Russka

The Tatar

1237, December

The horseman’s broad Mongolian face was weatherbeaten to an ochre brown.

His beard and moustaches were thin, rather stringy, and black.

Since it was winter, he was covered with thick furs although, hidden beneath were underclothes of the finest Chinese silk. He wore felt socks, and over them heavy leather boots. On his head was a fur cap.

He was, in fact, twenty-five, but wind and weather, war and the hard living on the open steppe had made his age seem indeterminate.

Tied to his belt was a leather drinking pouch containing the fomented mare’s milk – kumiss – that his people loved. Attached to his saddle was another pouch, containing dried meat. For as a Mongol warrior, he always travelled with all the bare essentials that he needed.

These also included his wife: together with a baby, she rode with the huge camel train that carried the baggage behind.

There was only one physical characteristic that distinguished this warrior from other men. Four years before, a spear had just missed his left eye but made a gash from his high cheekbone, across the side of his head, and taken off his ear, leaving only a jagged stump. ‘I was lucky,’ he had remarked, and thought little more about it.

His name was Mengu.

Slowly the vast army rode across the frozen steppe. As usual, it was drawn up in five large contingents of roughly equal size: two – a vanguard and a rearguard – on each wing; and in the centre, a single division.

Mengu was on the right wing. Behind him rode the hundred men he led. They were light horsemen, each carrying two bows and two quivers with which they could shoot at the gallop. The bows were fearsome – very large, composite, with a pull of over one hundred and sixty pounds – more powerful, that is, than the famous English longbow. They had a destructive range of up to three hundred yards. Like all his men, Mengu had first learned to draw a bow when he was three.

To his left moved a party of heavy cavalry who carried sabres and lances, a battle axe or mace, according to preference, and a lasso.

Mengu himself rode a coal-black horse – a fact which at once marked him out as belonging to the black brigade of the elite imperial guard. With the great herd of spare horses behind went his four remounts, all black.

He was glad his wife and firstborn son were with him. He wanted them to see his triumph. For this was his first command.

The Mongol army, and the empire that grew from it, was modelled on the decimal system. The lowest command was ten men. Then a hundred. The senior men commanded a thousand, and the generals led the myriads, the ten thousands. Mengu commanded a hundred. ‘But by the end of the campaign,’ he promised his wife, ‘I’ll have a thousand.’ And by the time the rest of the western lands were conquered, the lands which merchants had told him stretched to the end of the plain, he might even lead a myriad, a ten thousand.

Promotion: how he desired it. But one had to be careful.

For although all men were equal in the service of the Great Khan, and promotion was on merit, the most important things were judgement and tact. The old proverb of the Asian steppe said it all: ‘If you know too much they’ll hang you, and if you’re too modest, they’ll walk all over you.’

It also helped to belong to a successful clan. ‘And I am,’ he mused, using the Mongol phrase, ‘of the same bone as two generals already.’ That had helped him get into the imperial guard.

There was another factor, however, which he thought might advance him even more.

In the beauty contests which the Great Khan regularly held, to which all the prominent Mongols sent their daughters, his sister had been singled out. ‘A moon-like girl,’ the Great Khan himself had remarked: this was a high term of praise. She had been allotted, as a senior concubine, to Batu Khan himself. Several times he had seen her by the khan’s tent.

She will find a way to bring me to his notice, he thought confidently. And his hard, impassive face looked towards the horizon with satisfaction.

Soon, Mengu knew, they would reach the edge of the forest.

In the twelve-year animal calendar of the Mongols, there were two years to go until the year of the Rat. By the end of that year, the land of Rus would be conquered. This he knew as certainly as that the sun would rise and the stars shine.

For the Mongols were going to conquer the world.

It was Genghis Khan who had told them so. Genghis Khan, by birth the leader of a noble clan, who in 1206 – only thirty years before – had united all the Mongol clans under him and taken, from the ancient Turkish empires of the Asian plain, the title of Kagan or Khan. Genghis: also called the Dalai – the all-powerful.

Others before had borne this title, but none had ever built an empire as the Mongols were to do.

From their homeland in the pasture lands above the Gobi Desert, these warriors born to the saddle and the bow struck southwards across the Great Wall into China, and westwards against the Turkish, and now Moslem, states of Central Asia and Persia. These were not defenceless states, but powerful. The fighting was tremendous. But Genghis crushed them. In a few years the northern city of Peking had fallen; by 1220, most of Persia was his; and then, like all the conquerors from the east, the Mongols came to cross the crescent of mountains and ride down into the great, open north Eurasian plain.

It was the aim of every Asian empire to control the rich caravan routes to the west. To do so was very profitable. But it was the aim of Genghis Khan not only to do this, but to set up a state to rule the entire world. It was not only his mission but his duty.

‘Tengri, the god of the Great Blue Sky, has granted me to rule all who live in felt tents,’ he declared. But if this meant merely the nomad dwellers on the plains, he took it to mean the world. And like the Chinese emperors he conquered, he claimed a mandate from heaven.

His object – which popular history, with some reason, often forgets – was universal peace. The rules of this new world order were all set forth by Genghis in his code – the great Yasa – a copy of which was kept, like the Covenant, sacred and hidden from the eyes of the people at each of the Mongol capitals.

‘All men are equal,’ declared the Yasa, ‘and all, on their merits, shall serve the great Khan.’ It was a formula that other empires, like the Chinese, had used. ‘The old and the poor shall also be protected,’ the Yasa ordered. And indeed, in the empire of Genghis Khan, there was a kind of welfare state.

Wiser than many despots, he also allowed freedom of religion. ‘You may worship as you please,’ the conquered were told, ‘but in your prayers, you must also pray for the Great Khan.’ And all this was bound together with the simple formula: ‘There is one God in heaven, and one lord upon the earth – the Great Khan.’

In 1227 Genghis died. Like the falcon that was the tamga of the clan, he had flown up into the heavens, many believed. But his empire did not falter. For centuries the Khans would be elected from the large number of his direct descendants, the state clan.

The empire Genghis left his sons and grandsons in his Will was divided into four parts. In the oriental world, each of the four points of the compass had a colour: the north was black, the south red; the east was blue and the west white. And the centre, the royal centre, was gold.

Thus it was that the descendants of Genghis were called the Golden Kin.

To his sons, Genghis gave the order: expand. And to each, in his Will, he left not silver and gold, but armies with which to get them.

The great army that descended upon the western world in 1237 was led by Batu Khan, a junior ruler and grandson of Genghis. At his right hand was the great Mongol general Subudey. The clan council of the Great Khan had decided that his army, though it belonged to the western of the empire’s four divisions, should be supplemented by large detachments from the other divisions as well. It consisted, it is estimated, of about 150,000 men: the core Mongol, the rest mainly Turks from the conquered lands of Central Asia.

History, since that time, has usually referred to this army, and the vast western empire it was to rule, as the Golden Horde. In fact, this name comes from a misreading of a text written centuries later. The huge western Mongol lands were not called golden: being western, they were white. And the horde within this vast white division, that had come to subdue Russia, was called the Great Horde.

The Mongols’ information was excellent. Back in the time of Genghis, they had sent an expedition across the southern steppe, past the River Don; but the Russians had not understood who these soldiers were. Since then, spies had come, and merchant caravans had told their story: there were always many whispers across the steppe. While the Russians hardly knew of their existence, the rulers of the mighty empire had prepared their plan. ‘It will not be a long campaign,’ Mengu had told his wife.

Indeed, while the Mongol council believed that to subdue the entire empire of the Chinese, north and south, might take sixty years, they had estimated that the conquest of the Rus would take three.

In order to understand the shape and nature of the Russian state, it is necessary only to consider her greatest rivers. And the pattern they make is very simple: for they form, roughly speaking, the capital letter R.

First, from the beginning, there was the great north-south network of waterways that led from the cold northern lands by the Baltic Sea, down to the broad River Dniepr and thence through pleasant forest, across the dangerous southern steppe and at last to the warm Black Sea. This was the upright of the R, on which lay Novgorod in the north, Smolensk in the middle, and Kiev just above the southern steppe.

The tail of the R, stretching south-east from the centre, out across the steppe and down to the eastern corner of the Black Sea shore and the settlement of Tmutarakan, was the great River Don.

The loop of the R was made by two rivers: the upper part by the mighty Volga as it started its journey with an enormous curve up through the dark, north-eastern forest before turning south again; and the lower part by another river, the sluggish Oka, that came out from the centre and curved northwards to meet it. From their meeting point, about halfway up the loop, the Volga flowed away to the east again, to continue its journey across the endless Eurasian plain.

Within this huge loop – a land of forests and marshes, where primitive Finnish folk had dwelt since time immemorial – had gradually been established towns: Suzdal in the central section, sometimes called Suzdalia; Rostov further north; and on the outside of the loop, on the River Oka, the towns of Riazan and, above it, Murom.

Four chief rivers: Dniepr, Volga, Oka and Don. From the frozen north to the warm Black Sea: about a thousand miles. From west to east across the loop: nearly five hundred. This was the R of Russian rivers, the shape of the state of Rus.

In the century that followed the reign of Vladimir Monomakh in Kiev, however, one great change had taken place in the state of Rus. Its leaders had taken an increasing interest in the lands within the loop of the Russian R. New towns like Yaroslavl and Tver grew up. Monomakh himself had set up an important city in Suzdalia and given it his own name: Vladimir. Meanwhile, in the south, not only did the Cumans continue to raid from the steppe but – thanks to the near wrecking of Constantinople during the west’s confused Crusades – the Black Sea trade had weakened and the great city of Kiev entered a slow decline.

As a result of these developments, the centre of gravity in the state of Rus had shifted to the north-east, into the loop. The proud descendants of Monomakh preferred the forest lands where the Cuman raiders did not penetrate. The senior member of the royal clan called himself Grand Duke of Vladimir now; and golden Kiev, like a famous woman growing older but still glamorous, became only a possession that rich and powerful princes liked to display at their side.

The Grand Dukes of Vladimir were mighty indeed. They usually controlled Novgorod, and its huge trade with the Hanseatic German towns and far beyond. They received the great caravans that came across the steppe and forest from the lands of the Volga Bulgars and the orient.

And, to add religious importance to their new northern capital, they brought from Greece a sacred icon of the Mother of God and installed it in the new cathedral of Vladimir. No object was more reverenced in all Russia than the icon of Our Lady of Vladimir.

There was, however, one central weakness in the state of Rus: it was disunited. Though the rules of brotherly succession still applied for the position of Grand Duke, individual cities had gradually become power bases for different branches of the numerous royal house. The disputes were endless. No ruler in Vladimir ever imposed unity upon them from the centre.

The state of Rus was disunited. The Mongols knew it very well.

1239

Yanka was awake at dawn. The sky was growing pale.

Quietly she slipped off the warm shelf over the stove and made her way to the door. She could hear her parents and her brother breathing. No one stirred.

Pulling on her furs and her thick felt boots, she unlatched the door and stepped out on to the crisp snow.

In the half light, the village seemed grey. A few feet away on the right was a small dark dot on the ground. She inspected it. It was just a dog’s mess that had frozen to stone in the cold clear night. There was no wind, and only the pleasant smell of woodsmoke that emanated from the chimneyless huts. No one was about as she began to walk.

There was no particular reason why Yanka should have walked through the woods that dawn; except that, after a restless night, she was glad to go out into the cold open spaces away from the village for a while. She began to walk along the path through the trees.

She was seven years old: a quiet, rather self-possessed little girl, with hazel-flecked blue eyes and straw-coloured hair. Of the children in the village of Russka, she was one of the most fortunate: for her mother’s family were descended from the peasant Shchek, the keeper of the honey forest in the days of the boyar Ivan and the Grand Prince Monomakh. By the time of his death Shchek had acquired numerous beehives of his own and even now, generations later, in addition to the traditional distaff, salt box and butter press that came with every bride, Yanka’s mother had brought a handsome dowry, including several beehives. She was a gay, quick-witted woman, resembling her ancestor mainly in her thick dark hair and square build; and she loved to sing. Sometimes, it was true, Yanka had noticed some tension between her parents. She had even heard her mother speak words of scorn. But for the most part their household seemed happy.

The sun was about to rise. Its rays caught a single, small white cloud overhead, causing it to gleam. Yanka wandered on. She smelt the faint earthy scent of a fox that must have crossed the track. Turning, she saw it, watching her through the trees thirty paces away on the right. ‘Good morning, fox,’ she said quietly.

The fox slipped away across the snow, like a shadow dropping foot-prints as it passed.

It was time to turn back. Yet she did not. Something seemed to beckon her to the edge of the steppe. I will look at the sun rising over the steppe, she thought, before I go back to the village.

The settlement of Russka had become rather isolated in recent times. The fort was still there but poorly manned, for recently there had not even been a prince in Pereiaslav. The boyar’s family had long ago become strangers to the village. Ivanushka’s grandson, another Ivan, had married a Cuman girl, and their son, a strange, fair-haired fellow called Milei whose blue eyes were set in a rather high-boned Turkish face, had taken no interest in Russka. ‘The Turk’ the villagers called him; although by the standards of the Russian princes, some of whom were now seven-eighths Cuman, he was not particularly Turkish. Apart from this, the boyar’s family owned large estates in the north-east, beyond the River Oka. The boyar lived in the city of Murom. His steward came to inspect the village from time to time, and to take the profits from the honey. The family also kept up the little church, although it was sometimes left with only an ancient, half-blind priest to look after it.

During Yanka’s brief life, the village of Russka therefore was a place of benign torpor, its inhabitants gathering harvest and honey, cheating the absent boyar, sitting outside in the long summer months, and often singing in the summer evenings at the border of the southern steppe.

Except for the threat over the horizon.

Yanka did not know what to make of that. A huge raid from the steppe had taken place in the north the previous year. The Cumans, or whoever they were, had done great damage. And that autumn, the boyar’s steward had not appeared. Who knew what it meant? ‘But don’t worry,’ her father had told her. ‘You’ll be safe with me.’

When she came to the edge of the trees the sun had just cleared the horizon. Ahead, to the east, the white snows seemed to stretch for ever, as though the sun had come from some hidden declivity in their distant wastes. Now the great, golden sun was rising like an emperor in the blue sky of the east as she stared, transfixed, at its splendour.

The air was completely clear and silent. About a mile away, a little to the left, a small bump marked the place where there was an ancient kurgan. Far to the south, long layers of greyish clouds stretched along the horizon from steppe to forest, their edges gleaming gold.

Yanka stepped out from the trees and walked out on to the plain. Almost at once, its huge, empty silence seemed to envelop her. She took a deep breath of icy air and smiled. Now she was ready to go home.

Just as she was about to turn, however, her sharp eyes noticed a minute dot, far away on the horizon. She stared at it, shielding her eyes from the sun, not even sure if there was something there or not. It did not seem to be moving. Was it growing? She finally decided it was not. How strange, she thought, as she gazed. It must be a tree, casting a long shadow in the sunrise.

And then she turned to go home, while the sun, lord of the blue sky, took possession of the morning.

Mengu watched her.

He had ridden out from the camp at first light and before long had come to a low rise which gave him a good view. Across the open steppe, ten miles away, he could clearly see the line of trees and he had seen the little figure even as she emerged from the wood.

For while Yanka’s eyes were sharp, the eyes of the man of the steppe were far keener.

In the clarity of early morning, before dust or haze have risen, the men of the desert and prairie can make out a man at fifteen miles and more. Even at four miles, such warriors can spot the arm of a man hiding behind a rock.

So Mengu, like a falcon, watched the little girl as she ventured out on to the steppe and then went back.

Then he smiled. How easy it had been. The cities of the north – Riazan, Murom, Vladimir – had fallen helplessly before them. The Grand Duke and his army had been destroyed. It was only a pity that the wet spring weather had forced them to turn back before reaching Novgorod; but that great trading city could be dealt with later. These poor Russian cities, despite their high walls, never had a chance. To the siege engineers, used to dealing with the stupendous fortified cities of China, these western places seemed puny.

Now they had come again, in winter, to smash the south. And in this, too, they had shown their wisdom.

For the general view, that Russia is protected by her winter, is incorrect. The winter is a very good time to attack Russia. In spring and autumn, mud makes the land impassable. In summer, there are large rivers to cross. But in winter, the rivers are frozen solid and it is easy to travel if one is prepared for the cold and knows how to move over the snow. The Mongols were no strangers to harsh winters. They liked them.

Mengu continued to gaze thoughtfully at the distant treeline where the girl had vanished. The campaign had been satisfactory so far; his men had performed well; he had nothing to complain of. There was only one problem: he had not yet been able to attract the general’s attention.

His sister had done her best for him with Batu Khan, but the message she gave him was as bleak as it was simple. When the great man had heard about her brother and his hopes he had merely remarked: ‘Good. Let him distinguish himself.’

All he needed was a chance – even a skirmish would do, as long as it took place under the general’s eye. He nodded thoughtfully. An opportunity would come. But let it come soon.

Again he scanned the woods. If the girl had been wandering at the treeline, there must be a village nearby.

They would be there by noon.

Moments after Yanka awoke, her face was white with terror.

They were everywhere. And she had been deserted.

She stood, shaking convulsively, by the window. She could smell the sweating flanks of the horses, almost touch them as the horsemen in thick furs, with huge bows slung on their backs, went by, brushing against the eaves of the huts. Some of them carried burning torches.

Where was everyone?

Still not fully awake, she looked behind her. The hut was empty. For a second she had to collect her thoughts.

At mid-morning, she remembered, her father had harnessed the old mare and taken the sled down the frozen river to the next village. The clear sky of the dawn had disappeared. The cloud bank from the south had moved slowly up and by the time her father left, the light in the village had seemed almost brown. Nothing had been happening. It was dull, rather oppressive. Her mother had decided to go over to the fort; but Yanka had stayed behind and fallen asleep.

She had not heard the shouting.

And now she had awoken to this. Coming out of sleep, it seemed like a nightmare. The sounds of the horses’ hoofs on the frozen snow echoed eerily in the room.

Though Yanka did not know it, it was only a minute since the villagers had fled. For everything had happened so fast. Suddenly at the far end of the big field, a horseman had appeared. Then three. Then, as people began to shout, a hundred. It was as if all the trees had suddenly turned into horsemen, advancing with bow and spear.

Silently the Mongol army had melted through the woods, advancing in five enormous groups across a front about three miles across. The village of Russka lay near the centre. Now they were flowing through like a dark flood upon the snow.

The villagers had been so surprised that they had no time to do anything but run. Three people had banged upon Yanka’s door before tearing away, supposing the hut must be emptv. They had run across the frozen river, driven like game, looking for shelter. Some rushed up into the fort; a few ran to the sanctuary of the church; others preferred to try the woods beyond.

It was at the first shout from the village that Yanka’s mother looked out from the gateway of the little fort. First her breath caught in her throat. Then her heart began to race wildly.

She saw the villagers streaming out – small, pathetic, dark bundles running raggedly across the grey-white ice towards her. But where was Yanka?

A moment later she saw what none of the fleeing villagers could see – the full extent of the Mongol line, stretching up and down the river.

She scanned the fleeing villagers again – where was Yanka? There was no sign of her.

She started to run, down the slope, towards the river and the Mongol horsemen, who had already reached the opposite bank.

And she did not know that, seconds later, the villagers had stupidly closed the fortress gates behind her.

