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.’
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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 w
ill 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.
On the west, north and south
side, the boundary shall be as far
as the axe, the plough
and the scythe have gone.
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.’
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