God Within Us

The water offered to her was brackish and tasted of mud, but Vasilisa drank it down greedily as she sat beneath the shade of a tree.

Since she had last seen them in the swirling smoke of Balai, the ranks of Lady Nesha’s forlorn band had swollen greatly - the half-dozen from Yerkh had now grown to almost twenty; a motley of men and women from across the countryside who fled to the safety of the Cherech and begged their way onto the river skiff. Some brought their own supplies and silver, but most only brought their hungry stomachs - yet Lady Nesha was unable to find it in her heart to turn any of them away.

The newcomers brought with them more news of the war - and none of it the same. Some said Prince Gvozden was leading his men in the field to personally hang the rebels, others said the prince was cowering beneath his bedsheets as his city lay under siege.

One man said the rebels were no more than a handful of boyars with starvelings and rapists in their company, while another said the entire realm and all of its spears had risen up to skewer the Old Griffon of Gatchisk.

Talk of the war was all that they had chattered about for the nine days they traveled up along the Cherech to safety and freedom - but when they reached the outskirts of Gatchisk…

“They set the entire river aflame,” said Lady Nesha as she took a breath and sat next to Vasilisa. “We could not see who, but whoever it was, they blockaded the port with fire ships for a mile. And so we turned north - and sailed until we could no longer.”

The boyar’s wife looked old - her face set with worry lines and her cheeks hollow from days of putting off food and sleep. In the shade of the trees, Nesha looked half a ghost herself - and Vasilisa dreaded the question she knew would eventually come, once they were safe.

Where is Vratislav?

Where is my husband?

Vasilisa saw the question lingering behind Nesha’s eyes even now - but the lady did not voice it aloud, not yet.

Nearby, the Yerkh freeholders and their new companions worked to break off branches and bark from the trees, lashing them together into a crude sled to drag their meager supplies - a few sacks of onions and turnips, spoiling fish, and three hard loaves of bread. The rest of the food pilfered from Balai’s stocks had either been eaten on the way, or was lost when the river boat was claimed by the muddy grasp of the Rovetshi marshlands, whose shallows and shifting banks deceived even seasoned navigators on occasion.

“The food won’t last more than a day,” the boyar’s wife sighed as she looked on at Marmun and Valishin heaving the vegetables onto the sled. “Might be we could make it two or three, if some of the men are willing to go without. But food in their bellies was what kept them from fighting - as soon as some go hungry, they’ll be at each others’ throats.”

“We needn’t stretch our supplies thin,” Vasilisa spoke as she stood up and dusted off the layer of ash that had begun to form on her dress. “Rovetshi is close by - its ruler is my father’s man, loyal and true to our house.”

“As loyal as Stribor?” asked Nesha with a raised eyebrow.

Nesha’s words twisted uncomfortably in Vasilisa’s gut. She tried to picture boyar Hrabr and the last time she had spoken to him - or at the least, bowed and said a few murmured words as she did with all her father’s sworn men. It had been at the summer tournament in Belnopyl - where Stavr and Pyotr had won their place in her father’s druzhina. Boyar Hrabr had been one of the younger boyars in her father’s court, but was still old enough to be her father himself at twenty years her senior. She tried to grasp for what few bits and pieces she still remembered of him, but the boyar’s presence was vanishingly little in her memory. He was courteous enough in her company, sang as loudly as the rest of the men when drinking, and forgetfully adequate in the melee - not the first to fall, but neither did he show any valor that she could recall.

Would such a man still hold true to her father - or at the very least, his liege’s daughter?

“Perhaps,” she replied to Nesha’s pointed question. “Perhaps not. But Rovetshi is the only settlement around for miles, and it sits upon the only solid road through the marshes. If we try to pass around it…”

The ground will swallow you up, she remembered Mariana’s voice long ago, when the old woman had schooled her in the domains under Belnopyl’s rule. Stray off the Marsh Lords’ path, and you’ll find Rovetshi a land of sucking mud, disappearing footholds, and endless monsters never recorded in the scholars’ books. It’s the only land even the nomads fear - enough that they’d risk the mountains of the God Spine out west rather than the marshes.

