Book Four Chapter Twenty-Nine
@filcat is back! And he's appreciating my allusions to medieval literature! Excellent!
@Idhrendur is back, too! I also agree that the heretics are a pother to the Moravian realm... hopefully not for long. Converting Živka back will take effort, though.
Great to have you both commenting again and I hope you're continuing to enjoy the AAR.
@Midnite Duke, yes indeed, Živka has embraced certain Betazoid nuptial traditions! I'm not exactly sure about winter temps there either... thanks for being a regular reader and commenter.
Anyhow, without further ado...
WARNING: NSFW images of certain religious sect members.
TWENTY-NINE
Alone…
22 October 1192 – 28 June 1194
The twenty-second day of October, in the year of the world 6702, was the darkest of Botta’s life. He awoke to find his heart torn out of him… for his wife, his childhood playmate, his beloved, his queen-consort and the prop of his rule, Czenzi, had ceased breathing during the night. She had passed her seventy-second summer. Bohodar had at once called for Božena and for the priest, but there was nothing the former could do for Czenzi, and the latter was left to say his prayers over her. When the priest left, Bohodar knelt at his wife’s side and wept silently.
‘Lord Jesus,’ Botta murmured through his own elderly, quivering lips as he rested his head upon her cold hands, ‘grant unto your handmaiden Czenzi eternal rest, and, as you will it, remember her in your kingdom together with all your saints! And upon me, wretched sinner, O God, grant me mercy—!’
When Bohodar finally emerged from his room, he wore nothing but black: black tunic, black hose, black cloak. He wore none of the symbols of his office save for his rings. He spoke as few words in the zhromaždenie as he could get away with, and he passed most of his time in the court either in silence or in private prayer. He felt he could do nothing else. The light had gone out of his world.
The burial of Árpád Czenzi took place in the traditional resting-place of Moravia’s kings, in Velehrad. However much he might have wished it, Botta was disallowed from—as his ancestors Bohodar 1. and his aunt-wife Blažena had done—making plans to lie together in the same grave, casket and shroud as his beloved Czenzi. (According to the research he’d done, the only reason Queen Blažena had been granted this remarkable allowance in the first place was because she had died within a week of her husband, and the embalmer and undertaker had thus seen no physical impediment to it.) He would have to content himself with a grave as close adjacent to his wife’s as could be physically managed. Bohodar continued wearing the mourning black for months after his wife died.
‘For whom does the king mourn so intensely?’ asked one curious guest upon the elderly man’s return from Velehrad.
‘For his deceased wife, the former queen,’ said her companion.
The guest, Evdokia Pankeeva, was the sister of the late Knyaz of Černigov, who had been slain in a power struggle. His family had been forced to flee, and this was where Evdokia had landed. She had been bereft of a brother; she knew what that loss felt like. And when she saw the elderly widower moving under the burden of such grief, her heart was moved.
‘Please, tell me more about the king,’ said Evdokia.
The guest in Moravia’s halls spent the following weeks in sporadic, but persistent, attendance at the king’s court, and made every effort to listen to his speech, to understand him, to get close to him and to speak to him. She wanted to grant him what comfort she could, to let him know that he wasn’t alone in his grief. And—the more she saw of him, the more she realised that she and he were a great deal alike. At last, after several months, having shared speech with him and learned of him and gained his trust, she made bold to speak to Bohodar 3. letopisár, and broach with him the subject which had grown subtly but steadily in her mind since she’d first seen him.
‘O Lord Kráľ,’ Evdokia told him when the two of them had a chance to speak tête-à-tête, ‘it is plain to all who see you, the devotion that you still carry for the woman who loved you, and who was your support for over fifty years. I… well, in fact, I envy you somewhat. I still feel the grief of loss over my brother. But it is not well for someone to suffer alone, as you do. Would you not… consider sharing consolation yet, with another human soul?’
Evdokia flashed those bright, sincere, unguarded blue eyes up into Bohodar’s own elderly hazel ones.
