Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [75]
No one else ever knew how close he came to death that day.
As the cold waters closed over his head, he felt himself being dragged down by two forces – the strong river current and the weight of his mail. It took all his strength to fight his way to the surface, to gasp for air and dive again.
But he found Sviatopolk. His face was already grey; he was tangled in some river reeds that seemed to wrap themselves round him like insistent, importunate rusalki. How Ivanushka got him free, he hardly knew. But somehow he did, and drifted with him down the stream until he could pull him to the river bank. There, turning him over, he forced the water from his lungs.
Together the two brothers lay exhausted on the bank. For several minutes neither spoke. The sun was high in the sky. Birds were flitting curiously over the long grass around them. The sounds of battle had entirely died away.
‘Why did you save me?’
‘You are my brother.’
There was a pause. Ivanushka could feel Sviatopolk preparing himself for the next question. ‘But … last night. You knew?’
‘I knew.’
Sviatopolk groaned. ‘And now I must bear the burden of your forgiveness too.’ It was said without rancour. Sviatopolk sounded infinitely weary.
‘You forget,’ Ivanushka calmly reminded him, ‘that I, too, sinned. Perhaps more than you, when I was wandering and I stole. I returned with nothing, yet our father forgave me and took me in. Tell me now, my brother, what it is that drove you to such a thing?’
It seemed to Sviatopolk that he could hate no longer. For hatred, feeding upon him year after year, driving him forward like a cruel rider pushing his horse, hatred and misery had finally worn him out. Slowly, a few words at a time, staring straight up at the blue sky, he told his brother the whole story.
‘You had only to ask me for help,’ Ivanushka reminded him gently.
‘But what man can ask?’
‘You are too proud,’ Ivanushka said with a smile.
‘It has brought me despair and death,’ his brother sighed.
‘The preachers tell us it does,’ Ivanushka replied drily.
And that summer, having at last visited the great River Don, he paid his brother’s debts.
They had returned in triumph. Yet in the long warm days of autumn, that very year, the sage counsellor of great Monomakh, for the first time in many years, gave all Rus the chance to say: ‘Ivan’s a fool.’
He decided to build a church.
That would have been normal enough for a rich boyar, but he decided to build it in stone. Even that, if extravagant, might have been thought handsome had he decided to build it in Pereiaslav, or even perhaps in the fort of Russka.
But he did not. He decided to build it outside the fortress walls, on a little rise overlooking the river towards the village on the eastern side.
‘And since I see now that, without help, all men are lost,’ he declared, ‘I shall dedicate it to the Mother of God when she begs Him to forgive the sins of the world.’
So began the construction of his little church which was dedicated to the Virgin of the Intercession.
It was a modest building.
It had four walls made of brick, stone and rubble that formed, near enough, a cube. Over the centre of the cube was a small, squat octagonal drum, and this was topped with a shallow dome – only a little deeper in shape than an upturned saucer – with a little rim of roof around it. That was all: it was just a cube with a hole in the top.
Had one looked down from the sky at this little building before the roof was on, one could have seen that it contained four pillars, making a smaller square in the middle, and thus dividing the interior into nine equal squares. The drum and dome rested on the four pillars in the middle.
Within the church, however, this simple arrangement of nine squares could be seen another way. It appeared as three sections, dividing the church laterally. First, as one came in from the western end, came the introduction – a sort of vestibule. Then, one passed into the second, central section, under the dome. This was the