She looked at the milling peasants and freeholders who lingered by the gathered supplies, waiting to march on. In the days when Gatchisk and Belnopyl warred, the Rovetshi marshes were said to have swallowed entire armies whole within their watery embrace - a band of twenty shambling men and women would hardly even be a meal.

“Nothing good will come of straying off the road,” she spoke to Nesha. “Walk off the Marsh Lords’ path, and you’ll find the bones of thousands of others who sought to avoid Rovetshi’s walls. If there is even a small chance we can be granted safe passage from my father’s man, we should try.”

Nesha sighed, then rubbed her tired eyes before standing up. “I still do not like this, my lady. These are times of treachery - and if your father and mother truly are dead…”

They are not, Vasilisa wanted to reply sharply, but she held her tongue. It was enough that Nesha had to deal with leading her twenty lost souls for nine days, adrift and alone without her husband.

She needs warmth and comfort, not acid and steel.

But no words of comfort could spring to her mind - only numbness, and the pressing gloom of the marshes that lay ahead. When Nesha caught her breath, the lady of Yerkh set about corralling the peasants and setting a heading for the north. Vasilisa stepped to join her, and with Marmun and Valishin at the head of their band, they set forth into the waiting maw of the Rovetshi Marshes.

Five miles left, it must be, Vasilisa thought to herself as she took her courser by the reins and led it along the Marsh Lord’s path. Five miles, and then no one can reach us. Not Stribor, not the Baskords…

No…, she corrected herself. She saw the black fragments of the dead night sky falling to earth all over again in her mind - spreading their death from the heavens to the land below.

The dreamers. They will always find us.

***

They all walked slowly through the Rovetshi Marshes - keeping in single file behind Marmun and Valishin as the two crept ahead, testing the ground before them with long oars every dozen steps. The ground first grew more moist underfoot, and then a mile in opened into wide, stagnant pools with water so dark it was impossible to see whether they ran a half-inch or a foot deep.

The Marsh Lords’ road, for all its namesake, was little more than two faded ruts in the muddy ground reinforced every so often by duckboards - though half of the wooden planks were rotten and prone to snapping underfoot as they walked.

But worse than the sinking road was the air, which became foul and heavy to breathe in the pressing suffocation of the marsh. Every breath became a labor in itself, to say little of trying to walk through the gurgling mud which greedily sucked down at their feet - stubbornly refusing to let the trespassers go. The entire marsh seemed intent on keeping them to stay - and it was not long before they saw signs of those whom the marsh sought to make their eternal companions.

The first skull peered up at them just off the side of the road - stained yellow-white and picked clean of flesh. Sitting askew atop its brow was a helmet rusted red through and through - though a man from Chernopol still made to reach for it, leaning perilously far over a stagnant pool to snatch the helm. As soon as his fingers brushed against the yellowed bone, the skull’s empty eyes flickered to life - two pinpricks of ghostly light shining in a deathly gaze.

The one the others called Zynovij leapt back from the skull with a cry as the skull’s baleful gaze fell upon him - then pinpricks floated lazily up out of the skull, and the fireflies settled onto a moss-covered branch above.

Marmun guffawed. “That’ll teach you to disturb the dead, idiot.”

Zynovij staggered back to his feet, covered in slime and red up to the ears. “Feh, what use do the dead have for helmets? They’re long gone, and we’re still alive.”

“You won’t be for much longer if you wear that piece of trash,” Vasilisa scoffed. “One cut from that rusted iron, and you’ll be dead long before you’ll ever see battle.”

She remembered how one of her father’s servants - a potboy named Ostap - had turned into a writhing, frothing mess after he cut himself on a rusted kitchen knife. Despite all Mariana had done - her salves, her leeches, her healing - they had buried him on a plot on the outskirts of the city, where the other household servants were laid to rest. The sight of the burial grounds had left a bad taste in her mouth back then - and then she wondered whether there were enough souls in Belnopyl left to bury those that were lost.

If the visions were true, then graves would run on for miles - she imagined thousands of pale faces peering lifelessly from the black earth, left to the worms and the Mother of the Earth.

Or perhaps Belnopyl would become a city of the dead - ruled by carrion crow kings and starving boyar dogs.

She shook herself free from the swirling thoughts, and turned back to Zynovij as she saw him eyeing the helmet again. “Leave it - the ground and sky already want to kill us, and I would not add spirits to that list as well.”

