For several generations Dniepr Cossacks had served the Polish King. Some had been given special officer status and entered on a service register which entitled them to regular pay. But the majority had been ignored. Moreover, as non-Catholics, they had fewer rights anyway. More than once they had revolted to improve their conditions. But the revolts had been crushed and in recent years the service Cossacks had not even been allowed their own leaders. Their chief, the Hetman, had been a Polish appointee, and many of their officers came from the Polish lesser nobility, the Szlachta. No wonder even the better-off Cossacks were discontented.
And now, it seemed, some kind of new campaign was afoot. That was the message the two Cossacks from the Zaporozhian camp had brought. They were going to teach the Poles a lesson. The question was: could Andrei go?
The sun was still high, the afternoon deliciously warm as he walked his horse towards the farm. He could not help breaking into a smile of joy as he looked at it.
A broad clearing in the trees, which approached the buildings closely on three sides. Outhouses, some of timber, some of wattle: and in their midst, the broad, stout farmhouse with its shady porch, and whose whitewashed clay walls and bright red and green shutters gleamed brightly in the afternoon sun. All the buildings had thick, overhanging thatched roofs which resembled so many haystacks gathered from the endless steppe before them. On the dusty turf before the farm, some chickens, half a dozen geese, a cow and a goat picked at the ground in a desultory way: to right and left the long grass was still, in the heat.
And there was his father, in front of the porch. Andrei smiled with affection.
He was a little taller than his father, but even now, strong as he was, Andrei was not sure the old man might not best him in a fight.
‘He’s so quick,’ he would remark proudly to his friends.
One could see instantly that they were father and son, though old Ostap’s face was a little broader than Andrei’s. He shaved his chin, but had a splendid drooping moustache, all grey, that hung almost to his chest. He was dressed in wide, baggy trousers and a shirt, both of linen, tied with a silk sash rather than a belt. On his feet were silk embroidered shoes with long, curling toes; on his bald head a silk cap. His face was cheerful but florid, his nose mottled. He was smoking a short Cossack pipe.
For some reason his strength, and his quick rages, seemed all the more formidable to Andrei because he knew that at any moment the old man might suddenly breathe his last. The red face, the tell-tale signs of breathlessness – the old warrior would not live long. He knew it, they all knew it, but with the bravado of a true Cossack he would look his son in the eye and then, quite deliberately, to challenge fate, lose his temper over some trifle. Andrei loved him for it.
But what will happen to the farm when he goes? the young man wondered. He would be the only one left. His two sisters were long since married. His brother had died a brave Cossack death, fighting, six years before. ‘Died like a man,’ old Ostap would say, raising his glass in salute, as if he did not regret it. ‘Mind you do the same, if things so fall out,’ he’d add sternly to Andrei, lest the handsome young man should think he feared to lose his last son too.
But it was not only the prospect of Ostap dying that worried his son. There were debts.
Ostap liked to live well, as befitted a Cossack gentleman: for that was how he saw himself. He liked to drink. All Cossacks drank. When he went into Pereiaslav on a market day, he’d be sure to enjoy himself. For though, as a good Cossack, he despised most townsmen, he’d usually encounter some brother-in-arms and drink the night away with him. Nor could he ever resist a fine horse. He had only to see it to buy it.
‘Where does he get the money?’ Andrei would sometimes ask his long-suffering mother.
‘The Lord knows, but he casts his net broadly,’ she would reply.
There were the itinerant merchants in Pereiaslav and even Kiev who went out to join the caravans that followed the ancient salt route across the steppe to the Crimea. They lent money. So did a merchant in Russka. And so did the Jews. And they all lent to Ostap, on the security of his farm.
It was a fine farm. There were excellent crops of wheat and millet. There was part of the big wood, upstream, where Ostap owned a hundred beehives. ‘But we need you,’ his greying mother had told Andrei frankly. ‘Because if someone doesn’t manage the farm – and your father – we’ll lose everything. And I can’t do it.’
He wanted to go. He longed to go. Yet, as he reached the farm, Andrei was still uncertain what to do. He was a little disconcerted therefore when, as he dismounted, the old man abruptly said: ‘You’re leaving in the morning. I’ve prepared all you’ll need.’
Even as Ostap spoke, Andrei saw his mother coming out of the house looking worried. He glanced at them both while his father sucked contentedly on his pipe.
‘Andrei!’
It was all she said.
He paused. The prospect of going thrilled him, but he looked at his father with concern.
‘What about the farm, Father?’ he brought himself to ask.
‘What about it?’
‘How will you manage?’
‘Very well, damn you! Are you ready to leave?’ Sensing opposition, Ostap was starting to grow red.
Andrei hesitated. He caught his mother’s eye, saw her pleading look.
‘I’m not sure. Perhaps I should leave later.’
‘What!’ his father roared. ‘Are you disobeying me?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Silence, you young cur. You’ll obey your father.’ Suddenly Ostap’s heavy brows knitted and his eyes gleamed with anger. His whole body seemed to grow rigid. ‘Or is it,’ he asked menacingly, ‘that I’ve bred a coward? Is that it? Are you a coward?’ The last word was said with such apparent contempt and loathing, it was such a calculated insult, that Andrei felt his own body tense and his face go white with anger. It seemed, at any moment, that father and son might fly at each other’s throats.
The cunning old fox, the youth suddenly thought. He’s goading me deliberately so that I won’t do as Mother wants. And even though I know what he’s up to, I’m still getting angry.
‘Well?’ Ostap thundered. ‘Have I bred a coward? Are you really afraid to fight? Must I go and die in shame?’
‘Die as you please,’ Andrei cried in frustration.
‘So that’s how you talk to your father!’ Ostap was now beside himself. He glanced to left and right for something to strike Andrei with.
And who knew what might have happened next if, at this moment, three figures had not come riding out of the woods straight towards the little group. For the sight of them reduced both men to silence.
One was splendidly dressed, and rode a magnificent bay. The other two, dressed in long black coats, rode smaller horses. The first was a Polish noble; the other two were Jews.
That a Polish noble should ride in such company was no particular surprise. For generations now, the Polish Commonwealth was the one country in eastern Europe where the Jews could live at peace. Indeed, the authorities there even allowed Jews to carry swords like noblemen.
They drew up in front of the porch without dismounting. The Pole glanced down at the family before him coolly, then surveyed the farm thoughtfully. Andrei noticed that the gold brocade on the nobleman’s beautiful coat glinted in the sun; his long, aristocratic hands rested easily upon the saddlebow. His face was oval, pale, and except for a thin, dark moustache, clean-shaven. His eyes were large, blue and rather luminous. A kinsman of the great Lithuanian-Polish magnate, Vyshnevetsky, who owned vast tracts of land in the eastern Ukraine, Stanislaus was the local official of this region, overseeing numerous little forts like Russka, which Vyshnevetsky owned, on the edge of the steppe.