Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [2]
I am most fortunate in having an agent, Gill Coleridge, and two editors, Betty Prashker of Crown Publishers and Rosie Cheetham of Century, whose patience, encouragement and unstinting help made this book possible.
I am deeply grateful to my wife Susan for her kindness and patience during the long process of this book’s gestation. And once again, special thanks are due to Alison Borthwick for her expert map.
Finally, I should like to express a special debt to the Archimandrite and monks of the monastic community of Optina Pustyn, for affording me an unforgettable glimpse of Russia.
Forest and Steppe
AD 180
The steppe was quiet that night. So was the forest.
Softly the wind moved over the land.
In the hut – one of six that nestled together in the little hamlet by the river – the sleeping mother lay with her child.
She had no sense of danger.
High in the starlit summer sky, pale clouds passed from time to time, drifting in a leisurely procession, glowing softly in the reflection of a crescent moon that rode to the south.
Like horsemen they came from the east with their billowing white canopies, from who knew what endless steppes – sweeping majestically over the little collection of huts by the river’s edge and continuing their journey behind the hamlet over the dark forest which, very likely, was also without end.
The hamlet lay on the south-eastern bank of the stream. There, the woods of oak and lime, pine and birch, grew thinner, gradually giving way to glades and the broad stretches of open grassland that were the edges of the mighty steppe. Across the small river, on the north-west bank, the forest was thick, dark and unbroken.
The three families who inhabited the place had arrived five summers before, and finding there an ancient, deserted earthwork enclosure overgrown with scrub, had cleared it, put up a wooden palisade on the low earth wall, and built half a dozen huts inside. Nearby, two large fields cut untidy swathes into the trees. Further into the woods, a messy patchwork of smaller clearings appeared.
A few hundred yards downstream, the land on both sides became marshy, and remained so for a couple of miles.
Softly the wind moved over the land. It caressed the tops of the trees, so that the light undersides of the leaves shimmered pale in the starlight. The waters of the winding river and the marsh glimmered in the woods.
There were few sounds except for the gentle stirring of the leaves. Here and there, the sound of small animals, or of the deer quietly walking, might be heard. At a certain point near the marsh, against the monotonous background of the frogs’ croaking, an attentive ear might have picked up the crackling sounds of a bear making its way along the wood’s edge. But by the hamlet, the only sound was that of the leaves, and the intermittent rustle as the breeze stroked the long field of barley, sending a ripple like a momentary shiver down its length.
The wind moved, yet did not move. For sometimes the field stood still, or swayed in another direction, as though the wind from the east had paused, lazily, before brushing the ripened barley once again.
It was the year AD 180 – and yet it was not. That is to say, although future times would give to this year such a number, as yet the Christian calendar was not in use. Far south, in the Roman province of Judea where Jesus of Nazareth had lived, learned Jewish rabbis had calculated that it was the year 3940 AM. It was also the one hundred and tenth year since the destruction of Jerusalem. Elsewhere in the mighty Roman Empire, it was the twentieth and last year of the reign of Marcus Aurelius, also the first year of the single rule of Commodus. In Persia it was the year 491 of the Seleucid era.
What year was it here then, in the tiny hamlet at the forest’s edge? So far as history is aware, it was not any year. It was five years since the last village elder died. The huge systems of numbering familiar