Russka (37 page)

She looked around her again, and realized with sickening terror that someone was approaching along the path. If they will only kill me, and not my family, she prayed, as she waited, trembling, to face them.

It was Purgas. He took in everything with one glance, then gazed at her in astonishment.

She pointed to the Tatar, and Purgas examined him.

‘He’s not yet dead,’ he said calmly. Then, quietly, he undid his belt and throttled the Tatar.

For a few seconds, for the last time, Mengu, now called Peter, saw before him, and thought he smelt, the waving grasses of the steppe.

‘I thought you told us not to kill the Tatars,’ Purgas said with a soft chuckle, as he looked up at Yanka. ‘You knew him?’

She nodded.

‘Was this the one …?’

He knew a Tatar had killed her mother, but she had almost forgotten that she had told him a Tatar raped her as well. Whichever he meant, she nodded.

He looked around.

‘We can’t leave him here,’ he remarked.

‘They’ll kill us,’ she whispered.

‘I don’t think so. The tax gatherers have gone. That’s why I was
going over to Russka. There’s no one to know.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘First,’ he said sadly, ‘we’ll have to kill this horse. And that,’ he glanced down at the dead man with disgust, ‘is a pity.’

Yanka never admired her husband’s skill more than on that day.

He seemed to know exactly what to do, and he moved with such speed.

First he placed the Tatar on the splendid horse. Then, speaking softly to the animal and calming it, he led the way deep into the marshes. There, in a deserted and hidden spot he dug a trench; and then, tethering the horse firmly so that its head was over the trench, he neatly slit open its windpipe. Completely taken by surprise, the horse started violently, tried to break away, and then crashed to its knees. When Purgas had gathered all the blood in the trench, he slit the Tatar’s throat too, and carefully drained the body.

An hour later, he had deftly cut up both horse and man into manageable pieces and these he began to burn on a fire. He also burned all the Tatar’s equipment except his cloak and lasso.

By noon, there was nothing left but a heap of burned bones, the skull of the Tatar, which for some reason he had not burned, and a heap of ashes which he pushed back into the trench as he filled it in. When he had done, and scattered debris on the ground, even if someone had ever found the place, they would never have known that he had dug there.

‘Now,’ he told her, ‘we need a tree. And I know of one quite near.’

About two hundred yards away he showed her a mighty oak. He pointed to a place, high up in its trunk, where there was a hole.

‘There used to be a bee-hive up there once,’ he told her. ‘I found it last year. It’s empty now, but below it there’s a deep hole hidden in the trunk. Now help me bring the bones here.’

Carrying them in the heavy cloak, in several journeys they brought the bones to the foot of the tree.

‘Now hand me the lasso,’ he said. And moments later he was high up in the branches by the opening in the tree. Letting down the rope he told her to tie the cloak to it, and one bundle at a time he dropped them down into the hollow. In half an hour they had vanished.

Then he burned the cloak and the lasso and scattered the ashes.

‘The Tatars will look in the river and in the ground,’ he said. ‘But they’ll never look up in the trees.’

‘But what about his head?’ she asked, pointing to the familiar face with its missing ear which was lying on the ground and gazing blankly up at her.

He smiled.

‘I have another plan for that.’

It was two more weeks before Milei the boyar returned from Russka to Murom. When he got there, he found the city much disturbed. There had been numerous refusals to pay taxes in the villages; several of the Moslem tax farmers had been attacked. The Tatar authorities were furious and retribution was expected. The Grand Duke Alexander Nevsky was said to be preparing to travel to the Khan to ask for leniency. Times were black.

And Peter the
Baskak
had disappeared.

Indeed, the very day Milei arrived a centurion came to ask him when he had last seen him.

‘He was on his way directly to Murom,’ he assured the soldier.

The investigation that followed was thorough. All the villages between Russka and Murom were visited and questioned. Since Russka was the place he was last seen, a search was made and the river downstream was dragged; but nothing was found. By late autumn, suspicion finally centred on a village near the Oka where there had been rioting; but there was no proof that Peter had even been there. It seemed that he had simply vanished from the face of the earth.

