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 th
e 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 that 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 raiders 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?”
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Javor looked up the stream bank, where the Avars’ trail led into the trees. “Our only hope is that the riders are not too worried about putting much distance between themselves and us, and that they’ll stop soon to rest and eat. But then, they’ll probably rape the girls.”
Hrech winced. It was another trait of Javor’s to say out loud exactly the thing you didn’t want to think about.
They hadn’t taken any food or anything for the night. But Javor remembered Elli screaming as the rider dragged her by her long hair. And he thought of all the men of his village, waiting for someone else to make the first move. If we had all rushed them when Mladen did, we would have saved the girls. But who else would be dead?
“I hate to repeat myself, Javor, but we’re two kids with a knife and a wood-axe, and there are ten of them with armour and swords and gods know what else,” Hrech argued. “We won’t stand a chance.”
“We’ll catch up with them at night, sneak into their camp quietly, free the girls and steal the horses,” Javor replied, surprising himself. “The moon will still be pretty big tonight, and the sky will be clear. We’ll have enough light.”
“There’ll be at least one on watch,” Hrech protested.
“Then we’ll have to kill him quietly,” Javor answered. Where did these words, these ideas, come from? “We’ll have to be careful not to make any noise that would alert them. But they won’t be expecting us. They’ve done this before, I’ll bet. And I’ll bet that every time, the poor villagers were too afraid of getting killed to follow and rescue two girls.
“I think they’ll get really drunk, eat everything they can, rape the girls, then tie them up and fall asleep. We’ll sneak up when they’re deep asleep. If there’s one on guard, we’ll have to kill him quickly before he can alert the others. I’ll sneak up behind him and ... and cut his throat.” Javor felt the dagger’s fish-shaped handle, which nestled in his palm comfortingly. “You untie their horses and lead them away, but be sure you don’t make any noise doing it. Then we’ll untie the girls. They’ll probably be tied up near the guard. Then we’ll get out of there as fast as we can.” He was making this up as he went along, but it all seemed to make sense.
“They’ll follow us, you know, to get the girls back. And to revenge their dead guard,” Hrech said.
“You’re right. Well, we’ll have to kill all of them. First save the girls, take them someplace safe, then sneak back and cut their throats while they sleep.”
“I—I don’t think I can do that, Javor.”
“You’ve killed chickens and pigs, haven’t you?”
“I can’t kill a sleeping man,” Hrech said in a very small voice.
Javor turned to look at Hrech directly, something he almost never did. “Do you know what they’re going to do to the girls? First, they’ll rape them repeatedly. They’ll each take their turns with them, keeping them for their amusement as they ride back to wherever the Avars stay. When they get tired of them, they’ll kill them and leave their bodies to the vultures and dogs. And they’ll go to another village and take more girls.
“If Elli and Grat are really lucky, the raiders will sell them to a slave trader and they’ll go to Persia or someplace even farther and live the rest of their lives as slaves for some prince. Either way, we’ll never see them again alive, unless we do something right now. Are you with me or not?”
Hrech fell into step without another word, his face miserable.
At nightfall, they stopped by a stream to rest and drink. They found some nuts and sour pears. Hrech fell asleep, but Javor couldn’t. Elli, he thought. He thought of her thin legs, cut and dirty, of the tears on her face as she was pushed astride the horse.
When the moon rose, Javor woke Hrech and they slowly followed the horses’ tracks. From the droppings, they knew they had almost caught up to the riders. The group must have stopped long before nightfall and had a lazy afternoon.
The trail soon led into the forest. Javor and Hrech crept ahead, trying not to make any noise, listening. Javor winced every time they broke a twig or made a branch swish.
Soon, they heard a girl’s sobs. The moonlight would not penetrate the shadows under the trees, so Javor felt his way toward the sound. Hrech stepped on his heels and whispered “sorry.” A twig cracked underfoot and the sobs stopped with a sudden inward breath. Javor squinted: a darker shadow under a tree seemed head-shaped. Javor fell to his knees and found himself touching Elli’s soft hair. Her fist was in her mouth. Grat was beside her, trembling with the effort to stop sobbing.
