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Book Six Chapter Five
FIVE
In the Blood
12 January 1285 – 16 November 1287


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Anterio was fuming. That nice little Russian girl he’d been flirting with—the sweet-cheeked auburn-braided bit of skirt who had been giggling and smiling at him and suggestively telling him how well he must ride with a steed like that—had suddenly disappeared on him, and now was nowhere to be found. He had met with her once in the courtyard for a little tête-à-tête when all the king’s retinue had met for the coming campaign against Verona. But as soon as the king’s retinue went inside, it seemed she’d cooled off toward him and moved off for other men, the little minx.

‘Who was that girl?’ he asked of Despot Lucio. ‘The one I was talking to?’

‘I believe,’ Lucio told his vassal with a tap on the side of his nose, ‘that she’s the Moravian king’s ward. She’ll be of age soon—I think she’s sixteen this month. King’s eldest won’t be far behind her, either.’

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‘Is the king looking to make a settlement on her? The ward, I mean?’

‘Nay,’ Lucio answered him bluntly. ‘Don’t go sniffing around there for marriage prospects. She’s got no titles coming to her—no one knows who her father is, and evidently even her mother doesn’t acknowledge her. She’s got only the one blood relation, her older sister Praskovia, and the one sister is as much in the dark about her bastard parentage as the other.’

‘Some courtier’s brat from a bit on the side?’

‘Most likely,’ said Lucio. ‘She may have no better prospects, and that may be why she’s playing the wanton with you. Or… there might be other reasons, none of which concern you now. Keep your pointer in your pants up here, Anterio, and your eyes on the worthier prize. There’ll be plenty of better catches where we’re going. And plenty more when we’re successful.’

Not having been deterred by his devastating loss against the Holy Father in Rome, Despot Lucio was still eager to expand his holdings to what he considered rightfully his, and claim all the lands between Aquileia and Trento for his own, all the way down to the Polesine. These were all held, at present, by the Duce Ardizzione of Verona. Once again, Radomír 3. had graciously agreed to help him in his campaign.

~~~​

‘What was all that about?’ Bohodar growled.

‘I have no idea what you mean,’ Pribislava told him loftily.

‘All that in the courtyard… with the Italian baron! You know the one! The one you were making eyes at! What do you see in a man like that?’

‘Plenty!’ Pribislava cried out in exasperation. ‘He’s handsome, he’s tall, he holds himself well! And he’s a gallant with a sword—he doesn’t hide his nose in books all the time! And he knows how to actually talk to a girl! You can’t even get two words out around Katarina!’

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‘Well—but—I mean—’

‘There, you see?’ Pribislava let out a noise of derision. ‘You’re pathetic, Bohodar! Always gawking and mooning around after her like a dope! And you’re never going to talk to her!’

‘Oh?’ Bohodar’s blood was up. ‘And how far did you get with that Italian bloke?’

‘I’d have had him kissing me in minutes,’ Pribislava shot at him. ‘Just watch! I’ll go right now, find him—’

Bohodar shot out a hand and gripped Pribislava by the wrist. She turned around with a yelp and glared at the infuriating boy.

‘Ouch! Bohodar—let go! That hur—

Bohodar cut her off with a single eloquent gesture. Pribislava forgot all about the pain in her wrist—and Bohodar was relaxing his grip anyway. More importantly, all the jealous hurt melted away at his soothing and reassuring touch. Pribislava grabbed his elbows and dragged him closer, pressing her lips harder against his. At once, as though by an unspoken agreement, they opened their mouths to each other and met with their tongues.

The two of them now embarked upon a journey of exploration together that was not merely in their minds and in their thoughts. The shared fascination between the two old playmates now was upon the uncharted territories of male and female, the taste of breath, the warm touch of skin, of the scent and texture of hair, of the racing of heartbeats, of the thrill of nerves.

When Pribislava and Bohodar broke apart, they looked deep in each other’s eyes. Pribislava was the first to open her lips with the worried question—the one lingering doubt—

‘What about Katarina?’

‘What about her?’ came the answer. ‘But what about that baron?’

‘Who?’

And with it now resolved that no one could come between them, the auburn-haired girl and the black-haired boy went straight back to meeting and caressing each other’s lips, tongues, palms and fingers: each new mark upon their map more tender, more secret, sweeter and more enticing than the one before.

~~~

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When the Moravians entered the war for Verona, the Orthodox Aquileians had already captured Friuli, while the men of Verona had taken up their positions blockading Trento from all contact without. The armies of Radomír 3., together with the Despot and the few of his men he’d brought with him to Olomouc, marched southward once more through the Eastern Bavarian stretches of the Alps and moved to intercept the Verona men at Vicenza. The Moravians this time took no chances with the terrain, and engaged only when they had the clear advantage of numbers.

The battle of Vicenza was brief, but spectacularly bloody. The Aquileians fought with remarkable vigour and a spirit of vengeance that gave the Moravians pause. The charge was led by Anterio—the same who had been in the Olomouc courtyard flirting with Pribislava—and he took the head from the shoulders of one of the knights of Verona, who was called Bertoldo. The battle was won, and the Moravians moved off in their positions and began encamping themselves at Treviso.

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The two armies fought another rearguard engagement at Aquileia, which was led largely by the ordinary troops and townsmen of the northward Italian cities. Moravia arrived to support, but by that time Despot Lucio had all but declared victory upon the field of battle for himself. All that was left for them to do at that point was to drive the foe from the field.

Moravia still kept the troops in the field, and Radomír 3. felt it incumbent upon him to supervise the armies personally. He oversaw the sieges of Treviso, and also of Padua and Garda. The Venetians themselves, who were not under the rule of Verona, looked out nervously from the battlements as the Moravian army and the Italian raged against the mainland territories within view. The war was over within two years.

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During the war, the Kráľ of Moravia had, upon receiving missives from both Olomouc and the suitor in question, given his eldest daughter’s hand in marriage to the lord of Lykia in Asia Minor—a man named Staurakios.

And then Staurakios had evidently waxed quite eloquent upon the marriage he had made, and made a speech to his whole retinue and garrison when Vjačeslava arrived in Lykia.

‘The Moravian royals are famed throughout the world,’ he had declaimed upon receiving Vjačeslava within his court, ‘not only for the delicacy of their features, but also for the strength and soundness of their forms and the perspicacity of their minds and their accumulation of wisdom. They are famed throughout the world for the natural virtues which are native to their line—and which wax ever more potent with the passing of generations, like fine wine! And behold, I have taken to wife a woman of remarkable intelligence, who can aid me in both peace and war!’

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And as the New Year dawned upon the Year of the World 6796, Radomír 3. returned home in triumph from Verona, with his brother-in-law Despot Lucio having taken for himself everything he had set out to take. He did not know, however, the tragedy that had already befallen his whole house, and indeed his whole dynasty—the same which Staurakios had so eloquently praised upon the occasion of his marriage.

For, in the absence of the Kráľ, his eldest son and heir had likewise conquered and been conquered in turn. The now-eighteen Pribislava, and the now-fifteen Bohodar, had held off as long as they could from taking the final plunge together. They would not yield up the last secrets of their bodies to each other absent the formal blessing of a priest. But the newness and the rawness of the sensations that enthralled them both had overpowered them.

Bohodar had been the one to take both of Pribislava’s hands one fateful night, and lead her to the chapel and to the hapless priest. Together they had promised before God to have each other and no other, lifelong. Hand-in-hand they went to his room, bolted the door, drew the curtains, lit the candle. They undressed each other, lay down together on the bed. And together they joined bodies, and took the plunge deep into the mysteries of husband and wife, every bit as naturally and sweetly as they had joined lips and hands, and with every bit as much affection.

Pribislava and Bohodar had taken every care not to commit sin by the lights of the Church. But they did not know the deeper sin which now doomed them. They did not know the blood relation they shared. They did not know the hushed secrets and hypocrisies of their elders. They did not know the sin in the blood that they were now sealing with their conjoined bodies.

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The two of them handed Radomír 3. a fait accompli on Bohodar’s sixteenth birthday. Pribislava and Bohodar had already been honourably married for the better part of a year prior. And at the time, the Kráľ not only had no reason to object, he had even secretly hoped for such a marriage. And why not? The two of them had grown up together. They were well suited to each other. They had similar tempers and values. All the signs had boded well!

But then the hammer-stroke fell.

If she had been honest, Queen Mother Vjačeslava Vasilevna would have been the one to speak up, long before now. But she was not the one to speak. The deadly stroke came from Count Oldřich of Hradec.

‘Milord Kráľ,’ Oldřich had come to the castle and entered the King’s audience chamber alone, ‘I hear that some congratulations may be in order, on the marriage of your eldest son.’

‘Indeed,’ Radomír said complacently, even happily. ‘I had little enough to do with it myself, but I am happy for the event all the same.’

‘You shouldn’t be,’ Oldřich told him. ‘I shall not congratulate you. I have news which I fear will come most unwelcome, but which you ought to hear in any case—for the whole of the honour and good name of your line does depend upon it.’

‘Well?’ asked Radomír. ‘After a declaration like that, you oughtn’t keep me waiting!’

‘I fear I must ask in advance for a small consideration for this intelligence, O Kráľ.’

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Radomír had little choice. He opened his coffers to the Hrabě bearing this ill news. And then Oldřich spun out a tale of infamy that Radomír might well have had his head for—if he had not the witness and documents all in order to attest the truth of what he claimed.

‘The Queen Mother—your mother, sire—left Olomouc in the last days we knew of Kráľ Kaloján alive. She told you that she was leaving on account of ill health, and returning home to Bukovina. This was not true. She left, in fact, for Maramoroš, and she brought with her a midwife to attend her.’

‘A midwife—?’

‘A midwife, in fact, from Hradec… as I was able to ascertain. I can produce her here at need, but I have a statement from her affirming the truth of all she witnessed and performed. Your mother, môj Kráľ, was indeed pregnant when you took the throne. And indeed, she had been pregnant two years before, and contracted with the midwife I know of for the same services at that time too.’

Radomír knew that his mother had absented herself for health reasons then as well. His heart rose into his throat in dread, but he knew he must press on. ‘Go on, Oldřich.’

‘She gave birth. Twice. The first time, was to a little girl who was named Praskovia, for she was born on a Friday. The midwife attests that this girl was dark-avised, and that she stayed in Maramoroš while milady the Queen Mother returned to Olomouc. Then again the Queen Mother fell pregnant. Again she returned to Maramoroš. Again she gave birth. To Praskovia was added a sister—Pribislava.’

Radomír’s blood ran like ice in his veins. ‘And who was the father?’

‘The father of both children… was your uncle. Her own brother-in-law, Vratislav Rychnovský. He who is, or should be, sworn to the service of the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre.’

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The whole weight of the scandal fell upon the king’s shoulders at once, and crushed him. Although Oldřich had protested proof, he needed none. Truth rang out from the whole story. This whole time, his mother had been basely, filthily betraying the very memory of his father! She had been taking his father’s younger brother to her bed! She had not only debased her widowhood, she had also corrupted his monastic oath to do it! And it had been she who had borne both Praskovia and Pribislava of Ňamec! How could he have not seen it before—? Two Bukovin girls, born of a Bukovin mother—his own mother! Pribislava was both Radomír’s blood-sister and first cousin!

And now… even now, Bohodar, his own firstborn son and sole heir, was in marital congress with a woman doubly consanguineous: both his aunt and his first cousin once removed. Those two poor innocents were tangling the royal branch of the Rychnovský family tree into a desperate knot! Every night the two of them, happy and blissful in their ignorance, were sinning in the blood!

Worse: Bohodar and Pribislava enjoyed no sanction from the Church. True, avunculate marriages might in rare circumstances be forgiven, or even blessed—howbeit reluctantly. Heraclius’s and Martina’s had been, after all. So had Bohodar 1.’s and Blažena’s. But how could the Church bless such a union, when the Church had been deceived every bit as much as he was until now? If this ever came out, how could anything absolve those two poor children?

How was he to tell them? And what in heaven’s name was he supposed to do about it?

‘Milord?’

Oldřich still had his hands held out.

Radomír gave the detestable man his filthy money and sent him away, to be alone in his misery and grief.

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Book Six Chapter Six
SIX
Wrongs Darker
16 November 1287 – 9 July 1293

The confrontation between Kráľ Radomír 3. and his kráľovná matka over the revelations of Hrabě Oldřich about the parentage of his heir’s wife was not going to be a pleasant one. But it had to happen. And it ought to have happened long ago.

‘Mother—why didn’t you tell me?’

‘It wasn’t any business of yours,’ the Queen Mother stiffened her neck, though her weak chin was trembling. ‘You had a kingdom to run. And I had a… problem to take care of.’

A problem?’ Radomír hissed, his face white with anger. ‘I’ll say you had a problem, sleeping with Uncle Vratislav—a man who should be in a Brotherhood wayhouse! What the hell were you thinking?’

‘Radko, I wasn’t… I wasn’t thinking,’ Vjačeslava Vasilevna wrung her hands. ‘You don’t know how it was! You don’t know—you weren’t old enough! Kurík had his position, had his inheritance, had his kingdom to think of… and Vratislav was the one who always spoke up for me, for his brother’s duties to his wife and her kin! Vratislav was warm to me, he was considerate, he was passionate—and then when your father was killed, I—I—’

‘You went,’ Radomír pressed mercilessly, ‘and you whelped Praskovia. In secret! And you didn’t stop there. Not even when Uncle Vratislav went off to a monastery!’

It was only once after that,’ his mortified mother sobbed, tears now streaming down her cheeks. ‘I regretted it—regretted it even the very morning after! I had broken your uncle’s oath, made him a false monk! I had been a stumbling-block to him! I wanted… wanted to die, to rid the earth of me, so that he at least might repent and be saved! But I couldn’t… couldn’t harm her… couldn’t harm our daughter…’

‘You have harmed her,’ Radomír clenched his fist. His voice became a low, forbidding, hideous growl. ‘Your youngest daughter and your eldest grandson are incestuously yoked! Without extenuating cause! Unaware they are closer kin even than Bohodar 1. and Blažena were! And I blessed them to marry! You didn’t think to drop a word in my ear before the banns?!’

But even as he said it and he watched his poor mother bury her face in his hands, he knew what such a word would have cost Vjačeslava Vasilevna. And he began to understand her long absences, the fragility of her health, and her seemingly endless bouts of solitary drink which ended in days’-long hangovers. His mother had, these long twenty years and more, lived a truly wretched and miserable life. And her son began to pity her. Despite her titles and trappings and finery, she had had to live every day with the secret knowledge of the ruin she’d brought upon the house of all the men she’d ever loved.

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‘What should I tell them?’ Radomír laid a gentle hand on his mother’s arm. ‘Should I tell them?’

The elderly, unhappy Queen Mother hung her head. ‘No. Please… don’t tell them. Not before I die. Though I pray it may come soon.’

Radomír clasped his poor mother, and held her head against his shoulder as she wept.

~~~

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It was not long after that, that Anna Balharská-Borsa—the remarkably-competent spymistress that Vjačeslava Vasilevna had recommended to his notice—began to make her own advances. Unfortunately for her, her attempts to seduce the Kráľ were clumsy and even somewhat half-hearted. All she managed to do with her propositions was to make Radomír understand how lucky he was to be married to an understanding and thoughtful woman like Lucia—a woman he could call his friend as well as his wife.

And Lucia of Kráľovec had been a friend to him indeed, though he deserved it so little! She was a constant, steady support in his reign, and she loved talking with him about the things which sparked his interest. Even the Grodno dialect she spoke in (with its mingled features of Polish, Prussian and Ruthenian) had endeared itself to Radomír through her speech, nigh-unintelligible though it had been to him at first.

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Lucia had always appealed to Radomír’s better instincts. Not long after Oldřich’s visit, she had discovered a corpse that had been pocked and riddled with some contagious plague. And as he beheld it, the thought had flitted across Radomír’s mind to launch the contagion-bearing remains at Hradec from a catapult—as comeuppance to Oldřich for telling him the truth that he now had to live with. But it had been an unworthy thought, and it had melted away the moment he’d seen Lucia’s face. It had been his wife who had inspired him—though she had not spoken to him of it—to bury the body neatly and with due reverence to the poor man’s Maker. What more could be asked of a true friend than this?

In the end, it was on account of this friendship that Radomír decided he had to trust Lucia. He had to do better by her than his mother had by him.

‘Lucia… there’s something you should know.’

It was much to Radomír’s comfort, and to Lucia’s credit, that she did not react as he had done, when he had first heard the tale of infamy which he now unwound. His mother’s incestuous love for her brother-in-law. The fruit she had borne of it. Her return to her sin with him when he was a monk. And then the second daughter… who was now the wife of their son.

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Lucia’s eyes had widened in shock, and then her round-cheeked face had grimaced with mingled disgust and sympathy, as her husband unfolded to her the family secret he bore. Finally her features settled into a look of deep sadness and pity.

O Bože,’ she breathed. ‘Twaja biednaja maťka.’

Radomír sighed.

‘I thought I was angry with her,’ Radomír whispered. ‘My mother, I mean. But… how long had she felt the burning before? And how long afterward, had she had to live with the worm within her, gnawing at her conscience? How long has she tried and failed to drown it in drink?’

‘What she did—to Kurík, to Vratislav, to you, to her daughters—was very wrong,’ Lucia said firmly. ‘But God has punished her this much already. Do not add more to her grief, husband. Please forgive her.’

Radomír sighed again. ‘I wish to. Time will tell, I suppose, if I can.’

Lucia laid her hand on her husband’s elbow. One squeeze was enough to tell Radomír that she sympathised, that she understood what he was feeling… but that in the end she would expect him to do right by the woman who had borne him, whatever other wrongs darker than death or night she had done. Again Radomír was grateful to have a wife who loved him enough to expect that of him.

‘And what should we tell Bohodar and Pribislava?’ asked Radomír. ‘The poor girl is already pregnant.’

Lucia blew out a breath and shook her head. Radomír knew exactly what she was thinking, because he had been thinking the same thing. To expose them, suddenly and without warning as Oldřich had done, would be cruel, and Radomír couldn’t do that anymore to a ward he’d come to respect than to a son he loved. And there was the promise Radomír had made to his mother. At the same time, to keep the truth from them much longer would be unconscionable.

‘Let her bear her babe in peace,’ Lucia told him. ‘Leave them be at least until then. I think I can leave what you do after that to your discretion, but whatever decision you make, I will support.’