Mengu could hardly believe his luck when, as the gates shut, the general rode over to him. He was a stout, surly man, given to few words. He raised his arm and pointed his whip across the river. ‘Take that fort.’

It was a chance to prove himself. For a second, the image of his sister flashed across his mind. He knew very well that in the universe of the Great Khan, nothing, not even the smallest seeming diversion, happened by chance, and now his brain was working rapidly, calculating.

Scarcely pausing to acknowledge the order, he wheeled his horse and, with two curt commands, like a couple of harsh grunts, directed the nearby squadrons into two lines who immediately forked right and left, riding across the ice to encircle the fort and the church.

Beckoning a decurion he commanded: ‘One siege engine. A catapult.’ And the fellow clattered away up the frozen river.

They were bringing the engines across at a place where the woods were thinner, a few hundred yards to the north.

The Mongol siege was very like the hunts of the Great Khan. One circled the fortress entirely, excluding any possibility of escape. Sometimes, if a major town looked obstinate, the Mongols would build a wooden wall right round it as though to say: ‘You think your walls protect you. Now look: you are trapped inside ours.’ Then, at leisure, they would knock down the fortress defences, or fill in the moat and build bridges over the walls. There was no possibility that they would ever give up. The surrounded fort was doomed.

Mengu looked at the pitiful little wooden fort. What fools they were to shut the gates. The army would never even have bothered to burn the place down if they had just left them open.

But how convenient. What an easy way to show his mettle.

The thing must be done quickly: that was the key. The general would not want to see his forces delayed. ‘Hurry,’ he shouted after the decurion, who was already too far away to hear him. He frowned, impatiently.

Yanka hesitated.

The horsemen had passed out of the village. They had set two of the huts on fire but had not paused to do more. A shouted order from somewhere in front had caused them to move swiftly towards the river. Suddenly it was very quiet.

Perhaps her family were out there somewhere. Perhaps they were lying dead. Or they might be fleeing without her, and she would be left alone. What should she do? She was terrified of the horsemen, but even that was not as terrible as the fear of being alone.

She stepped outside.

The horsemen had already been drawn down to the river. As she came out of the hamlet she saw the back of the two files of cavalry trotting across the ice to surround the fort. Away to her left, past the old graveyard, was a body of about three hundred infantry. The men wore heavy leather coats, like armour, and their lines bristled with long, dark spears. To her right, half a dozen horsemen waited impassively upon the bank, and directly ahead, on the edge of the ice, a single horseman seemed to be giving directions. No one even noticed her existence.

Then she saw two sights that made her want to cry out for joy.

It was her brother Kiy who saw her first.

The nine-year-old boy and his father had been almost back from their trip, and approaching the last bend in the frozen river before the village, when Kiy suddenly heard his father exclaim: ‘Devil take it! Look at that – it’s a Cuman raid.’

He looked to the right. Three horsemen were calmly riding through the trees by the bank. Then he saw ten. Then fifty. His father jerked the reins. The sled swerved. ‘What’s behind us?’

Kiy looked back. ‘More. They’re crossing.’ And his father cursed. ‘What about Mother and Yanka?’ the boy cried out.

His father said nothing, but cracked the reins savagely along the old mare’s back. She flinched, tossed her head angrily, and they raced towards the bend. ‘Please God they aren’t in front as well,’ the peasant muttered.

The little sled whisked over the ice. Father and son held their breath. It must be a big raid. Kiy started silently to pray. Thank God, the bank seemed for a moment to be clear as they raced round the curve… and ran into the Mongol army.

The line of horsemen was trotting across the ice to surround the fort, directly in front of them. Kiy did not see his mother, but just as his father wheeled the sled round to race towards the woods on their right, he shouted: ‘Look! It’s Yanka. On the bank. She’s seen us.’

He was surprised when his father only muttered: ‘Devil take it. You’ll get us all killed.’

Then he saw Yanka start to run down, towards the Mongols.

For Yanka had not only seen them – she had seen her mother, coming across the ice between the two streams of horsemen. She opened her mouth to shout, but as though she were in a dream, no sound came except a tiny whisper that nobody heard. She tried to step forward. Nothing happened. And then her mother saw her.

Suddenly the little girl felt a flood of relief. She was safe. Without pausing even to think, she ran down the bank on to the frozen river, straight towards her mother, oblivious even of the Mongol on his horse who stood in the path between them.

Mengu stared. What was this peasant woman doing?

He had been looking for the siege engine anxiously. Another few moments and it would be in position. He glanced at his troops. The ring around the fort was almost complete. This would be his day. Studiously he avoided looking towards the general. ‘I’ll have the whole place under control in an hour,’ he murmured.

Though his face showed nothing, he felt a surge of excitement. It was like the great ring in the royal hunt. And today, the ring was his. For a brief hour he was to be general, like a prince. I’ll show them, he thought elatedly.

But who was this peasant woman coming towards him?

It was just then that he suddenly remembered a story he had heard some months ago. A peasant woman, no doubt very like this, had made a sudden rush at a young captain when they were burning the city of Riazan. She had pulled out a knife and killed him, too. ‘So watch out for their women,’ the fellow who told him had warned. He frowned, irritated. Who was she, to disturb the imperial hunt? He was not going to have a Russian peasant woman threaten his career.

Now she was breaking into a run, making straight for him.

At the lightest pressure from his knees, his horse clattered forward. He took out his sabre and with a single, curving slash cut straight down to her breast. She crumpled and slid across the ice. He turned back to look for the siege engine.

‘Mama!’

A scream. He wheeled again, sword in hand, to face this new threat. Even before he knew it his curved sabre was raised high, his face tense, his mouth a snarl.

A little girl, white-faced, was kneeling in terror on the ice beside the woman. Blood was pumping from the huge gash. The woman’s eyes were open; she was gazing at the child, trying to say something.

For a second he, too, forgot everything. He saw only the faces of the mother and her child.

‘Yanka!’

A shout, this time from a small boy and a peasant on a sled, two hundred yards away. He had not noticed it before because his horsemen, now across the river, had been in the way.

‘Yanka!’

The peasants stood there by their sled with no idea of what to do, in front of several hundred bowmen who could have killed them in a second.

The woman’s eyes were glassy. It was over.

There was a clatter upon the frozen river as the Mongol reached down and scooped the little girl up in one arm. The flakes of ice flew as his horse raced towards the sled where he threw her carelessly to the ground. Looking down contemptuously at the boy and his father, he waved them away.

A second later, their sled was racing through the trees.

It was not the policy of the Mongols to kill the peasants in the lands they conquered. Peasants tilled the soil, paid taxes and supplied recruits. The Mongols only killed those who were foolish enough to resist them.

Mengu turned back. The entire incident had taken rather less than a minute, during which time he supposed everyone had been too busy to take much notice.

The troops were all in place. The catapult was coming up, and an engineer was awaiting his order. He put the foolish incident out of his mind. Secretly he felt ashamed of killing the woman. As for the little girl… His face showed nothing.

With a curt nod, he signalled the catapult to proceed.

The inhabitants of Russka had never seen a catapult like this. Its technology was simple enough – a massive counterweight at one end of a lever caused the arm to hurl a stone from the other. But its power was truly extraordinary. For the engineers of China had constructed a machine that could be loaded with a stone it took four strong men to lift, and then hurl it with devastating accuracy almost a quarter of a mile.

The first stone completely broke down the parapet over the gate. The second smashed the gate itself.

At Mengu’s order, the Mongols streamed through into the fort. They moved rapidly but methodically. Every door was kicked open: every room, every crevice searched. They used spears and swords. Any living creature, man, woman or child, was quickly and efficiently butchered. They were so quick and thorough that, apart from a few moments of sheer terror, few of the people there even suffered very much.

Inside the fort they found some modest quantities of fresh food and ten tons of stored grain, which they removed in carts taken from the village. Then, leaving the bodies where they were, they set fire to every building, and to the wooden walls.

The huge bonfire on the little hill grew rapidly. Soon the whole fort was alive with fire, and over its walls, new walls of roaring flames appeared, hurling smoke and sparking cinders high into the air above the forest. As the broad-faced Mongols watched below, the whole place seemed to shudder with the roar, crack and whine of the little fort’s destruction.

Mengu turned to a decurion. ‘Twenty bowmen, with fire arrows,’ he ordered. ‘Surround the church.’

A few moments later there were broad-chested Mongols in leather jerkins and with huge, curved bows at the ready before each of the church’s walls. At a nod from Mengu, they took out long, heavy arrows with huge cloth heads that had been dipped in pitch, and lit them.

‘Fire.’ The arrows began to fly, and to crash through the church’s narrow windows. Soon smoke emerged; then flame.

Mengu wondered whether the people inside would come out of the door, and stationed more bowmen opposite. But though the force of the fire within seemed to be causing the door to tremble, it remained closed.

After a time, the little dome collapsed and fell with a crash into the building. No one could possibly be alive in there by now, he thought. The place must be a roaring furnace. Even the bricks were starting to glow. A wall fell, then another. It was good. In case the general thought him soft about the child, he meant to show he knew how to be harsh.

That evening, as a few villagers crept out of the woods, they saw in place of the fort and the brave little church, only blackened ruins beside which the birds were swooping curiously.

The report the general made to the mighty Batu Khan that evening was sensible and clear-headed.

‘He lost concentration because a woman ran towards him. He should have seen her before and ordered his men to cut her down or remove her. He didn’t. He waited until she reached him, then he killed her. He took his eyes off the job.’

‘Then?’

‘There was a little girl. He picked her up and threw her out.’

‘Waste of time. What then?’

‘He took the fort. Burned it down.’

‘Very well. Anything else?’

‘He burned down a church.’

‘Inside the fort?’

‘No. Outside.’

‘Was it defended?’

‘No.’

‘That is bad. The Great Khan respects all religions.’

‘I do not think he has a cool head,’ the general concluded.

That night, the mighty Batu Khan changed his mind and did not sleep with Mengu’s sister.

That same night, as she rocked herself to sleep in a shelter her father and brother had improvised in the bee-forest, Yanka remembered only one thing about the Mongol who had killed her mother: he had a scar across one side of his face, and was missing one ear.

She would never forget it: never.

1246

Softly the raft drifted through the early morning mists. Until the previous month, to escape detection, they had travelled only at night, inching their way upstream, reconnoitring every village in case of patrols. Once, on a moonlit night, they had almost run into a party of soldiers camped on the river bank.

It was August. Making their way northwards by the curving rivers, they had already covered a distance of some five hundred miles. It had taken them three months.

Last month they had left one river system and made their way overland to another. The boat by which they had come so far – a huge single tree trunk, hollowed out – was too heavy to carry. They had left it therefore and, having reached the other stream, had built themselves a raft, which suited their purposes well enough since, from now on, instead of working their way upstream, they would be drifting with the current. Their mood had also begun to lighten. It was possible, now, to travel by day. But they were still cautious.

For Yanka, her father and their companions were doing a very dangerous thing: they were trying to escape from the Tatars.

The Tatars. Even now, most Russians did not really understand the nature of the empire of which they had just become a part. Failing to perceive the absolute importance of the Mongol elite from their distant eastern homeland, the Russians confused them with the subject Turks who fought under them, and therefore gave the Horde a Turkish name which was to remain in use throughout history: the Tatars.

The estimate of the Mongol war council had been exactly right. Russia had fallen in three years. The great army that had passed through the village of Russka had swept on to destroy Pereiaslav utterly; within a twelve month, Chernigov had fallen and golden Kiev was a ghost town.

The ancient state of Rus was finished.

For convenience, the Mongols divided it in two. The southern half – the territories around Kiev and the southern steppe – were placed under direct Mongol rule. The north – the lands in the great loop of the Russian R, and in the deep forests beyond – were left under the nominal control of the Russian royal house, with the proviso that the princes ruled, henceforth, only as the representatives of the Great Khan. They were there to keep the people quiet and collect the Khan’s tribute. That was all.

Some chronicles of the time – and many Russians too – liked to pretend that the Tatars were just another, if impressive, group of steppe raiders whom, for the moment, the Grand Duke had to buy off.

The reality was very different. The Grand Duke was summoned eastwards, even as far as Mongolia, to receive his badge of office – the yarlyk. He ruled only at the Khan’s pleasure. ‘Remember, you belong to us now,’ all princes were told. No disobedience was tolerated. When a bold prince from the southwest refused to bow to an idol of the Great Khan, he was executed on the spot. This imposition of rule was immediate and total. Indeed, the only reason why the Russian princes were allowed to exist at all was because the Mongols, unimpressed with the wealth of the northern forests – puny indeed compared to the rich caravans and cities of Asia – had reckoned that the Grand Duke’s territories were not worth the cost of direct administration.

It is likely, had the Mongols not paused for the elections in the orient of a new Great Khan, that all Europe might have fallen at this point too. But the new Khan decided instead to consolidate his western empire: a new capital, Sarai, was built on the southern Volga and his army commanders were told: ‘Wait.’

And in this matter, too, the Mongols displayed their excellent understanding. For there was one other relevant fact which they had quickly understood.

Russia was Orthodox; the west Catholic.

Back in the days of Monomakh, the split between Rome and the Eastern Church had been one of liturgical niceties. But since then, the gulf had widened. Questions of authority were involved. Was the Patriarch of Constantinople – or his fellow patriarchs in the east – prepared to submit to the Pope’s authority? Had the Eastern – Orthodox – Church showed a proper interest in the Pope’s Crusades? Feelings ran high. When the Russians sent frantic appeals to their fellow Christians in the west for help against the heathen Mongols, they were met with silence. Indeed, the west watched with satisfaction while the Orthodox were being punished for their mistake. Worse yet, not only did the Catholic Swedes start to attack them in the north, but a pair of crusading orders – the Livonian and Teutonic Knights – whose headquarters were up by the Baltic Sea, started with the Pope’s approval to raid the lands of Novgorod. ‘Let the heathens smash them,’ said the Catholic west, ‘and we’ll gobble up the pieces.’ So it was that the Russians concluded, more firmly than ever: ‘Never trust the west.’ And the Mongol leadership cleverly calculated: ‘Take Russia first. The west can wait. Russia belongs to Asia now.’

Yanka’s father was not a bad-looking man.

He was just above average height, and fair, though his beard was thin and the crown of his head was covered by only a few strands of hair. His features were small and regular, while the upper part of his face seemed rather bony. His pale blue eyes were generally kindly, though they sometimes looked at people as if he were counting something. He was, in a nondescript way, quite pleasant-looking. Occasionally, he drank too much.

Sometimes he would punish her with a beating if she had misbehaved; this was always in the evening, and at such times he could be stern and frightening. But he was less severe, she knew, than the other fathers in the village.

He himself supposed that in earlier years he had taken less notice of her than he had of Kiy, his son. But the terrible events since the Tatar invasion had changed all that; and now, as they continued on their journey, he realized that he had undertaken it chiefly for her sake.

For if they did not leave, he had thought that she would die.

At first, after the terrible destruction, a strange silence had fallen upon the village. News of the fall of the cities of Pereiaslav and Kiev came; then nothing. From the boyar in the north, not a word. Perhaps he was dead. Meanwhile, in the shattered village, seed time and harvest came. Yanka’s father took up with a stout, dark-haired woman, though he did not marry her; and she taught Yanka to embroider. Kiy became a dexterous woodcarver. And then, the previous year, the blow had fallen.

On an autumn day a small Tatar troop led by an official from the newly created governor of the region, the Baskak, marched briskly into the village. All the people were lined up and counted – a thing that had never been known before. ‘This is the census,’ the official said. ‘The Baskak numbers every head.’ Then the men were divided into groups often. ‘Each ten is a tax unit and is fully responsible for maintaining its full complement,’ they were told. ‘Nobody may leave.’ A peasant who foolishly tried to argue was immediately whipped. They also discovered that the village was to have a new significance.

The imperial post service, the yam, connected every part of the Great Khan’s empire. His messengers, and selected merchants, could use it. There was a station every twenty-five miles, where mares and sheep were kept to supply kumiss and meat. Also a quantity of spare horses. For when the Khan sent a messenger, the man wore bells to warn the station of his approach so that a fresh horse would be ready, on to which he could leap, never pausing in his journey. The Baskak had decided that the ruined fort would do very well for a yam. An official stationed there would oversee the village too. ‘Which means,’ a villager whispered, ‘that we shall all be slaves.’

But it was the final action of the official which had destroyed Yanka. For suddenly, turning to the village elder he had demanded: ‘Who are the best woodcarvers here?’ And being given five names he had called them out. The youngest was Kiy, aged fifteen. ‘We’ll take the boy,’ the Mongol snapped. For the Great Khan had asked for artisans to be sent to him. And for long afterwards, that evening, as the party travelled away across the steppe, Yanka had gazed after the distant figures who began to look like tiny shadows that might sink, at any time, into the reddening sea.

Life for both father and daughter had been miserable after that. His woman had left him. Several times, to drown his own bitterness, he had got drunk and foolishly frightened the girl. Meanwhile, Yanka had gone into a strange decline. During the winter she had grown progressively thinner, eating little, speaking less. And by the spring, when she showed no signs of improving, her father had confessed: ‘I don’t know what to do.’

It was a family from the next village who had announced their intention of leaving. ‘We’re going north,’ they told him. ‘There are endless lands up in the northern taiga,’ they explained, ‘going right across the Volga, where men are free, without a master. We’ll escape up there.’

These were the so-called Black Lands. In fact, they were the prince’s land for which the settler paid him a small rent; but the further north and east one went, the more settlers became frontiersmen, recognizing no authority. Such freedoms were exciting, even though the life could be hard. ‘Come with us,’ they suggested. The father of the family had once been north as a young man. ‘I know the way,’ he claimed.

‘And if we get caught?’

The fellow had shrugged. ‘I’ll take the risk,’ he said.

The great river journey they had undertaken was very simple. They were slowly ascending the great Russian R. First up the Dniepr; then cutting across eastward until, after their brief overland journey, they had joined a small river that took them to the underside of the huge northern loop – the sluggish River Oka. For once at the Oka, they were in the Grand Duke’s lands where the Tatar patrols did not bother to come.

How pleasant it was, at last, to drift along the River Oka. Fish were plentiful. Forgetting her grief in this great adventure, Yanka had started to eat again. One day they even caught a noble sturgeon. As they went north and east, they saw signs of a gradual change in vegetation. There were fewer broad-leaved trees, more firs and larches. Their guide also pointed out another important feature to them. ‘We’re getting into the country of the old Finnish tribes now,’ he explained, ‘like the Mordvinians. And the names of places are Finnish too.’ The Oka River itself was an example. The cities of Riazan and Murom likewise. And one day, passing a modest river that joined them from the left, their friend remarked: ‘That river’s got a primitive Finnish name too: it’s the Moskva.’

‘Anything up there?’ Yanka’s father asked.

‘A small town called Moscow. Nothing much.’

Yanka’s father had considered carefully what they should do. He was attracted by the idea of these distant free lands of which the others spoke. But he was cautious too. Life could be very hard for a settler. He had with him a quantity of money, which he kept carefully hidden. He could start up anywhere. But I might be able to get more out of a landlord who needs a tenant, he thought.

So he had formed a simple plan. ‘When we get to Murom,’ he decided, ‘I’ll look for the boyar Milei. Perhaps he’ll help us. But if he won’t or he’s dead, maybe we’ll try the north.’

And so, that August, Yanka and her father went along the Oka.

