.

And the problem was that, so far as the Polish King was concerned, any Cossack not on the register was a peasant – and therefore liable to labour like a serf.

This was just the life that Karp had gone south to escape. Not only was it degrading, it was outrageous.

‘Back in the reign of Stefan Batory, all Cossacks were made noblemen,’ Ostap had always told Andrei; and although that Polish King had in fact done no such thing, most Cossacks firmly believed that they were, if not quite noble, just as good as any noble.

So it was from the bottom of his heart that Ostap now cried out: ‘A Cossack is a gentleman, you Polish swine!’ He spat with disgust. ‘But what would a Pole know about nobility?’

Stanislaus looked at him with secret amusement. He understood the old man, but despised him.

What, he wondered, could old Ostap know of the life of a Polish noble, let alone the great magnates? What could this crude farmer know of the splendid palaces of Poland – those great European houses filled with French and Italian furniture, Renaissance paintings, Gobelin tapestries; a glittering world of ballrooms, libraries, huge salons, where Polish lords in rich brocades or hussar uniforms cultivated their minds as well as their manners and might converse in French or Latin as easily as Polish? Even the French remarked that the Polish lords seemed to live in paradise.

The Polish lords were proud. They were not the slaves of their ruler, as the Russians were of their Tsar. They chose their kings – and circumscribed their power in the great Sejm, the nobles’ parliament. Not for nothing was the great Polish state, of which the Ukraine was a part, called the Commonwealth.

But the Commonwealth was for the nobility. Like most Polish lords, Stanislaus looked down upon the Cossacks. Though they were brave, he saw them as little more than brigands and runaway peasants, who gave themselves airs.

Above all, he despised their Orthodox religion, and their illiterate mumbling to their icons.

‘It is,’ he would say definitively, ‘a religion fit only for serfs.’

How far indeed it was from the romantic Catholicism of this Polish gentleman who, for all his cruelty and contempt towards the peasants, saw himself as a crusading, courtly knight, albeit in a twilight world.

This religious split between lord and peasant in the Ukraine had, if anything, been made worse half a century before when the subtle Catholic Church had come to a great historic compromise with the old Orthodox bishops centred at Kiev. By this arrangement, the Orthodox bishops had agreed to acknowledge the Pope as their spiritual head, so long as he would allow them to celebrate their services in, for all practical purposes, the Orthodox way.

This was the start of the so-called Greek Catholic, or Uniate, Church.

The trouble was that many of the Orthodox had refused to accept the compromise so that now in the Ukraine there were three Churches instead of two: Catholic, Uniate and Orthodox. The Cossacks, moreover, had decided to champion the old Orthodox faith. In every city, especially in the eastern Ukraine around Kiev, the citizens formed brotherhoods to defend their faith so that now there was a powerful religious movement sworn to oppose both the Catholic Poles and any kind of compromise with them.

It was, Stanislaus thought, just the kind of movement that would appeal to a Cossack like Ostap. He felt very little sympathy for him.

So now, with a casual wave of his hand, he indicated the thinner of the two Jews who had accompanied him.

‘This is Mordecai,’ he said casually. ‘I have given him the lease of this place, so you’ll be working for him. He’ll tell you what to do, won’t you, Mordecai?’ he remarked easily.

It was the final insult. As Ostap looked from the Pole to the Jew, he could not himself have said which one he hated the most. Religiously, he distrusted the Catholic more than the Jew. For although his grandfather had come from Muscovy, where the fear of Judaism was often deep, Ostap had lived all his life in the Ukraine where, ever since the time of the Khazars, the Orthodox and Jewish communities had usually tolerated each other well enough. The hatred he now felt for the Jew was not in fact based upon his religion but upon the particular roles in which the Polish overlords had used them – usually as tax collectors, liquor stall concessionaires, and rent agents. Consequently, men like Ostap found that, though in fact they were always in debt to the Poles, the face of the creditor they saw was nearly always Jewish. It was an arrangement that suited the Poles very well, for whenever their extortions went too far, they blamed their agents.

It is generally agreed that the root of the endemic anti-Semitism in South Russia lay in this cynical and unfortunate Polish system.

And no part of the system was worse than the practice of leasing, which Stanislaus was now planning to use. It was simple enough: Mordecai would hold the farm, probably on a short lease, of only two or three years. For this he would collect and pay Stanislaus a stiff rent; and in turn, Stanislaus would support him in whatever exactions he made to get extra profits out of the peasants. Whereas Stanislaus might demand three or four days’ work from Ostap, therefore, this adding of an intermediary who was also looking for his profit might mean that Ostap finished up working five or even six days for someone else. And since justice lay in the Polish courts, there was probably nothing he could do about it.

The old man said nothing at all. Outwardly he seemed calm, though Andrei knew that this only masked a seething rage within.

‘Good,’ Stanislaus said cheerfully. ‘That’s all settled then.’ Now he glanced at the other Jew. ‘There’s just one other matter. It seems you owe Yankel here for your liquor. He says you haven’t paid him in two years. Give me the bill, Yankel. Ah, yes.’ He handed it down to Ostap, who took it glumly, glanced at it, and looked distressed.

‘The Jew is lying,’ he said firmly, but Andrei knew from the tone of his voice that his father was not certain of his ground.

Mordecai was a stranger, but Andrei knew Yankel well enough. He was a fat, rather cheerful fellow who operated the liquor store in Russka. Almost everyone in the area owed him money, but though he charged interest for it, he was not unduly harsh. He had two children – a girl and a little boy – and as Andrei considered his father’s formidable intake of vodka, he suspected that Yankel’s claim was perfectly justified.

‘Well, are you going to pay it?’ the Pole demanded.

‘I am not,’ Ostap replied.

‘As you please. Yankel,’ he went on, ‘go to the stable there and pick out the best horse you see. That should do it.’

Yankel hesitated a moment. He had been tempted to go to the Pole after twelve months of trying to get Ostap to pay what he owed, but now he was starting to regret it. He had no wish to make the Cossack his sworn enemy.

‘Get on with it,’ Stanislaus ordered peremptorily, and Yankel, with a look of embarrassment, went off. A few minutes later he returned with a horse that was by no means the Cossack’s best.

‘Is that it?’ Stanislaus asked.

‘It will do, your High Nobility.’

The Pole shrugged.

‘Goodbye,’ he said carelessly, and with that he was off, the two Jews following behind.

For some time no one spoke. Then Andrei turned to his father.

‘I ride south tomorrow,’ he said quietly.

Ostap nodded. Even Andrei’s mother did not complain. There was nothing to lose any more.

‘When I come back with our brothers,’ Andrei remarked with cold fury, ‘we shall kill every Pole and Jew in the Ukraine. Then the farm will be ours.’

‘Good idea,’ Ostap replied.

There was one thing left to do that night, but Andrei waited until he could hear his father’s snores in the yard before he slipped out of the house.

Cautiously he crossed the yard. Old Ostap liked to sleep outside in the summer; he would wrap himself in a blanket and lie in front of the porch, gazing up at the stars and humming quietly to himself until he fell asleep. It reminded him of the years past when he slept in the open on campaign.

‘I give each star a name, you know,’ he once told Andrei. ‘Each one’s an old comrade and I choose the star that seems to suit their character best. So I look up at the Plough and I say to myself: “Yes, there’s old Taras; and there’s my friend Shilo!” God knows how many Tatars his strong arm killed. They flayed him alive when they caught him, you know.’ He sighed. ‘I see their faces, up there in the night sky. And then I fall asleep.’ Each year, when summer was over, the old man would stay out a few nights longer than he should, wrapping himself in a sheepskin instead of a blanket, and downing God knows how many tots of vodka to keep out the cold. After a week or so of this he’d stagger in grumbling that his bones ached, and then give it up.

The night was still warm now, however. His snores were comfortable.

Softly Andrei made his way along the path. There was a half moon, low on the horizon, that gave the forest an agreeable sheen. He was so full of youth, his heart was dancing so lightly that, scarcely thinking about it, he began to run, gathering new energy and joy with every step he took. In the darkness, it almost seemed to Andrei that he was flying along the starlit path.

He passed the still pond where, the children said, rusalki dwelt. A few minutes later he was emerging on to the edge of the village’s big field. He was at Russka.

Nothing had changed. True, the little stone church from the days of Monomakh had been burned down by the Mongols; and later, the village had lain deserted for two hundred years. And yet nothing had changed. For in this land, every wooden house, sooner or later, was lost to fire or age. Settlements, like the fields around them, had their seed time and harvest: it was as if Russka had been left fallow for a time and was now under cultivation once more. And how else should the place look, but a group of huts on one side of the stream, and a little fort with a palisade around it on the other? There was a wooden church, with a little tower, inside the fort. In the Ukrainian manner, it was arranged as a simple Greek cross with a cupola over the centre and smaller cupolas over its eastern and western ends and over the two transepts. In the tower was a single bell.

Andrei did not need to cross the river. Instead, he crept stealthily up to a large wooden hut at the edge of the hamlet.

A watchdog cocked its head at his approach, but scenting him came forward, wagging its tail and whimpering softly until Andrei quieted it.

The building had an upper storey; in the end wall, a single window looked out under the eaves, with carved shutters and a little balcony in front of it. The shutters were open, to let in the night air.

Carefully, but easily, Andrei climbed up and sat astride the balcony, before tapping gently on the window frame.

‘Anna.’

Silence.

‘Anna, I’m coming in.’

This time there was a faint sound from within. A pale form appeared in the shadows of the room. There was a soft laugh.

‘So what do you want, my young brave, calling on a girl at night?’ The low voice laughed again. ‘Be off or I’ll set the dogs on you.’

Andrei chuckled.

‘They won’t do anything.’

‘I could call my father.’

‘You could. But you won’t.’ He started to swing his leg over the window frame, but she moved forward quickly, caught his ankle, and pushed it out again.

‘No you don’t.’

Now he could see her, and it made him catch his breath. Anna was the daughter of a Cossack like his father but her mother was from the faraway Caucasus – the villagers called her the Circassian – and the result of this union was a girl unlike any other in the region. She was almost as tall as he was, slim, with dark brown hair, a pale creamy skin, and a head held so high that she seemed to stare at the world as proudly as a young warrior. Indeed, her bold eyebrows, straight, strong nose and firm chin might almost have been those of a handsome youth; but a slight upturning at the end of the nose, and the wonderful, full lips, both proud yet always, it seemed, about to open into a warm kiss, undercut any masculinity in her other features and made her, for Andrei and many others, tantalizingly desirable.

She was sixteen and unmarried.

‘Nor will I be, until I see a man I like,’ she had announced to her parents and the village in half-mocking defiance.

In the manner of the Cossack girls, she lived a free and easy life with the young men of the village. Some of them might even steal a kiss – though if they tried to go too far they would find her more than a match for them and like as not be sent sprawling.

But since Andrei had returned from the seminary a few months before, there had been a subtle change in her manner towards him.

Little as the Poles might think of the Orthodox Church, in the last twenty years it had made great strides. Under an ambitious young churchman, a Moldavian noble by birth, called Peter Mogila, who had come first to the Monastery of the Caves and then become Metropolitan at Kiev, an academy and numerous schools had been set up. Though they imitated the Jesuit Schools of the Poles, they were strictly Orthodox – Ostap would never have sent Andrei otherwise. The new movement set up printing presses too, and already literacy was becoming widespread.

To Anna, therefore, young Andrei was the nearest thing she had come across to a gentleman. He could read and write. He spoke a little Latin and Polish. His father’s farm was a fair size. And he was undeniably handsome.

It was not long before people were whispering: ‘He’s the one’, or ‘A fine couple’, and she found that she had no objection.

For above all, she sensed that within Andrei’s charm and youthful exuberance lay the one quality she admired above all others – the one thing that truly attracted her.

‘He has ambition,’ she remarked to her father.

This had not meant much to the Cossack; but she had taken care to let young Andrei know where she stood before the harvest was begun.

‘Most Cossacks are fools, Andrei,’ she remarked bluntly. ‘They dream about fighting and they drink themselves stupid. But a few are wiser and they rise. Some of them even enter the gentry. Do you agree?’

He had nodded. He understood her.

And he would already have suggested that his father approach hers to arrange a marriage, but for one thing.

First let me go on campaign, he thought. I will see a little of the world before I marry.

But now he was to leave. He looked at her.

She was wearing only a linen shift, which had loosened as she hurriedly got up. Not only could he see her pale form; to his delight he suddenly realized that he could see her breast, almost all of it. It was not large but rather high and narrow; through the gauze-like linen he could see the dark tip of it. His heart pounded.

She realized what he was staring at, but did not even deign to rearrange her dress. Her pride was her protection. ‘Look if you dare,’ her body seemed to say.

In a few whispered words he told her that he was leaving. He told her they were going to fight the Poles. He almost told her about the loss of the farm, but suddenly felt embarrassed and ashamed, and did not mention it.

She’ll find out soon enough, he thought gloomily.

He could not tell what she thought of the news of his departure.

‘When I get back, I shall marry you,’ he said boldly.

‘Will you indeed!’

‘You like me, don’t you?’

She laughed lightly.

‘Perhaps. Perhaps there are other handsome men too.’

‘Such as? Who’s better than me?’

She cast about in her mind, wondering how to taunt him.

‘There’s Stanislaus the Pole,’ she said with a playful smile. ‘He’s a handsome man. And rich.’

For a second he gasped, but then remembered she did not know about today’s episode.

‘He’s a Pole,’ he said grimly.

She wondered why he suddenly looked so downcast.

‘Maybe I will, maybe I won’t,’ she said. ‘Maybe you won’t come back. Then what would I do?’

‘I’ll come back. If I come back, you’ll marry me?’ he suddenly said, realizing belatedly she had just given him an opening.

‘Maybe.’

‘Let me in.’

‘Not until we’re married.’

‘Try me out. Make sure you like me.’

‘I’ll take it on trust.’

‘And if I die, I’ll never have made love to you. Let me at least – just once – take that with me to the grave.’

She burst out laughing.

‘You can die thinking about it!’

‘Perhaps I will,’ he said unhappily.

‘Perhaps.’

‘A kiss at least.’

‘A kiss then.’

Now they kissed; and it seemed to Andrei that while they kissed the moon must have moved across half the glittering stars in the night.

When he looked back, a little later, she had closed the shutters.

1648

All around, that April day, the huge camp was bustling with activity. In the warmth of early spring, the ground itself seemed to be steaming.

