He had been thinking about it ever since he reached Murom. Indeed he guessed that, sooner or later, suspicion might even fall on him for the Tatar’s death. But since he could prove that he had spent his time innocently at the village, he felt bold enough to take a chance.
And he could not resist it.
So when Peter’s son came to him and politely requested to know whether his father had bought the land from him for the monastery, Milei shook his head.
‘Alas, no. He did not like the place. A pity,’ he added, his eyes staring blandly at the young man. ‘I should have been glad if he had.’
‘So he gave you no money?’
Milei shook his head.
‘None.’
They could prove nothing. If ever they found the Tatar’s body, they could scarcely expect to find any money left on him. And, by that stroke of incredible good fortune, there were no deeds to the land for anyone to find!
Peter’s son had left. Short of calling him a liar, there was nothing the young Tatar could say.
The next week, using money from an ostensible sale of some land near Murom, Milei bought in the extra chernozem at Russka from the Grand Prince.
Fortune had smiled on him, indeed.
1263
How strange, how secret, are the ways of God.
In the spring of the next year, before the snows melted, Milei the boyar went to his estate at Russka.
From the front of his house, as he looked out, the first thing he saw was the rich land across the river. And now it was all his, stretching from the river out to the north of Dirty Place for several miles.
He had come early to the village because he had great plans for its improvement.
He had bought a number of slaves from the Moslem tax farmers. Some of them, admittedly, had been made slaves illegally for failing to pay enough taxes. But no one was likely to trouble about that here. And they were good Slavs, sound peasants, as well – just what he had always needed.
They were due to arrive at Russka in early summer.
There were settlers, too. He was going to let some of the new land and had managed to find three families, who had been ruined by the new taxes and were glad to get good new land on easy terms.
‘All in all, the Tatars have been good for me,’ he chuckled to himself.
On the first Sunday of April, the snow began to melt. Each day the sky was bright blue, the sun warm. Soon great banks of grey slush were forming beside little brown rivulets as the land began to appear. On the river, discoloured patches of brown and green could be seen where the ice was getting thin. On the Wednesday of that week, as he gazed out from the doorway, he could see little black bumps of rich earth peeping through the snow on the river’s eastern side.
And then, as he stepped over the threshold, Milei the boyar had an extraordinary sensation. It was as if someone had stabbed him in the heart.
He stopped and put his hand to his chest. Surely his heart was not giving out. He was not so old. He took a deep breath, but felt no pain: no difficulty in breathing. He looked at his hands for some tell-tale sign of blue in the fingertips, but there was none.
He walked out carefully, pulling his fur coat tightly about him, although the sun was warm. Nothing more happened. He walked round the village and went to see the steward. The fellow was about to cross the river, and so Milei decided to go with him. They went across in a little dug-out and got out onto the small jetty opposite.
Then something stranger still occurred. As Milei stepped on to the land of the east bank, his feet suddenly felt as if they were on fire. He took two more steps and cried out with pain.
‘What is it, lord?’ The old steward looked at him with astonishment.
Milei was staring down with horror. ‘My feet … when I stepped here … Do your feet hurt?’
‘No, lord.’
He tried to take another step, but the pain was so great he could not. ‘We’re going back,’ he mumbled; and the puzzled steward had to row him across the river again.
Greatly disconcerted, the boyar went back to his house. There he inspected his feet. They were just as normal.
Later that day, as he came out again and glanced across the river, the terrible pain struck him in the chest once more like a blow, so that his knees almost buckled and he had to catch the frame of the door to stop himself falling.
The same thing happened again the next day. And the next. He could not cross his own threshold; and he could not set foot on the land opposite the river.
Then he thought he understood.
‘It’s that damned Tatar,’ he murmured. ‘He’s returned to plague me.’
In fact, he was more accurate than he knew.
For it never occurred to him that one starless night the previous autumn, just after he had gone back to Murom, Purgas the Mordvinian had stolen by his empty house and, with consummate skill, ripped up the threshold outside and buried, in two feet of earth, the head of Peter the Tatar right under his doorway.
