Russka by Edward Rutherfurd Read Free Book Online Page B

reduced, quelled all living creatures into sleep.
    But it was not so. A grasshopper sounded near Lebed’s feet. To her right, a woodlark rose and hovered, bravely singing in the blazing heat. She noticed some hyacinths and irises at the wood’s edge, shrivelled by the summer. Some way in front of her, a dark green patch in the yellow grass told her that a marmot colony inhabited the place.
    Several times she called, but neither heard nor saw any sign of the child. She turned left and began to walk north-east, along the forest edge. Ahead of her and to the right, perhaps two miles out into the steppe, was a small but clearly visible mound. It was a kurgan – a tomb – but she did not know who had put it there or when. Her own people seldom built such things.
    Some time passed, yet strangely, through the heat haze, the kurgan never seemed to get any closer. The steppe played many such tricks with light, she knew; but today it seemed sinister, ominous. In the far distance, she saw an elegant demoiselle crane with its blue-black neck and white back make its way swiftly towards a hidden nest. Several times as she went along, she turned back into the trees, making a circle to search for Little Kiy before emerging into the glare of the steppe again.
    At last, the kurgan seemed to be getting nearer; and at the same time, she came to a thin promontory of woodland extending from the left out into the steppe. She started to walk through the line of the trees.
    The camp of the horsemen lay just the other side of the trees. She saw it as she came through, not a hundred paces away.
    And she saw that they had her child.
     
    The five wagons had canopies made of bark. They were arranged in a circle, making a modest ring of hot and dusty shadows in the huge brightness of the steppe. Several of the horsemen had dismounted and lay under the wagons.
    Outside the little circle, two men remained mounted. One of them was fair-haired, the other dark. The dark warrior addressed the other, the leader of the expedition.
    ‘Brother of mine, let us find the village.’
    The fair-haired horseman gazed at the child his blood brother held before him on the neck of his powerful black horse. The child was pale and stared about him with large frightened eyes. A good-looking little boy.
    His blood brother’s long raven hair glistened in the sun, almost as sleek as the flanks of his black mount.
    The village could not be far from where the boy had been wandering. They would take a few of the young men and male children away with them while the villagers protested powerlessly. And these would be trained as warriors – not as slaves, but as adopted members of the clan. Two of the horsemen resting under the wagons had been taken from Slav villages in this way when they were young. A strange people, he thought: they had no god of war, yet once trained they made brave and excellent fighters. No doubt the little boy in front of him would be a credit to the clan one day.
    That hot afternoon, however, he did not want to raid a village. ‘I came for another purpose,’ he said softly.
    The dark horseman inclined his head. ‘Your grandfather did not live to be old,’ he replied gravely. ‘Not for nothing was he called The Deer.’
    These were the highest compliments among the horsemen of the steppe. Among them, an old man was without honour – brave men died in battle before they grew old.
    It had been a little while before, as the sun reached its zenith that day, that the fair-haired warrior had stood on the top of the solitary kurgan that lay in the steppe nearby, and plunged a long sword into it. For this was the tomb of his grandfather, killed in a skirmish in this half-forgotten place; forgotten, that is, except by his family who would return every few years to honour him in this remote corner of the steppe. The sword stood there now, its crossed handle just visible from the wagons, a gleaming iron reminder of a noble warrior clan.
    Kiy stared at the