Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [136]
One day, he hoped, I’ll build Dirty Place up into something and then perhaps I’ll change its name to Bobrov.
But until that time it was just a shabby little hamlet and it was all he had.
In some ways he was lucky. The estate at Dirty Place, though rather reduced by subdivision, was still on good soil and he was the sole heir. It was also a votchina – it belonged to him absolutely by inheritance. In the last half century, less and less land was being held as votchina, and more and more was being held, either by impoverished landowners or by new men, as pomestie – that is, on condition of service to the prince. And though in practice pomestie land often passed to the next generation of a family, it only did so at the prince’s pleasure. Even so, Boris’s income was hardly enough to pay for horses and armour and support him through the year. If the family was ever to recover its former state, he must gain the favour of the prince.
The meeting with the Tsar had been the most important thing that had happened to him so far in his life. But even though the Tsar now knew his name, he must do more to attract his hero’s attention. The question was, what?
In late afternoon, they passed an area on the left bank where the woods gave way to a long strip of steppe; and it was while they went by that Boris saw a motley collection of houses about a mile away. He gave a faint snort of disgust as, staring at them, he saw that they were moving.
‘Tatars,’ he murmured.
The Tatars on Muscovy’s borders often lived in these strange, mobile houses – not so much caravans, like those used by the gypsies of western Europe, as wooden huts with small wheels underneath them. To the Tatars, the fixed abodes of the Russians, attracting rats and all kinds of vermin, were like pigsties. To Boris their mobile homes proved that they were shifting and untrustworthy.
The sight of these vagrants made him think about the two he had captured. He looked down at them. They were a pair of stocky, flat-faced fellows with shaved heads; when they spoke, their voices were deep and loud.
They bray like asses, he thought.
And they were Moslems.
Though the campaign had been a crusade, it was the Tsar’s policy that the Tatar populations he conquered should be converted to Christianity by persuasion, not by force. Indeed, to weaken their resistance, his emissaries were careful to point out to the Tatars that the empire of Muscovy already contained Moslem communities whom the Tsar allowed to worship in peace. But of course, if a Tatar wished to enter the Tsar’s personal service, he must be a Christian; for Ivan himself was strict and devout.
If I am to impress the Tsar, Boris considered, I must show that I too am devout.
The two Tatars would convert that night. And soon, he felt sure, he too would become one of the Tsar’s chosen few – his best men.
The afternoon was overcast, but ahead of them a break in the grey clouds had allowed mighty shafts of sunlight to descend, which lit up an area of broken forest causing it to shine with an almost unnatural gleam. And to Boris, gazing eagerly towards the west, it seemed as though this sunlit patch of land, aspiring to escape from the endless, dull stasis of the plain, had gathered itself together in a pool of golden fire, and was being drawn up into the sky like a huge pillar of prayer.
At dawn the next morning the two Tatars were baptized by one of the priests travelling with them. Following the Russian custom, they were fully immersed, three times, in the River Volga.
The young Tsar could not have failed to notice it.
Two days later, they arrived at the great frontier city of Nizhni Novgorod.
It lay on a hill, frowning over the junction of the Volga and the Oka, the last eastern bastion of old Russia.