Milei had business to conduct, so he left her to wander alone all morning. She was astonished by what she discovered.
For this was the ancient trading emporium of the north. There were all kinds of people there, even in winter: not only Slavs, but Germans, Swedes, and traders from the Baltic states of Lithuania and the lands of the Latvians. One stout man selling salted fish even told her that in his youth he had been with the herring fleets all the way to the western island of England.
One could buy anything.
There were all manner of foods: huge pots of honey, barrels of salt, and blubber oil. Fish there was in abundance, even in winter. There were barrels of eels, of herring and of cod. Bream and turbot, she soon learned, were popular. There were great piles of furs everywhere: bear, beaver, fox and even sable. There was bright pottery and acres, it seemed, of beautifully worked leather.
‘At the end of summer,’ a woman told her, ‘they bring in the cartloads of hops. Ah,’ she smiled, ‘the smell of them!’
There were neatly carved ornaments of bone and reindeer horn from the northern forests. They sold walrus tusks, which they called ‘fish teeth’.
And there were icons.
As she looked at them, she noticed a difference between these and the icons she had always seen as a child.
These ones seemed brighter, their outlines clearer and harder. Strong reds burst gaily out upon the icy scene, as though in these bracing northern climes a more boisterous deity was emerging over the coasts and forests. She had just observed the newly developing and soon to be famous Novgorod school of icon painting. She was not sure that she liked it.
But the goods she coveted came from the east. They had come from the caravans of the steppe, from the vast lands the Tatars now controlled. They had come through the cities of Suzdalia to the great emporium of the north.
There were spices, on their way to the west. There were combs made of boxwood and beads of all kinds. And there were dazzling silks from old Constantinople. She ran her hand over them sensuously.
‘Can you imagine feeling that soft silk on your skin?’ the stallholder asked her.
She could.
It was while she was watching a large man counting a pile of the stamped squirrel skins that the Novgorodians, too, used as small currency, that she noticed something else.
He was making small notes for himself with a stylus on a little wax tablet. She had seen Milei the boyar do this, but here was an ordinary small merchant doing so too. She wandered round the other stalls. Other merchants, even artisans, had wax tablets or, very often, little pieces of birch bark on which they made notes and drawings.
‘Can you read and write?’ she asked a woman minding a fish stall.
‘Yes, my dove. Most people can,’ she answered.
It made a deep impression on Yanka. No one at Russka could. And it opened up new possibilities in her eyes.
These people, she realized, are Slavs, yet they are not the same as us.
And as she looked around the huge square, which was also where the veche met, she began to have an idea of the thrusting, adventurous power of the Baltic north.
That night, in the inn, Milei summoned her to eat with him alone. He was in excellent humour. Whatever his business was, it had gone well.
She had never eaten like this. Fishes she had never had before, rich venison meat, huge carefully arranged bowls of delicacies and sweet-meats. At one point they brought a bowl of shiny roe that she had never seen before and placed it before her.
‘What’s this?’ she asked.
‘Caviar,’ he smiled. ‘From a perch. Try it.’
She had heard of caviar; she knew it came from perch, sturgeon and other fishes, but she had never eaten it. This was boyars’ food.
He plied her with mead and watched with amusement as her face grew flushed.
Towards the end of the meal, the door of the room opened and a thin old man looked in inquiringly. The boyar gave him a quick nod, and he entered.
He was a minstrel, a skazitel. In his hand he carried a gusli – the small harp of his trade.
‘What will you sing, skazitel?’ the boyar asked.
‘Two songs, lord,’ he replied. ‘One of the south, one of the north.’
He spoke with an accent that made Yanka think he had originally come from the south himself.
‘The first,’ he explained, ‘is a composition of my own. I call it “Prince Igor”.’
Yanka smiled. There had been several popular tales in her childhood of the noble Igor – a southern prince who had led a great raid against the Cumans of the steppe. It had been a valiant expedition, but it had failed and Prince Igor had been killed. Every Russian knew the story.
The old man had composed a haunting song. As his thin voice filled the room with a melancholy, oriental sound, she could see and almost smell the endless grasses of the steppe, the great empty spaces of her childhood.
The message of the song was simple: if the Russian princes were only united, the men of the steppe would never defeat them; and it seemed to apply even more poignantly now that the Tatars had come.
She looked up and saw that Milei, too, was misty-eyed. Were not his own ancestors these very men, Rus and Cuman, who had fought upon the steppe?
It was then that he reached behind him and pulled from a leather bag a small bale which he put in front of her.
It was a roll of the finest oriental silk.
‘A present for you,’ he said, and seeing her look of utter astonishment the big boyar leaned back his head and let out a huge laugh.
‘Milei is generous to those who please him,’ he cried, ‘Sing your other song,’ he commanded the skazitel.
This was the Novgorod song of Sadko the rich merchant. It was, in part, the Russian version of the Orpheus story, with the merchant minstrel charming the Finnish sea god in his palace at the bottom of the sea, and thus winning his return to life. It was also a reminder of an actual merchant of the city.
The minstrel had set it to a lilting, sensuous tune.
Yanka lay down at Milei’s feet, and slowly drew the soft, shining silk through her fingers; as the song described the sea god churning the ocean waves while Sadko played his harp, she stretched out luxuriously hugging the bale of silk to her and looking up at the boyar. The top of his kaftan was open. She stared at the curling fair hairs on his chest and at the little metal disc that hung from his neck, that bore the three-pronged tamga of his ancient clan. She looked up at him and smiled until, at last, he too gave a soft laugh and waved the minstrel away.
She abandoned herself to Milei the boyar that night. Everything was right. And afterwards, it seemed to her, that something more than usual had opened within her and that she, too, had been with Sadko the merchant minstrel in the palaces in the deeps of that northern sea.
Yet although Yanka was learning more every day about the world, it was two weeks later that she made her greatest discovery, and it came as a terrible shock.
For if there was one thing she had looked forward to in Novgorod, it was the chance of seeing that city’s famous prince: Alexander.
He was an extraordinary man. At the very moment Russia was cowering before the Mongols in the east, this young prince, descended from Monomakh, had won stunning victories over Russia’s foes from the west, smashing the Teutonic Knights in a battle on the ice, and halting the mighty Swedes, in an action by the River Neva that was to earn him his title – Alexander Nevsky. Yanka had already heard of this hero, even in faraway Russka; yet here, if she mentioned his name, people only shrugged. She could not understand it.
Since leaving the south, she had never heard anyone discuss the political situation and when, once or twice on the journey, she had asked Milei some naïve question, he had only laughed.