There are some problems of historical detail in Mitchison's novel. Given the tale of Scyles, for instance, it seems unlikely that Scythian chiefs and shamans could have moved between the two worlds with such immunity. But what she got right, by the sheer force of her imperious, empathetic imagination, was the adaptability of these Iranian peoples and their talent for assimilating to a different culture without any sense of surrender to 'civilisation'.
The Sarmatians — in many ways closer to Mitchison's characters than the Scythians - were especially creative with this talent. In the Bosporan Kingdom, Sarmatians became the guiding caste of a brilliant, wealthy, culturally hybrid empire which at its widest reached from the Dnieper estuary round to Colchis, in the southeastern comer of the Black Sea. Many centuries later, when the Sarmarians were driven out of the Pontic Steppe and when their separated nations found their way into central and western Europe, they used this innovative gift again. They entered the agrarian societies on the fringes of the disintegrating Roman Empire and grafted into their consciousness a new image of social leadership: the mounted knight in armour.
Nothing remains of the Scythians but their tombs and the memory of their nomad 'otherness', indelibly written into European consciousness by Herodotus and his successors. The Sarmarians, by contrast, survive unrecognised. This is something that scholarship has only recently begun to investigate: a fable which is turning out to contain elements of fact. Physically, there is one place where the Sarmarians are still present; the Ossetians of the Caucasus, descendants of the Alan group of Sarmatian tribes, have kept their Indo-Iranian speech and traditions. And culturally the Sarmarians survive in much of what we know about or have inherited from the Middle Ages of Western Europe. They hide in the decorative style which is misleadingly called 'Gothic'. They ride in disguise as the class of mailed horsemen who hold land and whose manner of living is called 'chivalrous'. To the extent that we have not yet completely escaped from that notion of aristocracy, the Sarmarians are among us.
We are on our way to the Bosporan Kingdom, by car to Panticapaeum. As a car-load, we resemble some overcomplicated ethnic joke. I sit in the back, the middle-aged Brit. Beside me is Lara, a young Russian expert on Caucasian ceramics, who believes in culture and science. In the passenger seat, resting his suppurating leg in bandages, is Sasha, a Cossack truck-driver who was injured in a road crash and is practising to be a tourism entrepreneur. The wheel is held by Omyk, who owns the car: a Lada. He is a Rostov taxi-driver, an Armenian for whom nothing is surprising and nobody is immune to persuasion. When we find a petrol queue, Omyk goes straight to the front of it and shows the 'administrator' his card as a Veteran of the Great Patriotic War. Omyk was not even born when the Great Patriotic War ended; this is his father-in-law's card, with his own youthful photograph glued into it. But it always works. We get served first; the other waiting drivers look at us with silent hatred. Why does it always work?
We have been to some queer places on this journey. We started in Rostov and headed south across the Kuban steppe to reach the Black Sea at Anapa. On the other side of Krasnodar (Ekaterinodar), a hundred heavy biplanes stood drawn up in ranks in a field, grass growing round their wheels. At Abinsk, in the middle of an oilfield, rusty oil pumps were nodding up and down in the backyard of the bus station. Here we found an open shop, its tiled floor brown with autumn mud, selling what seemed to be long rectangular blocks of horse pate. 'Chocolate butter'/ cried Lara. 'It's back! I haven't seen it since I was a child.' We bought two kilos at once, wrapped in porous grey paper, and used a Cossack dagger to spread it on slabs of bread. It was marvellous, a five-year-old's design for bliss.
At the port of Novorossisk, in the art gallery on Sovetov Street, there was a show of horrible paintings by Anatoly Zubtsov devoted to the private life of Lavrenti Beria, last and worst master of Stalin's terror. Here was Beria tearing with his nails at the skin of screaming adolescent girls. Here, climax of the exhibition, was the great Mingrelian clawing lustfully at the groin of Stalin's corpse - a fantasy first imagined, I think, in the mind of Alexander Solzhenitsyn but now disseminated into folk-history. It was a relief to emerge into the Black Sea sunlight and walk a little further along the street to the Museum of History. There I found a photograph of General Denikin boarding Emperor of India in 1920. By the saluting Admiral Culme-Seymour stood the figure of a junior officer, perhaps a midshipman — but the face was in shadow.
