by Scott Bury
It was only as he crept through the doorway and fell onto his straw mat that Javor realized how tired he was. He fell asleep immediately. And he dreamed a terrible dream.
He was flying a over wide plain where tall grass browned in the sun. On top of a small hill, a palisade guarded a village. Smoke drifted over the palisade—the village was burning. Bodies lay in front of the huts, and children huddled against the walls, crying for their murdered parents.
Across the plain, horsemen chased people on foot. He wanted to warn the running people about the horsemen, but he could not bring his mouth to open, nor make the smallest noise.
One horseman closed on two men and a woman. The horseman raised a curved shape—a sword. He brought it down sharply, once, twice—the running men fell, twisting, arms flailing, then still. Now, only the woman was left. The horse ran in front of her. The woman darted to one side, then the other, but the horse blocked her. The rider tired of the game quickly, and struck her, too, and she fell.
Javor rose higher, and he could see across the plain. Everywhere, groups of mounted men in dark armour chased terrified villagers on foot. Villages burned. Armoured men raped women. Finally, he descended, watching a group of grinning men taking their turns raping two girls while a village burned behind them. The smoke billowed and concentrated into an enormous man shape.
He forced his lungs to contract as the smoke grew darker and the shape it formed grew more distinct. He could see two great arms, thick as trees, ending in great curved cruel claws.
Javor strained. He pushed and then the scream climbed out of his throat, and he was sitting upright in his bed. The watery dawn light filtered in. He was sweating. To one side, he could hear his parents shifting.
“A dream,” he whispered to himself, falling back onto the heather that made up his bed. He gradually slowed his breath, but he could not go back to sleep.
His father got up and smiled. “Time for the ceremony.”
Chapter 2: The rescue
Look down. Two young men, boys really, walk across the meadows and forests on the southern slopes of mountains that rise gently, then heave up suddenly to angry grey crags occasionally topped by snow. One of the boys is very tall, with long yellow-gold hair. His long legs propel him swiftly across a meadow thick with yellow and purple flowers. He pays no attention to flies buzzing around him, to crickets and rabbits that leap out of his way.
His companion is smaller with tangled, long black hair. Blotches of soft black fuzz swirl around his chin and down his neck. He scurries to keep up with the blonde’s strides and is out of breath. They have been walking fast, nearly running, for hours. It is the solstice, some time past the year’s highest noon. Birds are quiet in the hottest part of the day, but insects chirp and hum and trill. Leaves on the trees are still a light green, not yet burned dark by the summer. The air is warm, not hot, not yet.
The dark one gets more anxious with every step. But all morning, the blonde boy has ignored him. The dark boy recognizes this trait in his friend: his ability to focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, for hours at a time. In their village, he was called “the dreamer,” or worse. Even in normal circumstances, you had to call him by name two or three times to get his attention. But now, he is following the trail of horsemen, mounted raiders, and no matter how many times the dark boy calls “Javor,” no matter how futile the quest, he cannot be pulled away.
Sometimes, it is easy to see the trampled grass or broken twigs and bushes, or a torn bit of cloth on a branch. Often, the light-haired boy seems to follow signs that his dark companion cannot see, and every time the dark boy doubts his friend and thinks they have lost the trail, he sees another sign—horse droppings, the surest of all, or once, a girl’s colourfully embroidered apron.
The dark boy begins touching every oak and birch tree they pass to pray to their spirits for protection, help, sanity for his friend. “You know, we keep going east. East is bad luck, Javor,” he puffs as they start up a slope.
Javor ignores that, too. At the crest of a ridge, he looks around, sees something that his friend cannot, continues at his same obsessive pace.
“You realize,” his friend says, trying hard to keep up, “that we fall farther behind them with every step we take. They’re on horses.” Still no response, so he reaches out and grabs Javor’s arm, forcing him to stop.
The blonde turns and looks at his friend without recognizing him. “Javor, we’re chasing mounted warriors,” the dark boy repeats. “We’ll never catch up.”
