Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [3]
For this was the land that would one day be known as Russia.
Softly the wind moved over the land.
She lay with her little boy. The worrying thoughts of the day before had passed from her mind in sleep like the pale clouds receding over the forest behind the river. She slept at peace.
There were twelve people sleeping in the hut. Five of them, including Lebed and her child, lay on the broad shelf that ran across the room over the big stove. On this warm summer night the stove was unlit. The air was thick with the sweet, earthy smell – not unpleasant – of folk who have worked all day in the field harvesting. To this was added the fresh scent of grasses carried in by the breeze through the square, open frame of the window.
She lay at one end of the wooden shelf – a lowly position – because she was the most junior of her husband’s wives. She was twenty-seven, no longer young. Her face was broad and her body had already developed a stocky roundness at the hips. Her thick fair hair had slid over the edge of the shelf.
Beside her, in the curve of her plump arm, lay a little boy of five. She had had other children before him, but they had died, and so he was all she possessed.
She had been fifteen when she married and she had always known that her husband had only taken her because she was strong: she was there to work. But she had few complaints. He was not unkind. Still a tall, good-looking man at forty, his weather-beaten face had something soft, even wistful, about it and usually when he saw her, his light blue eyes would gleam with a gentle, mocking amusement as he called: ‘Here comes my Mordvinian.’
With him, it was a term of affection. With the others, however, it was not.
For Lebed was not a full member of the tribe. To her husband’s clan she was a half-breed: after all, what was her mother – one of the forest folk? A Mordvinian?
Since time began, the forests and marshes that stretched northwards for hundreds of miles had contained the scattered tribes of Finno-Ugrian peoples to which her mother’s tribe belonged. Broad-faced, Mongoloid folk with yellowish skins, they hunted and fished in those huge, deserted regions, living a primitive existence in their little huts and pit dwellings. At the solstice, they would stand in a circle and sing, in a high, harsh, nasal chant to the pale sun who, as one travelled further north, would scarcely show his face in winter and in summer would deny the earth her nightly rest as he bathed the land in a long, white twilight and made the horizon tremble with pale flashes.
In recent times, her husband’s people – fair-skinned folk, speaking a Slavic tongue – had been sending out little colonies east and north into this forest. Some of these, like her husband’s clan, cultivated fields and kept cattle. When these Slavs and the primitive Finns encountered each other in those vast regions, there was seldom any conflict. There was land and hunting enough for ten thousand times their numbers. Marriages like her mother’s took place. But the settlers of the hamlet looked down upon the forest folk all the same.
It was her husband’s joke to call her by the name not of her mother’s little tribe, but of the great tribe of Mordvinians that lay far to the north. It made her sound more foreign, even though she was half pure Slav. It was gently mocking. And, she reflected sadly, it reminded the rest of the clan to look down on her.
Especially her mother-in-law. For nearly thirteen years her large, powerful figure had loomed over Lebed’s life like a threatening cloudbank in the sky. Sometimes, for days at a time, the other woman’s leonine face with its big, heavy cheeks would seem to be serene, even friendly. But then some small mistake on Lebed’s part – a spindle dropped, sour cream spilt – would call forth a thundering rage. The other women of the house would be silent, either looking down at the floor or watching her furtively. And she knew that they were glad