It was on the fourth day after his return that Milei told his great lie.

He had been thinking about it ever since he reached Murom. Indeed he guessed that, sooner or later, suspicion might even fall on him for the Tatar’s death. But since he could prove that he had spent his time innocently at the village, he felt bold enough to take a chance.

And he could not resist it.

So when Peter’s son came to him and politely requested to know whether his father had bought the land from him for the monastery, Milei shook his head.

‘Alas, no. He did not like the place. A pity,’ he added, his eyes staring blandly at the young man. ‘I should have been glad if he had.’

‘So he gave you no money?’

Milei shook his head.

‘None.’

They could prove nothing. If ever they found the Tatar’s body, they could scarcely expect to find any money left on him. And, by that stroke of incredible good fortune, there were no deeds to the land for anyone to find!

Peter’s son had left. Short of calling him a liar, there was nothing the young Tatar could say.

The next week, using money from an ostensible sale of some land near Murom, Milei bought in the extra
chernozem
at Russka from the Grand Prince.

Fortune had smiled on him, indeed.

How strange, how secret, are the ways of God.

In the spring of the next year, before the snows melted, Milei the boyar went to his estate at Russka.

From the front of his house, as he looked out, the first thing he saw was the rich land across the river. And now it was all his, stretching from the river out to the north of Dirty Place for several miles.

He had come early to the village because he had great plans for its improvement.

He had bought a number of slaves from the Moslem tax farmers. Some of them, admittedly, had been made slaves illegally for failing to pay enough taxes. But no one was likely to trouble about that here. And they were good Slavs, sound peasants, as well – just what he had always needed.

They were due to arrive at Russka in early summer.

There were settlers, too. He was going to let some of the new land and had managed to find three families, who had been ruined by the new taxes and were glad to get good new land on easy terms.

‘All in all, the Tatars have been good for me,’ he chuckled to himself.

On the first Sunday of April, the snow began to melt. Each day the sky was bright blue, the sun warm. Soon great banks of grey slush were forming beside little brown rivulets as the land began to
appear. On the river, discoloured patches of brown and green could be seen where the ice was getting thin. On the Wednesday of that week, as he gazed out from the doorway, he could see little black bumps of rich earth peeping through the snow on the river’s eastern side.

And then, as he stepped over the threshold, Milei the boyar had an extraordinary sensation. It was as if someone had stabbed him in the heart.

He stopped and put his hand to his chest. Surely his heart was not giving out. He was not so old. He took a deep breath, but felt no pain: no difficulty in breathing. He looked at his hands for some tell-tale sign of blue in the fingertips, but there was none.

He walked out carefully, pulling his fur coat tightly about him, although the sun was warm. Nothing more happened. He walked round the village and went to see the steward. The fellow was about to cross the river, and so Milei decided to go with him. They went across in a little dug-out and got out onto the small jetty opposite.

Then something stranger still occurred. As Milei stepped on to the land of the east bank, his feet suddenly felt as if they were on fire. He took two more steps and cried out with pain.

‘What is it, lord?’ The old steward looked at him with astonishment.

Milei was staring down with horror. ‘My feet … when I stepped here … Do your feet hurt?’

‘No, lord.’

He tried to take another step, but the pain was so great he could not. ‘We’re going back,’ he mumbled; and the puzzled steward had to row him across the river again.

Greatly disconcerted, the boyar went back to his house. There he inspected his feet. They were just as normal.

Later that day, as he came out again and glanced across the river, the terrible pain struck him in the chest once more like a blow, so that his knees almost buckled and he had to catch the frame of the door to stop himself falling.

The same thing happened again the next day. And the next. He could not cross his own threshold; and he could not set foot on the land opposite the river.

Then he thought he understood.

‘It’s that damned Tatar,’ he murmured. ‘He’s returned to plague me.’

In fact, he was more accurate than he knew.

