The Fire from the East

Introduction

note: for this first part, I recommend listening to this music (Composed by Adrian von Ziegler) for a more immersive experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmvM6syadl0

It had been two long and painful years since the disaster at the river Kalka had unfolded, and yet more and more people came from the southern marches. Haggard greybeards, lone mothers with children flocking around them, tired warriors and defeated nobles.

Two years since the horsemen came from the vast, eastern lands. The drumming of hooves was their herald and death was the seed they sowed across all villages and towns.

Few places remained untouched by them. One such place was Novgorod.

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Heavy, dark clouds loomed over the tired town as the sun began to give way to the moon. Novgorod the Great, the slav called it. And before him, the varangian had called it Holmgard. But, truth be told, there was hardly anything great about the town, at least on the outside. Everything had been built using wood from the ancient forests surrounding the town and the bogs. Planks covered the roads and little alleys between the buildings, and the heavy downpour turned even the shortest of walks into a mudbath.

Most people hated the moody weather, and stayed well inside their homes, clinging to every single whiff of warmth from their hearths.

A certain few were more than happy because of the hostile weather: innkeepers. All lodgings were packed with weary travellers searching for a roof above their heads, food and drinks, and some, discarding their empty stomachs, for women. The lack of life on the outside, on the streets of Novgorod, was just a frame for the bustling life inside the inns and back alley brothels of the town.

At a table of a well-known lodging, in a distant corner of the main room, he sat, staring with an empty gaze, beyond the people, walls, streets, forests, bogs...beyond the horizon itself. His dark hair was a disarrayed tuft, as was his generous beard, and his face almost gaunt. But the worst were his eyes: red and sore, with large pouches underneath them and tears still running down his cheeks. Still running down for days upon days. With a bent back he leaned on the wall behind him, holding a cup of kvass in his trembling hands.

"Svyatoslav. Svyatoslav! Look at me!", the inkeeper said, raising his voice.

But the man only shrugged and grunted.

"You are my friend, I have known you for many years now. But you have to pay for your share here."

And again, he only shrugged and kept staring.

Svyatoslav was a broken man. He had worked as a mercenary in the army of the Prince of Kiev, where he had also established a household and eventually a family. But he had lost everything, one thing after another: wealth, land, children and now his wife had died, just a few days before his arrival in Novgorod.

He remained alone, and spent his time in Andrey's inn, drinking his grief away and wishing he could somehow regain all that he had lost.

That is when an unlikely companion emerged from the soaked crowd.