Javor blinks and looks uncomfortable. He seems to realize where he is, comes out of the trance he can put himself into.
“We’ve been chasing them for hours, and we have no more hope now of ever catching up to them than we ever did. Let’s go back home.”
“Home?” Javor says it like he has never heard the word before. “No. We have to get the girls back, Hrech.”
Javor looks at Hrech, his best friend—his only friend—but what he sees is the morning in the village, all the villagers in their best, whitest clothes, the men in their embroidered vests, women in embroidered aprons and garlands of flowers, all standing in a circle around the oak tree on top of the holy hill.
He remembers how Vorona, the shaman, led the villagers in the hymn to Zaria, the heavenly bride of the sun, to pull the sun over the horizon. They lifted freshly-cut maple branches and sang to the kupalo, the spirits who came out of the forest at the end of winter to spend the summer under the growing grain. The sun rose; Javor saw Elli wearing flowers in her hair, dancing with the other marriageable girls in a separate circle around Grat, the popular girl who had been chosen to be kupailo. The kupailo girl threw out wreaths of flowers; the girls who caught them would be married by fall. The kupailo was supposed to be the most beautiful, but Javor thought Elli was prettier than Grat.
Javor watched intently, hoping and at the same time dreading that Elli would catch a wreath. Before she could, they heard a rapid drumming noise. Someone yelled “horsemen!”
Down the hill, in front of a cloud of dust, mounted men rode fast toward the village. Javor counted: five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Immediately, the villagers dropped their maple branches and ran for their homes—there was no time to get to the holody, the wooden stockade around the low hill. Riders were invariably soldiers, and that meant trouble.
The women hid in their huts while the men gathered in the centre of the village. The riders reined in hard enough to make their horses rear. They were all armoured and helmeted, with long black hair and beards. They all wore leather armour reinforced with iron strips and studs. Each had a shield on his back, straps over each shoulder, a sword at his side and a small battle-axe on his saddle.
The leader was a large man. In their armour, his shoulders looked to Javor to be wider than any he had ever seen, and his bare forearms rippled with muscle. He bore a horrible scar across his nose. He barked “Who headman here is?” in a strong, strange accent.
Roslaw stepped forward. “We are a peaceful village, sir. We want no trouble.”
The rider stared at him. “I Krajan am, Lord of this region in the name of King Bayan,” he barked. “This village owe tribute to Bayan, King of the Avars, Overlord of the Empire.”
“But Maurice is the Roman emperor,” said Old Oresh. The oldest man in the village, he looked up at the man on horseback, swaying a little.
Krajan guided his horse over to Oresh. So fast Javor could hardly see it, Krajan struck Oresh with an iron bar. The old man toppled face-first into the ground and lay still. From a hut, a woman screamed.
“Rome dead is!” Krajan bellowed. “Bayan supreme is! This village owe tribute and support to men of Bayan! You!” he pointed his cudgel at Roslaw. “Food for my men and horses! Bread, meat, wine! Now!”
Terrified, Roslaw ran for his hut. “Borys, some feed for their horses. Hurry!”
Javor heard a yell, rough laughter and girls’ screams. One of the Avars had dismounted and was pulling two young women
by the hair toward his fellows. With a shock, Javor realized they were Grat and Elli. Stupidly, they had hidden behind a haystack to watch what was going on, and the rider had caught them. The girls struggled and cried uselessly. The rider brought them to his leader.
Krajan dismounted and grabbed Elli by the chin. His mouth twisted into a horrible smile.
“Elli!” Javor yelled and lunged toward them, but his father, Swat, caught him from behind, pinning his arms and pushing him to the ground.
“No, Javor! They’ll kill you!” Javor managed to break free in time to see the girls’ mothers run out, screaming. Another raider stepped in front of them and savagely hit them with a heavy club. All the other villagers groaned, but no one had the courage to move. The women tried to get up, but the Avar hit Grat’s mother on the head again. She fell into the dust and did not move. Elli’s mother backed away on hands and knees, crying.
