Stephen paused. What could he say? Could he tell the young man that, like many churchmen, he disapproved of the monastery’s growing wealth? Could he tell Boris that he felt sorry for him and his rather helpless young wife? Could he tell him that, as things were, he was worried that Mikhail’s sons, if they did not eat enough, might be tempted towards a life of crime when they were older, or towards some foolish act? He could not.
‘I am only a priest, an onlooker,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘Let us say it is my good deed for the day.’
‘I shall bear what you have said in mind,’ Boris answered non-committally, ‘and I thank you for your concern and the trouble you have taken.’
With this they parted, the priest believing that he had done both the peasant and his lord a Christian service.
After he had gone, Boris paced about the room, going over the conversation carefully until he was sure he had got it straight in his mind.
What kind of fool did they think he was? Did that tall priest think he had not noticed the little smile of cunning on his lips? On the face of it, he had come to help, but Boris had learned better than to believe that. He thought of Tsar Ivan, betrayed by all. He thought of the four cousins, standing together on the day he had arrived with Elena at Russka. He thought of his wife, too, who sometimes shrank from him in bed. No, they were none of them to be trusted, none. ‘I must stand alone,’ he murmured, ‘and I must be cleverer, more ruthlessly cunning, even than they.’
What was the priest up to then? Why, he was baiting a trap: an obvious trap too, damn him. For if he reduced Mikhail’s service, who would benefit? The peasant, of course – Stephen’s cousin. And what would be the effect? To leave him, Boris, short of money: so that he would have to borrow more and bring himself a step closer to losing the estate to the monastery.
‘They just want to ruin me,’ he muttered.
The cunning priest. Only one thing he had said might be true. It was possible that the monastery, if it couldn’t get the estate yet, might try to steal Mikhail.
How, he wondered, could he prevent that?
All that month he considered the matter; yet surprisingly, of all people, it was the curious priest Philip, with his bobbing head and his passion for icons, who gave him his answer. It lay in a palace intrigue.
The strange business began in the Kremlin – in the dark recesses of the Tsar’s innermost court. It had been festering there for a long time, and it concerned the Church, and the fact that one of Ivan’s advisers hated another.
For with the increasing need for pomestie estates for Ivan’s loyal followers, some of his closest counsellers wanted him to support the Non-Possessors and take the Church’s lands. The Metropolitan was looking for a way to head them off. And that year he found it.
The fellow who was leading this campaign, a priest named Sylvester, was foolish enough to be friends with a man who could be accused of heresy. From this small beginning, the Metropolitan saw, a huge intrigue could be put together. Other, worse heretics were found: the accusers constructed a chain showing that if one man knew a second, the second a third, the third a fourth, then, to be sure, the first man and the fourth were plotting together. Better yet, a link between some of these conspirators and the family of Prince Vladimir, Ivan’s cousin and possible successor, could be discovered.
The Metropolitan was delighted. The dangerous Sylvester could now be shown to be the friend of heretics and of Ivan’s enemies. A show trial could be called as a warning, a shot across Sylvester’s bows.
Admittedly, some of the evidence was a little weak. While two defendants were clearly heretics, a third could only be accused of going to a meeting to argue the case for Orthodoxy against some Roman Catholic. Even that was enough, though.
‘For if this man had to argue about the matter,’ the prosecution pointed out, ‘if he did not know the answer, then how can he be of the true faith?’
A trial was called for late October. All Moscow was buzzing with speculation. The Metropolitan, the Tsar, the high dignitaries of the Church and court would all be there. Already the party of Sylvester and his friends were badly frightened. The talk of Church land reform had subsided into a nervous silence.
And this show trial might have been enough for the Metropolitan, but it was not enough for Sylvester’s rival in the council. Suddenly, now, a second case was brought – this time directly against Sylvester himself. The subject of the charge was: icons.
They were in the great Cathedral of the Annunciation, in the very heart of the Kremlin; they had been recently executed under Sylvester’s authority and, the charge said, they were heretical.
Even though Boris did not understand the details of the charge, like everyone else in Moscow, he knew how serious it might be. To speak heresy was dangerous, but a work of art that was heretical… that was something permanent, a matter of record: it was like erecting a totem, a statue of a pagan god from olden times in front of the Holy of Holies itself.
It was some days before the show trial was due to start that Philip the priest offered to take Boris into the Kremlin to look at the icons in question. He accepted eagerly.
The day was heavy, grey and sombre. The clouds were as thick and as solid as the ramparts of the city as the two men made their way across the emptiness of Red Square. They passed through the tall, grim gateway, under the watchful eyes of the streltsy guards, and made their way between barracks, armouries and other thick-walled buildings until they came finally to the central square of the Kremlin. It was a medium-sized stone square, on each side of which loomed the high, thickset, grey-white presences of the cathedrals and palaces. The Cathedrals of the Assumption, the Archangel Michael, the Annunciation; the Italianate Palace of Facets; the Church of the Deposition of the Robe; the Bell Tower of Ivan the Great: here they all were, with their massive walls and high, gleaming domes in this innermost heart of the vast empire of the Eurasian plain.
‘Come, I will show you the throne first,’ Philip said, as he turned towards the simplest and most stately of the buildings, the Cathedral of the Assumption.
It was amazing how he seemed to be able to gain admittance everywhere. He spoke a few words to the priest at the door, and a moment later they were ushered in.
It was a splendid building, made for the Tsar’s grandfather by an Italian architect, but modelled on the splendid old cathedral at Vladimir – a simple, pale stone Byzantine cathedral with five domes. Here, Boris knew, the Metropolitans were buried; with awe he looked around at the huge, high bare walls and round columns with their layers of enormous frescoes staring out into the airy spaces they owned. In this cathedral was housed the most sacred of all Russian icons, the Virgin of Vladimir, Our Lady of Sorrows, which had given the men of Moscow their great victory over the Tatars at Kulikovo, back in the time of the great St Sergius.
But to Boris even this great icon seemed less important than the narrow, canopied golden throne that stood to one side.
‘So this,’ he murmured reverently, ‘is where my Tsar was crowned.’
And he stayed there, staring at it for several minutes, until at last Philip had to drag him away.
They crossed to the Cathedral of the Annunciation.
The icons in question, which had caused such fear and trembling, did not look so unusual to Boris. Indeed, until Philip started to speak, he could not see anything wrong with them at all. But the intense young priest soon disabused him.
‘Look at that: did you ever see such a thing?’
Boris looked. Before him was a figure of Christ, with wings, and with his palms closed.
‘It’s perhaps unusual,’ he ventured uncertainly.