Russka (57 page)

And how he longed to go with those men, to the south. He could set out the very next day. Only one thing held him back – the question his worried mother had asked.

‘If you go, Andrei, what will become of the farm?’

Slowly and thoughtfully he rode back to the little
kurgan
where he paused for a few moments, to gaze around the fields and the steppe.

What wonderful land it was, with its long summers and its rich black earth! Some time ago now, this ancient Kievan territory had acquired another name, for this was the Ukraine.

The rich Ukraine: the golden land. Why then should old Ostap, as he surveyed his swaying wheat, complain?

‘God gave us the best fields and then sent a plague of locusts to devour them.’

It was because the Ukraine was ruled by the Catholic King of Poland.

Four centuries had passed since Ostap’s ancestress Yanka and her father had fled from the Tatars to the north. Since then, the Tatars had slowly lost their hold over the old Kievan territories and mighty Lithuania had moved down to take their place. But the lands round the Dniepr, rich though they were, had been half-deserted. Only very gradually had settlers moved back into the countryside and the shells of the once-great cities.

They were dangerous, frontier lands. Every few years, huge raiding parties of Tatars from the Crimea would come sweeping in from the steppe to take slaves; smaller raids were constant. Like all the other settlers, when Ostap and his men went out to plough, they took their muskets with them.

Yet they were free lands. The rule of Lithuania was generally easy-going. In the countryside, land was there for the taking. As for the towns, the greater ones like Kiev and Pereiaslav were allowed pretty much to govern themselves under the long established free burgher system from the west, known as the Magdeburg Law.

And so this part of the Ukraine might have remained: a rich frontier inhabited by Cossacks, Slav peasants, free townsmen and Lithuanian petty gentry, who nearly all followed the old Orthodox faith of ancient Rus.

Until some eighty years before. For at the Treaty of Lublin, in 1569, the two states of Poland and Lithuania, though they had
long been linked, were formally merged into one. The gentry began to convert to Catholicism; great Polish magnates started to take over huge tracts of land around the Dniepr; and though the cities kept their Magdeburg Law, the rest of the Ukraine discovered what it meant to live under contemptuous Polish lords.

How dare a Polish noble despise a Cossack! Were not the Cossacks free?

There were three main sections of their great fraternity. Four hundred miles away to the south-east, where the great River Don came down to the Black Sea shore, dwelt the Don Cossacks in their many settlements. Here, in these southern Kievan lands, lived the Dniepr Cossacks, proudly independent men like Ostap on his little farm by Russka. And lastly, far to the south, in the wild steppe below the Dniepr rapids, lay the Cossack horde – the Zaporozhian host – wild, unpredictable, living in a huge camp where no women were allowed, thousands strong and answerable to no man.

That was where the two fellows disguised as monks had come from.

How proud Andrei was to be a Cossack! He had learned their exploits at his mother’s knee. Who had been hired by the powerful Stroganovs, late in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, to explore and conquer the huge wilds of Siberia? Ermak the warrior and his brother Cossacks. Indeed, though Andrei did not know it, other Cossack adventurers, at this very time, were reaching those distant shores, five thousand miles away, that stared across the narrow straits to cold Alaska.

It was the Don Cossacks who had seized the great fortress of Azov, by the Black Sea, from the mighty Ottoman Turks. And it was the Zaporozhian Cossacks who had not once, but twice, taken their long boats down to Constantinople and burned the Ottoman fleet under the very noses of the Turks.

Everyone feared the Cossacks. The Tatars in the Crimea feared them, so did the Turks who were the Tatars’ overlords. Poland had needed their services again and again. Even the Pope had sent an envoy to the Zaporozhian camp. ‘And without us Cossacks,’ the old Ostap always said, ‘the Tsar and his family would never have gained the throne of Muscovy.’

Even this boast was half-true.

Poor Muscovy. What awful torments the northern land had
suffered. Soon after Ivan the Terrible’s death the ancient ruling house of Muscovy had ended. For a time a great boyar related to the royal house – Boris Godunov – had tried to hold the land together, but had sunk under the burden. Then had come those dismal years – the Time of Troubles – when plague and famine swept the land, when one after another false claimant to the throne seized power, until it was hard at times to say if any Tsar ruled in Russia. Other powers had seen their chance; Sweden had invaded and worst of all, using every kind of treachery and guile, the Polish King had tried to take the throne of Muscovy and make her Catholic.