Even Yanka never knew her husband had done this.
But when he had finished, had it been possible to see his expression in the darkness, a look of strange, almost diabolical satisfaction would have been discerned on the Mordvinian’s face. ‘If they ever find this, it is you, boyar, they will accuse of murder,’ he whispered, ‘lover of my wife.’
He had always guessed. Now he and the boyar were even.
Yet, though Milei knew nothing of the presence of Peter, the excruciating pains grew worse. He could hardly bear to leave his house now. I could take over the steward’s house for the time being, he thought. But how could he explain that? I’ll say the ants or the mice have invaded mine. Yet it sounded a poor excuse. Besides, what was the satisfaction of being here when he could not even set foot on his best land? I shall have to leave Russka, he decided.
The next day, he called for his horse in the morning and, swinging himself up into the saddle, told the steward: ‘I’ll be back in the summer.’
Yet he had not gone half a mile from the village when his horse quite suddenly shied and threw him so that, landing on some roots, he thought for a moment he had broken his leg. That was nothing to his astonishment though, when the animal, looking to its left, gave a piercing whinny of fear, and bolted in the other direction.
He stared at the place which had so startled his horse. And there, amongst the trees, he saw it. It was a magnificent animal: a stallion of unnatural size: a grey, with a black mane and a black stripe down its back. It came through the trees towards him and galloped straight across the path after his own mount. As it went by, its hoofs made no sound.
Slowly Milei picked himself up. He crossed himself. Then he limped back into the village. For now he understood.
As soon as he was back, he called the surprised steward to his house, and also the old priest from the little church.
‘I have decided,’ he told them, ‘to make a great gift to the glory of God. I am going to found a monastery on my old land across the river.’
‘What has brought about this decision?’ the priest asked. He had not considered Milei capable of such a selfless act.
‘I had a vision,’ the boyar replied drily, though with truth.
‘The Lord be praised,’ the old man cried. Truly, how strange and secret were the ways of God.
Milei nodded, then, apparently lost in meditation, he walked out through the door of his house to look at the land he had just given away.
He returned a moment later, smiling as if with relief, and at once took the priest across the river and conducted him round the site.
And so it was, in the year 1263, that the little monastery at Russka was founded.
It was dedicated to St Peter and St Paul.
One other event of significance occurred in that year.
In order to beg the Tatar Khan to be lenient with the rebellious tax-payers of Russia, the Great Prince Alexander Nevsky had set out across the steppe to visit the Horde.
‘He is not we
ll,’ a visiting boyar from Vladimir told Milei. ‘If the Tatars don’t kill him, the long journey may.’
‘I hope not,’ Milei answered. ‘His policy may have been unpopular with the people, but it has been wise.’
‘It will be continued,’ the other assured him. ‘But he was very distressed to go at such a time. His youngest son is only three and he wanted to see him through until he was grown.’
‘Ah, yes, Daniel is the little boy, isn’t he?’ Milei knew nothing about this child beyond his name. ‘I wonder what his inheritance will be.’
‘They say,’ the boyar from Vladimir told him, ‘that Alexander has instructed his family to give him Moscow when he is older.’
‘Moscow! That miserable town!’
‘It’s not much of a place,’ the other agreed, ‘though its position isn’t bad.’
Moscow. Milei shook his head. Whatever talents this infant prince might have, he couldn’t imagine he’d ever make much of a paltry little town like that.
The Icon
1454
At the Monastery of St Peter and St Paul, they were summoning the Monks to Vespers and though the spring evening was cold and damp, there was excitement in the air. Tomorrow was the great day: the boyar was coming; a bishop from Vladimir, too. And everyone smiled as his assistant Sebastian led the man at the centre of it all, old Father Stephen, into the church. There was only one sadness. If only Father Joseph could be there.
For many years there had been three very ancient monks at the monastery: now only these two remained. Father Stephen was short, Father Joseph tall. Stephen was revered as a maker of icons; Joseph had no skills and some thought him simple-minded. But both were very gentle, with long white beards, and they loved each other.
