by Yury Nikitin
Chapter 41
The man did not turn but continued to write. “What detained you, the Wise?” he asked slowly.
“Trifles,” Oleg replied. He winced, the fingers of his right hand were feeling a huge swollen bruise on his left elbow. “Have I kept you waiting too long, Slymak?”
“Never mind,” the man replied. “I had some things to finish, anyway.” He put the quill aside, turned slowly. A deathly cold struck through Thomas, a breath out of the grave. Slymak had white hair and a tiny grey beard, but radiated a power Thomas had sensed neither in himself nor in any other man before. The look of his sunken eyes was piercing. Thomas felt the evil wise man had known all of him at once, assessed his thoughts and desires, weighed his honor and knightly pride, looked through memories of the banks of the Don and the beautiful Krizhina. Slymak did not look a strong man but Thomas had no doubt that a move of his eyebrow would shatter a stone wall.
“The idea of stealing the cup,” Oleg spoke slowly, “was yours?”
He spoke with strain, watching every move of the Head of the Secret Seven, while Slymak settled back in his armchair easily, crossed his legs, smiled in a relaxed, free and easy way, like a lord. “The Wise,” he said, savoring that word, “but you have failed to guess… Haven’t you?”
“I have,” Oleg replied honestly.
“Now I can say it,” Slymak said uncaringly. Thomas caught himself in an anxious thought of himself and the wonderer as mice in a box together with a big cat. “Surely, the cup is nothing to us, people of reason. It means little even to Britain… though it could be some help to her.”
“Who is it important for?”
Slymak smiled condescendingly, fiddled with his beard. “For the new country, new nation… that could rise hundreds of years later!”
“Your calculations go that far?” Oleg said in a hollow voice.
“That’s your school, the Wise. You were the one to lay the foundations of knowing, of exact science. Our calculations say the cup will be carried across the ocean where a huge continent lies… In a word, there will be a new nation that may grow too independent… er… owing to some of the circumstances of its birth. That nation could acquire unprecedented power! You know we need no foes. We need workers.”
“Is the cup bound to get to that new continent?” Oleg asked.
Slymak nodded at the stiffened Thomas who stood still, pressing the cup against his chest with both hands. “His descendants! Like father, like son. Adventurers, brigands, poets, hirelings, dreamers, prophets… All of them shall rush to the new lands and create a state of a new… er… sort. All the states we know today are just hen coops and farmyards as against that one. You know we can’t allow it. No nation or kingdom can disobey us.”
“Have you heard of how Fagim died?” Oleg said softly. “He was the Head of Secret Seven.”
Slymak’s pale cheeks flashed with red. He leaned on the back of his armchair, chuckled. “Yes, you succeeded in uniting Slavs. Though only the eastern tribes. But we made this victory of yours turn out to be a defeat! The son of Rurik, whom you’d led to Novgorod, tried to accept the Judaism of the Khazars. His wife was baptized in the Orthodox Christian rite. Furious Svyatoslav, a grandson to Rurik, adhered to the true Russian faith just because he was indifferent to any gods. And his son, great-grandson to Rurik… ha ha… left his Russian name of Vladimir for the Greek one of Basil. With his help, we threw a net of steel on the savage beast called Rus’!”
Oleg went black, as though burnt by invisible fire. His teeth made a fierce grinding noise in the cruel silence; he looked down.
“And Vladimir himself,” Slymak went on with malicious laughter, “the one that baptized your Rus’, was but half a Rusich, which you fear to recall! Who was… ha ha… his mother? Malusha, a daughter of Gulcha who’s now one of the Secret Seven! And you know well who was Malusha’s father. You know, don’t turn away! And you know why it was so easy for Malusha to enchant the furious Svyatoslav, the last Prince of Rus’. You know why his son Vladimir, who was considered the contemptible offspring of slave woman, killed his blood brothers… his half-brothers, of pure Rus blood. And why he became the Great Prince of all Rus’, took the daughter of a Roman emperor for his wife, forced the wild Rus’ to christen!”
Oleg was bending, as though under an avalanche of falling rocks. He turned ghastly pale, with black pits for eyes, his breath rattling. He looked aged at once, dead tired.
