‘It’s not much of a place,’ the other agreed, ‘though its position isn’t bad.’
Moscow. Milei shook his head. Whatever talents this infant prince might have, he couldn’t imagine he’d ever make much of a paltry little town like that.
The Icon
1454
At the Monastery of St Peter and St Paul, they were summoning the Monks to Vespers and though the spring evening was cold and damp, there was excitement in the air. Tomorrow was the great day: the boyar was coming; a bishop from Vladimir, too. And everyone smiled as his assistant Sebastian led the man at the centre of it all, old Father Stephen, into the church. There was only one sadness. If only Father Joseph could be there.
For many years there had been three very ancient monks at the monastery: now only these two remained. Father Stephen was short, Father Joseph tall. Stephen was revered as a maker of icons; Joseph had no skills and some thought him simple-minded. But both were very gentle, with long white beards, and they loved each other.
For thirty-three years, however, Father Joseph had lived apart. Across the river now, in a small clearing some way beyond the springs, there was a group of three huts, which formed a hermitage, or skete. In recent generations, inspired by the so-called Hesychast tradition of the famous Mount Athos Monastery in Greece, many Russian monks had drawn apart for a life of intense contemplation. Some, like the blessed Sergius of the Trinity Monastery north of Moscow, had gone deep into the forest: ‘Going into the desert’ they called it. The skete at Russka was quite cut off. To reach the monastery the hermits had to walk about a mile to the river, then call for the ferryboat kept on the opposite bank. But they came in, each day, for Vespers.
Except Father Joseph. For a year, they had had to carry the old man. Now, however, he was too weak even to be moved. Death, everyone knew, could not be far off. Yet still each day, a thousand times, he whispered the Jesus prayer: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me.’
Vespers: the start of the day. Following the ancient Jewish custom the Orthodox Church began its day at sundown. The evening psalm was sung. Throughout the Orthodox service, however long, everyone stood. Nor were any musical instruments allowed, but only the human voice. ‘Right Praising’, as the Slavs call worshipping. The singing was lovely: the whole church year arranged in sequences of eight tones, adapted from the idea of the eight musical modes of the ancient Greeks, so that the calendar presented an endless, subtle variation of sound, week by week. The Great Litany began, and after each supplication the monks intoned the refrain Gospodi Pomily – Lord have Mercy – which little phrase, repeated again and again, sounded like tiny waves breaking upon a shore.
Sebastian looked around him happily. The monastery had many treasures. Since the marriage of his forebear David to the Tatar girl, the boyar’s family, besides acquiring a rather Asiatic look, had been granted more land, including the local Black Land at Dirty Place. The peasants there, once free and now under his steward, had no love for the boyar, but the monastery had gained much. The boyar had given the monks their fine church, built of gleaming white limestone, with its fashionable pyramid roof of false pointed arches and its bulbous onion dome; also a tower with a splendid bell – still a rarity in that region; also a lovely icon of St Paul by the great master, Rublev. But nothing, surely, could be finer than the great screen of icons – the iconostasis – that Father Stephen had been painting for thirty years and which would be revealed tomorrow.
How splendid it was. Stretching across the eastern end of the church, dividing the sanctuary from the main body, its five tiers of icons reached almost to the roof. The Holy Family and the saints, the roof. The Last Supper, the Saviour, the Mother of God and the saints; Holy Days, prophets and patriarchs: all were depicted in gleaming colours and in gold. In the centre was the great double door, called the Holy or Royal door, on which were painted the Annunciation and the four Evangelists. And old Father Stephen had painted it all.
One part of the screen was still covered with a cloth. That night the old man was going to complete the last, small icon of the top tier. In the morning he, Sebastian, would fix it in place in time for the ceremony. Then the work would be complete: to the glory of God.
And the glory of Russia. For one thing was clear to Sebastian, it was that now, in these last days before the world’s end, God intended Russia to be glorified.
How she had suffered. For two centuries now she had lain, dismembered, under the Tatar yoke. On every side she was threatened. To the south, Tatars swept across the steppe; to the east, the Tatar Khan – the Tsar, as the Russians called him – and his vassals the Volga Bulgars held their vast Asiatic dominion. And to the west, now, a huge new power had arisen: for in the vacuum left by the collapse of old Russia, the Baltic tribe of Lithuanians – first pagan, now Catholic – had swept across western Russia and taken the land even as far as ancient Kiev itself. Poor Russia: no wonder that even the icons of the Mother of God, in those times, have a special quality of sadness.
Yet Russia was slowly recovering – thanks to Moscow.
The rise of Moscow was astounding. It began when a clever ruler of the little principality married the Tatar Khan’s sister and became Grand Duke. As agents for the Khans, the Moscow princes slowly surpassed all their rivals – Riazan, the eastern city of Nizhni Novgorod, even powerful Tver – all now acknowledged her supremacy. Then, in 1380, blessed by the famous monk Sergius, Moscow had actually defeated a Tatar army at the great Battle of Kulikovo by the River Don. The metropolitan of the Orthodox Church resided at Moscow, too. And who knew, though the Tatars still raided the land and demanded tribute, one day Moscow might yet help Russia to break free.
When the last hymn, the Troparion, was finished, Sebastian escorted Father Stephen to his cell. The long Easter fast had weakened the old man and he looked very frail. Sebastian gazed at him fondly. By chance they were distant cousins, sharing an ancestor in Yanka the peasant woman. Chiefly, however, Sebastian felt full of gratitude. He had always been Stephen’s pupil. As a boy, the old man had explained the points of the Orthodox cross, with its two extra bars, the headrest and diagonal footrest, which distinguish it from the Catholic cross.
And now he had learned, thoroughly, the art of the icon: choosing the dry wood of alder or birch; planing the surface but leaving a rough border around the edge; attaching the linen; coating its surface with fish glue and alabaster; pricking the outline with a stylus; applying the gold leaf for the haloes; and then painting layer after layer, binding each with egg yolk and brass, to give the icon its wonderful depth. Finally, days later, one added the coating of linseed oil mixed with amber which soaked through and gave the icon its divine warmth. For the icon was not a picture, but an object of veneration.
Once in his cell, Father Stephen dismissed Sebastian and sat at his work-table alone. He had one icon, of the patriarch Abraham, to complete – a last layer, which would transform the whole. It could go into the iconostasis for the service tomorrow: the coating would have to come later. He was a humble man. ‘Beside the simple beauty of the great Rublev,’ he would say, ‘my icons are nothing.’ But such as it was, the iconostasis was his. Now, gazing at the unfinished icon, he said a prayer.
It was strange, he often realized, that his screen would only stand for thirty-eight more years. For the Church had decided, after many calculations, that the Russian year 7000 – 1492 by the Western calendar – would be the End of the World. Sebastian, he supposed, would see it. But it was not for him to reason about such things. He must paint icons, to God’s glory, to the end.