by Yury Nikitin
* * *
Cold tickling drops crept down his face. He opened his eyes and saw nothing but grey mist. He could not move. As he groaned, his voice sounded surprisingly hoarse and weak.
Some fingers touched his face. The grey curtain disappeared: it was a wet cloth, now removed from his eyes. He saw a gaunt face over him, it looked like a skull stretched tightly with dry skin. The man was deathly pale, his massive cheekbones so protruding that they threatened to break the skin. Thomas felt creepy all over. The skull said in a rasping voice, “Gods do not call you, sir.”
Thomas looked at his bony fingers holding the wet cloth. Behind the pilgrim, Thomas saw his own sword, shield, and dagger hanging on a scaly oak, his armor a heap below it. The wind ruffled the hair on his chest, and he realized he was lying naked up from the waist on a pile of twigs, his belly tied up with clean strips of bandage. Under them, he felt some thick twigs at his side, which was still burning, pitching, stinging with pain.
“Thank God,” Thomas whispered. His voice broke and hissed, so it sounded like “thanks”. “Who are you?”
“A wonderer1,” the pilgrim replied in a dull, lifeless but strong voice.
“A wanderer?” Thomas repeated.
“A wonderer,” the pilgrim said again. “This is…”
Thomas struggled to remain conscious, but the pilgrim’s voice was fading, like a sugarplum while sucked. Finally, it disappeared.
When Thomas came to himself, much later, he ran into the same grey mist, guessed to pull the wet cloth away but put it back the next moment: his forehead was burning terribly, as if from hitting against Beelzebub’s hardest pot.
The wonderer hunched, as still as stone, by a small fire. He had taken his cloak off to put Thomas on it, and the knight shuddered with both pity and disgust for the pilgrim’s terrible emaciation. A skeleton clad in skin and wisps of rags. As the fire warmed him, the abominable smell of unwashed body drifted over.
“What’s your name?” Thomas asked in a faint voice. “Where are you from?”
The wanderer turned his head slowly, as if it took him a great effort. His eyes were dark, with reddish sparkles in pupils. “I come from Rus’2,” he spoke slowly. “My name is Oleg. I have come to the Holy Land for a feat, just like you.”
Thomas coughed, winced with sharp pain at his wounded side. He felt bruises all over his body where the heavy blows of the robber’s axe had caved his armor in. “Never mind,” Thomas comforted, gasping for breath. “You’ll have it another way.”
“I had it,” the pilgrim replied in a flat voice. “Everything I wished.”
Thomas chocked on the air, raised himself on elbows in great astonishment, despite the sharp pain he suffered from that. “But, holy wonderer! You look like a man just out of Saracen prison… and beaten with all the canes of the Nile and Euphrates before that!”
“My feat,” the wonderer said dully.
Thomas lay down. “A feat is to kill a dragon,” he objected wearily. “To storm into the midst of Saracen hosts, kill their best warriors, capture their banner! A feat is to rescue a princess and to hammer her kidnapper into the ground up to his nostrils…” He fell silent, black flies dancing before his eyes.
Oleg the wonderer stirred the crimson coals with a twig, slowly and silently, with a thoughtful look on his face. Suddenly he leaned, snatched something that looked like a small round stone, shifted it to his other palm. “A dozen of baked eggs. You can’t do without food.”
The smell was exciting. Thomas recalled himself riding to the forest. Hungry as a hunter he was, dreaming of food and some rest in the shadow of trees. “You can,” he replied impetuously. “I see it.”
The hermit raked the rest of the eggs out of the fire. Thomas shelled them with trembling fingers. He swallowed half a dozen without sensing their taste. Not until his stomach got full and heavy did he check himself. “Oh, holy wonderer, I am sorry! I was so hungry…”
“Not holy,” Oleg corrected gently. “There are holy sorcerers, holy hermits and preceptors, but wonderers are just wonderers.”
He changed the knight’s bandages and examined his wound. At times Thomas passed out in a fever. His side was still burning, but the acute pain had subsided. “God reckon it to you,” he said clumsily but with proper pride. “You linger here because of me.”
“I’m in no hurry,” the wonderer comforted. “Your recovery is fast. Stop that, you owe me nothing. You have protected me from those mad dogs. I’m just paying you back.”
“Quits then.”
