Ashes

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The ashes that floated down from the sky seemed like they would never end - falling like the snows of an endless winter. Only instead of blanketing the earth in white, the skies shrouded everything in a dull, dead gray that sucked the color and life out of the whole world.

Beneath the falling ash, Stribor’s warband marched—a long, glinting serpent of iron winding through the carcass of the countryside. Stribor and his druzhinniks led the column, their scarred mail and dented plate dimly reflecting the gray morning light. Behind them trailed the warband’s spearmen and bowmen: a mix of untested freeholders and hardened mercenaries who made their living off of Klyazma’s ceaseless skirmishes between boyars.

At the rear was the baggage train, mules and horses straining under carts loaded with provisions, wine, tents, and the plundered wealth of ten villages that had been left smoking ruins by the warband's foraging. Following them were the captives, Yesugei staggering at the front of the grim line, driven onward by the jeering rearguard.

Vasilisa rode in the baggage train, covered from the falling ash by a cloth canopy, and watched over day and night by the Yllahanan sorcerer who leered at her in threatening silence. Stribor guarded his key to Prince Svetopolk’s favor well, like a dog with its favorite bone. It was only the prospect of a champion’s welcome and reward in distant Pemil which drove the boyar to march north, even as his druzhinniks and Hecellon advised him to hunker down and try to wait out the ashfall.

“It is a far march to Pemil,” one of Stribor’s druzhinniks had muttered back at camp - a man she nicknamed Scar for his ugly, pox-marked face. “Five hundred miles’ march in this ungodly ash…we will lose many. Too many. We should retreat to Hlotopol first - get more men, more horses for the trek north.”

“I think not,” she had heard Stribor interject as he leaned over a map. “It’s only a hundred miles to Rovetshi, the domain of my lady’s boyars.”

He pointed at a spot on the map - a small, inconspicuous dot on the border between Gatchisk and Belnopyl. “Rovetshi has a pier, does it not? I’m sure the boyar would be honored to ferry us to Pemil once he knows who will be aboard.”

If you can reach him, she thought as she listened. The map was not the land, and the title held by the boyars of Rovetshi was “Lord of the Gravemarsh” for a reason. If the gods are good, the mud will swallow all you southerners whole, just as it has for centuries.

“My lord…I still do not like the idea,” spoke Scar. “This ash…the men…they will worry. Some will flee. Some will die. We can scarce afford to lose good troops and horses as we are.”

“I do not keep you for your counsel,” Stribor responded, his voice sharp as a dagger. “I keep you for your sword. Now round up the men, and prepare to march. Your boyar commands it.”

The warband covered twenty-five miles the first day, travelling all the way beneath the open skies which poured ash onto warrior and peasant alike. They had marched for scarcely five hours that day when one of the captives - an old man with a twisted nose - collapsed to the ground wheezing and coughing up black mucus. Before she was able to say anything, a spearman had thrust his weapon through the collapsed man's side and continued on.

The second day the warband crossed another twenty miles as the ash continued to fall through the night, blending earth to sky in a single shade of gray. The first day had been a curiosity, but nothing the warriors couldn’t convince themselves would pass with the new morning. But by the second day, the ash had turned the men’s spirits gray as well - all thoughts of a triumphant, easy march to the distant north was smothered alongside the land as the ashfall continued with no end in sight.

“Oh Perun, Lord of Lightning and Heaven,” prayed the warriors on the second night as they knelt around a roaring pyre. “Sweep the skies clean, and keep us safe in journey and battle.”

A large, heavyset druzhinnik named Troyan led the prayer to the Lord of Lightning. As the warriors knelt before the roaring fire, the druzhinnik brought forward one of his own mounts and cut its throat before the flames. It took three more men to hold the beautiful stallion down as it screamed and bucked wildly, and once the horse fell limp the warriors dragged it whole into the bonfire for the Lord of Lightning to claim as sacrifice.

“Oh Perun, who rules higher than all,” Troyan had called then. “Accept this sacrifice of blood in your name, and clear the skies before your faithful.”

But the ash continued to fall again the next day, the day after, and ever on. Before long, the roads ahead of the column were completely blanketed in gray, concealing pits, sharp rocks, and brambles which turned every step into a careful gamble. When the winds picked up, they lifted great squalls off the ground which sent the entire warband into confused disarray as warriors sputtered and coughed.

Vasilisa herself was spared from the worst of it all; she was Prince Svetopolk’s bride-to-be, after all. While others hungered from morning to evening on the march, she ate game the druzhinniks hunted ahead of the warband. Whilst others shivered in the cold, bleak winds, she was wrapped in blankets. Whilst others struggled and stumbled through the ash, she rode inside her covered wagon, comfortable in her captivity.

