The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [145]
There were no beasts to be seen but the wild ones: the hare in her milk-white coat, and the grey squirrel and the stoat with its snowy-tipped tail. In the woods there were wolves, and bears, and elks: they saw their prints, and the horses shied at the smell. But the stock, the small, runted cattle and lean hogs were killed and frozen, or sharing with their owners the unstable log izbas, built up so assiduously against the snow, which the thaw might so easily bring slipping to disaster again. Inside, the ikon; the wall-plank for bedding. The stove-room with its bundles of birch-slivers where twice weekly the steam bath was taken, for cleanliness and to ward off disease. A diet of roots and garlic and onions and cabbage and too much time to sleep, or to toil under the stinking tapers at your painstaking craft: the working of skins and furs, the shoemaking and woollen embroidery; the making of wooden bowls and stools and sledges and hanging cradles and chests, painted raspberry red, and yellow, and black; the shallow gingerbread moulds, with their cocks and their pigeons patterned in the white wood; the beehive tooled like a bear, with flight-entries formed in its muzzle. The harsh drink; the coarse clothes; the grey, crackling pile of hard fish, culled for soup with a hammer.
Poverty. Poverty in the presence of starving cold and great, earth-cracking heat, and life lived in the shadow of the wolf and the bear, and tribes more cruel and avaricious. For it was the land which was implacable, far more than its masters. An obja, tilled by one horse, could be rented for two or three roubles or its equal in labour, and a fee of perhaps half of the rotated crop of rye or of oats. In law, the peasant might be hanged, where the boyar was only whipped or imprisoned, but discrimination was less than he had expected; serfdom was almost unknown.
Yet where was the succour when the grain was struck cold in the ground, and had to be gathered and ripened on Stovetops, and thawed in hot-houses, so that it might be ground? When the tinder-dry warehouses burned, and cities starved, and beggars, ragged and violent, roved the streets of Vologda, as he had seen them: Give me and cut me; give me and kill me.
How, if you were the Church, did you justify a single gold-collared ikon, with two thousand five hundred diamonds set upon its thick hammered surface? How, if you were the Tsar, did you vindicate your annual tribute, bartered for rich cloths and finer jewels for your treasurehouse? How, if you were a man from a softer land, where debate was instructed and free, and all the scholars and books from antiquity were there to correct and advise you, could you accept in your turn such a tribute, and use it to clothe the body and house of your mistress?
But he kept his thoughts to himself, and barely saw the Voevoda, except to exchange the slimmest of commonplace courtesies, until the day before their arrival in Kholmogory, when they stopped to eat in a church by the flat, snowfilled ice of the Dwina.
It was a new church, wreathed with galleries, its steps dropping from level to level in uneven flights, canopied and jointed like parings of apple. Above, the spires were leaved with fresh, gilded kokoshniks, and the onion domes with their tall, tangled crosses stood bright as an odd, untimely budding.
It was dark, even at noon, with the snow stretching white and stark to the violet slate of the sky. The