For Kráľ Bohodar’s part… well, though his wife had died, the fire had not at all gone out of his loins, and he still felt the burning. Evdokia was very much so a woman, standing before him. And she if she was no younger than Czenzi had been when he’d first married her, Bohodar could swear she was no older—a blossom of womanhood in her summer years, no more than twenty if she was a day. Her sincerity, earnestness and evident kindness gave her an appeal that a mere surface-level good looks could only ape with affect, and the wheat-gold hair that hung unbound about her shoulders was of a tantalising lustre and thickness. And that wasn’t all – Bohodar hadn’t lost the use of his eyes. The Severian beauty had a shapely swan-neck, and the curves beneath Evdokia’s apron, both fore and aft, were full and firm. No doubt she could provide ample ‘consolation’ to any man who shared her bed!
Bohodar heaved a long, heavy sigh together with a silent prayer. He knew what his answer to her would be—must be, regardless of the prickings and stirrings of his flesh, and the desire of his heart for the companionship it had lost.
‘Evdokia,’ the Kráľ laid a kindly hand upon hers, ‘I understand what you mean, but please reconsider before you offer me anything in haste. You are young, and healthy, and beautiful. The grave, on the other hand, beckons me with both arms now. However much I might desire it, I would not be so selfish as to have you waste your most precious years and vitality, looking after a sick old man in his dotage.’
‘Bohodar,’ Evdokia protested, ‘it would be no trouble for me! Health and vitality I do have, and what better use could they be put to than in caring for you? I do care for you—your sadness mirrors my own!’
Bohodar took both her hands in his and squeezed them with deep affection. Again he was tempted, sorely tempted, by what she was offering him—the moreso because he knew that every word she offered him was sincere. She would care for him selflessly, and never begrudge him the loss of whatever years he had left in him. He had almost made up his mind to say ‘yes’ to her, to let Evdokia throw herself upon him, to make herself the selfless and noble Abishag to a waning David in his twilight years. But…
‘Evdokia…’ he told her. ‘Dear Evdokia, you would give me greater happiness, if I could see you enjoy life, together with a man of your own years. You deserve that much. And it would keep my own heart at ease, if I could but tend to Czenzi’s memory.’
‘A memory… can’t keep you warm at night,’ Evdokia made one last-ditch attempt to argue her case.
‘Warm?’ Bohodar echoed her. ‘No. No, it cannot. But her memory can keep me human. Evdokia, I like you too much to love you after the manner of the flesh.’
‘Is… is this your final word?’ murmured a disappointed Evdokia.
‘It is.’
It was very much to her credit that Evdokia Pankeeva neither pitied nor resented him after such a rejection, but continued to lend him a sympathetic ear and mild speech of comfort and appreciation.
Evdokia Pankeeva was not the only one to offer her sympathies and gestures of goodwill to the grieving king. The Empire of the Romans had a new Basileios, Athanasios 2. Dekanos, who in a remarkably kind and liberal gesture sent Kráľ Bohodar a mechanical bird which could open its throat and sing with remarkable sweetness at regular intervals. Sadly, poor young Athanasios—who had made this gift to the elderly king as consolation for his loss—was rather hurt and offended when he learned that Bohodar letopisár had eagerly disassembled and delved into the marvellous construct’s inner workings in order to discover and understand how it worked.
For his own part, Bohodar dealt with his grief by continuing to delve into his studies, even as his children continued to add grandchildren to a growing brood. He pored over the papers which had been gathered in from all over Olomouc and beyond, seeking to fill in small gaps in the family lore. Bridging the past with a burgeoning future was now his sole study. The news of the birth of his great-grandson Radomír in Balaton did give him joy, but it still pained him that his granddaughter still adhered to the Carpocratian Gnostic heresy of the Balaton nudists, but at least he was assured that she had continued to eschew the ritual fire-dances. (Given the notorious promiscuity of these occult Gnostic rites, her “earthbound” faithfulness to one man seemed to have a perverse streak to it.) He could only hope now, from a distance, that his grandson could remain as constant, both in his faith and in his person.
Despite all of these well-wishes and attempts to distract himself, Bohodar continued to grieve. The Kráľ undertook a third journey to ‘Anṭâkiya in that same year. This time, he specifically did so in his wife’s name, and bore around his neck the mussel-shell amulet he had given her in his youth as a token of her presence, even though her body lay in Velehrad. He prayed without ceasing every step of the way, for the remission of Czenzi’s sins and the salvation of her soul.
