Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [109]
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.