Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [94]
There was no church.
The northern Russka.
The nearest village lay three miles away, to the south-east. This, too, was on the little River Rus. Just behind this village lay a low, wooded ridge. But below the ridge, down by the river, the land was marshy, and so when the Slav settlers had first come upon it they had called it Dirty Place – which remained its name thereafter. Past Dirty Place it was another seven miles to any village.
At first sight, it seemed to Yanka that the forest was all fir. But a walk around showed her that this was not the case. There were, in fact, a huge variety of trees: larch and birch, lime, oak, pine, and many others. Back along the Oka, around Riazan, she had even seen orchards of apple and even cherry trees. But she did not notice any here. The vegetable patches were not very impressive either. They grew peas and cucumbers mainly, as far as she could discover. And she observed something else: their horses were all tiny.
The houses were made of wood – huge, solid logs from base to roof: there were none of the clay walls and thatched roofs she had known in the south.
But, above all, the people were different. ‘They are so quiet,’ she whispered to her father, the first morning as they walked around the place. ‘You’d think they were frozen.’
There was a mix of people in the village. Before the boyar’s family acquired it, the inhabitants had been mostly Slavs of the Viatichi tribe. ‘Pagan animals’ she had always heard these Viatichi called, for they were amongst the most backward of the Slav tribes. There were six Viatichi families now. As well as these, there were three families who had moved up from the south a generation ago, and finally the three families of Mordvinians, with their high Finnish cheekbones and almond eyes, brought in by the boyar.
Different as these all were, to Yanka they seemed all the same in this one, crucial respect. For whereas the Slav villagers she knew in the south were expansive, argumentative, and full of droll humour, these people of the north were quiet, undemonstrative and seemed to be slow. In the south, one sat in the sun and talked. Here, people went quietly into the warmth of their huts.
They were not unfriendly though. On the steward’s orders, half a dozen of the men appeared with axes by midday. ‘We’ll build you a hut,’ they announced, and showed them a site at the southern end of the hamlet.
Then they set to work.
And Yanka’s opinion of them changed.
She had never seen anything like it. Huge logs appeared, seemingly from nowhere. The sturdy little horses she had seen were dragging in tree trunks you could almost have hollowed into boats. Great timbers of oak were used for the foundation, then softer, easily worked pine.
The plan of the hut was much the same as in the south: a central entrance corridor with a large space for keeping one’s equipment and stores on one side of it, and a room on the other. A good part of the wall between corridor and room was taken up with the stove, which they built of clay.
They worked entirely with their axes – stout, broad-bladed implements with rather short, straight handles, the blade extended towards the butt – and whether Finn or Slav, they seemed equally skilled. Each log was neatly jointed and slotted into its neighbour so that, although the lines between the logs were filled with moss, they were so tight it was scarcely necessary.
And there was not a single nail in the whole house.
It was not only the neatness of their work that amazed Yanka, but the speed of it. She was used to the busy people of the south, but there was something in these northerners’ quiet, ferocious pace that was heroic. They worked into the dusk. The women brought torches and lit fires so they could see better. By the time they stopped that night,