The time spent on the road, however, was not without its travails. His seventy-year-old body, of course, having grown fat and flabby with lack of exercise and slack from age, struggled with trails he had once traversed with ease. But also there were times when Bohodar was beset by doubts, and by the demons of noonday. He wondered if he weren’t better off turning back. But in his heart of hearts he knew that he must press on for Czenzi’s sake. When he reached the dome at last, every thought and every motion, every word which passed from his lips, was for the woman who had left him behind in the world.
After Bohodar’s return from the holy city, however, further grief was added unto him. He learned from his šafár that his daughter Bohdana, the one whom Czenzi had named for him, had died in Lehnice in childbirth. Her husband, Živka’s brother Miroslav Rychnovský-Lehnice, was beside himself. But her father was even more so. His wife had gone, and his youngest daughter as well. He sank into a deep despondency, and his prayers to God were tinged with a world-weariness that could not be any longer disguised.
‘My liege,’ said a worried Bohuslav, ‘the zhromaždenie is anxious for you—dangerously so. They fear for the health and soundness of mind of their king. It is not well of you to keep them in such doubts.’
‘Why should I make them certain, of something I doubt myself?’ Bohodar answered listlessly.
‘Because the realm depends on it,’ Bohuslav snapped. The effect was very nearly a slap in the face.
Bohodar blinked.
‘The Moravian realm,’ Bohuslav pressed mercilessly, ‘which you have spent your whole life defending, which you have built up into an abode of peace, which you have taken every effort to guide as though it were your own precious child! Are they now nothing in your eyes? Are you so self-consumed by your own personal losses that you would throw the entire work of your life into turmoil at the last?’
Bohodar stood. Bohuslav was, of course, entirely correct. ‘No.’
‘Then might I suggest,’ Bohuslav went on, ‘a public appearance? An event of some kind, to reassure the good Slavic folk, your subjects, of your well-being?’
Bohodar considered a moment, and then declared:
‘Assemble the hunters.’
The train of horses and hounds rode out from Olomouc later that week, and made their way north and west toward the royal hunting grounds in the Ores. Because the purpose of this hunt was in fact to reassure his subjects, the elderly king Bohodar made sure to ride in the open, up front by the banner. But a hunt it still was.
As they entered the forest, Bohodar went alongside a neckbearded burgomaster named Slavoj. Although the Kráľ was not one to really take quick dislikes to folk, he quickly found himself developing one for the burgomaster. The bearded burgher’s prattle was both incessant and insufferable. He spoke as though he was a learned teacher and master of every possible subject, which to a scholar of effort and achievement (like the king) was particularly grating. Bohodar noted even on their short walk through the woods that he outright contradicted himself no less than three times in his rambling monologues on this subject and that—he kept returning to the topic of vulgar gašparko plays in the market. And he sniffled as though he was suffering from some sort of respiratory complaint, even though there was clearly nothing wrong with him. And his endless blather was scaring away the game. Bohodar found himself fighting the urge to give the odious man a well-deserved kick into a bramble thicket.
Of a sudden, Bohodar paused. There was a sudden snap which seemed to be coming from the deeper forest toward the northwest. Bohodar gripped the haft of his hunting spear tighter. Slavoj, completely oblivious, kept on going pompously:
‘So I signed the letter of protest, you see… You know, it really behooves the Moravian crown to attempt to ally itself with the Braunschweig family, because the alternative would be—’
‘Shhh! Shut up!’ the king hissed. (He’d been secretly longing to tell Slavoj this all morning.)
‘Oh, naturally. Exactly what a member of the Moravian ruling family would tell me to—’
At that moment a massive hart of perhaps five years, twelve points upon its head and its body rippling with powerful muscles—at this point surging with raw anger and lust—interrupted Slavoj’s retort, as it came bursting out of the undergrowth from the northwest. Seeing the two men standing nearby, it bore down on them in its blind rage. Slavoj let out a shriek and dove for cover, leaving Bohodar to face the beast alone.