“The very name of your nation is all but extinct,” Slymak snapped fiercely. “In the most remote villages, where our power has not reached still, there are Ruses, but all the rest are Russian slaves, Russian serfs, Russian servants… Later they shall be just Russians. You, as a sorcerer, must know well the difference between noun and adjective! Once I met Sardan, just after he had penetrated the Kievins. ‘What nation are you now?’ I asked. ‘Russian,’ he answered. I laughed and said, ‘And I am Greek.’ Ha ha! The top class of humor, you see?”
Every one of his words bent Oleg down like a heavy stone dropped on his shoulders. Suffering for his friend, Thomas understood with fear that the evil mage spoke the truth; the wonderer was the last Rusich. The others in his fatherland were just Russians.
“Where are your Ratmirs, Vsegnevs, Vedeneys, Vysheslavs?” Slymak added. He leaned forward in his chair, peering greedily into the sorcerer’s face contorted with pain. “Princess Olga took the name of Helen – that must be a particular insult to you… ha ha! Half of the men’s names we replaced with Jewish ones, like Ivan, and the rest with a mixture of Greek, Chaldean and other scum. A better trick than the Obres did when harnessing your women into their carts! The present-day Ruses… no, Ruses would not have submitted… Russians carry us on their backs and sing praises to us!”
Oleg shook his head, as if he struggled not to faint, asked in a lifeless voice, “Why are you gathered here?”
Slymak’s face twisted, his eyes glittered with malice. Red spots on his cheeks flashed brighter. “Do you think we mean to meet you? Try to capture you? Too much honor! I won’t repeat Fagim’s mistake. I know all about you! I’m stronger. You know that.”
“Slymak,” Oleg whispered as if he were clutched between heavy boulders, “you are no kind of beast like Sardan or Isfahan. They were brutal fanatics. I can guess why you did not interfere… I know you are a genius, Slymak. But why don’t you see it’s not the way it should be?”
“Wise, I can’t believe my ears! Wasn’t it you that founded the Society of Magi in ancient times and put the Counsel of the strongest Seven at the head of it? To guide all the nations in the world, to direct, to correct, to lead the way to good and suppress evil? You were at the lead for several thousand years! Then you supposedly found another way, so you demanded us to prohibit magic, to destroy it. It is written in the records you came out alone against the whole Counsel.”
Stunned, Thomas shifted his gaze between the evil magician and his own best friend.
“But you won,” Slymak continued. “The new Counsel took your way. We accepted your knowing, and the magic was extinguished and banned. Mankind embarked on the path of extending knowledge.”
“I did not want fires made to burn witches!” Oleg interrupted painfully. “The extreme was not only those fires all over Europe, but about the knowing itself, too. Of all the knowery, which means ‘to know,’ ‘to realize,’ ‘to understand,’ you only took the precise analysis, to build all the work of the Seven Secret on it. I know that to make a thing straight you need to bend it into the other side and there had been a wild outburst of magic in the past… but it’s the way common men may think! And we must understand that science is not the only thing people need! You rubbed magic out of their lives – well, though it was done with too much haste. But you almost deprived them of culture too! That’s inexcusable.”
The voice of the supreme magician grew stern, his eyes flashed angrily from under overhanging brows. “Their culture has remnants of old beliefs, magic, superstition, and simply ignorance! That’s not the load to conquer
a peak with.”
“Do other Secret Ones hear us talking?” Oleg asked suddenly.
Slymak’s eyes narrowed, he replied coldly, “Even grandmasters and plain masters hear us. In all the parts of the world. But there’s no help for you. Those on your side have only a silent sympathy, and your opponents came here to stop you. Culture is a sluggish, hesitating thing, while civilization means energy, confidence, a firm grip!”
“The sunset is far yet,” Oleg said.
“What?” Slymak asked. His lips stretched in a jeering smile. “Will culture have time to develop the same firm grip?”
Oleg shivered, as if caught in a cold rain. “Gods forbid culture in power! As well as culture with fists. Let’s leave it, no agreement we can reach on this point. I see it’s not about me. Is it a plot against Kiev?”
Slymak laughed with pleasure. “Our men have already assumed power. Soon they’ll come out openly. Kievins are already slaves, though they don’t know it. But soon they will know.”
