For a moment, Ivanushka hesitated. The water was deep. Sviatopolk had vanished. If he went in, his chain mail would probably drag him under too. The words of the Old Testament story suddenly flashed through his mind. ‘Am I,’ he murmured, ‘my brother’s keeper?’ And for the first time in many years, as he gazed at the water, he knew fear.
‘Am I to give up my life for the brother who tried to kill me?’ he asked himself. He looked around. The battle had moved away towards the wagons. It was strangely quiet there. Then he took off his helmet and dived in.
No one else ever knew how close he came to death that day.
As the cold waters closed over his head, he felt himself being dragged down by two forces – the strong river current and the weight of his mail. It took all his strength to fight his way to the surface, to gasp for air and dive again.
But he found Sviatopolk. His face was already grey; he was tangled in some river reeds that seemed to wrap themselves round him like insistent, importunate rusalki. How Ivanushka got him free, he hardly knew. But somehow he did, and drifted with him down the stream until he could pull him to the river bank. There, turning him over, he forced the water from his lungs.
Together the two brothers lay exhausted on the bank. For several minutes neither spoke. The sun was high in the sky. Birds were flitting curiously over the long grass around them. The sounds of battle had entirely died away.
‘Why did you save me?’
‘You are my brother.’
There was a pause. Ivanushka could feel Sviatopolk preparing himself for the next question. ‘But… last night. You knew?’
‘I knew.’
Sviatopolk groaned. ‘And now I must bear the burden of your forgiveness too.’ It was said without rancour. Sviatopolk sounded infinitely weary.
‘You forget,’ Ivanushka calmly reminded him, ‘that I, too, sinned. Perhaps more than you, when I was wandering and I stole. I returned with nothing, yet our father forgave me and took me in. Tell me now, my brother, what it is that drove you to such a thing?’
It seemed to Sviatopolk that he could hate no longer. For hatred, feeding upon him year after year, driving him forward like a cruel rider pushing his horse, hatred and misery had finally worn him out. Slowly, a few words at a time, staring straight up at the blue sky, he told his brother the whole story.
‘You had only to ask me for help,’ Ivanushka reminded him gently.
‘But what man can ask?’
‘You are too proud,’ Ivanushka said with a smile.
‘It has brought me despair and death,’ his brother sighed.
‘The preachers tell us it does,’ Ivanushka replied drily.
And that summer, having at last visited the great River Don, he paid his brother’s debts.
They had returned in triumph. Yet in the long warm days of autumn, that very year, the sage counsellor of great Monomakh, for the first time in many years, gave all Rus the chance to say: ‘Ivan’s a fool.’
He decided to build a church.
That would have been normal enough for a rich boyar, but he decided to build it in stone. Even that, if extravagant, might have been thought handsome had he decided to build it in Pereiaslav, or even perhaps in the fort of Russka.
But he did not. He decided to build it outside the fortress walls, on a little rise overlooking the river towards the village on the eastern side.
‘And since I see now that, without help, all men are lost,’ he declared, ‘I shall dedicate it to the Mother of God when she begs Him to forgive the sins of the world.’
So began the construction of his little church which was dedicated to the Virgin of the Intercession.
It was a modest building.
It had four walls made of brick, stone and rubble that formed, near enough, a cube. Over the centre of the cube was a small, squat octagonal drum, and this was topped with a shallow dome – only a little deeper in shape than an upturned saucer – with a little rim of roof around it. That was alclass="underline" it was just a cube with a hole in the top.
Had one looked down from the sky at this little building before the roof was on, one could have seen that it contained four pillars, making a smaller square in the middle, and thus dividing the interior into nine equal squares. The drum and dome rested on the four pillars in the middle.
Within the church, however, this simple arrangement of nine squares could be seen another way. It appeared as three sections, dividing the church laterally. First, as one came in from the western end, came the introduction – a sort of vestibule. Then, one passed into the second, central section, under the dome. This was the heart of the church where the congregation stood and worshipped. Lastly, at the east end, came the sanctuary, with the altar in the middle. Upon the altar stood the cross and seven-branched candelabra, like a Jewish menorah; and to the left stood the oblation table on which the bread and wine were prepared for the liturgy.