The boyar Milei was a large man with a family of five. He was very proud of his physical strength. He was also cunning.

When the news had come upriver, eight years before, of the Mongol attack on Riazan, he had not waited to be summoned to battle. ‘The Grand Duke of Vladimir will order us to join him if he gives battle,’ he remarked shrewdly, ‘but he’ll do nothing for us if these raiders come to Murom.’

In this assessment of the relationship between the Grand Duke and the princes of the minor city of Murom he was entirely correct.

The little principality of Murom lay at the eastern edge of the loop of the Russian R. West of it lay the rest of the great loop – the wide lands of Suzdalia, ruled by the Grand Duke of Vladimir.

Once, Murom had been a major city, greater than Riazan. But in the last century, Riazan had become richer, and Suzdalia had become mighty; and now the princes of Murom did the bidding of the Grand Duke without question. So, of course, should Milei the boyar. Unless it did not suit him. Faced with this new threat, therefore, Milei had discreetly withdrawn, with his entire family, for a visit to the most remote and obscure of all his estates, where he had wisely remained until the following year.

The estate in question was isolated indeed.

Across the great loop of the Russian R, and dividing it horizontally in half, there runs eastwards a pleasant minor river called the Kliasma. It was upon this river, a little to the east of the loop’s centre, that Monomakh had set up the present capital of Vladimir. Other fine cities like Suzdal, Rostov or Tver, all lay in the northern half of the loop. The southern half of the loop, however, until one came to the cities on the Oka – Riazan and Murom – contained very little except hamlet, forest and marsh. It was here, in the southern half of the loop between the Kliasma and Oka Rivers, that the boyar Milei owned an estate. From this place a stream obligingly ran northwards up to the Kliasma, not far from Vladimir. It was also possible, some miles away, to pick up other streams, that led south to the sluggish Oka.

The boyar Milei’s grandfather who had been given the place had decided he did not like its barbarous Finnish name; and so he had renamed both the little stream that ran northwards and the settlement beside it. He named them after an estate he was fond of, in the south: the stream he called the Rus, and the village, Russka.

There were many such names that were carried like this from the south into the north.

It was not a bad place, and the winter that the boyar Milei spent there had convinced him that it had more possibilities than he had supposed. ‘Indeed,’ he told his wife, ‘from what I’ve discovered at Russka, we could make it highly profitable. All we need is more people.’ But then, finding enough peasants was the perennial problem of the Russian landlord.

The next spring, he returned to Murom to find his house outside the city walls burned down, but the large cache of coins he had hidden deep under the floor still quite safe. For the time being there had been plenty to do, for the Mongol invasion left much to repair. But the little village of Russka was often in his mind.

‘We must attend to it when we have time,’ he often remarked.

And so, late in the summer of 1246, he was surprised and delighted to find before him two peasants from his estate in the south.

Since the Mongol invasion, he had found it harder than ever to get enough peasants to work his land. So far he had only managed to add three families of Mordvinians to the settlement at Russka. ‘And two of those are drunk most of the time,’ his steward told him mournfully.

Now, as Yanka looked up at this tall, powerful man with his fair beard, only half grey, and his broad Turkish face, she saw nothing but friendliness. His hard blue eyes beamed. ‘I have the very place for you,’ he announced. ‘The Russka of the north.’

‘I’ve no money,’ her father lied.

The boyar gazed at him, not deceived for a second. ‘It’s more profit to me to give you land and have you work it than get no return at all,’ he replied. ‘You can build yourself a house – the villagers will help you. And my steward will take you there and set you up with everything else you need. You’ll repay me over time.’

He questioned them about their journey, and when he heard they had come with another family, with two strong sons, he at once made an offer to them too.

But they refused. ‘The offer’s good,’ their travelling companion told Yanka’s father, ‘but I don’t want a landlord. Come with us,’ he urged instead.

‘No,’ her father was shaking his head. ‘We prefer to remain. Good luck to you though.’

The next day, their companions were on their way. ‘God knows what they’ll do up by the Volga,’ her father growled. ‘We’re safer in the village.’ Then he turned away.

Russka.

This northern Russka was a very different place from the village in the south that she had left.

Its only similarity was that, like most Russian villages, it lay beside a river: that was all.

At the site chosen for the settlement, the river made a large, S-shaped curve. The western bank here was about fifty feet higher than the eastern, so that the curve formed a promontory on the west side, and left a large, sheltered space on the eastern bank just below it. This sheltered area had been made into a meadow.

There had once been a settlement in this meadow; but over time it had been moved for greater safety to the promontory where there now stood a dozen wooden huts with a strengthened fence around them. On the western side the land stretched away, almost flat. A few vegetable plots had been scraped bare near the fence, and two poor fields could be seen through a thin screen of trees.

There was no church.

The northern Russka.

The nearest village lay three miles away, to the south-east. This, too, was on the little River Rus. Just behind this village lay a low, wooded ridge. But below the ridge, down by the river, the land was marshy, and so when the Slav settlers had first come upon it they had called it Dirty Place – which remained its name thereafter. Past Dirty Place it was another seven miles to any village.

At first sight, it seemed to Yanka that the forest was all fir. But a walk around showed her that this was not the case. There were, in fact, a huge variety of trees: larch and birch, lime, oak, pine, and many others. Back along the Oka, around Riazan, she had even seen orchards of apple and even cherry trees. But she did not notice any here. The vegetable patches were not very impressive either. They grew peas and cucumbers mainly, as far as she could discover. And she observed something else: their horses were all tiny.

The houses were made of wood – huge, solid logs from base to roof: there were none of the clay walls and thatched roofs she had known in the south.

But, above all, the people were different. ‘They are so quiet,’ she whispered to her father, the first morning as they walked around the place. ‘You’d think they were frozen.’

There was a mix of people in the village. Before the boyar’s family acquired it, the inhabitants had been mostly Slavs of the Viatichi tribe. ‘Pagan animals’ she had always heard these Viatichi called, for they were amongst the most backward of the Slav tribes. There were six Viatichi families now. As well as these, there were three families who had moved up from the south a generation ago, and finally the three families of Mordvinians, with their high Finnish cheekbones and almond eyes, brought in by the boyar.

Different as these all were, to Yanka they seemed all the same in this one, crucial respect. For whereas the Slav villagers she knew in the south were expansive, argumentative, and full of droll humour, these people of the north were quiet, undemonstrative and seemed to be slow. In the south, one sat in the sun and talked. Here, people went quietly into the warmth of their huts.

They were not unfriendly though. On the steward’s orders, half a dozen of the men appeared with axes by midday. ‘We’ll build you a hut,’ they announced, and showed them a site at the southern end of the hamlet.

Then they set to work.

And Yanka’s opinion of them changed.

She had never seen anything like it. Huge logs appeared, seemingly from nowhere. The sturdy little horses she had seen were dragging in tree trunks you could almost have hollowed into boats. Great timbers of oak were used for the foundation, then softer, easily worked pine.

The plan of the hut was much the same as in the south: a central entrance corridor with a large space for keeping one’s equipment and stores on one side of it, and a room on the other. A good part of the wall between corridor and room was taken up with the stove, which they built of clay.

They worked entirely with their axes – stout, broad-bladed implements with rather short, straight handles, the blade extended towards the butt – and whether Finn or Slav, they seemed equally skilled. Each log was neatly jointed and slotted into its neighbour so that, although the lines between the logs were filled with moss, they were so tight it was scarcely necessary.

And there was not a single nail in the whole house.

It was not only the neatness of their work that amazed Yanka, but the speed of it. She was used to the busy people of the south, but there was something in these northerners’ quiet, ferocious pace that was heroic. They worked into the dusk. The women brought torches and lit fires so they could see better. By the time they stopped that night, the whole house except for the stove and the roof was completed.

The steward and his wife gave them shelter that night. By noon the next day, their hut was complete.

‘There,’ the men said. ‘This is your place. It will keep you warm, and will last for thirty-three years.’

This was the northern hut – the Russian izba. Its huge stove and tightly sealed walls would keep its occupants baking hot through the coldest winter as its very name implied: for ‘izba’ meant ‘hot room’.

After they had thanked their new neighbours, the steward led them out to show them the plot of land he had chosen for them.

As they walked, they chatted, and Yanka told the steward how impressed she had been by the men’s work. ‘With men like this,’ she gazed about her, envisioning cities in the forest, ‘there is nothing we Russians cannot do.’

The steward was a small man with a shrewd face. He laughed. ‘This is the north,’ he told her. ‘Up here we can do anything – for a short space of time.’ And seeing her puzzled look, he smiled. Then he gestured to the forest all around.

‘You’re in the north now,’ he explained. ‘And up here it’s like this: we do our best, of course, but whatever we do, the forest reminds us that the land, the winter, and God Himself will always be stronger than we can be. Too much effort is in vain. So then we don’t work so hard, except when there’s something definite to do in a hurry.’ She laughed, thinking this a joke, but he only replied: ‘You’ll see.’

The estate, he explained to them, was of medium size – about four hundred desiatin, or a thousand acres. Only part of it was worked at present. It lay on both sides of the river.

Many landlords preferred to give these remote estates over entirely to peasants and collect a modest rent, usually paid in kind. It was not like the old days in the south, he told them, where landlords ran their own estates and shipped the surplus to markets. ‘You’ll find things simpler up here,’ he continued.

But the boyar Milei had the resources to buy slaves and hire labourers. ‘He’s planning to bring more people in and build this place up,’ the steward said, ‘and work some of the estate himself. So although it’s small as yet, you’ll see changes here soon.’

One thing troubled Yanka.

‘We are Christians,’ she told him. ‘Are all the people here pagan?’

She had noticed some strange, hump-backed graves outside the fence that did not look Christian to her.

‘The Slavs from the south are Christian,’ he replied. ‘The Mordvinians,’ he laughed, ‘they’re Mordvinians. As for the Viatichi, they’re Slav, but pagan too. Those were their grave mounds you saw by the fence.’

‘Will there ever be a church?’

‘The boyar plans to build one.’

‘Soon?’

‘Maybe.’

After this she returned to the hut, while her father and the steward went to see the land he was to be given.

The land that he was allotted was the standard peasant plot of thirty chets – about thirty-six acres. But it was poor woodland, west of the village, that would need to be cleared. For this, however, he would only have to pay a small rent, with none payable in the first year. The steward would advance him a small sum, in return for which he was to do some light work for the boyar. And so began his career in his new home.

For Yanka, this was a time of discovery. The summer drifted on far into autumn that year, into the time of Indian summer which the Russians call ‘Granny Summer’.

She walked all round the area, sometimes alone and sometimes with the steward’s wife. The steward’s wife was a small, rather cold woman, but she wanted to make sure this new girl was useful to the estate, and so she showed her round thoroughly.

The woods were richer than Yanka had imagined. The older woman showed her where to find herbs – St John’s wort, betony, ribwort – and where there were medicinal ferns. They walked through a little pine wood to the south, above the river, and there on the mossy ground grew bushes of bilberry and cranberry. Here and there, as they walked, the steward’s wife would point to a particular tree and say: ‘There’s a squirrel’s nest up there, look.’ And she would point to the little tracks made by the squirrel’s claws as it went up the trunk again and again, to fill the deep hollow with nuts for the winter.

‘We have special wooden spikes you can put on your feet,’ she explained. ‘You can climb up any tree in them and steal the squirrel’s nuts – or honey from the bees. Just like Misha the bear,’ she laughed drily.

One spot that Yanka particularly liked lay about half a mile south of the village. Here, the high bank was set about ten yards back from the river, providing a little glade of trees, reached by a path along the bank, at the water’s edge. And from the bank, about twenty feet up, burst a little spring of bright, clear water, wonderfully cold even in mid-summer. The spring water divided into three little falls, dancing down the mossy bank, over grey rocks, and running away in tiny pools amongst the ferns.

‘One waterfall is for love, one for health, one for riches,’ the steward’s wife told Yanka.

‘Which is which?’

‘No one knows,’ came the wonderfully Russian reply, and they turned back to the village.

As they parted, the older woman gave her one piece of advice, which reminded her of the house-building she had witnessed. ‘This year’s unusual, a very long summer. Don’t expect it again though. The summers are short here, so you work very hard while they last – harder than they do in the south.’

‘And after that?’

The other woman shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

The other change in Yanka’s life was that she was becoming a woman.

She had known it, physically, for some time; but the journey upriver had made her conscious of new stirrings and vague desires which on some days filled her with a new confidence, and on others made her blush unaccountably, uncertain about herself. She had a wonderful pale complexion with a delicate rose colour in her cheeks, and long, yellow-brown hair of which she was rather proud.

Yet some days her skin became oily and pimples appeared; or her cheeks felt blotchy; or her hair seemed sticky and hideous to her. Then her downward-turning mouth would contract into a tight line, she would frown and stay indoors as much as she could.

She was more pleased with her body. It had filled out that summer, and though she was slim, there was a warm, gentle curve around her hips that she supposed some man, some day, would find delicious.

For the time being, as winter approached, she took pride in making a home for her father.

While he was out working with the village men, or building a cart for them, she busily wove cloth, built up their food stocks, smoked fish, and put all her skills to good use so that he would come in in the evening and smile: ‘What a fine nest you are building, my little bird.’

He seemed in better spirits. The hard work and the new life had challenged him. There was a new hardness and strength about him that filled her with pleasure. And as he came in, his face glowing darkly in the dying sunlight before dusk, she would turn and think to herself: There is my father, the man I can be proud of.

Nor did she take an interest in any other man in the village.

There were reasons for this; they dated from the first day when the steward had shown them round.

For it had been only halfway through that afternoon when her father had burst in through the door, leant against the warm stove and cried: ‘Have you seen their fields?’ And before she could answer, ‘Slash and burn. It’s all slash and burn. Mordvinians! Pagans! They haven’t even got a decent plough!’

‘No plough?’

He gave a disgusted snort for reply. ‘You hardly need one for this land. Come, I’ll show you.’

The problem that her father had discovered was one of the major disadvantages that were to plague the state of Russia for the rest of its history.

For the land in the north is very poor.

There are, on the great plain of Russia, two kinds of soil: leached soils and unleached. In leached ground, the water in the soil does not evaporate fast enough and washes the rich salts down, leaving a poor, acidic topsoil of little agricultural value. These leached earths are called in Russian podzols – literally ‘ash-soil’.

Unleached soils occur where evaporation is good. The rich salts remain in the soil, which is usually neutral to alkaline. Here, agriculture is good. The richest of all the unleached soils is the deep black earth, the chernozem, of the south.

Between these two soil types, however, lies a third – a sort of compromise. This is the grey earth – technically a leached podzol-which is moderately good for agriculture.

Roughly speaking, the good black soil lies in the south, on the steppe; the grey in the centre of Russia, in the lands from Kiev up to the River Oka. But in the great loop of the Russian R, and thence northwards until one reaches the peaty, waterlogged soil of the tundra, the ground is poor podzol, and yields upon it are low. This soil, together with the cold weather, is the reason why the agriculture of northern Russia is very poor.

And upon this earth, one did not need the heavy iron ploughs that had already been used for centuries in the thick, rich black earth in the south. The peasants in the north used the soka – a light, wooden plough with a modest steel tip that only scratched the surface of the thin, infertile land.

It was this feeble little plough, and this half-barren soil, that had disgusted Yanka’s father. But even more to be despised was the method the peasants were using to organize their holdings.

For instead of having two, or sometimes three, big fields upon which crops would be rotated, the villagers were using the ancient slash-and-burn technique: cutting down a piece of woodland, burning the debris, and then working the resulting carbonized field for a few years before moving on to another and leaving their last to become wilderness again. It was a form of ancient subsistence agriculture.

‘Pagans,’ her father repeated in disgust. But there was little, as a single newcomer, that he could do about it.

And it was this primitive aspect of the place that confirmed Yanka’s opinion of the villagers, and her lack of interest in them.

The steward, servant of the boyar, was technically a slave. The Viatichi families, besides being uncouth, were the poorest kind of peasants – sharecroppers – who instead of a fixed rent paid the boyar a third of their crop. The Mordvinians were hired labourers, who worked a part of the estate some way from the village which the boyar had decided to retain in his own hands; and the other Slav families from the south had already adopted the primitive ways of the north-east, it seemed to her, and were contentedly using the slash-and-burn techniques on their modest holdings.

There were, as it happened, no unmarried young men amongst these Slavs in any case. The nearest to her in age was an eleven-year-old boy. As for the three Mordvinian and two Viatichi youths, although they all seemed kindly, she did not care for them.

This place is primitive, she decided. Whoever I find to marry, he certainly won’t come from here.

It was three days later that her father had made a discovery that infuriated him even more.

‘There is good land here after all,’ he told her in frustration that evening. ‘Yes: chernozem. But they won’t let me work it.’

‘Where?’

‘Over towards the village they call Dirty Place. Can you believe it? I went over there today with those damned Mordvinians.’

For nature – the retreating glaciers from the last ice age, to be exact – had here and there deposited in the region of the sandy podzols, small stretches of good grey soil. There was a large area of this so-called chernozem above Vladimir, stretching towards Suzdal. And another, much smaller deposit had been made near Russka.

‘The boyar’s keeping back that land. He’s leaving us only the poor soil.’

As it happened, this stretch of chernozem was divided into three parts. One part, somewhat to the north, was a private estate that belonged to the Grand Duke himself. The village there had been destroyed by a plague some years ago, but in time, no doubt, the Grand Duke would use it again. The part to the east was Black Land – nominally the Prince of Murom’s – but let to the free peasants.

And the nearest, smaller part, belonged to Milei the boyar.

When the boyar had encountered Yanka and her father he had said nothing of this. A single man and a girl were hardly such desirable tenants for the best land. Let’s keep them in reserve and see what turns up, he reasonably judged.

Meanwhile, he had decided to work a part of the good land for himself with some slaves he had been able to find.

‘Perhaps we could work some chernozem,’ Yanka suggested.

‘No. I already asked the steward. He only wants hired labourers like the Mordvinians. I’ll not sink to that.’

She put her arms round her father and kissed him, aware of the faint smell of sweat from his shirt and the deep lines around his neck. She hated to see him frustrated like this. ‘We can leave,’ she suggested. ‘We have money.’

The money they had brought was safely hidden under the floor.

‘Maybe. Not this year though.’

‘No,’ she agreed, ‘not this year.’ Winter was too close.

Yet despite the unsatisfactory life of the village, she felt a certain sense of peace in these new surroundings. ‘At least,’ she remarked to her father one rainy day, as she stretched lazily, ‘it may be boring, but we are a long way from the Tatars.’

The warm weather, surprisingly, continued until mid-October. Yanka became used to the quiet rhythm of the village. She went out with the villagers to collect nuts in the forest; and when the men killed an elk one day she helped the women prepare a splendid feast.

He moved along the track, letting the water pouring down from the trees settle on his fur collar or run freely down the creased back of his neck. Below him, at the bottom of the little cliff, the lucky spring burst from the bank and seeped through the ferns into the river. He did not pause except to glance across the river below. Twice he cursed out loud.

Damn the girl!

Her fresh young body – what did it smell of? Roses? The wild carnations in the woods? Nuts. Roasted nuts. Could it really smell of roasted nuts?

Damn her, doesn’t she see me? he almost said aloud. Perhaps she doesn’t know, he considered, but at once dismissed the thought. Oh, yes. She knows. They know everything, women.