~~~

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Perhaps it was Radomír’s awareness of the harm that had been done. But when he was arranging marriages for his next-eldest daughters Živka and Lesana, he made damn well sure that the men they married could not possibly be related to them in any way, shape or form. He even went so far as to ask for their pedigrees going back seven generations.

Živka had grown as warm and kind and affectionate as she was beautiful, and Radomír was pleased to see that she had taken after his own scholarly interests with zeal. Radomír offered her in marriage to the Iberian-Greek master of Budžak, Doux Teokťisťe Bagrationi. Doux Teokťisťe was not at all displeased with the young, pretty, demonstrative red-braided bride he received, but it seemed to Radomír that he was a bit more interested in having a military alliance with Moravia.

As for Lesana, she was very much unlike Živka. She did have a placid, pleasant and easy-going temper, but nothing like the sort of effervescent warmth that her older sister possessed; and she was much more at home minding stores, keeping books and counting coins than studying anything more academic. Radomír matched her with a certain Swedish lordling named Sighvardh Sighbiornssen.

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And there was little that could be done at home but wait, once they had left.

Radomír doted on his youngest daughters, Viera and Gaudimantė. (He still thought this Prussian name Gaudimantė to be a bit on the outlandish side.) The two of them, as well as being fairly similar in terms of looks—both with long, raven-black tresses and flawless ivory skin accented by delicate blushes of rose—also seemed to be fairly alike in temper. Both girls were modest, selfless, retiring… unfortunately Viera a bit more so this last than Gaudimantė. If they sought to outdo each other as sisters, it was in the pursuit of virtue and liberality rather than in other achievements.

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And at last, Pribislava gave birth.

It was common knowledge that incestuous marriages produce children of feeble minds, uncertain tempers, or physical deformities… and Radomír had steeled himself for the worst, though both Bohodar and Pribislava were as ignorant of their relation as ever. The two of them were happy together, and had no reason at all to suspect any wrong.

When Pribislava gave birth to a baby girl, with a corona of light auburn strands around her soft and as-yet-unshapen crown, she was already ready with a name: Dorotea—the Bukovin Russian form of ‘Dorothy’. However, when the midwife handed Pribislava the newborn, the new mother’s brow furrowed slightly. One of Dorotea’s pink little feet was noticeably smaller than the other, it was sloped in a broad slant down from the large toe to the little, and it was bent painfully inward and downward nearly all the way over on itself. When touched, Dorotea broke out in storms of squalling, helpless pain.

But poor Pribislava cast a bewildered glance first at her suffering daughter, and then at Bohodar, who looked just as shocked and disconcerted, but who laid a comforting hand upon his wife’s shoulder.

Talipes equinovarus,’ Queen Lucia had diagnosed the congenital defect. Lucia’s voice was level, calm and competent—the perfect bedside manner. ‘Good thing we have a complete copy of Hippocrates on hand. I’ll look up the chiropractic treatments, and start Dorotea on a regimen right away.’

Poor little Dorotea’s deformity had come as a nasty shock to both her parents. It was significantly less of a shock to Dorotea’s grandparents, who had a calamitous knowledge of the cause.

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Those two poor innocents were tangling the royal branch of the Rychnovský family tree into a desperate knot! Every night the two of them, happy and blissful in their ignorance, were sinning in the blood!
Worse: Bohodar and Pribislava enjoyed no sanction from the Church. True, avunculate marriages might in rare circumstances be forgiven, or even blessed—howbeit reluctantly. Heraclius’s and Martina’s had been, after all. So had Bohodar 1.’s and Blažena’s.
<head lowering down, shutting eyes in cringe, rubbing forehead indefinitely, indistinct sighs are heard>

Eh.
From the game's perspective: The code does not have enough checks for choosing the partners in marital affairs or in any relations, and it certainly does not provide the player having any effective control on that matter.
From the side of the story: Family of geniuses. Yeah.

But ultimately it falls down on the code, as with the currently available tools (more correctly, a tool - limited to only marriage doctrine in religion mechanics - no mechanics such as laws or decrees etc.), there is not enough control possibilities for the player or the code. Even with the doctrines, it is limited to applying close-kin taboo, which does not help much as the code right away finds a distant kin to make the arrangement. It is not possible to identify what the code actually does: Is it hell-bent determined to act as such so it seems completely random, or is it an oddity worth for a story to tell; not possible to distinguish, because the code just makes it, constantly and continuously.

In the end, by the 11.-12. century of any run, the only healthy family in the world remains to be the player character's immediate family (and still the player has to be vigilant to avoid accidental-unknown arrangements). Sigh.


Anyway. Carry on, and focus on the music:
in the blood!
Interesting.
Answering with Ich bin weg! by Die Apokalyptischen Reiter, 2017.


Will not be available for a while, thus wishing all a happier and healthier new year in advance.
Cheers!
 
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<head lowering down, shutting eyes in cringe, rubbing forehead indefinitely, indistinct sighs are heard>

Eh.
From the game's perspective: The code does not have enough checks for choosing the partners in marital affairs or in any relations, and it certainly does not provide the player having any effective control on that matter.
From the side of the story: Family of geniuses. Yeah.

Heh, yup, geniuses. End maximum sarcasm mode. But in the age of Game of Thrones and such, aunt-nephew love is kind of tame as it goes.

But ultimately it falls down on the code, as with the currently available tools (more correctly, a tool - limited to only marriage doctrine in religion mechanics - no mechanics such as laws or decrees etc.), there is not enough control possibilities for the player or the code. Even with the doctrines, it is limited to applying close-kin taboo, which does not help much as the code right away finds a distant kin to make the arrangement. It is not possible to identify what the code actually does: Is it hell-bent determined to act as such so it seems completely random, or is it an oddity worth for a story to tell; not possible to distinguish, because the code just makes it, constantly and continuously.

In the end, by the 11.-12. century of any run, the only healthy family in the world remains to be the player character's immediate family (and still the player has to be vigilant to avoid accidental-unknown arrangements). Sigh.

From a gameplay perspective, this is kind of on me and my not paying attention from one day to the next.

'What? My daughter-in-law was caught sleeping with another of my sons? No one else knows? Sigh, fine. Disinherit son, send him off to Brotherhood, problem solved.'

Then, 20 years of gameplay and several days later, as I'm no longer playing Kalojan but Radomir 3.:

'Hey, how did this bastard kid get into my court? No mom? Cute-looking sister ... And she's got that comely trait and that hale trait! Looking pretty nice for a bastard. Maybe I'll marry her to one of my sons!'

[game gives me dreaded related, children may be inbred warning, which I, being an idiot, ignore, justifying it thus:]

'Meh. She's a Balgarska, Balgarskas are everywhere. Probably she was related to Kostislava or something; Kostislava had that pretty trait and was a redhead, too. I'm sure it's nothing to worry about!'

[Smuggy McSmugface Count Oldrich shows up]

'Hey, Rado! Remember how yo' momma was boinking your uncle? Guess who's married to your son now?'

[my face freezes in horror]

'...'

'And she's already pregnant, too.'

'...' '...' '...'

'Now, if this were real life, you could appeal to the Orthodox bishop and have their marriage annulled on account of consanguinity, and no harm, no foul... But remember what happened last time? Because this is CK3 and they're both related to you, if you try to enforce a divorce on them, you get a cumulative double-whammy -60 relations hit from all the members of your immediate family!'

'... JumaLAUta! PERKELE!'

Anyway. Carry on, and focus on the music:

Interesting.
Answering with Ich bin weg! by Die Apokalyptischen Reiter, 2017.


Will not be available for a while, thus wishing all a happier and healthier new year in advance.
Cheers!

Die Apokalyptischen Reiter. Classic. Pretty much everything they've done since Samurai has been gold--Der rote Reiter was no exception!

And a happy New Year to you as well, @filcat, with all good wishes! Welcome back anytime!
 
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Book Six Chapter Seven
SEVEN
Trench of Taurica
2 January 1294 – 26 April 1296


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‘So you’re the Moravian? Here for Doux Teokťisťe?’ asked the grizzled garrison captain.

‘That’s right,’ answered Bohodar.

The captain looked him over. Of the Taurican’s eyes, one was the indeterminate hue of a stormy sea; the other was milky-white and blind. His hair and beard were a dusty brown well-sprinkled with grey.

‘Right,’ he said, not altogether approvingly. ‘Well. Come this way. Make yourself useful, why don’t you?’

Bohodar endeavoured, with limited success, to guess at his origins. The massive Taurican’s face had the fair hue and round cheeks common to many of the Eastern Ruthenians. But there was something in his accent, as well as something in his features, that suggested some further-distant Asiatic admixture to his ancestry—Alan? Kimer? Khazar? Polovets? It was hard to tell.

‘Name’s Grigor,’ the captain told the visiting prince grudgingly.

‘Bohodar of Moravia.’

‘Welcome to the Trench,’ Grigor waved a well-fleshed hand out over the fortification. It did indeed look very much like… well, a trench. With the exception of a single stone-arch causeway that looked to be of Byzantine provenance, the dug-out section of earth went seemingly all the way across the field of Bohodar’s view from west to east, cutting off the Taurican peninsula from the Mirnoi to the north.

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‘Down south they call it Tafros, but that’s just a fancy Greek way of saying “trench”. You and your Moravians can get to work shoring up the near bank—might hold the Levedians a few hours longer. Shovels—there. Stakes—over there. Don’t pack the earth in too hard before you get the stakes in.’

Bohodar at once took up a shovel, gripping it in both hands, and went down to join the Tauricans who were already hard at work setting up the makeshift earthen and wooden barricade. Grigor’s eyebrows rose a thought, as though surprised and slightly impressed that a Moravian prince might deign to physical labour. But he turned his back abruptly on Bohodar to tell the same thing to the other newcomers off the Moravian ships.

The Moravian crown prince shrugged, went down the slope and found a good spot to start working. He stomped the blade of his tool head-down into the hard, dusty earth, lifting up a piece and setting it at a higher level to steepen the grade. It wasn’t work that needed any great presence of mind on Bohodar’s part, so his started to wander.

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He chuckled as he thought briefly about his younger brother Želimír. What would Žeľko say to him if he saw the beloved elder son and heir trudging around in the dirt like this? Probably some witty, wry remark—but one thing was to be said for his younger brother, he never despised anyone who made themselves useful! That had come to be a very useful little trait for the family.

The more so since his father had developed a sudden, and keen, philanthropic interest in the monastic houses and hospital of the Stauropegial Church of Saint Bartholomew in Veselí nad Moravou. Bohodar’s brow bent down and darkened. Normally this would be no cause for Bohodar’s concern: he shared his kingly father’s love of almsgiving. But his father’s conscience seemed troubled, and this recent outlay from the royal coffers seemed related. And for some reason, his father and mother had grown distant from him of late. Not that they had grown cold or unfriendly, but for someone as intelligent as Bohodar, it wasn’t difficult for him to cotton onto the fact that they were hiding something from him: something of dire importance. Something which was giving them both an intense feeling of guilt, perhaps?

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Bohodar’s brow softened, instead, when his thoughts turned to his wife, waiting for him back in Olomouc. Sometimes it seemed like Bivka was the only one who listened to him, understood him, and truly sympathised with him these days. Pribislava of Ňamec was, to be sure, a natural diplomat. For a woman as effortlessly gracious and likeable and lively as she, such would indeed be her calling; charm was a part of her nature. But when he was alone together with his Bivka, there was something deeper, more enduring, than mere charm. Alone among men, she trusted him and loved him.

What had bound them together were her struggles and worries in caring for clubfooted little Dorotea. Dorotea always gripped and grasped above her ability, and went into terrible tempests of frustrated rage and agony when her entirely natural efforts to put weight on her malformed foot ended in falls. Bivka, her poor mother, didn’t know what to do.

‘I can entertain a court full of dignitaries from Wessex, West Francia and Luxembourg,’ Pribislava had sobbed, ‘but I cannot calm or comfort my own thirteen-month-old girl! What is wrong with me?’

Bohodar remembered that he had held Bivka for half an hour as she beat his breast with one despairing fist, and released her free-flowing woes into his shoulder. And that then, he had reached down together with her to Dorotea. Between them, Dorotea’s mother and father had figured out how to help her brace against a wall or a cupboard or a table leg in order to keep her balance, and spare herself pain. Queen Lucia had also tutored both her son and daughter-in-law in how to massage the tendons in their daughter’s undergrown foot to lessen the pain and help it straighten somewhat.

Ej! Moravian!’ Grigor called down to him.

Bohodar snapped out of his reverie. ‘Yes?’ he called back.

‘Get back up here. We see Levedian banners up top.’

Bohodar took his shovel and began clambering up the narrow incline that he’d left himself for an easy ascent. Once high enough back up, he’d destroy it with the flat of his shovel-blade. Unfortunately, he caught his ringed tunic on one of the stakes, and was pinned where he stood just as the heads of the first of the Levedian troops appeared on the opposite side of the Trench.

The unmistakeable twang of bowstrings sounded, and black flights arced into the air. The Moravian prince fought to get his mail free of the stake. Somewhere above him came a grunt of exasperation, following by the scattering of loose dirt beneath a series of half-pounding, half-sliding footfalls just as the arrows began to streak downward. Triumph!—Bohodar got himself unstuck. But then he heard several cracks as heavy shafts of wood embedded themselves in a shield just in front of him.

‘Get up!’ growled Grigor. ‘Go!’

Together the Moravian prince and the Taurican captain struggled back upward along the incline, with Grigor keeping his shield between them and death from the air. Bohodar stopped only to kick and beat away the inclined trail behind him, and the two of them finally made it back above the stakes and onto a shallower grade. Once they were safely out of range of the Levedian bowmen, Grigor gave Bohodar a heavy chiding clout on the chest.

‘You jackass!’ he cursed. ‘When I say move, you move!’

‘I was moving!’ Bohodar shot back. ‘And that’s no way to address a prince!’

Grigor crossed his arms and spat, then let fly a blue streak in his Eastern Ruthenian speech. ‘Mne nasrať! Not if you were born in the purple to the Emperor himself! I know my turf; we’re on the same side; and you’re not dying on my watch. Now you get back behind the line with the rest of your men—i deržisi podaľše ot linii grevanogo ogňa! Mudak.

Bohodar couldn’t say he liked Grigor, but he couldn’t help having a certain degree of grudging respect for him. Despite his brusque and vulgar manner, he was clearly a competent commander respected by the other Tauricans. And—Bohodar had to own it—Grigor had just saved his life.

As the assault commenced, Grigor looked down into the Trench with grim satisfaction as the Levedians were stymied by the stakes and the dug-out steeps—easy marks for the Taurican archers at his command, who shot volley after volley down at the attackers, filling the Trench with their bodies. The Levedians had to beat a hasty retreat.

‘At least you know how to dig,’ Grigor said to Bohodar later. ‘That’s something.’

‘Say,’ Bohodar told Grigor, ‘you wouldn’t happen to know any good landing spots where we might be able to set up on the north shore and open up another line of attack, would you?’

Grigor sized the Moravian prince up, raising a single grizzled eyebrow. Bohodar could see the reluctant decision being made behind his eyes. ‘Come with me.’

Bohodar followed Grigor some ways along the Trench to a wooden gatehouse, where Grigor unfurled what looked to be an old sailing chart of the sort that sailors used.

‘There are a couple of sheltered bights to the west, along the coastline here, going past the Mirnoi. The safest one is probably… here, at Alešja. Take your ships around the jut. If you can make it there, you should be able to land your men without being attacked on the shore. You’d have to work hard and fast. You can do that.’

‘We’ll try that.’

Ej, Moravian.’

‘What?’

