Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [130]
Sometimes they hoisted sails, more often they rowed. From the bank of the huge river their oars could not be heard; only the boatmen’s faint rhythmic singing echoed plaintively across the stream.
Mother Volga. Mighty Volga.
Boris did not know how many boats there were. Only a part of the army had been left behind as a garrison in the east. The main force was returning to the frontier city of Nizhni Novgorod; and they were returning in triumph. For the Russians had just conquered the mighty Tatar city of Kazan.
Kazan: it was many days behind them now, on its high hill by the Volga where that huge stream at last turned southwards across the distant steppe and desert to the Caspian Sea. Kazan: by the lands of the ancient Volga Bulgars; gateway to the empire once ruled by mighty Genghis Khan.
Now it was Russian.
From dawn each day the boats travelled, until their shadows grew so long that they joined each vessel with the one behind so that, instead of resembling a procession of dark swans in the distance, they seemed to turn into snakes, inching forward on waters turned to fire by the western sunset ahead; while on the bank, the last red light from the huge sky eerily caught the stands of bare larch and birch so that it appeared as if whole armies with massed lances were waiting by the river bank to greet them.
Boris was sitting in a boat some way down the line. He was sixteen, of medium height with a frame that was still rather spare, a broad face with a hint of Turkish in it, dark blue eyes, dark brown hair and a wispy beard. Being a young cavalryman, he wore a quilted woollen coat, thick enough to stop most arrows. Over his shoulders he had draped a coat of fur, against the cold breeze on the river. Behind him was slung a short Turkish bow and at his feet lay an axe in a bearskin sheath.
He was of noble birth: his full name was Boris, son of David, surnamed Bobrov, and if asked where he came from he would answer that his estate lay by Russka.
No one paid any attention to him, but if they had bothered to do so, they would have observed a brooding, nervous excitement in his face, especially when he glanced at the first boat that was leading them back towards the west.
For in the first boat rode a twenty-two-year-old man: Tsar Ivan.
Ivan: Holy Tsar, Autocrat of all the Russias. No ruler before had taken such titles. And his capital was Moscow.
This was the state known to history as Muscovy, and it was already a tremendous power. One by one, in the process known as the Gathering, the mighty cities of northern Russia had fallen to Moscow and her armies. Tver, Riazan, Smolensk – even mighty Novgorod – had given up their ancient independence. And this new state was no federation: the Prince of Moscow was as great a despot as was once the Tatar Khan. Absolute obedience to the centre: this was the doctrine of the Moscow princes.
‘Only in this way,’ their supporters claimed, ‘will the state of Rus return to her ancient glory.’
There was still a long way to go. Even now, most of western Russia and the lands of ancient Kiev in the south, were still in the grip of mighty Lithuania. Further yet, across the Black Sea, a new Moslem power, the Ottoman Turks, had seized old Constantinople – henceforth called Istanbul – and their Ottoman Empire was expanding each generation. Catholics to the west, Moslems to the south. And to the east, the Tatars had regularly swept in from the steppes, over the Oka, past little Russka and even to the white walls of mighty Moscow itself.
It was not just that the Tatars looted and burned: it was the children they stole that made Boris hate them. He remembered how he himself as a boy had stood, quivering with fear and rage, inside the monastery walls as they came riding by, with huge panniers strapped to their horses, into which they tossed the wretched little boys