Oleg clenched his teeth; pain was pulsing in his head. He saw the city crackling in crimson flames, men running with raised axes dripping with blood, arrows and darts flying, mad horses galloping with empty saddles… “In thirteen years,” he whispered in depression.
Slymak jumped up in his armchair, took a firmer grip of the armrests. His eyes widened. “Have you calculated it? No, thus, you rely on intuition, or prognostication as you call it. Yes, thirteen is our secret number. We resolved to take power in Kiev and all the Rus’ in thirteen years. To take it openly. To bring down not only Pagan shrines that survived in some villages, but the stupid Christian ones too. Wherever we win we’ll put our symbol – the five-pointed star! We will put it, Wise. About all Kiev, our fangs and claws are hidden, waiting for an order, and here, in a safe place, the vigilant brain!”
Oleg drooped, his crackled lips moved, he spoke with entreaty. “Blood again? But Kievins shall take axes! When Ruses are at bay, they always clutch at this last argument! Fierce killing again, streams bursting their banks with blood…”
“You see it?” Slymak asked with keen interest. “It’s a pity our calculations, however precise, give no visualization!”
Oleg shook his head. “Half of Kiev burnt, many people dead… But don’t be glad, Slymak. That day shall see the death of all your men. Of every single one.”
Slymak recoiled, as though punched in face. “When does it happen, you say?”
“In 9882 by Russian calendar, 6621 by Jewish, 451 by Saracen, and if we count years since the birth of Christian god, then it’s 1113… Why so much love for a baker’s dozen? After that slaughter, you’ll never dare to act openly, Slymak. Secretly – yes, but openly – never.”27
Slymak narrowed his eyes, as though about to jump. “Won’t you lead that slaughter?”
“You know I’m against killing. Besides, what’s the use of fangs and claws… without a head?”
“Without a head?” Slymak hissed very softly.
A glaring flash of blue fire dazzled Thomas. Oleg was flung to the wall, enveloped in quivering, strangely rustling, like butterfly wings, flames. Thomas rushed with raised sword on the evil wizard but hit against some invisible wall. With fright, he felt separated from the battle, as though by most transparent glass.
The wonderer pushed off the wall, a dazzling white light came on Slymak. The magician stood up (he turned out to be taller than Oleg), jerked his long lean hands overhead. He was unaffected by fire, and Oleg the same, flames clung to him like clothes, but Oleg clenched his teeth, thick blue veins bulged in his forehead, sinews strained in his neck, as though he shouldered a mountain ridge.
The blue fire around Oleg flared up. Slymak stepped to his foe, as though squeezing himself through a mass of invisible glue. The blue and white flames met. Slymak’s face stiffened, as well as the wonderer’s; both were breathing heavily.
Thomas kept clenching his fingers painfully on his sword hilt. Twice he tried to break through the invisible wall, slashed it, but the heavy two-handed sword rebounded, almost wrenching his hands. Slymak took one more step. There was a terrible hiss, a fall of white sparks. Both enemies, the magician and the sorcerer, clenched their teeth and fists, trickles of turbid sweat ran down their scary faces.
Slymak took in a deep breath, alerted. Thomas felt in fear that this was a decisive moment in the fight. The blue fire blazed up, started to absorb the pure white light. Oleg bared his teeth in agony, his head tossed back, as he slipped down the wall helplessly.
Thomas, beside himself with fury, bellowed a war cry of the Angles, brought the big two-handed sword down with all his might. The gleaming blade, which could break a rider in halves down to his saddle, met an obstacle, all but stopped, then broke through the invisible wall and the sword point reached the enemy magician between his shoulder blades!
With a crash, the blue flames vanished at once. It went dark; the white fire around Oleg was all but a smolder. Slymak turned slowly to Thomas, the sword fell out of the terrible wound, clanged down on the floor. Blood gushed out of the broad cut. Slymak pulled a face of pain mixed with astonishment.
Oleg struggled up his feet, leaning on the wall. His chest heaved fast, his breath wheezed. The wonderer’s eyes were clouded with pain. Slymak lurched to the middle of the room, fell to his knees. His dry lips uttered a faint moan, “How could you?”
