Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [253]
It took place on a sunny October day in 1696. By the Moscow river a triumphal arch had been erected in the Roman manner, with huge statues, one of Mars, the other of Hercules, on each side. Below it was a model of the Turkish Pasha in chains.
When the procession came, it was headed by Peter’s tutor – the man who played Prince-Pope in the infamous Drunken Synod – dressed up in armour. Then in a gilded carriage came the Swiss Lefort. Then more carriages. Then came a cart containing a traitor who had foolishly helped the Turks during the campaign. The instruments of the torture and execution he was to suffer were displayed beside him.
And at last, towards the rear of a procession that went on for miles, came Peter.
To many who had never got a good look at him before, he was an astounding sight. He was built like an athlete. He had a mop of dark hair, a moustache like a Cossack, and piercing, staring eyes. He stood no less than six foot seven inches high.
Yet this young Russian giant was not wearing Russian dress. He wore a German uniform, a black coat and a huge black three-cornered hat in which he had jauntily stuck a long white feather.
And there was not a priest in sight.
No icons came before the procession; no priests with banners. No welcoming speech from the Patriarch; no church bells rang. A Roman Caesar had come, wearing a German uniform; a pagan procession was entering the capital of Holy Russia.
‘Yet even the Romans had their gods,’ Nikita murmured. ‘And even Genghis Khan, pagan that he was, did not despise the Church.’ And as he gazed at the procession he thought he saw a new, harsh sun that would burn away all the shadows.
As for Eudokia, she stared with furious disgust.
‘When his mother died, and he would not even stay at her bedside, I said he was unnatural,’ she remarked. ‘Now I have seen the face of evil itself.’
Yet even this horror had been as nothing to what was happening now.
For in 1698, Peter had, once more, done something that no ruler of Russia had ever done.
He had travelled abroad. And he had taken Procopy with him.
While they were away, Eudokia had scarcely even visited Moscow. The place had become hateful to her. Instead she had spent most of her time alone, down at Russka, where she continued to pass long hours in the company of the priest Silas, and Daniel and his family.
But now Peter and her son were back. And in Moscow, all hell had broken loose.
Daniel approached the capital with a mixture of curiosity and dread.
Could the rumours he had heard since Tsar Peter’s sudden return from abroad really be true? It was many years since he had been to the capital, but when he received the summons from that godly woman Eudokia Mikhailovna, he had not hesitated but had come, bringing with him his wife and little daughter.
For – and it often puzzled Daniel that God should have granted such a gift in these evil days – he and Arina, after nearly fifteen years, and long after they had given up hope, had unexpectedly been blessed with a daughter. She had been born in 1693 when Arina was thirty-nine and he was in his sixties. And now here he was, aged seventy, with a wife and a six-year-old girl.
At first, when he and Arina had gazed at the little baby who had so wondrously appeared, they had been astonished by one thing: she did not in the least seem to resemble either of them.
It was old Elena who, with a smile of delight, solved the mystery.
‘To think that, in my last days, I should have been granted such a thing,’ she muttered. ‘The child is my Maryushka, to the life.’
So that was what they called her: Maryushka. And old Elena, in the last three years of her life, would sit with the child every day with as much pride as if it had been her own.
Yet if little Maryushka had come into their lives like a ray of sunshine, what dark years they were into which she had been born. All over Russia, but especially in the north, the government had continued to persecute the Raskolniki. Some sought martyrdom by challenging