Thomas woke up with fever several more times. Each time Oleg’s face and sad eyes hung over him. Cold drops ran down the knight’s cheeks, as Oleg put on his forehead the cloth, so icy cold that Thomas would have removed it if only he had enough strength.
Finally, he fell so fast asleep that he would wake in another dream, and he did it several times before he found himself under the familiar oak, on a thick pile of twigs covered with his cloak. The rest of his clothes hung on the tree.
The hermit was sitting nearby. He watched indifferently as the fire burned out, the thin coating of grey spread over coals. Thomas felt his stomach getting anxious, twitching and howling.
Oleg looked up. His sunken eyes flashed red for a moment. “Back to yourself? Your wound is healing. You may stand up, slowly.”
“Holy father,” Thomas spoke in a shaky voice. “I have famine mirages as if I were still crossing the Saracen sands. I smell roast…”
“I’ve shot a wild boar,” the wonderer said indifferently. “Does your faith forbid you to eat pork?”
“No, it doesn’t!” Thomas cried fervently and coughed. “Not at all!”
He raised himself a little and was surprised by having managed it with only a little prickle in his side. Oleg raked the coals with a sharp twig, hooked a flat brown stone and offered it to Thomas. The knight grasped that it was no stone but a thoroughly roasted slice of meat, so he took it. The hot juice dripped down, burnt his fingers. He swore, dropped the slice on the ground, picked it up, dug his teeth into the meat hungrily, ignoring the blades of grass stuck to it – but it was too hot. He spat it out hastily, threw into his other palm, devouring the slice with his eyes. The juice was pouring from the bite.
“How did you do it?” Thomas wondered. “I had no bow. It’s no knightly weapon!”
“I made it,” the wonderer dismissed. “Sticks are everywhere, and the cord of your baldric made a bow string.”
Gnawing at his meat, Thomas watched the wonderer with astonishment. However, the boar might have never been chased before. Or it was stupid. Or he might have found the animal wounded and dying. “Doesn’t your faith forbid you to kill?”
The wonderer was surprised. “No one stops killing due to their gods. Why would I?”
“Gods?” Thomas said with horror. “You are a Pagan!” He dropped his meat again, picked it from the ground, oblivious to the grit and dry grass crunching in his teeth.
The wonderer shrugged indifferently. “My faith is kinder. No persecutions. You can put up the pillar or cross for Christ beside our gods. This is the way Khors, Simargl, and even Taran of Celts came to us. And we accepted them.”
“A Pagan!” Thomas repeated with disgust. “Christ is the god of gods! He is supreme!”
“Put him beside,” the wonderer insisted. “If people begin to sacrifice to him only, we’ll remove other gods.”
“Christ accepts no sacrifice.”
“What about praises and canticles? Or some fragrant smoke?”
Thomas wished to close his ears, but there were juicy slices of pink meat steaming over charcoal. He smelled their fragrance. The wonderer hooked a slice after a slice and offered them to him. Finally, the twig itself was given to Thomas. He gulped the food down, his voice half-choked. “Why aren’t you eating? I can see the sun through you.”
Oleg hesitated over the last slice sprawled in the crimson coals like a squashed turtle. He shrugged his pointed shoulders with doubt. “I don’t
know… I would live on locusts and wild honey for a long time. I would eat leaves and grass. But meat… It rouses a beast in you.”
“Er… Does it? I only feel appetite roused in me.”
The wonderer curled his pallid lips in a ghost of smile, his teeth as white and sharp as a predator’s. He picked the hot slice with bare hands and did not wince, rolled it in his palms, pressed it. His face seemed motionless: Thomas was not good at reading expressions on skulls stretched with skin.
He held his breath when the pilgrim brought the slice to his pale lips. They opened and touched the roast meat, his nostrils trembled, smelling it. Then the wonderer touched it cautiously with his teeth.
Thomas did not dare to move while he watched Oleg eat. When the wonderer swallowed the last bit (masticated almost into a gruel), Thomas breathed out with relief. “There you are! Beyond locusts and wild honey!”
The pilgrim turned to him with bewildered eyes, then nodded as he grasped it. “You don’t understand… In my faith, no food is forbidden. It was part of my feat! Self is the hardest to overcome. A fast sets the power of spirit over body. I was hungry for bloody meat but fed myself with leaves. I desired women but spent my time alone in the cave… Full abstention is what it needs to find the Truth. But the best lot is not to abstain from pleasures but to rule them, without them ruling you… Try to get it.”