The peasant from Chernopol muttered and grumbled, but fell in with the others as they shambled past.

The more Vasilisa looked for the skeletons as they walked, the more she saw - skulls and bones from wars and disasters years past lay scattered all about the dark pools and islands they crossed. It seemed a hundred pairs of empty eyes followed their every move - yellowed teeth bared in inviting grins that seemed to say, Come! The waters are warm, and the darkness calm! Come, lie with us for a thousand years!

But as the day drew to a close - and the darkness of the marshes pressed ever closer around them all - Vasilisa heard a new sound come up over the chittering and cawing of the marshes’ wild residents: the clangor of a bell, low and loud, echoing over the marshes and their din.

Just ahead, through the feeble mists that lurked above the surface of the waters, she glimpsed the towers and curtain walls of the Marsh Lords’ seat.

A low wall of stones surrounded Rovetshi from north, south, and east - supporting a high and stout wooden palisade behind which she saw the town’s belltower and the wooden keep. To the west lay the river dock, and when she squinted her eyes at the murky waters of the Cherech, she saw what looked like giant, webbed trees bobbing up and down along the surface. The thick mists parted before their path to the town, and then she realized the webs were sails, and the floating trees masts - standing like the gravestones of a dozen cogs and skiffs which lay at the bottom of the marshes.

A light breeze picked up across the marshes, and reeds whispered as the wind blew through their ranks, thinning the mists. She stepped carefully along the muddy ground to draw nearer to the walls - and then Marmun gave a cry as he pointed at a silhouette lying just beneath the shifting mists.

“There, look!”

A filthy man covered from head to toe in mud lay sprawled on the ground, already half-consumed by the sucking earth. She thought the man’s bald head to be a rock until she saw his scraggly, blood-crusted beard - and then she saw the crossbow bolt buried in the old man’s chest.

She cast her gaze over the misty approach to Rovetshi - and as the mists grew ever thinner, she saw what had appeared to be rocks and muddy slopes around the town beginning to take form.

“They’re everywhere…”

The town’s shrouding mists pulled back to reveal hundreds strewn all about their path, scattered on the outskirts of Rovetshi’s walls. Most of the dead that lay broken and slaughtered looked were peasants and freeholders - emaciated men and women clad in their day clothes butchered by blades, lances, and crossbow bolts.

But others that lay among the dead bore the colors of the Marsh Lords - she saw the green tree of Rovetshi stained red and black on the armor of a spearman whose jaw was torn away, perhaps by wild dogs. Another warrior lay on the ground with his rigid hands still pressing his guts back into the jagged wound across his stomach, and slumped next to him was an armored druzhinnik whose face had been stabbed so many times his visage was nothing but a mess of hanging, graying flesh.

Gastya retched at the sight, and several of the other freeholders in their company followed suit as the fresh smell of blood, piss, and shit rose up from the mud with a turn of the breeze. Valishin - who had made his living butchering pigs - dared to kneel down and closely examine one of the dead, and his face turned pale as he turned to face Nesha.

“Look here…this one’s the chief money-changer from Balai - Vadym the Toothless, we called him…”

Someone had put three feet of iron and heavy oak through the old money-changer’s toothless mouth - the speartip crusted with blood where it jutted out from the back of Vadym’s head.

More death…death everywhere…She thought of the dreamers falling from the sky, dead stars swallowing the land whole in their black tide. They were here.

Valishin pointed out another body from Balai - the wife of a fisherman, whose head was split open by an axe - and another, and another. There were too many to count - fishermen, farmers, merchants, cobblers, shiphands - but in death they all looked the same to Vasilisa, rotting together in the sucking mud and brackish waters.

“This is them,” muttered Marmun as he held a hand over his nose. “All of them. Everyone from Balai, it looks like. Butchered like sheep.”

“Was this a battle?” she wondered aloud as she looked upon the dead Rovetshi guards, some of whom lay beside fallen horses too stocky and well-bred to have been owned by any of the dead freeholders.

The bell tolled again, and its ringing seemed to cause the waters to ripple. Then from the walls ahead, she heard shouting and saw torches begin to flicker to life. The points of tall iron helmets gleamed red-orange along the battlements, and then she saw one of the men bring up a crossbow.