New contingents had been arriving every day; the number in the camp had swollen to some eight thousand men.

Only Cossacks came here. No one interfered with the well-defended island below the Dniepr rapids. Once, a dozen years before, the Poles had built a stout fortress a little way upriver, in the hope of intimidating the unruly Zaporozhians. They had called the fortress Kodak. The Cossacks had sacked it within months.

The island was full. The usual brushwood and log cabins, some covered with horsehide, others with turf, had been supplemented by every kind of temporary shelter. The latest arrivals had been putting up felt tents on the opposite bank. There were corrals of horses and baggage wagons everywhere.

This was the Cossack host. It contained all manner of men. There were fellows of Tatar blood, Turkish tribesmen from the east, Mordvinians from beyond the Oka River, renegade Poles and runaway peasants from Muscovy; there were farmers, small landowners, even noblemen from the Ukraine. Rich and poor, this colourful collection made up the huge fraternity of the host. There was not a woman in the place.

The Ukrainians, who now counted themselves as part of the Zaporozhian host, mostly wore the loose, baggy trousers and broad cummerbunds that the Zaporozhians had originally copied from the Tatars of the steppe. Then there were their brothers, the Don Cossacks, who had come in large parties to join them and brought with them other Cossacks from even further away, across the Don by the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. They looked more like Georgians and Circassians, with open coats, slanting pockets and heavy braiding. They wore black sheepskins and, when they rode, enveloped themselves in their huge capes, called burkas, which they used for sleeping blankets as well. There were even Cossacks from Siberia and the Urals, who favoured red shirts and high, Muscovite hats trimmed with fur.

There was tension in the air. At any moment, everybody knew, they would be off; but since this was the Cossack camp, where things must be done democratically, no one could assume anything until the meeting had been held and the vote taken.

Meanwhile, on every side, the Cossacks were passing the time and relieving the tension in the usual ways. Many were drinking. Once they set off, however, drinking would be forbidden, on pain of death. Here and there a Cossack was playing an eight-stringed lute and humming to himself some endless ballad about the great exploits of the past. In one place a group of energetic young fellows had got one of the older men to give them a tune on a balalaika while another joined in on an instrument rather like a small set of bagpipes: they were dancing wildly, squatting down, kicking their legs out, then leaping up high into the air.

And in the midst of all this commotion, a splendid young Zaporozhian Cossack and his companion were striding through the middle of the camp.

If old Ostap could have seen Andrei at this moment, how proud he would have been.

Over his wide, baggy trousers he wore a fine satin kaftan. His cummerbund was made of silk, his boots of red morocco. Usually he wore a tall sheepskin hat, but at present he was uncovered, revealing a head that had been carefully shaved except for a patch in the middle which had been gathered into a top-knot. At his side was a splendid, curved sword.

As soon as he had arrived the previous autumn, Andrei had undertaken the first initiation of a Zaporozhian, and taken a boat through the treacherous Dniepr rapids. He was itching to go on campaign so that he could be accepted as a full Cossack. But already, not just in his appearance but in his whole manner, there was a new toughness that, joined to his youthful elegance, made him stand out from the rest.

His companion was a strange fellow. He was huge, also wore a top-knot, like a Zaporozhian, but his coat and black sheepskin suggested he had come from somewhere near the Caucasus region. He also wore a huge, brown beard, like a Muscovite.

‘My father ran away to the Don and he kept his beard, so why shouldn’t I keep mine?’ he had explained to Andrei who had admired its length. ‘It’s a sign of respect,’ he added, quite seriously.

Stepan was thirty. He was immensely strong and there was no one in the whole camp who could out-wrestle him, but like many large men, he was gentle. Only in battle did he work himself up into a kind of transcendental rage that made even brave men scatter before him. For all this strength, however, he had the mind of a child. He was also immensely superstitious. The other Cossacks called him, affectionately, the Ox.

It was strange that the graceful young man from the Dniepr and this naïve giant from the Don should have become close friends, but each admired qualities in the other and they shared their secrets unreservedly.

Though the ethos of the camp was strictly military – women were only a useless distraction when the Cossacks went on their raids – Stepan had long ago confided in Andrei that when this business was over, he intended to give up his wandering life and get married.

‘I’m not like you though,’ he said, gazing at Andrei’s fine clothes. ‘I’ve got nothing except the clothes I stand up in.’ Indeed, his heavy blue coat was badly frayed at the edges and in several places the gold braid was coming off.

‘If the Poles take our farm, I shan’t have anything either,’ Andrei had confessed. ‘But don’t worry, old Ox. I’ll get the farm back and you can go home with a wagon-load of plunder. Tell me, though,’ he asked curiously, ‘who’s the girl you’re going to marry?’

Stepan smiled.

‘The one.’

‘What one?’

‘The only one, of course. The one fate has reserved for me.’

‘You haven’t met her?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Do you know anything about her?’

‘Nothing.’

‘So she might be a Tatar, or a Georgian, a Mordvinian, or,’ he laughed, ‘a Polish lady?’

Stepan nodded and smiled.

‘Any of those.’

‘You don’t mind which?’

‘How can I mind? It’s not for me to choose. I keep my mind blank. I form no picture. I just wait.’

Andrei smiled.

‘You sound just like one of the priests at the seminary. He told me that’s how he tries to pray.’

‘Ah, that’s right,’ Stepan said earnestly, ‘that’s just it. That’s how we should lead all of our lives.’

‘I dare say you’re right,’ Andrei replied. ‘But tell me – this magical girl – how will you recognize her when you see her?’

‘I shall know.’

‘God will tell you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Dear old Ox, how I love you,’ Andrei had said, suddenly embracing him.

Today, however, as they walked through the camp, there was a very different subject on their minds. At any moment they would be off, striking into the heart of the Ukraine. Moreover, as Andrei had discovered during the winter months in camp, the rebellion this time was no minor revolt. Since the Poles had put down the last Cossack uprising, some fifteen years before, the apparent peace of the Ukraine concealed a seething resentment. Only when he got to the camp and met scores of others like himself did Andrei realize that the kind of treatment his father had received was commonplace. In the western parts, nearer Poland, conditions were even worse and most of the population had already been reduced to utter serfdom. About half the small estates in the Ukraine were now in the hands of Jewish leaseholders.

And the current preparations for an uprising were due to a man rather like his own father, though richer and better educated, whose estate had not only been illegally seized by a Polish subprefect, but whose ten-year-old son had been beaten to death for protesting. His name, ever since revered in the history of the Ukraine, was Bogdan Khmelnitsky; and though writers since often refer to him, for simplicity, as Bogdan, the Cossacks at the time called him Khmel.

It was Khmel who had come down to the Zaporozhians to ask for help. It was he who, for months, had been sending secret agents to villages all over the Ukraine. And it was Khmel – understanding very well the strength and disposition of the Polish forces, and seeing the weaknesses of the fearless but rather disorganized Cossack cavalry – who had undertaken the most brilliant stroke of all. That February he had crossed the steppe to Bakhchisarai, the headquarters of the Tatar Khan of the Crimea, and by a ruse had convinced him that the Poles were planning to attack him. That was why, this very day, news had come that no less than four thousand of the devastating Tatar cavalry would reach the Zaporozhian camp the next day.

The combined force would strike into the heart of the Ukraine and, as it did so, the entire country was going to rise.

‘We’ll teach those Poles a lesson,’ Andrei predicted. ‘And then the farm will be ours.’

Even with such a force, it was a daring plan. The armies the Poles could muster were still much larger, and well trained. But even if the Cossacks succeeded, the question remained – what next? What would they demand? What were they fighting for?

Hardly anyone seemed to know. The Polish oppression would have to end, of course. Then men like his father would be restored to wealth and honour. There would be a lot of booty for everyone, naturally: there always was after a big Cossack expedition. But beyond that, Andrei confessed to himself, he had no clear idea.

Strangely, it was simple-minded Stepan who not only had considered the matter but had a detailed answer.

‘You must have a free Cossack state,’ he told Andrei, ‘with equality for all and to every man an equal vote. Just like the Don Cossacks. No rich men, no poor men; no landlords and serfs; no best men and lesser men. We’re all equal brothers on the Don.’

And although Andrei knew that this view of the Don Cossack state was a little romanticized, he also knew that this communistic democracy was widely favoured by the poorer Cossacks everywhere.

How noble it sounded. A brotherhood of man.

‘Of course,’ the Ox added, ‘we’ll kick out all the Catholics and Jews first: you can’t have a brotherhood of man with them. But then everything will be all right.’

Andrei supposed so. Yet he was not sure. Didn’t he want to get richer? Didn’t he want to become a gentleman and own estates, with ambitious Anna at his side?

His thoughts were interrupted by a sudden roar from the edge of the camp. That was the signal. Usually they beat the kettledrums to summon an assembly, but with so many present they were using cannon.

In the space of a few minutes, thousands of men had gathered at the meeting place where the Cossacks’ little wooden church now looked like a carnival float being carried by the crowd.

To loud cries of approval, the head of the camp – the Ataman – now led out Bogdan to address them.

He was a big, bluff fellow with a rather coarse, bearded face. He looked like the heavy Cossack squire he was. But when roused he had an unexpected gift for oratory. Now, in a few short sentences, he recounted to them once again his woes, and the disgraceful treatment he had received from the Poles. Everyone knew the tale well, but they wanted to hear it again: it was a question of form, and he did not let them down.

‘Is this, brothers, how brave Cossacks should be treated?’ he bellowed.

‘Never,’ they shouted back.

‘Is this our reward for our services – that we should be asked for our lives in war, and in peace treated worse than any of us would treat a dog?’ the peroration continued. He looked from side to side. ‘Are we to suffer for ever, while the brotherhood, wives, families, children, are butchered – or are we going to fight?’

‘We fight,’ they roared.

Now the Ataman stepped forward.

‘I have a proposal, brother Cossacks,’ he cried.

‘Say it!’ a hundred voices yelled back. The matter had long been agreed, but the vote must still take place.

‘I propose that Bogdan Khmelnitsky be elected our grand chief, the representative of all the Cossacks in the Ukraine. I propose he be Hetman. Who agrees?’

‘We agree!’ the whole camp shouted.

‘Let the standard be brought forth, then.’

And now even Andrei’s heart missed a beat. They were bringing forward the famous horsetail standard of the Cossacks; and once that was raised, even Polish lords and Ottoman Turks might tremble, for the free Cossacks of the steppe would fight to the death.

‘We march at dawn,’ the Hetman announced.

There have in human history, in many countries, been worse years than that of 1648 in Poland.

But in all the long annals of human cruelty and stupidity – which alas do not seem to change – the year 1648 deserves, for several reasons, a particular mention.

It also changed Russian history.

From mid-April the Cossack army – eight thousand Cossacks with four guns, and four thousand more Tatars just behind – advanced up the western side of the great River Dniepr, across the steppe. Ahead of them they carried a huge red banner sewn with an image of the Archangel.

The Poles knew that the Cossack rebels were coming and made preparations.

The Polish military commander, the magnate Potocki, made his headquarters on the west bank about eighty miles below Pereiaslav. From here he sent forward a vanguard in two parts. In the first, under command of his own son, were fifteen hundred Poles together with some twenty-five hundred regular, service Cossacks; in the second, another twenty-five hundred service Cossacks and a contingent of German mercenaries. The idea was that the vanguard was to garrison and refortify Kodak.

It was an act either of foolishness or of extraordinary arrogance to assume that these troops would remain loyal: especially since Bogdan’s agents had already infiltrated them.

The group with the Germans, as soon as they saw the rebels, voted to join them. They killed two of their officers and the Germans. The next day, May 6, unlucky young Potocki found his Cossacks had gone too, and after a useless stand by a stream known as Yellow Waters, he and his Poles were slaughtered.

The Cossack army came up with the main Polish force ten days later, near the modest town of Khorsun, which lay only some thirty miles south-west of Pereiaslav. Here the combined Cossacks and Tatars fell upon them.

The battle of Khorsun was a complete victory. The elder Potocki and no less than eighty Polish lords were taken. The loot was splendid. The Cossacks also acquired forty-one pieces of artillery and thousands of horses.

News of the victory spread like wildfire. And the Ukraine rose in revolt.

Andrei and Stepan were rich.

They had fought side by side, carving a swathe through the Polish soldiers; where Stepan would plough forward in a blind ecstasy of rage, Andrei had not only fought bravely, but had protected his friend’s back and wisely steered him, so that Bogdan himself had noticed them and remarked: ‘The big one is brave, but the young one’s cunning as well.’

At the end of the battle, when the whole force had erupted into a wild orgy of drinking and dancing, the Hetman himself strode over and, in addition to the loot which every Cossack received, presented each of the two men with six of the finest Polish horses.

‘Another battle like this,’ Andrei remarked to his friend, ‘and you’ll be able to buy your farm.’

The richest rewards, however, went to the Tatar cavalry. They were given all the Polish nobles to ransom. Large parties set off with these captives towards the Crimea.

‘The Tatars always get rich,’ Stepan told Andrei.

‘They fight like devils though,’ the young man replied enthusiastically.

‘Perhaps,’ Stepan said sadly. ‘But I know them better than you: just wait and see.’

For Andrei, it was a thrilling time. He had become a fully fledged Cossack, and he felt it. Not only was this an exciting adventure for him personally, but the larger, political events in which he was playing a part were taking a dramatic turn.

For Bogdan’s revolt could not have happened at a better moment for the Ukrainians. Just after the humiliating victory of Khorsun, news reached the camp that the King of Poland had died. In the Polish capital of Warsaw, until a new king was elected, the Catholic primate and the Chancellor were in charge. Bogdan had caught the Commonwealth at its weakest moment.

The whole of eastern Europe was in diplomatic uproar. Messengers flew from the Polish capital to Moscow and to the Ottoman Turks. The Sultan was urged to recall the Tatars, who were his vassals. The Tsar was asked, if he valued peace with Poland, to send troops to attack the Crimean Khan. The Polish nobility was appealed to, to raise troops from their estates.

Meanwhile, in the days that followed the battle, news came from all over the Ukraine of peasants rising against their Polish landlords; and a stream of men started to arrive at the Cossack camp – some mounted and fully equipped, others with no more than the jawbone of a horse tied to a staff – but all longing to do battle.

And in the midst of all this, Bogdan calmly sent messages of his own to the Poles and to the Tsar of Russia, and prepared to play one off against the other.

