Russka

by Edward Rutherfurd

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

  That was easy.

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

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

  ‘As you like,’ Karp had obligingly replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘It is, Gosudar.’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Oh, yes, lord.’

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

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

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

  Boris nodded.

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

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

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

  Then Ivan gave him a slight nod.

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

  Boris nodded again. He understood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  A little sadly, Boris withdrew.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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