It was just as the sky was beginning to lighten that he half awoke, to find Stepan rummaging through his baggage beside him. He noticed two things – that the girl was standing up, by the fire, and that his friend had upon his simple face a look of extraordinary exaltation, as if he had just been told some wonderful, mystical secret. More than ever, he seemed to be in a sort of daze. More asleep than awake himself, Andrei remembered vaguely seeing the two of them going out of the fort together, and thinking that Stepan looked like a man who was sleepwalking. Then he fell unconscious again.
The shout which woke the whole fort came only minutes later.
Startled wide awake, Andrei rushed to the gate, to find several of the guards already there, gazing out in puzzlement. He darted through them, and down the path.
Stepan was standing by the river bank. In his hands was a pistol. The girl was lying on the grass a few feet in front of him, dead.
He did not move. Even when Andrei reached him, he was still staring at her with a look of mystified disbelief on his face; and when Andrei tried to take him by the arm, he found that the big man was completely rigid.
For several minutes they stood there together, in the pale light of early morning then Stepan let Andrei take the pistol out of his hand and, his body suddenly sagging, walked slowly up the slope with him.
Only when he had sat the strange fellow down and made him drink a little vodka did Andrei get a confused account of what had happened.
During their long talk that night, it seemed the girl had understood the foolish, superstitious fellow only too well. She had told him she would marry him. He had been ecstatic. She had entirely won his confidence. And then, towards the end of the night, when Stepan had entered a state which, to him, seemed to be mystical, she had told him her wonderful secret.
‘It is true we were fated to meet, Stepan. I was expecting you.’ She had smiled. ‘You see, I am magical.’
She could even prove it to him, she said. If he came to a private place, she would show him.
‘You can fire your pistol through my heart,’ she promised, ‘and it will not even hurt me. Come, let me prove it.’
And that was what the simple fellow had done.
Even now, he could not fully understand that his faith in his destiny had been shattered. Still, he shook his head.
‘There must be a mistake. Perhaps she only fainted.’
Nor, it seemed, did any of the Cossacks except Andrei understand that, to the girl, death was better than to be sullied by Christian hands, even when those hands were kindly.
A little later he went to see to her burial.
Andrei wondered whether to bring her brother there, but decided it was better not. Feeling that the little fellow should at least have something to remember her by, he searched her and was surprised to discover, on a little chain around her neck, a small, ancient metal disc with a three-pronged trident on it. He had no idea what this might be, but took it for the orphaned boy all the same.
So it was that the girl was buried in an unmarked grave, by the edge of the steppe. That her journey with Stepan to the lands beyond the Don would have taken her to the homeland of her ancient Khazar ancestors, she had not remotely guessed.
As for Stepan, he gave his puzzled judgement later that morning: ‘It was that wildcat we saw. It must have looked at me. That’s what did it.’
At noon the party departed, to seek out news of the magnate Vyshnevetsky and his army.
The massacre of the Ukrainian Jews in the year 1648 followed a pattern very similar to the events at Russka. Indeed, written records survive of incidents just as strange as Stepan’s courtship.
How many Jews were actually killed is a matter of dispute which is unlikely ever to be resolved, but it is certainly true that the death toll ran into tens of thousands and that, for the rest of its history, this year marked the start of the systematic pogroms which have been a recurring feature of that region.
As for the magnate Vyshnevetsky, he gathered by early June a force of some six thousand men from his own vast estates and then crossed the Dniepr to its western side. Under his direction this force burned, looted and massacred virtually every Ukrainian settlement in its path, thus ensuring once and for all that the Ukrainians would loathe the Poles and demonstrating, with awesome stupidity, that singular genius for vengeance and incapacity for government that was the chief distinguishing trait of the seventeenth-century Polish Commonwealth.
In July, the fighting was resumed. And in the succeeding months, Andrei achieved the rank of esaul.
He did not forget, in the campaigns that followed, to look out for Stanislaus and Anna.
1649
It was a day he would always remember in later years: for, in a sense, it marked the end of the bright days of his youth.
At first it had seemed that things were going well. The uprising had been universal. By the end of 1648 half the population of the Ukraine were calling themselves Cossacks. Bogdan and his men had won more crushing victories over the Poles, captured another hundred guns with a baggage train containing a hundred million Polish zloty and the victorious Cossacks had entered Kiev to be greeted by the free townsmen and the Metropolitan himself as the saviours of the ancient lands of Rus.
A new Polish King had made a truce; treaties of friendship been signed with the Turkish Sultan and his east European vassals, and for a time it even looked as if the dream of a free Cossack state might come true.
Yet, despite these triumphs, Andrei could see that his friend was not happy.
After that terrible day at Russka, Stepan had never spoken of the girl again, but Andrei sensed that something important had changed within his friend. Stepan’s faith in himself, his simple-minded belief in his destiny, had been broken.
And though he continued to fight alongside his brother Cossacks, it was clear as the months went by that Stepan was losing faith in this cause as well. It was this disappointment on his part that caused the two friends, however sadly, to drift apart.
For the cause of a democratic Cossack state in the Ukraine was lost, even before it started.
There were two reasons. That very first season, when Poland was at its lowest ebb, Bogdan had been unable to take advantage of his victories. And as Andrei watched the peasants drift back to their farms, he could see why.
‘We aren’t strong enough to mount a long campaign without allies,’ he remarked.
True, there were the Tatars. But like most mercenaries, they were only there for profit. By the following spring, they refused to fight unless they could see the battle was going to be won, and in early summer, they started to make their own terms with the Poles.
The role of the Cossacks in history would always be the same: they could make or break another state, but there were never enough of them to form a viable state of their own.
They needed a protector – either Poland, the Crimean Khan, the Sultan of Turkey, or the Tsar of Russia. They could only fight for the best terms possible. But what were those terms to be?
In the summer of 1649 the Cossacks reached an agreement with the Polish Commonwealth. The terms, by Polish standards, were remarkable.
In effect, at that point, Bogdan and the Cossacks were promised a state within a state. No less than forty thousand of them were to be fully registered. Ancient Kiev and two other cities were to be the headquarters of Cossack regiments: Jesuits and Jews would be forbidden to live there.
‘It was worth the fight,’ Andrei had said joyfully to Stepan, but the other had only shaken his head sadly.
‘No. We have sacrificed everything – for nothing.’ And when Andrei had looked genuinely surprised Stepan had reminded him: ‘No free state. No equality. Privileges for rich Cossacks, nothing for the poor ones and the peasants.’