For thirty-three years, however, Father Joseph had lived apart. Across the river now, in a small clearing some way beyond the springs, there was a group of three huts, which formed a hermitage, or skete. In recent generations, inspired by the so-called Hesychast tradition of the famous Mount Athos Monastery in Greece, many Russian monks had drawn apart for a life of intense contemplation. Some, like the blessed Sergius of the Trinity Monastery north of Moscow, had gone deep into the forest: ‘Going into the desert’ they called it. The skete at Russka was quite cut off. To reach the monastery the hermits had to walk about a mile to the river, then call for the ferryboat kept on the opposite bank. But they came in, each day, for Vespers.
Except Father Joseph. For a year, they had had to carry the old man. Now, however, he was too weak even to be moved. Death, everyone knew, could not be far off. Yet still each day, a thousand times, he whispered the Jesus prayer: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me.’
Vespers: the start of the day. Following the ancient Jewish custom the Orthodox Church began its day at sundown. The evening psalm was sung. Throughout the Orthodox service, however long, everyone stood. Nor were any musical instruments allowed, but only the human voice. ‘Right Praising’, as the Slavs call worshipping. The singing was lovely: the whole church year arranged in sequences of eight tones, adapted from the idea of the eight musical modes of the ancient Greeks, so that the calendar presented an endless, subtle variation of sound, week by week. The Great Litany began, and after each supplication the monks intoned the refrain Gospodi Pomily – Lord have Mercy – which little phrase, repeated again and again, sounded like tiny waves breaking upon a shore.
Sebastian looked around him happily. The monastery had many treasures. Since the marriage of his forebear David to the Tatar girl, the boyar’s family, besides acquiring a rather Asiatic look, had been granted more land, including the local Black Land at Dirty Place. The peasants there, once free and now under his steward, had no love for the boyar, but the monastery had gained much. The boyar had given the monks their fine church, built of gleaming white limestone, with its fashionable pyramid roof of false pointed arches and its bulbous onion dome; also a tower with a splendid bell – still a rarity in that region; also a lovely icon of St Paul by the great master, Rublev. But nothing, surely, could be finer than the great screen of icons – the iconostasis – that Father Stephen had been painting for thirty years and which would be revealed tomorrow.
How splendid it was. Stretching across the eastern end of the church, dividing the sanctuary from the main body, its five tiers of icons reached almost to the roof. The Holy Family and the saints, the roof. The Last Supper, the Saviour, the Mother of God and the saints; Holy Days, prophets and patriarchs: all were depicted in gleaming colours and in gold. In the centre was the great double door, called the Holy or Royal door, on which were painted the Annunciation and the four Evangelists. And old Father Stephen had painted it all.
One part of the screen was still covered with a cloth. That night the old man was going to complete the last, small icon of the top tier. In the morning he, Sebastian, would fix it in place in time for the ceremony. Then the work would be complete: to the glory of God.
And the glory of Russia. For one thing was clear to Sebastian, it was that now, in these last days before the world’s end, God intended Russia to be glorified.
How she had suffered. For two centuries now she had lain, dismembered, under the Tatar yoke. On every side she was threatened. To the south, Tatars swept across the steppe; to the east, the Tatar Khan – the Tsar, as the Russians called him – and his vassals the Volga Bulgars held their vast Asiatic dominion. And to the west, now, a huge new power had arisen: for in the vacuum left by the collapse of old Russia, the Baltic tribe of Lithuanians – first pagan, now Catholic – had swept across western Russia and taken the land even as far as ancient Kiev itself. Poor Russia: no wonder that even the icons of the Mother of God, in those times, have a special quality of sadness.
Yet Russia was slowly recovering – thanks to Moscow.
