Gazing over the river under the huge, empty sky, he wondered – could his father see him in the darkness now? Did he know that they had triumphed over Kazan?
‘You are with me,’ he whispered, with a little rush of emotion.
It must be so. God would not deny to his father the knowledge that his son was restoring the family fortunes, completing the circle that would atone for his own broken life. It must be so. If it were otherwise, then God’s universe could never be perfect.
Surely the universe was perfect. Surely one day, whatever trials God made him undergo, he would be granted success, respite from his loneliness and – ah, the thought of what was soon to happen! – with his wife he would find the love and friendship he had dreamed about but never known. He would find it: perfect love.
It would be so. He smiled, and drank in the cold air before dawn.
A footfall, quite soft, came from somewhere behind him. He turned. At first he could not see anyone, but then he heard a faint rustle and saw another tall shadow move out from the line of boats.
He frowned, wondering who it could be. The shadow came forward slowly, but not until it was only three paces away could he clearly see this figure’s face; and when he did, he had gasped with astonishment, then bowed low, as he saw it was Tsar Ivan.
He was alone. Without speaking a word, he had advanced to the river bank and stood beside Boris for a minute or so before asking him his name.
How softly he spoke. Yet Boris thrilled to hear his voice. He asked the youth where he came from, who his family were and, though he did not comment, seemed satisfied, perhaps even pleased, with Boris’s answers. Having ascertained these facts, Ivan said no more but continued to stand silently by the young warrior staring at the broad expanse of water that stretched away, a pale glimmer, into the blackness.
What should he say? Boris wondered. Nothing perhaps, yet it seemed madness to lose this extraordinary chance to impress the Tsar. After a little time, therefore, Boris ventured to murmur: ‘Thanks to you, my sovereign, Russia is breaking free.’
Had it pleased him? Boris hardly dared to look, but when he stole a glance at the Tsar’s tall figure, he could see on his long, aquiline face only a faint frown as he continued to stare at the water. Not daring to say more, Boris waited in silence. The moving river, huge though it was, went by soundlessly.
It was some time before Ivan spoke, but when he did, it was in a deep, quiet murmur that was only just distinct enough for Boris to hear.
‘Russia is a prison, my friend, and I am Russia. Do you know why that is?’ Boris waited respectfully. ‘Russia is like a bear kept in a cage for men to mock at. Russia is trapped by her enemies – she cannot reach her own natural borders.’ He paused. ‘Yet it was not always so. In the days of Monomakh it was not so.’ He turned to address Boris directly. ‘In the days of golden Kiev, tell me, how did the men of Rus trade?’
‘From the Baltic to the Black Sea shore,’ Boris answered. ‘From Novgorod to Constantinople.’
‘Yet now the Turks occupy the second Rome; a Tatar Khan controls the Black Sea ports. And in the north,’ he sighed, ‘my grandfather Ivan the Great broke the Hansa merchants in Novgorod, yet still those German dogs control our northern coasts.’
Boris knew how Ivan the Great had ended the near cartel of the Hansa merchants in Novgorod. But alas, rich though Novgorod was, it still had to trade with the west through the Baltic ports which were mostly in the hands of the old German knightly orders or of German merchants. The only ports belonging to Russia herself were too far north, iced up for half the year.
‘Russia is landlocked,’ Ivan said bitterly. ‘That is why she is not free.’
How it touched Boris to hear these words. It was not just what the young Tsar said, but the pain that Boris heard in his voice that stirred him. This mighty sovereign, whom he already revered, suffered pain just as he did. He, too, felt a sense of indignity – in his case for Muscovy itself – just as poor young Boris suffered all the pangs of impotent fury when he considered his pitiful little inheritance at Russka. Truly, the Tsar in his noble and bitter rage was a man like himself and forgetting, for an instant, his own lowly position, he turned and whispered urgently: ‘But it is our destiny to be free, to be great. God has chosen Moscow as His third Rome. You will lead us!’
He meant it, passionately, every word.
Ivan turned and Boris felt his piercing eyes upon him, yet he was not afraid.
‘You truly believe what you have said?’
How could he not?
‘Yes, lord.’
‘That is good.’ Ivan nodded thoughtfully. ‘God led us to Kazan and gave it into our hands. He answered the prayers of His servant.’
Indeed the campaign to the Tatar city out on the eastern reaches of the Volga had resembled, at times, a mighty pilgrimage. Not only were the icons carried before the troops, but Ivan’s own crucifix, containing a piece of the True Cross, was brought from Moscow; priests had sprinkled holy water all over the camp to drive away the bad weather that was hampering the siege. And Ivan’s prayers had indeed been answered. He had prayed so long in his tent that some had even said he was afraid to join his troops, but Boris could not believe that. Was it not at the very moment in the liturgy when the priest had exclaimed: ‘Your enemies shall bow down before you,’ that the Russian mines had exploded and breached the stout oaken walls of Tatar Kazan? And was it not the feast of the Protection of the Mother of God when this had occurred?
He had never doubted the Tsar for a moment. Nor had he any doubt that Moscow was destined to lead the Christian world – she was the third Rome, until the end of days. God had given so many signs.
Sixty years before – in the year, by the western count, 1492 – the Russians had assumed the world would end. Indeed, it is a historical fact that for the year 1493, or 7001 by the old Russian count, the Orthodox Church had not even troubled to calculate the date of Easter. When, therefore, the millennium failed to arrive, there was genuine and official astonishment. What could it mean?
It meant, certain important churchmen decided, that a new age was beginning – an age which Moscow must surely be destined to lead. And so, in the reign of Ivan the Great and his successors, there began in the state of Muscovy the idea that Moscow was the third Rome.
After all, the imperial city of Constantinople, the second Rome, had fallen to the Turks. St Sophia was now a mosque. Though the Russian Church had waited patiently for the Greek Patriarch to assume his former authority, he had continued to be no more than a puppet of the Turkish ruler; and as the years passed, it became clear that the Metropolitan in Moscow was, for all practical purposes, the true leader of Eastern Orthodoxy.
An imperial destiny. The young Tsar’s grandfather, Ivan the Great, had married a princess of the old imperial family of Constantinople; from this date, the Russian royal family had proudly taken the double-headed eagle – the crest of the rulers of the fallen Roman city – as their own.
Boris looked across with reverence at the tall figure by his side. The Tsar had fallen silent and seemed to be lost in thought again.
Then he sighed.
‘Russia has a great destiny,’ he remarked sadly, ‘yet I have more to overcome within the borders of my land even than outside.’
How Boris felt for him. He knew how the bold Shuisky princes – of more senior descent than Ivan from Alexander Nevsky – had humiliated him as a boy; he knew how they and others had tried to undo the work of the great House of Moscow and replace the Tsar’s rule with that of the magnates. He thought of how, when a terrible fire had swept through Moscow only five years before, the Moscow mob had blamed Ivan’s mother’s Polish family and dragged his uncle out of the Assumption Cathedral itself and butchered him. They had even, he remembered, threatened to kill Ivan too.