So what did it mean? What did she mean by it? What did she suppose he felt in that room, alone with her, with the rain pouring off the eaves all around like a waterfall? What did she mean, arching those young breasts when she knew he was watching, and turning towards him – her whole, young body – and telling him in that soft voice that she was bored?

Is she teasing me? Does she despise me?

Pretending not to understand. That was her defence. And her weapon. She was good – oh, yes, she had been good to him. And she loved him. At least, she had once. It was as if she was his, yet not his; as if she understood everything, was ready to open herself to him, yet turned away whenever she sensed he might approach.

She was his daughter, of course.

Was that it? Of course that was reason enough, in theory. Forbidden. They both knew that.

But surely after all they had been through… They had a special bond, didn’t they? Was there not in her calm eyes that seemed to stare at the world with a kind of sad understanding – was there not a perfect understanding of how they were, he and she?

The way her mouth turned down, he thought – a little sad, a little cynical, and also, yes, sensuous: very sensuous when awakened. Those lips, those sad, obstinate lips with their hint of a pout – the pout that never developed because her strong mouth kept everything under control – were they going to refuse to part and open for him? Were they going to smile, and then open for another? The thought had become a torture to him.

He was her father. He stamped furiously down the path. He had heard of other fathers…

Besides, there was no one else for either of them. No one else in this God-forsaken place.

‘I’ll be a father to her. I’ll discipline her if she wants to play games with me,’ he muttered.

He had been so immersed in his thoughts that he had not noticed where he was going, nor realized how far from the village he had gone, until suddenly he looked up and saw a strange sight.

It was a bear. He stopped in his tracks. It was quite large. It was also very old. It was moving with great difficulty across the path ten yards in front of him. The bear saw him, but seemed uninterested. It was moving very stiffly.

And then he realized: the bear was going to die. It was only searching for a final resting place.

Cautiously he went foward.

‘Well, my Misha,’ he murmured, ‘what use can you be to me?’

The bear gave him a baleful look, but was too weary to threaten him. How old, sad and bedraggled the animal looked. The rain had soaked it; the bear’s coat was caked with mud and smelt dank. Moving closer, Yanka’s father drew his long hunting knife. A good idea had just occurred to him.

He would give Yanka a fur coat for the winter. That would please her. Not every man could say: ‘I have killed a bear for you.’

It required great skill to kill a bear. Even though it had almost collapsed, an instant’s revival, one swipe from those mighty arms, and he would be done for. But he thought he could do it.

He edged behind, paused, then suddenly leaped on to the creature’s huge back.

The bear started, began to stand up; and he ripped his long, sharp blade right across its throat.

The bear rose fully, with the man on its back, and tried to get at him. Again Yanka’s father plunged his knife into the throat, attacking the windpipe and searching for the huge veins. After a moment, he was sure he had succeeded, and leaped down into the mud, before running behind a tree.

He heard the bear gurgle. Then it came down heavily on its front legs again. Blood was pouring from its throat. The bear seemed to see him, but it did not move. It stood there miserably, knowing this was the end, and, for some strange reason, blinking uselessly. Then it crashed into the bushes and he heard it coughing.

An hour later, he had skinned it.

Yanka found the muddy season depressing. It was made worse by her decision, on a day when the rains had stopped, to go down to the nearby village of Dirty Place.

What a dreary spot it was. Half a dozen huts clustered by the river bank. The land there was Black Land, like the northern territory, so that the peasants there were, in practice, free. Better than that, the village’s land lay directly on the chernozem.

Yet still it was dismal. The river bank was very low. The ground immediately to the south was waterlogged and smelt of marsh. And when Yanka spoke to some of the village women, she found that four out of the six she met suffered from some strange affliction that made the skin on their head spongy to the touch and their hair perpetually oily and matted.

Instinctively, she drew away from them.

She was glad to get back, to put wood in the stove and feel her own hair, soft and light, as she ran her hand through it for reassurance.

It was that very evening that her father came in with a wonderful coat, made by one of the Mordvinian women from a bear he had killed for her himself. He had kept the incident a secret from her. Now he handed it to her with a smile.

‘You killed a bear? For me?’ She was half delighted, yet half terrified. ‘You might have been killed.’

He laughed. ‘It will keep you warm up here in the north.’

She kissed him. He smiled, but said nothing more.

Three days later the snows came. It was very cold; though one was perfectly warm inside. Yet once winter had sealed the little village she could not escape the sad fact: it was boring.

She had no friends. The village, it seemed to her, was quiet as a tomb. They did not mix much with their neighbours and, though they were only yards apart, days might pass without her speaking to another soul. There was not even a church to draw them together.

To pass the time, she began to make a large embroidered cloth. It had a white background, and on to this she sewed, in bright red, the striking, geometric birds that the village woman had taught her when she was a child.

So, in this remote northern hamlet, appeared a design drawn directly from ancient, oriental patterns familiar to the Iranian horsemen from the steppe a thousand years ago.

November passed. The cloth progressed, and the girl and her father lived alone.

The change in her life came in the first half of December. It took place rather suddenly.

Her father had been very kind to her of late. He knew that she was sometimes afraid of him if he drank too much, and so he had hardly touched any mead since autumn. In the last two days he had been especially warm with her, often giving her friendly hugs and a gentle kiss.

One evening, however, he did drink mead. She saw the faint flush around his neck; she looked at him a little nervously, but decided that he had not drunk enough to make him depressed. Indeed, she felt a little surge of happiness to see the smile of well-being on his face. She noticed his hands, resting on the table. For some reason she noticed the thick fair hairs on the back of them and this, too, filled her with a feeling of affection.

And then she did something very foolish.

She had been heating some red dye for the thread: it was almost boiling, and she decided to carry it across the room.

Her father had been sitting very quietly at the table now, for several minutes, without speaking. She did not particularly look at him, though she was aware of his strong back, and the bald top of his head as she brushed past him with the pot of dye.

Perhaps it was glancing at the top of his head that made her lose concentration. But suddenly her foot caught against the leg of the little bench he was sitting on. She started to fall, desperately righted herself and, by a miracle, only slopped a quarter of the boiling contents of the pot on to the table.

‘The devil take me!’

He had leaped back, upsetting the bench on the floor.

She stared at him, horrified, then at the dye on the table.

‘Your hands?’

‘You want to scald me alive?’ He clasped one hand in the other with a grimace of pain.

She dropped the pot on to the stove.

‘Let me see. Let me bandage it.’

‘You careless idiot,’ he roared. But he did not let her come near.

She was terrified, yet also anguished.

‘Let me help you. I’m sorry.’

He took a deep breath, gritted his teeth. And then it happened.

‘You will be,’ he suddenly said, very quietly.

She felt the inside of her stomach go cold.

She knew that tone. It came from her childhood, and it meant: ‘Wait until this evening.’

She trembled. In an instant, it seemed to her, the relationship of the last few months had vanished. She was a little girl again. And as a little girl, she knew what was to follow. Her knees began to shake. ‘You should look where you are going with scalding water,’ he said coldly. She was so upset she had hurt him that, in a way, she would almost prefer it if he would punish her. It was two years since he had last done so, before Kiy had been taken away. Yet it was strangely humiliating to be addressed like a child again.

‘Go to the bench.’

She lay face down on the bench. She heard him undoing his belt. Then she felt him pull up her linen shift. She braced herself.

But nothing happened.

She closed her eyes, waiting. And then, to her surprise, she felt his hands upon her. Then she felt his breath upon her ear.

‘I won’t punish you this time, my little wife,’ he said softly. ‘But there is something else you can do for me.’ Now she felt his hands moving over the back of her legs. She frowned. What was he doing? ‘Hush now,’ he breathed. ‘I won’t hurt you.’

She began to blush, furiously. She did not know what to do. Even now, she could not quite understand what was happening.

She felt his hands advance. Suddenly she felt naked as she had never done before. She wanted to cry out, to run; yet a hot sense of shame held her strangely helpless. Where was she to run to? What could she say to their neighbours?

At this terrible moment, this man, her father, in this stifling hot room, was trying to do something strange to her. And now she realized exactly what it was.

His touch terrified her. Her body suddenly arched, rigid, and she heard him gasp.

‘Ah, that’s it, my little wife.’

Moments later, after a sudden spasm of pain, she heard him moan: ‘Ah, my little bird, you knew. You always knew.’

Did she know? Did a little voice within her tell her that she had known this was to be, that she shared some complicity with him?

She wanted to cry, yet oddly, at this instant, she could not.

She could not even hate him. She had to love him.

He was all she had.

The next morning she went out early in the snow.

It was going to be a bright day. The sky was pale blue. Pulling snow shoes on over her thick felt boots she trudged towards the high river bank.

The sun was gleaming on the edge of the bank. Below, the forest was bathed in golden light as the sun rose.

A ragged figure was coming towards her. It was one of the Viatichi men. He was leaning far forward, dragging a pile of logs on a little sled behind him. His dark eyes stared at her, piercing, from under his heavy grey eyebrows. He knows, she thought. It seemed impossible to her that everyone in the hamlet did not know what she had done the night before.

The bearded figure went silently past her, without a word, like a sullen, elderly monk.

There was the lightest breath of wind, but it was very cold. Her heavy coat kept her warm; yet she was unusually conscious of her own body inside it, a body which felt naked and bruised.

She turned.

A few yards in front of her there was a silver birch tree. Its branches were bare, wintry; but the eastern morning sun was making its silvery bark shine. The black ribs on its bark reminded her of the rich black earth in the south. You look as if you were made of snow and ice, she thought, yet inside you are still warm.

The birch was a hardy tree. It would grow anywhere, in any conditions, supplanting trees that had been burned or cut down. I will be like that, too, she vowed. I shall survive.

Slowly she trudged back to the izba. An old woman peered at her from a doorway.

‘Perhaps she knows; perhaps not.’ Though she did not realize it, Yanka had said these words out loud.

She decided that, if her secret was guessed, she did not care.

She went inside.

Her father was there. He was sitting on a bench eating kasha. He glanced up at her, but neither of them spoke.

It happened again, a few days later; then again, the next day.

She was puzzled herself by her own attitude.

On the first of these two occasions she had tried to resist him. It was the first time in her life that she had realized, actually physically felt, how much stronger he was than she. He had not hurt her; there had been no need. He had simply taken her arms and she had found that she was completely unable to move them. Unless she chose to kick, or try to bite him, she was easily in his power. And even if she had: what then? A physical fight she would lose? The break up of the only home she had?

In silence she had braced herself against him, trying to ward him off, then given up the futile struggle.

And as he had possessed her she had thought, grimly, of the birch tree in the winter snow, surviving, always surviving.

Her confusion, in the weeks that followed, was natural. For he was never brutal. Despite herself, she could not help the fact that her body responded to his lovemaking.

He no longer called her ‘little wife’. That would have seemed, now, a too blatant reference to their secret. Nor did he put his arm round her in public, as he had used to do.

Yet she came to see him, now, as a woman sees her husband.

Still she loved him. She became aware in a different way of the rhythm of his body. When he sat at the table and the back of his neck seemed taut, or his hands slightly clenched, she felt sorry for him, as she had done when she was a child; but now, instead of thinking he needed comfort, she knew that these were simply physical symptoms to which there were equally simple remedies.

Sometimes – even if with a secret inner sigh, because she knew what must follow – she would walk over to him when he sat like this and, instead of throwing her arms round him as she would once have done, she would knead the back of his neck and his shoulders.

It was a strange relationship: she was never light-hearted; she never ruffled his hair, or teased him as she might have done with a friend or husband; there was always a slight constriction in her manner towards him; she was both timid, yet practical.

As the winter months went by, a new and curious bond grew between them. Once the door of the izba was open, they were a perfect father and daughter. If the other villagers knew or suspected, no one said anything. And the very fact that they shared this secret meant that there was a complicity between them.

Complicity. They both knew.

It was only a short step from there to the development that, in secret, she realized she had been dreading.

In the month of January, several times, she gave herself to him with pleasure.

Why should it matter so much to her that, for a few brief minutes, her young body had taken pleasure and found release in the function for which it had been created? Why were they so much worse, these particular intimacies, than those which had already taken place?

She knew very well. It was a long time since she had seen a priest, but she knew what this meant. The Devil had her. She had not only sinned: she had rejoiced in her sin.

It was after these occasions that she entered the abyss of self-disgust. ‘I am like the women at Dirty Place,’ she moaned. She felt as if her hair was matted like theirs, and as if her whole being was defiled.

And when she was alone, in her misery, she turned to the distant, sad-faced little icon in the corner and prayed: ‘Save me, Mother of God, from my sins. Show me a way out of this darkness.’

The boyar Milei was cautious and shrewd. He had three daughters and two sons and he meant to leave them rich. He trusted nobody. And though he served the princely family of the little eastern territory of Murom, he did so cynically.

His attitude was perfectly reasonable. For a long time now, the greater boyars had seldom actually served day to day in the princely retinues, leaving that to their sons or to poor cousins. And though they were theoretically at the prince’s service in any emergency, they had minds of their own. In the larger territory of Riazan, immediately to the south, the boyars were well known for their independence and the Riazan princes had some difficulty controlling them. In other principalities – in the distant lands of Galicia in the south-west, let alone over the border in Poland – the nobles and gentry were strong, and a prince needed their agreement to any major decision.

There was another factor, too.

While the princely families were royal – for they still all descended from the family of St Vladimir – they had become large. Unlike the great days of Kiev, when each prince ruled over a huge territory, some of the notable princes now ruled over minor towns, and their children and grandchildren might have less in land than the greater boyars. These small appanages, as the princely inheritances were called, meant that a boyar like Milei might have a more aggressive view of his own status: and as he looked out upon the changing fortunes of the many little princely towns, he saw a more relative political world than his ancestors had.

As for his own princes, those of the ancient city of Murom, they were puppets of the Grand Duke who, in Milei’s opinion, was not to be trusted.

‘In any case,’ he shrewdly remarked, ‘even the Grand Duke, whatever he may like to pretend, is only a servant of the Tatar Khans from now on.’

So where did his advantage lie? How was he to get richer?

The most telling development to Milei was not the fact that the Grand Duke had had to travel across the steppe to submit, humiliatingly, to the Khan. It was not that the Tatar army had destroyed cities – they could be rebuilt. It was not that the Prince of Chernigov had been executed.

What Milei wisely observed was that, unlike the Russian princes since great Monomakh, the Tatar Khan minted his own coins.

‘It’s the Tatars who will hold the money bags now,’ he told his two sons. ‘They won’t destroy all the trade – why should they? – but they’ll reap the profits.’

The province had been very depressed since the invasion. Though Milei owned slaves who produced some handicrafts he could sell, and though his villages brought him some brightly woven cloth and quantities of furs, there didn’t seem much room for expansion at present.

‘We must look to our own land,’ he decided.

He knew several boyars who had even been spending months at a time on their estates recently. Where before they always lived in the town, traded, and received their rents in money, they were now forced to live off the land.

‘And you know,’ one had said to him, ‘it may not be silver coin, but when a peasant of mine turns up with two sacks of grain, a cheese you can hardly carry, fifty eggs and a wagonload of firewood for his rent, I find I’m quite pleased to see him. When I go into the country, I may look like a peasant,’ he had laughed, ‘but I live well.’

Which had made Milei think carefully about Russka.

How big was the place anyway?

Here he had to guess.

For like most such documents in this huge and imprecise land, the title deeds to the estate stated no exact boundaries.

It was the usual formula. Only the local people, long familiar with the place, could say with any certainty where these traditional limits to cultivation lay.

But these three sides, lying as they did upon poor podzol, were of less interest to Milei than the east side across the river, where the chernozem was rich and fertile. And here the boundary, where it joined the prince’s Black Land, was well established.

Since there was no present reason why the Prince of Murom should grant it to him, Milei had several times offered to buy the village of Dirty Place from him. So far, he had got nowhere. But as his steward had pointed out, he had only partly cultivated the chernozem he already had.

‘Send me more slaves,’ the steward said, ‘and I can yield you good returns.’

It was with these matters on his mind that, late in the August of that year, Milei the boyar came to visit Russka.

The hay was already cut and the cone-shaped stacks were casting shadows on the meadow across the river when he rode into the settlement.

He had given the steward fair warning, and a stout new hut, with a tall, steep roof and a fenced plot of land around it, awaited his arrival. He came alone, with a single servant, and immediately called for fodder for his two splendid horses.

When the steward started to bring hay, he immediately cursed him.

‘Oats, you fool! These aren’t your pitiful village horses.’

Indeed, the splendid beasts were half as big again as the sturdy little northern horses the villagers used.

Milei himself ate quickly, made a few testy comments about the turnips they offered him, and then at once retired for the night. But when the steward’s wife complained to her husband about the lord’s bad temper that night, the steward grinned. ‘It’s a good sign. I know him,’ he told her. And when she looked surprised: ‘See, he wouldn’t bother to get cross if he hadn’t decided to take an interest in the place.’

The old fellow was right.

Milei was up at dawn the next morning, riding out to inspect the estate, with a few curt nods to the inhabitants as they went out to the fields.

The largest crop, the spring-sown rye, had already been reaped in July. They were reaping barley that day.

Milei rode round every inch of the place, with the steward running along beside him. He paid special attention to the chernozem.

‘We don’t grow any wheat?’

‘Not at present, lord.’

‘We should try.’ He gave a short, hard laugh. ‘Then you can make Communion bread.’

Communion bread? So the boyar meant them to have a church. The steward smiled to himself. He must really mean business.

He made other suggestions, too. They had started to grow buckwheat in the south when he was a boy. He wanted to try that at Russka. In particular, he seemed to have taken offence at those turnips they had offered him the previous night.

‘Damned peasants’ food,’ he said in disgust. ‘You hardly grow any peas here.’

‘No, lord.’

‘I want more peas, and lentils too. Hemp as well. Grow it with the peas. Hemp seeds are full of oil. They keep you warm in winter.’

‘Yes, lord.’ What on earth could the boyar want with all this? Could it be that he not only wanted to build the place up but actually live here himself? ‘Will this be for yourself, lord?’ he rashly inquired.

‘Mind your own business and do as you’re told,’ the boyar replied sharply, and the steward immediately bowed.

So that’s what he’s up to, if I know him, he thought happily.

Milei was pleased with the flax.

‘But I want more,’ he announced.

This was the basic fibre product of northern Russian agriculture and it was one commodity that could be profitably transported to market. The north-western city of Pskov was even exporting flax abroad.

When he inspected the livestock, the boyar did not complain. The sheep were not bad: they were small, hornless animals with rather long bodies that he had introduced himself. The pigs did well. But the cattle made him shake his head sadly. They stood less than three and a half feet high at the shoulder; at winter’s end, a single man could carry them out of their stalls to pasture.

Milei said nothing, and passed on.

It was afternoon before the boyar finally returned.

He ate, then slept. And then, in the early evening, he made a tour of the village huts and inspected the peasants.

He was not pleased.

‘A dirty, miserable collection of people,’ he remarked with irritation to the steward. ‘And don’t bother to remind me I sent most of them here,’ he added with a grim smile.

But his temper visibly improved when, last of all, he came to the house of the father and daughter he had sent the previous year.

‘At last,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘A clean izba’

It was better than that. There were fresh herbs hanging from a little straw rope over the stove. The place smelled sweet. Everything was beautifully cared for: the loving cup on the table, in the shape of a duck, was a little work of art. In the red corner, a candle burned before the icon; in the corner opposite, three beautiful embroidered cloths hung.