The rise of Moscow was astounding. It began when a clever ruler of the little principality married the Tatar Khan’s sister and became Grand Duke. As agents for the Khans, the Moscow princes slowly surpassed all their rivals – Riazan, the eastern city of Nizhni Novgorod, even powerful Tver – all now acknowledged her supremacy. Then, in 1380, blessed by the famous monk Sergius, Moscow had actually defeated a Tatar army at the great Battle of Kulikovo by the River Don. The metropolitan of the Orthodox Church resided at Moscow, too. And who knew, though the Tatars still raided the land and demanded tribute, one day Moscow might yet help Russia to break free.
When the last hymn, the Troparion, was finished, Sebastian escorted Father Stephen to his cell. The long Easter fast had weakened the old man and he looked very frail. Sebastian gazed at him fondly. By chance they were distant cousins, sharing an ancestor in Yanka the peasant woman. Chiefly, however, Sebastian felt full of gratitude. He had always been Stephen’s pupil. As a boy, the old man had explained the points of the Orthodox cross, with its two extra bars, the headrest and diagonal footrest, which distinguish it from the Catholic cross.
And now he had learned, thoroughly, the art of the icon: choosing the dry wood of alder or birch; planing the surface but leaving a rough border around the edge; attaching the linen; coating its surface with fish glue and alabaster; pricking the outline with a stylus; applying the gold leaf for the haloes; and then painting layer after layer, binding each with egg yolk and brass, to give the icon its wonderful depth. Finally, days later, one added the coating of linseed oil mixed with amber which soaked through and gave the icon its divine warmth. For the icon was not a picture, but an object of veneration.
Once in his cell, Father Stephen dismissed Sebastian and sat at his work-table alone. He had one icon, of the patriarch Abraham, to complete – a last layer, which would transform the whole. It could go into the iconostasis for the service tomorrow: the coating would have to come later. He was a humble man. ‘Beside the simple beauty of the great Rublev,’ he would say, ‘my icons are nothing.’ But such as it was, the iconostasis was his. Now, gazing at the unfinished icon, he said a prayer.
It was strange, he often realized, th
at his screen would only stand for thirty-eight more years. For the Church had decided, after many calculations, that the Russian year 7000 – 1492 by the Western calendar – would be the End of the World. Sebastian, he supposed, would see it. But it was not for him to reason about such things. He must paint icons, to God’s glory, to the end.
He bowed his head. Then something happened.
It was hard for Sebastian to keep still. Despite his own humility, the whole monastery was in awe of Father Stephen’s accomplishment and the coming day would be a triumph. Sebastian could think of nothing else as he paced in the damp night air. Hours passed, but he did not dare disturb the old master. Nor, when Stephen failed to appear at the midnight service of Nocturne, did anyone think anything of it. For afterwards, through the little cell window, Sebastian could see Stephen before his table, his head occasionally moving to and fro, as he worked. As so the night grew deeper.
Father Stephen sat still and wrestled with his body. The stroke he had suffered after Vespers had only made him unconscious for a short while. But he could not speak and he could not move his right arm and he stared, helplessly, at the unfinished icon before him. Hours passed. He prayed. He prayed to the Virgin of the Intercession.
It was in the early hours of the morning that Sebastian awoke and went outside. The candle in Father Stephen’s cell was still burning; and perhaps he might have approached if, looking over the monastery wall, he had not seen the strangest sight in the distance.
It seemed to be a little boat with a white sail, coming from the woods opposite, towards the river. He rubbed his eyes. Impossible. Then he saw that it was not a boat at all, but a man, moving with great speed. And next, wonder of wonder, the shining figure moved across the water. I’m bewitched! Sebastian was certain of it: for the figure suddenly floated, with apparent ease, over the monastery gate and went swiftly to Father Stephen’s cell. And then Sebastian saw that it was old Father Joseph. Trembling, he ran to his cell.
And he would, in the morning, have convinced himself that this whole business had been a dream, but for one curious circumstance. For while it so happened that both Father Stephen and Father Joseph had departed this world, from their separate abodes, at about dawn that day the icon, duly finished, was also found in the iconostasis, in its proper place.