‘Now we shall see a change,’ Andrei exclaimed to his friend.

‘Perhaps,’ Stepan replied.

It was in the middle of this period of consolidation that Andrei obtained permission to make a brief visit to Russka. He took Stepan with him.

His reasons for going were twofold: he wanted to see that his parents were safe, and he wanted to leave his loot and his horses at the farm. His father might sell some of the horses and keep the money hidden for him.

But in fact, Hetman Bogdan was glad to let the young man go, for he had an important mission for him.

‘The magnate Vyshnevetsky owns your village, doesn’t he?’ he asked. ‘Well, I hear he’s collecting men to attack us. Take ten men with you; find out all you can and bring me news.’ He gave Andrei an encouraging smile. ‘You went to a seminary, they tell me.’

‘Yes, Hetman’

‘Good. I’ll be watching you next time we fight.’

Andrei knew what that meant. In a year, perhaps, he might even be made an esaul – a Cossack captain. If the rebellion succeeded, the path to fortune might be opening up before him.

The party rode off in high spirits.

How beautiful the country was, as they made their way eastwards over the plain under the warm June sun. Occasionally they encountered stretches of woods and little coppices; sometimes there were willows and pines growing along the banks of the streams. But for the most part they saw only the broad, open steppe, with its delicate, waving feather grass. There was plenty of game, and fish to catch, but they rode steadily, resting at noon, travelling swiftly in the morning and evening.

Although he possessed the fine Polish horses, Andrei preferred to ride his smaller, Cossack steed. Bred for strength and endurance, these sturdy unshod animals could carry a man as much as fifty miles a day across the steppe. By the end of the second day, the party had reached the mighty Dniepr and crossed it by raft. In another day, they would be at Russka.

They came upon the first sign of trouble at mid-morning. It was at one of the tiny wooden forts, smaller than Russka, which served as outposts for the Polish administration. As they approached, the Cossacks saw that the place was deserted, and they would have passed by without stopping if Andrei had not noticed something strange hanging from the open gateway.

It was a Polish official – one could see that at once from his fine clothes. He had been hanged. But the Ukrainian peasants had not been content until they had been cruel; and so they had first killed his wife and children in front of him and then hung their heads, on a rope, round his neck. It was a miserable ending that many Poles were to suffer that summer.

An hour later they came to a Cossack farmstead, not unlike his father’s. This had been burned to the ground and thoroughly looted. But when Andrei began to curse the Poles, Stepan stopped him.

‘Look.’ He picked up an arrow from the ground. ‘It wasn’t the Poles. It was the Tatars on their way back.’

Andrei looked and nodded.

‘We gave them all the Polish nobles,’ he remarked sadly. ‘Wasn’t that enough?’

‘Nothing’s ever enough for the Tatars,’ Stepan replied.

‘Let’s move on,’ Andrei said. He wondered what they would find at Russka.

They rode, for the most part, in silence. The others had sensed Andrei’s anxiety and the whole group pressed ahead as fast as it could.

Only one tiny incident provoked a conversation. This was when a wildcat darted across the path in front of them and disappeared into the long grasses. Andrei would not have thought about it at all, if he had not heard Stepan mutter a curse beside him.

‘What’s the matter, my Ox?’

‘Nothing,’ the huge fellow gruffly replied, but he didn’t sound very convincing.

‘Come on, what is it?’

‘That wildcat: did it look at us?’

Andrei considered.

‘I don’t think so. Why?’

‘Nothing. Perhaps it didn’t.’

Anxious as he was, Andrei could not help smiling. In a superstitious age, in a superstitious land, he had never met anyone like Stepan. Time and again on the campaign, he had seen the big fellow gaze at trees, rocks, the flight of birds, any number of everyday things which had some special, magical significance for him.

‘So what does it mean, where you come from, if a wildcat looks at you?’ he asked with a laugh.

But Stepan would not tell him.

At last, late in the afternoon, they drew close to Russka. Anxiously Andrei looked from side to side, searching for signs of Tatars, but saw nothing.

And then, just before they reached the marshes below Russka, they met a peasant from the forest; and when he told them what he knew, Andrei saw what he must do.

‘Prepare yourselves for a battle,’ he told his men. ‘This will need careful timing,’ he added.

The little fort of Russka was closed tight. Inside, a garrison of twenty Polish soldiers, sent there from Pereiaslav in the general confusion, awaited further instructions.

The fortress also contained Yankel the liquor concessionaire, three Jewish craftsmen and two other Jewish merchants, all with their families. Since the Poles did not trust them, the local Cossacks and peasants had all been left outside, to defend themselves if the Tatars came as best they could.

When they left Pereiaslav, they had been told that the magnate Vyshnevetsky was raising a large force, but since then they had heard nothing of this force’s movements. They had been waiting for news for two days.

The sun was already getting low when, at the edge of the woods, on the Pereiaslav side, they saw the detachment approaching. Shielding their eyes against the sun, it was with huge relief that they saw, from the detachment’s shining uniforms and their splendid mounts, that they were Poles.

From his position behind some bushes, just a hundred yards below the fortress gate, Stepan also watched the Poles approach.

As they came close, the men on the walls called down: ‘Where are you from? What news?’

‘We’re Vyshnevetsky’s men,’ came the welcome Polish reply. ‘His main force is just behind us. Come down and open the gates.’

From behind his bush, the intrepid Stepan grunted: ‘Good. Very good. We’ll kill them all.’

The men from the walls came down and, as their brother Poles reached the gates, opened them.

Then something very strange occurred. Unseen by the defenders, as they opened the gates to the Poles, the huge figure of Stepan, together with about twenty villagers, rushed from their hiding places to swarm into the fort behind the horsemen. Only as they reached the gate itself did the garrison see them, but as they cried out in alarm, the Polish horsemen, instead of turning on the insurgents, jammed the gates open.

And then, too late, the Polish garrison realized they had been duped.

As he cut down an astonished Pole, Andrei laughed to himself. The splendid horses he and Stepan had been given, and the various Polish uniforms, swords and finery that his companions had looted in the big battles, had come in very useful in this little deception.

I’m even glad they made me learn Polish at the seminary, he thought.

Taken completely by surprise, the Polish garrison lost a quarter of their men before they even realized what was happening. But they rallied bravely and fought well. There was no quarter given; they did not suppose that there would be any captives taken. The fighting went from house to house.

It was in this way that Andrei almost lost his life.

Pressing a Pole slowly back past the stout wooden hut where Yankel the Jew sold his liquor, he failed to see another who had crept up on to the little balcony above. Only a shout from Stepan caused him to glance up and ward off a blow as the fellow leaped down on him. He fell to the ground and would have been done for if his friend’s huge figure had not burst upon the scene and despatched both Poles with a couple of mighty blows.

As he got up he saw that the battle was over. He could see the last two Poles surrounded by four of his men.

‘Don’t kill those two,’ he shouted cheerfully, ‘we’ll see if they have any information.’

Then he saw something else.

The rest of his men, and the villagers Stepan had collected, were killing the Jews.

Andrei grimaced. He didn’t like the Jews any better than the Poles, and if these fellows had been armed he wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But they were not armed. One man was trying to defend himself with a stick, but he soon went down. Then he saw them dragging out the women and children.

‘Stop that,’ he ordered.

The men took no notice. He saw a woman fall.

‘Leave them,’ he bellowed. ‘That is an order.’

The Cossacks hesitated this time. But he had not reckoned on the villagers.

‘Jewish children down the well,’ one of them shouted.

‘No, we use the well.’

‘To the river, then!’ another voice cried.

They were going to drown them, and he realized, with a sense of self-disgust, that there was nothing he could do to stop them.

He turned away.

‘Lord Andrei.’ The loud whisper came from the window of the house. ‘Lord Andrei.’

He looked in. It was Yankel. In all the excitement he had forgotten about the fellow.

‘Lord Andrei, I recognized you. Save us, noble sir. You see what is happening.’

Andrei looked at him dully.

‘I never did you any harm,’ Yankel went on eagerly. ‘You’re my only hope.’

Because he was not sure if he had the power, Andrei replied testily: ‘You took my father’s horse.’

‘But not the best. The one I took was worth half what he owed me, and you can have it back if you want.’ He paused for breath. ‘Send me out to die. Kill me yourself. But at least have pity on my children.’

‘Open the door.’

They went in. The main room of the house was not very light and it had an unmistakable aroma of vodka, not unpleasant. Before him he saw, besides the stout old Jew, a girl of about fifteen, and a boy of eight or nine. He suddenly realized he had not seen the girl for some years, since before he went away to the seminary. She was a striking, dark-haired beauty now, with almond eyes and a curving nose that looked Turkish. The boy, too, was a handsome little fellow.

‘All right,’ Andrei said. ‘I’ll try. But I’ll need help.’ He turned to his friend. ‘Will you help me, my Ox, to protect these Jews?’ he began, but then stopped as he realized that his huge companion had not even heard. For Stepan was staring at the girl open-mouthed, as though he had seen a ghost.

It was Yankel’s own fault that, a few moments later, he lost his life.

He was so relieved and excited to have got the protection of Andrei and his huge friend that, without thinking, he went out through his front door first. Two villagers standing nearby, one with an axe, the other with a scythe, took one look at him and, before the poor fellow even had time to tell them about his protector, fell upon him. He was dead when, moments later, Andrei emerged.

There were several things to be done. One was to question the two captive Poles to see what they could tell him. Another was to make two graves, one for the Poles, another for the Jews. He instructed the villagers to do this. A third was to ride over to see his father.

He took the boy with him.

The sun had just gone down when he reached the farm. He found old Ostap in robust good humour. With all the events of recent months, Mordecai had not been able to visit the farm to claim his labour service and Ostap had ignored the whole business. He had been drinking less and sleeping in the open.

‘I’ve heard it all!’ he cried, as Andrei rode up. ‘A boy from the village came by. Pity you couldn’t have let me know in time, I would have enjoyed that fight.’

He was delighted with the horses, but when Andrei made his other request, his brow clouded.

‘You want me to shelter a Jewish boy?’

Andrei explained everything that had happened.

‘I can’t take him to the camp. The villagers will kill him. Do you want me to leave him to them?’

Old Ostap frowned, unwilling to admit that he might have a soft heart.

‘He must convert,’ he announced. ‘Then he can help on the farm.’

Andrei went over to the boy.

‘This is the only place where you may be safe. People won’t bother my father. But you have to become a Christian.’

‘Never,’ the boy said defiantly.

Andrei paused, then he looked carefully into the boy’s eyes.

‘I promised your father to save your life and I must keep my promise. You have to help me. Do you understand? As long as you stay here, you’re Orthodox.’

The boy looked at him, still defiant, but understanding him.

‘He’s converted,’ Andrei announced.

The Polish prisoners couldn’t tell them much. The Cossacks took all their possessions and let them walk off through the forest.

As soon as this was done, and while his men were setting up their quarters for the night in the fort, Andrei went across the river on his next errand. This was to see Anna.

He had not noticed her so far, but there had been so much to do that it was not particularly surprising. He was taken aback therefore, on reaching her house, to find it closed and boarded up.

‘Where are they?’ he asked.

‘The old man’s gone off with his sons to your Cossack camp,’ their neighbour told him. ‘His wife’s gone to her sister in another village near Pereiaslav.’

‘And Anna?’

‘Anna?’ The man looked surprised. ‘Why, didn’t you know? She’s gone. The Pole took her. Stanislaus. Came by here just after the men left, stayed a few days then off he went and took her with him. Stole her at dawn.’

Andrei could scarcely believe it. First the arrogant Pole had tried to take his farm and humiliate his father. Then he had abducted his girl.

‘Where did they go?’

‘Who knows? They’re probably in Poland by now,’ the man said.

Thoughtfully Andrei returned to the fort. It seemed he had lost his bride.

But I’ll find her, he vowed. As for Stanislaus, there could be only one solution.

If anything could take his mind off his loss, it was the extraordinary thing that had happened to his friend. For if Andrei had lost a bride, it seemed that Stepan had found one.

And whoever could have imagined that, of all the possibilities, his choice would have fallen on the Jewish girl! Despite his own troubles, Andrei almost burst out laughing.

‘But she’s Jewish, my old Ox,’ he protested as they sat together by a little fire inside the fort.

‘She’ll convert,’ Stepan said.

‘Does she say so?’

‘I know she will.’

‘But why this girl?’

‘I don’t know why,’ the strange fellow confessed. ‘I just know that it’s so.’

‘You just saw her and… it was fate.’

‘Yes. That’s it.’

He seemed to be in a kind of daze. Even when they spoke, his eyes had a faraway look and Andrei was not sure if his friend was truly with him.

‘Oh dear, poor old Ox,’ he said. ‘What are you going to do with her? You can’t take her on campaign.’

Stepan nodded his large head slowly.

‘I know. I’ve been thinking about that. I’ll find a priest to marry us. Then I’m going home to the Don with her.’

‘You’re deserting me?’

‘The time has come,’ Stepan said solemnly.

‘You’d better talk to her.’

‘Yes.’ The huge fellow got up slowly. ‘We must talk.’ And with that he walked slowly over to the place where the girl was sitting in the shadows. Quietly he led her to the fire and made her sit by him. Andrei, curious though he was, left them alone. Then, very softly, Stepan began to talk to her.

For some time, from a distance, Andrei watched them. The other Cossacks glanced at them too. What a strange fellow the bearded giant was, to be sure!

The girl seemed to be saying little, watching Stepan with her large, thoughtful eyes, interjecting a word here and there as if to prompt him. There she was, a fifteen-year-old who had seen her own father hacked to death just a few hours before, and now she was sitting with this strange Cossack who had taken it into his head to marry her. And, Andrei thought, it was as if she were the teacher and he the child; for something in her composed, tragic young face made her look older than him – older than any of them, perhaps.

At last, Andrei went to sleep. But several times, that short summer night, he awoke to see them still sitting there, quietly conversing by the glowing embers of the little fire.

What was Stepan saying to her? Who knew what strange jumble of thoughts might be coming from that solemn head. Was he trying to convert her? Was he, perhaps, telling her about the lands past the Don which were his home? Was he telling her his life story, or God knew what tales of magic and superstition with which his simple head was full? Perhaps he was describing the endless, scented steppe, or his belief that all men should be equal brothers. Whatever it was, it was clear to Andrei that his friend, believing that this Jewish girl was his fate incarnate, had chosen that night to pour out his whole soul.

And the girl was listening, always listening.

