Our chivalric honor will not allow it. My understanding is limited, but what I’m wondering is, should we send our young men off alone in our skiffs to raid the Anatolian shores? What do you think, brothers?”

“We will all go! Take us all to the Anatolian shores!” men shouted from all sides. “We will lay down our lives for the True Faith!”

The Ataman looked startled, as if the last thing he wanted was to rouse the whole Sech to arms, for it would be wrong to break the pledge of peace given to the Sultan.

“Brothers! May I make another speech?”

“Enough!” the Zaporozhians shouted. “You have already spoken the best words that can be spoken!”

“If that is how things are, then so be it! I bow to your will. As we all know, and as the Holy Writ proclaims, the voice of the people is the voice of God. One cannot contrive anything more clever than what the people have contrived. But keep one thing in mind: The Sultan will doubtless punish the pleasure our young men are to enjoy. We will have to prepare ourselves, and be at our strongest! We must fear no one! And while we are away the Tatars might well attack! Those Turk dogs don’t dare look you in the eye, they don’t dare come to a house when the master is home, but they will all too gladly creep up behind you and bite you in the heel, and their bite is raw indeed! As we have come this far in our decision, I must speak the truth and own that we do not have enough crushed gunpowder or skiffs for all of us to go into battle. But I am well pleased, and bow to your wishes!”

The cunning Ataman fell silent. Groups of Cossacks began talking, and company captains conferred with one another. Fortunately, not many of the men were drunk, and so it was decided to follow the Ataman’s prudent words.

A few of the Cossacks set out immediately for the opposite bank of the Dnieper, to where the Sech treasury and the weapons that had been seized from the enemy lay concealed in unreachable burrows and under water. Others rushed to the skiffs to inspect them and prepare them for the expedition. The shore quickly filled with a crowd. A few carpenters appeared, carrying axes. Old, sunburned Cossacks, broad-shouldered and thick-legged, with graying or black mustaches, stood up to their knees in the water with rolled-up trousers, and dragged the skiffs into the river with sturdy ropes. Others were hauling dry logs and trees of all shapes and sizes. Skiffs were being patched up with planks and turned upside down to be caulked and tarred; bundles of reeds were tied to their sides so they would not capsize at sea. Rows of bonfires were lit some distance inland from the shore, and tar was boiling in copper cauldrons. The old and the experienced taught the young. Hammering and shouts spread all around. The teeming banks swayed and moved.

A large ferry neared the shore. On it stood a crowd of men, who had begun waving from afar. They were Cossacks in ragged tunics. Their disorderly getup—many stood smoking their pipes in nothing but their shirts—showed that they had either just escaped a calamity, or had been carousing with such abandon that they had drunk the very clothes off their backs. A squat, broad-shouldered Cossack of about fifty stepped from their midst and stood before them. He shouted and waved more vehemently than the rest, but his words were inaudible above the hammering and yelling of the workers on the shore.

“What brings you here?” the Ataman asked when the ferry reached the shore.

All the men stopped working and, putting down their axes and chisels, looked on expectantly.

“A disaster!” the squat Cossack shouted from the ferry.

“What disaster?”

“Brother Zaporozhians, may I give a speech?”

“Speak!”

“Or would you rather call together an assembly?”

“Speak! We are all here.”

Everyone gathered in a crowd by the ferry.

“Can it be that you haven’t heard what is happening in our lands?”

“What is happening?” one of the Sech commanders asked.

“What, he asks! Can it be that the Tatars have stuffed your ears with plaster and you have heard nothing?”

“Well, tell us what happened!”

“Things have happened the like of which we haven’t seen since we were born and baptized!”

“So tell us what happened, you son of a bitch!” someone in the crowd shouted, obviously losing patience.

“As things stand, our own holy churches no longer belong to us!”

“What do you mean, they no longer belong to us?”

“The Jews are holding them in pledge. If you don’t place money in the Jew’s hand, there is no midday mass!”

“What are you babbling about?”

“And if a dog of a Jew does not scratch a sign with his unclean hand on our holy Easter cake, then we won’t be able to bless the Easter cake either.”

“He is lying, brothers! It cannot be that an unclean Jew would scratch a sign on our Easter cake!”

“Hear me, for there is something else, too! Popish priests are swarming over the whole of the Ukraine in carts! The evil is not that they are traveling in carts, but that they have harnessed Orthodox Christian men instead of horses! Hear me, for there is something else, too! They say the Jews’ women have begun sewing themselves skirts from our priests’ cassocks! This is how things stand in the Ukraine, brothers, while you are carousing here in Zaporozhe, for it seems the Tatar has driven such fear into you that you have neither eyes nor ears, and do not hear what is happening in the world!”

“Stop, stop!” the Ataman shouted. He had been listening with eyes fixed on the ground like all the other Zaporozhians, who in important matters never gave in to their first impulses but remained silent, their silence fueling the grim power of their fury. “Stop, and I shall speak! May the devil snatch your fathers, but what were you doing when all this happened? Where were your sabers? How could you let such lawlessness pass?”

“How could we let such lawlessness pass? You try and stand up to fifty thousand Poles! And then, sin will out, many dogs from our side went over to their faith!”

“What about your Ataman and commanders, what did they do?”

“God save us from what they did!”

“What did they do?”

“Our Ataman ended up being roasted inside a copper cauldron and now lies in Warsaw, and the hands and heads of our commanders are being paraded at fairs! That is what our commanders allowed to happen!”

The crowd stirred. First a hush, such as heralds a fierce storm, lay over the shore, and then loud words rose and the whole shore burst into speech.

“The Jews are holding our churches in pledge?”

“Popish priests have harnessed Orthodox Christians to carts?”

“How can we bear such tortures from the damn nonbelievers on Russian soil?”

“How can we allow them to do such things to an Ataman and to commanders!”

“We cannot let this pass!”

“We cannot!”

Such words came flying from all sides.