Жюльетта Бенцони - Marianne and the Crown of Fire

The plain stretched endlessly in all directions. Its silvery surface rippled gently in the summer sunshine as the light wind sent it rolling in long waves to the horizon. It was as if some fabulous goddess had let down her floating mane of silken hair after a party. Here and there gleamed the red flower of the wild thistle or the plumed heads of feather-grass.

The heat grew more intense the farther they advanced and by midday was often suffocating, yet Marianne had never been so happy.

In the week or more since she had been travelling with her companions over this vast sea of grass she had experienced a happiness so deep and piercing that it was almost painful. But she knew that this time of grace could not last and that at the end of the long, northward journey was the war that must shatter her present happiness, and so she snatched at it like a starving man, obsessively searching out the smallest crumb and savouring it to the last.

By day, they journeyed across the steppe from one stage to the next. The posting houses lay at intervals some fifteen versts, or roughly ten miles, and thanks to Gracchus's miraculously acquired permits they were able to change horses, and drivers also, without finding themselves fleeced. The drivers thought themselves well paid at two kopecks a verst and sang all day long.

In theory they covered two stages a day, stopping at night to rest, and the posting houses doubled also as inns, which were otherwise non-existent in the great steppes. The travellers found rooms right enough, but for the most part they were unfurnished, except for the inevitable icons on the walls, hence the necessity for the mattresses with which Gracchus had provided them. Sometimes it was possible to obtain food as well but this varied according to the wealth and generosity of the landowner on whose estates the inn was situated.

The inns, in fact, were a charge on the local nobility, who in the Ukraine and the ancient region of Podolia were mostly Polish. These maintained both horses and staff and for the most part got little enough in return, since paying travellers were few, owing to the ease with which the celebrated permits could be procured.

In her character as an English lady, Marianne might easily have claimed the hospitality of the nobles themselves and have found in their houses, though few and far between, a degree of comfort and even luxury unknown to the imperial post roads. But these mansions, situated in the midst of vast cornfields which in the rich black earth of the steppes grew as rampantly as weeds in a wilderness, often lay a long way from the road. Besides, she had grown to like the bare rooms, with their clean-smelling wooden walls, where they put down their mattresses and she passed passionate nights in Jason's arms, nights that would have been impossible in a private house where the 'manservant' would have been relegated to the servants' quarters.

Both of them had suffered too much and had been parted for too long to have a thought to spare for keeping up appearances or for making any sort of pretence to their companions. Jason had laid his cards on the table the very first night, in Count Hanski's posting house. They had no sooner finished their meagre dinner of duck stuffed with mince and sour milk than he had risen to his feet and silently held out his hand to Marianne. With a deep 'goodnight' to the assembled company, he had borne her off to her bedchamber.

There, still without a word, they faced one another and, not touching but with their eyes locked in each other's, they had proceeded methodically to undress. As two hands meet and clasp, they came together and together they remained, as one, oblivious of the world around them, until morning light.

Every night after that the lovers lost themselves in their shared ecstasy. By day they abandoned themselves to the endless rocking of the kibitka as it travelled over the highroad. For the most part they slept, despite the jolting and the heat, which both shortened the journey and left them fresher for the night. Twilight falling and the scent of wormwood rising from the steppe would reawaken their desires and from then on they lived only for the magic moment that would lift them out of time, to become once again the first man and woman, naked together in the first night of the world.

Jason's thirst for this woman was insatiable. With her, he could forget his lost ship, the war that lay ahead and all past bitterness and misunderstanding. While in his arms Marianne forgot the child she had lost, her mysterious husband, the perilous secret she carried and all her past sufferings. Above all, for both of them, came forgetfulness that each day was carrying them deeper into a country rent by invasion, bringing them nearer to the blazing heart of the volcano and to the inevitable moment of parting. For with the feel of the imperial letter moving lightly against her skin under her dress Marianne sensed even then that she would never go with Jason to St Petersburg, that the time would come when she must make the choice that would divide their paths once more, for how long she could not tell.

Her task was to reach the Emperor and speak to him. And after that she must return to Paris to await the Cardinal's messenger and give into his hand the diamond she carried at her breast, in a little wash-leather bag sewn to her chemise. It was not in her power to go straight to America. Later, yes, but for the present there were things she still had to do in Europe. Even if it were only to make one more attempt at a last sight of her baby, Sebastiano.

On the evening of the ninth day, the road came to a river. It lay in a shallow valley lined with bushes and small trees, bent by the wind that blew off the steppes, and planted with a patchwork of crops that ranged from grain to melons, and water melons too. The wide blue stream flowed between reedy banks where fishing boats bobbed lazily at their moorings, along with what appeared to be some kind of ferry boat. This was the Kodyma, a tributary of the Bug. A village had grown up on the bank and it was here the travellers came just as the sun was setting.