She probably knows more about that fellow than some wives learn in a lifetime, he thought with a smile, the third time he went to sleep.

It was just as the sky was beginning to lighten that he half awoke, to find Stepan rummaging through his baggage beside him. He noticed two things – that the girl was standing up, by the fire, and that his friend had upon his simple face a look of extraordinary exaltation, as if he had just been told some wonderful, mystical secret. More than ever, he seemed to be in a sort of daze. More asleep than awake himself, Andrei remembered vaguely seeing the two of them going out of the fort together, and thinking that Stepan looked like a man who was sleepwalking. Then he fell unconscious again.

The shout which woke the whole fort came only minutes later.

Startled wide awake, Andrei rushed to the gate, to find several of the guards already there, gazing out in puzzlement. He darted through them, and down the path.

Stepan was standing by the river bank. In his hands was a pistol. The girl was lying on the grass a few feet in front of him, dead.

He did not move. Even when Andrei reached him, he was still staring at her with a look of mystified disbelief on his face; and when Andrei tried to take him by the arm, he found that the big man was completely rigid.

For several minutes they stood there together, in the pale light of early morning then Stepan let Andrei take the pistol out of his hand and, his body suddenly sagging, walked slowly up the slope with him.

Only when he had sat the strange fellow down and made him drink a little vodka did Andrei get a confused account of what had happened.

During their long talk that night, it seemed the girl had understood the foolish, superstitious fellow only too well. She had told him she would marry him. He had been ecstatic. She had entirely won his confidence. And then, towards the end of the night, when Stepan had entered a state which, to him, seemed to be mystical, she had told him her wonderful secret.

‘It is true we were fated to meet, Stepan. I was expecting you.’ She had smiled. ‘You see, I am magical.’

She could even prove it to him, she said. If he came to a private place, she would show him.

‘You can fire your pistol through my heart,’ she promised, ‘and it will not even hurt me. Come, let me prove it.’

And that was what the simple fellow had done.

Even now, he could not fully understand that his faith in his destiny had been shattered. Still, he shook his head.

‘There must be a mistake. Perhaps she only fainted.’

Nor, it seemed, did any of the Cossacks except Andrei understand that, to the girl, death was better than to be sullied by Christian hands, even when those hands were kindly.

A little later he went to see to her burial.

Andrei wondered whether to bring her brother there, but decided it was better not. Feeling that the little fellow should at least have something to remember her by, he searched her and was surprised to discover, on a little chain around her neck, a small, ancient metal disc with a three-pronged trident on it. He had no idea what this might be, but took it for the orphaned boy all the same.

So it was that the girl was buried in an unmarked grave, by the edge of the steppe. That her journey with Stepan to the lands beyond the Don would have taken her to the homeland of her ancient Khazar ancestors, she had not remotely guessed.

As for Stepan, he gave his puzzled judgement later that morning: ‘It was that wildcat we saw. It must have looked at me. That’s what did it.’

At noon the party departed, to seek out news of the magnate Vyshnevetsky and his army.

The massacre of the Ukrainian Jews in the year 1648 followed a pattern very similar to the events at Russka. Indeed, written records survive of incidents just as strange as Stepan’s courtship.

How many Jews were actually killed is a matter of dispute which is unlikely ever to be resolved, but it is certainly true that the death toll ran into tens of thousands and that, for the rest of its history, this year marked the start of the systematic pogroms which have been a recurring feature of that region.

As for the magnate Vyshnevetsky, he gathered by early June a force of some six thousand men from his own vast estates and then crossed the Dniepr to its western side. Under his direction this force burned, looted and massacred virtually every Ukrainian settlement in its path, thus ensuring once and for all that the Ukrainians would loathe the Poles and demonstrating, with awesome stupidity, that singular genius for vengeance and incapacity for government that was the chief distinguishing trait of the seventeenth-century Polish Commonwealth.

In July, the fighting was resumed. And in the succeeding months, Andrei achieved the rank of esaul.

He did not forget, in the campaigns that followed, to look out for Stanislaus and Anna.

1649

It was a day he would always remember in later years: for, in a sense, it marked the end of the bright days of his youth.

At first it had seemed that things were going well. The uprising had been universal. By the end of 1648 half the population of the Ukraine were calling themselves Cossacks. Bogdan and his men had won more crushing victories over the Poles, captured another hundred guns with a baggage train containing a hundred million Polish zloty and the victorious Cossacks had entered Kiev to be greeted by the free townsmen and the Metropolitan himself as the saviours of the ancient lands of Rus.

A new Polish King had made a truce; treaties of friendship been signed with the Turkish Sultan and his east European vassals, and for a time it even looked as if the dream of a free Cossack state might come true.

Yet, despite these triumphs, Andrei could see that his friend was not happy.

After that terrible day at Russka, Stepan had never spoken of the girl again, but Andrei sensed that something important had changed within his friend. Stepan’s faith in himself, his simple-minded belief in his destiny, had been broken.

And though he continued to fight alongside his brother Cossacks, it was clear as the months went by that Stepan was losing faith in this cause as well. It was this disappointment on his part that caused the two friends, however sadly, to drift apart.

For the cause of a democratic Cossack state in the Ukraine was lost, even before it started.

There were two reasons. That very first season, when Poland was at its lowest ebb, Bogdan had been unable to take advantage of his victories. And as Andrei watched the peasants drift back to their farms, he could see why.

‘We aren’t strong enough to mount a long campaign without allies,’ he remarked.

True, there were the Tatars. But like most mercenaries, they were only there for profit. By the following spring, they refused to fight unless they could see the battle was going to be won, and in early summer, they started to make their own terms with the Poles.

The role of the Cossacks in history would always be the same: they could make or break another state, but there were never enough of them to form a viable state of their own.

They needed a protector – either Poland, the Crimean Khan, the Sultan of Turkey, or the Tsar of Russia. They could only fight for the best terms possible. But what were those terms to be?

In the summer of 1649 the Cossacks reached an agreement with the Polish Commonwealth. The terms, by Polish standards, were remarkable.

In effect, at that point, Bogdan and the Cossacks were promised a state within a state. No less than forty thousand of them were to be fully registered. Ancient Kiev and two other cities were to be the headquarters of Cossack regiments: Jesuits and Jews would be forbidden to live there.

‘It was worth the fight,’ Andrei had said joyfully to Stepan, but the other had only shaken his head sadly.

‘No. We have sacrificed everything – for nothing.’ And when Andrei had looked genuinely surprised Stepan had reminded him: ‘No free state. No equality. Privileges for rich Cossacks, nothing for the poor ones and the peasants.’

It was true of course. Andrei could not deny it. For men like Bogdan – for Andrei and his father too – the terms were excellent. But those poor peasants, inspired by Bogdan’s promises of freedom, who had risen with their makeshift weapons and suffered the magnates’ revenge – for them there was nothing at all.

When challenged about it, what had Bogdan and his council replied?

‘Let the Cossack be a Cossack, and the peasant a peasant.’

This simple statement, which would long be remembered, had served as the epitaph for a free Ukraine. It left many of the participants disgusted.

‘That is not what I came to fight for,’ Stepan said grimly.

‘It’s as good as we could get,’ Andrei remarked.

Truth to tell, it was as much as he wanted. He realized that. Why should he want a free peasantry now that he was in a position to buy an estate? But in any case, the whole idea was impossible.

‘You can’t have complete freedom. It’s an illusion,’ he suggested.

The big man shook his head.

‘It’s no illusion, but you fear it,’ he replied sadly.

‘I just know it can’t work. And anyway, who would protect us from attack? Freedom leaves us defenceless. We need authority, a big power. Don’t you see that?’

‘I see that treachery brings only evil,’ the big man replied.

And now, within days, he was being proved right.

The peasants, furious at being sold out, were beginning to rise up again; and now it was the Cossack council, not the Poles, who decreed they must be put down at once. The orders had been issued. Andrei prepared to ride.

He knew it was the end of his friendship with Stepan: he knew it the moment he heard the order.

Yet, even so, he was in for a small surprise.

He found the big man already prepared to leave. Though he greeted his friend gruffly, Andrei guessed that Stepan must have been waiting for him before departing. His horse was saddled; some modest possessions were strapped to a pack-horse. Andrei saw a spare horse standing nearby.

‘You’ve heard the order, then?’

‘I have.’

‘You’re going?’

‘Of course. I want no part of it.’

Andrei sighed. He didn’t try to dissuade him.

‘So you’re going back to the Don?’

‘Perhaps.’

Andrei looked around, a little puzzled.

‘Where are your Polish horses? Where’s all your loot?’

‘I gave them away.’

‘Gave them away? To whom?’

‘To some peasants. They needed money more than me.’

It was a stunning rebuke, but Andrei did not try to justify himself, nor did he feel insulted. Stepan thought one way; he thought another.

‘But haven’t you kept anything for yourself? What about your farm back on the Don?’

‘Perhaps I won’t go back to the Don.’

‘Men are free there, my Ox, even if they aren’t in the Ukraine. That’s where you belong.’

For a moment or two, the Ox did not reply. It seemed there was something on his mind, something he had been brooding about for some time. He shook his head slowly.

‘Men,’ he muttered at last, ‘are never free. Not when they are ruled by their own desires.’

Andrei looked at his friend. There was a kind of finality in this statement which suggested that, whatever path it was that Stepan had been travelling in his thoughts, he had come to the very end of it and had, so to speak, returned before setting off again.

‘Don’t you have faith in men any more, my Ox?’ Andrei asked affectionately.

The fact that Stepan did not reply at once told Andrei that his faith in the affairs of men had been destroyed.

‘We are all sinners,’ he grunted with a frown.

‘Where will you go, then?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Then you still have faith of some kind.’

‘Perhaps.’ Stepan glanced down at his feet. ‘One day I may become a priest,’ he said gloomily.

‘A priest?’

‘Or a monk. But not yet. I am unworthy.’

Andrei scarcely knew what to make of this.

‘Will I ever see you again, old Ox?’ he asked.

‘Perhaps.’ He wiped a fly off his long brown beard. ‘Perhaps not.’ He glanced at his horse. ‘I must be off.’

Andrei embraced him.

‘Goodbye, my Ox. God be with you,’ he said.

He did not expect to see him again.

1653

And now, on a sharp, cold morning, in the spring of 1653, young Andrei was riding northwards with the Cossack envoys.

They were going to see the Tsar.

His own career, since the departure of Stepan, had gone from strength to strength. He had increasingly come to Bogdan’s personal notice, and the Hetman, with his long, crafty face, had often given him sensitive missions.

Old Ostap had died – not of his bad heart, as Andrei and his mother had always expected, but of a plague that had visited the Ukraine a little after the peasant revolt. The incident had saddened Andrei and reminded him of his own mortality.

‘Time you married,’ Bogdan had told him. But for some reason, though he had taken to enjoying conquests wherever he went, Andrei had not yet done so. Could it really be that he still remembered Anna? And if so, what could he possibly hope for? He did not know; and he was, besides, too busy to think about it.

The present mission, he understood very well, was by far the most important of his life. The letters the little party was carrying from the Hetman were designed to do nothing less, this time, than save the Ukraine.

For events had been moving towards a crisis.

Poland had not been content with even a partial Cossack state. Neither the Catholic Church nor the Uniates could tolerate the success of Orthodoxy in the Kievan lands; the magnates wanted their lands back; the Szlachta nobility and every taxpaying Pole was indignant at the huge increase in the Cossack register and the large number of Cossacks who therefore might suppose the Commonwealth should pay them salaries. Soon there was more fighting. The Poles added large numbers of German mercenaries to their forces and Bogdan was not always successful. Gradually his hold was weakened. Jews began to return to the Ukrainian lands. And twice, now, large parties of Cossacks and peasants had crossed the border into Russia and been given asylum.

What should the Cossack Hetman do?

He’s still a crafty fox, Andrei had often reminded himself, with admiration.

Indeed he was. At any one time he might be negotiating with the Sultan, the Tatars, the Tsar and the Poles all at once; he even tried to get the throne of the little state of Moldavia, down in the south by the River Danube, for his son. But above all, it was becoming clearer each year that the only hope for the Cossacks lay to the north and east, with Russia. Only the Tsar would respect the Orthodox religion; only he could protect the Ukraine from mighty Poland.

The problem was that Russia was unwilling. The great empire of the north had troubles of her own; she had no wish to risk a costly war with a furious Poland if she accepted the Ukraine. Bogdan had sent messengers, threatened to give the Ukraine to the Turkish Sultan, even harboured a strange adventurer who claimed the Russian throne – anything to get the Tsar’s attention.

Now, this spring, the Poles had sent another large force to reduce the Ukraine and yet again, the Hetman was appealing to Moscow. But this time, things might be different.

‘So far we’ve had nothing but offers of cheap bread and salt,’ the Hetman told Andrei, as he handed him the letters. ‘But there may still be one way to sway them.’

Andrei nodded.

‘The Church?’

‘Exactly.’ The Hetman leaned back in his chair and half-closed his eyes. ‘Holy Russia. That’s how they like to think of Muscovy now. Moscow, the third Rome. Remember, the old Moscow Metropolitan became a Patriarch after Ivan the Terrible’s reign – just like Constantinople or Jerusalem. That’s very important to them. There are powerful men in the Church and amongst the boyars, who think they should protect their Orthodox brothers in the Ukraine. What’s more, they’re getting stronger.’

He opened his eyes again and grinned. ‘Shall I tell you something else? Our Ukrainian priests are better trained than the Russian ones. I’m told that the new Patriarch wants to import more of them to civilize his own priests. Let them pay the price, then – don’t you think?’ He closed his eyes again. ‘I’ve told him I’m ready to give the Ukraine to the Sultan. Of course, I know our people wouldn’t like it because the Turks are Moslems, but the Orthodox Russians will like it even less.’

Bogdan had given the envoys three letters: one for the Tsar, one for his adviser the boyar Morozov, and one for the Moscow Patriarch.

‘Send word by messenger on how you are received, then if things look promising, stay in Moscow and keep your ears open.’

These were the instructions Andrei carried with the letters as he went on his thrilling mission.

Muscovy. Two Cossacks led the party – Kondrat Burlay and Silvian Muzhilovsky. Andrei was their aide.

Swiftly they made their way eastward from the River Dniepr, through the thinning woods until finally, leaving the trees behind them, they ventured out on to the open steppe. They travelled east another day before turning northwards. The winter had been long and bitter. The ground was still hard, with little snowdrifts in places.

