He bowed his head. Then something happened.
It was hard for Sebastian to keep still. Despite his own humility, the whole monastery was in awe of Father Stephen’s accomplishment and the coming day would be a triumph. Sebastian could think of nothing else as he paced in the damp night air. Hours passed, but he did not dare disturb the old master. Nor, when Stephen failed to appear at the midnight service of Nocturne, did anyone think anything of it. For afterwards, through the little cell window, Sebastian could see Stephen before his table, his head occasionally moving to and fro, as he worked. As so the night grew deeper.
Father Stephen sat still and wrestled with his body. The stroke he had suffered after Vespers had only made him unconscious for a short while. But he could not speak and he could not move his right arm and he stared, helplessly, at the unfinished icon before him. Hours passed. He prayed. He prayed to the Virgin of the Intercession.
It was in the early hours of the morning that Sebastian awoke and went outside. The candle in Father Stephen’s cell was still burning; and perhaps he might have approached if, looking over the monastery wall, he had not seen the strangest sight in the distance.
It seemed to be a little boat with a white sail, coming from the woods opposite, towards the river. He rubbed his eyes. Impossible. Then he saw that it was not a boat at all, but a man, moving with great speed. And next, wonder of wonder, the shining figure moved across the water. I’m bewitched! Sebastian was certain of it: for the figure suddenly floated, with apparent ease, over the monastery gate and went swiftly to Father Stephen’s cell. And then Sebastian saw that it was old Father Joseph. Trembling, he ran to his cell.
And he would, in the morning, have convinced himself that this whole business had been a dream, but for one curious circumstance. For while it so happened that both Father Stephen and Father Joseph had departed this world, from their separate abodes, at about dawn that day the icon, duly finished, was also found in the iconostasis, in its proper place.
Ivan
1552
Very slowly. Very slowly.
The oars’ lilting refrain on the water.
Mother Volga, mighty Volga: the ships were coming from the east up the river.
High in the endless autumn sky, pale clouds passed by from time to time, as the ships, like their shadows, crossed the sullen waters, and the sun dipped slowly to the distant shore. Mother Volga, mighty Volga: the ships were coming from the steppe to the homeland.
Sometimes they hoisted sails, more often they rowed. From the bank of the huge river their oars could not be heard; only the boatmen’s faint rhythmic singing echoed plaintively across the stream.
Mother Volga. Mighty Volga.
Boris did not know how many boats there were. Only a part of the army had been left behind as a garrison in the east. The main force was returning to the frontier city of Nizhni Novgorod; and they were returning in triumph. For the Russians had just conquered the mighty Tatar city of Kazan.
Kazan: it was many days behind them now, on its high hill by the Volga where that huge stream at last turned southwards across the distant steppe and desert to the Caspian Sea. Kazan: by the lands of the ancient Volga Bulgars; gateway to the empire once ruled by mighty Genghis Khan.
Now it was Russian.
From dawn each day the boats travelled, until their shadows grew so long that they joined each vessel with the one behind so that, instead of resembling a procession of dark swans in the distance, they seemed to turn into snakes, inching forward on waters turned to fire by the western sunset ahead; while on the bank, the last red light from the huge sky eerily caught the stands of bare larch and birch so that it appeared as if whole armies with massed lances were waiting by the river bank to greet them.
Boris was sitting in a boat some way down the line. He was sixteen, of medium height with a frame that was still rather spare, a broad face with a hint of Turkish in it, dark blue eyes, dark brown hair and a wispy beard. Being a young cavalryman, he wore a quilted woollen coat, thick enough to stop most arrows. Over his shoulders he had draped a coat of fur, against the cold breeze on the river. Behind him was slung a short Turkish bow and at his feet lay an axe in a bearskin sheath.
He was of noble birth: his full name was Boris, son of David, surnamed Bobrov, and if asked where he came from he would answer that his estate lay by Russka.
No one paid any attention to him, but if they had bothered to do so, they would have observed a brooding, nervous excitement in his face, especially when he glanced at the first boat that was leading them back towards the west.
For in the first boat rode a twenty-two-year-old man: Tsar Ivan.
Ivan: Holy Tsar, Autocrat of all the Russias. No ruler before had taken such titles. And his capital was Moscow.
This was the state known to history as Muscovy, and it was already a tremendous power. One by one, in the process known as the Gathering, the mighty cities of northern Russia had fallen to Moscow and her armies. Tver, Riazan, Smolensk – even mighty Novgorod – had given up their ancient independence. And this new state was no federation: the Prince of Moscow was as great a despot as was once the Tatar Khan. Absolute obedience to the centre: this was the doctrine of the Moscow princes.
‘Only in this way,’ their supporters claimed, ‘will the state of Rus return to her ancient glory.’
There was still a long way to go. Even now, most of western Russia and the lands of ancient Kiev in the south, were still in the grip of mighty Lithuania. Further yet, across the Black Sea, a new Moslem power, the Ottoman Turks, had seized old Constantinople – henceforth called Istanbul – and their Ottoman Empire was expanding each generation. Catholics to the west, Moslems to the south. And to the east, the Tatars had regularly swept in from the steppes, over the Oka, past little Russka and even to the white walls of mighty Moscow itself.
It was not just that the Tatars looted and burned: it was the children they stole that made Boris hate them. He remembered how he himself as a boy had stood, quivering with fear and rage, inside the monastery walls as they came riding by, with huge panniers strapped to their horses, into which they tossed the wretched little boys and girls they caught. There were several lines of defence against them: the settlements of vassals – formerly hostile Tatars themselves – across the Oka; then there were little forts, wooden barriers and stout walled towns with garrisons. But no one had been able to control them.
Until this year, when they had found a master.
Boris smiled darkly. At his feet, with their hands manacled, lay two Tatars he had captured himself, and whom he was going to send down to his poor estate at Russka. That would teach the Tatars who was their lord.
Soon, he would get more. For this campaign was only the beginning. Kazan was the nearest of the Tatar Khanates. Far away to the south, by the Volga delta where once the Khazars ruled, lay another Tatar capitaclass="underline" Astrakhan. Astrakhan was weak. That would fall next.
And then would come the chief of all the western Tatars, down by the warm Black Sea – the Khan of the Crimea, at his stronghold: Bakhchisarai.
He was a terrible figure. The palace of Bakhchisarai was like the famous Topkapi Palace of the Turkish Sultan in Istanbul, and even the Ottoman ruler was glad to use the Crimean Khan as an ally. But in time he too would fall, and after that, eastwards across the Volga, the Kazaks, the Uzbeks, the Nogay horde – the fierce but fragmented tribes who dwelt in the Asian deserts – they too would falclass="underline" the power of Muscovy would crush them all.