To relieve the harshness of this design and add a sense of direction to his building, there were three little semi-circular apses on the eastern end.
The roof was made with sets of simple barrel vaults, resting on the walls and central pillars, and open in the centre where the dome rose. There were long, narrow windows in the walls and small windows in the octagonal drum under the dome.
This was the standard Byzantine church. All the great churches and cathedrals of the Orthodox Church, like St Sophia in Kiev, with their many arcades of pillars and their multiple domes, were only elaborations on this simple arrangement.
There was one technical problem to solve. This was how to support the octagonal drum over the square formed by the four central pillars.
Though much brick building could be easily enough accomplished by the skilled wood-builders of Rus, this particular problem was of a different nature. There were two chief solutions, both from the east: the Persian squinch, a kind of fan vaulting; or the one the Russians usually preferred, the pendentive, which had originated eight centuries before in Syria.
This was simply a spandrel – as though one had cut a V shape or triangle on the inside of a sphere. Curving out from the supporting pillar, the top of this V could support a circle or octagon above.
As simple as it was elegant, this arrangement allowed the dome above to seem to float, weightless as the sky, over the congregation.
On the outside of the church, Ivanushka copied the great churches in Kiev, alternating brick and stone, joined by thick layers of mortar mixed with brick dust so that the whole building had a soft, pinkish glow.
At the outer edges of the three curved roofs, with their barrel vaults, he added a little jutting overlap so that the roofline’s triple wave, like a triple eye-brow, was pleasantly accentuated.
Such was the little Russian-Byzantine church the eccentric boyar built. It was very small. There was only room for a small congregation. Indeed, had the inhabitants of the village been Christian, the place would have been full to overflowing. Work was begun in the autumn of 1111 and, pushed ahead vigorously by Ivanushka, it proceeded through the following year.
1113
The first Russian revolution – that is to say, the first organized uprising by the people against an exploitative mercantile class – took place in the year 1113. And it was successful.
The grievances of the people were entirely justified, and were caused by an unpleasant mixture of what amounted to laissez-faire capitalism, widespread corruption and cartels – in all of which the ruling princes were involved.
The general speculation which had drawn Sviatopolk into debt had continued and grown worse. It was led by the Prince of Kiev himself who, with increasing age, had grown not wiser, but lazier and more rapacious.
There was corruption everywhere. Debt, often at crippling interest rates, was positively encouraged. Small artisans and smerdy, in considerable numbers, had been thus forced into becoming zakupy. It was, after all, a very cheap form of labour for the creditor. And if, on distant estates, the friends of the prince ignored the laws concerning the zakup and actually sold him as a slave, the prince turned a blind eye. Because of these widespread abuses, the people were furious.
But worst of all were the cartels. They were organized by the great merchants. Their object was simple – to obtain monopolies on basic commodities and raise their prices. And the greatest of all was the salt cartel.
The Prince of Kiev had been successful. His plan for controlling the Polish supply had been effective and prices had soared.
‘Are we to welcome visitors with bread alone?’ his people demanded ironically. For every Slav, since time began, welcomed a stranger at his door with bread and salt.
But the Prince of Kiev was corrupt and cynical. The abuses continued.
And then, on April 16 1113, he died.
The next day, an almost unheard of event occurred.
Years before, after the troubles of 1068, the Prince of Kiev had moved the meeting place of the veche from the podol to the square by the palace, where he could keep an eye on it. Nor did the veche meet unless summoned by the Metropolitan of the Church, or the boyars. But these safeguards did nothing for the ruling powers now. Without consulting anyone, the veche of the people met of its own accord. And their meeting was both stormy and determined.
‘They make slaves of free men!’ they rightly protested. ‘They conspire to ruin the people,’ they said of the cartels.
‘Let us return,’ many demanded, ‘to the laws of Yaroslav.’ Although in fact the Russkaya Pravda – the Russian Law – which had been collated by Yaroslav the Wise and his sons was chiefly concerned with the payments due for harming the prince’s servants and boyars, it did contain a provision protecting the zakup from being made into a slave.
‘Let us return,’ they cried, ‘to another just prince who will maintain the law.’
There was only one such man in the land of Rus; and so it was that the veche of Kiev, in the year 1113, offered the throne of Kiev to Vladimir Monomakh.