‘Good luck.’ The Taurican tipped his head to the side. It was the most polite salute he got from the man. But Bohodar took it kindly, as it was meant.

~~~

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For Bohodar, the incident in the Trench was the most eventful part of the war between Budžak and Levedia, with the Ruthenians of Taurica and Tmutarakan playing their role in the east. The landing at Alešja was accomplished with surprisingly little resistance, and Bohodar had lain siege to the town there with ease. Kráľ Radomír was busy up north at Chortycia and Bachmut doing the same. Ultimately, the Doux of Levedia was forced to own that his war was getting him nowhere. He had to relinquish his claims on Budžak. The northern strand of the Black Sea was once again at peace, howbeit tenuously.

Upon his return, Bohodar lost no time embracing Pribislava. He poured out upon her every warm feeling that his remembrance of her at the Trench and elsewhere had given him. And she, in turn, received him gratefully, with the same warmth and trust. That first night back in Olomouc, Bohodar took fright at the sight of her. But he’d been able to dispel that fright, with her help.

Now he was looking down at the peacefully-dozing form of his wife, familiar and welcome in her entirety, trusted implicitly. He knew how deeply Bivka trusted and enjoyed him in turn. But there were certain times in their marriage—occasions, mere flashes—when her face bore a strange and disconcerting resemblance… to whom, he could never be quite sure. By turns Bivka looked distressingly like his aunt Svetluša; or like his younger sister Lesana. At such times Bohodar felt as if some horrid shadow coming up behind him and clutching him by the throat. But then Bivka would look up into his eyes and disperse the shadow away with her steady affection.

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Pribislava became pregnant again, with the signs showing themselves in the October after his return. Bohodar did everything in his power to care for his wife and make her comfortable. He didn’t want this child to have the same deformity as Dorotea—for whom Bohodar was now serving as full-time parent.

When Pribislava again gave birth, in April of the Year of the World 6804, it was to a boy. This boy, blessedly, was free of any mark of deformity of body or spirit—and not only that, but it was clear to his doting parents and grandparents from his deep, wide-eyed, alert gaze that he would inherit his mother’s good looks and his father’s able mind. Just as it was customary for the Radomírs to name their firstborn sons after Letopisár and Slovoľubec, so too it had become custom for Bohodars in the Rychnovský clan to name their firstborn sons after Saint Vojtech. This was the case as well for Bohodar’s and Bivka’s son.

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‘Would you allow me to raise the lad myself?’ asked Kráľ Radomír gently.

Bohodar looked to Bivka, who dimpled as she answered the king: ‘We would be honoured.’

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~~~​

The following month, a large party of menfolk (and a few womenfolk, though not as many)—most of them of a deep, well-sunned olive complexion and ranging from very young boys to ancient old whitebeards—arrived in the streets of Olomouc, all in very fine white linen tunics, brightly-hued vests and brimless hats of red and green and gold. Although thus resplendently arrayed, the air of the approaching men was solemn and expectant, voices muted and reverent. Indeed, the whole attitude of the party became one similar to the religious processions preceding the Christmas and Easter feasts.

May was a very pleasant month in Olomouc; the fields were green and burgeoning with new growth from the drenching of the sun after the late March rains, and such good fortune in weather happened upon this party from the Levant as they made their way northward along the Jerusalem Way.

A small group of the menfolk from the group asked, and were granted, admittance to the seat of the Rychnovský honour. And over the next two days, this small party representing the respectable Jordanian and Syrian lineage of al-’Irbid met in private with King Radomír in one of the private offices, to negotiate for the hand of the middle daughter of the Moravian king.

‘O Great Malik aṣ-Ṣaqâlibat al-Ġarb,’ spoke the head of the party, ‘I now formally request on behalf of my son ’Amîr here, the hand of your daughter Fîrâ in marriage… as we agreed one year ago. Have you discussed the match with Fîrâ? Is my son acceptable to her as Fîrâ is to him?’

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The man who was speaking had a long, straight nose set upon a face which looked like it was chiselled from stone. His straight brow perched like a ledge over two sharp, aquilean amber eyes. Although his low-pitched voice was mild and supplicatory, Radomír got the strong impression that this was not a man to be crossed. Indeed—this man was Naqîb Ḥakam ibn ‘Adil, the captain of a formidable band of Bedouin raiders, and a member of the ruling dynasty of the Sultanate of al-’Irbid. Said son ’Amîr, a man of about twenty-four or twenty-five years, was the very image of his father transmuted into youthful blitheness and health, though his eyes were a good deal softer and kinder.

Radomír answered: ‘My daughter has agreed to the match. I have told her of ’Amîr’s munificence, and she has answered me that he is just the sort of man she would like to marry. She is also quite curious about the tales of your campaigns, sir.’

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Radomír had wondered whether the last addition would come amiss. He knew that the Arabs were quite particular about keeping their women apart from the affairs of men, which would naturally include war. But the naqîb let out a short sharp ‘ha’ of laughter, and thumped his son on the shoulder.

‘There, boy! Finally—someone whom I can talk strategy with, at last! My son is of course a good hardworking lad. And also he’s quite strong of sinew, as you can see, and a deft hand with a blade. But when it comes to the larger picture… well, let’s just say that he is better leaving to Allâh what is left to Him, and to those with keener minds—’

‘Enough, Father,’ ’Amîr protested sullenly. ‘I’m sure our host would wish to discuss the finances.’

Radomír quickly understood that ’Amîr wasn’t being stingy—quite the opposite. Indeed, he would get on quite well with Viera. Radomír and the men of al-’Irbid spent the rest of the evening discussing the material exchanges that would accompany the exchange of vows, and the party left for the courtyard satisfied.

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The next morning found all of them dancing a dabkah in time with each other, out of the courtyard into the streets. This time their attitude was quite different from their entrance into the city! All of them were singing joyfully, even raucously, in a tongue very rarely ever heard in Moravia up until that time. The olive-skinned guests went along with hymns of praise to God and ballads of love in the language of the Mašriq, of the eastern Arabic lands—accompanied by the frempt but nonetheless mesmerising sounds of the ‘ûd and the mizmâr. Those beggars and street waifs who were fortunate enough to be present that morning along the route, received into their wondering palms coins of silver and even gold from the bridegroom’s party as the festive family made their way up to the castle.

Many of the residents of Olomouc peered out their windows at beholding this spectacular display from men who were very clearly foreign and newly arrived from a far part of the world. Some of the wiser and older men of the garrison—including those who had been in the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre—would take on a wistful look of remembrance.

‘Someone is getting married,’ a few of them said.

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And right they were. ’Amîr ibn Ḥakam and Viera Rychnovská were enthroned together the following day, and the handful of womenfolk of the groom’s party took great care in painting the hands of the couple with henna. ’Amîr was quite taken with the milky-fair beauty he had taken to wife, and Viera for her part drank in her fill with her eyes of her tall, lean, spare-but-muscular Syrian groom with his well-kept beard. And after an entire month of feasting, ’Amîr ibn Ḥakam ibn ‘Adil ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥamîd ibn Fayṣal al-’Irbid took the third-youngest Rychnovská of the royal family back with him to ’Anṭâliyâ, there to begin their new life as a married couple.
 
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Book Six Chapter Eight
EIGHT
The Wages of Sin
16 December 1296 – 17 April 1303


I.
16 December 1296 – 2 October 1298

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… the accusations that we have hereby disclosed, that the Crown Prince of Moravia, Bohodar son of Radomír, is currently in a union of unholy and blasphemous abomination, contrary to the law of God and the laws of nature, with a thrice-degraded woman simultaneously three and five degrees removed, are not themselves sinful false witness. That Bohodar uncovers the nakedness of his father’s own sister is fact beyond admonition. Behold: the proofs are subject to the witness of no less than three souls, vouched for as truthful by their kin and each having delivered themselves of their knowledge under oath, that if they spake false they should be flung headlong into the hell of everlasting damnation…

Bohodar’s blood froze and his heart seemed to stop as he heard the proclamation being read aloud in the Zhromaždenie. His face was as shocked and still as Daniel’s, as Dobrava’s, as Vlasta’s and Siloš’s in the King’s Privy Council as they heard this bile. But then the same blood surged up again hot with anger. This couldn’t be true! It couldn’t possibly!

Radomír, however, was running his hands over his face. He didn’t share his son’s anger, it seemed. It looked like he was merely tired.

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‘Siloš, did you say this document originates with Slavena Davydovna of Petrivka?’

‘It does, milord. She had it proclaimed aloud first in the court of Galicia-Volhynia.’

‘I want you to investigate, Siloš,’ Radomír ordered the Vojvoda of Sliezsko. ‘She’s a Balharská too. We may be barking up the wrong tree, but we need to be certain. Find out in particular if anyone from Hrabě Oldřich’s court in Hradec had any contact with the Červený. I want to know exactly where these “proofs” and “witnesses” came from.’

‘Milord,’ Siloš nodded.

‘Father, why go to all this trouble sorting out the source of this rumour?’ Bohodar exploded, after he had recovered the use of his tongue. ‘Just post a notice telling everyone that it simply isn’t true!’ Bohodar tried to chuckle, to dismiss all thought of it with its ludicrousness.

But his chuckle died in his throat when he saw the hesitant look upon his father’s face.

‘Father? It isn’t true… It isn’t…’

Bohodar’s anger threatened again to burst out of him, this time at his father. How dare he make that haunted, saddened, pathetic expression now? How dare he connive in this lie by his silence? How dare he let it stand that Bivka was Bohodar’s—? Was his—?

‘Bohodar… follow me, son. Let’s go somewhere private.’

‘No! Father, no!’ Bohodar was on his feet, his face beet-red with mingled rage and shame. ‘Denounce that spiteful grease-faced Červen kurva in Petrivka! Do it here, now, before the whole council! Tell them, father! Tell them Bivka isn’t… tell them she isn’t your…! She can’t be…’

‘Come here, son,’ Radomír implored him gently. He looked older and wearier than Bohodar had ever seen him. And right now Bohodar couldn’t think of a time he’d detested his father more.

‘I won’t—’ Bohodar let out a strangled sound between a yelp and a manic laugh. ‘I won’t—won’t listen to any more of this!’

‘Please,’ Radomír begged.

It took every ounce of will that Bohodar had in him to move his feet and follow where his father led. Each step felt like he was carrying lead in his boots. And by the time he had entered the king’s study, he felt too numb for shame, too numb even for tears of rage.

‘Son,’ Radomír told him, ‘please forgive me for what I’m about to tell you. What your grandmother did; what I have done; what I have covered up, to your loss.’

All the while, as Radomír was telling Bohodar the whole story, and then begging his forgiveness for hiding it from him for the past eight years, the king’s son looked at the toes of his boots. This couldn’t be happening. This was a nightmare. He’d wake up, surely. And Pribislava would be next to him in bed, and she’d embrace him, and whisper in his ear soothingly that it had all been but vapour… that there was nothing to fear…

He turned on his heel and fled. And where else did his feet take him, but to the mother of his daughter and son, to the same woman he had been denounced in courts across three realms for loving? Pribislava had also heard the same news, which her homonymous ill-willed cousin in Petrivka had spread abroad. And when Bohodar appeared before her, she did not run or even flinch from him, but went to him and fathomed him to her, with every single fibre of her body and spirit and aching soul. She didn’t want the news to be true either.

‘… But even if it is,’ she told Bohodar mildly, ‘that can’t stop me being your wife.’

‘Even if our bed is an abomination?’

Pribislava traced one tender hand over her nephew-husband’s black-bearded face. ‘Our marriage is not an abomination! Bohodar, think of what we’ve been through together, you and I! Look at how you have comforted me, look at how you have cared for our daughter—she walks, now! Dear one… others are culpable for this. Not you! Oh, no, not you! How can anyone who has seen you doubt it?

‘Now: if you wish to have our marriage annulled and go back to merely being… aunt and nephew… I won’t blame you and I won’t stop you. I will make myself content to love you from the proper distance. But if you choose to ask the Church to keep our marriage together, I will not leave our bed. Given how much we’ve been through, I could never deny you my body, or myself yours.’

Bohodar turned his face heavenward, and two tears leaked out the corners of his eyes. How could Bivka say these things, be so kind to him, after they had sinned so gravely together—however unknowingly?

~~~​

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Archbishop German had heard the same news as the Zhromaždenie had, of course. And he had summoned to him at the Cathedral the elderly Queen Mother Vjačeslava Vasilevna, the Kráľ Radomír, the Kráľ’s son Bohodar and his wife Pribislava. All four of these Rychnovských and Balharské-Ňamcovia before him, he began castigating at once in the strongest possible terms, with Leviticus and Deuteronomy already roaring chapter and verse from his furious Serbian tongue. Radomír and Bohodar both came in for blows from the Archbishop’s shepherding-staff, which they, the wayward rams, bore stoically. German spared the ewes from the physical chastisement, but his words were no less bruising. German spent hours storming and raging and shouting himself hoarse at the weeping Queen Mother, whom he rightly discerned to be at the root of this tangle. It was clear to all of them, however, that the thing which hurt her most was when German had calmed down and spoke sadly to her:

‘My daughter Vjačenka… if only you had loved God, and loved your own children, and loved the memory of your poor rightful husband a tithe as much as you love and worship yourself: they would be spared all of this wrack.’

Archbishop German still imposed upon Bohodar and Pribislava a heavy penance of prayer and fasting from meat and wine, and barred them from the Chalice for eight and a half years: which was again the entire length of time which they had already been in incest together. Still, the Archbishop—grumbling and fuming and smouldering the whole while—reluctantly agreed, ‘for the sake of your children alone, who need both their parents’ love’, to retroactively bless their marriage by oikonomia. He performed the marriage blessing then and there before him, in private, and agreed to pronounce the Church’s sanction the following day. Their marriage was no longer legally incestuous.

Bohodar Rychnovský and Pribislava of Ňamec left the Archbishop’s office with long, grave and sombre faces. But they left it hand-in-hand, side-by-side.

~~~​

Not everyone agreed with this decision. At once upon hearing of it, the clean-shaven bishops of Galicia-Volhynia appeared in Constantinople, their hands piously folded in front of them, asking the Patriarch to overturn Archbishop German’s decision. They said their decision had been arrived at prayerfully, on account of the scandal that such a marriage would bring upon the faithful.

‘Any excuse to tear the Moravian realm apart at the seams and move in on Maramoroš, more like!’ German ground his teeth. ‘Are all these Galician clergy such self-serving political swine in cassocks?’

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Closer to home, Knieža Ostrivoj Mikulčický of Nitra had taken the same line as the Galician bishops.

The Mojmírov scion had evidently decided that the shenanigans of which the King’s family was clearly guilty were reason enough for the removal of the King from the throne. In January of 6806, Ostrivoj moved against Olomouc in force with sixteen thousand men.

Pribislava was loath for Bohodar to leave her side. The news of their blood relation had come as much of a shock to her as it had to him. And her instinct—just as his had been—had been to draw closer to him who understood her. The news that their marriage would be saved had come as a great relief, though now she was aware of how much she stood to lose. Pribislava spent the night before the muster with Bohodar, holding every inch of him as close to her as she possibly could, and not letting go of him until long after day broke.

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The one castle in Nitra which still swore fealty to the king after Ostrivoj declared open rebellion, was Pustý Hrad. The castellan of Pustý knew quite well that after crying defiance upon the rightful lord of Nitra, he would be the first to suffer punishment, and so he dug in his heels for the fall of the hammer. And sure enough—the armies of Ostrivoj struck out first at Zvolen. It was but a dead certainty that the first engagement would happen there.

The first upon the scene at Zvolen was Ctiboh, the hrabě of Heves—a fearsome red-eyed albino with seven knights and all sixteen thousand of Ostrivoj’s men at his back. Daniel 3. of Česko joined the battle in front of the gates of Pustý. With more men, more knights, and a slight edge in logistics and manoeuvrability owing to Daniel’s penchant for plunder, Daniel not only carried the day and held the field at Pustý, but he even captured Ctiboh alive and handed him over to the castellan.

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The men of Nitra regrouped in the west, and struck out at southern Moravia itself. Radomír’s armies gave pursuit and chased them away from Bítov, and southward into the Bavarian-held lands. There was little hope for the Nitrans to win on Moravian land; Radomír had to respect their tactical choice, where they made their stand.

The battle was joined at Sankt Pölten in the Alpine foothills. At once, Kráľ Radomír was assured of the wisdom with which he had hastily ransomed back one of his finest knights. For Aristarch Mstislavič took to the field with the full assurance of a seasoned and practised rider in arms, and at once he sought out upon that Bavarian soil, the vanes of the Mojmírovci. He found one—and he tilted his lance straight where stood the steed of Ostrivoj’s kinsman Jaromil Mikulčický.

The rebel knight had no time even to raise his own weapon, and barely enough to raise his shield. Had he been a split-second slower, he would have been skewered utterly upon Aristarch’s deadly ord. As it was, his shield shattered, and he was carried completely out of the saddle by the sheer momentum. His horse fell sideways on top of him, having been toppled by the impact.

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‘What prowess!’ cried the king when he saw this.

The rebellion of Ostrivoj Mikulčický ended after almost exactly twenty-one months, with Ostrivoj’s death on the twenty-fourth of September, 6808. He died in the field, of a spate of ill health which could mostly be chalked up to old age. His son Bystrík 2. saw no profit in carrying on the rebellion, and a peace was quickly drawn up between king and vassal.

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After the Moravian Army returned home to Olomouc, Hviezdoslav and Gaudimantė—now both newly-minted adults, having completed their educations—greeted their kin. And in addition to these, there was a new addition to the family.

Bohodar returned to his Bivka, and she was beaming and leading by the hand an auburn-haired daughter, already a year old and staring up at this black-haired and black-bearded newcomer with curiosity. Bohodar noticed that one of her shoulders sat a little bit higher than the other.

‘Hello!’ the returning Crown Prince knelt before her and smiled. ‘And what’s your name?’

‘Gruša,’ the little girl said.

‘Gruša?’ Bohodar looked up at her mother quizzically.

‘Short for Agrafena,’ the proud mother proclaimed.

‘Good to meet you, Gruša,’ Bohodar grinned.

Agrafena pointed to the newcomer. ‘Baťka?

Pribislava dimpled and nodded. ‘Yes. That’s your baťka.’

It was a relief to Bohodar that she could say so openly, and without any shame. Even though there was still the better part of seven years left upon their penance, at least now their children could know and say it: who was their baťka, and who was their mamka.

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What a shame just when things were going so well with the acceptance without trouble of primogeniture the old family problem of incest springs up once more. At least we got to see more clergy on monarch violence though. It's became something of a trademark of this AAR! At least the rebelion was swiftly crushed...
 
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What a shame just when things were going so well with the acceptance without trouble of primogeniture the old family problem of incest springs up once more. At least we got to see more clergy on monarch violence though. It's became something of a trademark of this AAR! At least the rebelion was swiftly crushed...

What can I say? The common people aren't allowed to thrash kings and nobles yet and won't be for a good long while, so having the clergy do it is the next best thing. :p


II.
18 November 1298 – 6 February 1301

The Kráľ barely had time to react. He barely had time to register the flash of gleaming tines and the surging movement of a bulk of grey and brown fur, before he had to make a split second decision.

Hunters and bravos who boast of keeping their calm in the face of a charging animal, and bringing the beast down with the poise of a surgeon, can be found by the dozen for an eighth-obol at any tavern or wayhouse in the Morava Valley. But it was in that moment that Kráľ Radomír understood, in a flash of insight, that these tales were probably all bunk.

All Radomír remembered in the aftermath was that heartbeat’s-breadth of sheer blinding terror, the sudden narrowing of his world to a single strip of earth no longer than fifteen paces between him and the angry charging hart, and the instinctive leap that needed to be made to fight, freeze or flee.

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But in the midst of the hart’s charge, some stray logical part of Radomír’s brain flashed. This flash told him that if he fled, there was no doubt that his son-and-heir, who was standing not ten feet distant from him, would be the hart’s next target. And it was owing only to this sudden awareness that Radomír found himself keeping his feet and levelling his boar-spear. He loved his son too much to do otherwise, and he had already caused Bohodar and Pribislava enough pain as it was.

The impact caused a sharp wrench of liquid pain to shoot up both of his forearms, and the buck’s heavy body alone very nearly yarked the boar-spear out of Radomír’s grasp. But the buck’s own weapons, the tines of his antlers, never reached him. Bohodar was looking on, agape, for a long and excruciating couple of seconds before he came to his senses, drew his knife, and—taking care to keep behind range of the animal’s heavy prongs—despatched the impaled hart with a swift, merciful stab between the ribs just behind its foreleg.

Radomír finally allowed himself to let go of the spear, although both of his arms were on fire with the agony of straining against such a powerful animal in its last, bitter struggle. He let out several hard, ragged breaths of astonishment as the wider reality came slowly flooding back to him.

‘Thanks, son,’ he gasped.

‘No, Father,’ Bohodar bowed meekly. ‘I saw what you did. Thank you.’

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Radomír and Bohodar, between them, handled the deer back to the cart, where the hunting party would be waiting. There was a need of game for the wedding-feast, as Bohodar’s little brother’s bride would be arriving in Olomouc from Debǎr, in Epir to the south.

‘And we do need plenty of food and great variety,’ Radomír had told Bohodar, ‘because you know how your brother likes to eat!’

When Hviezdoslav came back to the cart and saw what his father had killed, a look of awe and respect crossed his face.

‘What a beast!’ the heavy-browed youngster breathed. ‘Would that I had come across such a fine animal! How on earth did you take it down?’

‘It nearly took us down, brother,’ Bohodar told Hviezdoslav.

Bohodar recounted the tale to his brother while the royal company returned to Olomouc, in order to greet Hviezdoslav’s bride Eulalía Balharská of Debǎr. The Moravians had been somewhat expecting a grand, flashy Epirote noblewoman with a long train of servitors, but instead they found somewhat to their surprise a single rider—slender, dark, certainly no beauty, but having a kind of assurance and self-mastery that seemed to make up for it.

‘Which one of you is Hviezdoslav?’ she asked directly.

Her eyes scanned the Moravian party until she found the hefty, well-fed young man with the heavy brows. She looked to his hands—no rings there. And he seemed the right age. She stepped up to him and held out her hand.

Hviezdoslav stooped to kiss it, but Eulalía instead took his and grasped his arm in a proper handshake. She had a strong, firm grip.

‘You look like you’ve got some spirit in you. Good. I won’t abide a weakling.’

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That was all she would say to her pudgy young groom before she allowed herself to be whisked off by her female in-laws to prepare for the wedding. Hviezdoslav had been preparing himself mentally for a challenge in handling a wife… but this brusque, gruff, darkling young woman in front of him hadn’t been that. She would be a challenge of a very different sort. Bohodar came up to Hviezdoslav and offered him a sympathetic hand on the shoulder. Hviezdoslav said nothing, and his elder brother said nothing back. They understood each other.

‘Oh, don’t fret over him. They’ll be fine,’ said Pribislava later to the new groom’s brother.

‘You sound very sure of that,’ replied Bohodar.

‘Oh, I had our Eulalía pegged the moment she rode in,’ Pribislava remarked shrewdly. ‘Behind all her tomboy swagger, she’s really quite a simple soul. And your brother isn’t a fool. He should have no trouble keeping her content.’