It was a strange frontier region, this. Andrei had never been here before, though he knew that many Cossacks and Ukrainians had fled to these broad borderlands where they had come, at least in name, under the protection of the Russian Tsar.

‘And the Tsar has been making his presence felt here, too,’ Burlay told him. ‘In the old days, the Russian fortress line against the Tatars was a long way north, almost up at the River Oka. They’ve just finished a new line now, though. It runs right across the steppe.’ He laughed. ‘It’s quite impressive.’

Nothing, however, had prepared Andrei for what he saw when they came to it the next day.

He simply gasped. So this was the might of Muscovy!

The new, so-called Belgorod line of the Muscovite state was an awesome undertaking. The completed line ran across the steppe from near the fortress town of Belgorod all the way to the distant Volga as it descended towards the deserts by the Caspian Sea. Huge earth walls with trenches in front of them, wooden palisades above, stout towers with sharpened wooden stakes pointing outwards from their tops: this was Muscovy’s mighty barrier against the Crimean Khan who, even now, a century after Ivan the Terrible had conquered Kazan, still demanded tribute, from time to time, from the Russians in their forest empire.

It was as he gazed upon this tremendous wall that the young Cossack received his first impression of the true character of the Russian state of the north.

These people are not like the Poles at all, he suddenly realized. The Poles would never build like this. Poland had simply given the huge tracts of the Ukraine to a few magnates to exploit as they thought best. True, they set up forts to protect their income; they employed Cossacks to keep the raiders at bay. But they were just a collection of great lords, concerned with reaping a profit from these rich borderlands, to keep themselves in comfort in their European palaces in the west.

This colossal fortification, though, was not the work of mere aristocrats. It was the work of a mighty emperor – of a great, dark power, half-Slav, half-Tatar. It’s like a Tatar city on the steppe, he thought, looking at the high pointed stakes on the parapet, but huge, endless.

And, indeed, the great wall itself seemed to speak, as though to say: ‘We know you horsemen of the steppe, for we are partly of your blood; but see, we can out-build you – for our heart is greater than yours. Thus we shall carry our mighty Russian forest, even across the endless steppe, until one day even the proud Khan shall bow before our Holy Russia.’

It was Burlay, riding beside him, who now remarked: ‘If you want to understand the Russians, Andrei, always remember – whenever they feel threatened, they rely upon size.’

So it was that the little party continued, into the great fortress of the Russian state.

At first, Andrei noticed nothing very different. When they began to encounter woodland again, the broad-leaved forests seemed very like those around Kiev: the villages with their thatched roofs and timber stockades seemed familiar, too.

Yet gradually he began to see a change. The thatched roofs petered out, to be replaced by heavy logs. It grew colder: the snow lay more thickly upon the ground. Somehow the woods, and the fields, looked grey.

And there was something else.

He was used to Russians: there had been plenty of them at the Cossack camp. They spoke Great Russian of course, but that was not difficult for a Ukrainian to understand. Not that they compared with a man from the south. ‘Those Russians are crude fellows,’ the Ukrainians used to say. For just as the Poles despised the Ukrainians, so they in turn liked to despise their Orthodox cousins in the north.

Yet now that he had entered Russia Andrei was surprised to feel a faint sense of unease as he travelled north. It was something to which, at first, he could not put a name. Something oppressive.

The forest grew thicker and darker. Sometimes, in the forest, they encountered little settlements where the people produced potash. In these, the Cossacks noticed, the peasants looked healthy enough. But in the ordinary villages it was a different story.

‘This is the third year the winter has gone on too long,’ the people told them. ‘Even in a good year, we only have just enough. With these poor crops, another year and we’ll be starving.’

When Andrei looked at their villages and heard their sad story, there was one thing that puzzled him. ‘Your fields are huge,’ he exclaimed. ‘Surely you should have enough even in bad years.’ ‘No,’ they told him, ‘it’s not so.’ And only at the third such village did Andrei discover the reason.

‘You see, for every measure we sow, we only get three back at harvest,’ a peasant explained.

A yield of three to one. A miserable rate, unthinkable in the rich Ukraine.

‘Our land is poor,’ the man said sadly.

And badly cultivated, he could have added. For this three to one crop yield in north Russia was no more than farmers in western Europe had been getting in the Dark Ages, a thousand years before.

But if the poverty of these little villages struck Andrei, he was soon to see something very different.

The party was about fifty miles below the great eastward loop of the River Oka when they came to the old frontier line. Though not as impressive as the new Belgorod line, it was another sign of the formidable power of the Muscovite state. The stout wooden forts and palisades were still intact.

‘They stretch another hundred miles, all the way to Riazan,’ Burlay remarked.

In many places there was long-established open parkland in front of the line; but where there was not, huge swathes had been burned through the woodland so that the Tatar raiders would not have any cover.

And it was just past this great line that they came to the sprawling industrial town of Tula.

Andrei had never seen anything like it. It was a town, yet not a town. Everywhere there seemed to be long, stout houses, of wood or brick, filled with the sounds of men hammering. Half the buildings seemed to be smithies.

‘The whole place is like a giant armoury,’ he remarked.

And most impressive of all, there were the big, grim buildings with continually smoking chimneys which contained the blast furnaces.

These were the first blast furnaces that Russia had seen. Operated by the Dutch family of Vinius, they had been set up at Tula because of the ancient iron ore deposits in the region. Not only were the mighty furnaces here, but innumerable workshops where armaments were made.

‘They make more weapons here than anywhere except Moscow itself,’ Burlay remarked. ‘They say these Romanov Tsars are bringing in new foreigners all the time, because they’re the only ones who know how to operate these new machines.’

Cannons, muskets, pikes and swords: Andrei saw wagon-loads of them. As a soldier, he was impressed; but he found the huge, smoky place rather frightening, and was glad soon to be on his way to Moscow again.

They reached the capital a week later.

It had been a long, hard winter. The huge city of Moscow was still under snow, although the Lenten season had begun.

Over the vast, snowbound city, the skies were grey, heavy and monotonous. In the streets, where the snow had not been cleared, there was also greyness, as though at some point the clouds had let fall not flakes of snow, but a dismal settling of ice-dust and cinders in their place.

Yet the scene was not without colour. The roofs of the houses were white. Above, the domes of the churches were gold, silver, or brightly painted. Occasionally in the street one might encounter a noble in a voluminous, fur-trimmed cloak of red or blue; there might be a glimpse of rich brocade beneath; the patrols of musketeers, the streltsy, were to be seen in the citadel with their red coats and gleaming pikes; even the simple townswomen often went out with brightly coloured scarves wrapped over their heads.

It was hardly surprising that, for some time after his arrival in Moscow, Andrei lived in a state of happy excitement. After all, it was a fine thing for a young Cossack to enter a mighty capital and find himself well received.

For they had been warmly welcomed. When they delivered their letters to the Kremlin, a senior functionary let them know that the Tsar and the boyars were well disposed towards them; and when they left the Kremlin and went to the Palace of the Patriarch on Ilinka Street, they were told that the great churchman would give them a personal audience in a few days.

Andrei was full of hope. After the hard months of fighting and uncertainty, he felt like a schoolboy suddenly granted a holiday.

And if Tula had been impressive, he found Moscow awe-inspiring. He would walk across the vast expanse of Red Square towards the extraordinary building already called St Basil’s Cathedral. The floor of Red Square was slightly curved so that, as one walked, St Basil’s seemed to rise up over a shortened horizon. He would advance three-quarters of the way, to the tribune platform where announcements were made and stare with wonder at those strange, barbaric Asiatic towers and domes. Nearby, the high, massive Kremlin walls, so blank, so pitiless, seemed both threatening and protective. On one of the towers there was now a huge English-designed clock, as though to suggest that, despite the huge, tomb-like silence of the Kremlin, it was still watching each minute of the present, passing world.

Sometimes he would wander through the suburbs, through street after street of dark brown, stolid wooden houses, whose roofs were still thick with snow. At every corner, it seemed, there was a church. Many were wooden, with high tent roofs but often, over the wooden houses, he would see the big, squat, pale shape of a masonry church looming over the quarter, with softly glowing domes and, perhaps, those gay little tiers of false arches arranged in a pyramid that the Russians called kokoshniki, meaning ‘headdresses’, such as women wore.

And above all, as he wandered about in the icy city, he noticed the endless sound of bells. How many churches could there be, to produce such a continuous noise?

‘They say there are forty times forty and I believe it,’ he concluded.

Indeed, a friendly priest assured him, in the summer, when the nights were short, the monastery bells could be heard all through the night. ‘Just like so many nightingales,’ the priest said, laughing.

Truly this was the capital, the northern fortress of the Orthodox Church.

But what a study in contrasts Moscow was. He had always heard that the Muscovites were given to whoring and drinking. ‘They get as drunk as us Cossacks after a victory,’ his father had always told him. And to be sure, Andrei saw plenty of people getting drunk, even lying helplessly in the freezing streets by dusk. Yet at the very same time, he would see crowds of men and women moving in a solemn stream into the churches to pray.

And how they prayed! While the priests appeared before the iconostases in their gorgeous vestments, the people stood for hours – longer even than in the great cathedral in Kiev. Many of the faithful even suffered from an incurable foot ailment because of this, he learned. There was a communal zealousness about some of them, too, that he had not seen in the Ukraine. A little knot of women was often to be seen by the church doors and he had supposed they might be asking for alms until one day he saw a drunken man approach, and watched, astonished, as the women suddenly turned upon the fellow with scorn and shoved him brutally away. Truly these Russian women were devout.

Everything is done to extremes in this land, he concluded.

He noticed something else, too. There were quite a few foreigners in the streets, each wearing different national costumes. Some were merchants, but most seemed to be soldiers.

The Tsar is drawing men from all countries into his service, he thought, with some satisfaction.

It was at the end of his first week that Andrei made a new friend.

He had gone into the Kremlin to visit the cathedrals. His mood was light-hearted. The sun had appeared once or twice through the clouds that morning and just as he had left his lodgings, he had had a delightful experience. A young girl had gone tripping by, so close that he had nearly bumped into her as he came out. She could not have been more than fifteen. She wore a long pink cloak trimmed with fur, a tall cylindrical fur hat, and her hands were tucked neatly into a fur muff. She was very fair, her fresh young face glowing in the sharp air, and the long golden plait of hair that hung down her back was gaily tied with a bright red ribbon.

Before he had time to collect his thoughts, she was gone, but he smiled to himself as he thought: When this business is over, it will be time to think of getting married. Perhaps I’ll take one of these pretty Russian girls with me.

Now, as he walked past the palace in the Kremlin, he paused for a moment below the window in the Terem Palace where one of the streltsy guards stood to receive the people’s petitions.

How remarkable it was that anyone, even the lowest peasant, could come here, place his petition in the little box provided, and know that it would go straight to the Tsar’s personal secretariat in the famous Golden Room above – very likely be read out to the Tsar himself. The mighty autocrat was like a personal father to his people. And a kindly one too. Andrei had already heard stories of the young Tsar’s kindness: how he would visit the prisons in person, give the poor fellows sheepskin coats, even sometimes set them free by paying off their debts. ‘The Tsar is like a sparkling sun,’ the Russians liked to say.

He had just turned towards the cathedrals when he heard a friendly voice behind him: ‘Well, if it isn’t my friend the Cossack.’

He turned and saw a young fellow in a beaver coat grinning at him. He had to think for a moment to remember where he had seen him before, then realized that it had been in the government office where they had delivered their letters: this was the young clerk who had greeted them and conducted them to the senior secretary who had interviewed them.

He was a pleasant young man of about Andrei’s own age. Andrei now noticed that he had pale, rather ivory skin and a broad, handsome forehead crowned with thick, wavy black hair parted in the middle and brushed carefully back. Yet if this upper part of his face made Andrei think of a Polish nobleman, the rest seemed to derive from a quite different source. His high cheekbones and rather slanting eyes, despite the fact that they were blue, suggested a Turkish or Tatar ancestry. It was as though a high European face had been compressed in its middle section to produce a slightly squashed though quite agreeable effect.

He introduced himself as Nikita, son of Ivan, Bobrov. The name meant nothing to Andrei.

The two young men fell into an easy conversation. The clerk seemed eager to talk to this visitor from the south and it was not long before he warmly suggested: ‘Come to my lodgings today. We can talk better.’

It seemed an excellent chance to learn more about this great state which the Ukrainians were trying to join, and Andrei accepted willingly. He agreed to come that afternoon.

The lodgings of Nikita Bobrov were in the fashionable kitaygorod quarter, but they were modest, consisting of three rooms on the upper floor of a stout wooden house belonging to a merchant.

His host was not alone when Andrei arrived. Standing at one side of the main room was a middle-aged man in a heavy sheepskin. At the far end stood a plump woman with a younger one beside her, whose face Andrei could not quite see in the shadows.

The man in the sheepskin was of medium height. His bad-tempered face might once have been pale but now it was blotched; he had small dark eyes and his hair was parted in the middle and pulled tightly down his head so that it seemed to become one with his flowing beard. Everything about him, his body, his eyebrows, his entire character, appeared to be close-knit. He might have been a small merchant. And he was obviously as angry as he dared be.

Nikita briefly excused himself while he turned back to this man, whom he now addressed with an air of finality.

‘I can talk to you no more, Ivan,’ he said firmly. ‘My mind is made up. You see for yourself that Elena has hurt her leg and needs Maria to help her. She can’t even get to the market. You can’t object to your wife helping her mother. And even if you do, I’m ordering you, so there’s an end of it. You’re to leave now and return here after Easter with those missing rents.’

‘I should never have brought her,’ the fellow mumbled angrily.

‘That’s beside the point. And take care you bring those rents when you return,’ the young man added severely, ‘or I’ll have you thrashed.’

The man glowered in the direction of the two women, but reluctantly placed his hand on his heart and made a low bow to Nikita before going out. His heavy steps could be heard going down the stairs outside. Andrei thought he detected a stifled laugh from the younger of the two women, but a moment later they, too, bowed and vanished into the next room.

‘My steward,’ Nikita explained with a smile. ‘A difficult fellow.’ He indicated two benches by the window and they went over to them. ‘The fact is,’ he confessed, ‘I brought a widow from my village as housekeeper to save myself the expense of hiring servants in Moscow. Now,’ he added ruefully, ‘I have family quarrels on my hands. The penalty of being poor,’ he grinned. ‘Let’s talk of other things.’

