Igor served the Prince of Kiev himself. Indeed, he was almost in the inner council. Ivanushka’s brothers, too, were already in the outer druzhina, although Boris was still only a page; and it thrilled Ivanushka to think that soon he too would follow them.
‘Dismount!’ His father’s curt voice cut into the boy’s reverie and he started. They had only gone a few hundred yards, but Igor had already swung out of his saddle and was striding away; and as Ivanushka looked up, he saw why. They had reached the cathedral. He sighed. He dreaded the cathedral.
The walled citadel of Yaroslav the Wise contained many fine buildings. Besides the handsome wooden houses of the nobles, there were monasteries, churches, schools, and a splendid gateway – the Golden Gate – built in stone. This gateway was especially fine because on top of it, soaring up into the sky, stood the little golden-domed Church of the Annunciation. But nowhere in all the lands of Rus was there anything as magnificent as the great cathedral that rose before him now. For just as his father, the Blessed Vladimir, had built his great Church of the Tithes in the old citadel, so Yaroslav had begun his own huge cathedral in the new one.
He called it St Sophia: what other name would do, when everyone knew that the greatest church in the Eastern Roman Empire, the seat of the Patriarch in Constantinople, bore that sacred name? St Sophia, the Holy Wisdom of the Greeks.
For though this new northern nation might proudly declare, ‘We are the Rus,’ it was the civilization of the Greeks that they copied. The senior priests were mostly Greek. Even the one Slav, the mighty preacher who had headed the Russian Church a decade ago, had taken the Greek name of Hilarion. When noble children were baptized, they took a second, Christian name to complement the Slav or Scandinavian names they mostly bore. Thus a Yaroslav or a Boris would also carry a Christian name like Andrei, Dimitri, Alexander or Constantine. And all these names were Greek.
How huge the cathedral was. It was built of red granite, laid in long thin strips and fixed with almost equal layers of pink cement. It rose up a massive, rather square, red and pink block, a holy fortress designed to impress upon all the people the might of the newly adopted Christian God. Upon its centre sat a great burnished dome, in the shape of a flattened helmet – like that of the church in Constantinople – and around it were grouped twelve smaller domes. ‘They stand for Our Lord and the twelve disciples,’ Igor had told his son. The cathedral was almost finished. Only a small scaffolding on one side showed where work was still being done on the outside staircases. With a shiver Ivanushka stepped inside.
If the outside was like a fortress, the high, broad, gloomy spaces within seemed as vast as the universe. In the manner of the great churches of the Roman Empire, it proceeded from west to east in a broad line of five naves – a wide central nave, with two more on each side. At the eastern end were five semi-circular apses. At the western end, high above the floor, were galleries where the princes and their courtiers gathered to pray, looking down upon the people. And at the centre of the church, under the huge dome, was the great airy space where the priests in their shining vestments stood before the congregation and heaven met the earth.
But it was not the high dome, nor the five naves, nor the massive columns that dominated the cavernous interior. It was the mosaics.
They made Ivanushka tremble. From floor to distant ceiling they covered the walls. The Blessed Virgin with hands outstretched in the eastern attitude of prayer; the Fathers of the Church; the Annunciation; the Eucharist: in blues and browns, in reds and greens, against the background of shining gold, these awesome, august figures stared down upon the world. Enormous, pale, oval faces with dark hair and huge, black eyes gazed mournfully yet impersonally from their golden setting upon the little people in the passing world. And highest of all, the Pantokrator, creator of the world, gazed from the central dome, his large Greek eyes seeing all, seeing nothing – knowing all men yet unknowable, beyond all earthly wisdom.
Earth met heaven in the church; hundreds of candles flickered in the gloom; and upon the walls the golden mosaics glowed, their great and terrible light shining in the darkness of the world.
Some priests were chanting.
‘Gospodi pomily.’ Lord have mercy. They sang in Church Slavonic – a nasal version of the spoken tongue that was both understandable but mysterious, hieratic.
Igor lit a candle and stood, in silent prayer, before an icon by one of the heavy pillars, while Ivanushka looked about him.
Everyone knew the story of the Blessed Vladimir’s conversion: how he had sent out to the three great religions – Islam, Judaism and Christianity – and how his ambassadors, having visited Constantinople, reported to him that in the Christian church of the Greek, ‘We did not know whether we were on earth or in heaven.’
In such cathedrals as this, the emperors of Constantinople – and now the princes of Kiev who copied them – brought the visible heavens to earth and reminded their people that they, the rulers who prayed in the galleries above, were regents for the eternal Godhead whose golden universe was present, though unknowable, amongst them.
Igor, part oriental, found peace in the contemplation of this absolute, unknowable authority. Ivanushka, half Slav, instinctively shrank from such a God; he yearned for a warmer, softer deity. And this was why, in the great church, he shivered as though from cold.
A few minutes later, he was glad to be out of the church and riding towards the gate, beyond which lay the track through the woods to the monastery, and his destiny.
At last they were at the monastery gates.
Their ride along the path from the citadel had been so delightful it had filled Ivanushka with joy. After passing through the scattered huts of the lesser folk outside the city walls, the track had led southwards, up to the little promontory of Berestovo, now a suburb, where St Vladimir himself had kept an extra residence. Over the treetops on the left, one could see the river shining far below, and past that, on the other side of the broad expanse of floodwater, the woods stretched across the flat plain into the distance. The oak and beech coming into leaf spread over the landscape like a soft, light green mist under the washed blue sky. Nothing disturbed the gentle sounds of the birds in the stillness of the spring morning, as Ivanushka rode happily behind his father towards the wide south-western promontory, two miles from the citadel, where the monks lived.
And still Ivanushka had no idea why he was really there.
Igor was silent, deep in thought. Was he doing the right thing? Even for a boyar as devout and austere as he, this morning’s expedition was an extraordinary step. For Igor’s idea was that Ivanushka might enter the religious life.
It had cost him dear. No boyar normally wanted his son to be a monk or even a priest. The life of poverty seemed like a reproach; and those of noble blood who chose the religious life did so, almost always, against their family’s wishes. True, a boyar like Igor might spend many hours in prayer each day; a prince, on his deathbed, might take the tonsure of a monk; but for a young man to bury himself and take vows of poverty – that was another matter.
It was just after the appearance of the red star that the idea had taken shape in his mind. ‘I do not say Ivanushka’s a fool,’ he had said to his wife, ‘but he is a dreamer. That night I found him gazing at the star – if I hadn’t fetched him in he’d have frozen to death. The boy should be a monk.’ Igor had worked so hard to make himself a man of affairs, a warrior and member of the druzhina: he knew what was required. ‘And I cannot see Ivanushka succeeding,’ he admitted sadly.