The girls were bound to the tree with a thin rope looped around their waists and wrists. Hrech stepped around Javor to cut the rope with the axe, frustrated because Javor never seemed to know how to do anything practical. He pulled Grat to her feet. “Where are the soldiers?” he whispered. No answer. “Did they let you go?” Javor and Hrech led the girls to a narrow path. “Are you hurt?” Hrech asked as they stumbled along, but Elli would only shake her head. She pointed toward a clearing. When they reached it, the girls would go no closer. Leaving Hrech with the girls and holding his dagger in front of him, Javor stepped into the clearing.
It was hard to make out at first what he saw in the moonlight, but when his foot struck something that rolled, understanding hit him like a cold wave. It was a severed head; the Avar helmet rolled off it and continued a short distance before it fell over in the grass.
Javor was surrounded by the dismembered bodies of the whole troop. Ten heavily armoured men had been literally torn apart—maybe more. They may have had friends. Everywhere he looked there were legs, arms, torso, heads. A shadowy heap turned out to be a horse, its throat torn open. Javor turned and turned, his head swimming. What could have done this?
Trembling, he returned to Hrech and the girls. He could only shake his head when Hrech asked, “What is it? What’s there? What is scaring you all so?” They found the path and went the opposite way they had come, hoping it would lead home. In the next clearing they came to, they found two of the soldiers’ horses, grazing, wearing their saddles and bridles. The boys took the reins. No one thought of riding the horses—no one in their village had a horse and no one knew how to get on, let alone hold on and ride.
Finding their way home was easy—they just followed the same path that had brought them to the raiders’ camp. Hrech and Javor fell behind the girls and whispered. “What was in that clearing?” Hrech demanded.
“The soldiers. They’d been torn apart.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said. Arms and legs and heads ripped apart.”
“More soldiers? Greeks?”
“No. That wasn’t done by swords. It was like—like when you eat a chicken and pull the meat off the bones. It was ... I don’t know. Unbelievable.”
They drank at a stream. Hrech made a fire while Elli and Grat washed. They had nothing to dry themselves with and shivered, even though the night was warm. Grat didn’t say anything, only sobbed continually. Finally, they huddled together for warmth. Again, Hrech fell asleep. Javor felt weary, too, but could not sleep. If he closed his eyes, he saw the dead, mutilated raiders in the field. It’s no more than they deserved, he thought. But still—what had done that?
Elli was awake, too. Grat was crying, but she seemed half asleep. “Did they hurt you, Elli?” Javor asked.
She shook her head. She answered haltingly, pausing and shuddering. “Nothing serious. They hit us to make us stop crying when we set out. We kept slipping off the horses, and they would get mad and slap us when we fell off.” She absently rubbed her face, remembering pain. Javor could see tears glistening on her face in the sinking moonlight.
“Did they touch you?” Javor asked. He hesitated. “Did they…did they rape you?”
Elli shook her head. “Not yet. They were going to. I knew it.” Her voice started to tremble. “They actually gave us some food. They made a camp where you found us and ate the food that Roslaw gave them, and gave us a little. And they started to dr
ink some strong wine. They made us drink, too. Grat got sick ...”
“What happened to them?”
Elli looked down. “I don’t know,” she said in a shaking whisper. “At sunset, they tied us to a tree. I thought they would rape us then—they were all gathered around. But their horses started to make a lot of noise and they ran to see why. One stayed to guard us. Then there was a horrible noise, a roar like a bear, only worse, louder ... then the men were screaming. Our guard ran to his friends and then he screamed. Then he … he stopped.” Elli bit her lip. Javor could see her hands shaking as she pulled her tunic closer to her body.
“Did you see anything?”
Elli shook her head. She stared at Javor, trying to tell him something with her eyes, but no words would come. Javor put his arms around her and pulled her closer, chafing her arms to try to warm her up. When her trembling subsided, she nuzzled her head under Javor’s chin.
“I could not see anything but the trees. There was a lot of commotion, movement, I could tell men were running this way and that. There was sound, like branches breaking, but … wet. I think it was the arms and legs of the men, breaking.” She buried her face in his chest, like she had three nights ago after Vorona’s celebration. Her tears dripped onto Javor’s skin.
Eventually, Elli fell asleep, but Javor could not. He listened intently, but the only sounds were crickets, frogs and birds. Once, far off, a wolf howled.
When the sun rose at last, Javor woke the others. They silently set off again for home, leading the horses, conscious of how hungry they were.