This was what Yanka, in eight months of the blackest inner torment, had achieved.

And in front of him, it appeared to the boyar, stood a model father and his child. Though he had been working in the field all day, the peasant’s thin brown beard was neatly combed. He had put a fresh blouse on in the boyar’s honour; and he smiled respectfully, but manfully, like a fellow with a clear conscience.

The girl was a pearl. Neat, clean, and he was bound to say, good-looking. For once, even the cynical Milei’s heart was touched.

‘A good man deserves such a daughter to look after him,’ he said with a pleasant smile for them both.

How the girl had improved since he had last seen her. She was still slim, but her body and face had filled out a little in this first season of her womanhood. Her skin was wonderfully clear, yet a little pale.

He looked at her carefully. Was there a trace of worry in her eyes?

Then, thinking of his own daughters, he reminded himself that all girls worry about something at that age.

‘A pretty virgin to pluck,’ he could not help murmuring to himself once they were outside again.

He went to Dirty Place the next day, then announced that he was departing but would return shortly.

‘So be ready for me every day,’ he shouted to the steward as he left.

He did not come back for a month.

When he returned, in late September, he was followed by four boats which his men were pulling up the stream with ropes.

In the first was a family of slaves.

‘Mordvinians, I’m afraid,’ he said to the steward, ‘but you’ll make them work.’

In the others there was livestock: Milei had brought young calves from the Riazan region.

‘They grow them bigger in those Oka meadows,’ he said. ‘Give two of them to that new man with the daughter to look after for the winter. He’ll take good care of them.’

He settled into his house and announced that he would remain there a week, at the end of which he would receive the rents.

‘Then,’ he told the steward, ‘I’m going to Novgorod on business. I shall return from there in the spring.’

He made no inspections this time, but contented himself with walking around and watching the villagers at work.

One of the activities he liked to watch was the threshing.

This took place on a space cleared beside the little kilns where the grain was dried by smoking.

The sheaves were threshed in two ways. Some were hit with sticks and flails: this was the men’s work. But the more delicate method, performed by the women, used a horizontal log, on two upright supports. By tapping the sheaf on the log, the grain was knocked out but the long straw was preserved for weaving and plaiting. The rye straw was especially long and soft, yet strong enough for rope making.

Milei often walked past and paused to watch. Though the women were at first a little frightened by the presence of this big, Turkish-looking lord with his hard eyes and yellow hair, they soon got used to him. He did not seem to be looking at anything in particular.

But Yanka soon sensed that he was. She could feel it.

She was always neatly dressed; but the second day he came by, he noticed that the smock she was wearing had one of her bird designs embroidered on the front, and that she had tied her belt just a fraction tighter than usual, so that as she bent and then raised her arm, he could clearly see the outline of her body.

Indeed, to Milei, worldly though he was, there was something magical in this little village scene, miles from anywhere, with this pretty, clean young creature working with the other women before him.

He had been away from home for a long time. He felt strong, but he knew he was getting older; and this girl was different.

He felt strangely refreshed, as though in this magical late summer season, in this place apart, it had been granted him for a few days to step outside the passing of the years.

He did not speak to her, nor she to him. But they were both aware of each other and of this thought which, as inevitable as the coming of the shadows, seemed to join them in the bright silence of the afternoon.

On the fourth day, in the early evening, as he was standing alone gazing out over the reddening field across the river, she came towards him, smiled, and passed on.

The day before he was due to leave, Milei the boyar received his rents.

They brought him sacks of grain and young pigs. Half the pigs were usually slaughtered before winter. They brought him lambs and baby goats. One family, who had elected to pay in money instead of kind, brought him a pile of the rabbit skins bearing an official stamp, that were the small currency of that time and place.

They brought him beaver skins that he could trade.

It was a haunting little scene, with peasants dragging forward pigs and cattle. The cattle still wore the wooden bells that were hung round their necks when they were put out to feed in the woods after harvest. A melancholy clinking filled the autumn air as they came before the lord and were marked for killing.

Milei, though he was pleased with the rents, felt a sadness at the thought that he was about to leave this place. At the end of the proceedings, when it was almost dusk, he rose and, signalling to the steward that he wished to be alone, left the hamlet for a last walk along the river’s edge.

The shadows were long; the trees seemed very tall in the silence.

He was surprised a little later, though not displeased, to find the girl in front of him on the path. Below them lay the still, glassy river. He saw that she wished to speak, and stopped.

This time, she looked straight at him with those strange, half-sad eyes.

‘Take me with you, lord.’

He gazed at her.

‘Where to?’

‘To Novgorod. Isn’t that where you are going?’

He nodded.

‘You don’t like it here?’ he asked quietly.

‘I must leave.’

He looked at her curiously. What was troubling her?

‘Is your father unkind?’

‘Maybe. Maybe not. What’s that to you?’ She took a deep breath. ‘Take me with you.’

‘You want to see Novgorod: is that it?’

‘I want to go with you.’

There was something desperate about her. He had not observed it before, and if he had been a young man, he might have found it a little frightening. She was like a rusalka, haunting him from a river. Yet all the same, she seemed quite self-possessed.

He thought of her body.

‘What would your father say?’

She shrugged.

So that was it. He thought he guessed. He looked at her calmly, with a new frankness.

‘And what would you do for me, if I took you with me?’

She stared back at him, with equal calmness.

‘Whatever you want.’

It was her only chance. He did not know that, if he refused, she had decided to kill herself.

‘Very well,’ he said.

He turned to go back. The river below was a pale ribbon of light; the woods were already dark.

It was a long journey – nearly four hundred miles north-west to the lands by the Baltic Sea. Yet as soon as she left Russka with the boyar and his retinue of half a dozen men, she felt a sense of excitement.

It was also, for a time, uncomfortable. For the boyar had sent the boats downriver again and told her they were to ride to Novgorod.

‘You can ride, can’t you?’

She could ride the farm horses, of course, but it would not occur to a peasant to undertake a long journey except by boat. By the end of the first day in the saddle she was sore. By the third, she was in agony. Milei thought this amusing.

‘Anyone would think I’d beaten and raped you,’ he remarked jocularly.

He was a large and powerful figure; and when he rode his tall and splendid horses, he looked larger and more impressive still. He wore a fur-trimmed coat and hat, which had a diamond in it. His big, high-cheeked face, his hard eyes set wide apart, his rich fair beard, all seemed to proclaim: ‘I am power itself, untouchable by mere peasants, for whom I care nothing.’

And with a trace of pride she watched him as they rode and murmured to herself: ‘This is my boyar.’

He had wasted no time. He had made love to her the first night after they had left the village.

But though, for a moment, she had been a little alarmed by the size of this powerful man whose tent she was sharing, he was surprisingly gentle with her.

He made love skilfully. She hoped she pleased him.

He was kindly as well. A few questions had before long drawn from her the whole story of her recent months with her father, and the boyar was comforting.

‘Of course you want to get away,’ he told her gently. ‘But don’t think too badly of him, or of yourself. In these small villages, miles from anywhere, I can promise you these things are not uncommon.’

Her father, to her surprise, had not raised great objections to her leaving. Strictly, since they were free peasants, Milei could not order her father to give her up. But when the powerful boyar had summoned the peasant to him and informed him of his decision, he gave him such a piercing look that her father went scarlet.

He did not altogether lose his presence of mind though.

‘The girl is of great help to me, lord,’ he said carefully. ‘I shall be a poorer man without her.’

Milei had understood.

‘How much poorer?’

‘My land is very bad. And you see I am a good workman. Let me have some of the chernozem.’

Milei considered. He supposed the fellow would work it well.

‘Very well. Five chets. You’ll pay a fair rent. Talk to the steward.’

And he had waved him away.

When Yanka had parted from him, there had been tears in his eyes. She saw him for what he was, and felt sorry for him.

They rode up to the Kliasma River.

Yanka would have liked to enter the capital city of Vladimir, which was not far away, and see the famous icon of Our Lady. She had heard that it had been painted by the Evangelist St Luke himself. But Milei shook his head, and the little party turned westwards. They rode along the Kliasma for ten days until they were just north of the small town of Moscow. Then they struck north-west.

The rains caught them just as they reached another minor city, Tver, that lay below the gentle Valdai Hills, on the banks of the upper reaches of the Volga. It was a small town, rather like its neighbour Moscow. They found an inn there and waited for ten days. Then the snows came.

A week later, sitting in a large and comfortable sled now, Yanka began the last, and magical, part of her journey.

Some days there were icy winds and blizzards. But on others, the sun shone over a sparkling northern scene.

How softly and easily the sled had raced down the slope by Tver and across the frozen Volga. They travelled swiftly across the snow, sometimes following rivers, sometimes plunging into dark woods, and following endless tracks between the trees.

West of Moscow, she had noticed, the woods had become mainly broad-leaved again, like those of the south. But as they went further west and north, the tall firs of the taiga appeared together with these trees.

Then, late in November, the countryside began to change. It opened out into huge flat spaces with mixed woods broken up into coppices and small stands. Often she realized that they were gliding over ice rather than earth, and that there was frozen marsh underneath. The ridges were very low. It felt as if they were approaching the sea.

Milei was in high good humour. He began to sing the song of Sadko, the merchant of Novgorod, smiling to himself as they sped over the flat, open land. Then, one afternoon, he pointed.

‘Lord Novgorod the Great.’

From a distance, it was not so impressive, because the citadel only rose a score of feet above the river. But as they approached, she began to realize the remarkable size of the place.

‘It’s huge,’ she said.

He laughed.

‘Just wait till we get there.’

The mighty city of Novgorod lay on the slow-moving River Volkhov, just north of the great Lake Ilmen. It consisted of two halves, one each side of the river, surrounded by tremendous wooden palisades and joined by an enormous wooden bridge. In the middle of the western half, and raised above it, stood a stout citadel with thick, blank stone walls.

They came in from the east, clattered through the eastern quarter and across the bridge.

Yanka cried out in wonder.

The bridge was massive. Sailing boats could go under it.

‘There’s not another like it in all the lands of Rus,’ Milei remarked.

The bridge led them straight under a huge gateway. Immediately before them towered a stern-looking cathedral. They turned right and passed through the northern quarters of the city until they finally came to rest at a large wooden structure which was an inn.

And already Yanka was gasping.

For all the streets were paved with wood.

The early part of her stay in Novgorod was happy.

Milei was busy, but although she was there, ostensibly, as his servant, he often let her walk along behind him and, from time to time, curtly pointed out the sights.

The western side, containing the citadel, was called the St Sophia side, because of the stern-looking cathedral she had seen. It contained three quarters, called ends: the most northerly, on the edge of which they were staying, was the Leatherworkers end; then came the Zagorod end, where the rich boyars had their houses. Then came the Potters end.

There were fine wooden houses everywhere, wooden churches, it seemed, by the hundred, and even stone churches by the dozen.

How solid and strong everything seemed. The streets were not very wide – mostly about ten feet. They were made of big logs, split end to end and laid, the flat side up, across the framework of poles, like rails, that ran along under the street. At one place, where they were repairing the street, she saw that underneath lay layers – she could not see how many – of older wooden pavings.

‘So the streets of Novgorod are slowly rising,’ she said to Milei.

‘That’s right,’ he replied. ‘You’ll notice that you have to take a step down, now, into some of the older stone buildings.’

Every street was enclosed by fences – not like the modest fences she knew at Russka, but thick, solid wooden walls, almost like small palisades, that seemed to say: ‘Bump into a fence in Novgorod if you like, but you’ll get hurt.’

When she was a girl, in the south, the people from Kiev or Pereiaslav were always a little contemptuous of the distant people of Novgorod.

‘Carpenters’ they still called them.

But she found nothing to laugh at in their carpentry now. She found it a little frightening.

The great cathedral in the centre of the citadel had been built to rival its namesake at Kiev: St Sophia.

Like the Kievan church, it had five aisles. But its walls, instead of soft glowing pink brick, in tiny lines, were made of large irregular stones. Its whole aspect was harsh and austere. Instead of Kiev’s thirteen shining cupolas, it had five large domes, plated with lead, that gave off a dull, dark gleam. Inside, instead of glittering mosaics with their mysterious, other-worldly Byzantine light, huge frescoes stared coolly down from the flat, soaring walls. The building expressed not transcendental mystery, but high, hard, unyielding northern power. For this place, it reminded the beholder, was Lord Novgorod the Great.

‘The painting here was done mostly by Novgorod artists, not Greeks,’ Milei explained to her. And when she admired the huge bronze gates of the west door, carved with rich biblical scenes, he told her: ‘We took them from the Swedes, but they were made in Germany, in Magdeburg.’

When they came out, she pointed to a huge wooden palace standing nearby.

‘Is that where the prince lives?’ she asked.

‘No,’ Milei told her. ‘The people of Novgorod won’t let the prince live in the city. He has to live in his own little fort, just to the north. That’s the archbishop’s palace you’re looking at. It’s the archbishop and the people’s veche who rule in Novgorod. The prince defends the place, and they won’t accept a prince they don’t like.’

She had always heard that the city of Novgorod was free, but she had not realized that such expressions of power as she saw all around her could belong to the people.

‘They are truly free then?’ she remarked with admiration.

‘They are truly obstinate,’ he replied curtly, and glancing down at her puzzled face remarked: ‘You’ll see.’

But if St Sophia’s side was impressive, it was nothing compared to the astonishment she felt when they crossed, on their second day, over the river.

From the citadel they passed under the huge Virgin Gate with its stone church over the arch and across the great wooden bridge. Below them lay the frozen River Volkhov that led southwards on the ancient trading route down to the Dniepr and Kiev, and flowed northwards to a huge lake called Ladoga, that was joined by the River Neva to the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea.

And before them lay the market side.

‘There are two ends,’ Milei announced, as the sled went over the bridge, ‘the Slovensk and the Carpenters ends. And in the middle is the market. That’s where we’re going.’

She had never seen anything like it. Beside another impressive church spread a huge open area stretching to the river’s edge and the wharfs.

It was covered with snow, yet on the frozen surface were long lines of brightly coloured stalls, more than she could count.

‘There must be a thousand,’ she said.

‘Probably.’

Milei had business to conduct, so he left her to wander alone all morning. She was astonished by what she discovered.

For this was the ancient trading emporium of the north. There were all kinds of people there, even in winter: not only Slavs, but Germans, Swedes, and traders from the Baltic states of Lithuania and the lands of the Latvians. One stout man selling salted fish even told her that in his youth he had been with the herring fleets all the way to the western island of England.

One could buy anything.

There were all manner of foods: huge pots of honey, barrels of salt, and blubber oil. Fish there was in abundance, even in winter. There were barrels of eels, of herring and of cod. Bream and turbot, she soon learned, were popular. There were great piles of furs everywhere: bear, beaver, fox and even sable. There was bright pottery and acres, it seemed, of beautifully worked leather.

‘At the end of summer,’ a woman told her, ‘they bring in the cartloads of hops. Ah,’ she smiled, ‘the smell of them!’

There were neatly carved ornaments of bone and reindeer horn from the northern forests. They sold walrus tusks, which they called ‘fish teeth’.

And there were icons.

As she looked at them, she noticed a difference between these and the icons she had always seen as a child.

These ones seemed brighter, their outlines clearer and harder. Strong reds burst gaily out upon the icy scene, as though in these bracing northern climes a more boisterous deity was emerging over the coasts and forests. She had just observed the newly developing and soon to be famous Novgorod school of icon painting. She was not sure that she liked it.

But the goods she coveted came from the east. They had come from the caravans of the steppe, from the vast lands the Tatars now controlled. They had come through the cities of Suzdalia to the great emporium of the north.

There were spices, on their way to the west. There were combs made of boxwood and beads of all kinds. And there were dazzling silks from old Constantinople. She ran her hand over them sensuously.

‘Can you imagine feeling that soft silk on your skin?’ the stallholder asked her.

She could.

It was while she was watching a large man counting a pile of the stamped squirrel skins that the Novgorodians, too, used as small currency, that she noticed something else.

He was making small notes for himself with a stylus on a little wax tablet. She had seen Milei the boyar do this, but here was an ordinary small merchant doing so too. She wandered round the other stalls. Other merchants, even artisans, had wax tablets or, very often, little pieces of birch bark on which they made notes and drawings.

‘Can you read and write?’ she asked a woman minding a fish stall.

‘Yes, my dove. Most people can,’ she answered.

It made a deep impression on Yanka. No one at Russka could. And it opened up new possibilities in her eyes.

These people, she realized, are Slavs, yet they are not the same as us.

And as she looked around the huge square, which was also where the veche met, she began to have an idea of the thrusting, adventurous power of the Baltic north.

That night, in the inn, Milei summoned her to eat with him alone. He was in excellent humour. Whatever his business was, it had gone well.

She had never eaten like this. Fishes she had never had before, rich venison meat, huge carefully arranged bowls of delicacies and sweet-meats. At one point they brought a bowl of shiny roe that she had never seen before and placed it before her.

‘What’s this?’ she asked.

‘Caviar,’ he smiled. ‘From a perch. Try it.’

She had heard of caviar; she knew it came from perch, sturgeon and other fishes, but she had never eaten it. This was boyars’ food.

He plied her with mead and watched with amusement as her face grew flushed.

Towards the end of the meal, the door of the room opened and a thin old man looked in inquiringly. The boyar gave him a quick nod, and he entered.

He was a minstrel, a skazitel. In his hand he carried a gusli – the small harp of his trade.

‘What will you sing, skazitel?’ the boyar asked.

‘Two songs, lord,’ he replied. ‘One of the south, one of the north.’

He spoke with an accent that made Yanka think he had originally come from the south himself.

‘The first,’ he explained, ‘is a composition of my own. I call it “Prince Igor”.’

Yanka smiled. There had been several popular tales in her childhood of the noble Igor – a southern prince who had led a great raid against the Cumans of the steppe. It had been a valiant expedition, but it had failed and Prince Igor had been killed. Every Russian knew the story.

The old man had composed a haunting song. As his thin voice filled the room with a melancholy, oriental sound, she could see and almost smell the endless grasses of the steppe, the great empty spaces of her childhood.

The message of the song was simple: if the Russian princes were only united, the men of the steppe would never defeat them; and it seemed to apply even more poignantly now that the Tatars had come.

She looked up and saw that Milei, too, was misty-eyed. Were not his own ancestors these very men, Rus and Cuman, who had fought upon the steppe?

It was then that he reached behind him and pulled from a leather bag a small bale which he put in front of her.

It was a roll of the finest oriental silk.

‘A present for you,’ he said, and seeing her look of utter astonishment the big boyar leaned back his head and let out a huge laugh.

‘Milei is generous to those who please him,’ he cried, ‘Sing your other song,’ he commanded the skazitel.

This was the Novgorod song of Sadko the rich merchant. It was, in part, the Russian version of the Orpheus story, with the merchant minstrel charming the Finnish sea god in his palace at the bottom of the sea, and thus winning his return to life. It was also a reminder of an actual merchant of the city.

The minstrel had set it to a lilting, sensuous tune.

Yanka lay down at Milei’s feet, and slowly drew the soft, shining silk through her fingers; as the song described the sea god churning the ocean waves while Sadko played his harp, she stretched out luxuriously hugging the bale of silk to her and looking up at the boyar. The top of his kaftan was open. She stared at the curling fair hairs on his chest and at the little metal disc that hung from his neck, that bore the three-pronged tamga of his ancient clan. She looked up at him and smiled until, at last, he too gave a soft laugh and waved the minstrel away.