We drove out to Myskhako, the tip of the Malaya Zemlya peninsula whose heroid defence against the Germans during the Great Patriotic War is supposed to have been organised by the young Leonid Brezhnev. A Greek port-colony once stood here. Now there is nothing to see but a weedy melon-patch and the Black Sea knocking gently against low, yellow-white cliffs. As Lara and I looked for bits of pottery, an old lady in spectacles and headscarf appeared pushing a trolley made out of a wooden box and pram wheels. She visited two cows tethered on what had been the Greek cemetery, talked to them briefly and then began to cut leaves for rabbit-food, tossing them into an enamel pail on the trolley.
Behind her, a few hundred yards inland, was the war-memorial to the Malaya Zemlya defenders: a parade ground, laid out around a metal sculpture which represents a bomb bursting into splinters. It seemed neglected, the ground dusty and the metal tarnished. In and around Novorossisk, there are more and larger war memorials torpedo-boats mounted on plinths, concrete Kalashnikovs two stories high - than 1 have ever seen in one place. They are all fairly new, demonstrating the truth of the rule that the remoter the war, the bigger the monument. They were mostly put up in the 1970s, the later years of the Brezhnevian 'period of stagnation', suggesting that the sculpture patrons of this Hero City were mostly concerned to heroise Leonid Ilyich.
We spent the night at Abrau-Dyurso, a few miles along the coast from Novorossisk. This camp of pine-board chalets hidden under a witchy wood used to belong to the Soviet Navy but has been taken over by the University of Rostov. Dropping our luggage, we went down to the sea and swam off a stony beach equipped with the usual Russian bathing-furniture: wooden slat-beds and iron Vespasienne modesty-shelters, like old Paris pissoirs, in which to change.
Sasha unwound the dirty bandages from his leg. He discovered a repulsive, inflamed wound eating into his shin and dribbling as it ate. His spirits rose instantly. Stumbling to his feet, he faced in the direction of Istanbul and shouted, Turks! Drink and get poisoned!' He waded in, and thrashed his gangrenous leg about in the Black Sea. We all dived and splashed and played, and then dried off in the sunset with the help of Sasha's vodka and my cognac. When it began to grow cold, Omyk and I played ducks and drakes. He ran up and down the edge of the water, yelling with glee as the flat stones skipped and skittered.
That night, the Rostov academicians gathered in the mess-hall to watch a video of Terminator //, dubbed in Russian. Most found it positive — even very positive. A neighbour explained to me that life itself, and even Terminator //, taught that altruism and solidarity would always triumph over the mechanistic context. I went to bed in our chalet, where three of us slept in one room and Omyk snored.
To reach the site of Panticapaeum, the modern port of Kerch, we had to cross the sea into another country. The city was built on the western, Crimean side of the Cimmerian Bosporus, the Kerch Straits which connect the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov, and as Crimea is now part of the independent state of Ukraine, the ferry crosses an international frontier. None of us had proper identity papers, let alone the $20 Ukrainian visa required for foreigners. But it turned out not to matter. The customs-shed on the Kerch side was deserted.
We had breakfasted at Anapa: a resourceful, Russian occasion. After much banging of dented iron trays and screaming in the scullery, the hotel restaurant had produced thick, fluted glasses of cafe-au-lait, and for the rest, we made a picnic. I had put the chocolate butter and some frankfurters in the hotel fridge overnight, from which they emerged frozen like lumps of scrap-iron. Sasha, unperturbed, stood the sausages in his hot coffee until
they relented. Omyk and Lara brought out some pieces of fried carp saved from a previous meal at Tanais, and bread and cheese.
At the tip of the Taman peninsula, a queue of vehicles was waiting for the ferry. The sun was hot, and there was a scent of herbs and seaweed. In the reedy mud-flats by the Taman Gulf, thousands of terns were feeding while herons, egrets and bitterns waded in the shallow sea. Wild olives were ripe on bushes by the side of the road: tiny, white and delicious to chew.
