Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [193]
And it is then, after the Easter kiss, that the priest begins that most lovely sermon of Chrysostom.
It is a sermon of forgiveness. It reminds the congregation that God has prepared for them a feast, a reward: it speaks of the Lenten fast, by which is also meant repentance.
‘If any have laboured long in fasting, let him now receive his reward,’ the priest read out, in his gentle voice. How kindly the sermon was. If any have delayed, it said, let them not despair. For the feast of the Lord is not denied to sinners so long as they come to Him. For He shows mercy to the last, just as the first.
‘If any have wrought from the first hour,’ he read out, ‘they should be rewarded. If any have come at the third hour, they too. If any have arrived at the sixth hour, they should not now fear. If any have delayed until the ninth hour, let them approach. If any have tarried …’ Ah, that was it, even until the very last … ‘If any have tarried,’ the priest glanced towards the back, ‘even until the eleventh hour, let him come …’
Whatever had been passing in his mind – whether it was that he now understood that his wife was innocent; whether it was from guilt for the deaths of Stephen and Feodor; or whether it was that, being unable any longer to sustain the burden of evil that his pride, and fear of the loss thereof, had placed upon him – it was certain that, as he stood in the place reserved for penitents, Boris, when he heard these lovely words, at the eleventh hour sank to his knees and, at last, entirely broke down.
In the year 1572, the dreaded Oprichnina was officially ended. All reference to its existence was forbidden.
In the year 1581 came the first of the so-called ‘Forbidden Years’ during which peasants were forbidden to leave their landlords even on St George’s Day.
In that same year, Tsar Ivan, in a fit of anger, killed his own son.
The Cossack
1647
Freedom: freedom was everything.
The steppe lay all around him. How quiet it was – golden, brown, violet at the horizon, stretching forever eastwards. A single hawk hovered in the sky; a tiny marmot scurried into the cover of the long, dry stalks. There was no breeze. Here and there, unexpectedly, an ear of wheat whose seed, no doubt, had been dropped in that place by the wind in bygone years, grew amongst the myriad wild grasses of the endless plain.
Andrei Karpenko rode his horse slowly, making a large, lazy curve out from the big wheat field, past the little kurgan that marked its end, and away some two miles out into the wild plain before returning slowly in the direction of the little River Rus that flowed down towards the mighty Dniepr in these ancient Kievan lands.
The young man took a deep breath, so full of contentment that it was almost a sigh. How sweet was the scent of the grasses – the cornflower and broom, the wild hemp and milkwort, and, always, the unending, now withered feather grass that covered all. It was as though all these, and thousands of varieties more, had been thrown by the hand of God into a huge, flat basin, burnished by the sun all summer long, moistened with dew each day and then heated in the glowing pan once more until they gave off in their last extremity a final quintessence that arose from the land like a shimmering haze on this slow, late-summer afternoon.
His father’s farm lay just inside the line of trees, about a mile from the little settlement still known, after all these centuries, as Russka.
Andrei smiled. His father, Ostap, had been amused by the name of the place when he first came to it. ‘Russka – that’s where my father Karp ran away from, in the north,’ he had often told his son. It was from this runaway that they had been given the typically Ukrainian family name of Karpenko. But the fact that he had returned to the home of far earlier ancestors was something old Karp never knew.
Freedom: the birthright of every Cossack. Freedom and adventure.
And now Andrei’s turn had come. It was a thrilling prospect. Only the day before, the two men had appeared at the farm. They were disguised as wandering monks, and