Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [110]
It was then that he reached behind him and pulled from a leather bag a small bale which he put in front of her.
It was a roll of the finest oriental silk.
‘A present for you,’ he said, and seeing her look of utter astonishment the big boyar leaned back his head and let out a huge laugh.
‘Milei is generous to those who please him,’ he cried, ‘Sing your other song,’ he commanded the skazitel.
This was the Novgorod song of Sadko the rich merchant. It was, in part, the Russian version of the Orpheus story, with the merchant minstrel charming the Finnish sea god in his palace at the bottom of the sea, and thus winning his return to life. It was also a reminder of an actual merchant of the city.
The minstrel had set it to a lilting, sensuous tune.
Yanka lay down at Milei’s feet, and slowly drew the soft, shining silk through her fingers; as the song described the sea god churning the ocean waves while Sadko played his harp, she stretched out luxuriously hugging the bale of silk to her and looking up at the boyar. The top of his kaftan was open. She stared at the curling fair hairs on his chest and at the little metal disc that hung from his neck, that bore the three-pronged tamga of his ancient clan. She looked up at him and smiled until, at last, he too gave a soft laugh and waved the minstrel away.
She abandoned herself to Milei the boyar that night. Everything was right. And afterwards, it seemed to her, that something more than usual had opened within her and that she, too, had been with Sadko the merchant minstrel in the palaces in the deeps of that northern sea.
Yet although Yanka was learning more every day about the world, it was two weeks later that she made her greatest discovery, and it came as a terrible shock.
For if there was one thing she had looked forward to in Novgorod, it was the chance of seeing that city’s famous prince: Alexander.
He was an extraordinary man. At the very moment Russia was cowering before the Mongols in the east, this young prince, descended from Monomakh, had won stunning victories over Russia’s foes from the west, smashing the Teutonic Knights in a battle on the ice, and halting the mighty Swedes, in an action by the River Neva that was to earn him his title – Alexander Nevsky. Yanka had already heard of this hero, even in faraway Russka; yet here, if she mentioned his name, people only shrugged. She could not understand it.
Since leaving the south, she had never heard anyone discuss the political situation and when, once or twice on the journey, she had asked Milei some naïve question, he had only laughed.
But all that changed the night that the boyar gave a feast.
It was for the men with whom he had been doing business, and she was allowed to remain in the room to serve. There were about a dozen of them – mostly large, bearded men in rich silk kaftans. Several wore huge sparkling precious stones; one was so fat it seemed astonishing to her that he could walk at all. Some were boyars, others wealthy merchants, and two, including a younger man with a thin, dark face, of the middling merchant class.
Only as she heard them talk did she realize the richness and size of Novgorod.
For they spoke of estates scores, even hundreds, of miles away in the forests and marshes of the north-east. They spoke of iron from the marshes, of great salt beds, of huge herds of reindeer that roamed by the tundra’s edge. She learned that for a month in summer, in these northern climes, there was no darkness but only a pale twilight, and that in midwinter, trappers roamed the wastes which scarcely grew light. A boyar of Novgorod might own whole tracts of land which he never even saw, and receive rents of furs from trappers who had travelled a hundred miles to their rendezvous and had never set eyes, in their lives, on a town of any kind.
Truly, this was the land of the mighty, the endless taiga.
But when she heard them speak of politics, she was truly astonished.
‘The question is, what are you going to do