By the jetty, peasants squatted beside tables heaped with jars of sprats, strips of sturgeon with yellow-barred skin and packets of foreign cigarettes. A young heifer strolled unhindered between the stalls, splattering the turf with dung. Truck-drivers dozed in the shade of abandoned railway tanker-wagons which had rusted to their rails, while an old man fished for Azov herring off the sea-wall. It was peaceful. Leaning back against the hot metal of the Lada and chewing a wild olive, I fell asleep for a few minutes as the ferry laboured towards us, seeming to make no progress, drifting sideways in the mid-stream current. Then, opening my eyes, I saw her suddenly quite close, with a yellow-and-blue Ukrainian ensign at her stern. The ramp rumbled against the slip. Engines were switched on, passengers climbed back into their cars and lorries, and we bumped on board for the crossing from Asia to Europe. It is a twenty-minute voyage from the flat Taman shore, heading towards the tall grey downs of Crimea and the lighthouse which stands above the old Turkish fortress at Yenikale.
In winter, the Straits freeze over. Long ago, when winters were even harder here, Strabo wrote that 'bronze water-jars burst, and their contents freeze solid . . . the waterway from Panticapaeum across to Phanagoria [Taman] is traversed by wagons, so that it is both ice and roadway. And fish that became caught in the ice are obtained by digging with an implement called the "gangame" and particularly the anticaet [sturgeon] which are about the size of dolphins.
Leaning over the rail, I pulled out some pages from the 1920 Admiralty Pilot, pages which my father must have read anxiously in the gunroom before going on watch. Luckily for him, the Straits were too shallow for a serious warship to penetrate, let alone a battleship like Emperor of India. Even the weird, disc-shaped ironclads which the Russians once designed for the Sea of Azov could get into trouble here. This passage between shoals was much too dangerous to be attempted without a pilot.
The naval directions are a severe poetry:
Vessels . .. having given Cape Takil a berth of about 3 miles, should haul up for Kamuish burnu until Pavlovski leading light-towers are in line bearing 357' true, which being steered for will lead through the first or Pavlovski section of the dredged channel between the black spar buoys on the starboard hand and the red spar buoys on the port hand, until the Kamuish burnu leading lights are coming on, when these kept in line astern, bearing 217' true, will lead through the second, or Burunski section, midway between the buoys on either side; from thence alter course in good time to bring Churubash and Kamuish light-towers in line astern, bearing 247' true ...
Fathers cannot always, or easily, be present to take their sons through danger. They die, and we go forward alone. To starboard, the end of the Taman spit was opening wider and wider upon the Sea of Azov; the Cape Yenikale light to port was closing across the safe channel which leads through to the Kerch roads. Reading the Pilot again, I saw that these were not neutral instructions, not the sort of data that one might access or retrieve from a computer. This was a human voice, speaking pauselessly and patiently in flowing speech which does not abandon the listener even for the space of a full stop. Its archaic, Latinate grammar, with its ablative-absolutes and passive past-participles, is in fact deliberately selected in order to convey continuity, reassurance. This voice, transmitting the compiled knowledge of hundreds of generations of seamen, was now talking quietly into the ear of a young and very nervous officer on the bridge, so that, altering course in time on a true bearing, he would come through to safety.
Laurence Oliphant, a twenty-five-year-old Scotsman, came to Kerch the long way in 1852. He took a sailing-ship from Taganrog southwards across the Sea of Azov, a Prussian brig ('arrant tub') bound for Cork with a cargo of wool, and it was slow going. 'For four days we went edging on through the thick pea-soupy substance of which the water seems composed, literally ploughing our way through scum and passing over every conceivable shade of green and yellow - for the Sea of Azov can never be accused of being blue.' Oliphant smoked cigars and ate caviar spread on ship's biscuit; the ship's pig ate his handkerchiefs and socks off the washing-line.
