Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [164]
He gazed around the market place.
‘Look at these people,’ he went on. ‘You can see for yourself: they’re backward. They have few industries, no learning at all. They eat and and drink, they whore and pray to their icons. And thats it. Their army is huge, but badly trained. When they try to get to the Baltic ports, the well-trained Swedes and Germans can cut them down in no time. And that’s how we like them. Who needs a civilized Russia? That’s why Tsar Ivan is so pleased to see you. You came round by the extreme north. It’s a long and inconvenient way, frozen half the year, but it still suits him very well. He can circumvent the Baltic that way and get the skilled men he knows he needs. You’re gold to him.’
While the English might be useful to the Tsar, he in turn could be very useful to them.
‘We sought a passage to Cathay by sea,’ Chancellor told Wilson, ‘yet it seems to me we can reach the east by land. Down the Volga, beyond the lands of the Tatars, lies the orient. Below the deserts lies Persia. With his protection, our merchants might reach such places after all.’
George Wilson soon decided that this strange, huge land was the best opportunity he would ever have to make his fortune. But he found it a disquieting place all the same.
It was not the violence, the crudity, or even the cruelty of the people. He cared nothing about any of these. It was their religion.
It was all-pervading. There seemed to be priests and monks everywhere. People crossed themselves for, it seemed to Wilson, no reason at all; and in every house there were icons to which people bowed.
‘’Tis like popery,’ he remarked, ‘only the idolatry of the Russians is even greater.’
Like most of his compatriots, George Wilson was a Protestant. He had been a boy when Henry VIII of England broke with the Pope in Rome. Now Henry’s son was on the throne, and all good Englishmen were supposed to be Protestant. This was a faith which suited Wilson very well, not from any profound religious conviction, for he had none, but rather because he had a rooted if secret dislike of all authority, and also because a certain harsh pride made him enjoy reading the tracts that attacked the abuses, and theology, of the old religion with fierce logic.
‘These Russians are fools,’ he concluded. But since he thought that of most people anyway, it did not greatly signify.
And when, in January, Chancellor told him that, after their return to England that spring, he intended to lead another expedition to Muscovy, and asked him if he wished to join it, Wilson insistently replied: ‘I do.’
He would make his fortune here. Besides, he had another reason in mind, too. The German merchant, also a Protestant, had an unmarried daughter, and no son. The girl was a little heavy, but handsome. A nice, plump girl, he thought.
He would return.
To Elena, it seemed that Boris had slowly grown another skin, on top of his own.
That, at least, was how she came to think of it.
Sometimes she had the impression that he was still moving about, rather uncomfortably, inside this carapace; that if she could find a way to break through, she would still find him within. At other times, it would be as if this new, ever thicker layer were stuck fast, glued on to his own skin and all of one piece with it. Then, even when he came to her intimately, it felt as if she had in her hands a strange animal with a thick hide, whose mind she did not know.
Not that, in the succeeding years, she saw him very often.
For three years the armies of Russia, led by Kurbsky and others, smashed the Tatar revolts around Kazan. They went further, across the eastern Volga into the land of the Nogays; even the distant Tatar Khan of West Siberia, beyond the Urals, acknowledged Ivan as his overlord. Twice, huge fleets went south down the mighty Volga, through the steppe to the desert lands of Astrakhan and took that city too.
Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Astrakhan: how exotic Ivan’s new titles proclaimed him to be. Huge new chronicles were prepared, glorifying the Tsar