~~~​

Indeed – Radomír had quite a lot less trouble from his new daughter-in-law than he did from one of his sons-in-law. Lesana’s husband, Sighvardh Sighbiornssen, had chosen to partake in the usual severan pastime of quarrelling with his neighbours over land. Being the chieftain of the so-called ‘Söðra män’, he had urged his claim in the law-courts over the territory which extended over Uppsala and Östhammar, and several other territories besides. Then, being thwarted there, he had decided to invade. The invasion had not gone well. And now he was asking for Moravian reinforcements.

Both Bohodar and Hviezdoslav took long farewells of their wives. Pribislava had spoken true of her new lady niece and sister-in-law—Eulalía wasn’t exactly hard to please. She doted over Hviezdoslav, especially after seeing him spar with the other soldiers, or when he was wearing his ring-mail and sword-belt. As for Pribislava herself, she was always compelled to hold her nephew-husband tight before she knew he had to leave on campaign. And when he finally had to rise and dress, she herself lay long in the warmth of the hollow where Bohodar had lain and caressed her.

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The men of Uppland had not been expecting a large fleet from the Baltic to land near Östhammar, and for over twenty thousand Moravians to disembark there. Hviezdoslav Rychnovský was at their head, and thanks to his quick organisation they had already established a solid beachhead by the time the Upplandmen arrived.

The battle at Östhammar was brief and decisive. Despite the severané being better-led and better-equipped, being on their home territory, the Moravians had sheer numbers on their side, as well as a careful and solid defence from Hviezdoslav at their lead. With the armies of the Upplandmen broken and on the run, it wasn’t long before all of Uppland was in the Moravians’ grasp, and they put out to sea once more in order to seize the Åland Archipelago.

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The expedition into the north in pursuit of Sighvardh Sighbiornssen’s claim on Uppland turned out to be somewhat prophetic to Moravia’s future fortunes in that region.

Bohodar and Hviezdoslav Rychnovský led their men up to the northernmost shores of the Gulf of Bothnia, and captured for plunder the Swedish fishing-villages that lay along those chilly coasts. And this, during the time of year when the inlets and shorelines were beginning to freeze solid! Although Julevädno was not a party to this dispute, the Sámi of Julevädno still had to play host to Moravian men.

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It proved to be a somewhat wistful time. There was practically no sunlight at this time of year in these northward climes; all the light was from the fires. As Bohodar and Hviezdoslav watched some of the lonely young unmarried men (and a couple of the older married ones as well) among their father’s retinue drink and snuggle down with the Sámi girls who were hosting them, the two brothers exchanged a glance. Their home felt very far away—and Pribislava and Eulalía were awaiting them there. The black-bearded Bohodar and the clean-shaven Hviezdoslav, instead lifted bowls of the local guompa (fermented reindeer milk flavoured with angelica) toward each other and silently toasted their wives.

Unbeknownst to him, Hviezdoslav had actually left his wife pregnant when he had bade her farewell. In Olomouc, Eulalía had given birth to a dark-browed daughter, who was named Dobrohneva. (Either Eulalía valued as much the Bulgarian roots of her family tree as she did the Epirote Greek culture she had adopted, or else she had turned to her in-laws on ideas for what to name her baby.)

After the war for Uppland was won, and Sighvardh was safely ensconced as the high chieftain of all of the Eastern Swedes, the Moravians sailed for home and arrived in Olomouc two weeks after. Eulalía proudly presented her husband with Dobrohneva upon their arrival. Pribislava, for her part, showed Bohodar how much she missed him by dragging him into their bedroom, shutting and locking the door firmly behind her, and not letting him sit up from their bed for three full days. Soon enough, Pribislava’s belly, too, began to show.

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III.
17 April 1301 – 17 April 1303

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‘Is that true?’ Vojtech asked Dorotea. ‘Tell me! Did Baťka really fight against the fierce Vikings in the ice and snow, and did he take their chief fastness upon the shield?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Dorotea answered, wincing a bit as she adjusted her bad leg into a more comfortable position. ‘You’ve seen Baťka’s collection, haven’t you? How can you doubt it?’

It was true. Vojtech had indeed gazed in awe at the chests full of silver coin, silver plate, silver brooches, drinking-horns set with precious jewels, ear-spoons, cutlery and other severan valuables that Baťka and Uncle Hviezdoslav had brought back with him from Uppland. He had traced his finger over the intricate shapes of winding serpents, vines, valknuts and runes that had been lovingly etched into the work by some master Swedish silversmith—or several.

But in truth it wasn’t the silver he coveted so much as the tales of deeds of valour and mastery such as he had been demanding of his elder sister, governing how it was gotten. Vojtech thought that if he could become a bold warrior and leader of men like Uncle Hviezdoslav, much more than this would be his to command. And so he went to his grandfather the Kráľ and demanded of him:

‘Teach me how to fight!’

‘How to fight?’ asked Radomír.

‘And how to lead armies!’

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Radomír looked down fondly at his small, demanding grandson. Precocious Vojtech—clever beyond his years, big and strong and assertive, as well as possessed of a disarming cuteness that would translate later in life into perilous good looks—would, Radomír was sure, prosper in whatever field of study he chose to pursue.

‘Might I ask why,’ Radomír inquired of his grandson, ‘you would wish to pursue the knowledge of an art which may lead to your early death? For does not Our Lord say that those who live by the sword, shall perish by the sword?’

‘Doesn’t He also say there is no greater love than this, but that a man lay down his life for his friends?’

Radomír chuckled. ‘Clever, young one. But that does not answer my question.’

‘I want to know how to lead Moravians to victory upon the battlefield, so that we need fear nothing.’

Radomír smiled sadly. Would that Vojtech never came to know the sorts of fears that still gripped his heart and robbed him of his sleep—the secrets which he had had to conceal; the sins of the blood that lurked in the shadows! If only such fears could be conquered as easily as armies of foes in the field! But he would not rob Vojtech of this innocence quite yet. And such skills were indeed useful to know. At last the Kráľ nodded and assured his grandson he would teach him. The dark-haired boy returned to his parents, satisfied with this answer.

Queen Lucia of Kráľovec, who had been looking on from a corner, stepped toward her husband.

‘Rather a demanding little lordling of a grandson we have there,’ Lucia told him mildly.

Radomír looked to his queen. ‘For one directly in the line of succession, as he is, the knowledge of strategy and skill at arms won’t be wasted.’

‘I’m sure it won’t,’ Lucia remarked. ‘But… you know as well as I do that there is worse coming for this kingdom than arms can solve. God is not mocked—and a right fear of God is far from the minds of many, even within your own family.’

That got a grimace out of Radomír. ‘Well do I know. But as long as I can keep such wrath away from him, I will.’

‘Well, you both have my prayers.’

~~~

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In the west, the news came from Lužica that Vojvoda Grzegorz had formally founded another cadet branch of the Rychnovských line, and set himself up as the head of the Rychnovský-Błota family. And other happier news came closer to home, as Pribislava gave birth to another auburn-headed daughter for Prince Bohodar. Perhaps in token of forgiveness to the father who had grievously wronged her and all of her kin, Pribislava of Ňamec named this fruit of her womb Vratislava.

Even though the Church of Moravia had, under Archbishop German, reluctantly blessed the consanguineous union of Bohodar and Pribislava, the position of these couple who would inherit the Moravian realm was still somewhat… politically tenuous. This unfortunate fact still gave Radomír many misgivings. The previous Patriarch of Constantinople, Iakōvos, had been… pliable. A couple of suitably discreet gifts to the City of the Emperors had kept him suitably quiet. Unfortunately, the new Patriarch Nikētas 2. seemed neither so easily impressed by gifts, nor so inclined to forgive infractions of canon law.

The suitable thing, therefore, was for Radomír to sit down together with Bohodar and attempt to make the new Patriarch see reason by appealing to some facet of his better nature. Father and son wracked their brains between them, figuring out as much as they could about this new Patriarch. Eventually, with Bohodar’s encouragement, Radomír worked out an epistle that spoke to Nikētas’s calm reason and his ability to clearly see all sides of an issue. This epistle never received a response.

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Radomír was more heartened by his young granddaughter. Dorotea had learned, by fits and starts, how to deal with the physical deformity of her right leg and foot. Queen Lucia had continued the Hippocrates-derived chiropractic regimen, which—though the effects were gradual—had noticeably lessened Dorotea’s painful limp, and made her able to place a certain degree of weight on her right foot without horrible wrenching pain. Dorotea herself had learned, of careful and deliberate study, to be patient with her own body, and to take her road to motor function quite literally step by step.

‘You were doing well today,’ Radomír told his granddaughter as she completed her third walking lap of the courtyard. Dorotea carefully, but deftly, set herself down on the grass next to him.

Dorotea dipped her auburn head in pleasure at the compliment from her grandfather, then quoted the Psalter: ‘“This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” I have my own struggle ready-made, only I can choose how to bear it.’

Radomír nodded.

‘And I suppose,’ Dorotea mused to herself, ‘everyone has their struggle, whether a body can see it or not. It’s easy enough to see mine. For most people, they aren’t as obvious.’

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Radomír was, quite frankly, stunned to hear such wisdom coming from the mouth of a nine-year-old girl. And he was doubly stunned that a girl with a painful club foot would be able to see past her pain in order to empathise with others’. But then—should he have been? Who better to understand and pity pain in others, than those who have to live with it themselves, all day and every day? The Kráľ would not have said this aloud to his ward, but he was thankful that Dorotea, far from allowing her inborn infirmity to embitter her, instead had allowed the pain to purify her soul.

Perhaps watching his granddaughter struggle to walk her three laps around the courtyard, and then listening to her compassionate with others’ pain in spite of her own, had put him into a merciful mood. When certain men of Heves showed up in the courtyard, he greeted them cheerfully.

‘What can I do for you, gentlemen?’ asked the Kráľ after the formalities had been observed.

‘Milord Kráľ,’ said the foremost of the men, ‘I am the šafár of Heves. I have come with fifty denár in gold to ransom milord Ctiboh from Olomouc.’

‘Ah, yes!’ Radomír took the money and instructed one of the garrison: ‘Inform the palace guard to release Hrabě Ctiboh from his chambers at once!’

‘The Kráľ is gracious,’ the šafár bowed stiffly.

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Soon enough Hrabě Ctiboh of Heves appeared in the courtyard, his red eyes blinking uncomfortably in the sunlight, and his flaxen-fair features and icy-white skin seeming somehow untouched by his long stint in house-arrest. The hrabě looked to the king, and then to his šafár.

‘One in and one out, eh?’ Ctiboh asked the king with a humourless smile.

‘And who told you about that?’

‘Guards talk,’ Ctiboh remarked calmly, ‘and sometimes they forget that their prisoners have ears. So… Paní Bohumila and Hrabě Vlastislav! Huh. What is it with you Rychnovských and older women?’

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Queen Lucia came into the courtyard just then. Radomír caught her eye and exchanged a smile with her.

‘If you don’t already know, then it’s no use telling you,’ Radomír said to Ctiboh, turning back to him. ‘A fair journey to you, Hrabě. Thank God and your šafár for your freedom, enjoy the winds and the sights of home. And take care not to partake in any… ill-considered rebellions from now on.’

Ctiboh gave the king a bow which was half-genuine and half-mocking.

Radomír turned to his wife once they had departed.

‘And what reply should I make to Knieža Yurii?’ she asked him.

‘Tell the good Knieža that I shall indeed be with him in Siget for the Lord’s Holy Pascha.’

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~~~

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Siget on the Tisa had long been the seat of the Pavelkov family, and later its Koceľuk cadet branch. It was the foremost of the towns of Maramoroš, but it still had long had a look of hardscrabble poverty with its bare wooden walls and skinny feral dogs. Siget had been where Praskovia and Pribislava had spent much of their childhood, after being left there by Queen Mother Vjačeslava Vasilevna in their infancy. The slouch-shouldered Kňažná Dobrava Grigorevna had a good heart, and she had taken care of the girls as best as she had known how, but she hadn’t had the perspicacity or the diligence to enquire effectively into the girls’ origins. Upon her death, Maramoroš had come into the possession of her eldest son Yurii.

Radomír had never been quite sure what to make of Yurii Danilovič. The man was certainly cleverer by far than his mother. And he was the sort of man to wear his feelings on his sleeve and say plainly what he meant, which the Kráľ found quite refreshing. But there was another aspect to his vassal which seemed to Radomír quite cold-hearted and grasping.

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Yurii had made an alliance, through his marriage to Hērakleia, with the influential severská-grécka Lampsiōtēs family which had taken possession of Lake Tuoppa in the far northern regions. Technically Tuoppajärvi was under Radomír’s indirect jurisdiction through Hrabě Ruslav Lampsiōtēs of Litoměřice. Kráľ Radomír had indeed received a delegation of weather-bitten Sámi reindeer herders in brightly-embroidered blue caps and jackets, who knelt and swore him fealty back when he’d first taken the crown. He now regretted that, they having travelled so far, he had treated their oaths rather lightly. Of course at that time, he had been preoccupied with the disappearance of his grandfather, and so he hadn’t paid that much attention to Lake Tuoppa. But evidently that was a fairly quiet neighbourhood…

And that connexion wouldn’t trouble him still, if Kráľ Radomír hadn’t marked the cold indifference with which Yurii Danilovič treated his Nordic-Greek consort, or the bold eyes he made at the younger women in Olomouc when he came to visit. Had that marriage been his idea, or his mother’s? And then there were the rumours that he had connived in the untimely death of at least one of his courtiers…

Still, as the Kráľ and his entourage made their way to the Cathedral of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel in Siget, he couldn’t help but be taken in by the overwhelming joy of the occasion. The Passion of the Lord, His burial in the tomb, and finally that greatest of mysteries, the discovery of His tomb lying empty—the Lord Risen from the dead—all of these entered in upon the King’s earthly worries and dispelled them. Radomír couldn’t help but be borne up by the elated hush as the Holy Fire was borne out from the altar, and he joined in the loud ecstatic cries of ‘Kristus vstal z mŕtvych!’ and ‘Vskutoč, On je vstal!’ which followed thereupon.

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And then, after the Gifts of the Divine Liturgy had been distributed, Yurii himself took up the second place in the joyous procession which was bound straight back for his manor in Siget. He flung open the doors and presented a great feast to them. Whole roast pigs and shanks of mutton graced the table, as did fish, duck, chicken, quail and fowl of every other sort. There were massive loaves of paska bread that had been baked to a perfect honey-gold; there were sweet Easter cheeses in the traditional pyramid shape, stuck with cheerily-burning candles; there were red eggs at every place setting, and massive casks and vats of wine and mead had been set up, ready to be tapped and drunk.

All of the guests set to, but few with more gusto than Yurii himself. Yurii soon became tipsy upon his own stock of drink. Radomír was once again rather disconcerted by his host. Yurii not only imbibed heavily, but once the blood had rushed bright red to his face he began to leer with a clear and alarming intent at his twenty-five-year-old niece, Vjačeslava Daniilovna. The poor woman tried to put him off as well as she could, but Yurii couldn’t seem to take a hint. He would even become aggressive and hostile to any other man who approached her.

Radomír was quite disconcerted by this. Was this his fault? Having sanctioned the marriage of his son to his half-sister, had the other nobles of his realm taken it themselves as sanction for their own incestuous liaisons?

At one point, hoping to spare the poor woman further mortification from her lecherous uncle, Radomír headed off his own kinsman Predslav Rychnovský-Nisa as he attempted to make conversation with Vjačka, to whom at one point he had been betrothed. Predslav was clearly looking to provoke Yurii, whom he had never particularly liked. But Radomír took the young man aside and dropped a fly in his ear about the proper demands of hospitality, despite the growing boorishness of their host.

Knieža Yurii, of course, interpreted the king’s intervention in an entirely different way.

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‘I am much indebted to you,’ the lord of Siget slurred to him. ‘What would you have me do for you in return? Name it—upon my honour—and it shall be done!’

The Kráľ felt miserable. He truly felt that the whole situation was of his own making. He couldn’t take advantage of his inebriated vassal’s poor judgement. He assuaged his vassal with some calm words, and also carefully extricated Yurii from the hole he’d managed to dig for himself.

Thus Predslav and Yurii had both been kept from each other’s throats for the time being, and although the feast continued on in a more cheerful manner once Yurii Danilovič had slept off the previous night’s mead. But what should have been a relaxing feast for the king (who had come to love feasts) turned out instead to be stressful. The whole incident boded quite ill for the kingdom, in the mind of its Kráľ, and called to mind the words of his Kráľovná before about the wrath which would come due for them all.

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Book Six Chapter Nine
NINE
As Go Two…
24 December 1303 – 19 November 1305

‘How do you manage it?’ asked Vojtech, sitting down heavily on the edge of the bridge.

‘Actually,’ Dorotea sighed as she dangled her bad foot over the side with him—evidently at ease now that she wasn’t putting any weight on it, ‘I don’t manage it all that well. Not really. It hurts like fire every time I try walking on it. They keep saying the pain will get less. They keep saying that my leg will get better with the massages, but… it doesn’t.’

‘Really? I can’t tell.’

Dorotea pursed her lips and looked out and down at the Morava River. ‘I don’t want pity. I don’t want to remind people that there’s this… mark of God’s wrath on me.’

Vojtech nodded. ‘I can understand that.’

‘But… there’s nothing wrong with you, though,’ Dorotea tilted her head sceptically. ‘I mean… Gruša has her slouch. And Vratislava’s as tall as me already despite being half my age!’

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Vojtech blew out a breath through his teeth. ‘Ohhhh… there is something wrong with me, though, I know it. I can’t stand being around people. Other people. Strangers. The court… all those voices and laughter… it’s just too much noise. Sometimes even just walking by dedo’s audience chamber gives me… headaches. Nothing like to your pain, I know, but…’

‘Everyone has a struggle,’ Dorotea nodded. ‘That’s why I do my best not to show mine.’

‘… So that’s why you try to help people.’

Dorotea shrugged. ‘If I can.’

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Vojtech shook his head with a laugh. ‘You know, sometimes I get jealous of you.’

‘Jealous of me?’ Dorotea chuckled. ‘Vojta—you’re the heir.’

‘I know, I know,’ Vojtech told his older sister. ‘Even so, next to you I still feel like such a brat sometimes. You make it seem so easy, being a good girl all the time.’

‘The truth is,’ Dorotea told him earnestly, ‘that’s as much a struggle for me as walking.’

