Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [103]
The province had been very depressed since the invasion. Though Milei owned slaves who produced some handicrafts he could sell, and though his villages brought him some brightly woven cloth and quantities of furs, there didn’t seem much room for expansion at present.
‘We must look to our own land,’ he decided.
He knew several boyars who had even been spending months at a time on their estates recently. Where before they always lived in the town, traded, and received their rents in money, they were now forced to live off the land.
‘And you know,’ one had said to him, ‘it may not be silver coin, but when a peasant of mine turns up with two sacks of grain, a cheese you can hardly carry, fifty eggs and a wagonload of firewood for his rent, I find I’m quite pleased to see him. When I go into the country, I may look like a peasant,’ he had laughed, ‘but I live well.’
Which had made Milei think carefully about Russka.
How big was the place anyway?
Here he had to guess.
For like most such documents in this huge and imprecise land, the title deeds to the estate stated no exact boundaries.
On the west, north and south
side, the boundary shall be as far
as the axe, the plough
and the scythe have gone.
It was the usual formula. Only the local people, long familiar with the place, could say with any certainty where these traditional limits to cultivation lay.
But these three sides, lying as they did upon poor podzol, were of less interest to Milei than the east side across the river, where the chernozem was rich and fertile. And here the boundary, where it joined the prince’s Black Land, was well established.
Since there was no present reason why the Prince of Murom should grant it to him, Milei had several times offered to buy the village of Dirty Place from him. So far, he had got nowhere. But as his steward had pointed out, he had only partly cultivated the chernozem he already had.
‘Send me more slaves,’ the steward said, ‘and I can yield you good returns.’
It was with these matters on his mind that, late in the August of that year, Milei the boyar came to visit Russka.
The hay was already cut and the cone-shaped stacks were casting shadows on the meadow across the river when he rode into the settlement.
He had given the steward fair warning, and a stout new hut, with a tall, steep roof and a fenced plot of land around it, awaited his arrival. He came alone, with a single servant, and immediately called for fodder for his two splendid horses.
When the steward started to bring hay, he immediately cursed him.
‘Oats, you fool! These aren’t your pitiful village horses.’
Indeed, the splendid beasts were half as big again as the sturdy little northern horses the villagers used.
Milei himself ate quickly, made a few testy comments about the turnips they offered him, and then at once retired for the night. But when the steward’s wife complained to her husband about the lord’s bad temper that night, the steward grinned. ‘It’s a good sign. I know him,’ he told her. And when she looked surprised: ‘See, he wouldn’t bother to get cross if he hadn’t decided to take an interest in the place.’
The old fellow was right.
Milei was up at dawn the next morning, riding out to inspect the estate, with a few curt nods to the inhabitants as they went out to the fields.
The largest crop, the spring-sown rye, had already been reaped in July. They were reaping barley that day.
Milei rode round every inch of the place, with the steward running along beside him. He paid special attention to the chernozem.
‘We don’t grow any wheat?’
‘Not at present, lord.’
‘We should try.’ He gave a short, hard laugh. ‘Then you can make Communion bread.’
Communion bread? So the boyar meant them to have a church. The steward smiled to himself. He must really mean business.
He made other suggestions, too. They had started to grow buckwheat in the south when he was a boy. He wanted to try that at Russka. In particular, he seemed to have taken offence at those turnips they had offered him the previous night.