“With no remorse,” Thomas snapped fiercely.
“Noble knight… in my back…”
“I don’t mind what a boar thinks of me!” He supported the staggering Oleg. “Sir wonderer, are you safe?”
Blood trickled out of Oleg’s lips, set at once. He glanced askance at the dying magician who was still balancing on his knees in a puddle of his own blood, said with reproach, “You could have done it before. You were my only chance!”
Slymak was going as yellow as a dead man, the puddle of blood spreading around.
“May I,” Oleg asked, “tell your will to someone? Your last words?”
The lips of the supreme magician stirred, he whispered faintly. “Come back… To the head of the Counsel of Secret Magi… your own brainchild…”
Thomas sprang aside from Oleg in fear, feeling his sword hilt.
Oleg shook his head. “Until there is the power over power… I am the eternal opposition.”
Slymak collapsed face first, splattering the floor with blood.
Thomas felt sick at the awful wound; cleaved bones, gurgling blood as the body was still trying to live. “It is fatal even to a magician,” Oleg told him softly. “Let’s get away from here.”
The opposite wall cracked and slid apart, as though obeying his gesture – or it did obey. In a small room filled up with thick books, rolls of maps and drawings, a small woman sat at the table, her head rested on her hands. She started with fright, and Thomas recognized at once those raised surprised eyebrows, innocent eyes, the tender features of her face. The woman who’d taken away the Holy Grail! He pressed the cup instinctively to his chest.
“Sir Thomas,” the wonderer said gloomily, “let me introduce to you… my most dangerous enemy! Gulchachak or Gulcha. Not a true name, but that’s what they call her.”
The woman rose slowly. Her wide eyes were searching his still face with disbelief. “You… you killed them all?”
“Defending ourselves,” Oleg replied briefly.
She cast a momentary glance at Thomas. He braced himself up, dusted his elbows off, stood upright proudly. “Killed everyone?” she asked Oleg, her disbelieving eyes still fixed on his gaunt face.
“Defending,” Oleg said again.
She clutched her small fists against her bosom, screamed in a thin voice. “But how could you… He was stronger! We calculated hundreds of times! No mistake could occur!”
Oleg made a slow move of his shoulders. “Who says it did? But I had a tiny chance. And I used it.” He put his arm round her shoulders, led her to an entrance that opened suddenly, a glare of distant sunlight at the end of the tunnel. <
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Thomas felt magicians, the Holy Virgin, beastly god, falling walls, and the beautiful woman who turned out to be the most dangerous person in the world – all mixing up in his mind. He trailed along behind them irresolutely, pressing the cup to his breast, his sword hilt catching at the low ceiling.
The sunlight struck his eyes with pain. Thomas screwed up his face, breathing in the cool air greedily. The cold waters of a great river were flowing by near at hand. Behind him, there were towers of cliffs gaping with black holes; from small bumblebee or swallow to giant ones. In one of those caves, our serpent now lies drowsy, counting sacks of juicy meat in his sleep.
The woman turned round slowly to the wonderer, her face was meek. Oleg looked in her eyes. She lifted her arms, which were bare and tender, but he caught them, brought them away from his neck, examined her palms closely. With an imperceptible move, he tore a nail off. It fell down on the ground, bloody, glittering with a razor-sharp edge. The strange woman did not even wince, looking into the wonderer’s green eyes. All of her nails, as Thomas spotted with terror, were in place. It appeared weapons were not limited to swords only. A false nail could hide enough poison to send a legion of heroes to Heaven! Or otherwise to Hell.
Oleg put her palms on his neck slowly. Their eyes kept grappling. “Any other tricks?” he asked softly.
“None,” she breathed. “You won again, damn you…”
“Why so angry?”
“You know, rascal, I wish no one’s death as much as yours. Let it be terrible. It shall make me free from this stupid love that follows me through the ages!”
Oleg’s eyes showed deep sympathy. He clasped her to himself, patted the back of her head with his huge palm gently, as if she were an offended child. “Will they try to stop me again?”
“You crushed them all,” she replied quietly. “The rest of the Counsel do not interfere.”
“No more tricks?” he asked.
“No, you bloody winner.”
