Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [215]
These were the instructions Andrei carried with the letters as he went on his thrilling mission.
Muscovy. Two Cossacks led the party – Kondrat Burlay and Silvian Muzhilovsky. Andrei was their aide.
Swiftly they made their way eastward from the River Dniepr, through the thinning woods until finally, leaving the trees behind them, they ventured out on to the open steppe. They travelled east another day before turning northwards. The winter had been long and bitter. The ground was still hard, with little snowdrifts in places.
It was a strange frontier region, this. Andrei had never been here before, though he knew that many Cossacks and Ukrainians had fled to these broad borderlands where they had come, at least in name, under the protection of the Russian Tsar.
‘And the Tsar has been making his presence felt here, too,’ Burlay told him. ‘In the old days, the Russian fortress line against the Tatars was a long way north, almost up at the River Oka. They’ve just finished a new line now, though. It runs right across the steppe.’ He laughed. ‘It’s quite impressive.’
Nothing, however, had prepared Andrei for what he saw when they came to it the next day.
He simply gasped. So this was the might of Muscovy!
The new, so-called Belgorod line of the Muscovite state was an awesome undertaking. The completed line ran across the steppe from near the fortress town of Belgorod all the way to the distant Volga as it descended towards the deserts by the Caspian Sea. Huge earth walls with trenches in front of them, wooden palisades above, stout towers with sharpened wooden stakes pointing outwards from their tops: this was Muscovy’s mighty barrier against the Crimean Khan who, even now, a century after Ivan the Terrible had conquered Kazan, still demanded tribute, from time to time, from the Russians in their forest empire.
It was as he gazed upon this tremendous wall that the young Cossack received his first impression of the true character of the Russian state of the north.
These people are not like the Poles at all, he suddenly realized. The Poles would never build like this. Poland had simply given the huge tracts of the Ukraine to a few magnates to exploit as they thought best. True, they set up forts to protect their income; they employed Cossacks to keep the raiders at bay. But they were just a collection of great lords, concerned with reaping a profit from these rich borderlands, to keep themselves in comfort in their European palaces in the west.
This colossal fortification, though, was not the work of mere aristocrats. It was the work of a mighty emperor – of a great, dark power, half-Slav, half-Tatar. It’s like a Tatar city on the steppe, he thought, looking at the high pointed stakes on the parapet, but huge, endless.
And, indeed, the great wall itself seemed to speak, as though to say: ‘We know you horsemen of the steppe, for we are partly of your blood; but see, we can out-build you – for our heart is greater than yours. Thus we shall carry our mighty Russian forest, even across the endless steppe, until one day even the proud Khan shall bow before our Holy Russia.’
It was Burlay, riding beside him, who now remarked: ‘If you want to understand the Russians, Andrei, always remember – whenever they feel threatened, they rely upon size.’
So it was that the little party continued, into the great fortress of the Russian state.
At first, Andrei noticed nothing very different. When they began to encounter woodland again, the broad-leaved forests seemed very like those around Kiev: the villages with their thatched roofs and timber stockades seemed familiar, too.
Yet gradually he began to see a change. The thatched roofs petered out, to be replaced by heavy logs. It grew colder: the snow lay more thickly upon the ground. Somehow the woods, and the fields, looked grey.
And there was something else.
He was used to Russians: there had been plenty of them at the Cossack camp. They spoke Great Russian of course, but that was not difficult for a Ukrainian to understand. Not that they compared with