She abandoned herself to Milei the boyar that night. Everything was right. And afterwards, it seemed to her, that something more than usual had opened within her and that she, too, had been with Sadko the merchant minstrel in the palaces in the deeps of that northern sea.

Yet although Yanka was learning more every day about the world, it was two weeks later that she made her greatest discovery, and it came as a terrible shock.

For if there was one thing she had looked forward to in Novgorod, it was the chance of seeing that city’s famous prince: Alexander.

He was an extraordinary man. At the very moment Russia was cowering before the Mongols in the east, this young prince, descended from Monomakh, had won stunning victories over Russia’s foes from the west, smashing the Teutonic Knights in a battle on the ice, and halting the mighty Swedes, in an action by the River Neva that was to earn him his title – Alexander Nevsky. Yanka had already heard of this hero, even in faraway Russka; yet here, if she mentioned his name, people only shrugged. She could not understand it.

Since leaving the south, she had never heard anyone discuss the political situation and when, once or twice on the journey, she had asked Milei some naïve question, he had only laughed.

But all that changed the night that the boyar gave a feast.

It was for the men with whom he had been doing business, and she was allowed to remain in the room to serve. There were about a dozen of them – mostly large, bearded men in rich silk kaftans. Several wore huge sparkling precious stones; one was so fat it seemed astonishing to her that he could walk at all. Some were boyars, others wealthy merchants, and two, including a younger man with a thin, dark face, of the middling merchant class.

Only as she heard them talk did she realize the richness and size of Novgorod.

For they spoke of estates scores, even hundreds, of miles away in the forests and marshes of the north-east. They spoke of iron from the marshes, of great salt beds, of huge herds of reindeer that roamed by the tundra’s edge. She learned that for a month in summer, in these northern climes, there was no darkness but only a pale twilight, and that in midwinter, trappers roamed the wastes which scarcely grew light. A boyar of Novgorod might own whole tracts of land which he never even saw, and receive rents of furs from trappers who had travelled a hundred miles to their rendezvous and had never set eyes, in their lives, on a town of any kind.

Truly, this was the land of the mighty, the endless taiga.

But when she heard them speak of politics, she was truly astonished.

‘The question is, what are you going to do about the Tatars?’ Milei began. ‘Will you submit or will you fight them?’

There was a murmur round the room.

‘The situation is delicate,’ an elderly boyar remarked. ‘The present Grand Duke will not last.’

Yanka knew the last Grand Duke of Vladimir, the father of the great Prince Alexander of Novgorod, had died on his way back from a visit of submission to Mongolia. Some said the Tatars had poisoned him. That year, his brother had succeeded him and confirmed his nephew Alexander as ruler of Novgorod. But this new Grand Duke was said to be weak.

‘The real power struggle,’ another said, ‘will be between Alexander and his younger brother Andrei.’

She had heard of his brother, but knew nothing about him.

‘That’s where we shall have to take sides,’ the old boyar nodded.

And then she heard the first astounding words.

‘To some of us,’ the thin-faced young merchant remarked, ‘they are both of them traitors.’

Traitors? Prince Alexander, the valiant conqueror of the Swedes and Germans a traitor? To her amazement, no one protested.

‘It’s true,’ the fat boyar said with a sigh, ‘that Alexander is not loved. People think he likes the Tatars too much.’

‘Is it true,’ Milei asked, ‘that at his battle with the German knights he used Tatar bowmen?’

‘It’s been said, but I believe it’s untrue,’ the fat boyar said. ‘But you must remember that not only do people dislike his friendship with the Tatars, but there are those in this city, and still more in our neighbour Pskov, who still would be happy to see the Germans ruling here.’

As he said these words, there was an awkward silence.

Since being in Novgorod, Yanka had heard that, at the very time when Prince Alexander had been defeating the Swedes and Germans, the leaders of the city of Pskov had actually taken the German side.

‘When Alexander came back to Novgorod, he hung the German sympathizers here, you know,’ the fat boyar explained to Milei, ‘so even if someone felt that way now, he might not say so.’

For a moment, the silence in the room grew very deep.

‘The rumour is,’ the young merchant went on quietly, ‘that young Prince Andrei secretly prefers the Catholic Germans and Swedes. So to us small merchants, it seems there isn’t an honest Russian prince to be found.’

Could this really be? Though Yanka, in her simplicity, understood that some princes might be stronger and braver than others, it had never occurred to her that they might be playing cynical games with the lands of Rus.

The discussion went on in this way for some time, the various members of the group giving their views on the likely, and most profitable, outcomes. Finally the fat boyar turned to Milei.

‘Well now, you’ve heard that none of us can agree: so what does the boyar from Murom say?’

They looked at him with interest as he paused, taking his time. Yanka, too, waited expectantly. What would her powerful protector say?

‘Firstly,’ he said at last, ‘I understand the Catholic camp. You’re close to Sweden, Poland, and the Hansa trading towns of Germany. They’re all Catholic, and fairly strong. In the same way, the Prince of Galicia down in the south-west thinks he can hold off the Tatars with help from the Pope. But the Catholic party is wrong. Why?’ He gazed round the room. ‘Because the Tatars are much stronger and the Pope and Catholic powers are unreliable. Every time the Prince of Galicia tries to assert himself, the Tatars crush him.’

There were some murmurs of agreement. What he said about Galicia was true.

‘Novgorod is mighty,’ he went on. ‘But beside the Tatars, Novgorod is puny. They’d crush your fortifications in days if they wanted to, as they did at Vladimir, Riazan, Kiev itself. You were lucky that they happened to turn back before reaching you.’

‘The Tatars will vanish like the Avars, the Huns, the Pechenegs and the Cumans,’ someone objected.

‘No, they won’t,’ Milei replied. ‘That is exactly the mistake half our Russian princes are making. They don’t like the truth so they won’t admit it. These Tatars are not like the Cumans. They’re an empire like none other the world has seen. And,’ he paused for a moment to make his point, ‘if you oppose them, they’ll crush you like a fly upon a gong.’

‘So,’ said the young merchant sadly, ‘you think Prince Alexander is right and we have to submit to these pagans?’

Milei looked at the thin young man with calm disgust. And now there came into his eyes a look of ancient, cynical cunning that Yanka had seen before, but never known enough to understand.

‘I think,’ he said very quietly, ‘that the Tatars are the best friends that we have.’

‘Exactly,’ the fat boyar broke out. ‘I saw at once, my friend, that you were an intelligent man.’

Yanka was aghast. What could he mean?

‘Of course Alexander is right,’ Milei continued. ‘We have no choice. Mark my words, in a few more years they will rule us all. But that is not the point. Who runs the caravans from the east with whom you trade? The Tatars. Who mints coins and who keeps the steppes free of Cumans? The Tatars. Where shall our sons find profitable service and plunder? With the Tatars, just as my Alan ancestors served the Khazars before the state of Rus existed.

‘And what is the alternative? The princes of Rus? The Grand Dukes who never lifted a finger to help Riazan or Murom when the Tatars came?

‘The Tatars are strong and they love the profits of trade. Therefore I will cooperate with them.’

Yanka was white.

Before her, at that moment, rose up the vision of her mother, falling before her eyes. Then the Tatar with the missing ear. Then her brother, disappearing across the darkening steppe.

So he was for the Tatars.

She had not known. How could she, a poor Slav peasant from a little village? She had not understood that, for more than a thousand years, Sarmatian, Khazar, Viking and Turk, the men of steppes, of rivers and of seas, the powerful wanderers on the earth, had seen the land and the people of Russia only as objects for their use, to be ruled for profit.

Several of the older men were nodding wisely.

It was fortunate that, standing quietly in a corner, virtually forgotten, she was too shocked even to speak.

But at that moment, she felt more utterly defiled by the nights she had spent with Milei than she ever had, even in the depths of her despair, by those spent with her father.

It was a week later that she first suspected she might be pregnant.

She did not tell him. She said nothing to anyone. In any case, there was no one to talk to. But what should she do? At first, she did not know. She walked around Novgorod each day, trying to make up her mind.

Looking for quiet places, away from the noisy bustle of the narrow streets, she visited the outlying monasteries, and the prince’s hunting grounds to the north of the city. She came to know the place quite well.

Yet the better she came to know Great Novgorod, the less she liked it. Even in the nearby Yuriev Monastery, where she had expected to discover a peaceful haven, she found a huge, square cathedral that was so high and harsh that it seemed almost cruel.

Similarly, when she entered the church of those gentlest of saints, Boris and Gleb, what she saw was a big, rich building, housing pompous oak coffins of the nobility at one end. An old woman told her: ‘This place was built by Sadko – the merchant in the song.’ And as she gazed round at the impressive interior the old woman added approvingly, ‘Yes, he was rich.’

Day by day, Yanka was discovering that this was all that mattered in Novgorod – how much money one had.

Not only when she went to the market, but at the inn or in the streets, whoever she talked to seemed to speak of their neighbours and to value them only by their wealth. To them, she realized, I am not a person. I am only a sum of money. And as the time passed, this harsh, unyielding world began to repel her. I don’t belong here, she confessed to herself. I have no wish to remain.

It was not easy, being obliged to make love to the boyar at nights, and going out into this harsh, mercantile world by day. The image of herself that she had once conceived – as a silver birch tree, withstanding wind and snow – no longer helped her. If she closed her eyes and thought of it at nights, it seemed puny and far away. By day she became depressed and listless; at night, full of self-loathing. There was no sanctuary.

Sometimes she would visit the lesser churches. There were many of these, in wood and stone. The smaller stone churches were especially beautiful to look at. The Novgorod architects not only favoured the placing of Greek crosses over the domes, as was often done in Russia now, but they liked to alter the shape of the old Byzantine dome. Instead of the broad old cupola, like an upturned saucer, they sometimes squeezed the top up into a point, so that it resembled a helmet. And more elaborate still, they might even give the sides of this helmet dome a slight bulge so that it looked like a large, shining onion.

They were miniature versions of the cathedrals, with a main chamber above and a smaller cellar below where services could be held when it was cold. Yet though they were of stone, many of these churches had been built by boyars and merchants just like those who had visited Milei that terrible evening. Instead of the high galleries where princes could look down upon the people, they contained on their upper floors little corner chapels where the family of the founding merchant could worship and where, often as not, the merchant’s dark bearded image stared out severely, yet smugly, from a fresco on the wall.

Perhaps it was her mood, but these places, too, soon filled her with repulsion.

And still she was pregnant with the boyar’s child. What was she to do?

She had no doubt he would provide for the child. But what would become of her? Where would she live? And would she ever get a husband? Though the married women in Slav villages might take part in the careless sex that sometimes followed the end of a drunken feast night, it was shame to any man to find his young wife not a virgin. If his neighbours knew, they would probably paint his door posts as a sign of contempt. An unmarried woman with a child stood few chances.

In any case, she hated Milei now, and the child was his.

To her own surprise, she found that often she had no feeling for it. The little life inside her belonged to him and to this big city. She was carrying this burden against her will. She wanted to be rid of it, turn her back on Novgorod, and flee to another world.

‘I do not want it,’ she often murmured. ‘I am not ready for this. And it ties me to him.’

Yet while she was full of this resentment, a part of her yearned to give life; and her instincts told her that the further she went into her pregnancy, the more terrible it would seem to lose the child.

Sometimes she did not know what she wanted. She either walked about listlessly, or sat alone, staring into space.

Milei, sensing her discomfiture with him, yet not troubling to find out the cause, sent for her less.

In January she finally decided: I will get rid of it.

But how? She knew that girls sometimes ended unwanted pregnancies by jumping off a gate. Somehow she had no wish to try that. So what to do? For two days she wandered around thinking that perhaps she would, thanks to some divine intervention, slip and fall on an icy street and have a miscarriage. She went and prayed before Novgorod’s most sacred icon – Our Lord of the Sign. But though the icon had once preserved the city against the men of Suzdal, it did nothing for her. At last, in despair, she began to search around the market place. Surely there must be someone there who would know how to do such things.

She found her one afternoon, in mid-January: a hard-faced old woman with a wart on one hand, who sold dried herbs at a little stall near the river.

When she explained what she needed the old woman seemed neither surprised nor shocked, but her small, brown eyes gave her a careful, cold look.

‘How many months?’

Yanka told her.

‘Very well. But it will cost you money.’

‘How much?’

The old woman was silent for a minute.

‘Two grivnas.’

She gasped. A small fortune.

The old woman looked at her, but showed no sign of giving anything away.

‘Well?’

‘Can you be sure…?’

‘You won’t have the child.’

‘And I…’

‘You’ll come to no harm.’

That afternoon, Yanka took the bale of silk that Milei had given her and sold it for two grivnas.

‘Come back this evening, at dusk,’ the old woman told her.

As the sun fell over the frozen marshes late that afternoon, she followed as the old woman shuffled along a path that led by the southern outskirts of the city. On their left were huts; on their right, the frozen river. The sun in the west was sinking, a distant red disk going down into the snows like a sigh; downstream the palisades across the river, caught in icy shadow, looked black as a raven before the red sky.

She led Yanka to a small izba at the end of a little lane. Beside the izba was a little outhouse. She opened the door of this, and motioned Yanka in. It contained various sacks, a table covered with little pots of strange-smelling herbs, and a single bench. It was cold.

‘Sit there and wait,’ the old woman said, then vanished.

When she reappeared, she was carrying a small tub which she placed in front of Yanka. Then she went away again.

Some time passed before she came back. This time she had a large pail of hot water which she poured into the tub. A cloud of steam arose. She brought two more pails, until the tub was half full.

Then, from the table, she took several of the wooden pots and began to pour their contents into the water, stirring with a long wooden spoon. A sharp, almost acrid smell began to fill the room. Yanka had never smelled such a thing before, and it made her eyes water.

‘What is it?’

‘Never mind. Now take off your boots, pull up your shift and put your feet in the tub,’ the old woman ordered.

Yanka did so, and immediately cried out in pain. The water was scalding.

‘You’ll get used to it,’ the woman said, and pushed her feet down again. ‘Now stand up.’

As she did so, she almost toppled over. The pain in her feet was terrible.

The old woman caught her, steadied her, then pulled her shift right up, exposing her stomach.

Suddenly she felt helpless just like a little girl again, as if her father were making her lie down on the bench. The sharp fumes from the tub were almost choking her. She looked down and saw that not only her feet, but her legs were turning bright red.

‘You’re boiling me,’ she moaned.

‘More or less,’ the old woman said, and poured in some more hot water.

The minutes passed. The pain in her legs had turned to an ache, then almost to numbness. She had grown used to the smell, though her eyes were still streaming. When she thought she would fall, or faint, the old woman gave her a staff to hold. And still, from time to time, she poured in more hot water and added more of the pungent herbs, whatever they were.

A whole hour passed. Then Yanka fainted.

When she came to, she found the old woman rubbing her bright red feet and legs with a paste of some kind.

‘They’ll hurt for a while. They’ll feel scalded, but they aren’t,’ she said calmly.

‘And the baby…?’

‘Come and see me in the market, the day after tomorrow, at sundown.’

Yanka slept late the next morning.

The day after, as instructed, she walked by the little stall. The old woman glanced up at her, her hard eyes giving nothing away.

‘Well?’

Yanka nodded.

‘It worked. It’s all right.’

‘As I told you,’ the old woman said and turned away, as if she were of no further interest.

There was nothing left for her now. There was nothing in Novgorod. She tried to avoid Milei for fear that he might make her pregnant again. But what was she to do next?

Soon, while the snows were still on the ground, she knew that the boyar meant to take the road back to the east. But where should she go? She was determined not to stay in Novgorod.

Strangely, despite all that had happened, she missed her father’s familiar face. She had no wish to return to live with him, yet she would like to see him again. Without him, she was still utterly alone.

Yet on what possible terms should she return? Had the boyar some plans for her? Or did he intend to leave her at some town or roadside inn and pass on into the distance? She had no idea; and being completely unsure what she wanted herself, she did not care just then to ask him.

It was at this time that she found one place of sanctuary. She discovered it three days after her abortion.

It was a church, but not a stone one. It lay in the Potters end, on the St Sophia side of the city, and it was constructed entirely of wood. It was dedicated to St Blaise.

This saint was a typical example of how, at the level of the simple people, the Christian Church had wisely adapted itself to the customs and affections of the Slavs and Finns it converted. St Blaise was a saint who protected animals. To all intents, the saint was identical to the old Slav god Veles, protector of cattle, god of well-being and wealth.

Something about the atmosphere of the dark wooden building with its tall sloping roof made her feel at home. From the outside, it was more like a high barn, yet inside, with its low ceiling and its dark little icons and gleaming candles, it had the warmth and intimacy of an izba. True, the logs it was made of were huge. It was as solid as a fortress. But the priests, the old men trying to look busy, the stout women patiently sweeping or polishing the candlesticks that stood everywhere, all seemed friendly. As she stood, sometimes for an hour or more, in front of the icon of St Blaise, she felt that, perhaps, even in her own miserable and useless existence, there might be hope.

‘Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy,’ she would sometimes whisper to herself.

Once, as she turned from the icon, she saw a tall, dark-bearded priest who looked at her kindly and said: ‘Our Father loves all His children. Above all He loves those who have fallen and who repent.’ And Yanka, knowing that he had seen into her heart, felt tears crowd into her eyes as, with head bowed, she quickly left the church.

It was a few days later that she met a young man.

There was, at first glance, nothing exceptional about him. He was about twenty-two or three, she supposed, a little above average height, with a brown beard. His cheeks were rather high, his eyes almond-shaped and brown. She noticed his hands. They were workman’s hands, and calloused, yet there was something fine, strong yet sensitive in the well-shaped, tapering fingers. Unusually for a workman, his nails were carefully pared. He had a serious, studious look.

When she first saw him, he was standing quietly, in reverence, before an icon, but as she moved towards the door, he immediately left off his prayers, so that she smiled to herself.

He let her leave just in front of him and then caught up and fell into step beside her.

‘You seem to think you are going my way.’ She smiled a little mischievously.

‘Only to protect you. Which way do you go?’

‘Towards the Leatherworkers end.’

‘I too. My master lives there.’

There seemed no harm in him.

He was a slave, she discovered, a Mordvinian who had been taken captive after a raid when he was twelve. His name was Purgas. His master since he was fifteen had been a rich merchant here in Novgorod, who had had him taught carpentry.

They parted near the inn, but not before he had learned that she liked to visit the wooden church each afternoon.

She half expected, therefore, to see him there the next day, but she was surprised when he produced a little piece of carving he had done. It was a tiny riverboat, no bigger than his hand, carved out of birchwood, with oarsmen and a little sail.

It was so perfectly done that, for a moment, she caught her breath; for it reminded her of the carvings her brother used to do.

‘It’s for you,’ he said. And he insisted that she take it.

He walked her home again that day.

They often met after that. He was always friendly, rather quiet and, she soon observed, there was a kind of shyness about him, a reserve, that she liked. When they walked through the streets, he would pause from time to time, to point out some feature of a house that she would otherwise never have noticed: a little carving, some latticework by a window, or simply the way that the heavy logs were joined at the corners.

There were dozens of ways of joining logs, she discovered. They could be cut round or square, they could be laid this way or that, notched or slotted one into another. What to her had seemed an endless collection of stout, rather brutal wooden houses was to him a mass of elaborate puzzles to be solved and enjoyed as he passed.

