them, looming out of the driven snow and the fading light. All with guns slung
across their shoulders—real guns, not the battered muskets and old bolt-action
rifles that the folk of Ozhbarchik could muster.
This band of guerrillas had visited them before. That time the butchers had
stolen food and killed a villager who tried to resist them. This time, it
seemed, the murderers were bent on killing all the villagers.
Most of the thirty-seven men of Ozhbarchik had fallen in a bloody hail of lead,
massacred by the laughing strangers. The nineteen women and three surviving
children were seized and held in several of the scattered huts. The cows were
each shot with a single bullet through the skull. Ivan’s two chickens were
chased and caught with much merriment, decapitated, then thrown into a cauldron
simmering over an open fire.
Ivan Ivanovich had been the chieftain of Ozhbarchik. His ownership of the pair
of fowl had conferred that dubious honor on him. Now he was paying a monstrous
price for that honor.
Before his eardrums were pierced, Ivan Ivanovich had heard the leader of the
band, named Uchitel, ordering his followers to take what they wanted, roast the
animals, eat their fill. He had warned his people to watch for concealed
weapons. “A man may dine, yet feel his tripes spilled in his lap,” he’d shouted.
There had been screaming; high, thin sounds, as the raiders took their pleasure
with the women of the village; Ivan’s sister had been taken in front of his eyes
by three men at once, with others jostling in a queue behind, their breeches
unlaced, and erect, hugely swollen penises thrusting ready.
He’d watched a man fail in his efforts to sodomize a woman then take out his
anger by slitting her throat from ear to ear, cursing the dying woman as her
blood fountained across his boots.
A huge woman with coarse skin had punched Ivan to the floor, holding him there
with a muddied boot, while two other women cut away his clothes with their
narrow-bladed knives. They had not been gentle, and his skin was streaming from
a dozen shallow slashes from their weapons. They had mocked him as they took and
bound him to the rude frame of his own bed, hands and feet pulled painfully
apart in a great X. Blood trickled from beneath his broken nails from the
tightness of the rawhide cords that bit into the skin at ankle and wrist.
He’d been conscious of the horrors all about him. One of his children had been
butchered for refusing to use his tender mouth to pleasure a skinny killer. He’d
smelled the scent of a huge fire outside and knew that some of the huts were
being used for fuel to roast the slaughtered cattle. Gradually the screaming had
died down. None of them had come to hurt him.
Not then. Not at first.
After an hour or so, the leader came to the bed and stared down at him. He wore
a long coat made from the skin of a white bear, trimmed with soft sable. His
eyes were a curious golden color, his mouth warm and friendly. Around his
temples was a band of silver, a ruby at its center.
“This stinking hovel makes me want to vomit, old man. My good brothers and
sisters may become sickened from being here. But we shall not stay long.”
And he smiled down at Ivan Ivanovich. That was before the pain and the
blackness, when Ivan still had a name and knew who he was.
The brutish woman came then, when everyone else was outside. The others called
her Bizabraznia, the ugly one. Through the open door Ivan saw the bright flames
as they danced and flared, caught the rich taste of the cooking meat, heard the
devilish laughter. By then he supposed that everyone in the village was dead.
Bizabraznia, grimacing and farting, lowered her bulk to the side of the bed. He
could smell her sour breath, the taint of kvass. The raiders had quickly found
the kegs of the sour beer.
“The men enjoy their fucking, little grandfather,” she said, reaching out with
her broad hand and touching him beneath the chin. He tried to pull away, but the