Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [44]
And now, this bright September morning, the whole city was in an uproar. Terrified messengers came at the gallop to say that the Cumans were advancing. In the podol outside the citadel, the city assembly – the famous veche – was meeting. All the people had gone there.
And the talk was of revolution.
That was why, this morning, instead of staying with his family in the high, brick hall of the prince’s palace, he had sneaked out, crossed the bridge over the ravine that led from the old citadel to the new, and made his way past St Sophia’s cathedral towards the gates into the podol.
The new citadel was eerily quiet. The nobles’ houses were deserted: not even the horses and grooms had been left at his father’s. There were a few women and children, and the occasional priest in the streets, but it seemed that the whole male population had gone down to the veche in the suburb.
Ivanushka knew about the veche. Even the Prince of Kiev himself was afraid of it. Usually, of course, it was tame enough and run by the leading merchants. But in times of crisis, every free man of the city had the right to attend and to vote. ‘And when the veche revolts, it is terrible,’ Igor had told him. ‘Even the prince and the druzhina can’t control them.’
‘Are the people angry now?’ he had asked.
‘They are beside themselves. You’re not to go out.’
As he made his way through the citadel, Ivanushka was so excited he almost forgot that he was disobeying his father. He hurried through the gate to the market square.
It was full. He had never seen so many people in his life. They had even come in from the outlying towns – merchants, artisans, the free traders and workers of the Russian city states – several thousand of them. On each side of the square was a church: one a stout, brick, Byzantine affair with a flat central dome, the other a smaller wooden structure with a high gabled roof and a little octagonal tower in the middle. They seemed to be overseeing the proceedings, giving them a religious sanction. In the centre was a wooden platform, upon which all eyes were fixed. A huge brown-bearded merchant in a red kaftan was standing there. In his hands was a staff, and, like some terrible Old Testament prophet he was denouncing the authorities. ‘Why is this prince here, in Kiev?’ he shouted. ‘Why do his family rule in other cities?’ He paused until he had drawn an expectant silence from the crowd. ‘They are here because we invited their ancestors to come to us.’ He hammered his staff. ‘The Varangians came from the north to us Slavs because we brought them in!’
This rewriting of history that had grown up over the generations had suited both sides – the norsemen because it gave legitimacy to their original, piratical rule, and their Slav subjects because it salvaged their pride.
‘Why did we bring them in?’ He glowered from side to side, as though challenging the churches themselves to interrupt him. ‘To fight for us. To defend our cities. That is why they are here!’
There was truth in this. Even now, the relationship between the princes and the cities they governed was ambiguous; the prince protected the city but he did not own it, any more than he owned the land, much of which still belonged to free peasants or communes. In the great northern city of Novgorod, the veche of the people had been known to reject princes, and never allowed their chosen protector or his druzhina to own land in their domains. So Ivanushka did not find the merchant’s