Sun stood pale in the overcast sky, appearing more like the moon. It shone down on the buildings squatting at the sides of a hill. Patches of snow clung to their sloping roofs. Icicles edged the white woodwork around the small windows—they had to be small, for in the dead of winter warmth mattered more than light. Besson led me to somewhere in the North.
I didn't recognize the town; I didn't know the date, but it was a tragic day in history. Black smoke lay below the clouds and even the gilded domes of the churches had the heaviness to them, same as the jaws of the fighting man.
Of those men, there were two kinds before me.
The first group—clad in black—rode horses.
The other group walked beaten, barefoot, with little to cover their naked bodies. Men bled from their mouths, spitting saliva, blood, curses or whatever was left of their tongues. They bled from the stumps at elbows or shoulders, where their sword arm should have been. Yet, this wasn't the worst.
Women and children clung to the defeated men. Women bled down their legs and down their bellies from the raw circles left by the sliced off breasts. And children... there were children. They filled the icy air with sounds of inconsolable grief, because they were too young to be used to cruelty and march in silence, like their parents.
What crime did their fathers commit? Their mothers? Themselves? What crime is so abhorrent to God, that earthly powers punished it by walking like this?
They walked, and dogs weaved round their frostbitten legs. The biggest of the hounds dared to jump and rip chunks of human flesh, chewing with frothing jaws. Bitches, who hadn't yet tasted human flesh, howled in hopes to become the man-eaters.
For when men want to become dogs, their dogs become like men.
Severed dog-heads snarled from the saddles of the black riders until their snarls rotted away and only skulls remained. The men in black—the tsar's hounds—wore this emblem willingly. They seemed like an invention of a dark fantasy, but the most terrifying thing about them was that they were perfectly real.
In my timeline, we called Putin's police 'orcs'. We needn't have borrowed the name from Tolkien! We had a word for them as Russian as vodka: the Oprichniks, our first secret police. Ivan the Terrible created it to grab lands from his own subjects and kill with impunity—anyone he wanted. Anyone at all. The tradition continued...
Blessed are those who hadn't seen a man tortured... blessed, no matter what other burdens the Almighty placed upon their shoulders, Besson prayed.
I shuddered. Is this your memory?
No. No. Not this. He choked. I could feel through our bond that he'd seen other things for real, no less horrid. This must be the massacre in Novgorod... I wasn't born yet.
You understand that we're witnessing something from the past? In this timeline he was like me, a bodiless spirit.
Aye. It's a vision.
On this occasion, Besson's sixteenth century mind coped easier with the surreal facts than my modern one. Despite that, I wished we both had our bodies, so I could hug him. Poor guy had seen too much cruelty, and no one was safe from it in his time.
If my world didn't end and I went to Ukraine, I wouldn't be safe either. The fate worse than being gunned down waited for me there—to serve as the tsar's hound.
The Oprichniks herded the poor knot of humanity down the muddy track to the ice-bound River Volkhov. Judging by their outriders, their ultimate destination seemed to be a place where the bank had a shallow slope, providing easy access onto the ice. There, large holes were cut through for water supply. Frozen mist rose above the water in these hollows.
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The Tetrachromat (On HOLD)
Historical Fiction||UMBRELLA ACADEMY x THE PRINCES IN THE TOWER|| In 2023, eighteen-year-old Grisha is upset over missing his admission to a prestigious Art Academy. Worse, he's drafted to fight in an unjust war he hates. In a fit of rage, Grisha rips his second-hand...
