Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [34]
On his father’s instructions, Ivanushka wore only a simple linen shirt and trousers – the long shirt hanging outside and held in with a belt. Somewhat against his mother’s will, he had been allowed to keep on his favourite green boots. But his face and hands had been thoroughly scrubbed in the big copper basin that stood on the washstand.
Igor, too, was similarly dressed, his shirt only distinguishable from that of a peasant by the fineness of the embroidery at the edges. ‘For rich ornament is not fitting, up there,’ he would say severely. Ivanushka’s eyes were shining. He had been too excited to eat more than a little bread and oatmeal porridge called kasha. Now, kissing his mother and his brother, he ran out and moments later, mounted on his pony, felt the cool, damp morning air on his cheek as he clattered into the street.
It was muddy. The houses of the nobles were mostly large wooden structures on one or two floors, with tall wooden roofs like tents and outbuildings behind. Each was in the middle of a small plot of ground enclosed by a stake fence; and these plots were, at present, so sodden from the melted snow and spring rain that planks had been laid on the path from the outer gate to the stables. The street outside was boarded in some places too, but where it was not, the horses’ hoofs almost disappeared into the mud.
Ivanushka, on his grey pony, rode respectfully behind his father. The nobleman was a splendid figure: a simple black cloak hung from his shoulders over his white shirt, and Ivanushka stared at his proud, straight back with boundless admiration. The jet-black horse that Igor rode was his finest. The ancient imperial name it bore had undergone a slight modification in its passage across the generations into Slavic: it was called Troyan.
The simple folk that father and son passed put their right hand on their heart and bowed from the waist; even the robed priests inclined their heads respectfully. For Igor was a muzh – a nobleman. The blood-money to be paid if he was killed was forty silver grivnas, whereas killing a free peasant, a smerd, cost a fine of only five.
Even the names of the ruling class were often different. The princes, and a few of their greatest retainers, frequently bore the ‘royal’ names that ended in slav, meaning praise; or mir, world. Such, for instance, were the great Vladimir and his son Yaroslav. For the nobility, Scandinavian names like Riurik or Oleg were still quite often used. Even Igor’s wife, though of noble Slav family, bore the name Olga, the Russian version of the nordic Helga. A peasant, on the other hand, would probably bear some simple old slavic name like Ilya, or Shchek, or Mal.
But it was a special form of address that marked out the noble beyond doubt. For while a peasant might be plain Ilya, a noble also added his father’s name, his patronymic. Thus young Ivan was called Ivan, son of Igor: Ivan Igorevich. And the three brothers might be referred to as ‘sons of Igor’ – the Igorevichi. For Igor was not only a noble: he was a valued member of the druzhina of the Prince of Kiev himself.
There were many princes in the land of Rus. Each of the trading cities on the great river routes had a prince as its protector, and all of them were descendants of the norseman named Oleg who had taken Kiev from the Khazars two centuries before. At the moment, the greatest cities in the vast river-trading empire were in the hands of the sons of the last prince of Kiev, the mighty Yaroslav the Wise. The sons of Yaroslav had organized the succession by rote – the eldest brother taking the greatest city, Kiev, and the rest taking the lesser cities by order of seniority, and owing obedience to the eldest. Thus while Igor’s master was now the senior, or Grand Prince of Kiev, the city of Chernigov, to the north, was in the hands of his younger brother