The fight-or-flight instinct took hold of the practised blademaster first. But it was soon followed by a dangerous, but disquietingly comforting, thought. What if this hart were to gore him to death just now? Would that not be a fitting end? Would he not get to see his Czenzi the sooner in that event? Part of Bohodar—a far larger part than he would later like to admit—wanted to see to it that he put his spear down, and hold forth his elderly body for the wild enraged beast to mangle.
But the despairing thought wasn’t quite enough to overpower Bohodar, who couched his spear against his side and thrust forward at the last moment, impaling the beast just under its neck. The impact jolted Bohodar’s body painfully backward, and he could hear as well as feel at least one of his joints pop out of its proper seating. But it was the hart which had been gored to death, rather than the Kráľ.
The incident, however, had left Bohodar rather shaken. Even on the return from his hunt, he was aware of the sinful despair that had nearly claimed him. He needed to remedy this.
Bohodar turned, therefore, in his last days to the heirs of Father Szilveszter, the Orthodox priest who had married them, but who had carried about his person the various totems and symbols of the shamanic táltos. Such priests had been rare, though, even when Czenzi and he had been young. It took great effort to search the Csángóföld for another such. However, he felt he had to turn to such ‘folk religious’ methods of prayer, to bring himself to a state of peace… still being in the world, while Czenzi no longer was. He found Father Imre, who taught him a method of entering the trance-state.
Bohodar practised this method of prayer, over and over. Although men began to whisper that the Kráľ had gone mad, or that some dark power had come over him, still he practised and continued until he found he could bring about a state of openness and clarity within himself. He combined this with the standard prayers at the iconostasis. There were uncomfortable murmurs among the clergy that Bohodar had adopted a kind of ‘double faith’, and the Kráľ came to be regarded with a degree of suspicion, if not outright fear, on account of his… innovative methods of prayer.
Even though the king did nothing to dispel such whispers, in truth, they needn’t have worried. The king would not now abandon the faith that united him to Czenzi. He would not abandon the Creed which promised a resurrection of the dead and a life in the world to come. He would not abandon hope that one day, he would be reunited with his Czenzi once more.
@Idhrendur is back, too! I also agree that the heretics are a pother to the Moravian realm... hopefully not for long. Converting Živka back will take effort, though.
Great to have you both commenting again and I hope you're continuing to enjoy the AAR.
@Midnite Duke, yes indeed, Živka has embraced certain Betazoid nuptial traditions! I'm not exactly sure about winter temps there either... thanks for being a regular reader and commenter.
Anyhow, without further ado...
WARNING: NSFW images of certain religious sect members.
TWENTY-NINE
Alone…
22 October 1192 – 28 June 1194
The twenty-second day of October, in the year of the world 6702, was the darkest of Botta’s life. He awoke to find his heart torn out of him… for his wife, his childhood playmate, his beloved, his queen-consort and the prop of his rule, Czenzi, had ceased breathing during the night. She had passed her seventy-second summer. Bohodar had at once called for Božena and for the priest, but there was nothing the former could do for Czenzi, and the latter was left to say his prayers over her. When the priest left, Bohodar knelt at his wife’s side and wept silently.
‘Lord Jesus,’ Botta murmured through his own elderly, quivering lips as he rested his head upon her cold hands, ‘grant unto your handmaiden Czenzi eternal rest, and, as you will it, remember her in your kingdom together with all your saints! And upon me, wretched sinner, O God, grant me mercy—!’
When Bohodar finally emerged from his room, he wore nothing but black: black tunic, black hose, black cloak. He wore none of the symbols of his office save for his rings. He spoke as few words in the zhromaždenie as he could get away with, and he passed most of his time in the court either in silence or in private prayer. He felt he could do nothing else. The light had gone out of his world.
The burial of Árpád Czenzi took place in the traditional resting-place of Moravia’s kings, in Velehrad. However much he might have wished it, Botta was disallowed from—as his ancestors Bohodar 1. and his aunt-wife Blažena had done—making plans to lie together in the same grave, casket and shroud as his beloved Czenzi. (According to the research he’d done, the only reason Queen Blažena had been granted this remarkable allowance in the first place was because she had died within a week of her husband, and the embalmer and undertaker had thus seen no physical impediment to it.) He would have to content himself with a grave as close adjacent to his wife’s as could be physically managed. Bohodar continued wearing the mourning black for months after his wife died.