Andrei soon discovered, rather to his surprise, that he and his host shared several things in common. As his face suggested, young Bobrov’s mother, who had come from Smolensk, was Polish and thanks to her he had early on been taught to read and write and scan a little Latin – in fact, a similar education to the one Andrei had got in Kiev. He even knew some Polish courtly tales. But while this degree of education was becoming more common in the Ukraine, it was still very rare in Russia and the young clerk had been delighted to discover someone his own age who shared these attainments.

As Andrei had hoped, his friend was happy to give him all the information he wanted about the politics of Moscow.

‘You came at a good time and you took your letters to the right people,’ Nikita assured him. ‘The Tsar and the boyar Morozov are your friends, and that’s important. The people hate Morozov because he has a silver-plated carriage and he put high taxes on bread and salt, but he’s powerful. His wife and the Tsar’s wife are sisters and their family, the Miloslavskys, control a lot of the court.’ He grinned. ‘Morozov even owns part of the big ironworks you saw at Tula.’

‘But we asked for the Tsar’s protection before, and nothing came of it,’ Andrei reminded him.

‘True, but things have changed. The first time you asked, the Tsar was younger and your letter arrived in the middle of a popular revolt here. Half the suburbs were in flames and Morozov nearly lost his life. Moscow wasn’t ready to take on a commitment that risked war with Poland. But we’re stronger now and the Tsar’s in control.’

‘What about the Church?’ Andrei asked, remembering Bogdan’s words.

‘The Church wants union. You know the Patriarch of Jerusalem himself came to Moscow to plead your cause. And we already value your Ukrainian scholars.’

Andrei knew that the Patriarch of Jerusalem had been in Kiev at the very time of Bogdan’s triumphal entry and that after this he had gone north. He also knew that a number of Ukrainian scholars had recently been set up in a house in the Sparrow Hills at Moscow’s edge. All this seemed to augur well.

‘But the greatest and most powerful friend you have is not even our master the Tsar,’ the young man solemnly told him. ‘It’s our new Moscow Patriarch.’ And now Andrei noticed that his host unconsciously dropped his voice a little in respect: ‘Patriarch Nikon.’

Andrei had noticed that although this new Patriarch had only been chosen the previous year, people already seemed to speak of him with a kind of awe.

‘They say,’ Nikita went on, ‘that he may be a new Philaret.’

This was a remarkable claim. For when, forty years before, the amiable Michael Romanov had been chosen by the Zemsky Sobor as the first Tsar of the new dynasty, it was not long before his father, the austere Patriarch Philaret, was virtually ruling the state for him. Could this new Patriarch, whom he knew to be of humble origins, really be so powerful?

‘Wait till you see him,’ Nikita said.

Nikon’s interest was simple, it appeared. He wanted to see Moscow recognized as the equal if not the highest of the five patriarchates of the Orthodox Church. The dignity of the Moscow Patriarchate had to be raised. They needed more saints. Only a year before, the body of Metropolitan Filip, whom Ivan the Terrible had murdered, had been ceremoniously brought back to Moscow to be venerated in the Kremlin church. He also knew that the Russian Church was backward, its texts corrupt and its scholarship inferior. He wanted to correct all this and, together with the Ukraine, make the ancient lands of Rus a mighty bulwark against the Catholic and other religions of the west.

‘He’s already started to reform the prayer book and the liturgy,’ Nikita explained. ‘It seems we’ve even been making the sign of the cross the wrong way.’

‘Is there any opposition?’ Andrei wondered.

‘Yes. A bit. There’s a small group amongst the senior zealots who don’t approve. They hate change.’ He laughed. ‘I got waylaid in the Kremlin not long ago by some fellow from the provinces called Avvakum – I ask you, what a name! – who went on about it for half an hour until I shut him up. But Nikon’s very powerful and he’ll make short work of any opposition. You can be sure of that. And then, my dear fellow, Moscow will truly be the third Rome,’ he added enthusiastically.

It was an enthusiasm Andrei could share. This was what the Cossacks wanted to see.

They were briefly interrupted by a rustling at the entrance as the older of the two women appeared and began quietly to set food on the table. It was a modest meal: fish, a few vegetables, and a sort of gingerbread she had made without eggs or milk, so as not to break the Lenten fast. To wash this down, however, Nikita had allowed himself some of the vodka which was now the drink of all classes in northern Russia.

Andrei had idly watched these preparations, curious to see whether the younger woman would appear; but she had not. They moved to the table and at once Nikita poured them both a liberal quantity of vodka.

Andrei was curious to know more about his host. What sort of man was he?

‘I’m a small landowner,’ Nikita explained. ‘My family have been service gentry – boyar’s sons, they call us – for a long time. Our estate’s a small place in the Vladimir region. But I hope to rise,’ he confided. He explained that the next step up would be to join the more select, so-called Moscow Gentry that Ivan the Terrible had founded with his chosen thousand retainers. ‘And who knows, after that? People like me have even become boyars – the highest rank of all.’

His modest education, it turned out, was a great advantage to him because it allowed him to make himself useful in his government department.

‘It was because my mother taught me Polish that I was chosen for this part of my department,’ he added. ‘We have special responsibility for Cossack affairs.’

Andrei knew that the government department – the prikaz – was one of the ways to advancement in the Tsar’s service and he was curious about it. Nikita was happy to tell him more, describing the work of his unit with pride. Yet the more Andrei listened, the more puzzled he became.

For as well as Cossack affairs, it seemed Nikita’s prikaz dealt with honey production, the Tsar’s falcons, and numerous other matters that seemed to be completely unrelated to its main task. When he questioned Nikita about this, the young clerk only grinned.

‘Every prikaz is the same in Moscow,’ he said. ‘You see, each department grew up because some particular matter had to be dealt with; and when something new turns up, it’s just given to whoever happens to be free. There are at least three other departments dealing with you Cossacks, as well as my own.’

‘Isn’t it confusing?’

‘It is until you know your way around. But it’s useful too, you know. The thing is to try to get your finger into as many pies as possible.’

As Nikita began to describe the extensive and hopelessly confused Russian bureaucracy, Andrei’s head began to swim. How, with so much red tape, so much overlapping of responsibilities, was it ever possible to get anything done? Try though he might, the more he listened, the less he could see any answer to this question – which, indeed, was not surprising, since any Muscovite at that date could have told him that there was no solution to the problem of government red tape.

They drank numerous toasts: to the Ukraine, to Holy Russia, to the Cossacks. Nikita was anxious to know the Cossacks’ military strength and Andrei assured him of their fitness.

‘Because if we accept the Ukraine, it will mean war with Poland,’ the young man remarked seriously.

For his part, Andrei wanted to know about the many people from other countries he had seen in Moscow. Who were they? At this, Nikita became vehement.

‘Damned foreigners,’ he cursed. ‘We need them, that’s the trouble. Do you know why, my dear Cossack?’

Andrei was not sure.

‘Because you and I aren’t good enough, that’s why.’ He sighed. ‘It’s the same problem Ivan the Terrible faced. Most of our history, you see, our enemy has been the horsemen, usually from the east. People like my ancestors – and nowadays you Cossacks – know how to fight the Tatars. But now we have even more powerful people we need to fight: the Germans, the Swedes, the powers up in the Baltic. We want to conquer the Baltic and dominate its trade, but these people have science and military expertise that we do not possess.

‘Why do you think I am a clerk in a prikaz when my ancestors were warriors? It’s because the Tsar doesn’t need poor amateurs like a Bobrov to lead his men. He needs Dutch and German engineers, Scottish mercenaries, even English adventurers. They’re the people who we’re recruiting to be our officers now. They know how to fight trained infantry. They understand siege warfare and modern artillery.’

‘What about the streltsy?’ Andrei had always understood the famous musketeers were formidable.

‘Good in their day – in the time of Ivan the Terrible. Hopelessly out of date now, both in tactics and weapons. They’ve got lazy too.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘No, we must be humble and learn from the west, my friend. They possess so much knowledge.’

These thoughts seemed to depress him. They depressed Andrei too, for this new world hardly sounded promising for the half-disciplined Cossacks either. Nikita poured them both more vodka, which they downed. Nikita poured again. Then he suddenly brightened.

‘Of course, once we’ve learned their damned western science – Dutch cunning we call it in Moscow – then we’ll kick them all out.’

‘Ah,’ said Andrei appreciatively. ‘I’ll drink to that.’

And so, though they did not know it, the two men, with their poor smattering of education, drank cheerfully to the greatest weakness of the Muscovite state.

For, like almost everyone, even amongst the elite in Moscow, these young men were entirely unaware of the centuries of culture that these uncomfortable western neighbours represented. Of the great philosophical debates of the Middle Ages they were entirely ignorant. Of the Renaissance they knew almost nothing. For the slow growth of a complex political and economic society in Western Europe, they cared not at all. The Russians had seen only the military power of the west and supposed that if they copied it, they had discovered all they needed. Thus they reached out to touch, not substance, but merely the dancing shadows cast upon Russia’s walls.

‘What about the foreign merchants?’ Andrei asked. ‘I’ve noticed a great many.’

Nikita shrugged.

‘They’re all heretics. Patriarch Nikon has known how to deal with them, I must say. The reason you notice them is that the Patriarch made them all wear their own national dress, even if they’ve been here a generation or more. That way they can’t conceal themselves. You know they’re not allowed to live in the city any more?’

Andrei had heard of the so-called German quarter – the contemptuous Russian words actually meant ‘Dumb people’s quarter’ – outside the city, but had not realized that it was a sort of ghetto.

‘That was Nikon too,’ Nikita said approvingly.

‘I don’t see any Jews.’

‘No. The Tsar won’t have them.’

‘That’s good,’ the Cossack said.

‘There’s only one other kind of foreigner that’s banned – at least from the capital.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘The English, of course.’

‘The English?’ The young Cossack from the south did not know a great deal about this distant nation. ‘Are they terrible heretics?’

‘Worse. Didn’t you know?’ Nikita involuntarily lowered his voice even to speak of the horror. ‘They cut off the head of their own King, Charles I, not four years ago.’

Andrei looked at him. As a Cossack, he supposed that it was a terrible thing to kill a king though it did not seem so very terrible to him, so long as the king wasn’t Orthodox.

But the effect upon Nikita, even of mentioning this awful deed, was quite extraordinary. His face puckered up into an expression of utter contempt and loathing.

‘They killed their own annointed King,’ he repeated. And then he said something which stayed in Andrei’s mind for a long time afterwards. ‘They are worse than the Poles. Thank God we know that we are the Tsar’s slaves.’

Several times before Andrei had noticed this manner of speaking. The common people would call themselves the Tsar’s orphans, and the official service classes seemed positively proud to call themselves his slaves. So far he had assumed it was a figure of speech; but watching his new friend Nikita now, he was not so sure. It was strange.

It was just after leaving that he caught sight of the younger woman. He had glanced back at the house and seen her face, quite clearly, at an open window.

It belonged to a girl about his own age: a pretty face, lightly freckled, with regular features. He could just see the top part of her body. It was obviously slim. Definitely a handsome girl.

She was watching him. He smiled at her. She smiled back, then, quickly turning her head, ducked back inside the window.

He frowned. How strange. It looked almost as if the girl had a black eye.

Perhaps it was not altogether by chance that he happened to pass near Nikita’s lodgings the next day and strolled about in the little market nearby. If he had been curious to see the girl, he was rewarded, for he had only been there a short time when she and her mother came by. He noticed that the mother, despite what Nikita had said, was hardly limping at all.

They saw him and greeted him politely. And as they came close he saw clearly that, though it was fading, the girl had certainly had a black eye.

He engaged the older woman in conversation, and she seemed quite happy to talk, but all the while he noticed the girl. There was something about her, a lightness on her feet, a faint humour in her lips, that almost reminded him of Anna. He knew she was staring at him. He tried to listen to what the older woman was saying.

And then suddenly he started. What had the woman said? She had just remarked that they came from the town of Russka. He questioned her more closely. She described the place, where it was; there could be no doubt about it: his young friend’s estate was undoubtedly the place from which his grandfather had run away. Which means, he thought with a smile, that if he hadn’t, I should very likely be a peasant of Nikita’s instead of a Cossack he entertains in his own house.

He was just about to blurt all this out when some instinct for caution held him back. Nikita might yet be useful to him, and who knew how he might feel about the grandson of a runaway? Nonetheless, he supposed he must have relations in the place.

‘Perhaps I shall visit it some day,’ he said lightly.

They talked a little more. He told them about his companions and where they were lodged, then they parted. As they did so, he saw that the girl was looking at him intently.

It was not a complete surprise, therefore, when he met her in the street the next day near his lodgings. She came up to him with a smile. Despite the dark mark around her eye, she looked cheerful, even radiant. She had a light, springing step. ‘Well, Mr Cossack,’ she said, ‘may I walk with you?’

Most of the women one saw in the street moved rather cautiously; even if they wore a headdress, they placed a large scarf over it, tied under the chin; they seldom smiled. But though she wore a scarf and a long, rather threadbare cloak, there was something in this girl’s easy, almost dancing gait that reminded him of the free, self-confident Cossack girls of the south. ‘You should call me Maryushka,’ she said, using the diminutive. ‘Everybody does.’

‘Well, Maryushka,’ he said, ‘tell me about yourself. Why do you have a black eye?’

She laughed. It was a gay little sound, though with a hint of sadness and bravery in it that was very appealing.

‘You never need to ask a married woman that,’ she replied. Then with a sigh she added: ‘They say it’s a fault in my character.’

Her story was simple, though unusual. When she was younger, she had refused to marry.

‘There was a boy in Russka,’ she laughed again. ‘He was so handsome! Slim, and dark like you. But he married someone else. He didn’t want me. And the other boys – well…’ She made a gesture of contempt. ‘My father was dead. My mother goes on at me every day: “Marry this one, marry that one.” I say, “No! He’s too short. No, he’s too tall.” She says I’m a wicked girl. I need training. I’ll get a bad name. So…’ She shrugged.

‘So you married the steward? The man I saw at Bobrov’s?’

‘His wife died. He told my mother he’d tame me. “Give her to me,” he says.’

‘You didn’t refuse?’

‘Yes. But he’s the steward. He could make it very awkward for us. He has the power. So – that’s life. I married. I was old, you know. Nearly twenty.’

‘And he beats you?’

She shrugged.