And then, at last, great Russia had risen. She had suffered the terror of Ivan, plague and famine and foreign invasion but now, having suffered, she arose. It was not the great princes and magnates, not the leading gentry, who turned like an irresistible tide against the Poles. It was the simple peasants, the small landholders, and the grim, bearded elders of Orthodoxy from beyond the Volga River who massed with spears and axes to sweep the Catholics out. ‘And we Cossacks helped them, our Orthodox brothers,’ Ostap would say with truth, and with rather less truth: ‘Without us, they would have lost.’

The Poles had been driven out. A great meeting, a
Zemsky Sobor
, had been called, and a popular boyar family had been chosen to found a new dynasty.

In this way the family of Ivan the Terrible’s first, kindly wife, who had been despised by the great magnates only fifty years before were, in the year 1613, chosen to be rulers, and the new Romanov dynasty was begun.

Andrei had mixed feelings about the Muscovites. Like most Ukrainians, he thought them crude. With all Cossacks, he was suspicious of any authoritarian ruler like the Tsar. But the Russian people were his brothers, for a very simple reason: they were Orthodox. ‘They drove the Catholic Poles out of their land. Perhaps one day we can drive them out of ours too,’ he sometimes said.

For several generations Dniepr Cossacks had served the Polish King. Some had been given special officer status and entered on a service register which entitled them to regular pay. But the majority had been ignored. Moreover, as non-Catholics, they had fewer rights anyway. More than once they had revolted to improve
their conditions. But the revolts had been crushed and in recent years the service Cossacks had not even been allowed their own leaders. Their chief, the
Hetman
, had been a Polish appointee, and many of their officers came from the Polish lesser nobility, the
Szlachta
. No wonder even the better-off Cossacks were discontented.

And now, it seemed, some kind of new campaign was afoot. That was the message the two Cossacks from the Zaporozhian camp had brought. They were going to teach the Poles a lesson. The question was: could Andrei go?

The sun was still high, the afternoon deliciously warm as he walked his horse towards the farm. He could not help breaking into a smile of joy as he looked at it.

A broad clearing in the trees, which approached the buildings closely on three sides. Outhouses, some of timber, some of wattle: and in their midst, the broad, stout farmhouse with its shady porch, and whose whitewashed clay walls and bright red and green shutters gleamed brightly in the afternoon sun. All the buildings had thick, overhanging thatched roofs which resembled so many haystacks gathered from the endless steppe before them. On the dusty turf before the farm, some chickens, half a dozen geese, a cow and a goat picked at the ground in a desultory way: to right and left the long grass was still, in the heat.

And there was his father, in front of the porch. Andrei smiled with affection.

He was a little taller than his father, but even now, strong as he was, Andrei was not sure the old man might not best him in a fight.

‘He’s so quick,’ he would remark proudly to his friends.

One could see instantly that they were father and son, though old Ostap’s face was a little broader than Andrei’s. He shaved his chin, but had a splendid drooping moustache, all grey, that hung almost to his chest. He was dressed in wide, baggy trousers and a shirt, both of linen, tied with a silk sash rather than a belt. On his feet were silk embroidered shoes with long, curling toes; on his bald head a silk cap. His face was cheerful but florid, his nose mottled. He was smoking a short Cossack pipe.

For some reason his strength, and his quick rages, seemed all the more formidable to Andrei because he knew that at any moment the old man might suddenly breathe his last. The red face, the tell-tale signs of breathlessness – the old warrior would
not live long. He knew it, they all knew it, but with the bravado of a true Cossack he would look his son in the eye and then, quite deliberately, to challenge fate, lose his temper over some trifle. Andrei loved him for it.

But what will happen to the farm when he goes? the young man wondered. He would be the only one left. His two sisters were long since married. His brother had died a brave Cossack death, fighting, six years before. ‘Died like a man,’ old Ostap would say, raising his glass in salute, as if he did not regret it. ‘Mind you do the same, if things so fall out,’ he’d add sternly to Andrei, lest the handsome young man should think he feared to lose his last son too.

