She took their children over to Russka to the wooden church there, and he did not object. This made her happy.
Her father had taken another wife. She was glad. Shortly after they had arrived at Dirty Place he had come to see them and, taking her aside, had pressed into her hand the bag of silver coins he had brought with him from the south. ‘I don’t think Kiy is ever coming back,’ he said. ‘So it’s all for you.’ She understood it was his way of making amends, and since then they had been friends.
She had showed the coins to Purgas and he had inspected them carefully. Some, he told her, came from Constantinople and were very old. Some were Russian, from the time of Monomakh. But some puzzled him.
‘The writing here seems Slav,’ he told her, ‘but what can this be?’ And he pointed to a strange, oriental-looking script. ‘I think I have seen it on an icon,’ he said.
It was Hebrew. For the coins came from Poland and bore inscriptions both in Slavic and in Hebrew, thanks to the ancient Khazar community there.
They hid them under the floor. Who knew when they might be needed?
Purgas was not only a hunter; he worked hard on their land, and it was not long before they were living well. She had nothing to complain of.
Only one thing about her husband irritated Yanka. It was the same habit of mind that the elder had told her about when she first came to Russka; but her Mordvinian husband seemed to have it to a greater degree. He would not plan for the future. ‘None but crows fly straight,’ he would remind her if she pushed him for some decision. To him, each season, each day, was there to be lived through, cautiously, as if it might be one’s last.
Once, after they had been arguing over some matter of this kind, he went off into the forest and returned several hours later with a deer he had killed. ‘If he made plans for next week,’ he gently told her, ‘they were in vain.’
‘But I’m not an animal,’ she protested impatiently. To which he only smiled and shrugged.
She loved him, all the same. He gave her three children and great happiness. The villagers respected him.
And at least once a year the steward of Milei the boyar approached them with more and more tempting offers from the boyar to come as his tenants to Russka. Which they always refused. ‘We’re Black People,’ she said simply. ‘We’re our own master here.’
As the years passed, she had grown stout. Her face had filled out. And she was content.
Yet even now, she could still be amazed by her husband. What, for instance, had come over him the previous evening?
For the night before, learning what had happened with the tax gatherers at Russka, the foolish men of the hamlet had wanted to ambush and kill them. And Purgas was in favour.
News of the trouble in the northern towns had come downriver a few days before. The free peasants of the hamlet were excited.
‘You’re mad,’ she told them. ‘Russka didn’t revolt.’
‘Because the boyar’s in league with the Tatars,’ one of the men said.
‘But they’ll come and kill us all.’
They didn’t believe her.
‘We’re not afraid,’ the young men claimed.
‘When I was a boy, beyond the Volga,’ Purgas remarked, ‘a young fellow wasn’t ready to marry until he’d killed a man. That was the custom among the real Mordvinians.’
‘You foolish pagan,’ she shouted. ‘You don’t understand.’
And she outlined to them the might, the incredible might of the empire on whose edge they lay.
‘They would destroy us all,’ she told them. ‘They would never give up.’
‘So,’ Purgas quietly said, ‘you’re on the boyar’s side now.’
She opened her mouth. Then closed it. What could she say? She remembered the evening at the inn and how Milei’s words had shocked her. In a way, they still did; yet now that she was older, now that she had seen the Tatars take over the north too, she had to admit he had been right. ‘Hide whatever you can,’ she told them, ‘pay up but make them think they’ve ruined you. Otherwise, we’ll be destroyed.’
Eventually, she won. Even Purgas promised to do as she asked. Then the preparations began.
That day, it had gone as she had predicted. The tax farmers had arrived soon after dawn, thinking to catch the hamlet unawares. They had quickly emptied half the grain store and taken most of the livestock they could find; but before dawn, Purgas and the men had hidden the rest in the marshes which the visitors did not know how to penetrate. By early morning, they were already preparing to move on.
While they took the grain, Yanka had gone for a walk. Without especially thinking where she was going, she drifted along the path towards Russka. Perhaps I’ll go and see Father, she thought.
Though it was still early, the sun was already getting warm. The path took her by a small opening in the trees where there were some little mounds, old Viatichi tombs, and a pleasant view towards Russka. It was very quiet. And it was just as she came to this place that she stopped, transfixed.
Surely it must be a vision.
Peter the Tatar was pleased with his day. The setting for the monastery was just what he wanted. It was time he made his peace with God. ‘A man without religion has no peace,’ the official in Rostov had urged him. It was true.
The Khan at Sarai, after all, was now a Moslem. Why, even the new Great Khan himself had abandoned the old sky worship and shaman cults of Genghis. And the new supreme head, Kubla Khan, had taken the Buddhist religion of the Chinese he ruled.
That all men should bow before the Great Khan, Peter had no doubt. But with the passing of the years, and the shameful power struggles and intrigues amongst the Golden Kin for the greatest offices, Peter’s bright passion for the empires of men had dimmed. Even the childhood memory of Genghis himself, the ruler of the world at his royal hunt, now seemed more like a memory of a bygone world and less like a vision of heaven.
There was one God in heaven, one lord upon earth.
Perhaps, he considered, if I had been more successful, if Batu Khan had not died and I had become a general, I might yet hunger for earthly things.
His career was over, though. He would keep his position, but go no higher. He accepted it. Thanks to his sister, while Batu and her son lived, he had done well and had amassed a splendid fortune.
He missed the steppe. Often, just before sleeping, he would think of its huge open spaces, and the swaying grasses.
Two years before, he had gone across the steppe to Sarai. It was there, from some Alans, that he had bought the magnificent grey stallion he now rode, with the black mane and stripe down its back. It was bred below the Caucasus Mountains, of the noble breed they called hoarfrost.
‘But that, I think, may be the last time I shall see Sarai,’ he said sadly to his wife. An instinct told him he would pass the rest of his days in Russia.
He had paused at the edge of the woods for a last look back at his new acquisition, dismounting and walking over to the highest of the little mounds by the path there, for a better view.
His face softened as he gazed at the place.
Idly, he brushed away a fly that had decided to settle on the place where his ear had once been. Then he frowned.
Something was bothering his horse.
Afterwards, she could never explain to herself how it was that the madness had seized her: for madness it certainly was, even to think of such a thing.
And yet, it was as if she could not have done anything else. She had always sworn she would. Though she had had many other things to think about in recent years, deep down that promise to herself had remained, and hardened into a certainty. One day, she knew, I shall see him, and my chance will come.