‘For whom does the king mourn so intensely?’ asked one curious guest upon the elderly man’s return from Velehrad.
‘For his deceased wife, the former queen,’ said her companion.
The guest, Evdokia Pankeeva, was the sister of the late Knyaz of Černigov, who had been slain in a power struggle. His family had been forced to flee, and this was where Evdokia had landed. She had been bereft of a brother; she knew what that loss felt like. And when she saw the elderly widower moving under the burden of such grief, her heart was moved.
‘Please, tell me more about the king,’ said Evdokia.
The guest in Moravia’s halls spent the following weeks in sporadic, but persistent, attendance at the king’s court, and made every effort to listen to his speech, to understand him, to get close to him and to speak to him. She wanted to grant him what comfort she could, to let him know that he wasn’t alone in his grief. And—the more she saw of him, the more she realised that she and he were a great deal alike. At last, after several months, having shared speech with him and learned of him and gained his trust, she made bold to speak to Bohodar 3. letopisár, and broach with him the subject which had grown subtly but steadily in her mind since she’d first seen him.
‘O Lord Kráľ,’ Evdokia told him when the two of them had a chance to speak tête-à-tête, ‘it is plain to all who see you, the devotion that you still carry for the woman who loved you, and who was your support for over fifty years. I… well, in fact, I envy you somewhat. I still feel the grief of loss over my brother. But it is not well for someone to suffer alone, as you do. Would you not… consider sharing consolation yet, with another human soul?’
Evdokia flashed those bright, sincere, unguarded blue eyes up into Bohodar’s own elderly hazel ones.
For Kráľ Bohodar’s part… well, though his wife had died, the fire had not at all gone out of his loins, and he still felt the burning. Evdokia was very much so a woman, standing before him. And she if she was no younger than Czenzi had been when he’d first married her, Bohodar could swear she was no older—a blossom of womanhood in her summer years, no more than twenty if she was a day. Her sincerity, earnestness and evident kindness gave her an appeal that a mere surface-level good looks could only ape with affect, and the wheat-gold hair that hung unbound about her shoulders was of a tantalising lustre and thickness. And that wasn’t all – Bohodar hadn’t lost the use of his eyes. The Severian beauty had a shapely swan-neck, and the curves beneath Evdokia’s apron, both fore and aft, were full and firm. No doubt she could provide ample ‘consolation’ to any man who shared her bed!
Bohodar heaved a long, heavy sigh together with a silent prayer. He knew what his answer to her would be—must be, regardless of the prickings and stirrings of his flesh, and the desire of his heart for the companionship it had lost.
‘Evdokia,’ the Kráľ laid a kindly hand upon hers, ‘I understand what you mean, but please reconsider before you offer me anything in haste. You are young, and healthy, and beautiful. The grave, on the other hand, beckons me with both arms now. However much I might desire it, I would not be so selfish as to have you waste your most precious years and vitality, looking after a sick old man in his dotage.’
‘Bohodar,’ Evdokia protested, ‘it would be no trouble for me! Health and vitality I do have, and what better use could they be put to than in caring for you? I do care for you—your sadness mirrors my own!’
Bohodar took both her hands in his and squeezed them with deep affection. Again he was tempted, sorely tempted, by what she was offering him—the moreso because he knew that every word she offered him was sincere. She would care for him selflessly, and never begrudge him the loss of whatever years he had left in him. He had almost made up his mind to say ‘yes’ to her, to let Evdokia throw herself upon him, to make herself the selfless and noble Abishag to a waning David in his twilight years. But…
‘Evdokia…’ he told her. ‘Dear Evdokia, you would give me greater happiness, if I could see you enjoy life, together with a man of your own years. You deserve that much. And it would keep my own heart at ease, if I could but tend to Czenzi’s memory.’
‘A memory… can’t keep you warm at night,’ Evdokia made one last-ditch attempt to argue her case.