“No!” was all she could manage to shout before the crossbow thrummed, and a feathered bolt whistled through the air.

The bolt crossed fifty yards in the blink of an eye - and yet it seemed so slow, as though it were moving through water to strike for her. She brought the Kladenets up to bear in a gray blur, and then the bolt went spinning to the side, landing in one of the stagnant pools with a plop.

“Stop!” shouted Lady Nesha as she waved her arms at the crossbowmen on the walls. “Stop shooting!”

A confused silence was the only reply from the walls, but no more bolts flew from the battlements in greeting. Then a moment later a splash of fiery red hair poked out from behind the battlements, and a hoarse voice called out.

“Hold there, and come no closer!” shouted the red-haired man. “You come with your wits still about you?”

As he stood tall over the battlements, she saw the man wore a stained leather tunic with a green cloak thrown over his shoulder - but even at a distance, Vasilisa recognized the polished bronze clasp that fastened the man’s cloak.

“It seems your own men are the ones who’ve lost their wits - shooting at the sick and injured!” she called back to the man. “I would have your name - who are you, magister? And where is Boyar Hrabr?”

In the ages of old - before Raegnald and his kin foisted princes and boyars upon the people of Klyazma - it was the tribal headsmen and chieftains who held sway over the people, elected by the free men of their holds. When the princes came with their boyars, it was the old headsmen whom they raised to rule the towns and cities - carrying on the husk of the old traditions from before.

Though it was the boyars who were appointed by the princes to marshall their armies, carry out the law, and rule over the minor freeholds across the land, it was the headsmen-turned-magisters who held sway over the urban merchants, toll-collectors, and artisans - and it was the same folk they ruled over who gave their voices at councils to elect the magisters as they pleased.

The magister of Rovetshi bristled at her question, then hollered back, “I would have your name first - you who come to our lands with your cursed sword! These are dark times, and men turn into beasts that kill as they please - give me your name, your business, and only then may we speak as equals.”

Vasilisa raised her chin high and proud as her father did when speaking to his subjects. “You speak to Vasilisa, daughter of Igor - and princess of Belnopyl.”

She waved over to the men and women who now gathered behind her, and behind the Kladenets. “I bring with me the sickly and injured from Gatchisk - the lands to the south are consumed by war, and it's boyars pillage the lands of those they swore to defend.

“I seek to return to my father’s hold - and I seek protection for these folk, magister.” she finished, and she saw the red-haired man eyeing her suspiciously. “Now you have the truth, and I would ask your name, sir.”

The magister squinted at her for a moment and then responded, “I am Serhij, my lady. It has been a long while since I last saw you - seemed you were still a little girl, then.”

“Time drags us all by the hair,” she grinned back. “I confess, I do not remember meeting you - was it at the summer tournament, five years ago?”

“Almost six, by my count.” said Serhij, and with a wave of his hand the militia crossbowmen set down their weapons, and the iron-banded gates to the town groaned open.

She hurried quickly along the path - fearing that cruel fate would slam the gates shut before her face if she lingered for too long. It was only when the gates were slammed shut - and she found herself finally able to take a seat on a rickety wooden chair - that she let herself truly breathe again. Behind the safety of the walls even the air tasted different - lighter, and more alive than the heavy stench of the dead marshes.

Serhij descended from the battlements barking orders here and there to his ragged militia, and as they set about getting the freeholders settled Vasilisa saw every other man was adorned with bandages, or walked with a stagger that betrayed injuries hidden by their gambesons and rusted maille. Several of the freeholders fell to their knees the moment their feet touched the cobblestone grounds of the town, and the militiamen let them be as exhaustion swept over them all at last - claiming Lady Nesha worst of all, as the boyar’s widow fell into a troubled sleep the instant a bench was pulled up for her.

Vasilisa cast a glance about Rovetshi as Serhij gave his orders. Despite its place along the trade roads, Rovetshi had always been small - the wooden keep and the belltower dominated the town, and little more could be built upon such fragile grounds as the marshes. From where she sat, she saw that the shops and inns and alehouses in the western quarter of the town nearest to the docks looked as though they had been plundered or burned, and then she saw more militia dragging blackened bodies from the buildings and hauling them into carts.

