Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [194]
‘Vodka!’ he shouted to his wife. ‘Vodka for our guests! Andrei, listen and attend. And now, gentlemen,’ he continued in a businesslike way, the moment they were seated, ‘what news from the south – from the camp?’
They were Cossacks, and when they had announced their exciting news, old Ostap slapped his thigh and cried out: ‘It’s time you were off, Andrei. What an adventure! The devil – I’ve a good mind to go too!’
To ride the steppe with the Cossacks – it was what young Andrei had been dreaming of since he was a boy. His horse, his equipment, everything was ready.
There was just one problem.
He was a handsome young fellow of nineteen, recently returned from the Academy at Kiev where the Orthodox priests had taught him to read and write, some simple arithmetic, and even a smattering of Latin.
His hair was jet black, his skin dark, but smooth rather than swarthy; his beard was thin, like that of a Mongolian, and mostly sprouted on his chin, but he was growing a long, fine, drooping moustache. His face was round, with high cheekbones, and he had handsome, brown, almond-shaped eyes. Though some of these features came from the beautiful Tatar wife that his grandfather Karp, the runaway, had taken, Andrei’s tall frame and graceful bearing were Karp’s exactly. Slavic charm and ruthless Tatar eyes – it made him magnetic to many women.
Since he was still young enough to believe that human nature was consistent, it sometimes puzzled Andrei that he seemed to have two souls at war within himself: one devoted to his family and their farm; the other a wild, free spirit with neither home nor conscience, which yearned to roam the steppe to the horizon and beyond. He was a perfect young Cossack.
And how he longed to go with those men, to the south. He could set out the very next day. Only one thing held him back – the question his worried mother had asked.
‘If you go, Andrei, what will become of the farm?’
Slowly and thoughtfully he rode back to the little kurgan where he paused for a few moments, to gaze around the fields and the steppe.
What wonderful land it was, with its long summers and its rich black earth! Some time ago now, this ancient Kievan territory had acquired another name, for this was the Ukraine.
The rich Ukraine: the golden land. Why then should old Ostap, as he surveyed his swaying wheat, complain?
‘God gave us the best fields and then sent a plague of locusts to devour them.’
It was because the Ukraine was ruled by the Catholic King of Poland.
Four centuries had passed since Ostap’s ancestress Yanka and her father had fled from the Tatars to the north. Since then, the Tatars had slowly lost their hold over the old Kievan territories and mighty Lithuania had moved down to take their place. But the lands round the Dniepr, rich though they were, had been half-deserted. Only very gradually had settlers moved back into the countryside and the shells of the once-great cities.
They were dangerous, frontier lands. Every few years, huge raiding parties of Tatars from the Crimea would come sweeping in from the steppe to take slaves; smaller raids were constant. Like all the other settlers, when Ostap and his men went out to plough, they took their muskets with them.
Yet they were free lands. The rule of Lithuania was generally easy-going. In the countryside, land was there for the taking. As for the towns, the greater ones like Kiev and Pereiaslav were allowed pretty much to govern themselves under the long established free burgher system from the west, known as the Magdeburg Law.
And so this part of the Ukraine might have remained: a rich frontier inhabited by Cossacks, Slav peasants, free townsmen and Lithuanian petty gentry, who nearly all followed the old Orthodox faith of ancient Rus.
Until some eighty years before. For at the Treaty of Lublin, in 1569, the two states of Poland and Lithuania, though they had long been linked, were formally merged into one. The gentry began to convert