‘Warm?’ Bohodar echoed her. ‘No. No, it cannot. But her memory can keep me human. Evdokia, I like you too much to love you after the manner of the flesh.’
‘Is… is this your final word?’ murmured a disappointed Evdokia.
‘It is.’
It was very much to her credit that Evdokia Pankeeva neither pitied nor resented him after such a rejection, but continued to lend him a sympathetic ear and mild speech of comfort and appreciation.
Evdokia Pankeeva was not the only one to offer her sympathies and gestures of goodwill to the grieving king. The Empire of the Romans had a new Basileios, Athanasios 2. Dekanos, who in a remarkably kind and liberal gesture sent Kráľ Bohodar a mechanical bird which could open its throat and sing with remarkable sweetness at regular intervals. Sadly, poor young Athanasios—who had made this gift to the elderly king as consolation for his loss—was rather hurt and offended when he learned that Bohodar letopisár had eagerly disassembled and delved into the marvellous construct’s inner workings in order to discover and understand how it worked.
For his own part, Bohodar dealt with his grief by continuing to delve into his studies, even as his children continued to add grandchildren to a growing brood. He pored over the papers which had been gathered in from all over Olomouc and beyond, seeking to fill in small gaps in the family lore. Bridging the past with a burgeoning future was now his sole study. The news of the birth of his great-grandson Radomír in Balaton did give him joy, but it still pained him that his granddaughter still adhered to the Carpocratian Gnostic heresy of the Balaton nudists, but at least he was assured that she had continued to eschew the ritual fire-dances. (Given the notorious promiscuity of these occult Gnostic rites, her “earthbound” faithfulness to one man seemed to have a perverse streak to it.) He could only hope now, from a distance, that his grandson could remain as constant, both in his faith and in his person.
Despite all of these well-wishes and attempts to distract himself, Bohodar continued to grieve. The Kráľ undertook a third journey to ‘Anṭâkiya in that same year. This time, he specifically did so in his wife’s name, and bore around his neck the mussel-shell amulet he had given her in his youth as a token of her presence, even though her body lay in Velehrad. He prayed without ceasing every step of the way, for the remission of Czenzi’s sins and the salvation of her soul.
The time spent on the road, however, was not without its travails. His seventy-year-old body, of course, having grown fat and flabby with lack of exercise and slack from age, struggled with trails he had once traversed with ease. But also there were times when Bohodar was beset by doubts, and by the demons of noonday. He wondered if he weren’t better off turning back. But in his heart of hearts he knew that he must press on for Czenzi’s sake. When he reached the dome at last, every thought and every motion, every word which passed from his lips, was for the woman who had left him behind in the world.
After Bohodar’s return from the holy city, however, further grief was added unto him. He learned from his šafár that his daughter Bohdana, the one whom Czenzi had named for him, had died in Lehnice in childbirth. Her husband, Živka’s brother Miroslav Rychnovský-Lehnice, was beside himself. But her father was even more so. His wife had gone, and his youngest daughter as well. He sank into a deep despondency, and his prayers to God were tinged with a world-weariness that could not be any longer disguised.
‘My liege,’ said a worried Bohuslav, ‘the zhromaždenie is anxious for you—dangerously so. They fear for the health and soundness of mind of their king. It is not well of you to keep them in such doubts.’
‘Why should I make them certain, of something I doubt myself?’ Bohodar answered listlessly.
‘Because the realm depends on it,’ Bohuslav snapped. The effect was very nearly a slap in the face.
Bohodar blinked.
‘The Moravian realm,’ Bohuslav pressed mercilessly, ‘which you have spent your whole life defending, which you have built up into an abode of peace, which you have taken every effort to guide as though it were your own precious child! Are they now nothing in your eyes? Are you so self-consumed by your own personal losses that you would throw the entire work of your life into turmoil at the last?’
Bohodar stood. Bohuslav was, of course, entirely correct. ‘No.’
‘Then might I suggest,’ Bohuslav went on, ‘a public appearance? An event of some kind, to reassure the good Slavic folk, your subjects, of your well-being?’
Bohodar considered a moment, and then declared:
‘Assemble the hunters.’