‘There are more ways of building a simple izba than you would dream of,’ he told her. ‘And the master carpenters of Novgorod know them all.’

Yet though he appreciated the city and knew every building in it, she soon discovered that he missed the native forests of his childhood.

‘We lived in the woods, out by the Volga,’ he told her. And he would enumerate for her all the trees and plants of the region. When he spoke of buildings, it was with a keen professional appreciation; but when he spoke of the forests, a dreamy, faraway look came into his eyes, and she felt for him.

But the greatest surprise came the fourth day they met. She had stopped in the church in front of an icon depicting Christ holding an open book on which some words were written.

‘“Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgement,”’ Purgas said, reading the text.

She stared at him in amusement.

‘You can read too?’

‘Yes. I learned here in Novgorod.’

A Mordvinian, a mere Finn from the forests, who could read.

It was at this moment that Yanka made up her mind.

That very evening, she went to Milei the boyar and told him what she wanted.

‘Well,’ she asked, when she had finished, ‘you had what you wanted from me. Will you help me now?’

To her surprise, he smiled kindly. He even gave her some useful advice.

‘Now tell me again the name of this merchant and where he lives,’ he said. And then: ‘You don’t actually know if this young man wants…?’

She shook her head.

‘But I think he will,’ she replied.

The very next morning, Milei arranged the matter.

‘It will cost me a pretty penny though,’ he remarked with a wry smile. ‘However, the priests will approve.’ The church encouraged the liberation of slaves.

He could be kindly, Yanka realized; for the ability to be generous is a pleasant exercise for powerful men.

And so, that afternoon, she turned to Purgas outside the church and asked: ‘Would you like to marry me? My master will buy your freedom if you want.’

He looked thunderstruck.

‘I wanted to ask,’ he confessed. ‘But as a slave, I was afraid…’

‘There are conditions,’ she went on. She had thought very carefully about this; and it was Milei who had coached her, rather reluctantly, in what to do. ‘We shall leave the city and live near my village – but not as a boyar’s peasants,’ she added quickly. That was one thing she knew she did not want. ‘We shall be free. We’ll live on the Black Lands and pay rent only to the prince himself.’

Despite everything, she wanted to be near her father. If anything happened, at least he would be there. But she did not want to be in the same village; nor did she wish to have Milei as a landlord any more.

‘Go to the Black Land, then,’ Milei had told her. ‘There’s Black Land with good soil – chernozem – right next to Russka. The prince is glad to get peasants on his land. You’ll get good terms and you could do very well.’

Hearing this, to her relief Purgas laughed. There was nothing in the world he wanted more.

‘That’s settled then,’ he said.

It was: almost.

‘There is one other thing,’ she began hesitantly, and looked down at her feet.

He waited.

‘Once, a long time ago…’ she paused. ‘When I was just a girl… It was a Tatar, they came to the village.’

He stared at her, not comprehending for a moment. Then he gently drew her to him and kissed her on the forehead.

They left two days later with Milei, who allowed them to follow him in a second sled.

When at last they reached the place on the River Kliasma where the stream led down to Russka, he parted from them.

He had been distant on the journey, as a boyar might be with a pair of almost slaves. But at the moment of parting he called Yanka over to him.

His worldly, clever face was not unkind as, discreetly, he pressed two grivnas into her hand.

‘I’m sorry about the child,’ he murmured.

Then he was gone.

The day after they arrived at Dirty Place, it began to thaw.

1262

Milei the boyar waited.

Across the river, pale columns of dust rose from time to time, swirling across the field that had recently been harvested. The sky was a brilliant blue. There were a few thin, vaporous clouds in the high distance. Away over the forest, on the horizon, was a pinkish haze. It was very dry; there was a scent of wormwood; no discernible wind.

He was waiting for the Tatar.

Things had been tense all that year. At any moment, he had feared an explosion.

And this very morning, here in Russka, it had almost come. If he had not been there himself those two Moslem tax collectors would be dead, he was sure of it. Only when he had threatened the villagers that he would turn them off his land did they quieten down.

‘Not that they love me for it,’ he smiled grimly.

They were all in the big barn now, loading sacks of grain on to the tax collectors’ wagons. He still kept one ear cocked for any further sounds of trouble.

‘It’s certainly a pity these damned tax farmers are Moslem,’ he sighed.

He had been right about the Tatars: right in every respect. Everything had come to pass exactly as he had told those Novgorod merchants it would, a dozen years ago. The Tatars had taken over the north-east. True, the princes had been allowed to continue their rule; but the census and conscription had come; the northern lands were now divided up into myriads, thousands, hundreds and tens, just as the lands of Kiev had been. And there was nothing that anyone could do about it.

Even Novgorod had had to submit to being taxed: Lord Novgorod had been humbled too. Prince Alexander had ridden in with the Tatar tax collectors and helped take the Tatars’ tribute himself. He had crushed the local people when they resisted.

Milei smiled. What a cunning fellow this Alexander was! He had discovered how to get the Tatars on his side; he’d used them to push aside his uncle and his brother until, now, he was the greatest prince in all the Russian lands. He even wore an oriental helmet, given him by the Tatar Khan.

The Russian people might not like him, yet his policy was not only cunning, it was also wise. The Russians alone could not defeat the Tatars. ‘Look what happened to his brother Andrei,’ he would remind people who called Alexander a traitor. ‘He tried to fight the Tatars: so they smashed him and looted half the towns in Suzdalia.’ That had been ten years ago and it was still remembered.

And what if Russians looked for help from outside?

‘Consider, in that case, that fool the Prince of Galicia,’ he would urge. The prince in the south-west, who had been flirting with the Pope, had been even more foolish than Milei had predicted. First, he had received a crown from the primate. Then he had looked for allies. Who should he choose but those pagan Lithuanian tribes of the north, who were expanding into the western Russian lands to avoid the Teutonic Knights? The Lithuanian chief had, for a few years, become a Roman Catholic and together he and the Prince of Galicia had challenged the Tatars.

And the result of it all?

The Tatars thrashed Galicia and made them attack the Lithuanians. Then they made the Prince of Galicia take down all his fortifications. The western Catholic powers, as usual, did nothing; the Lithuanian king went back to being a pagan. And that summer, he had heard, the pagan Lithuanian had attacked Galicia, which was now quite defenceless.

‘Poor Galicia’s finished. If Alexander had tried anything like that,’ he always said, ‘the Tatars would have taken one half of his lands, and the Germans would have taken the other.’

Alexander was wise. But, oh, he was subtle, too!

Tatar policy was never to hurt the Church. And Alexander, who served the Tatars, had made the Metropolitan Cyril a close friend.

‘And bless me, now he’s got every priest and monk in the land on his side. The people hate Alexander, yet every time they go to church, they hear the priests say he’s a national hero. Those priests are even calling him Alexander Nevsky now, as though that skirmish with the Swedes on the River Neva back in his youth had saved all Russia.’

The political astuteness of this propaganda amused the boyar hugely.

Yes, he had been right about the Tatars. They were the masters and only a fool would refuse to work with them. He, Milei, had been working with the Tatars and with Alexander Nevsky for more than a decade.

He had also used intrigue.

When Alexander’s brother was briefly on the throne of Vladimir, by incredible good luck, a foolish boyar had sent him a letter that seemed to implicate the prince in intrigues against the Tatars. Milei had at once sent it to Alexander. A year later, Alexander had been on the throne in his brother’s place, and word came to Milei that he was in favour with the new ruler and with the Tatars. Since then, many modest favours had come his way.

Recently, it had to be admitted, things had been more difficult.

When Batu Khan had ruled in Sarai, Milei had not found it difficult to cooperate. But at present there was a new Khan in Sarai who had become a Moslem.

It was not that this new Khan oppressed the Russian Church: he did not. But he had decided to allow Moslem merchants to farm the taxes from the Suzdalian lands, and these men had been exploiting their situation ruthlessly. A number of unfortunates who could not meet all the tax demands had been taken into slavery and all over the region, from Vladimir to Murom, came news of revolts.

For once Milei sympathized with the people. The whole affair had been badly handled. But business was business. ‘You will see to it that the estates near Murom pay all that is demanded,’ he instructed his sons. ‘I shall go to keep an eye on Russka.’

Which was what he had been doing that morning.

He had another reason, however, for being in Russka that late July day. For with luck, today, he was to complete the biggest coup of his career. And one that would change the character of Russka for ever. When this crowning deal was done, he would hand over his affairs to his sons. He was getting old.

Anxiously Milei waited for the Tatar.

He rode in towards the evening: a quiet man in early middle age. One could tell at once from his dress and the magnificent horse he rode that he was rich and of some importance; he came alone though, without any escort, and with just a single Mongol bow and a lasso slung on his horse behind him. He was dressed in a kaftan of dark red silk and wore a wide-brimmed Chinese hat. Only one item of his dress was unexpected. Around his neck, on a silver chain, hung a little silver cross.

For Peter the Tatar was a Christian.

In fact, it was not so surprising. The Mongol state had no official religion. In their huge advance from Mongolia and across the Eurasian plain, the Mongols had encountered many powerful religions, from Buddhism in the east to Islam and Catholicism in the west.

One such faith was that of the ancient Christian Church called Nestorian which, cut off by theological disputes from the west, had expanded from its base in Persia six centuries before and set up communities as far away as China. And it was this half-forgotten Nestorian Church which had given rise to the great legend in medieval Europe: that somewhere to the east there lay a fabulous land, ruled by a mighty Christian ruler – a giant of a man.

This was the legend of Prester John.

As a boy, Milei had believed it. But in fact this legendary empire of Prester John was simply an ancient community that was perfectly familiar to the peoples of the orient. Even the son of the great Baru Khan himself had become a Nestorian Christian.

And in Russia, too, a few Tatars had taken the Orthodox Christian faith, just as some others further east had become Moslems. There was a Russian bishop at Sarai, and it was well known that the entire family of the senior Tatar official in the northern city of Rostov to the north were all Christian. Even so, it had been a surprise when, a year before, Milei had encountered the new Tatar official in Murom and found that the Baskak too had converted to orthodoxy a few years before.

The boyar had had some dealings with this Baskak, and had found him a shrewd but quiet fellow.

‘The question is,’ he remarked to his sons, ‘how can we turn this Christian Tatar to our advantage?’

For some months he had assiduously courted Peter. He had discovered quite a lot about him. Peter had taken the Orthodox faith, Milei discovered, at the suggestion of the official in Rostov.

‘Apparently there is a small group of these officials who have converted. They’re mostly below the top grades in the Khan’s service but not without influence; and the Tatar authorities think it is good that some of their people follow the religion of the country where they operate. So I think this fellow could be useful,’ he announced to his family.

The first idea had crystallized in his mind when he discovered that the Tatar had an unmarried daughter.

His own eldest son was married, with two daughters so far. His younger son, David, a handsome boy of nineteen, was not.

‘What about it?’ he asked the boy. ‘I’ve seen the girl. She’s not bad-looking. And this Baskak Peter seems to have a considerable fortune. They say he has some good connections too.’

There had been a few marriages between Russian princes and Tatar princesses already.

‘Our family has married everything from Saxon to Cuman,’ Milei added with a grin. ‘So why not a Tatar this time?’

There was another consideration too. Milei had heard talk of a future Tatar campaign in the Caucasus Mountains in the southeast.

‘They intend to attack the territory of Azerbaidjan down there,’ he told the boy. ‘I know you’re keen to go on a raid like that, and the pickings could be huge. It’s got to help you get a good position if you’re connected with a Tatar.’

The boy had no objection; and to Milei’s surprise, the Tatar Peter was agreeable as well. The marriage had taken place. The Tatar had been generous. Things were looking up.

But nothing, nothing in the world, had prepared Milei for what came next. For two months before, at the start of summer, Peter had approached him and announced: ‘It is my intention to endow a small religious house, a church and some monks. Can you advise me where I could find a good site?’ A monastery! Even he had not realized the Tatar was so rich, nor that he took his religion so seriously.

‘Give me two weeks,’ he had said. ‘I may have just the place for you.’ Surely it was a gift from heaven. He calculated swiftly and worked feverishly.

This was just what he needed for Russka.

Over the years, he had done what he could to build the place up, but it had been difficult. There was a simple wooden church there now; the population had doubled. But the troubles with the Tatars in the last ten years had made it harder than ever to find reliable settlers, and he had not been especially successful. The presence of a monastery would bring people to the place and, sooner or later, trade.

He had acquired much of the vast land – the uncultivated forest – in the area and derived some income from the furs and honey in that. His first thought had been to sell Peter some of this.

‘But it won’t do,’ he said to David. ‘He tells me he wants good land, and the only good land at Russka is the chernozem on the east bank.’

It was then that Milei the boyar had his stroke of genius. A messenger was sent hurriedly to Alexander Nevsky himself. The monastery’s needs were explained, so were Milei’s, and a dutiful reminder of past services to Alexander’s cause was added.

The reply came back. His request was granted, though with one proviso. ‘The Grand Prince has other matters to think about. Ask no more,’ the message had added. It was enough.

‘You see,’ Milei told David, ‘for a very favourable price, he’ll sell me a tract of his chernozem land just north of Dirty Place, and that tract is twice the size of what we have at Russka.’ He rubbed his hands. ‘If I can sell the Tatar my land at a good price for his monastery, then I’ll receive enough to buy what the Grand Prince is offering me without spending my own money at all!’

The beauty of the thing made him smile with an almost artistic pleasure.

With what joy, therefore, did he now welcome the Christian Tatar, and lead him to his house.

‘I’ll show you the whole place in the morning,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll be pleased.’

He told him about the trouble with the villagers.

‘Of course they know nothing about our business,’ he joked. ‘So they’re probably terrified to see you.’

Peter nodded slowly but did not smile.

‘There have been serious riots in Suzdal and other towns,’ the Tatar warned. ‘Murom is still quiet, and I’ve left strict instructions with the guards, but I must go back tomorrow in case there’s trouble. The Khan will be furious.’

‘Nevsky will sort it out. The Khan trusts him,’ Milei said confidently.

‘The Khan trusts no one, and no one is safe,’ Peter told him coldly.

His words sent a chill through the evening and made Milei more glad than ever that he had made family alliance with these harsh rulers.

For dinner they had fresh fish from the river, and sweetmeats, and mead. He did what he could to lighten the mood.

The next morning, they went out early and inspected the land. Milei showed him the rich chernozem on the eastern bank with pride. The Tatar walked all round the little village and saw that Milei had, indeed, offered him the best land.

‘It’s a good site for a monastery,’ he agreed. ‘I shall endow a small church and perhaps half a dozen monks to begin with. But it will grow.’

Milei nodded.

‘Does that mean you want to buy it?’ he asked with a smile.

‘Your price?’

Milei named it.

It sounded a little expensive, but not unreasonable. Milei was wise enough not to be obviously greedy.

‘Very well,’ Peter agreed. And to Milei’s delight he produced a bag of gold coins and paid him there and then.

‘Now it is mine,’ the Tatar said.

‘It is yours.’

Peter began to get on his horse.

‘Will you not stay?’

The Tatar shook his head.

‘With these troubles… I want to be back in Murom tomorrow.’

Milei nodded.

‘All the same,’ he said, hardly pausing to think about it, ‘I should draw up a deed for the property.’

It seemed such an obvious thing to say that he was completely taken aback by what came next.

‘A deed? What is that?’

Milei opened his mouth to speak, then kept silent.

The Tatar looked at him curiously.

‘A deed?’

Was it possible that this official did not know that in the land of Rus all property was held by deed?

Suddenly, it dawned on Milei that there was no particular reason why he should.

For the entire Mongol apparatus, thorough, merciless as it was, was also completely self-contained. They took their census – which no Russian ruler had ever done – they divided up the land by tens and hundreds, and they taxed. But there it ended. Their system of government was efficient, but it ran entirely parallel to the continuing pattern of Russian life. This intelligent Tatar, this Christian whose daughter had married a Russian, was still entirely a stranger in this country. He probably had no interest in being anything else. He knew nothing of Russian land transactions and law.

He had just paid for the land – but without a deed, it was not his.

I have to give him the land, Milei thought quickly. And if he ever finds out that I should have given him a deed… Yet, he hesitated. Was there something more to be squeezed from this transaction? He would have to think about it. When in doubt, delay.

‘Go back to Murom,’ he said with a warm smile. ‘We’ll talk business again when I return there.’

Peter started off.

‘Be firm with these damned people,’ Milei called after him, then turned back to the village, with his bag of gold.

In Dirty Place, too, there had nearly been a killing that morning.

Only Yanka had prevented it.

The two Moslem merchants had brought a dozen men and three large carts with them. They were not in the best of tempers when they arrived.

The Mongol administration had allowed them to collect what they could in return for a fixed amount they were to remit to the Khan. They had expected to make a profit but at present they were showing a loss.

Their visit to Russka the day before had been unsatisfactory. Milei the boyar had thought his presence had stopped the villagers attacking the tax gatherers. In fact, knowing his Tatar connections, the merchants had been careful to make quite reasonable demands at Russka. Now they needed to make up for their leniency.

The insignificant little community of free peasants at Dirty Place was somewhere to start.

‘We’ll fleece this village,’ they agreed as they approached.

And that, all morning, is what they did.

The hamlet had grown to fifteen households now and had the status of a volost – a commune. In recent years the volost had become modestly prosperous; and this was thanks to the man whom the households had elected as their elder: Purgas, the husband of Yanka.

Ever since they married, the modest carpenter whose freedom she had arranged had never ceased to surprise her. The first surprise had been after they had built their izba at Dirty Place and she had hung a little icon in the corner; for that very day he had quietly gone to the corner and hung a little chaplet of birch leaves just above it.

‘Why do you do that?’ she asked, puzzled. ‘That is what the pagans do.’

He had looked a little awkward for a moment and then confessed: ‘I am not a Christian.’

‘But we were married by a priest.’

It had been done in Novgorod just before they left.

He smiled gently.

‘It didn’t seem to matter.’

She had never thought to ask him if he was a Christian. Hadn’t they met in a church?

‘I followed you in,’ he confessed.

‘You should have told me,’ she said angrily.

‘I was afraid. I didn’t want to lose you,’ he mumbled.

She thought of her own deception of him. So they had both lied for fear of losing the other’s love. It was a bond.

‘You must become a Christian now,’ she told him. But to her surprise he refused.

‘Our children can be Christian, but leave me to my own ways,’ he said. ‘In Novgorod, I lived amongst the Christians long enough,’ he added with some feeling.

She understood. His escape back to the countryside with her was a return, for him, to his origins. And indeed, as she watched him find his place in the little community on the Black Lands, she saw a strange transformation occur.

At times, he seemed almost like a creature of the forest. He would stand, quite motionless, with his spear on the river bank and then, it seemed, idly dip it in the stream and come up with a fish where she, lying on the bank and staring down, had seen nothing. He would take dried fungi from a birch tree and rub it in his hands for only seconds before a little flame sprang, as it were, from the palms of his hands. He would find dried pine roots that would burn without crackling, and all manner of medicinal roots.

He got drunk rather easily, but always fell asleep then. The only cause of friction between them was when he insisted she allow him to eat hare, which was forbidden by the Church.

‘I worship the god Tchampas,’ he would say. ‘He is not as great as your god, but he resides in heaven and all the gods of the earth are under him.’

