They were Cossacks, and when they had announced their exciting news, old Ostap slapped his thigh and cried out: ‘It’s time you were off, Andrei. What an adventure! The devil – I’ve a good mind to go too!’
To ride the steppe with the Cossacks – it was what young Andrei had been dreaming of since he was a boy. His horse, his equipment, everything was ready.
There was just one problem.
He was a handsome young fellow of nineteen, recently returned from the Academy at Kiev where the Orthodox priests had taught him to read and write, some simple arithmetic, and even a smattering of Latin.
His hair was jet black, his skin dark, but smooth rather than swarthy; his beard was thin, like that of a Mongolian, and mostly sprouted on his chin, but he was growing a long, fine, drooping moustache. His face was round, with high cheekbones, and he had handsome, brown, almond-shaped eyes. Though some of these features came from the beautiful Tatar wife that his grandfather Karp, the runaway, had taken, Andrei’s tall frame and graceful bearing were Karp’s exactly. Slavic charm and ruthless Tatar eyes – it made him magnetic to many women.
Since he was still young enough to believe that human nature was consistent, it sometimes puzzled Andrei that he seemed to have two souls at war within himself: one devoted to his family and their farm; the other a wild, free spirit with neither home nor conscience, which yearned to roam the steppe to the horizon and beyond. He was a perfect young Cossack.
And how he longed to go with those men, to the south. He could set out the very next day. Only one thing held him back – the question his worried mother had asked.
‘If you go, Andrei, what will become of the farm?’
Slowly and thoughtfully he rode back to the little kurgan where he paused for a few moments, to gaze around the fields and the steppe.
What wonderful land it was, with its long summers and its rich black earth! Some time ago now, this ancient Kievan territory had acquired another name, for this was the Ukraine.
The rich Ukraine: the golden land. Why then should old Ostap, as he surveyed his swaying wheat, complain?
‘God gave us the best fields and then sent a plague of locusts to devour them.’
It was because the Ukraine was ruled by the Catholic King of Poland.
Four centuries had passed since Ostap’s ancestress Yanka and her father had fled from the Tatars to the north. Since then, the Tatars had slowly lost their hold over the old Kievan territories and mighty Lithuania had moved down to take their place. But the lands round the Dniepr, rich though they were, had been half-deserted. Only very gradually had settlers moved back into the countryside and the shells of the once-great cities.
They were dangerous, frontier lands. Every few years, huge raiding parties of Tatars from the Crimea would come sweeping in from the steppe to take slaves; smaller raids were constant. Like all the other settlers, when Ostap and his men went out to plough, they took their muskets with them.
Yet they were free lands. The rule of Lithuania was generally easy-going. In the countryside, land was there for the taking. As for the towns, the greater ones like Kiev and Pereiaslav were allowed pretty much to govern themselves under the long established free burgher system from the west, known as the Magdeburg Law.
And so this part of the Ukraine might have remained: a rich frontier inhabited by Cossacks, Slav peasants, free townsmen and Lithuanian petty gentry, who nearly all followed the old Orthodox faith of ancient Rus.
Until some eighty years before. For at the Treaty of Lublin, in 1569, the two states of Poland and Lithuania, though they had long been linked, were formally merged into one. The gentry began to convert to Catholicism; great Polish magnates started to take over huge tracts of land around the Dniepr; and though the cities kept their Magdeburg Law, the rest of the Ukraine discovered what it meant to live under contemptuous Polish lords.
How dare a Polish noble despise a Cossack! Were not the Cossacks free?
There were three main sections of their great fraternity. Four hundred miles away to the south-east, where the great River Don came down to the Black Sea shore, dwelt the Don Cossacks in their many settlements. Here, in these southern Kievan lands, lived the Dniepr Cossacks, proudly independent men like Ostap on his little farm by Russka. And lastly, far to the south, in the wild steppe below the Dniepr rapids, lay the Cossack horde – the Zaporozhian host – wild, unpredictable, living in a huge camp where no women were allowed, thousands strong and answerable to no man.
That was where the two fellows disguised as monks had come from.
How proud Andrei was to be a Cossack! He had learned their exploits at his mother’s knee. Who had been hired by the powerful Stroganovs, late in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, to explore and conquer the huge wilds of Siberia? Ermak the warrior and his brother Cossacks. Indeed, though Andrei did not know it, other Cossack adventurers, at this very time, were reaching those distant shores, five thousand miles away, that stared across the narrow straits to cold Alaska.
It was the Don Cossacks who had seized the great fortress of Azov, by the Black Sea, from the mighty Ottoman Turks. And it was the Zaporozhian Cossacks who had not once, but twice, taken their long boats down to Constantinople and burned the Ottoman fleet under the very noses of the Turks.
Everyone feared the Cossacks. The Tatars in the Crimea feared them, so did the Turks who were the Tatars’ overlords. Poland had needed their services again and again. Even the Pope had sent an envoy to the Zaporozhian camp. ‘And without us Cossacks,’ the old Ostap always said, ‘the Tsar and his family would never have gained the throne of Muscovy.’
Even this boast was half-true.
Poor Muscovy. What awful torments the northern land had suffered. Soon after Ivan the Terrible’s death the ancient ruling house of Muscovy had ended. For a time a great boyar related to the royal house – Boris Godunov – had tried to hold the land together, but had sunk under the burden. Then had come those dismal years – the Time of Troubles – when plague and famine swept the land, when one after another false claimant to the throne seized power, until it was hard at times to say if any Tsar ruled in Russia. Other powers had seen their chance; Sweden had invaded and worst of all, using every kind of treachery and guile, the Polish King had tried to take the throne of Muscovy and make her Catholic.
And then, at last, great Russia had risen. She had suffered the terror of Ivan, plague and famine and foreign invasion but now, having suffered, she arose. It was not the great princes and magnates, not the leading gentry, who turned like an irresistible tide against the Poles. It was the simple peasants, the small landholders, and the grim, bearded elders of Orthodoxy from beyond the Volga River who massed with spears and axes to sweep the Catholics out. ‘And we Cossacks helped them, our Orthodox brothers,’ Ostap would say with truth, and with rather less truth: ‘Without us, they would have lost.’
The Poles had been driven out. A great meeting, a Zemsky Sobor, had been called, and a popular boyar family had been chosen to found a new dynasty.
In this way the family of Ivan the Terrible’s first, kindly wife, who had been despised by the great magnates only fifty years before were, in the year 1613, chosen to be rulers, and the new Romanov dynasty was begun.
Andrei had mixed feelings about the Muscovites. Like most Ukrainians, he thought them crude. With all Cossacks, he was suspicious of any authoritarian ruler like the Tsar. But the Russian people were his brothers, for a very simple reason: they were Orthodox. ‘They drove the Catholic Poles out of their land. Perhaps one day we can drive them out of ours too,’ he sometimes said.