It might have been, for another passenger, very restful. But Oliphant was a young Scot in a hurry. His admiration for Crimean Tatar culture was matched by his self-important fury at Russian sloth and corruption. Here he was, drifting across the pea-soup with his notebooks full of economic and military information eagerly awaited at home, and when he finally did reach Kerch at six one morning ('crumbling village'), the chief customs officer had the impertinence to let him know that it was a bit early to get up and clear his baggage. Oliphant took it out on the officer's servant. 'Finding that our entreaties were useless, and that the man was becoming insolent, I suddenly beat a double rap with my cane which would have done honour to a London footman, upon which his face assumed a persuasive expression, and he said something by which I understood him to mean that he would wake his master for a rouble . . . '
Oliphant was probably a spy as well as a gentleman traveller. He had taken a lot of trouble to get into Sevastopol, even then a closed city, getting a good look at the extension to the naval base and dockyard and trying to estimate the numbers and types of the warships moored in the creeks or alongside. Less than two years later, the Crimean War broke out. Oliphant's book about Russia was snatched up by readers and went into revised editions. His career took off. He was dragged in to advise generals, then hired by the Daily News to report the war, and finally despatched by the British government to lead a secret mission to the north-east Caucasus; there, Oliphant tried but failed to make contact with Shamyl, the fundamentalist Imam from Daghestan who was leading armed resistance to Russia in the mountains. After the war, as a protege of Lord Elgin, Oliphant became an adventurous diplomat, a novelist on social problems (Piccadilly: A Fragment of Contemporary Biography) and finally a Liberal member of Parliament.
Mount Mithridates looks down on Kerch, and out over the misty horizon of the Sea of Azov - known to Greeks and Romans as the 'Maeotian Marsh'. From a crumbling village, Kerch has become a city of dignified yellow-and-white imperial buildings, quiet boulevards, suburbs of little white houses with green board fences. Everything in Kerch lies open to the view of anybody standing on Mount Mithridates. In the naval base, the day I was there, a few small frigates flying the Russian flag were alongside, and a blue welder's spark glittered in the dry-dock. There were old tiled roofs, and the green dome of an Orthodox cathedral.
For most of the last fifty years, Kerch has been closed to foreigners. The naval base, used by Soviet coastal submarines, was sensitive and too visible from the hill, although for the last decade of the Soviet Union each parked car and each rifle carried by a shore patrol has been recorded by the cameras of American satellites. But when Ukraine became independent in 1992, naval ports in Crimea like Balaklava and Kerch simply ceased to bother about who entered the town or strolled along the waterfront. Only Sevastopol, headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet and still effectively under Russian control, kept up its check-points across the highways leading into town.
Kerch is another 'Hero City', but its war memorials are discreet compared to those of Novorossisk, although terrible things happened here. The Germans - Ohlendorf's Einsatzgruppe D again -murdered the entire Jewish population of the town and anyone with a remote connection to the Soviet bureaucracy. Partisan resistance continued all through the three years of Nazi occupation, carried on by guerrilla soldiers hiding in a labyrinth of tunnels under Mount Mithridates. In 1944, Kerch was shelled and bombed to ruins when the Red Army launched an assault landing acros
s the Straits to begin the recapture of Crimea.
Little of this suffering shows now, except for a partisan memorial — obelisk and eternal flame - on the mountain summit. Kerch, resigned to the idea that its position at the eastern tip of Crimea has always made it a target for bombardment and piracy, takes an ironic, southern view of politics. Most of the inhabitants I met were Russians; they were satirical about their sudden Ukrainian citizenship, but equally indifferent to the 'Crimea for Russia' campaign banging its drum far away at the provincial capital of Simferopol.
When I was there, the main exhibition in the Kerch museum was entitled 'Presents for Brezhnev'. This touring show of some of the gifts laid at the feet of Leonid Ilyich by the toadies of the world catered in a distinctly un-Russian way to visitors assumed to have taste and humour. From the man-sized china vases with his portrait to the black boxes of lacquered Feduskino papier-mache showing Brezhnev's war deeds in the manner of Andrei Rublov, from the statuary groups of Leonid Ilyich solving problems for wondering foremen and scientists to the Vietnamese portrait with real medals and a suit of real cloth glued to the canvas, to the rugs from Central Asia embroidered with disgusting, servile inscriptions, the six-foot pencils from the Karl Liebknecht Pencil Factory, the models of machinery with love from the working people of Krasnodar... not one single object was desirable. Everything was hideous. We all agreed — the Russian, the Armenian, the Cossack and the 'British guest' — that even if we were begged to take away anything we fancied, we would take nothing. We left the museum with a new respect for ourselves.
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