~~~

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There was great sadness in Olomouc as Eulalía Balharská-Debǎr’s father, Kaisarios, went to join the Lord—as all of us must do. By that time, however, Eulalía was five months pregnant with Hviezdoslav’s second child. She delivered early that following May—this time a boy, whom they named Mojmír. That name had not been a particularly common one in the Rychnovský line. Hviezdoslav, however, evidently thought himself, and his son, far enough out of the line of succession that he could get away with it—and Eulalía had made no objection.

Kráľ Radomír could not feel the same joy in the birth of Mojmír as his children did. He still felt intensely guilty—personally guilty—for what he was beginning to see as the spiritual and ethical decline of the kingdom he was leading. The amours of Bohumila and Vlastislav, and the barely-concealed passions he had observed at Knieža Yurii’s feast, were only two mild examples of what he feared was happening in every manor and every fastness of his kingdom. And the thought haunted him, that not only his mother’s and his uncle’s sins together, but also his connivance in covering them up—and then his attempt to uphold the sanctity of his son’s marriage as a result—were giving the nobles precisely this licence to behave badly behind closed doors.

And added to this, he felt that he had too long neglected certain affairs of state, particularly those affecting the outlying territories under his sway. For example, he discovered almost too late that the Orthodox Sámi who lived around Tuoppajärvi had been making noises of discontent for years about their immediate Bohemian and seversk‎ý-grécky lieges… a little detail that the Knieža of Bohemia had long neglected to mention in council.

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And so he had sent his kancelár Bystrík 2. of Nitra northward into that lake-dotted country, the better to assuage the Sámi there and assure them of Moravia’s protection and patronage. The commons in the siida had thankfully been persuaded, but Bystrík’s visit had the rather unfortunate side-effect of setting the diplomatic barn on fire with regard to the Kingdom of Duortnoseatnu.

Radomír subsequently made some very careful directives to his kancelár, even as Orthodox Sámi on the southeast side of the lake in question were starting to square off against Catholic Sámi on the northwest. Thankfully, the new King of Duortnoseatnu, named Juvven, was still very much a youngster… and also neither particularly belligerent nor (if truth be told) particularly bright. Juvven was more than willing to talk with Bystrík, with his own siida standing around him for advice. Not only was a ‘Tuoppajärvi War’ thus avoided, but the young Sámi leader sent a most amiable missive to Olomouc in response to Bystrík’s diplomatic efforts… along with a choice reindeer hide and a clay pot of cloudberry preserves.

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It was a small success, but the incident still weighed heavily on Radomír. A great deal these days weighed heavily on Radomír.

Even the ordinary everyday business of running the kingdom seemed to place Radomír on edge. He even caught himself snapping in ill temper at an ordinary bower, who had come to seek the Kráľ’s aid for his village after a rather nasty season of drought.

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The final straw for the king seemed to come, however, when he heard the news from Opole, that Vjačeslava Daniilovna had gotten pregnant… and that the father was none other than her own uncle, Knieža Yurii. And it had been Vjačeslava Daniilovna’s own husband Predslav who had brought all the sordid details of this incestuous affair to light. Radomír retired to his own chambers directly after hearing of this news. And that was the last anyone ever saw of him alive.

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~~~​

‘All I’m saying is, it seems to be something of a pattern, doesn’t it?’ muttered Siloš to another member of the council within earshot of Bohodar, the day after the Kráľ’s body was discovered. ‘Slovoľubec’s son gets killed by a severán and then exhumed as a traitor. The first Kráľ Radomír dies possessed by devils. The second Kráľ Radomír dies untimely of a defect of the heart, and now the third one dies untimely of the same. Now, I’m not saying anything against the kingly line, but I’m telling you, the Rychnovských-Nisa haven’t named any of their firstborn sons Radomír for generations. Doesn’t take a polymath to square that circle.’

Bohodar—soon to be Kráľ Bohodar 4.—ground his teeth and fought down the overwhelming urge to turn around on Siloš Rychnovský-Nisa and tell him to shut his dirty trap. Bohodar knew better than anyone, leaving aside perhaps his mother Lucia, how much the strain of ruling combined with the oppressive sense of guilt over his own personal failures as a son and father, had taken their toll on his father’s health. Nothing to do with his name. But God, not Siloš, would see all and sort all.

When Bohodar made his way to Velehrad, he was still very much so under penance. As a result, the coronation was (unlike previous ones) a very small, very private affair. And the overall attitude which reigned over it was not triumphal or jovial, but instead sombre, and meant to call the new king to mind of the weight he now bore. Bohodar only hoped that that weight would not crush him, the way that it had crushed his father.

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EUROPE AT THE END OF THE REIGN OF RADOMÍR 3. RYCHNOVSKÝ

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Scotland is coming together well, and Frisia is still working on building that North Sea Empire. West Francia broke up hard. Ruthenia is expanding and White Rus' is nearly gone. Galicia-Volhynia is still annoyingly large and influential.

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The Eastern Roman Empire is still rather in a shambles. Thessaly, Epirus, Pontus and Croatia are all independent, as are bits and pieces of what was previously Byzantine-ruled Bulgaria. Arabs are expanding northward. Interestingly, the ERE's base of power is now solidly in the Caucasus.

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The Papal State is becoming a major power in the West. As is the Hafsunid Dynasty in al-Andalus - they will be major troublemakers later on in history...

 
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Interlude Fourteen
INTERLUDE XIV.
Blood of the Saint
16 February 2021


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The door to the dorm room slammed open again and Živana Biľaková stepped through. Cecilia looked toward the short foyer of their dorm room. Živana took off her winter coat, beneath which she had on a stylish evening dress and sweater (both green, selected with care to complement and accentuate her eyes), her red hair was carefully done up and she had (modestly and judiciously) applied blush and eye shadow to effect. But Cecilia noted with concern the gruff tightness with which Živana tugged off her high heels, and the set to her plucked red brows which had not quite become a furrow… but which suggested one. The evening’s date had not gone well.

‘Živka?’ asked her roommate.

‘Fine,’ Živana told her. ‘Just fine. Brilliant.’

Cecilia sat silently in her favourite chintz as Živana strode over to the table, set down her bag, took a breath and went to the shared washroom adjacent. Cecilia continued her studied silence. She heard the tap turn on. Then off. Then a red updo appeared from around the corner to the washroom.

‘Cili?’

‘Mm?’

‘How… relevant… should a bloke’s hobbies to a second date?’

Cecilia thought a bit. ‘I suppose it depends on the hobby.’

Živana’s face was the model of exasperation as she emerged from the washroom. ‘Moth collecting.’

‘Moth collecting.’ Cecilia raised her eyebrows. ‘Well, I suppose that wouldn’t be so bad…’

‘Well, you know, maybe it wouldn’t have been. But Ackermann spent half an hour describing to me, in detail, the best methods for… preserving the eyes and feelers. Over dinner.’

‘Still Ackermann and not Thilo, then,’ Cecilia noted shrewdly.

‘Ackermann.’ Živana confirmed decisively as she carried herself over to a chair and sat heavily. ‘Do you know of any other nerdy blokes who, just for example, collect toy soldiers or model trains or old coins? Anything that… wasn’t once alive, and that you don’t have to pin to a display board? Send ‘em my way.’

‘Well, better not dwell on it,’ said Cecilia. ‘Did you already do the essay for Grebeníček, for Thursday?’

‘Mostly done.’

‘Which topic did you choose?’

‘Assassinations and technological innovation. Basically, I’m arguing in my paper that the burst of technical advances in the late 14th century weren’t wholly owing to the vigour and drive of Radomír 4., but instead more so to the reality and prevalence of political murders thirty to fifty years prior. Killing by stealth grew so common that it came to require different and ingenious methods. And this led to a veritable explosion of far more respectable new contraptions, uses for everyday chemicals, and even battle tactics. I can show you the research I’ve done so far…’

Cecilia laughed. ‘Grebeníček will probably disagree with your thesis. And still give it a 1.5.’

‘What’s your topic?’ asked Živana.

‘Saint Dorotea of York and Utrecht,’ Cecilia said.

‘Saint Dorotea?’ Živana traced her chin thoughtfully. ‘I remember I’ve seen icons of her, at our church in Chust. She was a martyr, wasn’t she?’

Cecilia nodded. ‘Her major shrine is in Lindisfarne, in Britain—where she’s called “Saint Dorothy”. The remains of Saint Dorotea were transferred to the abbey there after the defeat of the Adamites and the restoration of Catholicism in by King Étienne 4. of Luxembourg, as a gesture of goodwill to the new King Cenwulf of England. Though why Étienne didn’t return them here to Moravia…’

Cecilia turned her laptop toward Živana, who peered toward it with interest. On the screen was an Italian fresco of a fair young woman with a tad morose-looking face and a halo, holding a book in one her right hand and a cluster of roses with thorns in the other.

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Cecilia tapped the touchpad on her laptop, and this image was replaced with an Orthodox icon, which was clearly of the same young woman. Upon her head was a golden circlet. In one hand she held a three-bar cross twined about at the base with a red rose with thorns, and in the other hand she held a scroll bearing the inscription:

ОДОВЗДАМ ВШЕТКО
ЛЕН НЬЕ ЛАСКУ
А НЬЕ ПРАВДУ

‘All things will I surrender—but not love, and not the Truth,’ Živana read.

‘Mm,’ Cecilia nodded. ‘And she didn’t surrender those. She never abjured the Orthodox Faith, even though she was mutilated, maimed, and brutally tortured in every way possible by the Adamites. To the end she professed that her heart belonged only to Jesus Christ, and to the man she had in His name lawfully married: Torgil son of Flosi, the Jarl of Jorvig.’

‘I can see why she appeals to you,’ Živana said.

‘Oh, not just to me,’ Cecilia Bedyrová protested. ‘The cultus of Saint Dorotea was wildly popular here in Moravia even shortly after her death.’

‘Oh?’

‘According to contemporary accounts and to her later hagiographies, she appeared miraculously at the Battle of Znojmo, and intervened between the Frisians and Kráľ Bohodar 4. when he was trapped and wounded, and about to be slain. According to legend, Dorotea saved her father’s life.’

‘But the king lost the Battle of Znojmo,’ Živana observed.

‘Right! The Čističe won the battle, and it’s arguable that they even won the war. But she—Saint Dorotea—won the hearts of the Moravian people.’

‘Do you really believe that? On account of a hagiographic miracle-story like that?’

‘It doesn’t matter whether I believe it or not,’ Cecilia shook her head. ‘Of course you know what the 14th century was like in Moravia: a trap around every corner and a dagger behind every back. The heir to the throne was married to… well, you know what his first wife was like. The moral authority of the Crown had all but disintegrated.’

‘Yeah…’

‘When the Čističe showed up in Nitra, they promised to “console” the kingdom, right? Cleanse it from the taints of greed and murder and lust, and restore it to its rightful glory. And their way of life appealed to many—they were pescatarians, some of them were great ascetics, some of them refused to even pick up weapons. Lots went over to their side, commoners and nobles. Even some of the overlords of Nitra were adherents.’

‘Yes, I know all that. I don’t need Grebeníček’s lecture twice, thanks.’

‘Look, the point is that Orthodoxy was on the ropes. If they weren’t part-and-parcel of the moral degradation and intrigues of the Moravian 14th century, they certainly weren’t unaffected by it. That’s why the Čističe were so popular! They were promising purity, asceticism, honour. And along comes this martyr, the king’s firstborn daughter, who went innocently to her death at the hands of Gnostic persecutors, with the name of Christ upon her lips!’

‘I see where you’re going with this,’ Živana smirked.

‘As it turns out, she was a major rallying point for the Church of Moravia. The Čističe couldn’t compete with this girl who embodied all the virtues they were preaching, plus the Faith! I’m arguing in my paper that if Saint Budimír saved Orthodoxy in Moravia in the 1200s, then Saint Dorotea did a better job saving the Church in the 1300s.’

‘Aiming for that 1.0, are you?’ Živana asked. ‘You’ve clearly done your research.’

‘Well, I just haven’t found the right moth-collector to take out for the night yet,’ Cecilia ribbed.

Živana gave Cecilia a firm but good-natured jostle with her shoulder.

‘You want some help working on your paper for Thursday? Or would you rather just veg?’

‘For now, give me the vegging,’ Živana sighed. ‘I’ll work on murder and contraptions later.’
 
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Book Six Chapter Ten
Merry Christmas to one and all of my readers! What better way to start off after Christmas than with a new king? (By the way: go vote in the Yearly AARLand Year-End AwAARds while there's still time!)


The Reign of Bohodar 4., Kráľ of Veľká Morava

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TEN
Bukovina Ballads
21 December 1305 – 4 September 1307


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The winter following the installation of Bohodar 4. as Kráľ of Veľká Morava was an eventful one. The darkest night of the year came, in the forefeast of the Lord’s Nativity, and only one rider was out in the snow amid the all-too-soon-gathering dusk. Cloaked and cowled against the cold, the rider was middling in height for a man, but slender and lithe. Although the frigid air clearly made him stiff, his ease and grace in the saddle suggested a youngster little over a boy’s years, but trained from youth in riding. And although the mount he rode was an ordinary workhorse, the young man himself had an erectness, firmness and soundness of form which suggested that he was of no mean birth.

He approached the gatekeeper outside the town walls of Olomouc. The voice of the watchman came down to him:

‘God greet you, stranger! You’d better find shelter and quickly, night’s dropping fast!’

‘If you’ll admit me,’ a young, clear voice called up, ‘that’s what I intend!’

‘Well, it is nearly Christmas,’ the watchman said. ‘I’ll admit you. I’m sure you can find a room to spare at one of our ale-houses.’

‘Obliged, sir,’ the well-mannered young man gave a gauntleted salute.

As he rode in through the gates, however, he did not turn off the main road toward any of the ordinary ale-houses as the watchman had suggested, but he rather rode northward through the town toward Olomouc Castle. When at last he cleared the midtown bridge and had made his way up the winding hillside road toward the castle walls, this time his reception was a good deal gruffer.

‘Hold where you are! We have a dozen arrows nocked and trained on you.’

The stiffening of the young man’s shoulders betrayed surprise, and he did stop his horse in his tracks. But he showed no other sign of fear.

‘Who comes upon the castle near nightfall, clearly not from the town, and bearing no device? Speak!’

‘My name is Torgil. My father is Flosi, who’s Jarl in Jorvig.’

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‘A far-off place indeed,’ came the doubtful answer from the battlements. ‘Is there anyone who can swear to your tale, or vouch for your person?’

‘Of late I’ve been in Bihar,’ called up the youngster. He was cold, but it seemed he didn’t resent being held out in it to answer questions. ‘The court there can attest readily enough to who I am.’

He waited, and waited. No further questions came. It seemed the men above were taking counsel as to whether or not to admit him. Eventually, however, the portcullis opened to him, and the snowbound courtyard beyond lay ahead.

Upon riding into the courtyard, he was greeted by some grooms who took from him his horse and saddlebags. As he did so, one certain onlooker within the courtyard got a glimpse of the young man’s face. It was fair and clean-shaven, still practically a boy’s. He had a pair of merry, sparkling eyes and a small, narrow mouth that suggested benevolence and a sweet temper. He was attractive: there was no doubt about that—the onlooker’s eyes roved down his neck and along his lean, spare form. He moved off in the direction of the keep, no doubt desirous of keeping warm.

The onlooker followed him with her gaze until he disappeared within the hall. Then she turned toward the stables, where the grooms had taken his horse. With care, she set off in that direction.