As he kept patting her, the fingertips of his left hand ran along her elegant girdle. Their eyes met for a moment. The sorcerer smirked wider. He took out a hairpin, as thin as a needle; his fingers cracked it. The broken halves tinkled against the floor, turned into a poisonous smoke that melted away
A golden comb flashed in Oleg’s right hand. Her gleaming hair, as black as raven wings, came down on her straight back in a released waterfall of black gold. Oleg dropped the comb uncaringly. Thomas gasped. The comb turned into a lizard, orange as melted gold, with a reared comb from the back of its head to the tip of its tail. Its red eyes blazed with malice like coals. Baring its teeth, the lizard darted to the sorcerer’s boot, but he stepped on it quickly with the other foot. There was a faint pop, as though a fish bladder were burst. Small spiders scattered out from under his double sole, dashed to hide beneath the stones.
Oleg laughed, took precious earrings out of the woman’s pink ears made for kisses, tossed them down on the ground before Thomas, then a brooch, bracelets, hairpins, rings. At last Oleg took a necklace off her neck tenderly. The knight, bathing in the vile sweat of terror, jumped like a hare, his iron soles knocked the hellish creatures into the rocky ground, trampled down, squashed, destroyed.
When he also smashed the necklace, which turned out to be a tiny basilisk spitting out fire and poisonous arrows, the woman asked innocently, “Sir knight, did this hypocrite tell you that your beautiful Constantinople shall fall under the blows of his sons? It shall be ruined forever, along with all the Eastern Roman Empire.”
Oleg was convulsed. “Do you mean to hurt him? Alas, she speaks the truth, Sir Thomas. She bore a hero who will give rise to a new nation… I recall giving him the name of Seljuk.”
The woman laughed triumphantly, as she made herself comfortable in the ring of strong arms, settled on his broad chest.
Oleg, his eyes grievous, nodded at the setting sun. “Sir Thomas, we set off in the morning! Come what may, here goes! I’ll see you to Britain. I just want a look at the glorious ancestors of the future nation that will have the blood of Ruses, the battle fever of berserks, the soft sensitivity and reason of Germans, the cheerfulness of Franks, the courage of the Irish… I want to see the people who will have the brightest light of the Holy Grail!”
Still embracing the small woman, he led her to the dark cave entrance. At one moment the woman seemed to make a move away but the strong arm kept holding her narrow shoulders and she went limp, clung to him like a supple vine to a mighty oak.
Thomas twisted, trying to work out how he could express his apprehension delicately. That was no woman but a full armory.
Oleg and Gulcha were already at the cave threshold when Thomas yelled at the top of his voice, as if he were storming the Tower of David again. “Sir wonderer! Oleg! If last time… Seljuk, what will happen now? Think about the future! Or your victory will become a defeat.”
Oleg looked back. The knight was clasping the Holy Grail with both hands to his iron chest. He had the eyes of a scared deer. The petite woman stopped. For a while the wonderer stood thoughtful; maybe he was thinking about the future. The woman felt his hesitation, cuddled up to him with her whole body. “Future?” Oleg asked vacantly. “By chance it will come right.”
The last thing Thomas could see – while the wonderer could not – was that her hand, the one that remained free, darted to the luxurious mane of her hair, tore out a pitch-dark single hair, and threw it aside. Then the couple vanished into the black gape of the cave.
Thomas stopped breathing. The single hair transformed imperceptibly into a snake, as black as sin. It stirred, went crawling to the cave entrance. Thomas jumped after it. A champ under his boots, a splatter of dark stinky blood. Thomas trampled down for a while to make sure, spreading the black flesh, bones, and even skin on the stones, then wiped his soles clean with disgust. His heart pounded as if he were a hare caught by a wolf.
He sat down near the entrance, set the bare sword up menacingly at his feet. The wonderer won’t beat off a gnat now. I must guard. His thoughts floundered fussily around the tribe that would ruin Constantinople in centuries to come. Then a burning question flashed: what would the people who come of him, highborn Angle Thomas Malton of Gisland, be like? Where, in which unknown land, would they create their unprecedented state? Would his descendants bear some resemblance to him, a modest knight errant?
Well, he was not likely to find it out till morning came. The creation of new tribes and nations must be time-consuming.