Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [121]
Their visit to Russka the day before had been unsatisfactory. Milei the boyar had thought his presence had stopped the villagers attacking the tax gatherers. In fact, knowing his Tatar connections, the merchants had been careful to make quite reasonable demands at Russka. Now they needed to make up for their leniency.
The insignificant little community of free peasants at Dirty Place was somewhere to start.
‘We’ll fleece this village,’ they agreed as they approached.
And that, all morning, is what they did.
The hamlet had grown to fifteen households now and had the status of a volost – a commune. In recent years the volost had become modestly prosperous; and this was thanks to the man whom the households had elected as their elder: Purgas, the husband of Yanka.
Ever since they married, the modest carpenter whose freedom she had arranged had never ceased to surprise her. The first surprise had been after they had built their izba at Dirty Place and she had hung a little icon in the corner; for that very day he had quietly gone to the corner and hung a little chaplet of birch leaves just above it.
‘Why do you do that?’ she asked, puzzled. ‘That is what the pagans do.’
He had looked a little awkward for a moment and then confessed: ‘I am not a Christian.’
‘But we were married by a priest.’
It had been done in Novgorod just before they left.
He smiled gently.
‘It didn’t seem to matter.’
She had never thought to ask him if he was a Christian. Hadn’t they met in a church?
‘I followed you in,’ he confessed.
‘You should have told me,’ she said angrily.
‘I was afraid. I didn’t want to lose you,’ he mumbled.
She thought of her own deception of him. So they had both lied for fear of losing the other’s love. It was a bond.
‘You must become a Christian now,’ she told him. But to her surprise he refused.
‘Our children can be Christian, but leave me to my own ways,’ he said. ‘In Novgorod, I lived amongst the Christians long enough,’ he added with some feeling.
She understood. His escape back to the countryside with her was a return, for him, to his origins. And indeed, as she watched him find his place in the little community on the Black Lands, she saw a strange transformation occur.
At times, he seemed almost like a creature of the forest. He would stand, quite motionless, with his spear on the river bank and then, it seemed, idly dip it in the stream and come up with a fish where she, lying on the bank and staring down, had seen nothing. He would take dried fungi from a birch tree and rub it in his hands for only seconds before a little flame sprang, as it were, from the palms of his hands. He would find dried pine roots that would burn without crackling, and all manner of medicinal roots.
He got drunk rather easily, but always fell asleep then. The only cause of friction between them was when he insisted she allow him to eat hare, which was forbidden by the Church.
‘I worship the god Tchampas,’ he would say. ‘He is not as great as your god, but he resides in heaven and all the gods of the earth are under him.’
He loved the forest, and he loved the river, in a way that she realized she could not. He would touch a tree and to him it was a special being. She remembered how she had once felt about the silver birch tree, and how she had tried to assume its character. And he feels like that about everything, she mused. It was an ancient religion, this fetish cult of the northern forests, and she wisely did not try to dissuade him from it any more.
She took their children over to Russka to the wooden church there, and he did not object. This made her happy.
Her father had taken another wife. She was glad. Shortly after they had arrived at Dirty Place he had come to see them and, taking her aside, had pressed into her hand the bag of silver coins he had brought with him from the south. ‘I don’t think Kiy is ever coming back,’ he said. ‘So it’s all for you.’ She understood it was his way of making amends, and since then they had been friends.
She had showed the coins to Purgas