Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [211]
The shout which woke the whole fort came only minutes later.
Startled wide awake, Andrei rushed to the gate, to find several of the guards already there, gazing out in puzzlement. He darted through them, and down the path.
Stepan was standing by the river bank. In his hands was a pistol. The girl was lying on the grass a few feet in front of him, dead.
He did not move. Even when Andrei reached him, he was still staring at her with a look of mystified disbelief on his face; and when Andrei tried to take him by the arm, he found that the big man was completely rigid.
For several minutes they stood there together, in the pale light of early morning then Stepan let Andrei take the pistol out of his hand and, his body suddenly sagging, walked slowly up the slope with him.
Only when he had sat the strange fellow down and made him drink a little vodka did Andrei get a confused account of what had happened.
During their long talk that night, it seemed the girl had understood the foolish, superstitious fellow only too well. She had told him she would marry him. He had been ecstatic. She had entirely won his confidence. And then, towards the end of the night, when Stepan had entered a state which, to him, seemed to be mystical, she had told him her wonderful secret.
‘It is true we were fated to meet, Stepan. I was expecting you.’ She had smiled. ‘You see, I am magical.’
She could even prove it to him, she said. If he came to a private place, she would show him.
‘You can fire your pistol through my heart,’ she promised, ‘and it will not even hurt me. Come, let me prove it.’
And that was what the simple fellow had done.
Even now, he could not fully understand that his faith in his destiny had been shattered. Still, he shook his head.
‘There must be a mistake. Perhaps she only fainted.’
Nor, it seemed, did any of the Cossacks except Andrei understand that, to the girl, death was better than to be sullied by Christian hands, even when those hands were kindly.
A little later he went to see to her burial.
Andrei wondered whether to bring her brother there, but decided it was better not. Feeling that the little fellow should at least have something to remember her by, he searched her and was surprised to discover, on a little chain around her neck, a small, ancient metal disc with a three-pronged trident on it. He had no idea what this might be, but took it for the orphaned boy all the same.
So it was that the girl was buried in an unmarked grave, by the edge of the steppe. That her journey with Stepan to the lands beyond the Don would have taken her to the homeland of her ancient Khazar ancestors, she had not remotely guessed.
As for Stepan, he gave his puzzled judgement later that morning: ‘It was that wildcat we saw. It must have looked at me. That’s what did it.’
At noon the party departed, to seek out news of the magnate Vyshnevetsky and his army.
The massacre of the Ukrainian Jews in the year 1648 followed a pattern very similar to the events at Russka. Indeed, written records survive of incidents just as strange as Stepan’s courtship.
How many Jews were actually killed is a matter of dispute which is unlikely ever to be resolved, but it is certainly true that the death toll ran into tens of thousands and that, for the rest of its history, this year marked the start of the systematic pogroms which have been a recurring feature of that region.
As for the magnate Vyshnevetsky, he gathered by early June a force of some six thousand men from his own vast estates and then crossed the Dniepr to its western