Russka (32 page)

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.