‘That’s part of being married. He hits with his fist. Sometimes I can get out of his way. But he’s quick.’ She gave a mournful laugh. ‘Oh, yes. He’s quick. So. That’s all.’

Andrei had always heard that these women in north Russia suffered harsh treatment from their husbands. The Cossack girls, he knew, though their husbands often called them weak women and pretended to despise them, would not have put up with much of this kind of treatment.

‘What does your mother say?’

‘At first she says: “Obey him and don’t be headstrong, then he won’t beat you.” Then she says: “You must work to make him love you. Have children.”’ She shrugged, then gave him a little smile. ‘You know what she says now? She says: “Maryushka, all men are the same, to tell you the truth. Obey him, submit, but keep your own council. Men are despicable,” she says, “but there’s nothing you can do about it.” So I say: “Why didn’t you tell me that before?” And she says: “Because I wanted you to get married.”’ She laughed aloud. ‘So I’m married.’

‘And how did you get to Moscow?’

‘Ah, I tricked him. He had to bring the rents to our landlord. So I say: “Take me to Moscow and I’ll do anything you want.” Then when I get here I say to my mother: “You have to keep me here. I can’t stand it any more. Not this month.” So she pretends to hurt her leg and the landlord’s sent him back to Russka without me!’ She laughed happily.

‘Look,’ she cried suddenly, ‘there’s a church. Let’s go in and pray.’

What a strange, wayward girl she was! But what spirit she had. Before they parted that day, Andrei had already decided: It’s time I had a woman: this will be the one.

Because of business, however, he had to put her out of his mind for a couple of days.

It was on the third day that he saw a strange sight. He was just walking out of the White Town when, turning a corner, he saw a wagon that had been stopped in the middle of the street; and at the same moment he realized to his surprise that it was being attacked by a small mob. Thinking they must be robbers, he was about to rush to the aid of the wagoner when he noticed that the attackers were being led by a pair of priests.

‘What’s this?’ he asked a bystander.

‘Those are zealots,’ the fellow grinned. ‘And they’ve found what they’re looking for.’

To his amazement Andrei now saw the mob pull down from the wagon a lute, a balalaika, and several other musical instruments.

‘A fire!’ he heard one of the priests cry. ‘Burn these iniquities.’

And sure enough, moments later, the wagon itself was set on fire. Not only that, but the gathering crowd of onlookers was roaring its approval. He had been curtly told by a priest the day before not to smoke his Cossack pipe, and he had also seen a drunkard dragged away to be flogged. But what kind of land was this, where priests burned musical instruments? Scarcely thinking what he was doing, he opened his mouth and began to utter a curse of disapproval, when unexpectedly he felt a hand held across his lips.

It was a female hand, and before he could even look down, he heard a familiar voice speaking softly at his shoulder.

‘Take care, Cossack.’

Her hand was a little longer than he had realized; as she took it away, Maryushka gently squeezed his cheeks and then ran the tips of her fingers across his lips.

‘Don’t you realize, Mr Cossack,’ she whispered, ‘there are probably people in the crowd who are listening – they’ll tell the priests if they hear you swearing.’

‘What then?’

She shrugged.

‘Who knows? The knout perhaps.’

The Russian leather-thonged whip was a fearsome instrument.

‘Are these zealots so strict then that they burn musical instruments and give the knout for swearing?’

‘Oh, yes. The Patriarch is for it, and some of the zealots in the Church are even stricter. They are determined to cure us Russians of our whoring and drinking. All sorts of pleasures are forbidden.’ She laughed. ‘You know, the landlord’s even afraid to go home because the priest at Dirty Place preaches such sermons. And Bobrov has a lute from Germany hidden in his house, I know.’

Andrei frowned. Was this dour zealotry the Orthodoxy he was fighting for? Was everything in the Muscovite state so dark, so claustrophobic? The sense of unease he had felt on his journey northwards from the Ukraine seemed to come back to him now with more force.

But Maryushka had reached up and gently touched his lips again.

‘Is there anyone in your lodgings now?’ she asked.

He knew there was not.

He looked at her.

‘What if we’re caught? The knout?’

She smiled.

‘No one will catch us.’

A blue sky appeared the next day, and the spring sun. By noon the thaw had set in. And though, in the succeeding days, the sky was often overcast, it was clear that winter was ending at last.

The streets became sodden, grey and brown. A rich, damp smell began to emanate from the millions of logs of the wooden houses, like a sharp, resinous incense. The wet wooden walls were almost charcoal; icicles, thinning to mere needles, hung from the glistening eaves; and here and there the white walls of a church or the slender shape of a silver birch glimmered above the dull slush and endless puddles of the street. The smoke from the fire in every house rose to be carried, like the modest sound of the church bells, over the still sombre morass of the city whose high, golden domes alone gave promise of the light and warmth to come.

In this melting season, Andrei made love to the girl Maryushka.

She had a slim, strong body; the light freckles on her legs and breasts petered out to a surprisingly pale whiteness. Her breasts were rather small.

She would visit his lodgings in the afternoon, and they would lie on his bed in the shadowy room that was almost overheated by the big stove at one end. She liked to undress herself and stretch out, luxuriously, to await him. Sometimes, having arched her back with a catlike movement, she would raise one of her strong, slim legs and admire it before asking him, cheerfully: ‘Well, Mr Cossack, what are we going to do today?’

The first day they made love, he noticed that she winced when he first touched her, but when he looked surprised she gave a wry smile and held up her arms.

‘A little reminder from my husband,’ she remarked drily, and Andrei saw that along the side of one arm were ugly dark marks where the steward had obviously punched her. ‘He’s quite strong,’ she said mildly, and then, as though the bruises were not there, pulled him gently to her.

‘You are strong yourself,’ he remarked a little later, ‘like a cat,’ he added.

‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘a cat with teeth.’

And so they passed the time each afternoon while the dull light outside slowly turned to dusk, then darkness, and apart from some occasional footfalls in the street and the faint hiss from the hot stove, the only sound was the slow dripping of melted ice from the overhanging eaves, or the little rustle and soft thud of snow slipping off the roof onto the ground below.

Sometimes, afterwards, she would sigh.

‘You will be gone soon, my Cossack.’

‘Don’t think of it, my little cat.’

‘Ah, easy for you to say. You’re not trapped.’

It was hard for him to reply to this.

‘Sometimes I wish that Ivan would die,’ she would muse. ‘But… what then? I’ve nowhere to go.’ And then she would manage a short, ironic laugh. ‘All dressed up on St George’s Day – but St George’s Day has been taken away. What do you think of that, Mr Cossack?’

This was a subject to which she often returned in their conversations, and it was one that made Andrei rather uneasy.

For his affair with Maryushka was turning out to be not only a sensual pleasure, but a very important piece of education: and it was an education that was by no means pleasurable.

Only since coming to know her, Andrei now realized, had he truly begun to understand the nature of this powerful Muscovite state. And the more he understood, the more uncomfortable he became. The feature of the state that he disliked above all was one that – though it had been developing for along time – had only recently passed into law. And this was what, nearly every time they talked, Maryushka complained about.

For she was no longer a free peasant. St George’s Day had been abolished.

It was the law code of the present Tsar, Alexis, which had so decreed just four years before. Until that time, though the right had been limited in practice, it was still possible in theory, once a year, for the Russian peasant – technically free since the days of ancient Kiev – to leave one master for another. The old institution of St George’s Day was still in force.

It was the service gentry, the small men with modest estates, who disliked the rule. Invariably short of money, they could never match the terms the Church and magnates could afford to offer for the labour which, thanks to Russia’s endemic famine and plague, was always in short supply.

Pitiful the service gentry might be, individually. But taken all together they were a large and formidable force. It was they who kept order in the country; they who could, when need arose, raise troops in every village in the vast, ungainly land. In short, as the rest of Europe entered the modern age, in the backward land of Muscovy there remained an essentially feudal state of petty landed retainers and a Holy Tsar.

It had been the riots of 1648, when the administration had briefly lost control of Moscow, which had reminded Alexis that he should ensure the loyalty of this service class. And he had done so brilliantly.

In 1649, the famous Russian law code known as the Ulozhenie was proclaimed. Amongst its provisions it stated that no peasant might leave his master’s land for another; and that there was no time limit for the recapture of runaway peasants by their owners. It also stated for good measure that the lower orders in the towns were likewise unfree to move.

To most of the peasants in Dirty Place, these provisions made no difference to their daily lives. They greeted the news, as it filtered down to them, with an apathetic shrug.

But Maryushka did not. Her sharper intelligence perceived the law for what it was. She saw that now there was nothing to prevent the landlord owning his peasants like chattels.

And she was right. As history was to show, with this great law code, the road to the final subjugation of the Russian peasant had been quietly opened. For over two centuries, longer than the actual subjugation to the Mongols, most Russians would be born to be serfs.

‘Do you understand?’ Maryushka demanded. ‘Your young friend Bobrov owns me like a slave. He can probably even sell me. If I run away, he can get me back as long as I live.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘You Ukrainians revolt against the Poles. Then you want to become part of Russia, which is worse! You’d be better off under the Turkish Sultan!’

It was a thought which had recently occurred to Andrei too. But he could only answer: ‘The Sultan is not Orthodox.’

Surely that was the point; at least, he hoped it was.

Then, as if to resolve his doubts, came Palm Sunday.

The morning was overcast, but with only a thin film of grey cloud, which was seamed with glimmering gold and silver fissures from the bright spring sky that was hidden above.

Nikita had suggested Andrei should accompany him, so that they could go into the Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin afterwards; accordingly they had set off together, followed respectfully by Maryushka and her mother, for the citadel; but when they arrived at Red Square the crowds were so thick that they had to stop some way from the Kremlin walls.

As they waited, Andrei glanced at the older woman and then at Nikita. Did either of them guess about his relationship with Maryushka? He supposed not.

They did not have long to wait.

The ceremony of Palm Sunday in the Holy State of Muscovy was, at that time, an extraordinary affair. Setting out from before the towering, exotic mass of St Basil’s Cathedral, the long procession of boyars, officials and priests moved towards the little tribune near the middle of Red Square, where the choir of boys was singing hymns. Sombre, rich, magnificent, the greatest men wore huge chains of gold around their necks, tall hats, and coats of ermine or black fox. Splendid embroidered robes adorned the boyars, heavy enough, it seemed, to crush lesser men. And how imposing the bearded Muscovite priests looked, in their glittering vestments covered with gold and gemstones; they had become still more gorgeous in recent years by adopting oriental headgear. The bulbous, jewelled mitres of the bishops, like so many church domes, caught the dull glow from the broken sky and glimmered with an eerie magnificence.

On a wagon pulled by four horses was a tree, hung with fruit, to symbolize the day; on each side, the streltsy guards, ranged in open formation across the square, now sank to their knees and bowed their foreheads to the ground. And last of all, to re-enact for the people the entry of Christ into Jerusalem on that great day, came the Tsar himself, walking humbly on foot and leading a donkey upon which sat the tall figure of the Patriarch.

At the little platform the procession paused. The Tsar spoke a few words. Then it moved on, across Red Square and into the Kremlin through the great Gate of the Saviour. The Tsar was going to the Cathedral to pray.

Surely, Andrei thought, this must be the ideal state: the land where the Church and monarch were as one. How was it the Russians liked to style their ruler? ‘Most Pious and Orthodox, the most Gentle Tsar.’ Wasn’t that what he had just seen?

He and Nikita went into the Kremlin. There was too much of a crush to get into the Assumption Cathedral itself but they waited outside in the hope of seeing something more.

Their patience was rewarded. At the end of the service, with the bells pealing, he saw not only Tsar Alexis but the sweet-faced Tsaritsa too emerge from the Cathedral uncovered.

‘The Patriarch insists that she show herself to the people on these great occasions,’ Nikita whispered, as they both bowed low.

Yes, Andrei thought, all is well. I have seen Holy Russia.

It had been a memorable day.

It was also the end, at least for a while, of his affair. He had not especially thought about it, but when, later that day, he encountered Maryushka again at Nikita’s lodgings, and she suggested she should come to him the next day, he shook his head.

‘Not in Holy Week,’ he said. It was one thing to sin, but during this, the most sacred week of the year, he simply felt he could not; and he was a little surprised that even her wayward and rebellious spirit could wish for such a thing.

She shrugged, a little sadly, but said nothing.

Holy Week passed quietly. Feeling guilty after his previous sins, Andrei fasted strictly.

On one day he, Burlay and the other Cossacks rode out to look at the Tsar’s country residence at nearby Kolomenskoye. Sited by the Moskva River it was a curious jumble of buildings – some wooden, others of brick, covered with white stucco. Its tent roofs, onion domes and towers flanked by ascending pyramids of kokoshniki suggested a silent, powerful peacefulness like an Indian temple.

They returned to the city feeling refreshed.

By the end of the long and lovely Easter Vigil in the Kremlin at the end of the week, Andrei felt both weak in the knees and elated. The next morning, he saw the Tsar ceremonially give the brightly painted Easter eggs to the great men and soldiers at the Kremlin. Then he went to Nikita’s lodgings for the feast that marks the end of Lenten fasting.

It was a happy occasion. Blinis, honey cakes, gingerbread, all manner of foods had been procured. Maryushka and her mother, both a little pale after their vigil the night before, served the collection of friends Nikita had invited. Appropriately, the sky had cleared to a pale blue that morning and this Easter Day Andrei felt suddenly as if he had been made anew.

Yet as his head began to swim pleasantly with the kvass and mead and vodka he was offered, and a delightful warmth began to fill his stomach, his pious thoughts of the preceding week soon began to fade into the background, and looking across the room at Maryushka he thought happily: Soon I’ll make love to her again.

The week after Easter is known, in the Russian Orthodox Church, as Bright Week.

And it was on the Tuesday that the Cossacks were at last received in person by Patriarch Nikon at his palace.

Only now, seeing him at close quarters and without his mitre, did Andrei realize the dominating presence of this legendary figure.

The Patriarch stood an astounding six foot six inches. Years of prayer and rigorous fasting had left their unmistakable mark on his face which, like his tall body, was gaunt but commanding. His eyes were not unkind, but piercing.

He treated the Cossacks in a friendly but businesslike manner.

