Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [177]
Once again therefore, in early spring, his mind turned to the old question: how could he enlarge the monastery’s estates?
Boris’s land, now that he was one of the Oprichniki, was of course out of the question. That left one other piece of land, a little to the north, that now belonged to the Tsar himself. Might Ivan be persuaded?
It was not a foolish idea. Despite his restrictions on the Church acquiring new land, Ivan himself had remained a generous donor.
‘He strikes down his enemies; then he gives the Church some more land, to save his soul,’ one of the monks had cynically remarked.
Might this latest purge in fact be a good time to approach him?
It was with this in mind that Daniel the monk went to the brother who had been keeping the chronicle, and set to work.
The document which they produced, and which, in the month of February, they persuaded the nervous abbot to sign, was a splendid concoction. It reminded the Tsar of the many privileges granted to the Church in the past, even under the Tatars. That some of these were Church forgeries Daniel himself did not know. It pointed out the loyalty of the monastery and the purity of its chronicles. And it begged for much-needed land. Written in the high ecclesiastical style it was long, bombastic, and somewhat ungrammatical.
If it succeeds, Daniel thought, my position in the monastery will be unassailable.
Before sending it, the abbot rather doubtfully showed it to Stephen who read it, smiled, and said nothing.
On the morning of March 22 1568, in the Cathedral of the Assumption in Moscow, a terrifying event took place.
The Metropolitan Filip, while celebrating the Eucharist, suddenly turned and, in the presence of a large congregation of boyars and Oprichniki, publicly rebuked the Tsar for his murder of innocents in the latest purge.
Ivan, in a fury, struck his iron-tipped staff upon the rostrum, but Metropolitan Filip stood his ground.
‘They are martyrs,’ he announced.
It was an act of huge moral courage. The boyars trembled.
‘Soon,’ Ivan responded, ‘you will come to know me better.’
Within days, the Metropolitan took refuge in a monastery and Ivan began to execute members of the brave churchman’s staff.
And it was unfortunate for Daniel that it should have been on the very day following this event that a clerk brought to the Tsar the Russka monastery’s request for land.
Tsar Ivan’s response was immediate, and frightening; and when Daniel saw it, neither he, nor the terrified abbot, were sure what they should do.
St George’s Day had come.
Mikhail the peasant, his wife, his son Karp, Misha the bear, and the peasant’s two other children were ready.
The work of the year was done. The harvest was long in. Indeed, there had been little enough to do since, as if in punishment for the terrible deeds of its ruler, God had sent Russia that year a dismal crop.
Over the brown and grey landscape a chill wind was bringing with it light flurries of snowdust that were speckling the wet, now hardening ground. The stout wooden huts of Dirty Place smelled dank; bare trees, bare fields having shed their last covering, waited gauntly for the snow to submerge them. St George’s Day, harbinger of the bleak winter to come.
Mikhail and his family were ready to go. The exit money was all there in the peasant’s hand. Unlike many other peasants in the area, he had no debts, having discreetly cleared them the month before. He had a good horse and journey money besides. He was a free man. Today, he could leave.
The peasants’ plan was ambitious, but quite simple. They would go across country, through the woods, to Murom. There they would stay until, probably in the spring, they could take a boat up the Oka to Nizhni Novgorod. From there they would find a boat that was travelling out to the east on the mighty Volga to the new lands where settlers lived free.
It would be hard. He was not sure how they would find money to survive the whole journey; but they could find a way. Misha the bear would help them by earning a few kopeks here and there.