The warm rays of the sinking sun caught the soft honey that trickled off the beard of the barley man, so that it shone.
By the side of the field, three old women, each a babushka too old now to dance or sing, watched them placidly. As she glanced at them, Lebed smiled to herself. She knew that she too would pass that way. They say that the god of the field shrinks to a tiny old man when the field is cut, she thought. Humans, too, shrink into the earth, dwelling underground like the ancestral domovoi. That was fate. Nature could not be mastered; man or woman could only accept seed time and harvest. And her individual destiny – this too, she knew, was not important. No, not even the loss of her child would be greatly noticed, whatever her pain. So many children were lost. Nobody counted them. But some survived; and the life of the village, of the rod, only this would continue, always, through the harsh, remorseless cycle of the seasons in the endless land.
When the song was done, she went over to Little Kiy. He was sitting on the ground, fingering the talisman the horseman had given him; his mind was not on her, but moving upon the open steppe. He scarcely looked up at her.
And now her husband was in front of her, hovering over the child, his face smiling, eager.
He too was necessary: at certain times, at certain seasons, she had need of him. Yet although she was his to command, although it was the men who ruled in the village, it was the women, she knew, who were strong and who endured. It was the women, like Moist Mother Earth herself, who protected the seed in the ground and who brought forth the harvest for the sun god and for a man with his plough.
He smiled.
‘Tonight.’
It was after dusk, when the splinters of resin wood that served as candles were lit, that the feasting began in the elder’s hut. The loving cup and its ladle, brimming with sparkling mead, was passed from hand to hand. And with each course of fish, millet bread, and meat, a dish was offered to the domovoi who it was assumed had emerged from his lair under the barn to join them.
When the food was eaten, the whole village continued to drink, and to dance. Kiy saw his mother take her red tambourine and dance before his father; and watched, fascinated, until in the heat his head finally fell forward on his chest and he slept.
Twice her husband touched her and murmured: ‘Come.’ Twice she shook her head and continued to dance. She too had drunk, though less heavily than the others, and now her body was suffused with warmth. Excited by her own dancing, she began to crave him; but still she danced and drank, to bring herself to the moment when she would truly want him.
Gradually, as men and women alike reeled drunkenly out into the night, Lebed too allowed her husband to put his arm round her waist and lead her out. All around, by the huts, towards the field, indiscriminate couplings were taking place: who knew, who would remember, who had lain with whom? Who would know whose child was whose, in any results of that general sexual encounter? It did not matter. By such careless means the life of the rod would go on.
They went down to the river, past long grasses where the fireflies were shining in the darkness. Together they gazed at the river, that gleamed in the moonlight. To this little river, the villagers had given a name, taken from the horsemen of the steppe they feared. For as the Slavs knew well, some of the greatest of the Alans had described themselves, in their Iranian tongue, as Rus – meaning ‘light’, or ‘shining’. And so, since to a Slav ear this word had a pleasing feminine sound, well suited to a river, the villagers had called the little gleaming waterway Rus – the shining one.
It was a good name. And no doubt it would have pleased them still more had they known that this same Iranian name – Rus or Rhos – was also to be applied in these early ages to that mighty river far to the east that later times would call the Volga.
Rus they called the river; and the hamlet beside it they called, similarly, Russka.
The night was quiet. The stream shone, moved, yet did not move. They lay down on the grass. High above in the starlit summer sky, pale clouds came from time to time, like horsemen in an unhurried procession, glowing softly in the reflection of a crescent moon that rode to the south – and who knew, out in the forest, what bear or fox, wolf or firebird might be moving through the shadows, or what horsemen camped by their fires upon the endless steppe?
But the only sound that Lebed heard was a whisper in the leaves, as the wind moved softly over the land.
The River
In the year of Our Lord 1066, in the month of January, a terrible sign appeared in the heavens. It was seen all over Europe.
In the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England, threatened with William of Normandy’s invasion, it was recorded in the chronicles with gloomy expectation. In France, Germany and all round the shores of the Mediterranean it was seen. In eastern Europe, in the newly formed states of Poland and Hungary, the dreadful object dominated the nights. And beyond them, on the eastern borderland where forest meets steppe and the broad River Dniepr runs down to the temperate Black Sea, the great red comet hung, night after night, over the white and silent landscape; and men wondered what new evil was to befall the world.
And how that world had changed. In the nine turbulent centuries since the days of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, western civilization had passed from classical to medieval times in a series of huge events. Rome had become Christian; but soon after, its sprawling empire, now divided between its western and eastern capitals of Rome and Constantinople, had collapsed under the weight of huge barbarian invasions.
From the Mongolian lands above the Great Wall of China they had come, wave after wave from the east, crossing the great southern crescent of mountain ranges and sweeping down on to the desert and steppe of the vast Eurasian plain. Some white, some Mongoloid, mostly speaking forms of Turkish, these terrible invaders swept all before them. Thus came Attila and his Huns; after them the Avars; then the Turks. But it was not their sudden invasions, nor their huge, short-lived empires in the steppe that broke the Roman Empire: it was the enormous chain reaction of migrations that they set off as they crashed into the tribes of eastern Europe. These were the migrations that brought the Franks to France, the Bulgars, descendants of the Huns, to Bulgaria, the Saxons and Angles to Britain, and gave the names of tribes to regions like Burgundy and Lombardy.
By the end of this process, the old world had been shattered. Rome had fallen. Western Europe, though the barbarians were slowly converted to Christianity, remained a disorderly patchwork of tribal and dynastic regions. Only in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea did a semblance of the old order remain. For here, just above Greece and beside the narrow channel that links the Black Sea to the waters of the Mediterranean, stood the stately city of Constantinople, also known as Byzantium. Unconquered, guardian of classical culture and of eastern Christianity, its character Greek rather than Latin, Constantinople remained inviolate: the city where, right through the Middle Ages, there would still preside – even if only in name – a Christian Roman Emperor.
But this was not the end of the west’s troubles. For in the year 622, the Prophet Mohamet made the first hijra from Mecca and the mighty power of Islam began its explosive expansion. ‘To the Garden, Moslems, not the Fire,’ their leaders would cry as they went into battle: for those who fell were assured a place in heaven. From Arabia the Moslem armies swept through the Middle East, then eastwards to Persia and India, and westwards across North Africa and even into Spain. In another drive, they even reached the gates of Constantinople. And for centuries yet to come, Christian Europe was to tremble at the prophet’s name.