Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [102]
It was a strange relationship: she was never light-hearted; she never ruffled his hair, or teased him as she might have done with a friend or husband; there was always a slight constriction in her manner towards him; she was both timid, yet practical.
As the winter months went by, a new and curious bond grew between them. Once the door of the izba was open, they were a perfect father and daughter. If the other villagers knew or suspected, no one said anything. And the very fact that they shared this secret meant that there was a complicity between them.
Complicity. They both knew.
It was only a short step from there to the development that, in secret, she realized she had been dreading.
In the month of January, several times, she gave herself to him with pleasure.
Why should it matter so much to her that, for a few brief minutes, her young body had taken pleasure and found release in the function for which it had been created? Why were they so much worse, these particular intimacies, than those which had already taken place?
She knew very well. It was a long time since she had seen a priest, but she knew what this meant. The Devil had her. She had not only sinned: she had rejoiced in her sin.
It was after these occasions that she entered the abyss of self-disgust. ‘I am like the women at Dirty Place,’ she moaned. She felt as if her hair was matted like theirs, and as if her whole being was defiled.
And when she was alone, in her misery, she turned to the distant, sad-faced little icon in the corner and prayed: ‘Save me, Mother of God, from my sins. Show me a way out of this darkness.’
The boyar Milei was cautious and shrewd. He had three daughters and two sons and he meant to leave them rich. He trusted nobody. And though he served the princely family of the little eastern territory of Murom, he did so cynically.
His attitude was perfectly reasonable. For a long time now, the greater boyars had seldom actually served day to day in the princely retinues, leaving that to their sons or to poor cousins. And though they were theoretically at the prince’s service in any emergency, they had minds of their own. In the larger territory of Riazan, immediately to the south, the boyars were well known for their independence and the Riazan princes had some difficulty controlling them. In other principalities – in the distant lands of Galicia in the south-west, let alone over the border in Poland – the nobles and gentry were strong, and a prince needed their agreement to any major decision.
There was another factor, too.
While the princely families were royal – for they still all descended from the family of St Vladimir – they had become large. Unlike the great days of Kiev, when each prince ruled over a huge territory, some of the notable princes now ruled over minor towns, and their children and grandchildren might have less in land than the greater boyars. These small appanages, as the princely inheritances were called, meant that a boyar like Milei might have a more aggressive view of his own status: and as he looked out upon the changing fortunes of the many little princely towns, he saw a more relative political world than his ancestors had.
As for his own princes, those of the ancient city of Murom, they were puppets of the Grand Duke who, in Milei’s opinion, was not to be trusted.
‘In any case,’ he shrewdly remarked, ‘even the Grand Duke, whatever he may like to pretend, is only a servant of the Tatar Khans from now on.’
So where did his advantage lie? How was he to get richer?
The most telling development to Milei was not the fact that the Grand Duke had had to travel across the steppe to submit, humiliatingly, to the Khan. It was not that the Tatar army had destroyed cities – they could be rebuilt. It was not that the Prince of Chernigov had been executed.
What Milei wisely observed was that, unlike the Russian princes since great Monomakh, the Tatar Khan minted his own coins.
‘It’s the Tatars who will hold the money bags now,’ he told his two sons. ‘They won’t destroy all the trade – why should