Only a few common folk lingered about the streets in the near evening, though she saw curious faces and eyes peering from every lit window as Rovetshi’s folk watched and doubtlessly whispered to one another of the foreigners in their town. The thought of their whispers and gawking made her remember the Kladenets, though she felt too exhausted to do anything more than prop it against a wooden pillar as Serhij approached her with his thumbs tucked into his belt.

“Lady Vasilisa…” The magister's face reddened with embarrassment. “A thousand apologies, my lady. I will have the crossbowman found and flogged when this business is done. Unforgivable - shameful!”

She stood up from her seat, towering near a full head over Serhij as he apologized. “It’s already been done, magister. But what I would know is what happened outside your walls - was there a battle? Or a massacre? Hundreds of innocents cut down - and some of your own among the dead…”

“You would not have called them innocents if you saw what happened,” muttered Serhij grimly. “My men had tracked an army of freeholders and serfs approaching our walls - you'd have thought them all roaring drunk by the way they staggered up to us. When I sent a man to treat with the mob and ask for their business…they ripped him from his horse, tore the poor wretch to pieces, and then tried to storm the walls with their fists and tools - hundreds of them!

“They sent more along the river, in great big trading cogs, and when they came upon us they started hacking apart anyone they laid their hands on!” Serhij gestured out to the ruined western quarter with an outstretched hand. “I lost thirty good men forcing those savages back into the waters…and fifty hearths in this town lie cold without families to tend them - though their number may still grow yet, we're still counting the dead.”

She thought of the silver-helmed killers and their butchery - but none of the dead she had seen resembled anything close to Chirlan's fanatics. “What caused such rage in the mob? Surely they would not have attacked without reason.”

“I don't know what drove them,” sighed Serhij. “I'd say a madness - or a plague, perhaps. You would not believe how they fought - it was like they were wild dogs, like they could not feel pain. Men I trust not to embellish their stories spoke to me of how those savages fought on even when they lost their arms, spilled their guts, or even when they had their throats cut!”

“What about Boyar Hrabr?” She asked. “I saw one of his druzhinniks out there in the fields.”

“His lordship thought he could break the mob with a cavalry charge,” admitted Serhij. “He took his best men into a wedge and cut a swath through the horde - but riding against men that have no fear, they got stuck. His lordship barely escaped with his life, and took a dozen different wounds fighting free from the mob…”

Serhij paused, weighing his next words. Then he spoke in a whisper, “His lordship is bedridden and injured…but he also told me he saw who- what led the mob. He said it was a spirit - and when it retreated back into the marshes, so did the mob, following after it like they were its dogs. Some of the savages we forced into the river even tried to swim for it - and they drowned in the dozens.”

The gray, empty-eyed face of the Apostle floated back to her - its voice of cracking glass, and its terrible laugh as it stomped over the corpses underfoot. So it had been one of the dreamers. But if so…

“How did Hrabr escape the spirit?” Vasilisa asked. One from the woods claimed a dozen men with ease, yet a boyar and mortal men forced it to turn tail and run. Perhaps not all is lost. “Have you sent anyone to track this spirit, or the mob? We saw no traces of them on our path through the marshes.”

“I've scarcely enough men to keep the walls manned, my lady,” said Serhij. “And those I've remaining are in no shape to navigate the marsh. As for how Hrabr escaped…I've no clue. I'll be frank to say that I did not see this spirit, and neither did my men - I think it a fabrication of my lord's fever, most like.”

“Take me to him,” she blurted out. “I need to speak to the boyar.”

“I can have some of my men escort you to the keep, my lady,” said the magister, beckoning over two spearmen to her side. “But before you leave…”

The magister's eyes fell upon the Kladenets, and then the ash-covered freeholders. “The armed mob came along the southern road, same as you. And that sword…”

Serhij's gaze was one of deadly steel as he met her eyes. “My lady, first we hear of Belnopyl being sacked. Then the skies pour down ash from above. And now this…death and madness all around. You've been beyond the walls - what is going on out there?”

She took up the Kladenets, slinging it over her shoulder. The stone blade whispered to her of the dreamers, and she knew its truth well.

“It's a harvest, magister, a terrible one of blood and bone. You've turned it away from your walls for now, but..."

It will return. The dreamers will always find us.