Andrei nodded.
‘The Church?’
‘Exactly.’ The Hetman leaned back in his chair and half-closed his eyes. ‘Holy Russia. That’s how they like to think of Muscovy now. Moscow, the third Rome. Remember, the old Moscow Metropolitan became a Patriarch after Ivan the Terrible’s reign – just like Constantinople or Jerusalem. That’s very important to them. There are powerful men in the Church and amongst the boyars, who think they should protect their Orthodox brothers in the Ukraine. What’s more, they’re getting stronger.’
He opened his eyes again and grinned. ‘Shall I tell you something else? Our Ukrainian priests are better trained than the Russian ones. I’m told that the new Patriarch wants to import more of them to civilize his own priests. Let them pay the price, then – don’t you think?’ He closed his eyes again. ‘I’ve told him I’m ready to give the Ukraine to the Sultan. Of course, I know our people wouldn’t like it because the Turks are Moslems, but the Orthodox Russians will like it even less.’
Bogdan had given the envoys three letters: one for the Tsar, one for his adviser the boyar Morozov, and one for the Moscow Patriarch.
‘Send word by messenger on how you are received, then if things look promising, stay in Moscow and keep your ears open.’
These were the instructions Andrei carried with the letters as he went on his thrilling mission.
Muscovy. Two Cossacks led the party – Kondrat Burlay and Silvian Muzhilovsky. Andrei was their aide.
Swiftly they made their way eastward from the River Dniepr, through the thinning woods until finally, leaving the trees behind them, they ventured out on to the open steppe. They travelled east another day before turning northwards. The winter had been long and bitter. The ground was still hard, with little snowdrifts in places.
It was a strange frontier region, this. Andrei had never been here before, though he knew that many Cossacks and Ukrainians had fled to these broad borderlands where they had come, at least in name, under the protection of the Russian Tsar.
‘And the Tsar has been making his presence felt here, too,’ Burlay told him. ‘In the old days, the Russian fortress line against the Tatars was a long way north, almost up at the River Oka. They’ve just finished a new line now, though. It runs right across the steppe.’ He laughed. ‘It’s quite impressive.’
Nothing, however, had prepared Andrei for what he saw when they came to it the next day.
He simply gasped. So this was the might of Muscovy!
The new, so-called Belgorod line of the Muscovite state was an awesome undertaking. The completed line ran across the steppe from near the fortress town of Belgorod all the way to the distant Volga as it descended towards the deserts by the Caspian Sea. Huge earth walls with trenches in front of them, wooden palisades above, stout towers with sharpened wooden stakes pointing outwards from their tops: this was Muscovy’s mighty barrier against the Crimean Khan who, even now, a century after Ivan the Terrible had conquered Kazan, still demanded tribute, from time to time, from the Russians in their forest empire.
It was as he gazed upon this tremendous wall that the young Cossack received his first impression of the true character of the Russian state of the north.
These people are not like the Poles at all, he suddenly realized. The Poles would never build like this. Poland had simply given the huge tracts of the Ukraine to a few magnates to exploit as they thought best. True, they set up forts to protect their income; they employed Cossacks to keep the raiders at bay. But they were just a collection of great lords, concerned with reaping a profit from these rich borderlands, to keep themselves in comfort in their European palaces in the west.
This colossal fortification, though, was not the work of mere aristocrats. It was the work of a mighty emperor – of a great, dark power, half-Slav, half-Tatar. It’s like a Tatar city on the steppe, he thought, looking at the high pointed stakes on the parapet, but huge, endless.
And, indeed, the great wall itself seemed to speak, as though to say: ‘We know you horsemen of the steppe, for we are partly of your blood; but see, we can out-build you – for our heart is greater than yours. Thus we shall carry our mighty Russian forest, even across the endless steppe, until one day even the proud Khan shall bow before our Holy Russia.’
It was Burlay, riding beside him, who now remarked: ‘If you want to understand the Russians, Andrei, always remember – whenever they feel threatened, they rely upon size.’
So it was that the little party continued, into the great fortress of the Russian state.
At first, Andrei noticed nothing very different. When they began to encounter woodland again, the broad-leaved forests seemed very like those around Kiev: the villages with their thatched roofs and timber stockades seemed familiar, too.
Yet gradually he began to see a change. The thatched roofs petered out, to be replaced by heavy logs. It grew colder: the snow lay more thickly upon the ground. Somehow the woods, and the fields, looked grey.
And there was something else.
He was used to Russians: there had been plenty of them at the Cossack camp. They spoke Great Russian of course, but that was not difficult for a Ukrainian to understand. Not that they compared with a man from the south. ‘Those Russians are crude fellows,’ the Ukrainians used to say. For just as the Poles despised the Ukrainians, so they in turn liked to despise their Orthodox cousins in the north.
Yet now that he had entered Russia Andrei was surprised to feel a faint sense of unease as he travelled north. It was something to which, at first, he could not put a name. Something oppressive.
The forest grew thicker and darker. Sometimes, in the forest, they encountered little settlements where the people produced potash. In these, the Cossacks noticed, the peasants looked healthy enough. But in the ordinary villages it was a different story.
‘This is the third year the winter has gone on too long,’ the people told them. ‘Even in a good year, we only have just enough. With these poor crops, another year and we’ll be starving.’
When Andrei looked at their villages and heard their sad story, there was one thing that puzzled him. ‘Your fields are huge,’ he exclaimed. ‘Surely you should have enough even in bad years.’ ‘No,’ they told him, ‘it’s not so.’ And only at the third such village did Andrei discover the reason.
‘You see, for every measure we sow, we only get three back at harvest,’ a peasant explained.
A yield of three to one. A miserable rate, unthinkable in the rich Ukraine.
‘Our land is poor,’ the man said sadly.
And badly cultivated, he could have added. For this three to one crop yield in north Russia was no more than farmers in western Europe had been getting in the Dark Ages, a thousand years before.
But if the poverty of these little villages struck Andrei, he was soon to see something very different.
The party was about fifty miles below the great eastward loop of the River Oka when they came to the old frontier line. Though not as impressive as the new Belgorod line, it was another sign of the formidable power of the Muscovite state. The stout wooden forts and palisades were still intact.
‘They stretch another hundred miles, all the way to Riazan,’ Burlay remarked.
In many places there was long-established open parkland in front of the line; but where there was not, huge swathes had been burned through the woodland so that the Tatar raiders would not have any cover.
And it was just past this great line that they came to the sprawling industrial town of Tula.
Andrei had never seen anything like it. It was a town, yet not a town. Everywhere there seemed to be long, stout houses, of wood or brick, filled with the sounds of men hammering. Half the buildings seemed to be smithies.