The captives and horses had it hardest on the march. Several draft horses collapsed from exhaustion, and were butchered on the spot for meat. By the fourth day, two captives had fallen - two more nameless souls who had friends and family of their own, left unburied by the road. Vasilisa learned of their deaths once they made camp, and she felt guilt twist like a knife through her gut when she caught herself thanking the gods Yesugei had not been among the dead.

Yesugei himself seemed to age decades in days. His skin cracked, and the healing bruises dealt by Stribor’s men painted his face a grotesque mask of purple and yellow. Each night, Vasilisa tried to speak to him, but Stribor’s warriors barred her, declaring that Svetopolk’s bride had no business dealing with commoners or Khormchak scum. Stribor’s patience with her demands wore thin, and soon her wagon became both her shelter and her cage, with no escape in sight.

“Let me have a horse,” she asked Scar on the morning of the fifth day as he sat beside her in the wagon, picking at a roasted pheasant. “I am going mad in here. Let the captives stay here in my place - I would ride alongside his lordship.”

Scar only scoffed at that. “It is hard going, my lady. What bride will you be for Svetopolk if your lungs are black as coal, and your skin turned gray by this ash?”

That is all I am to them now, she thought. A doll they mean to keep pretty. The prettier, the greater their own reward.

“Why do you insist on these noble futilities?” asked Hecellon once Scar had finished eating and rejoined the column’s iron tip.

The question took her aback, and the Yllahanan mage smiled at that.

“They are not futilities,” she responded angrily. “People are suffering - the freedmen and captives more than anyone else. How do you think they feel, watching their noble lady ride high and warm while they freeze in this storm?”

“It does not matter what they think,” Hecellon shrugged back. “They are your subjects, or they will be soon. Their love does not matter - all that matters is that they serve you. The sooner you get that through your head, the sooner your tortured soul will be at ease in this cruel, unfair world.”

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Hecellon spoke to her as if he were speaking with a child, and for that she hated him almost as much as Stribor. The Yllahanan’s sneering haughtiness suffered small insult when Scar threw him into the pigsty with the other prisoners, but his sharp tongue quickly found itself once more on the open road.

Would that I had a dagger, I’d cut out your tongue and save us all from your tripe, she thought to herself as the Yllahanan learned back in his seat on the wagon.

By the end of the fifth day, the warband had only managed ten miles - and even for that they counted their blessings.

It was in the evening of the fifth day that Vasilisa first heard more mutterings of sacrifice among the warriors - not of horses, but of men.

Troyan the Faithful was the one who spoke of it to the others in Stribor’s company as they huddled around a cookfire for warmth beneath the empty sky.

“A true blood sacrifice has special power, my lord,” the druzhinnik said to the boyar who sat opposite him. “Dark times are among us - most like the land runs red all round with sacrifices for the Lightning Lord’s favor. But if we give him an unbeliever - a pagan - Perun will surely smile upon us all and rid us of this storm for good.”

“The only unbeliever we have is more useful to us alive than dead,” Hecellon counseled Stribor from the side. “My lord, if you would let me put him to the question again-”

“I wasn’t speaking of the nomad, Yllahanan,” grinned Troyan. “Even the Khormchaks hold respect for the heavens and spirits of the land. Perhaps it’s your wretched blood magic and sorcery that are causing this mess.”

To that, Hecellon’s expression darkened. With a flick of his fingers, Vasilisa saw the meager cookfire suddenly swell and grow until it towered over the druzhinniks - a great pillar of white-hot, flicking tongues of flame. “Touch me, and I will give your pagan god his burnt sacrifice myself.”

Scar pulled Vasilisa away from the scorching flames, keeping his other hand on his sword. Troyan’s own blade shone blindingly as he pulled it free and pointed it in Hecellon’s direction. Before they could home to blows however, Stribor’s voice boomed over them all.

“Enough.” the boyar roared as he rose to his feet.

The boyar’s mask of authority was one she knew well from her father’s court - and it was a mask she could see through as easily as glass. Stribor’s eyes flitted between Troyan and Hecellon as they stood against each other, and the first time in the boyar’s eyes she saw fear.

“There will be no burnings, and there will be no questioning. You are all under my command, and I will have this matter put to rest - unless the two of you wish to swing from the same tree.”

“M- my lord-” stammered Troyan, only to be silenced by a raised hand from Stribor.

“Enough.”

Hecellon was the first to stand down, letting his magic fade from the roaring cookfire until the pillar had shrunken down to a bare flicker once more. After a while Troyan sheathed his sword, though the tension lingered like a heavy pall over the camp the entire night.

There was no mention of the fight when the next day rose, only a sullen silence that made the march that much more miserable. Soon, the forest around them began to thin out and the grasses began to rise higher as the path ahead yawned out into open, wild plains that stretched out as far as the eye could see.

