Then it was done. The priests began to turn. When suddenly the whole sky appeared to crack.
To Maryushka, for a second, it seemed as if the world must have come to an end. The great thunderclap, followed by a roar, seemed to fill the whole sky, the whole day. She started so violently that she left the ground. And then, even as the mighty roar of the cannon massed along the Kremlin wall was reverberating back and forth across the river, a second awful crash followed as the twelve thousand men before her raised their muskets and fired a volley into the air; a few moments later there was another; then a third.
And the little girl, completely taken by surprise, burst into tears.
This was Tsar Peter’s contribution to the celebration of Epiphany.
Only afterwards did her parents explain to her that the tall man in green, standing far away from the Patriarch, was the Tsar and that the roar of the guns was meant to be a happy celebration.
As for Daniel, it seemed to him that, for the first time, he had truly seen the face of the Antichrist.
It was hard. It was cold. It was unlike anything seen in Russia before. For the Antichrist, this Peter, he now realized, was the state itself, without religion. And he remembered a phrase he had heard some Moscow Raskolniki use only the week before, and which he had not quite understood.
‘That’s it,’ he murmured. ‘All power is Antichrist because all men are subservient to it.’
Peter was the new state. And he was about power.
It was a week later that his friend the little monk disappeared.
Daniel heard that they had taken him to the Preobrazhensky Prikaz for questioning. Ten days later, he heard from the community of Raskolniki that the little fellow was dead. He had freely confessed to saying that Peter was the Antichrist. He even told his guards that they should not obey the Tsar. But he had refused to name any accomplices. They had punished him by the death known in Russia as kopchenie: with this method, the victim is slowly smoked to death like bacon.
It was the week after this that Daniel left Moscow for Russka.
1703
Andrei was pleased to be going to Moscow again – all the more so since he had discovered by letters that his old friend Nikita Bobrov was still alive.
And I understand he’s still rich, like me, he thought with a grin.
Life had been good to him, Andrei considered. There had been tragedies: he had lost three children and his first wife. But there had been a happy second marriage and three more children, of whom his greatest joy was his son, Pavlo.
What a handsome, brave young fellow he was – a true Cossack.
As for their estates – they were considerable.
‘Which is why,’ he would remark slyly, ‘I am a good Russian!’
Since the days of Bogdan and the union with Muscovy, the Ukraine had suffered some terrible times while Poland and Russia fought over her, and Cossack factions had fought between themselves in the period usually known as the Ruin.
But that was over now. After numerous disputes, Russia and Poland had finally signed a perpetual peace. Poland kept the land west of the River Dniepr, with the exception of ancient Kiev, and Russia held the land to the east, known as the Left Bank. At this time also, the Orthodox Churchmen in Kiev finally placed themselves under the Patriarch of Moscow instead of Constantinople. There was some grumbling – because these Ukrainians still considered themselves more sophisticated than the Muscovites – but they did it.
It was also at this point that Russia found a new and satisfactory Hetman to rule the Left Bank. He was a nobleman of polished manners and education who had at one time served the Polish King. His name – almost as famous as Bogdan’s in the Ukraine – was Ivan Mazeppa.
His aim was very simple: control the land for Russia; strengthen the Cossack gentry; leave the poor Cossacks and peasants as they were; and, of course, enrich himself. This policy made the ordinary people hate him, but it certainly worked.
Ivan Mazeppa, in a feat rarely equalled in the highest days of feudalism, managed in thirty years to amass very nearly twenty thousand estates. He also gave estates to his faithful officers, who included Andrei and his son. ‘Thanks to Mazeppa we have ten estates,’ Andrei would remind his son. ‘And see how cleverly he has managed to make a friend of young Tsar Peter.’ For it was true that Mazeppa had managed to form a close and very profitable friendship with the new Tsar, who trusted him more than most of his court.
And, thank God, young Pavlo was in the good graces of Mazeppa. Better still, he had fought his first campaign with him when the Cossacks helped at the taking of Azov. Pavlo had been only seventeen, but he had caught the attention of Tsar Peter himself. Who knew what sort of career he might one day have! He could even be Hetman.
He was a dark, handsome young man of twenty-five, a little shorter than Andrei had been, but very strongly made. The previous month he had broken his arm in a fall, and returned home to visit his parents while it mended. And though at first young Pavlo had been furious to be out of action, Andrei had suddenly remarked to him one day: ‘My boy, I think perhaps this is an opportunity after all.’
The times were certainly exciting. Russia had begun her great war on the Baltic coast with Sweden. And Charles XII, that country’s bold young king, was still so confident he could defeat the half-trained Russians that he had calmly attacked Poland as well. For a good Cossack, all this could only mean one thing – an opportunity to fight and enrich oneself. ‘The Tsar needs good men for his northern campaign. And Mazeppa’s going to ask his permission to take back some of the Polish lands across the Dniepr,’ Pavlo had told his father. ‘Either way, I can’t wait to get into action.’
‘But there are more ways of getting ahead than fighting,’ old Andrei had reminded his son. ‘Look at Mazeppa.’
What better time could there be for Pavlo to go to Moscow and recommend himself to Tsar Peter?
Everything had worked out welclass="underline" Mazeppa himself had given Pavlo a letter to Peter; Andrei had discovered that his old friend Nikita Bobrov had a son who was close to the Tsar. It was with high hopes, therefore, that he rode northwards into Russia. Of the young Tsar he did not know a great deal. The poor Cossacks hated him. They respected his conquests in the south and the fact that he had finally ended the payments to the Khan down in the Crimea. But they hated the new religious ways – many had already become Raskolniki – and they detested the new war in the north. Their wild and undisciplined ways were useless against the trained infantry of the Swedish King. Losses had already been high. ‘We’re cannon fodder for English and German officers,’ they truly said. But none of this greatly concerned Andrei now. A Cossack landowner was a very different fellow from these poor fighting peasants.
It was spring when he left Kiev. The weather was getting warm, and the rivers were settling down again into their new courses. For each year, in their full spate, the melting rivers carried downstream such a mass of branches, ice floes and debris of all kinds, that their courses were subtly altered. Here a bank would collapse; there silt pile up a new one; fallen trees might turn a stream into new channels; a meadow become a swamp. Each year it was the same river, yet not the same.
So, too, Andrei reflected, he was taking the same journey that he had taken half a century before: the same, but different, and this time with his son.