A Thousand Year Summer

Chapter Two - A New Era

Ludmilla stayed huddled up in that storeroom for another day, sobbing until tears could not fall. The raiders were long gone by then, with their haul of to-be slaves and servants to whomever their lord was.

She crawled into the main room of the dwelling, slowly inspecting what was left. The door had been left ajar, and mice surrounded a piece of stale bread that had fallen to the floor. "Go, get away!" exclaimed Ludmilla, as she herself dove for her bread, shoving it in her mouth before the rodents could protest.

Stepping out of the threshold of her home and into the open, Ludmilla was horrified. The majority of the village had been destroyed by the raiders, and corpses were strewn over the paths and in the wreckages. She bent down next to a body she thought belonged to the baker, but the wounds obscuring his notable features were too heavy and too severe.

Stumbling through the ruins, Ludmilla found nothing. There were no remains familiar to her, no one that could have been her parents or her brother. She knew, with certainty, that her sister had been taken north to serve some warlord, and would not have perished here.

Never before in her life had Ludmilla ever felt so hopeless. No one she knew had ever survived her predicament. She recalled what her mother had recounted to her, on the subject of wolves: a wolf may be discarded and abandoned, and its ability, however existent it was, to join another pack was limited. Ludmilla had nowhere to go. She did not know her grandparents, nor her aunts and uncles.

She collapsed into the mud, curling up and cradling her head. She couldn't believe that her parents were gone north, that her brother and sister had been stolen from her permanently. It wasn't true, it couldn't be possible. In a few hours she would wake up to her sister's snores and her mother's calls.

The soft sound of footsteps towards her did not make her feel threatened immediately, and thus she was quite unprepared for the small hand placed on her shoulder.

A young boy, perhaps her age, offered her his hand. She pushed herself to stand by herself, and with terror in her voice, exclaimed, "Who are you?"

He cautiously took a step forward, his hand still extended. "I come from Hungary. Don't be alarmed, I am quite civil and won't hurt you. I was returning from Poland and heard about the raids here, and decided that I should quite like to see your land."

He did appear to be an upperclassman, with his clean shoulder-length hair, luxurious traveling clothes, a light leather chest plate and a rapier at his side. Perhaps he was a prince sent away to another kingdom by his family–this way he would have a lower chance of being assassinated. It was quite common. If he was a prince, or any sort of nobility, where was his band of soldiers to protect him? He was too well-off to be a peasant sent away as a breadwinner.

Ludmilla was no more comforted by his presence. Her family had been denied by people like his own, simply because they did not believe in his version of God, and refused to become Catholics. She feared that her creed would be resented by him, and end in bloodshed.

The boy noticed her silence and her wide eyes, and asked, "What's your name? I would like very much to help you."

Ludmilla shook her head. "I can't," she stammered, "my parents warned me against telling my name."

He said, with mild disappointment at her refusal, "My name is András, I come from Budapest, an old Roman town far southwest of here. I find your home extremely beautiful, I am sorry it was destroyed."

She shook her head for it had not been destroyed. She, however, was not fond on letting this boy into her family home. Saying nothing, Ludmilla slowly began to formulate a plan to escape his clutches.

András smiled again, and said, "I am traveling with a band of friends, if you would like to join us and come with us in our return to Budapest.  I think that you are a lot like us."

Ludmilla nervously responded, "Look, I think you have made a mistake. I can't come with you, I must retrieve my parents and my siblings. Then I will come back to here and continue my life."

András contemplated her answer quietly, and said, "I will return."

He did not come back for a long time after walking down the trail leading out of the village, still littered with her fallen neighbors. The sun fell down from the sky and beneath the hilly horizon, and night set in. Ludmilla found herself nibbling on a crust of bread in the darkness. Her encounter with the boy had shaken her, not to mention her earlier traumas. Did he understand that it was not the same for her as it was for him? She was not a noble, she was not invincible, she was just the daughter of the blacksmith in a backwater village, ignored largely by the governing bodies that lorded over the lands.

Clearly András's village, Budapest, was not the same; she had never heard of it, but for such an influential young man to originate there it had to have some notoriety.

After all of her introspection, and her contemplation of András's offer, Ludmilla had not yet come to a decision should he really make an appearance once more.

The next morning, the first in her life without her family, and the beginning of a new era, Ludmilla was more torn up about the massacre than the boy. It smelled awful, and she had an awful ache in her heart. She missed her mother's sweet voice, her father's comforting presence, her sister's steady protection and her brother's quiet demeanor.

She quickly got to work with her traditional early-morning chores, like sweeping and cleaning the dirt and soot from various surfaces. She then removed a container of butter from a cabinet, and spread it on a piece of stale bread. Sitting near the fire she had created in the fireplace, Ludmilla quietly devoured her breakfast.

She had just finished when a heavy knock sounded from the front door. She inched from her positing on the ground across the dirt floor and to the door, made from planks of wood, and peered through the gaps between planks. She could not discern exactly who it was who knocked, and curiosity overwhelmed her, driving her to open the door.

Outside a tall boy, maybe two years older than herself–Yohanan's age, she remembered–stood, boring holes into her with his intense eyes. He was shoved aside by András, who said quickly, "This is Giselbert–a friend of mine I told you about." He motioned to another boy, shorter, who stood behind them. "And this is our friend Toris. They're all quite nice."

Ludmilla was mesmerized by the intensity of Giselbert's pure white hair. She had never seen such a thing in a young boy.

Curiously, and a little spooked, Ludmilla asked, "How did you find me?"

"Smoke," said Giselbert, with some hesitation. His voice was rough and much deeper than András's. "My friend told me that you're coming with us back to Budapest. Your parents aren't coming back, and it would be safer for you to come with us."

Even though she didn't want to admit it, Giselbert had a point–no one she knew had come back from where the raiders took them. It was a death sentence. Yet she could not bring herself to abandon everything she had ever known–very rarely in her short life had she seen the outside world. To travel so far away was inconceivable.

But it did not appear, in her circumstances, that Ludmilla had any choice in the matter–there was nothing left for her.