But it was not only the prospect of Ostap dying that worried his son. There were debts.

Ostap liked to live well, as befitted a Cossack gentleman: for that was how he saw himself. He liked to drink. All Cossacks drank. When he went into Pereiaslav on a market day, he’d be sure to enjoy himself. For though, as a good Cossack, he despised most townsmen, he’d usually encounter some brother-in-arms and drink the night away with him. Nor could he ever resist a fine horse. He had only to see it to buy it.

‘Where does he get the money?’ Andrei would sometimes ask his long-suffering mother.

‘The Lord knows, but he casts his net broadly,’ she would reply.

There were the itinerant merchants in Pereiaslav and even Kiev who went out to join the caravans that followed the ancient salt route across the steppe to the Crimea. They lent money. So did a merchant in Russka. And so did the Jews. And they all lent to Ostap, on the security of his farm.

It was a fine farm. There were excellent crops of wheat and millet. There was part of the big wood, upstream, where Ostap owned a hundred beehives. ‘But we need you,’ his greying mother had told Andrei frankly. ‘Because if someone doesn’t manage the farm – and your father – we’ll lose everything. And I can’t do it.’

He wanted to go. He longed to go. Yet, as he reached the farm, Andrei was still uncertain what to do. He was a little disconcerted therefore when, as he dismounted, the old man abruptly said: ‘You’re leaving in the morning. I’ve prepared all you’ll need.’

Even as Ostap spoke, Andrei saw his mother coming out of the
house looking worried. He glanced at them both while his father sucked contentedly on his pipe.

‘Andrei!’

It was all she said.

He paused. The prospect of going thrilled him, but he looked at his father with concern.

‘What about the farm, Father?’ he brought himself to ask.

‘What about it?’

‘How will you manage?’

‘Very well, damn you! Are you ready to leave?’ Sensing opposition, Ostap was starting to grow red.

Andrei hesitated. He caught his mother’s eye, saw her pleading look.

‘I’m not sure. Perhaps I should leave later.’

‘What!’ his father roared. ‘Are you disobeying me?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Silence, you young cur. You’ll obey your father.’ Suddenly Ostap’s heavy brows knitted and his eyes gleamed with anger. His whole body seemed to grow rigid. ‘Or is it,’ he asked menacingly, ‘that I’ve bred a coward? Is that it? Are you a coward?’ The last word was said with such apparent contempt and loathing, it was such a calculated insult, that Andrei felt his own body tense and his face go white with anger. It seemed, at any moment, that father and son might fly at each other’s throats.

The cunning old fox, the youth suddenly thought. He’s goading me deliberately so that I won’t do as Mother wants. And even though I know what he’s up to, I’m still getting angry.

‘Well?’ Ostap thundered. ‘Have I bred a coward? Are you really afraid to fight? Must I go and die in shame?’

‘Die as you please,’ Andrei cried in frustration.

‘So that’s how you talk to your father!’ Ostap was now beside himself. He glanced to left and right for something to strike Andrei with.

And who knew what might have happened next if, at this moment, three figures had not come riding out of the woods straight towards the little group. For the sight of them reduced both men to silence.

One was splendidly dressed, and rode a magnificent bay. The other two, dressed in long black coats, rode smaller horses. The first was a Polish noble; the other two were Jews.

That a Polish noble should ride in such company was no particular surprise. For generations now, the Polish Commonwealth was the one country in eastern Europe where the Jews could live at peace. Indeed, the authorities there even allowed Jews to carry swords like noblemen.

They drew up in front of the porch without dismounting. The Pole glanced down at the family before him coolly, then surveyed the farm thoughtfully. Andrei noticed that the gold brocade on the nobleman’s beautiful coat glinted in the sun; his long, aristocratic hands rested easily upon the saddlebow. His face was oval, pale, and except for a thin, dark moustache, clean-shaven. His eyes were large, blue and rather luminous. A kinsman of the great Lithuanian-Polish magnate, Vyshnevetsky, who owned vast tracts of land in the eastern Ukraine, Stanislaus was the local official of this region, overseeing numerous little forts like Russka, which Vyshnevetsky owned, on the edge of the steppe.