She shuffled. Her right leg could not fully sustain her weight.

~~~​

The feasting-hall was brightly lit and toasty as the roaring Christmas fire greeted him. There was no meat or cheese in the hall; these were high days of holy expectation, with only four nights until the commemoration of Christ’s birth, and so the fare was Lenten. The mood in the hall was also suitably subdued and still, but with a quiet warmth. Torgil never minded the fast—even a vegetable stew or a porridge would suit him well enough right now, as long as it was hot!

Com hingaþ, outlanding!

Torgil’s face shot up at the man who had spoken to him in… passable English. The eyes of the Kráľ of Moravia met his. Obediently, Torgil went up toward the king and made an obeisance. Bohodar indicated an empty seat by his side with his hand, and made a motion for the young man to sit.

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‘You speak English?’ asked Torgil of the king in surprise.

‘I’ve learned several tongues,’ Bohodar assured Torgil warmly, answering in English. ‘Found I had a talent for it after learning my lady’s Ruthenian dialect. And my ancestor Letopisár was half-English himself, did you know? Anyway, even if it was not clear to my guards that you are who you say you are—you gave me at least a partial assurance of your sincerity, just now. Sit! Eat!’

A handsome woman with heavy-lidded eyes and long auburn hair appeared at his elbow. She bore a pitcher of beer. In a single smooth, suave motion, like the expert hostess she was, she plucked the empty cup from off the table in front of Torgil and handed it back to him, quite full. Not a drop spilled.

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‘Much obliged, milady,’ said Torgil.

‘We observe English customs for an English guest,’ Kráľovná Pribislava told him sincerely. ‘By your lights I should serve you the ale. You are most welcome here, sir.’

‘My lady always enjoys meeting new folk,’ Bohodar smiled beneath his dark beard before leaning conspiratorially toward Torgil and stage-whispering to him: ‘Do me a personal favour tonight and indulge her curiosity about your travels. Else she will bombard me with questions after.’

Pribislava swatted her consort with a complacent hand. ‘Don’t be an ass, Daška. Using your wife as a shield for your own curiosity—shame on you.’

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That set off a small storm of cheerful banter, light insults and flirting between aunt-wife and nephew-husband which Torgil chuckled to hear and behold. Whatever the rights and wrongs of their relationship, it was clear to the young Anglo-Norse that the two of them were indeed well-suited to each other. But soon they were interrupted when another person—actually two—burst in upon the gathered assembly in the hall. One of them, the taller of the two with a surly look upon his face, Bohodar recognised as one of the grooms. The other—

Dorotea shuffled forward with winces, which her father knew not to be as much from the pain of her club foot as from deep mortification. The groom brought her up close to the king, and then whispered in the king’s ear out of the hearing of the other guests:

‘I found her by the guest stables, going through Burgomaster Ctiboh’s belongings. I think she must have gotten the wrong stall, though—she went in right after we brought in the stranger’s horse. I’m betting it’s his goods she was after.’

Bohodar’s brow darkened at his daughter. ‘Well…?’

‘Vojta put me up to it. Well… he—he dared me to,’ Dorotea’s eyes flicked back and forth as her cheeks reddened further. She gulped heavily. Bohodar was about to open his mouth again, but it was Pribislava who took her daughter hard by the wrist.

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‘Think better on your words, girl,’ said the irate mother. ‘Vojta’s upstairs; you know he hates gatherings. He can’t have seen Torgil’s horse arrive. Now—why don’t you reconsider your tale to your father?’

Dorotea’s gaze turned around to the youth she had seen come into the courtyard. Torgil, of course, didn’t know her from Eve. But her father understood Dorotea very well. He could tell that she had noticed Torgil, liked him by looks, and was abashed to have been caught doing something naughty in his presence. He could see behind his daughter’s eyes that she was quickly making a decision. She drew in a deep breath and then spoke.

‘I did it,’ she murmured quietly. ‘I searched through Ctiboh’s saddlebags thinking they were the newcomer’s. I was curious. I’m sorry.’

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Torgil turned in his seat toward the king. ‘I know it’s not the done thing to eavesdrop on a private household matter, and of course I can’t speak for this—Ctiboh?—but speaking for myself as the, er… incidental person of interest, I think a spot of forgiveness might be in order for your daughter. You can’t imagine the mischief I got up to when I was her age. What—thirteen? Fourteen?’

Pribislava, Bohodar and the groom had all turned toward their guest. The Kráľ’s jaw dropped. ‘You speak Moravian?’

Torgil chuckled. ‘Try not to look so surprised, your Highness. I couldn’t very well have gotten this far on a journey to Bihar without it, now, could I?’

Dorotea’s face had taken on the look of a lost child who has suddenly seen the light of home as she gazed down at Torgil. She had liked him well enough to look at before, yes. But now a new and frightening urge had arisen in her breast at hearing him ask for her father’s clemency.

‘Well, lass,’ Bohodar prompted her, making her start where she stood. ‘What do you say to the man?’

‘I’m—I’m sorry,’ the poor girl stammered. ‘And—thank you.’

‘Off with you now,’ said the king gently. ‘We’ll talk later.’

~~~​

‘Do you think he really is the son of the Jarl of Jorvig?’ asked Pribislava after they had retired.

‘His tales do have the ring of truth to them,’ Bohodar stroked his beard. ‘Bivka, I’ve been on campaign to some of the places he describes. I think he’s been there himself, or else knows someone well who has. And—forgive me for saying it—he’s rather a young one to be playing the charlatan.’

‘Charlatans all start out somewhere,’ Pribislava shrugged and tossed her hair back. ‘But in this case, Daška, I think you’re right. I observed him carefully this evening—he takes to halls like a fish to water. He’s suave… but he’s thoughtful, even-tempered, forgiving. Those aren’t exactly characteristics I normally associate with the severané.’

‘He certainly forgave our ill-behaved daughter this evening. Very prettily.’

‘She likes him, you know.’

‘Mm.’

‘And he likes her.’

‘How do you figure that?’ asked her husband.

‘I doubt he would have stepped in like that for her if he hadn’t wanted to make a good impression, Daška. He followed her out of the hall with his eyes—didn’t you notice? And then afterwards he was giving me the, um… “prospective son-in-law once-over”.’

‘The what?’

Pribislava chuckled. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about. You’re a man. Kakova mať, takova i doč, right? So if you want to know how the daughter’s figure will age, well…’ she made a sweep of the hand, the length of her torso from shoulders to thighs. ‘Quite the bold eye, that one. And not just for the ladies, either.’

‘Rascal!’

‘Isn’t he?’

‘So what are you saying?’ asked the Kráľ. ‘Do we… encourage him to stay?’

‘At least we should keep him long enough for us to confirm his story,’ Pribislava said shrewdly. ‘Doveräj, no proveräj. And bear in mind that the son of a jarl is no poor catch even for the daughter of a king.’

~~~​

The messenger who went to Bihar and back verified Torgil’s story, and more: Bihar’s lord had a seal bearing the inscription of the Jarldom of Jorvig from the lad, of which he had provided an inken facsimile to the messenger to present to the King.

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As for Torgil, some consideration did have to be made for his room and board—and that was not light. But the son of Jarl Flosi was indeed prevailed upon to extend his stay in Moravia at least until the following Pentecost… and also to receive Dorotea Rychnovská’s hand in betrothal. It was to both the Kráľ’s and the Kráľovná’s satisfaction, that neither Torgil nor Dorotea seemed displeased at all with the arrangement. And another strange but not unwelcome turn that Torgil’s betrothal to Dorotea had taken for the king, was that it had caused Kráľ Bohodar to look afresh at his wife.

He remembered vividly the rages of jealousy that took him when Pribislava flirted with other men, when she was younger. And just now, when she had mentioned to him Torgil’s regard—innocent or not—Bohodar again felt the stirrings of that old protectiveness simmer within him.

The meanwhile, though, loomed between. Back then, Bivka and he had been only a girl and a boy. He had taken her by the hand and kissed her. She had kissed him back. They became sweethearts, and then husband and wife. They had bonded over their beautiful, sweet, perfect-though-deformed daughter. And then his father had let the anvil drop right on his head. Their nuptial wine soured to vinegar, when the revelation had been made cruelly public that Bivka was in fact both his blood aunt and also his blood first cousin once removed. The whole of the life they had made together had been sin.

True, Bivka had offered him the choice to annul, and he had refused. He had remained Bivka’s husband; she had remained Bohodar’s wife. But life is not so simple. A chasm had appeared between them. Their innocence, such as it was, had been crushed. Could he ever embrace her again without reserve, as they once had done, knowing that she was his aunt? Had not three of their children been born with some mark of their sin—Dorotea’s club foot; Gruša’s bent spine; Vratka’s abnormal height and growth? This was something they did not speak of together, but it had still lain there.

Now, though—Bohodar wanted to embrace his wife again, truly, as wife. Could it be done? Why could it not be done?

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Of long experience he knew her tastes—almost as well as he knew his own. She loved the ballads and folktales of her ancestral home, of the southern Bukovina. He hired básniki from Sučava to tell him of these ballads, and how to sing them in the dialect she had grown up with. And he had serenaded her with them one night. That had not gone unnoticed.

One night after he sang, when the rain beat down in the courtyard, the wind howled outside, the lightning flashed and the thunder rolled…

‘Daška… Come to bed. Please. I don’t want to be alone.’

Bohodar stood and walked to her. A crash of thunder boomed—close. Pribislava started and clung to Bohodar. Bohodar slid his arms around her. And they stood there together in their chambers. She clung there long—and then dug in her fingertips and clung harder, her face buried in his shoulder. When she looked up at him, her heavy-lidded eyes shining with some strong but inscrutable emotion, he leaned down. Pribislava flung her arms around Bohodar’s neck and kissed him with every ounce of passion she had in her body. She surrendered herself to him, as simply and as thoroughly as she had on her wedding-night.

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Book Six Chapter Eleven
ELEVEN
Riders and Bombards
14 December 1307 – 18 April 1311

The first years of Bohodar 4.’s reign were quiet as far as foreign policy went. This was a particular surprise given how controversial his marriage to Pribislava had proven to be. There was very little that disturbed Moravia’s calm from without. Even the Červený of Galicia-Volhynia were proving to be relatively quiet.

That fact was largely owing to his consort. Although Bivka had been raised in relative poverty and ignominy—a bastard, parentless child in the court at Siget before coming to Olomouc—it sometimes seemed as though she were a born hostess and peacemaker. She was capable of holding interest with any sort of company on the great bulk of common topics of conversation.

Mellow and gracious as she was, no guest ever left the hall at Olomouc feeling unappreciated or bored. Kráľ Bohodar was impressed by this, and he was equally impressed that, although she was well aware of her formidable social elegance, Pribislava didn’t abuse it or exult in it. The impish curiosity and puckish good looks she’d had as a child, had matured into a genuine caring warmth toward guests and a stately bearing that guaranteed Moravia’s good standing among the princely courts of Europe.

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Unfortunately, even Pribislava’s redoubtable queenly influence could not prevent certain mishaps from occurring. The Lampsiōtēs-Tuoppajärvi situation again came very close to boiling over, as disputes over fishing rights on both sides threatened to escalate into blood-feud. Knieža Bystrík 2., in his attempt to keep up his good relations with King Juvven of Duortnoseatnu, unfortunately made a faux-pas which guaranteed the Northern Sámi fishing rights on both sides of the lake. Only later did the Kráľ learn that this as good as constituted a valid claim not just to the waters but to the shorelines. Needless to say, the Skolt and Kildin subjects of the Moravian Crown were not happy with Bystrík’s performance this time.

But to the Moravian Kráľ, this constituted a minor slip-up on the very outer fringes of his sway. Of greater concern to him was that his kinsman Knieža Ostromír of Česko had carried on a torrid affair with a married woman in his own court, and even fathered a child by her. Bohodar had little choice, when the matter came to light, but to enforce the law and place the adulteress under enclosure. Having seen the pock-marked woman as she was led in, Bohodar didn’t understand the attraction she held for Ostromír. Still, eventually the Knieža did pay the fine in silver which the law demanded for her release.

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The Kráľ was taken ill in the year 6817. It was the Queen Mother Lucia who attended him at the bedside.

‘Tunic off, son,’ she told him. ‘This might not be pleasant, but it should help.’

Pribislava watched as her husband lay back, and fought down a wave of revulsion as her mother-in-law took a knife and a bucket of live frogs, sliced them open, and placed them innards-side down on her husband’s naked torso. Bohodar didn’t flinch at this treatment, though he winced a little and shivered at the feeling of the slimy cold carcases against his body. Then Queen Pribislava noticed something alarming. Lucia was moving her left arm when slicing the frogs in a peculiar way. In attempting to understand why, she saw that on the side of Lucia’s ribcage, just underneath her arm, there was a large, unsightly lump.

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Lucia finished her treatment, gave some reassuring words to her son, and left the room. Pribislava followed her out into the stone corridor.

Mamka…’ she called.

Lucia turned.

Ty v porädku?’

Pribislava indicated Lucia’s left side with her hand. Lucia gave her a sad smile. She made no attempt to hide her condition from a sister- and daughter-in-law she had come to love.

‘My humours have long been out of balance,’ Lucia said. ‘Excess of drink, I’m afraid. Melancholia has overtaken me: an excess of black bile in my body. This… karcinoma… is the unfortunate result. I haven’t been able to rid myself of it despite all my best efforts, and it only keeps growing.’

‘How long have you known?’

‘Years,’ Lucia told her sadly. ‘It has caused me pain every time I move my arm. And before you ask… I do believe it will kill me, within a matter of months.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Pribislava took her sister- and mother-in-law’s hands. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t be,’ Lucia shook her head. ‘I am shriven—at peace with all and at enmity with none. I have had a long life. I am going to my rest in Christ soon.’

When the end did come at last for Lucia of Kráľovec, it came quietly in the night, early in December before her son had recovered from his illness. She was granted her final resting-place in Velehrad in the section of the cathedral yard reserved for the Rychnovských, adjacent to her husband Radomír 3.

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~~~​

Bohodar mourned his mother deeply, from the Christmas season all through the following Lent. Although he was still in mourning, he did not forsake his father’s custom of spending Pascha visiting the court of one of his vassals. In this case, he spent the feast of Christ’s Resurrection in Nitra, in the court of his kancelár, Bystrík 2. This season of the oncoming spring sent a molten drop of joy into the midst of the Kráľ’s sorrows: the promise that his mother would be raised whole into life everlasting, with no taint of the pain of her final days. The Kráľ joined the feast after the Paschal Liturgy and the procession through the town with a heart still grieving, but somehow lightened.

At the feast, the Kráľ’s eye caught that of the Purkmistrička of Bíňa—it seemed she was deliberately keeping to the corner. She was in a pickle, though, as she was sitting right in the path of the guests filing through into the hall. Bohodar quickly tapped his glass and proposed a toast to the host of the feast—thereby turning the guests’ attention to a much more amenable Bystrík as his vassal slipped gratefully out of the line of contact. The host called for the guests to be seated, and Bohodar found himself seated next to a young hrabě, Dioclès Mojmírovec of Hont.

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Bohodar gave the Paschal greeting to Dioclès, who answered with a soft but heartfelt ‘Vskutoč, On je vstal!’ Half-French and half-Nitran, born with the loan-translated name of Bohuslav, tall, slender, goateed Dioclès struck Bohodar as a quiet and well-mannered youth.

‘I hear that you lost your mother this past year,’ condoled Dioclès. ‘I am sorry, as I am sure that all your subjects are, for your loss. I am sure she is with God now.’

‘Thank you, Dioclès.’

‘It is hard to lose someone so close, and then to be in a position of lordly responsibilities and duties, without the space and time to grieve properly.’

‘You are speaking… from experience?’

Elas à dire, I lost my own mother when I was five,’ Dioclès sighed. ‘Murdered. Don’t know by whom.’

‘I’m sorry indeed,’ the Kráľ answered. That at least answered the king’s question about his French name, accent and mannerisms—he must have been raised by his morganatic father after his mother died.

Dioclès shook his head. ‘Non, non… it is alright, meon Roi. It happened long ago. I have… not made peace with Mother’s death, and may never yet, but it is an old battle and one which I win as much as lose. What was it Marc Aurèle said? “The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time”?’

‘You read the Meditations?’ asked Bohodar.

Por quoi bien seür, meon Roi! “I search after truth—by which man never yet was harmed.”’

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From the Meditations of the last Good Emperor in the West, Bohodar proceeded with Hrabě Dioclès to the Stoa in general and its disputes with the Peripatetics and the Middle Academy. Throughout the conversation over the feast, Bohodar was gratified that his initial impression of Dioclès was correct. Though mild of manner and soft of speech, Dioclès had a penetrating mind that grasped the subtleties of the differences between the classical schools of thought, and insight into each of the ways of life the schools advocated—and he could deliver himself of some decided but well-considered arguments. Bohodar had seldom had such entertaining discourse with one of his vassals.

The feast ended, and Bohodar took a fond farewell of Dioclès. The discussion of philosophy in Nitra had given him new perspective. If nothing else, Bohodar returned to Olomouc with a renewed sense of looking forward. He would apply himself to settling his son, who would soon come of age, with a spouse.

~~~​

In that pursuit, sadly, Kráľ Bohodar made what would come to be one of the worst decisions of his reign.

He once again looked to the north, to Grodno from whence his mother came, to look for a bride for his son. He made several inquiries which resulted in dead ends. However, at that time, the hall of the Baltic-Norse borgstöre of the nearby town of Tilsit[1] was playing host to a young woman of the rather obscure and little-regarded Byzantine house of Komnēnos[2], named Alexandrinē. Inquiring about her to the borgstöre, the King received a reply from him to the effect that Alexandrinē Komnēnē was mild and placid in temper and had a keen intellect, but that she valued rather too highly her fine foods and creature comforts. He appended also that the Komnēnoi had for the past three generations been Gnostics, rather than Orthodox, but that the girl herself had no particularly strong religious opinions. But, the borgstöre assured him, the girl would be more than happy to wed a Moravian prince.

When he discussed what he knew of Alexandrinē Komnēnē with his son, Vojtech considered.

‘She comes from the same place as babka did?’

‘Same region. Tilsit is under severan rule, though, not Ruthenian.’

‘And… she’s Gnostic?’

‘Her family is. I think she’ll be more than happy to be received into the Church if it means marrying you.’

Vojtech’s mind was working—his father could tell. Vojtech was withdrawn, but he had never been a lad who asked for much, and he was lenient and tolerant in temper. No doubt he could get along well with most women, though when it came to choosing a wife the lad was naturally quite serious. Kráľ Bohodar planned some additional inducement.

‘The borgstöre of Tilsit sent along a sketch of her face.’

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Vojtech took the parchment from his father and looked over it carefully. The artist’s impression suggested a woman of dark complexion, with a broad square face, a full-lipped mouth and wide brown eyes. She wore her hair in an elaborate coiffure of the Byzantine style, suggesting that however far she was from home, at least in one respect she hadn’t forgotten her roots.