For it never occurred to him that one starless night the previous autumn, just after he had gone back to Murom, Purgas the Mordvinian had stolen by his empty house and, with consummate skill, ripped up the threshold outside and buried, in two feet of earth, the head of Peter the Tatar right under his doorway.

Even Yanka never knew her husband had done this.

But when he had finished, had it been possible to see his expression in the darkness, a look of strange, almost diabolical satisfaction would have been discerned on the Mordvinian’s face. ‘If they ever find this, it is you, boyar, they will accuse of murder,’ he whispered, ‘lover of my wife.’

He had always guessed. Now he and the boyar were even.

Yet, though Milei knew nothing of the presence of Peter, the excruciating pains grew worse. He could hardly bear to leave his house now. I could take over the steward’s house for the time being, he thought. But how could he explain that? I’ll say the ants or the mice have invaded mine. Yet it sounded a poor excuse. Besides, what was the satisfaction of being here when he could not even set foot on his best land? I shall have to leave Russka, he decided.

The next day, he called for his horse in the morning and, swinging himself up into the saddle, told the steward: ‘I’ll be back in the summer.’

Yet he had not gone half a mile from the village when his horse quite suddenly shied and threw him so that, landing on some roots, he thought for a moment he had broken his leg. That was nothing to his astonishment though, when the animal, looking to its left, gave a piercing whinny of fear, and bolted in the other direction.

He stared at the place which had so startled his horse. And there, amongst the trees, he saw it. It was a magnificent animal: a stallion of unnatural size: a grey, with a black mane and a black stripe down its back. It came through the trees towards him and galloped straight across the path after his own mount. As it went by, its hoofs made no sound.

Slowly Milei picked himself up. He crossed himself. Then he limped back into the village. For now he understood.

As soon as he was back, he called the surprised steward to his house, and also the old priest from the little church.

‘I have decided,’ he told them, ‘to make a great gift to the glory of God. I am going to found a monastery on my old land across the river.’

‘What has brought about this decision?’ the priest asked. He had not considered Milei capable of such a selfless act.

‘I had a vision,’ the boyar replied drily, though with truth.

‘The Lord be praised,’ the old man cried. Truly, how strange and secret were the ways of God.

Milei nodded, then, apparently lost in meditation, he walked out through the door of his house to look at the land he had just given away.

He returned a moment later, smiling as if with relief, and at once took the priest across the river and conducted him round the site.

And so it was, in the year 1263, that the little monastery at Russka was founded.

It was dedicated to St Peter and St Paul.

One other event of significance occurred in that year.

In order to beg the Tatar Khan to be lenient with the rebellious tax-payers of Russia, the Great Prince Alexander Nevsky had set out across the steppe to visit the Horde.

‘He is not well,’ a visiting boyar from Vladimir told Milei. ‘If the Tatars don’t kill him, the long journey may.’

‘I hope not,’ Milei answered. ‘His policy may have been unpopular with the people, but it has been wise.’

‘It will be continued,’ the other assured him. ‘But he was very distressed to go at such a time. His youngest son is only three and he wanted to see him through until he was grown.’

‘Ah, yes, Daniel is the little boy, isn’t he?’ Milei knew nothing about this child beyond his name. ‘I wonder what his inheritance will be.’

‘They say,’ the boyar from Vladimir told him, ‘that Alexander has instructed his family to give him Moscow when he is older.’

‘Moscow! That miserable town!’

‘It’s not much of a place,’ the other agreed, ‘though its position isn’t bad.’

Moscow. Milei shook his head. Whatever talents this infant prince might have, he couldn’t imagine he’d ever make much of a paltry little town like that.

At the Monastery of St Peter and St Paul, they were summoning the Monks to Vespers and though the spring evening was cold and damp, there was excitement in the air. Tomorrow was the great day: the boyar was coming; a bishop from Vladimir, too. And everyone smiled as his assistant Sebastian led the man at the centre of it all, old Father Stephen, into the church. There was only one sadness. If only Father Joseph could be there.