Thomas didn’t get it. “You stick to your Pagan beliefs, don’t you?” he asked with disappointment.
“So far I do,” the wonderer replied gently. “The power of my spirit is strong enough to keep my flesh from trembling at the sight of meat or any hearty meal. You see, I can have it and remain calm. Thus I can proceed up: from small reclusion to the Great.”
Thomas did not listen. He had fallen asleep, sated by food.
On the seventh day, the knight tried to mount. Once the stallion took his pace, Thomas got the pallor of death and swung. The wonderer barely had time to catch the knight falling down.
When Thomas came to his senses, he was lying under the same oak. All the day long the wonderer was boiling some stinking broth of roots and herbs in the knight’s helmet, knocking black excrescences down from birch trees to chop into it. He made Thomas drink the vile bitter mix, with all the hard wing cases and little sharp-clawed legs floating there.
Thomas cursed the names of Beelzebub and Astaroth but drank it. As a noble knight, he knew little about potions, leaving it to lesser men, but he took his new friend’s word for it, as believing is noble and Christian.
The wonderer made potions and decoctions and shot birds skillfully with self-made arrows. Once he shot a young badger. As Thomas ate, his young muscled body, hardened in battles, campaigns and far journeys, filled with strength quickly. In times he would get up and listen to his body. The wounded side ached, but no sharp pain.
“When did you wash yourself last, holy father?”
“Last month I got caught in a heavy shower,” Oleg replied with a vacant look.
“Oh. Is there any water nearby? I caught a glimpse of a stream while falling from horseback.”
“There is,” the wonderer confirmed. He became thoughtful, spoke slowly, “Yeah, I forgot… The Great Reclusion permits everything that is allowed to others. So I can…”
He came back wet and clean, with his hair plastered to his head and his eyes shining. Thomas watched him in amazement: the wonderer’s hair turned out to be the color of sunset, his face as white as if it were never exposed to the sun. His eyes also had an odd color: green as spring grass, green and sad.
“You are not Saxon, are you?” Thomas wondered.
“I’m Slav. And you? From Britain?”
“Yes. I was born on the banks of Don,” Thomas said with a faraway look. “My castle stands in the bend near the estuary. It’s surrounded by woods… and bogs and swamps. Britain is all woods and swamps. The hill under my castle is the only dry place within a hundred miles. The forest is crowded with aurochs, boars and deer, not to mention badgers and hares. The cries of birds will drive you mad. Fish are hitting your boat with their heads, asking to be caught…”
Oleg nodded. “I’ve also loved it on Don.”
Thomas wheeled round lively, his eyes glittered. “Have you been there?”
“Dozens of times.”
“Have you seen a high castle of white, white stone? It stands in the bend of the river, with its moat and rampart on the left…”
Oleg shook his head. “I’ve been on the banks of Don in the Eastern Rus’, Palestine, Colchis, Arabia, Gishpaniya, Hellas… Rivers got the name of Don wherever the sons of Scyth came.”
Thomas twitched. “Did those wild Scythians ever conquer Britain?” he asked with threat.
“I’ve been to the Holy Land without conquering it, haven’t I? Once Targitai, the great chieftain… or that was Koloksai3…? decided to replace Dana, the old goddess of nomads, with Apia, Mother Earth. He wanted to turn nomads into plowmen at once! Of course, that turned a bloody strife. After the battle, the Old Believers crossed all Europe and settled on the Tin Islands. They made some old-way altars of colossal stones, dolmens. Have you seen them? No? That’s a pity. The place is beautiful. Stonehenge, that’s the name of it. The Old Believers also gave names to rivers. Don is a Scythian word for river. The city built in the estuary was named London, which means standing in the mouth of the river. Other Scythian word for estuary is ustye. In Rus’, we also have cities named Ust-Izhora, Ust-Ilim or simply Ustug.”4
“I’ve never seen any savages there,” Thomas interrupted haughtily. “We Angles have lived on the banks of Don since the beginning of time. Since God created us right there, just after He made all the world, in six months only!”
“Six days,” the wonderer corrected in a meek voice.
“I know it,” Thomas snarled. “I was afraid a Pagan wouldn’t believe it. Six days is really a… And six months is enough time for your gods to do the same if they work altogether!”