The train of horses and hounds rode out from Olomouc later that week, and made their way north and west toward the royal hunting grounds in the Ores. Because the purpose of this hunt was in fact to reassure his subjects, the elderly king Bohodar made sure to ride in the open, up front by the banner. But a hunt it still was.
As they entered the forest, Bohodar went alongside a neckbearded burgomaster named Slavoj. Although the Kráľ was not one to really take quick dislikes to folk, he quickly found himself developing one for the burgomaster. The bearded burgher’s prattle was both incessant and insufferable. He spoke as though he was a learned teacher and master of every possible subject, which to a scholar of effort and achievement (like the king) was particularly grating. Bohodar noted even on their short walk through the woods that he outright contradicted himself no less than three times in his rambling monologues on this subject and that—he kept returning to the topic of vulgar gašparko plays in the market. And he sniffled as though he was suffering from some sort of respiratory complaint, even though there was clearly nothing wrong with him. And his endless blather was scaring away the game. Bohodar found himself fighting the urge to give the odious man a well-deserved kick into a bramble thicket.
Of a sudden, Bohodar paused. There was a sudden snap which seemed to be coming from the deeper forest toward the northwest. Bohodar gripped the haft of his hunting spear tighter. Slavoj, completely oblivious, kept on going pompously:
‘So I signed the letter of protest, you see… You know, it really behooves the Moravian crown to attempt to ally itself with the Braunschweig family, because the alternative would be—’
‘Shhh! Shut up!’ the king hissed. (He’d been secretly longing to tell Slavoj this all morning.)
‘Oh, naturally. Exactly what a member of the Moravian ruling family would tell me to—’
At that moment a massive hart of perhaps five years, twelve points upon its head and its body rippling with powerful muscles—at this point surging with raw anger and lust—interrupted Slavoj’s retort, as it came bursting out of the undergrowth from the northwest. Seeing the two men standing nearby, it bore down on them in its blind rage. Slavoj let out a shriek and dove for cover, leaving Bohodar to face the beast alone.
The fight-or-flight instinct took hold of the practised blademaster first. But it was soon followed by a dangerous, but disquietingly comforting, thought. What if this hart were to gore him to death just now? Would that not be a fitting end? Would he not get to see his Czenzi the sooner in that event? Part of Bohodar—a far larger part than he would later like to admit—wanted to see to it that he put his spear down, and hold forth his elderly body for the wild enraged beast to mangle.
But the despairing thought wasn’t quite enough to overpower Bohodar, who couched his spear against his side and thrust forward at the last moment, impaling the beast just under its neck. The impact jolted Bohodar’s body painfully backward, and he could hear as well as feel at least one of his joints pop out of its proper seating. But it was the hart which had been gored to death, rather than the Kráľ.
The incident, however, had left Bohodar rather shaken. Even on the return from his hunt, he was aware of the sinful despair that had nearly claimed him. He needed to remedy this.
Bohodar turned, therefore, in his last days to the heirs of Father Szilveszter, the Orthodox priest who had married them, but who had carried about his person the various totems and symbols of the shamanic táltos. Such priests had been rare, though, even when Czenzi and he had been young. It took great effort to search the Csángóföld for another such. However, he felt he had to turn to such ‘folk religious’ methods of prayer, to bring himself to a state of peace… still being in the world, while Czenzi no longer was. He found Father Imre, who taught him a method of entering the trance-state.
Bohodar practised this method of prayer, over and over. Although men began to whisper that the Kráľ had gone mad, or that some dark power had come over him, still he practised and continued until he found he could bring about a state of openness and clarity within himself. He combined this with the standard prayers at the iconostasis. There were uncomfortable murmurs among the clergy that Bohodar had adopted a kind of ‘double faith’, and the Kráľ came to be regarded with a degree of suspicion, if not outright fear, on account of his… innovative methods of prayer.
Even though the king did nothing to dispel such whispers, in truth, they needn’t have worried. The king would not now abandon the faith that united him to Czenzi. He would not abandon the Creed which promised a resurrection of the dead and a life in the world to come. He would not abandon hope that one day, he would be reunited with his Czenzi once more.
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