Russka

by Edward Rutherfurd

  ‘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 th
inks 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.