Roslaw and some other men ran up with bags of food. “No, please, leave the girls alone! Take the food, take it all, but leave our daughters!”
Krajan backhanded Roslaw savagely. The warrior’s heavy leather and steel gauntlet made a sickening crushing sound as it connected with the headman’s face, and Roslaw slumped into the dirt, bleeding from the nose and mouth.
Mladen, Elli’s father, sprang forward with a scythe, screaming “Everyone together! We outnumber them!” Faster than anyone could see, another raider drew a sword and slashed down. The scythe clattered to the hard ground, Mladen’s severed hand still gripping it. The Avars cheered and laughed; Mladen fell to his knees, gasping and staring in disbelief at the empty space at the end of his arm. Blood spurted over and over again onto the ground, splashing Elli and Grat until the Avar thrust his sword into Mladen’s neck, then kicked his body down. Elli’s mother shrieked. The village men cried out, but still no one dared move.
Krajan, the leader, looked down from his horse. “We take these,” he declared flatly. His men packed the food into their saddlebags; two of them tied the girls’ hands in front of them, then loaded them, crying but complacent, onto the backs of their horses. Laughing, the Avars rode down the hill and into the forest.
“We can’t save them.” Hrech’s insistent tone brought Javor back to the moment. He realized they were both still in their dress clothes, bright white now stained with mud and sweat and grass. “Even if you do catch up to them, you can’t fight them,” Hrech said. “There are at least 10 of them, all of them heavily armed. And they know how to fight and they don’t hesitate to kill anyone.”
“I can’t just do nothing,” Javor said, his voice hoarse. He swatted absent-mindedly at a fly near his face. “I have to try to get them back. No one else is doing anything.”
Hrech nodded, remembering how the village women had come out of their huts to join their men as the Avars rode away. Only when the thundering sound of hoof beats had faded into the distance, when the raiders were surely gone, did the women begin to wail and the men to cry.
Elli’s mother helped Grat’s mother to her feet. She turned to scream at Roslaw, the headman. “Do something!” Blood smeared the dirt on her face from where the Avar had knocked her down. “They’ve killed my husband! They’ll kill my daughter! They’ll rape her! Get them back!”
“What can we do?” Roslaw protested. He held one hand over his eye and his own blood seeped between his fingers.
“We can all go after them!” said one man.
“They’ve already killed Mladen and Oresh!” Roslaw barked. “You go after them, they’ll kill you, too!”
“Not if we all stayed together!” said someone else. “Like Mladen said!”
“Who here even has a sword? Who’s willing to die today?” With one eye, Roslaw glared at each man, one by one. Each one looked down. “Exactly. There’s no point in all of us getting killed.”
Hrech put his hands on his friend’s shoulders. “They’re gone, Javor. They might as well have died in a pestilence. And if you don’t stop this madness, you’ll just get yourself killed.”
Javor blinked. He looked down the Avars’ trail, where it skirted a stand of poplars and beeches. Two boys armed with a knife and a wood-axe don’t stand a chance against heavily armed, trained and experienced warriors on horseback—who probably had friends they were meeting, he realized. I am going to be responsible for killing my only friend. “Hrech, go back home if you want to,” he said. “I’m going on.”
Hrech sighed. “I can’t leave you out here, far from home, alone,” he said. He did not say No one else is likely to come looking for you. Not for Javor. Maybe they would search for someone else, anyone else, but Hrech was almost the only one in their village, other than Javor’s parents, who cared at all about the strange, tall blonde boy. Weird, they said. Strange. Touched. Nobody ever said stupid, no one except Mean Mrost, who delighted in making people feel bad. No, Javor was not stupid, Hrech thought. But he certainly had his own way of looking at things.
“So what’s your plan?” Hrech asked. Javor looked at him blankly again. “Do you have a plan?”
Javor had to admit that he had none. He had set after the raiders in heat and anger, thinking only of Elli, the girl he loved, whom he last saw crying and afraid.