‘She’s pretty,’ Vojtech said simply. It wasn’t said with any particular strength of desire, but that in no way detracted from the sincerity of his appreciation.

‘Is that a yes?’ asked Bohodar.

‘Sure,’ Vojtech nodded.

~~~​

The man who came to retrieve Dorotea Rychnovská from Olomouc and make her his bride, did not come this time as a solitary cloaked rider whose identity had to be begged from Bihar. This time, it was Jarl Torgil Flosason who came in state, with a formidable band of house-carls at his side, beneath the vanes of Jorvig and of the Sigurding clan from which he descended. With him also were two older women, both of a similar blonde colouring to his own, and dressed in fine linen gowns with good wool aprons, and massive jewelled silver brooches and girdle-ends to display their wealth.

Dorotea was on tenterhooks the whole time, awaiting her groom. And when he arrived in the courtyard, she set off at a rapid shuffle to meet him, just beside her father. Lo, how Torgil had let his beard grow! The long yellow strands hung down halfway to his navel, and were parted in two long, thick braids. But despite the change to his appearance, Dorotea could tell it was still the man she’d taken a fancy to when she was younger. He had the same sparkling blue eyes, bright and merry.

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‘Dorotea,’ Torgil gave her a slight bow and kissed her outstretched hand. He then gestured to the two women at his side. ‘May I introduce you to my sisters—Gerd and Astridh?’

Dorotea made her trembling courtesies to both women, who answered her with smooth ones of their own. Her first impressions of her groom’s sisters were not promising. Gerd was giving her a look of studied but detached (and, Dorotea felt, insincere) pity at the sight of her lame right leg. And Astridh simply regarded her with haughty disdain, as though she were not worthy of marrying their brother. Still, these were now to be her sisters-in-law, and she would treat them accordingly.

‘Hunþjof,’ called Torgil.

One of the muscular, heavyset house-carls stepped out of formation, grabbed either end of a heavy chest and lifted it. Torgil unfastened and opened the lid to reveal a small fortune in gold and jewels.

‘The bride-price,’ Torgil told the Moravian king. ‘And does Dorotea have her dowry?’

The settlement was made in the exchange of precious gifts and money—which to the mercantile Anglo-Norse way of thinking was the most important part of the transaction. But clearly to Dorotea the coin and jewels were merely a distant second in comparison to the prize she had standing before her. What were the riches of the world to her, when she would have the gold of his hair and beard, and the sapphires of his eyes? When she returned with him to Jorvig at last, she looked content indeed.

‘Milord,’ Knieža Yurii Koceľuk approached him.

‘What is it, Yurii Danilovič?’

‘Come with me. There are two things that I would like you to witness.’

The Kráľ and his elderly vassal left the castle and walked over the bridge of the Morava. The Kráľ knew the road that Yurii was leading him on—it was the road toward the training field that the maršal and his drillmasters had used for centuries. However, when they approached the field, it looked strange—and with good reason. There were what looked like several mock towers and walls of masonry, which had been erected along one side of the field. What they were protecting the Kráľ couldn’t tell: it simply looked like one unfinished section of town wall.

‘Stand this way, O Kráľ. We don’t want you hit by any debris.’

‘Debris—?’

Yurii gave a hand signal. Somewhere down the field a horn sounded. There was a crack like thunder, and distant plumes of smoke. A mere second later there was another, much nearer and more alarming clap that rang in Bohodar’s ears. He looked back at the masonry—several large craters had been taken out of the stonework, and one of the mock towers was razed at the middle.

Bože moj,’ the king crossed himself. ‘What dark magic is this?’

‘Black powder weapon,’ said Yurii Danilovič. ‘The concept we borrowed from Taugats: we’re calling it a bombarda. Forge-welded iron bore—requires the very best craftsmanship. Furthest we’ve shot with it is a thousand paces—but you see how effective it is at half that range. We have six pieces at the ready, and we have enough footmen trained to work twenty at need.’

‘Well. Well,’ Bohodar muttered, his head still ringing from the explosion and the impact of the weapon. He hadn’t quite grasped yet that this development would at one point render obsolete ballistae and catapults and other mechanical siege engines using rope tension and lever, and that the end of his age of the world was now within their sights. ‘That’s one thing. What’s the other?’

‘Here they come now.’

A tight formation of riders in full mail and gleaming helms appeared, and then led a perfect sweep of a cross-field charge within the king’s sight with their training lances. Trained warhorses—also armoured.

Bohodar was immediately much more impressed than with the bombardy. ‘How many riders?’

‘A hundred and a handful,’ replied Yurii. ‘We should be able to scrounge up thirty or forty more from the garrison, and teach them to ride these beasts.’

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‘Excellent,’ said Bohodar. ‘We shall be prepared for what comes!’


[1] Present-day Sovetsk in Russia’s Kaliningrad Oblast.
[2] In another world, in another time, the Komnēnoi would go on to become one of the great Imperial dynasties of the Eastern Roman Empire, producing emperors such as Alexios 1., Iōannēs 2. and Manuēl 1. However, in the world we are speaking of, the Komnēnoi never rose to such prominence: the great Imperial dynasties of this time, after the decline of the Macedonian line, were the Katotikoi (in-laws of the Macedonian Emperors who inherited peacefully) and the Dekanoi (who took power through a palace coup).
 
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Book Six Chapter Twelve
TWELVE
Murder in the Feast-Hall
25 April 1311 – 2 May 1314


I.

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Yurii stood suddenly from his seat at the head of the table. Kráľ Bohodar, who was seated next to him, looked to him in alarm.

‘Where—?’ Yurii gasped raggedly. ‘Where am I—?’

He nearly lost his balance as he tried to walk. Bohodar stood as well, and could tell upon looking at him that something was badly wrong. His face was flushed, and the pupils of his eyes had spread so that his irises were nothing more than two hair-thin blue bands around them. Yurii’s body shoved heavily against him as the poor man lost his footing completely, and tried to keep him from falling.

‘They…’ Yurii whispered, ‘they’re coming… coming out of the walls…’

Bohodar looked around at the walls of the hall of Siget. They were the same wooden planks that they had always stood there. Apart from the looks of astonishment and dismay on the faces of the guests as they looked to their host, nothing at all seemed to be out of the ordinary about them.

‘Yurko,’ Bohodar whispered to him, ‘let’s get you to bed. Come on…’

Yurii clung to Bohodar in alarm at whatever he imagined was coming out of the walls, but there was no strength or awareness of mind in him to resist being led out of the hall. Bohodar got him into an empty guest room and led him to the bed, by which time Yurii was chuckling excitedly about something. Bohodar went and flagged down the nearest servant he could find, asking them to send for the leech.

The leech accompanying the servant was a Carpatho-Rusin woman of middle years and shrewd, rather stern-looking features. When she entered the guest-room she felt her knieža’s pulse, then felt his red forehead. With a grim expression, she bade the nobleman open his bearded mouth, and then tried without success to get him to follow her fingers with his eyes.

‘Charcoal,’ she bade. ‘Get me some charcoal, a fresh egg, table salt, water and a clean goblet. And tell the guests not to eat, drink or even touch anything else on the Knieža’s place at the table.’

The servant who had brought her went at once. The leech turned to the king.

Knieža Yurii has been poisoned,’ she told him. ‘My guess is, with krasávicja.’

Sadly, Yurii’s already-melancholic heart was already too weak—by the time the servant returned with the makings of an antidote to the krasávicja toxin, it had already stopped beating. There was nothing they could do.

‘Fetch a priest, and fetch Sjätopolk Daniilovič. Let none of the guests leave,’ the leech told the crestfallen servant. ‘I’m sorry, Kráľ, but you too must stay if justice is to be done. Someone murdered our Knieža.’

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Once the priest had administered the final prayers and Yurii’s ginger-haired teenage grandson had said his goodbyes, Bohodar and the leech (whom the Kráľ learned was yclept Hafia Demjanovna) went to examine the remnants of Yurii’s last meal: lamb, turnips, some greens, some bread, and a half-drunk goblet of wine. The leech called for a stray dog to be brought. The stray dog was fed each of the food dishes at a time with no ill effect. When the wine was given to the dog to drink, however, it began exhibiting the same symptoms of agitation and disorientation that Yurii had in his last hour—and then it collapsed.

‘A witch! Devilry!’ Yurii’s son Volodar cried.

‘I’ll find the damned monster who did it!’ raged Sjätopolk, Yurii’s grandson. ‘Lock the doors to the hall! Let no one leave!’ Then he stormed off to find the poisoner.

The leech, however, examined the wine goblet.

‘No seeds. No pieces of root or crushed greens,’ Hafia Demjanovna murmured. ‘The poisoner did the thing thoroughly. Whatever went in, had to have gone in already as liquor. And it would had to have been added to the Knieža’s goblet after the places were set: no one else has begun showing symptoms.’

‘Where could it have come from?’ asked Bohodar.

Hafia let out a derisive snort. ‘Around here? You can find krasávicja bushes in any hedgerow or grove or meadow’s edge. Stuff grows wild in these parts. Ask your lady wife, Kráľ—it’s all the rage among girls between here and Sučava as a magic charm for making themselves more beautiful. Hence the name.’

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‘But you said it went in as liquor,’ the king interjected. ‘Could it have been alchemically distilled?’

‘It could have,’ Hafia considered. ‘But in that case the poisoner need have added only a very little to the Knieža’s goblet to kill. We’ll narrow things down if we can find who was around the Knieža’s seat after the places were set, and before the wine was poured. You included, of course. No offence.’

‘None taken,’ Bohodar said sincerely. In fact, he was starting to like this Carpatho-Rusin physician. Her manner might be a little brusque, but she clearly had a formidable store of folk knowledge as well as a keenly logical mind.

‘Who was that smart-looking, dark-haired lad sitting on the other side of you from Yurii Danilovič?’ asked Hafia. ‘Was it your son?’

‘Yes, that was Vojta.’

‘He came into the hall ahead of you, didn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

Hafia Demjanovna called Vojtech Rychnovský over. Like the rest of the guests, he had suffered a rather heavy shock and dismay. Hafia asked him:

‘Did you come into the hall at any time after the goblets were set out, but before the guests arrived?’

‘Yes,’ Vojta told her. ‘But I left the hall soon after to rouse my father from the guest chambers.’

‘Did you see anyone in the hall when you were there at that time?’

Vojtech considered. ‘There was the Kňažná, of course,’ he said. ‘Small wonder; she’s the hostess. His second son Volodar was in here as well, and his grandson Sjätopolk Daniilovič. And there were a couple of servants as well—I couldn’t name them to you, but I think I could point them out if I saw them.’

‘All three of them had motive to kill,’ Bohodar observed. ‘As the only son of Yurii’s eldest, Sjätopolk Daniilovič is first in the line of succession, and Volodar Yurievič is second. And Hērakleia Lampsiōtia can’t have been too happy with her husband after she found he’d been sleeping with his own niece.’

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Hafia considered. ‘I’ve been the physician to all three of these suspects for years. I can tell you that I’d think both Sjätopolk and Volodar are capable of killing… but both men strike me as unlikely poisoners.’

‘What makes you say that?’ asked Bohodar.

‘You saw how the two of them behaved—they’re probably still storming around the hall roughing up servants at random. Sjätopolk in particular I think lacks the patience to make the poison and then wait for opportunities to deliver it. And Volodar: I simply don’t think he has the brains to know krasávicja from half a dozen other bushes, let alone distil the poison from it. I’m not saying we should rule either of them out—one of them might well have paid an agent to make and deliver the poison. But I’m sceptical that either of them acted himself.’

‘Don’t forget: I was there, too,’ Vojtech added. ‘And there was a time—not long, but long enough—that I was alone in the hall with the goblet. I’m as suspect as anyone else.’

Hafia Demjanovna looked him over appreciatively. ‘True, you were there. And clearly you run deeper than either of the Knieža’s kinsmen. Crafting the poison wouldn’t be beyond your skill and attention. But what reason might you have to kill my lord?’

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‘I imagine it will be said,’ Vojtech spoke slowly, thinking over each word, ‘that I envy the Knieža’s position in Father’s Privy Council, and the prestige he enjoys as maršal. After all, I am a tactician easily the equal of any other in Moravia, and I am the Kráľ’s son. What better opportunity to rid myself of a rival, than at a feast he held for the Kráľ and his kin?’

Hafia gave Vojtech a thin smile. Clearly she appreciated the young man’s candour.

‘I like you, chlópčina. I hope it wasn’t you.’
 
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II.

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That night, the entire hall at Siget was kept under lock and guard, with no one allowed to go in or come out. But the fact of knowing that murder had taken place there earlier that day made rest fitful for most of the residents in the hall. The only man who truly rested that night was the dead Knieža, Yurii Danilovič.

The four noble suspects had reacted in different ways to having their movements restricted to the hall. Vojtech Rychnovský had taken it with calm resignation: a man was dead, and bringing the killer to justice was of the first priority; Vojta understood and expected this. Hērakleia, too, simply inclined her head and waited in her chambers, with only her lady-in-waiting for company. The heir-presumptive, Sjätopolk Daniilovič, had taken it ill, deeming it an outrage that he as lord of Siget should be kept prisoner within his own hall. And the lad’s uncle Volodar Yurievič had simply sat back and reclined, opining that the whole ‘charade’ of the lockdown was a waste of time, but making no other objection.

‘Five of the kitchen staff—Michail, Konstantin, Tichon, Lada and Varvara—and two other servants—Bozena and Dobroslav—admitted to being in the hall before the guests arrived and the wine was served,’ Hafia Demjanovna reported. ‘However, none of them were there alone. Each of them can be vouched for by at least one of the others, and none of them did anything suspicious around the king’s goblet. I hope we aren’t dealing with a wide conspiracy here.’

‘We still have four noble suspects to investigate,’ said Bohodar. ‘Let’s not forget them.’

‘Oh, I haven’t forgotten,’ Hafia told him. ‘Personally I think we ought to start with the presumptive new Knieža, though that will of course be a matter for your Majesty to decide.’

~~~​

‘Of course I was in the hall before the feast!’ Sjätopolk Daniilovič grumbled. ‘It’s my hall. I can go anywhere I please. What is so suspicious about that?’

‘Was there anyone else in the hall with you?’ asked Hafia.

‘This is outrageous,’ Sjätopolk raged. ‘You think I had something to do with my grandfather’s murder? Why the hell should I? All that was his would have come to me in due time anyway.’

‘We think it unlikely you had anything to do with it,’ Bohodar attempted to assuage the affronted young knieža-presumptive, ‘but we need to follow up on every lead. Now, was there anyone else in the hall with you when you went in ahead of the guests?’

‘Dobroslav was with me the whole time,’ Sjätopolk answered readily. ‘He will readily speak for me. And your son was there also, O Kráľ.’

‘Yes, we know,’ Bohodar replied.

‘And does he have to deal with these insulting questions and insinuations from you? I don’t think so. Now, leave me be!’

‘Well, that went well,’ Hafia sighed as they left the young knieža’s room.

‘It could have gone worse. Did Dobroslav mention anything about being in the hall with Sjätopolk?’ asked Bohodar. ‘Do their tales match in each particular? You interviewed the other man; I didn’t.’

‘They do match,’ Hafia told him. ‘Whether from coaching or not, I can’t really tell. Dobroslav said that Sjätopolk wanted to make sure that he didn’t really care where he sat, but he didn’t want to be seated next to his grandmother. Evidently he feels the woman smothers him.’

‘H’m,’ Bohodar muttered. ‘Perhaps we should have a little chat with said grandmother next.’

Kráľ, you seem to have a knack for this sort of work. I do hope the nobles properly fear you.’ Hafia spoke with a fierce sort of admiration.

When they arrived at the chambers of Hērakleia Lampsiōtia, they were admitted by the same chamber-maid who accompanied her before. Hērakleia herself was draped in black, and she was looking distraught. In her younger days, Bohodar mused, she must have made a prime example of how the mingling of Greek and Norse blood could produce a rare and striking beauty. Her hair, though it was streaked heavily with white, was clearly once of a light reddish-gold hue, but her eyes were dark brown and soulful. Her face, which had a deep angular set to it, could convey either sweet mercy or perilous wrath while never losing its femininity—but looked as though it were more accustomed to bearing a stoic and solitary calm. How Yurii could have been such a fool as to despise and overlook such a woman mystified the king. There were no obvious tear-stains on her face, but she did have a drawn look. Hērakleia looked the way an elderly woman who has lost a husband of many years would look. If this woman was the murderess, then Bohodar had to give her credit for her acting abilities.

‘Excuse me, madam,’ the king said, ‘but we will need to ask you a few questions.’

‘Certainly,’ Hērakleia jutted out her firm chin. ‘I have nothing to hide.’

‘You were in the hall prior to the guests’ arrival. Were you alone with the king’s goblet at any time?’

‘No. I saw your son there, and my son, and several other servants in the hall. But I was never alone with the goblet. At the very least, my chamber-maid Penelope was there with me at all times. She can vouch for me that I never once touched my husband’s goblet with any ill intent.’

‘But… begging your pardon, madam, but your… relationship with your husband provided you grounds for harbouring just such ill intent.’

The woman’s eyes flashed. ‘That’s not the issue.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘It’s impertinence,’ said the Greco-Norse widow, ‘particularly coming from a man who disgracefully takes his own aunt to bed, and still calls her a “wife”.’

Hafia began to interject, but Bohodar held up his hand to stop her.

‘You hated him for it,’ Bohodar said gently.

Hērakleia took a deep, shuddering breath before answering with care. ‘It is… not easy to bear the sort of shame that my husband visited upon me. I… resented it. I still resent it. He never regarded me with any sort of affection. He saved all that for his whores. Vjačeslava Daniilovna was only the latest.’

Hafia went toward the former Kňažná’s toiletry table, picked up one of the small bottles on it, sniffed it, tipped out a little of its contents out on her fingers and rubbed them together.

‘Milady, what do you use this tonic for?’

‘It’s a tonic for the skin. It’s beneficial—helps keep my face’s complexion rosy.’

Hafia exchanged a meaningful look with the Kráľ.

‘Have you been using it recently? More than usual?’

The former Kňažná’s face had gone strangely slack and blank. She stared a bit at the physician before shaking her head slightly.

‘I’m sorry, what were you saying?’