The swaying grass whispered in the cold breeze as Stribor’s column marched on, rising so tall in some patches they tickled the horses’ bellies. The land almost seemed calm as they trundled through the steppe, and then the horse pulling Vasilisa’s wagon finally collapsed beneath its yoke.

When Scar rode up to the commotion, he ordered the horse butchered for meat, and the wagon pushed off to the side to make way for the rest of the caravan. None of the horses that remained were strong enough to pull the wagon - and the food and fodder had to keep moving above all else. Then Scar dismounted from his own horse, and passed its reins to Vasilisa.

“If we try to ride double, it will kill my steed,” he said. “Take my horse, and stay close to the band.”

She smiled appreciatively at the druzhinnik - and some part of her even actually meant it. Scar was not as bad as Pervusha and his gang - though he had been willing to split her head upon much the same as the others when she was merely a blood-sorceress. She hopped onto the druzhinnik’s courser and let herself breathe a sigh of relief as she felt the familiar creak of the leather saddle beneath her.

As the warriors hurriedly quartered the dead horse, Vasilisa glanced about the open steppe - her silent heart yearning for nothing more than to bolt for freedom while it lay in her grasp. She scanned the plains slowly, and then she saw a face peeking out from behind a patch of grass.

She nearly jumped at the sight of it - and then saw the face had empty eyes, and skin of weather-beaten stone that was overgrown with moss.

A statue…

The stubby statue that peered out at her from the grass was dressed in strange garb - a short, pointed cap with a rolled brim, and a long robe whose surface was pock-marked by the elements. At the base of the statue, nearly hidden by the grass, she saw what looked like runes.

Yesugei’s eyes lit up with recognition as he too glimpsed the statue, and Vasilisa gently drove her courser towards him as the nomad crouched nearby the giant wheel of a supply wagon.

"You recognize this statue?"

“I do,” said Yesugei slowly, scratching his scraggly, dusty beard. “It is a statue, but a marker. The face points to the east, and the script here shows what season these lands are to be used for grazing herds. But…I’ve never seen one of these on this side of the Devil Woods before.”

Yesugei walked as far as the rope around his neck allowed him, and managed to crouch uncomfortably near the base of the marker. He traced his fingers lightly over the grooves in the stone where the inscription was carved, silently mouthing words Vasilisa did not understand.

Eventually, he said, “This is the script of the Kangar. They were a tribe to the far west of my father's lands - but they have been gone for decades now.”

"What drove them away?" she asked curiously.

“War,” replied Yesugei, his face growing serious. “One in which their people fought on the wrong side. My father's noyans drove the Kangar from the steppe near the end of the civil war, along with the others who cast their banners for Naizabai. I never bothered to ask where the exiles went - I had always assumed they simply...faded away.”

Yesugei jabbed at each of the inscriptions in turn, slowly voicing out, “This one marks the lands as belonging to a Böri-khan, of the Kangar. This one marks the lands for winter, to be used for goats and sheep only.”

“Who would give them these lands?” Vasilisa scanned the empty plains. “My father’s maps showed this as Gatchisk territory, not for nomads.”

“Maps lie,” Yesugei said. “The Kangar are skilled furriers and horse breeders. They need no towns for their crafts. And look around - these plains are wild and empty. Instead of letting them lie fallow, your southern prince may have invited them himself, like other kingdoms did before the Great Horde. More people to tax, another army to raise, and the Kangar are excellent riders and archers.”

“Powerful allies,” Vasilisa mused. “But these are times of treachery. If even Prince Gvozden's own kinsmen turn against him, would the Kangar remain loyal?”

“Loyalty is a fickle thing among my people,” said Yesugei with an exasperated sigh. “The survival of the tribe is what matters above all else - the Kangar would just as easily side with Svetopolk as they would their old master if it meant they would be able to keep their lands and their wealth.”

Yesugei's face suddenly grew dark with concern, and Vasilisa knew what had crept up to his mind. “Your father's exile of their people.”

“Khormchaks have long memories,” Yesugei muttered. “I do not know this Böri-khan, but if he is kin to the khan who ruled the Kangar in the steppe…”

The laws of the blood feud were the same from east to west, Vasilisa knew. “Then he would kill you.”

“Without a doubt,” Yesugei spoke quietly as he stared at the empty stone eyes of the marker. “My father damned their tribe when he cast them out - any Khormchak who dies beyond the native steppe is denied a place in the Eternal Sky, cursed to remain as a spirit of the earth.”

“Killing you would not bring them their lands back.”

“No,” laughed Yesugei sardonically. “But it would provide comfort to spiteful men who linger in the past. And that would be enough.”

Yesugei stood up and lightly kicked the base of the marker with his boot, but Vasilisa saw how his eyes flicked across the open plains - searching the distance for the ghosts of his father’s war.