He loved the forest, and he loved the river, in a way that she realized she could not. He would touch a tree and to him it was a special being. She remembered how she had once felt about the silver birch tree, and how she had tried to assume its character. And he feels like that about everything, she mused. It was an ancient religion, this fetish cult of the northern forests, and she wisely did not try to dissuade him from it any more.

She took their children over to Russka to the wooden church there, and he did not object. This made her happy.

Her father had taken another wife. She was glad. Shortly after they had arrived at Dirty Place he had come to see them and, taking her aside, had pressed into her hand the bag of silver coins he had brought with him from the south. ‘I don’t think Kiy is ever coming back,’ he said. ‘So it’s all for you.’ She understood it was his way of making amends, and since then they had been friends.

She had showed the coins to Purgas and he had inspected them carefully. Some, he told her, came from Constantinople and were very old. Some were Russian, from the time of Monomakh. But some puzzled him.

‘The writing here seems Slav,’ he told her, ‘but what can this be?’ And he pointed to a strange, oriental-looking script. ‘I think I have seen it on an icon,’ he said.

It was Hebrew. For the coins came from Poland and bore inscriptions both in Slavic and in Hebrew, thanks to the ancient Khazar community there.

They hid them under the floor. Who knew when they might be needed?

Purgas was not only a hunter; he worked hard on their land, and it was not long before they were living well. She had nothing to complain of.

Only one thing about her husband irritated Yanka. It was the same habit of mind that the elder had told her about when she first came to Russka; but her Mordvinian husband seemed to have it to a greater degree. He would not plan for the future. ‘None but crows fly straight,’ he would remind her if she pushed him for some decision. To him, each season, each day, was there to be lived through, cautiously, as if it might be one’s last.

Once, after they had been arguing over some matter of this kind, he went off into the forest and returned several hours later with a deer he had killed. ‘If he made plans for next week,’ he gently told her, ‘they were in vain.’

‘But I’m not an animal,’ she protested impatiently. To which he only smiled and shrugged.

She loved him, all the same. He gave her three children and great happiness. The villagers respected him.

And at least once a year the steward of Milei the boyar approached them with more and more tempting offers from the boyar to come as his tenants to Russka. Which they always refused. ‘We’re Black People,’ she said simply. ‘We’re our own master here.’

As the years passed, she had grown stout. Her face had filled out. And she was content.

Yet even now, she could still be amazed by her husband. What, for instance, had come over him the previous evening?

For the night before, learning what had happened with the tax gatherers at Russka, the foolish men of the hamlet had wanted to ambush and kill them. And Purgas was in favour.

News of the trouble in the northern towns had come downriver a few days before. The free peasants of the hamlet were excited.

‘You’re mad,’ she told them. ‘Russka didn’t revolt.’

‘Because the boyar’s in league with the Tatars,’ one of the men said.

‘But they’ll come and kill us all.’

They didn’t believe her.

‘We’re not afraid,’ the young men claimed.

‘When I was a boy, beyond the Volga,’ Purgas remarked, ‘a young fellow wasn’t ready to marry until he’d killed a man. That was the custom among the real Mordvinians.’

‘You foolish pagan,’ she shouted. ‘You don’t understand.’

And she outlined to them the might, the incredible might of the empire on whose edge they lay.

‘They would destroy us all,’ she told them. ‘They would never give up.’

‘So,’ Purgas quietly said, ‘you’re on the boyar’s side now.’

She opened her mouth. Then closed it. What could she say? She remembered the evening at the inn and how Milei’s words had shocked her. In a way, they still did; yet now that she was older, now that she had seen the Tatars take over the north too, she had to admit he had been right. ‘Hide whatever you can,’ she told them, ‘pay up but make them think they’ve ruined you. Otherwise, we’ll be destroyed.’

Eventually, she won. Even Purgas promised to do as she asked. Then the preparations began.

That day, it had gone as she had predicted. The tax farmers had arrived soon after dawn, thinking to catch the hamlet unawares. They had quickly emptied half the grain store and taken most of the livestock they could find; but before dawn, Purgas and the men had hidden the rest in the marshes which the visitors did not know how to penetrate. By early morning, they were already preparing to move on.

While they took the grain, Yanka had gone for a walk. Without especially thinking where she was going, she drifted along the path towards Russka. Perhaps I’ll go and see Father, she thought.

Though it was still early, the sun was already getting warm. The path took her by a small opening in the trees where there were some little mounds, old Viatichi tombs, and a pleasant view towards Russka. It was very quiet. And it was just as she came to this place that she stopped, transfixed.

Surely it must be a vision.

Peter the Tatar was pleased with his day. The setting for the monastery was just what he wanted. It was time he made his peace with God. ‘A man without religion has no peace,’ the official in Rostov had urged him. It was true.

The Khan at Sarai, after all, was now a Moslem. Why, even the new Great Khan himself had abandoned the old sky worship and shaman cults of Genghis. And the new supreme head, Kubla Khan, had taken the Buddhist religion of the Chinese he ruled.

That all men should bow before the Great Khan, Peter had no doubt. But with the passing of the years, and the shameful power struggles and intrigues amongst the Golden Kin for the greatest offices, Peter’s bright passion for the empires of men had dimmed. Even the childhood memory of Genghis himself, the ruler of the world at his royal hunt, now seemed more like a memory of a bygone world and less like a vision of heaven.

There was one God in heaven, one lord upon earth.

Perhaps, he considered, if I had been more successful, if Batu Khan had not died and I had become a general, I might yet hunger for earthly things.

His career was over, though. He would keep his position, but go no higher. He accepted it. Thanks to his sister, while Batu and her son lived, he had done well and had amassed a splendid fortune.

He missed the steppe. Often, just before sleeping, he would think of its huge open spaces, and the swaying grasses.

Two years before, he had gone across the steppe to Sarai. It was there, from some Alans, that he had bought the magnificent grey stallion he now rode, with the black mane and stripe down its back. It was bred below the Caucasus Mountains, of the noble breed they called hoarfrost.

‘But that, I think, may be the last time I shall see Sarai,’ he said sadly to his wife. An instinct told him he would pass the rest of his days in Russia.

He had paused at the edge of the woods for a last look back at his new acquisition, dismounting and walking over to the highest of the little mounds by the path there, for a better view.

His face softened as he gazed at the place.

Idly, he brushed away a fly that had decided to settle on the place where his ear had once been. Then he frowned.

Something was bothering his horse.

Afterwards, she could never explain to herself how it was that the madness had seized her: for madness it certainly was, even to think of such a thing.

And yet, it was as if she could not have done anything else. She had always sworn she would. Though she had had many other things to think about in recent years, deep down that promise to herself had remained, and hardened into a certainty. One day, she knew, I shall see him, and my chance will come.

Now, quite suddenly, there he was, standing on a mound not fifteen paces from her. Even from behind, she recognized him – the Tatar with the missing ear!

He was alone. She looked up and down the path. No one was coming.

What brought him here? She supposed he must have come to see the tax gatherers, who were about to leave. Whatever the reason, providence had given him to her, alone and unguarded. Madness it was; but she knew, with absolute clarity, that she would never have another chance like this again.

Before her, her mother’s face suddenly appeared.

She crept forward. His horse was standing by a tree. On its back was a bow, and a quiver of arrows. Carefully she reached up, took the bow and a single arrow, laying the arrow across the bow and feeling the pull. How hard it was. She could hardly bend it. Her heart was pounding, but she began to move towards him.

The horse stirred and snorted angrily.

And now the Tatar turned.

It was him. There was the scar, running to the missing ear. She remembered his face as if she had seen him only yesterday. He looked amazed and began to raise his hand. He had no idea who she was.

She took a deep breath and pulled on the bow. She pulled with all her strength, her face puckering up as though in acute pain. He was coming towards her. She pulled, then released.

‘Ah.’

It was her own outburst of breath that she heard. Then she heard his cry.

He was still coming towards her. His hand was flailing wildly. She began to back away towards his horse. He was on his knees now. The arrow was sticking through him, in the middle of his stomach.

What was that noise? He was hissing something at her. She was trembling violently.

He stayed where he was, his hands on the arrow, tugging at it. Then she saw his face go very white, and he fell sideways. And now the thought came to her. It came with huge force, like a soundless thunderclap of fear in a nightmare: what could she possibly do now?

She looked around her again, and realized with sickening terror that someone was approaching along the path. If they will only kill me, and not my family, she prayed, as she waited, trembling, to face them.

It was Purgas. He took in everything with one glance, then gazed at her in astonishment.

She pointed to the Tatar, and Purgas examined him.

‘He’s not yet dead,’ he said calmly. Then, quietly, he undid his belt and throttled the Tatar.

For a few seconds, for the last time, Mengu, now called Peter, saw before him, and thought he smelt, the waving grasses of the steppe.

‘I thought you told us not to kill the Tatars,’ Purgas said with a soft chuckle, as he looked up at Yanka. ‘You knew him?’

She nodded.

‘Was this the one…?’

He knew a Tatar had killed her mother, but she had almost forgotten that she had told him a Tatar raped her as well. Whichever he meant, she nodded.

He looked around.

‘We can’t leave him here,’ he remarked.

‘They’ll kill us,’ she whispered.

‘I don’t think so. The tax gatherers have gone. That’s why I was going over to Russka. There’s no one to know.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘First,’ he said sadly, ‘we’ll have to kill this horse. And that,’ he glanced down at the dead man with disgust, ‘is a pity.’

Yanka never admired her husband’s skill more than on that day.

He seemed to know exactly what to do, and he moved with such speed.

First he placed the Tatar on the splendid horse. Then, speaking softly to the animal and calming it, he led the way deep into the marshes. There, in a deserted and hidden spot he dug a trench; and then, tethering the horse firmly so that its head was over the trench, he neatly slit open its windpipe. Completely taken by surprise, the horse started violently, tried to break away, and then crashed to its knees. When Purgas had gathered all the blood in the trench, he slit the Tatar’s throat too, and carefully drained the body.

An hour later, he had deftly cut up both horse and man into manageable pieces and these he began to burn on a fire. He also burned all the Tatar’s equipment except his cloak and lasso.

By noon, there was nothing left but a heap of burned bones, the skull of the Tatar, which for some reason he had not burned, and a heap of ashes which he pushed back into the trench as he filled it in. When he had done, and scattered debris on the ground, even if someone had ever found the place, they would never have known that he had dug there.

‘Now,’ he told her, ‘we need a tree. And I know of one quite near.’

About two hundred yards away he showed her a mighty oak. He pointed to a place, high up in its trunk, where there was a hole.

‘There used to be a bee-hive up there once,’ he told her. ‘I found it last year. It’s empty now, but below it there’s a deep hole hidden in the trunk. Now help me bring the bones here.’

Carrying them in the heavy cloak, in several journeys they brought the bones to the foot of the tree.

‘Now hand me the lasso,’ he said. And moments later he was high up in the branches by the opening in the tree. Letting down the rope he told her to tie the cloak to it, and one bundle at a time he dropped them down into the hollow. In half an hour they had vanished.

Then he burned the cloak and the lasso and scattered the ashes.

‘The Tatars will look in the river and in the ground,’ he said. ‘But they’ll never look up in the trees.’

‘But what about his head?’ she asked, pointing to the familiar face with its missing ear which was lying on the ground and gazing blankly up at her.

He smiled.

‘I have another plan for that.’

It was two more weeks before Milei the boyar returned from Russka to Murom. When he got there, he found the city much disturbed. There had been numerous refusals to pay taxes in the villages; several of the Moslem tax farmers had been attacked. The Tatar authorities were furious and retribution was expected. The Grand Duke Alexander Nevsky was said to be preparing to travel to the Khan to ask for leniency. Times were black.

And Peter the Baskak had disappeared.

Indeed, the very day Milei arrived a centurion came to ask him when he had last seen him.

‘He was on his way directly to Murom,’ he assured the soldier.

The investigation that followed was thorough. All the villages between Russka and Murom were visited and questioned. Since Russka was the place he was last seen, a search was made and the river downstream was dragged; but nothing was found. By late autumn, suspicion finally centred on a village near the Oka where there had been rioting; but there was no proof that Peter had even been there. It seemed that he had simply vanished from the face of the earth.

It was on the fourth day after his return that Milei told his great lie.

He had been thinking about it ever since he reached Murom. Indeed he guessed that, sooner or later, suspicion might even fall on him for the Tatar’s death. But since he could prove that he had spent his time innocently at the village, he felt bold enough to take a chance.

And he could not resist it.

So when Peter’s son came to him and politely requested to know whether his father had bought the land from him for the monastery, Milei shook his head.

‘Alas, no. He did not like the place. A pity,’ he added, his eyes staring blandly at the young man. ‘I should have been glad if he had.’

‘So he gave you no money?’

Milei shook his head.

‘None.’

They could prove nothing. If ever they found the Tatar’s body, they could scarcely expect to find any money left on him. And, by that stroke of incredible good fortune, there were no deeds to the land for anyone to find!

Peter’s son had left. Short of calling him a liar, there was nothing the young Tatar could say.

The next week, using money from an ostensible sale of some land near Murom, Milei bought in the extra chernozem at Russka from the Grand Prince.

Fortune had smiled on him, indeed.

1263

How strange, how secret, are the ways of God.

In the spring of the next year, before the snows melted, Milei the boyar went to his estate at Russka.

From the front of his house, as he looked out, the first thing he saw was the rich land across the river. And now it was all his, stretching from the river out to the north of Dirty Place for several miles.

He had come early to the village because he had great plans for its improvement.

He had bought a number of slaves from the Moslem tax farmers. Some of them, admittedly, had been made slaves illegally for failing to pay enough taxes. But no one was likely to trouble about that here. And they were good Slavs, sound peasants, as well – just what he had always needed.

They were due to arrive at Russka in early summer.

There were settlers, too. He was going to let some of the new land and had managed to find three families, who had been ruined by the new taxes and were glad to get good new land on easy terms.

‘All in all, the Tatars have been good for me,’ he chuckled to himself.

On the first Sunday of April, the snow began to melt. Each day the sky was bright blue, the sun warm. Soon great banks of grey slush were forming beside little brown rivulets as the land began to appear. On the river, discoloured patches of brown and green could be seen where the ice was getting thin. On the Wednesday of that week, as he gazed out from the doorway, he could see little black bumps of rich earth peeping through the snow on the river’s eastern side.

And then, as he stepped over the threshold, Milei the boyar had an extraordinary sensation. It was as if someone had stabbed him in the heart.

He stopped and put his hand to his chest. Surely his heart was not giving out. He was not so old. He took a deep breath, but felt no pain: no difficulty in breathing. He looked at his hands for some tell-tale sign of blue in the fingertips, but there was none.

He walked out carefully, pulling his fur coat tightly about him, although the sun was warm. Nothing more happened. He walked round the village and went to see the steward. The fellow was about to cross the river, and so Milei decided to go with him. They went across in a little dug-out and got out onto the small jetty opposite.

Then something stranger still occurred. As Milei stepped on to the land of the east bank, his feet suddenly felt as if they were on fire. He took two more steps and cried out with pain.

‘What is it, lord?’ The old steward looked at him with astonishment.

Milei was staring down with horror. ‘My feet… when I stepped here… Do your feet hurt?’

‘No, lord.’

He tried to take another step, but the pain was so great he could not. ‘We’re going back,’ he mumbled; and the puzzled steward had to row him across the river again.

Greatly disconcerted, the boyar went back to his house. There he inspected his feet. They were just as normal.

Later that day, as he came out again and glanced across the river, the terrible pain struck him in the chest once more like a blow, so that his knees almost buckled and he had to catch the frame of the door to stop himself falling.

The same thing happened again the next day. And the next. He could not cross his own threshold; and he could not set foot on the land opposite the river.

Then he thought he understood.

‘It’s that damned Tatar,’ he murmured. ‘He’s returned to plague me.’

In fact, he was more accurate than he knew.

For it never occurred to him that one starless night the previous autumn, just after he had gone back to Murom, Purgas the Mordvinian had stolen by his empty house and, with consummate skill, ripped up the threshold outside and buried, in two feet of earth, the head of Peter the Tatar right under his doorway.

Even Yanka never knew her husband had done this.

But when he had finished, had it been possible to see his expression in the darkness, a look of strange, almost diabolical satisfaction would have been discerned on the Mordvinian’s face. ‘If they ever find this, it is you, boyar, they will accuse of murder,’ he whispered, ‘lover of my wife.’

He had always guessed. Now he and the boyar were even.

Yet, though Milei knew nothing of the presence of Peter, the excruciating pains grew worse. He could hardly bear to leave his house now. I could take over the steward’s house for the time being, he thought. But how could he explain that? I’ll say the ants or the mice have invaded mine. Yet it sounded a poor excuse. Besides, what was the satisfaction of being here when he could not even set foot on his best land? I shall have to leave Russka, he decided.

The next day, he called for his horse in the morning and, swinging himself up into the saddle, told the steward: ‘I’ll be back in the summer.’

Yet he had not gone half a mile from the village when his horse quite suddenly shied and threw him so that, landing on some roots, he thought for a moment he had broken his leg. That was nothing to his astonishment though, when the animal, looking to its left, gave a piercing whinny of fear, and bolted in the other direction.

He stared at the place which had so startled his horse. And there, amongst the trees, he saw it. It was a magnificent animal: a stallion of unnatural size: a grey, with a black mane and a black stripe down its back. It came through the trees towards him and galloped straight across the path after his own mount. As it went by, its hoofs made no sound.

Slowly Milei picked himself up. He crossed himself. Then he limped back into the village. For now he understood.

As soon as he was back, he called the surprised steward to his house, and also the old priest from the little church.

‘I have decided,’ he told them, ‘to make a great gift to the glory of God. I am going to found a monastery on my old land across the river.’

‘What has brought about this decision?’ the priest asked. He had not considered Milei capable of such a selfless act.

‘I had a vision,’ the boyar replied drily, though with truth.

‘The Lord be praised,’ the old man cried. Truly, how strange and secret were the ways of God.

Milei nodded, then, apparently lost in meditation, he walked out through the door of his house to look at the land he had just given away.

He returned a moment later, smiling as if with relief, and at once took the priest across the river and conducted him round the site.

And so it was, in the year 1263, that the little monastery at Russka was founded.

It was dedicated to St Peter and St Paul.

One other event of significance occurred in that year.

In order to beg the Tatar Khan to be lenient with the rebellious tax-payers of Russia, the Great Prince Alexander Nevsky had set out across the steppe to visit the Horde.

‘He is not well,’ a visiting boyar from Vladimir told Milei. ‘If the Tatars don’t kill him, the long journey may.’

‘I hope not,’ Milei answered. ‘His policy may have been unpopular with the people, but it has been wise.’

‘It will be continued,’ the other assured him. ‘But he was very distressed to go at such a time. His youngest son is only three and he wanted to see him through until he was grown.’

‘Ah, yes, Daniel is the little boy, isn’t he?’ Milei knew nothing about this child beyond his name. ‘I wonder what his inheritance will be.’

‘They say,’ the boyar from Vladimir told him, ‘that Alexander has instructed his family to give him Moscow when he is older.’

‘Moscow! That miserable town!’

‘It’s not much of a place,’ the other agreed, ‘though its position isn’t bad.’

Moscow. Milei shook his head. Whatever talents this infant prince might have, he couldn’t imagine he’d ever make much of a paltry little town like that.