He still could not understand it. He knew people could be cruel—he had suffered the cruelty of children often enough. But to kill men just to show how tough you were … to steal food from hungry people … to beat women so you could take their daughters …
He shook his head as he followed the trampled underbrush and broken branches of horses’ passing.
He also could not believe what the other villagers, his people, his relatives had done: nothing. They buried Oresh and Mladen, they laid Grat’s mother down on a straw bed. They talked and argued and yelled and cried.
But they just let the Avars take the girls away.
He remembered how his father, Swat, had sat down beside Roslaw with a pitcher of ale. “I know we don’t have much. But if we gathered everything we have, food, ale, the few treasures any of us have, maybe we could negotiate with them, get the girls back.”
Roslaw just shook his head.
“It’s too dangerous,” said Bogdan, a small nervous man with a continual tic in his left eye. “They would just take what we offered for the girls and kill everyone who came to talk!”
“We would need to arm ourselves,” Swat had tried to say reasonably. But other men gathered and the whole thing became a squabbling, useless argument.
It was at that point that Javor had known what had to be done—what he had to do. He could almost see himself doing it. He went quietly to his hut, found the little wooden case his mother had shown him the day before and took out his great-grandfather’s long dagger. Even in the dim light of the hut, he could see the angles and spirals on the blade, the fish-shape of the handle. The blade’s curve was comforting, as if there were no other shape a blade could be. Like a big tooth. He wrapped it in a soft cloth and tucked it into his belt, then stepped out of the hut and toward the edge of the village.
At that moment, he heard a sound like an owl’s call from the hut. Anyone else would have wondered about that: why is there an owl in my hut? Why is it calling during the day? But Javor was focused on something else.
“Where are you going?” said a voice at his side. Javor jumped, but it was only Hrech.
“I’m going after Elli and Grat. Are you coming or not?”
“Are you crazy? Are you trying to get killed? Do you even have a weapon?”
Javor took out the fish-handled dagger. Hrech goggled. “Where did you get that?”
“It was my great-grandfather’s. Come on.”
“Javor, you can’t,” Hrech sputtered, arguing what would become for him a refrain for the day. “You can’t catch up with mounted men when you’re on foot. And even if you do, what could you do by yourself?”
“I have to do something. No one else is.”
“No one else is stupid enough!” Hrech felt more afraid now even than when the raid
ers were in the village. “You’re one boy against 10 armed men, and all you have is a fancy knife!”
Javor took long strides into the grass the horses had trampled. Behind him, the adults argued and cried and whimpered, oblivious to the two boys leaving. “They’ve got to stop to rest sometime. I’ll keep going and sooner or later, I’ll catch up with them. Are you going with me?”
Hrech scrambled to keep up with Javor’s long strides. Poor guy never has been able to see straight, he thought. “The only thing you’re going to accomplish is to get yourself killed.”
“I don’t care. If Elli’s gone …” What? He did not think past that. “I’ve got to do something,” he repeated. He started to run along Avars’ trail.
Hrech knew he could not stop Javor, but he also knew his friend would not be able to survive on his own. Javor was bigger and physically stronger—he didn’t know it, but he was the strongest bachelor in the village—but Javor acted very young, like a child. “I’m with you,” Hrech panted. “But I’ll need a weapon, too.” He ran as fast as he could back to the village and found Swat’s axe beside Javor’s hut. By the time he had caught up to Javor again, he did not have enough breath to argue anymore. So he had followed Javor. By noon, his throat was parched.
He finally made Javor stop to drink at a clear stream. Javor hadn’t realized just how thirsty he was, even though the sun was high and hot. He touched his hair: it was hot on top, wet in the back. He drank some more, then splashed water over his head. Hrech did the same.
“I don’t care what you do. I’m taking a breather,” Hrech said. Javor said nothing, but sat beside his friend in the shade of a birch tree. Hrech looked up at his friend. He could see Javor withdrawing into himself. His jaw went slack, his lips parted slightly. He stared at the birch tree as if he were trying to count its leaves, but his eyes were not focused. Hrech knew he had to say something to bring Javor back to the here-and-now. “So, what now?”