It was not a large place, consisting only of a group of whitewashed, reed-thatched houses, each with its vegetable patch and cluster of outbuildings, scattered about an open space facing the church. This too was whitewashed and built in the shape of a cross with equal arms, each with its small pediment, facing to the four cardinal points, so that the priest in charge might look eastward while saying mass. In the centre was a gilded onion dome surmounted by a Greek cross that caught the light of the setting sun. Ducks and chickens wandered at will and rose-coloured kingfishers were swooping low over the river.

The posting house stood at the roadside some little distance from the centre of the village. The kibitka drew up before it, startling a pair of fat bustards into cumbrous flight. The driver, reining in his horses, said something only Gracchus who, far from wasting his time in Odessa, had acquired a fair smattering of the difficult Russian language, was able to understand.

'He says this place is called Velikaia Stanitsa,' he translated now. 'It's a cossack village.'

'Cossack?' exclaimed Jolival, in whom the word had roused a passion for history that was never very far below the surface. 'How can that be? I thought this was the territory of the old Zaporogi, suppressed by Catherine the Great in the last century.'

'Well, she can't have suppressed all of them,' Craig suggested. 'There must have been some left over.'

Gracchus essayed a question or two, to which the driver responded with a lengthy speech that came as something of a surprise from one who had so far done little more than sing.

'What is he saying?' Marianne asked, stunned by this sudden eloquence.

'I couldn't understand it all by a long way, but I think the gist of it, setting aside a good many appeals to the Little Mother of all the Russias, is that a number of survivors gathered into a few villages. The only thing is, they aren't Zaporogi any more but Black Sea Cossacks.'

The driver, in the meantime, had jumped down from his seat and was pointing with his whip to the church square. He called out something and this time Jolival needed no translation.

'He's right,' he cried. 'Look there!'

The sound of a bell had brought men out from the little gardens, leading horses saddled for a journey. The men were armed to the teeth and wore long tunics of black woollen stuff, caught in at the waist, over baggy trousers of some sort, with tall hats of shaggy fur on their heads. Their weapons consisted of a gun barrel slung over their shoulders, a curved sword, pistol and dagger thrust through their belts and a long lance. Their small, wiry horses carried high, sheepskin-covered saddles.

All the men wore long beards and their appearance was so alarming that Marianne asked uneasily: 'What are they doing? Why are they all coming out together?'

'That's not hard to guess," Jolival said gloomily. 'Remember what was happening at Odessa. The cossacks live quietly in their villages, tilling their fields and minding their flocks, until their Ataman sends out his summons over the steppes. Then they put away their ploughs and get out their weapons and set out for the mustering place. That is what these are doing. We've no need to ask what enemy they are going to fight.'

Marianne shivered. It was the first time since leaving Odessa that she had been reminded so clearly of the conflict taking place so far away on the borders of Lithuania that no news of it had yet come to their ears. Sobered by the sight, she would have liked to retreat at once into the posting house but her companions seemed fascinated by the spectacle.

The cossacks were gathering before the church, in the doorway of which now stood a priest in full canonicals. After the men came the women, clothed, or rather bundled up, in a kind of woollen shift, tied at the waist and worn over a long skirt. They were barefoot and their heads were covered with red or blue scarves. Last of all came the old women and children. The whole population formed up in a half circle in front of the church, as though waiting for something.

At that point the last of the warriors appeared. He was clothed and bearded like his fellows but distinguished from them by the expression of brutal rage that disfigured his flat features and by one thing more. Instead of his horse, he was dragging after him, by her long, tangled black hair, a screaming woman clad only in her shift. Behind these again came an old, grey-haired woman of impassive countenance, carrying a large sack made of heavy canvas.

The woman being so roughly used was young and might have been pretty had her face not been distorted by weeping and screaming. She was doing her utmost to wriggle free from the man's ruthless hand that was dragging her in the dust. When he came in front of the church, the man released the handful of hair in his grasp and sent her sprawling in the centre of the circle of villagers.

There was a murmur of appreciation from the men and a chorus of abuse from the women which the priest silenced with a gesture of his hand. Then the man stepped forward and, in a voice that sounded curiously calm in contrast to his recent behaviour, delivered himself of a short speech which the driver did his best to translate for the benefit of his passengers.

'What is he saying?' Jason asked.

'Well, all I can say is that these people here have some peculiar habits,' Gracchus answered. 'As far as I can gather, the man speaking is the husband of the woman on the ground. She has been unfaithful and he is casting her off before he leaves for the war so that she shall not soil his hearth with the fruit of her misdeeds.'

'He need not cast her off so brutally,' Marianne said indignantly.

'That's not the half of it,' Gracchus went on. 'If there's another man in the village willing to take her, she may live. If not, she'll be tied up in that sack that the old woman, her mother-in-law, is carrying and be thrown into the river.'

'But that's scandalous!' Marianne exclaimed fiercely. 'Why, it's nothing more than criminal! Where is the man who was her lover?'

'It seems he was some vagabond, a wandering fellow of the steppes belonging to the woman's own people. She is a gipsy and she'll not have many friends in this village.'