This was the great destiny that Tsar Ivan had seen: that a Christian Russian Tsar would one day rule over the vast Eurasian empire of mighty Genghis Khan. Beside this even the largest ambitions of the western crusaders of old would look puny.
For the first time in all history, the men of the forest were going to conquer the steppe.
Indeed, even as they were leaving Kazan, Boris had heard some Tatars refer to Ivan as the White, that is western, Khan. No wonder therefore if he should gaze ahead at the young Tsar’s boat with such excitement.
Besides, he had another reason to be excited that day. That very morning, the young Tsar himself had spoken to him. Even now, Boris could hardly believe it. Tsar Ivan had not only spoken to him, but, it seemed, taken him into his confidence as well. Ever since, while those around him chatted, or gazed at the passing scenery, Boris’s mind had been full of the encounter with his hero.
And how heroic he was, this tall, dark young Tsar with his huge destiny. It had not been easy for him, Boris knew that. Yet he had overcome all obstacles. Only three years old when he inherited the crown, he had been forced to watch, humiliated, as the great princes and boyars fought to rule Russia in his place.
There were two mighty groups: the princes, descended either from the old Russian royal house or from the rulers of Lithuania; and the greatest boyar families – some thirty-five clans who made up the central core of the boyar duma.
These were the powerful schemers whom Ivan had overcome. They hated his mother because she was Polish; and they despised his wife. For when, like the ancient Khans, he had summoned fifteen hundred eligible girls to be brought before him, he had chosen this girl, from an ancient family, to be sure – but not from one of theirs. Yet Ivan had made them submit to his will. He had ruled through his own inner council of trusted, lesser men; and he had married his wife for love.
Anastasia. Boris had never seen the Tsar’s wife, yet he thought about her often. He thought about her because, when he got back to Moscow, he was due to marry himself and already, in his dreams, he had created for his wife the same role that everyone knew the lovely Anastasia played.
‘She comforts him in all his troubles. She is his rock.’ That was what they told him. ‘She is the one person in all the world he knows that he can trust.’
Her family might not be amongst the greatest magnates, but they were distinguished. Their name at that time was Zakharin. A little later they were to change it and call themselves by another: Romanov.
Boris had no love for the princes and magnates. Why should he support them when they wanted to take all the great positions and leave nothing but the scraps from their table for the mere gentry like himself? Under the autocratic princes of Moscow, however, men like him could rise.
For the rule of the autocratic princes gave hope to obscure families like the Bobrovs. While the Moscow rulers had set out to break the power of the mighty clans, they had advanced men of lesser family, like the great Morozovs and Pleshcheevs, to enormous fortune. Indeed in Russia the gentry, men like Boris Bobrov, instead of opposing autocrats, as they did in much of western Europe, welcomed them as providing their way to fortune past the princes and magnates.
Two years before, Ivan had chosen a thousand best men – ‘sons of boyars’ as the gentry were called, or even humbler fellows – and ordered that they be given estates near Moscow so that they should be close at hand. Boris, to his chagrin, had been just too young to be selected, for service began when you were fifteen; but he had been glad to see that not all those chosen had actually been found estates nearby. And Russka, though a minor place, was not so very far from the centre.
The estate I have is nearer Moscow than some of the thousand, he reminded himself with satisfaction. I’ll not be left behind for long.
These were the thoughts that filled the mind of Boris Bobrov as he moved up the river, and went over, again and again, his meeting with the Tsar.
The camp had been still asleep, the boats drawn up in long lines upon the bank, shadow merging into shadow in the silence before dawn. Nothing moved upon the water; the sky was empty. Not even the few birds of the night, it seemed, chose to infringe any longer upon the vast peace of the slowly fading stars.
Boris had stood by the river bank. Before him, the nearby water seemed black although, far out into the huge river, a swathe of silvery greyness across its surface gave a hint of the pale starlight above. He gazed towards the eastern horizon scanning it for the first signs of the dawn, but as yet there was nothing to see.
He had awoken early and got up at once. It was cold and there was a slight dampness in the air. Pulling on a fur coat, he moved quietly out of his tent into the darkness and began to walk towards the river.
He nearly always had a particular sensation at this hour. First, beginning in the pit of his stomach, began a sense of melancholia. In the silence, under the unending darkness of the sky, he experienced an extraordinary feeling of desolation. It was as if he had stepped from the close womb of sleep into another womb – that of the universe itself which, perhaps, had no end: so that he was at the same time for ever trapped, yet utterly alone.
He came down to the water, to the boats by the bank, the long line of shadows. Before him lay the river, vast, soundlessly proceeding on its way.
His melancholy was bittersweet. It was like a conversation in which no words were spoken aloud. It was as if he had said: ‘Very well. I accept that I am eternally alone – I shall wander for ever on the empty roads of the night.’
And yet, even in making this sad submission to the universe, even as he moved into this region beyond tears, rather like the relief after weeping, he felt a warmth in his stomach that spread with a tingling sensation. It was a secretion, deep inside him, of tremendous joy and even of love, that made itself known to him only in these silent times before the dawn.
As he stood in the shadows, his mind had turned to his parents.
Boris could only just remember his mother – a gentle presence who had faded from his life. She had died when he was five. For him, therefore, family meant his father.
It was a year since he had died, but for as long as Boris could remember, he had been a tragic figure, disabled by terrible wounds he had received fighting the Tatars soon after Boris was born. For ten years he had been a widower. Once, one could see, he had possessed a big, burly frame, but the blue eyes in his broad, rather Turkish face were sunken, with dark hollows under them. His broad chest showed the bones, and it was only by a great effort of will that he managed to hold his ravaged body together with some semblance of dignity, until his son came of age and could fend for himself in the world.
It was this feat of endurance, this drawing upon deep reserves, that had made its deep impression upon the boy. More than any vigorous warrior, his father’s fallen figure represented to him something heroic. It was almost as if the emaciated figure who cared for him was both a living father and, at the same time, an ancestor from beyond the grave. And though he was only of medium height, and sometimes rather clumsy, broad-faced Boris grew up with a single, towering passion: to fill the heroic role his father had been denied.
‘The family is in your hands now,’ his father told him. ‘Our honour rests upon you alone.’
If he closed his eyes, he could see them, his ancestors – tall, noble figures resting in their graves, figures receding into the mists of time, warriors of forest, steppe and mountain. And if they were watching him, he vowed that they would not be disappointed. The family of Bobrov, with its ancient trident tamga, would rise again to glory.
Either that or I will die, he had promised himself.