‘Though the Metropolitan of Kiev properly comes under the Patriarch at Constantinople,’ he said, ‘Holy Russia can and should give him its protection. This I am determined to do. And as for the Church in Moscow, it is backward. I welcome our brothers from Kiev who have so much that we need.’ He looked at them severely. ‘This is the dawning of a new age – an age of renewed and purified Orthodoxy, led by a pious Russia. You Cossacks will have a splendid role in the defence of our Orthodox state. You may rely upon me, therefore,’ he concluded, ‘to support your application for the Tsar’s protection. Indeed,’ he smiled, ‘I think you may be sure that your mission here will succeed.’

It was not only the ringing words – it was the tone of them, the force of the man, which commanded, uplifted. And as he left, Andrei suddenly felt that he was no longer just a rebel against Poland, but the servant of a mighty cause.

Maryushka’s husband arrived the next day.

Andrei saw her briefly at Nikita’s lodgings, but it was only possible to talk for a few moments. She told him she was to return to Russka with her husband in three days.

‘So I shan’t see you again,’ she said quietly. Then she was gone.

He was surprised by the effect this news had on him. A strange melancholy seemed to invade his whole spirit, a sense of loss rather like a foreboding. Yet why should that be? If he were truthful with himself, the ending of an affair usually left him with a sort of elation – a sense, however mingled with regret, of freedom, of pastures new, and, it had to be said, the pleasant, self-satisfied feeling of a conquest completed.

Yet this time it was different. He felt a cold sadness he had not known before – and he realized soon that it was not because she had meant so much more to him than any of the many others, but that this time, he was afraid for her.

It’s not just the steward and what he’ll do to her, he realized. It’s something in herself.

Without fully understanding it, he was looking at the inner fate of a woman who wished to protest in an endless land where all must submit.

He did not want to lose sight of her. It was absurd.

A partial reprieve, at least, was suggested the next morning when Burlay, the leader of the mission, announced that their work was nearly completed and that they would soon be returning home.

‘How soon?’ Andrei asked.

‘About a week,’ he was told.

‘Then I have a request to make,’ he said.

‘Very well,’ Burlay said when he had heard it. ‘As long as the landowner there has no objection. You can follow on as you please.’

And so it was that Andrei made preparations to accompany Maryushka to northern Russka.

Nikita Bobrov was amused when Andrei told him of his desire to visit the estate and explained his own connection with the place.

‘My dear friend,’ he laughed. ‘Do you mean your own grandfather ran away from the Bobrov estate?’

‘I think so,’ Andrei admitted.

‘What a pity he didn’t leave later. If he’d been in a more recent census, I could probably claim you back!’

‘A grandson?’

‘Well, not in practice I dare say. But,’ he grinned, ‘have you ever seen the Ulozhenie?’

The law about which Maryushka had complained. Andrei confessed that he had not.

‘Well then, I’ll show you.’

Some twelve hundred copies of the great law code of 1649 had been printed – a huge figure for that time – and Nikita Bobrov had one of them.

It was a remarkable document, written not in stilted chancery language but in plain, vernacular Russian, so that it would be readily understandable to all.

‘Here we are,’ Nikita showed him. ‘Chapter Eleven.’

And now, for the first time, Andrei truly understood what it meant to be a Russian peasant.

There were thirty-four clauses dealing with peasants. They covered every imaginable circumstance. Not only was there no time limit whatever on when a lord could claim a runaway back – if he married, the lord could claim his wife back; if he had children, the lord could claim them, their wives, and their children too.

It was forbidden for a lord to kill a peasant – if he did so with premeditation. But if he did so in a fit of anger, it was not a serious offence. If, in a fit of anger, he killed the peasant of another lord, he must replace him.

Andrei asked to look at other chapters. They covered everything, from blasphemy to forgery, from monastery lands – whose growth was now limited – to illegal taverns.

One thing in particular struck him. It was the mention, time and again, of the knout.

‘There’s plenty of flogging in Muscovy,’ he remarked.

‘Only peasants can be flogged,’ Nikita quickly assured him.

There were in fact one hundred and forty-one offences in the twenty-five chapters of the law code which carried punishment by the knout. More severe offences carried the death penalty. But since fifty lashes with the knout was usually fatal, the code could in practice be even more brutal than it looked.

As he read this stern, dark law code, Andrei realized with some shame that, though he had been here some time, and had received many hints, he had failed to look carefully beneath the surface of Muscovite life. More than ever, now, he understood the sense of oppression and claustrophobia that had assailed him ever since he passed the huge Belgorod fortress line across the steppe. And as he thought of the sunny, open lands of the Ukraine, of the unruly Cossack farmers, and of the free cities of Kiev and Pereiaslav who still governed themselves under western laws, he could only shake his head.

‘If the Tsar wants to take the Ukraine under his wing,’ he remarked thoughtfully, ‘he will have to sign a contract to guarantee our people better rights than these.’

But now it was Nikita who shook his head.

‘We know the Ukraine has other customs, which will be respected,’ he assured Andrei. ‘But surely you understand, if the Tsar accepts you under his protection, he does not sign contracts with you. That is beneath his sovereign dignity. You must trust in his kindness and understanding.’

‘The King of Poland signed contracts with us,’ Andrei protested.

‘The King of Poland is only an elected monarch.’ Nikita smiled with faint contempt.

‘Cossacks,’ Andrei said carefully, ‘are not slaves.’

‘And our Most Pious, Orthodox and Most Gentle Tsar is appointed by God to do with us all as he wishes,’ Nikita replied firmly. ‘You must remember,’ he went on, with a trace of condescension, ‘that the Tsar is the heir of St Vladimir, of Monomakh, and of Ivan the Terrible.’ He smiled a little grimly. ‘Ivan, I can assure you, knew how to command obedience. He had one of my own ancestors roasted in a frying pan.’

It was curious, Andrei thought, how these Russians seemed to take pride in the cruelty of their rulers, even when it was directed against themselves. He had several times heard Muscovites speak admiringly of the terrors of Ivan: they seemed almost to long for his return.

How different from the Cossack way. The Cossack warrior gave his Hetman power of life and death over everyone during a campaign, but woe betide him if he tried to exercise any authority in time of peace!

This little altercation had produced a slight tension between the two men. Nikita broke it with a laugh.

‘Well, my Cossack, you are welcome to visit my poor estate. I’ve told my steward to put you in my house and look after you. I’m only sorry I can’t come with you myself.’ He paused. ‘By the way,’ he gave him a sidelong glance, ‘I know I can rely upon you not to subvert any of my peasants to your Cossack ways – of either sex.’

So, he knew. Andrei looked at the floor awkwardly. But as they parted he reflected that, in Muscovy, one could never be sure what people knew, and what they did not.

Russka.

He supposed it was what he had expected.

Spring had come to the little town and its monastery. As they approached the place, the woods opened out to large open fields; their long, gentle undulations of raw turf, dark earth and long slivers of greying snow seemed to be an echo of the endless spaces beyond. At Russka itself, the ice had cleared from the centre of the stream. At the edges, the women still knelt on boards by holes in the ice, washing their clothes in sight of the monastery’s pale walls.

On the trees, even before the last traces of ice had melted from the ground around them, little green buds were already opening staunchly under the hard, bright blue sky. Just outside the walls of Russka, a cattle pen was already a little sea of mud.

It had been a strange journey. Maryushka and the steward travelled in a light, two-wheeled cart while Andrei rode. Despite the surrounding dampness, the tracks through the woods were fairly passable and they made good speed. At nights they rested in the villages or hamlets along the way.

The steward was sullen. Now and then, as if to prove that he was really an interesting fellow, he would engage Andrei in conversation. But Andrei politely discouraged him and remained aloof. To Maryushka he was similarly distant, so that the steward more than once growled to his wife: ‘A cold fellow, that.’

Sometimes Andrei would trot on ahead of them; or he might hang back and watch their two heads from behind, Maryushka’s held rather still, the steward’s bobbing forward constantly as though he were nodding off to sleep. But more often he would walk his horse beside them, glancing across from time to time at Maryushka, who would always be looking, dully, straight ahead. How pale she was.

Twice, however, when her husband had taken the horses down to one of the nearby streams to drink, she had moved swiftly over to Andrei and whispered: ‘Now, quickly. Take me now.’

And in the damp chill of the forest, for a few minutes, they had continued their urgent, surreptitious lovemaking before resuming their places, apparently distant from each other.

When they reached Russka, Andrei was to stay at Nikita’s house near the church while the steward returned to Dirty Place. As they approached the town Maryushka remarked to her husband: ‘I don’t want to wait on that damned Cossack.’

‘You’ll do as you’re told,’ he answered gruffly. ‘The master said I was to look after him so that’s that. He’ll be gone in two days,’ he added, by way of encouragement.

And she had sullenly obeyed.

The two days in Russka had been even more memorable than the journey.

Firstly, there had been the village of Dirty Place, where the steward had obligingly taken him.

It was a small village, no different from any number of damp little hamlets he had seen on the way. Were there still relations of his there? No one seemed to know anything about his grandfather, who had fled eighty years before, until one old woman was able to tell him that, yes, she had heard that one young man had disappeared into the wild field a few years before she was born. The grandson of that family lived at one end of the hamlet. And so it was that Andrei found himself confronted with a sturdy, pleasant-faced fellow with a thick shock of wavy black hair. He and four children lived in one of the stout huts. They welcomed Andrei when they heard his story, looked with admiration at his fine clothes, and through this sturdy peasant he learned that he was, in some way or other, distantly related to many of the village folk including even Maryushka’s mother.

‘And you are free – you have your own farm? You are not a serf?’ his cousin asked in wonder.

It almost hurt Andrei to admit it and to see the look of friendly envy on the man’s face.

He enjoyed his visit to the monastery rather more. The monks and the artisans of Russka still made icons, but in recent generations they had made no attempt to produce their own style, preferring to copy the work of others.

‘Here,’ one of the monks said proudly, as he showed Andrei a beautiful miniature icon, done in bright colours and lavishly decorated with gold, ‘is a Mother-of-God in the style of the Stroganov masters. And here,’ he showed his guest a large, imposing icon of Christ, the Ruler of the World, ‘is a fine one in the present Moscow manner. This is for one of the Tsar’s own churches.’

He thanked the monks for their kindness and gave a suitable donation before he left.

The last forty-eight hours had been difficult. There was the danger of discovery, for a start.

Not that he was afraid for himself. He was a Cossack after all. But there was a wildness, a desperation in Maryushka that made him afraid, more than ever, that she might do something foolish that could harm her.

She was cunning though. She complained grumpily to the neighbours and townspeople at having to clean and cook for the Cossack. She would be seen going irritably about her work while he was out, and she even made it appear that she left the house as much as possible when he was there.

Yet on both days she had slipped quietly into his bed in the early morning, and had already managed, on four other occasions, to make brief but passionate love to him when they could not be seen.

Several times, though, she had come close to him and whispered: ‘Take me away with you. Take me to the Ukraine.’

It was impossible.

‘You’ve a husband,’ he reminded her.

‘I hate him.’

‘And I’m going on campaign.’

Did she love him or was he a means of escape? He did not know. He did not really care either. For the fact was, even if running off with Maryushka were possible, he did not want her.

Yet she did not give up. She would ask, wait a few hours, then gently ask again.

‘Take me away, my Cossack. Take me with you. You needn’t keep me. I’ll go away and not trouble you. Just take me away from this place. Don’t leave me here.’

It was a litany he quickly came to dread.

And then, the second afternoon, just when he expected it to begin again, she turned to him with apparent calm and asked: ‘Have you any money, Cossack?’

‘A little. Why?’

She looked at him in a matter-of-fact way, then pursed her lips.

‘Because I think I’m going to have a baby.’

‘You’re pregnant?’

‘I’m not sure but… maybe. My time never came.’

‘And it’s mine?’

‘Of course.’

He looked at the floor.

‘I know you won’t take me away.’ Her voice was flat, monotonous and far sadder than he had heard it before. ‘A Cossack can do anything, but you don’t want me. Anyway, it was just a dream.’

He said nothing.

‘But if you have some money,’ she said, ‘you can give me that.’

‘Perhaps you’re not pregnant,’ he suggested hopefully.

‘Perhaps.’

Could it be a ploy? He did not think so.

‘But do you want to have it?’

‘Better yours than his.’

‘Won’t he know?’

She shrugged.

‘We’ll see,’ she replied.

He had a considerable amount of coins with him, some Polish, some Russian. He took out all the Russian and gave it to her.

‘Thank you.’ She paused. ‘You can still keep the money and take me with you,’ she said with a sad, wry smile.

‘No.’

Neither of them spoke for a little time, but he was aware of her long fingers opening and closing over the little leather pouch of coins, kneading them. He knew that she was silently crying now, but did not move to her side, fearing it would make her worse.

When she spoke again, through her tears, it was in a soft voice that was little more than a moan.

‘You don’t know, do you, Cossack? You don’t know what it is to be alone.’

‘I am often alone.’ He said it, he supposed, not to justify himself but to comfort her.

She shook her head.

‘You’re alone with hope. You may be killed, but you’re on an adventure. You’re free, Cossack – free as a bird over the steppe. But I’m alone with nothing – don’t you see? Just the sky; just the earth. There’s no way out. It’s so terrible, don’t you see, to know that. To know you’re alone, for ever…’

He thought of her mother, the village of Dirty Place, and of her child.

‘You’re not alone,’ he said.

She did not reply.

‘I’m going,’ she said finally. ‘When do you leave?’

‘At dawn.’

She nodded, then smiled weakly.

‘Remember me.’

She had a bright red scarf which she placed, in the manner of all Russian women, over her head before departing.

The sky was clear, a wonderful pale blue, as he rode southwards from the little town of Russka in the early morning.

Two miles below the town there was a huge meadow that had been made by the monastery a few decades before.

And it was as he skirted this that he saw her, standing on one side of it, wearing her red scarf. For a moment he thought of riding over to see her, but he decided not to. It was better that way.

Some time later, he looked back.

She was still there, a tiny patch of redness in a huge expanse of green; a lonely figure on an endless plain. She watched him until he was out of sight.

Andrei rode south. Soon he would see the steppe again, and thatched cottages, and swaying fields of wheat.

What a strange and contradictory land this Muscovy was. Now that he was leaving it, his spirits seemed to lighten, as though a door to a dark room were being opened.

His mind drifted back to earlier days – to Anna. And then, suddenly, he thought of his old friend Stepan the Ox. He did not suppose he would see him again.

Freedom, that was the thing. Life was good. He was a dark and handsome fellow, there was no doubt about it. He felt his moustache – a true Cossack one.

His wide Cossack trousers flapped as the sun rose in the east and a little breeze got up.