Penelope stood forward. ‘I think you both should leave. Milady is fatigued.’

‘Did you have any more questions for milady, Kráľ?’ asked Hafia.

‘None right now.’

‘Then—we shall be taking our leave.’

‘I’ll be here,’ Hērakleia said stiffly. ‘I doubt I’ll be going anywhere far.’

Once they were out in the hallway and out of earshot of the door, the physician turned to the Kráľ. ‘That may well have been the murder weapon. That tonic that the Kňažná uses—it’s a popular beauty treatment that women use south of here, as well as in Italy and Greece. It soothes the skin, adds a little blush, dilates the eyes so they look darker and rounder… but if drunk it is highly poisonous. It’s made from krasávicja berries.’

‘Do you think she did it?’

‘I don’t know. There’s only one problem with that, though—she was never in the hall alone. And either her son or her grandson could have crept into the room and drawn enough from the bottle to kill without her being any the wiser.’

‘Or my son, perhaps?’

‘Perhaps—if he knew the use and composition of the tonic.’

‘What was that about, when she… went blank for a moment like that?’

‘Oh, that,’ Hafia shook her head sadly. ‘That part, at least, is innocuous. Milady has been suffering from that little problem for some time. I prescribe a particular potion for her nerves, which seems to soothe her when those fits come upon her.’

‘Well,’ the king sighed sadly, ‘unfortunately, right now it’s looking like Vojta is the only one without an alibi. We’d best talk to Volodar, but if he too can be vouched for I see no choice but to question my son further about his movements in the hall.’
 
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III.

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The news that both the former Kňažná Hērakleia and the current Knieža Sjätopolk had ironclad alibis during the time that the poison was administered managed somehow to spread throughout the hall at Siget. As a result, more and more tongues began to wag that perhaps it was indeed jealousy on the part of the king’s son that had motivated the Knieža’s murder. Knieža Yurii had been more feared than loved by his subjects, but even so he had been theirs, and there was a certain righteous feeling to having an outsider to blame for his death. As a scapegoat Vojtech worked quite well. It was unclear if he would be allowed to leave the hall unscathed unless the murderer was found, and soon.

… unless Vojta was the murderer. Kráľ Bohodar trusted his son implicitly, but even he could not escape the implications of the interviews he had done so far. Vojta was the only person who had been in the hall by himself, and who had the opportunity to slip the poison into the Knieža’s goblet unnoticed.

But the one known source of the poison they had found so far had been inside the Kňažná’s dressing-cabinet—and there it had a legitimate and reasonably-innocuous use. It wasn’t simply that Vojta was Bohodar’s son that caused him to doubt his guilt. Something didn’t add up. He was having difficulty imagining Vojta sneaking into Hērakleia’s chamber, beattering Yurii’s goblet, and then returning the guilty bottle to its rightful place with no one noticing.

There had still been Volodar, but interviewing him had proven to be as fruitless as interviewing the other two members of the Koceľuk family.

‘Of course I was in the hall,’ Volodar said indolently. ‘Usually before guests arrive, it’s the quietest place in the whole building to take a nap. I was proven wrong about that, and so I moved out-of-doors.’

‘So I suppose you didn’t see anyone else in the hall while you were there. And you weren’t there alone.’

‘That’s right,’ Volodar gave the king a sly smile. ‘Still looking for an out for your boy, are you? I don’t blame you—kin look out for kin, it’s the way of the world—but sadly for you, everyone else seems to be above suspicion.’

‘I hate to say it,’ Hafia Demjanovna had told the king after they left Volodar, ‘but he’s right. Your son’s the only one without an alibi.’

‘But he owned it himself. You heard him. He also owned a possible motive on his part. Is that what a murderer would do?’

Hafia took a deep breath and released it slowly as she pondered. ‘There are certain forms of perversity that take pleasure in daring others to catch them. Has your son ever demonstrated this to you?’

‘Never,’ said the king. ‘I can’t think of a less perverse person than my son.’

Hafia regarded the king with a sad sort of sympathy. ‘You do know what is likely to be said?’

Bohodar sighed. ‘Each of my other children has some malformation of the body—only Vojta was born seemingly whole and without bodily blemish. Some may say that Vojta was born with some invisible but dire malformation of the soul, as a result of our sins—my consort’s and my own.’

The Rusin physician shook her head grimly. ‘I wish it weren’t so. I really do like your son, and I really do hope that he is innocent.’

‘That’s the damned thing, though,’ the king grumbled, pounding one fist into his open hand and voicing his strongest doubt. ‘The more I think about the circumstances, the less they make sense to me. For Vojta to sneak into Lampsiōtia’s room unnoticed, go down to the hall, wait until everyone was gone, dose Yurii’s goblet, then sneak back up to the Kňažná’s chamber and put the stuff back—it’s an unlikely scenario to say the least!’

Hafia Demjanovna placed a hand over her shrewd mouth as her eyes widened in surprise. Then she lowered it, placed it behind her back and began to pace back and forth.

‘No… wait, that doesn’t work… but if there was only one, and she…’

She?’ Bohodar cottoned onto the pronoun.

‘Come with me, Kráľ.’

Bohodar followed the Rusin physician, a tad mystified, as she led him back up to Hērakleia’s chambers. She knocked and was given admittance.

‘Milady,’ Hafia courtesied to Hērakleia, ‘I beg your pardon for this intrusion, but I must ask you to think back carefully. You know the tonic that I prescribed you for your… quaking fits?’

‘Why yes, I think I should know the one,’ Hērakleia said haughtily.

Did you take it before coming down to the hall before the feast?’

~~~​

Pēnelopē came to her lady’s chambers with a confident stride. She checked in her step a little bit upon seeing her lady’s physician and the Kráľ present there as well, but continued to her lady’s side as she had been bidden. Her face was impassive.

‘Pēnelopē,’ Hafia addressed her sweetly, ‘Your ladyship is in need of you. Could we ask you a few things?’

‘Certainly,’ said the maid-servant. ‘Might I ask what this is about?’

‘Well, Lady Hērakleia has suffered quite the awful shock this past couple of days. But—you recall this, of course, as you were here—there’s the matter of the calming tonic that I prescribed to Lady Hērakleia when she was taking with those awful shaking fits last year. As I recall, I asked her to take it twice a day?’

Pēnelopē nodded. ‘I was here. Yes, I remember.’

Hafia made a thoughtful frown. ‘I had been considering increasing the dosage, given the dreadful state of her Ladyship’s nerves, but it’s a rather tricky concoction. At her years, too much might be worse than too little, you see. I need to know if she’s been taking both daily doses regularly.’

‘Of course she has,’ Pēnelopē bristled. ‘I make sure that she takes one in the morning and one at night, each day.’

‘Yes, I know you do,’ Hērakleia soothed her. ‘But on the day of the feast, I remember I took the tonic from you after I came back upstairs—not before the feast started, but after. Why?’

‘She was doing well that morning,’ Pēnelopē said. ‘There was nothing nervous about her behaviour. I sometimes delay her taking the medicine if that’s the case. I didn’t think it would be any problem if I…’

‘… If you waited until after she came downstairs?’ Hafia’s voice was suddenly harsh. ‘Your mistress was taken ill with a fit on the stairs—what if she’d hurt herself?’

‘That’s not true! She was in the hall when—!’

Pēnelopē clapped a hand over her mouth.

‘Yes,’ Hafia murmured. ‘She was already in the hall when she had an attack that morning, wasn’t she? And there was no one else in the hall to see. Naturally, when Lady Hērakleia had her attack, you made sure that your lady was safe, away from any danger… before you took the bottle from her Ladyship’s dressing table and poured some of it into the Knieža’s goblet.’

Pēnelopē’s eyes went wide. ‘Milady—! She’s lying!’

Hērakleia straightened her back and regarded her servant frigidly. ‘If I had an attack on the stairway, I would remember it, of course. But many of these attacks I simply don’t recall. I have no way to know.’

‘But your servant would,’ Hafia went on. ‘In fact, she was counting on it.’

‘This is utter madness,’ Pēnelopē breathed in outrage. ‘Why in God’s name would I want to kill my lady’s husband?’

‘I can think of several reasons,’ Hafia said. ‘Some more noble than others. Tell me, milady, has Pēnelopē ever taken leave of you these past months?’

‘Only once,’ Hērakleia said. ‘To visit her sisters, who serve in Sliezsko.’

‘And we know that your late husband had at least one mortal enemy in Sliezsko,’ Hafia Demjanovna said. ‘Milady, please order your servant to allow us to inspect her quarters and personal effects.’

‘Don’t, milady, please—!’ Pēnelopē’s eyes suddenly went round with terror.

‘I think what she is asking is wholly reasonable,’ Hērakleia told her servant icily. ‘Search away, physician.’

~~~​

Two gold ingots, each worth about thirty denár in gold, were found among Pēnelopē’s belongings—far more gold than any servant, even a Kňažná’s chamber-maid, would usually see all together in the whole of their lives. It was a foregone conclusion that the gold had not been paid to her by her lawful mistress. It didn’t take long for her to confess thereafter that the ingots had been given to her by Predslav Rychnovský-Nisa… the jealous husband of Vjačeslava Daniilovna, Knieža Yurii’s niece and sometime lover. Pēnelopē was then taken to the Siget fonsels by the guard. The real murderer had been apprehended, and Vojtech was clear of any suspicion in Knieža Yurii’s death.

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‘And what of Predslav?’ asked Vojtech. ‘What sort of punishment will he face?’

‘That is up to his noble kinsman Siloš to decide,’ Bohodar sighed heavily. ‘If he is wise, he will pay Sjätopolk a suitable wergild.’

The private justice that awaited Predslav’s agent Pēnelopē in Siget was not likely to be so lenient. It didn’t strike Vojtech as quite fair.

‘I’m still quite impressed with the physician here,’ Vojtech told his father. ‘I imagine she taught you a trick or two about investigating.’

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‘She certainly did,’ Bohodar said.

Sjätopolk Daniilovič was glad that the murderer was caught, but he didn’t exactly apologise for the aspersions he had cast upon Vojtech during the investigation. Indeed, he continued to treat the lad in a rather icy fashion for the rest of his stay there. Vojtech was therefore all too happy to leave Siget behind when the opportunity offered, and return to Olomouc.

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There was a pleasant surprise awaiting both father and son when they returned thither. Pribislava was pregnant with her fifth child with Bohodar; and Alexandrina was pregnant with her first by Vojtech. The two women had evidently both conceived by their husbands the January prior, and their bellies were both beginning to swell.

Pribislava embraced her husband when he entered their chambers.

‘Well, milovaný môj,’ she told him, ‘from the sound of things it was a rather eventful feast.’

‘It was,’ Bohodar answered. ‘God willing I shan’t have to endure many other such events.’

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That was a fun murder mystery.
 
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Book Six Chapter Thirteen
Glad you both enjoyed it, @Idhrendur and @Cromwell! It was fun to attempt a bit of genre-writing in the AAR, even if it wasn't (or was only very loosely) scripted.


THIRTEEN
The English War
24 September 1314 – 14 November 1316

Bohodar now had a newborn son and granddaughter in his court. But it was difficult for Bohodar to take more genuine joy in those days, than in receiving letters from Jorvig. The careful, lengthy, expressive letters that his daughter sent him were each of them a warm ray of light.

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Dorotea was not only well in Jorvig, but happy. She described Jorvig as a town of bustling activity where there was never any want of things to do. It was evident that Torgil treated her well, and Bohodar could tell reading between the lines that Dorotea doted on him. The two of them already had two sons, Flosi and Sven, and a third child was on the way. Although he had never met these two grandsons of his, he felt as though he already knew Flosi and Sven quite well. The older Flosi seemed a clever little scamp, always first into trouble, while fat little Sven seemed overly eager to keep pace with him.

Torgil, however, evidently harboured designs upon what lands of Jorvig yet lay beyond his grasp and in the hands of King Leofweald of Wessex. In the first month of the year 6824, Torvig attacked Wessex and called the Moravians to his aid. Kráľ Bohodar at once sent his armies north to the North Sea.

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Prince Vojtech, who now had the position of his father’s maršal, was sent at the head of one of these armies; and under him they would land in England on behalf of the severané of Jorvig and begin laying siege to the key towns of East Anglia.

The new weapons—the bombardy—that the late Knieža Yurii had conjured for the Moravian Army were finally put to the test against real walls. And, according to Vojtech’s field reports, they rose to the occasion beautifully. The defences of Ipswich were no match for Moravian black powder and forged iron, and the seventy pieces of artillery blasted wide gaps in the town walls within the first week of the siege.

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Despite these invigorating initial tidings, the Kráľ didn’t particularly regret that he was not together in Suffolk with his elder son. He stayed behind instead with Bivka and his younger son, the newborn Vasilii.

‘Our youngest daughter, it seems, has taken after you,’ Bivka told him appreciatively.

Vratislava was an immense girl—despite being only thirteen she was taller and heavier than most men, and she was still growing. But she sat contentedly in the courtyard looking after the resident flock of ducks, and occasionally tossing grass seed to them out of her expansive, and munificent, hand. Bohodar and Bivka looked down the courtyard together toward her.

‘Nonsense,’ Bohodar told his wife. ‘That goodness she has—it’s all yours. Dorotea’s, too.’

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‘You know as well as I do that I’m a mean, jealous old woman,’ Pribislava told him tolerantly as she continued to rock Vasilii to sleep. ‘Oh, by the way, there’s a rather interesting little gift from Volimíra of Srem in your study. Have you had a chance to look at it yet?’

‘I haven’t yet,’ Bohodar said. ‘Would you and Vasilii care to accompany me?’

As it turned out, the Serbian countess had gifted to him a wondrous gift indeed. In a small gilt cage on the desk of his study, perched upon a branch made out of steel, there was a golden bird. But for its lustre, which was clearly artificial, the bird itself seemed almost natural in its shape and movements. Each of its feathers was delicately smith-wrought from red gold or some similar alloy, its eyes fashioned from spinel. And it had a voice as well.

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‘What do you think, my dear?’ asked Bohodar of Pribislava as he gazed at it. ‘Thread and resin, perhaps? How many different threads were used inside to make each sound?’

‘If you want my true opinion, Daška,’ said the ever-diplomatic Bivka, ‘I feel you’d be better off putting it on display and showing it off in the hall, rather than taking it apart to see how it works.’

In the end, however, Bohodar’s curiosity won out over his diplomatic chops; and he ended up using silversmith’s tools to prise apart the precious bird and examine the mechanisms by which it produced its music. As it turned out, there was a complex gearing mechanism in the base of the cage as well as wires inside the steel branch the bird sat on—and, as Bohodar expected, resin and thread—a set of seven different paired strands anchored to a small steel plate inside the bird which each produced a different note or timbre of bird-call. Bohodar couldn’t help but admire the fine craftsmanship that had gone into making the bird, and sent back a detailed letter to Volimíra expressing his appreciation. Thankfully for him, Volimíra was a woman who understood and approved of such curiosity—even if Pribislava had distinctly disapproved.

Another gift which Bohodar received around this time was a packet of rare seeds that a merchant from Salzburg had sent him, which were claimed to have various health benefits when brewed. Bohodar’s chief interest here, however, was in getting them to grow that summer. Most of the plants died, but Bohodar did learn quite a bit about gardening during that year.

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The reports that Vojtech was sending him back from England, however, were not quite as enthusiastic as his first one recounting the performance of the bombardy against Ipswich.

The Moravians had besieged Cambridge to similar effect—the bombardy had wasted no time in blasting through the city wall in several places. However, these heavy pieces of equipment were cumbersome and required significant horsepower to transport from one place to another. Also, black powder was expensive to manufacture, and they quickly ran through their stores during the siege. In addition, the West Saxons had taken the East Riding and borne off the king’s grandsons Sven and Heming for ransom.

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His son wasted no words in his letter. ‘We are in dire need of funds from home if we stand any chance of pursuing Jarl Torgil’s just claims with any success.

Now Bohodar began to regret that he hadn’t done the practical thing, and sold off the mechanical songbird or the seeds. Moravia’s coffers of state were running dangerously low, and if Kráľ Bohodar wasn’t careful he would end up having to borrow from the silversmiths’ guilds… perhaps even as far afield as Venice. The Church already viewed him as enough of a sinner as it was without him asking for a loan from the moneylenders.

Bohodar therefore had to undertake drastic measures. Measures which, as a scholar, cut him to the quick. He began to sell off his books.

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‘Are you sure about this, milord?’ asked Radislav, the new Archbishop of Moravia.

‘No,’ Bohodar sighed. ‘I’m not. But we have to raise the money somehow.’

‘Have you considered,’ Radislav asked his liege, ‘asking Constantinople for funds?’

‘Would Constantinople be amenable?’ asked Bohodar.

‘If you ask nicely,’ Radislav told him, ‘I’m sure something could be arranged.’

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The forthcoming funds from Constantinople—with the help of Radislav’s careful massaging of the request—saved Moravia from going into long-term debt over the English war. In the meantime, though, Vojtech had rather dire news.

The armies of Moravia had travelled all the way to Gwynedd, in the territory that had once been Cymraeg. They had marched along the Llŷn Peninsula to meet the armies of the West Saxons. Even though the West Saxons had less than half their number—merely six thousand to the Moravians’ sixteen thousand—the men of Wessex had better lines of supply, and were better-equipped, better-fed and better-funded. They also had more riders and more men-at-arms. The outcome of the battle at Llŷn was far from a foregone conclusion.

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Vojtech’s following letter cast the battle at Llŷn as a victory—but a costly one indeed. As formidable as they were in sieges, the stationary bombardy were of little use in pitched battles, where the stones could be evaded by manœuvre and charge. The king’s brother Želimír Rychnovský had distinguished himself in the battle with a bold charge at one Earl Thoræd, which had unhorsed and removed him from the ranks. But many of the Moravians had been killed at Llŷn or were run off into the Welsh forests.

And then there was the worst news of all. The news came even as he recalled his armies from the coast of Wales. It sent the king into a deep misery.

Dorotea, the king’s eldest daughter and Jarl Torgil’s wife, had been too slow on her feet to outrun the West Saxons and their allies when they had retaken the East Riding. She and her eldest son Flosi had been captured—not by the Catholic King Leofweald, but instead by the Adamite Frisians. Dorotea was now being held hostage by Bérenger de Vasconia-Boulogne, the Comte of Guines, Kent and Utrecht.

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