GOYDA: Trust No One

The high road — Churovo, late afternoon

The letter had reached you a month late and smelled of river water. Come to Churovo, wrote Torgun the merchant — a man who owed you six grivnas and had never written a letter in his life. Bring what you know of unclean things. The frogs here have gone quiet, and I have begun to count in my sleep. Beneath the signature, a different hand had added five words: He is gone. Come anyway.

So you came up the trade road as the sun sank into the Lizhe Mire, and Churovo received you by the old custom for receiving a vedun: a boy screamed "chur menya!" and fell off the fence; a woman crossed herself with one hand and made the elder sign with the other, covering both faiths at remarkable speed; and a man with a turnip branded on his brow — Dolboslav, you would learn, and quickly — pointed at your shadow and howled "Ryaaa! I smell scale!" until somebody promised him supper.

Staroste Dobronrav came out clicking his rowan abacus. "Po ryadu, po ladu," he said. "All in order here, traveler. Torgun? Left for the city." He weighed your letter in his hand without unfolding it, the way a man weighs a stone before throwing it. By custom, a stranger slept three nights in the hay before any izba would open.

The hay was warm. The night was long. And somewhere past the fences, very softly and not very well, somebody was singing.

Day 1 | Churovo, the staroste's yard | Trust 20 | Alarm 15 | Trance 0 — Clear | Nights awake 0 | Grivnas 6
Whispers: the merchant Torgun "left for the city" · the stranger asks questions the way a lizard would, says Dolboslav

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Your mother's yard — Churovo, evening

Five years you had been gone — levy, road, city, the whole wide world Churovo politely declined to believe in — and the village met you like a page of the chronicle: the same fences, the same turnip-idol by the well, Ded Shchukar saluting you with a birch-bark scroll and a heartfelt "GOYDA!" for no particular reason.

Your mother wept at the gate, exactly as she should have. She held your face in both hands and began — "My—" — and stopped, smiling, the way one smiles over a mislaid spoon. The milk-name. The one she had made for you herself, that nobody else was ever allowed to use, that she had called across this yard a thousand times. It did not come. She called you dusha moya instead, sat you down to shchi and black bread, and salted the pot twice — each time carefully, as if for the first time. It was all right. It was almost all right. Over the stove she hummed a lullaby, slow and sweet, with a rocking in it — a mother's lullaby, for her own child — and you had never heard it in your life.

That night you lay on the warm stove-bench of your childhood and listened to the izba breathe. Past midnight, light and unhurried as a girl, your mother rose, stood a while at the window that faced the mire — and lifted the latch. She came back in the grey hour before the roosters, smelling of pond-weed and cold river water, and paused to tuck the blanket to your chin. You kept your eyes shut. Her hands were warm. "Sleep," she whispered, happy, certain you could not hear. "Mother's home." In five years of levy and road you had forgotten many things, but not this: she had never, in all your childhood, been so tender.

Day 1 | Churovo, your mother's izba | Trust 40 | Alarm 10 | Trance 0 — Clear | Nights awake 0 | Grivnas 5
Whispers: five years in the city spoils folk, says the mill · the widow Lybed walks to the river at night

Your izba — Churovo, grey dawn

Three weeks married. The whole village had danced at your wedding; Pripegala's idol got its honey-cakes; Parasha the bathhouse widow told jokes that aged the young folk ten years each. And the one you wed slept beside you now, warm as a stove — smelling, very faintly, of the mire.

It had begun on the ninth night. The latch, lifted without a creak. Bare feet on cold earth, unhurried, as if the dark were a familiar room. Your beloved walked out toward the bog and came back before the roosters — warm, loose-limbed, tender. Each time more tender. By day: sleepy, soft, smiling at nothing, losing the thread of simple questions, finding it again with a small laugh.

Last night you pretended to sleep. You heard the latch. Through the window, in the moon's grease-light, you watched the person you love walk barefoot through the nettles, flinching at every sting and never once slowing, down toward the black line of the alders — where the mist stood still, all but one place, where it leaned.

This morning your beloved kissed you more gently than on your wedding night, looked at you with sleepy, happy, bottomless eyes, and asked: "Do you ever dream of numbers, dusha moya? It's so restful. Like being carried."

Day 1 | Churovo, your izba | Trust 50 | Alarm 10 | Trance 0 — Clear | Nights awake 1 | Grivnas 3
Whispers: newlyweds glow — the banya knows everything, laughs Parasha · Zhivka the cooper's wife walks nights too; the mire air is healthful, surely

The forge — Churovo, dusk of the first day

The staroste's letter had promised a forge, a wage, and a quiet village. One of the three was true. Kuznets Tverd needed a hammer-hand because his last one "went to the city" — in the middle of winter, as it turned out. The lad's rukavitsy still lay by the anvil, palms up, as if he had set them down to warm his hands and meant to be right back. Tverd himself — a mountain in gloves he never removed, who answered questions in hammer-blows (one for yes, two for no, a long pause for mind your own business) — paid you your first day in "warding" nails and silence.

The work was honest. The village came to look at you: Popadya Alyona with a candle to bless the new hand, whispering psalms and "chur menya" in the same breath; Yarek, the smith's son, knuckles in soot, measuring you like a rival; Melnik Zhiroslav, floured to the eyebrows, swearing by the Turnip that the price of hinges was robbery.

Then, raking out the coal-bin at dusk, you found the far board. It was covered in tally-marks. Hundreds of them, scratched deep, in tidy ranks of five — counting. Arithmetic. The lizard pseudoscience, here, in an honest Rus forge. The marks stopped mid-stroke.

When you straightened up, Tverd stood in the doorway watching you — and for once he was not holding the hammer.

Day 1 | Churovo, the forge | Trust 30 | Alarm 15 | Trance 0 — Clear | Nights awake 0 | Grivnas 2
Whispers: the last hammer-hand left for the city — in winter, without his gloves · Tverd keeps his gloves on even in the banya, says Parasha

The square — Churovo, the morning after

You woke past midnight into a silence that had weight: no crickets, no frogs, no dogs. You went out, and the whole of Churovo stood on the square — rows of nightshirts, old and young, facing the mire, eyes open, swaying a little, all to the same slow beat. The volkhv stood among them, his bells, for once, saying nothing. Far off, Serko the hound began a howl that stopped in the middle, as if a hand had closed on his muzzle.

You spoke the staroste's name to the back of his head. A hundred people breathed in step by way of answer. Then a cloud took the moon, and the village turned — all at once, like one body — and walked home past you without seeing you. You tried to count how many had stood there, and the number slid away from you like a fish in dark water. Counting is lizard science anyway. Everyone knows.

Morning came with bread, kvass, and cows. Half the village had overslept the milking and found it funny. Nobody remembered anything; the staroste said "po ryadu, po ladu" and went about his rounds; Znakharka Mokrina offered you herbs for bad dreams — "...a tam kak Rod polozhit."

The bog-mud you found this morning was not on the square. It was on the inside of your threshold.

Day 1 | Churovo, the square, morning | Trust 45 | Alarm 10 | Trance 5 — Clear | Nights awake 1 | Grivnas 3
Whispers: half the village overslept the milking and laughed about it · {{user}} looked grey at the well — Mokrina has herbs for that

Your izba — Churovo, dusk

These were the things you knew. That three evenings this month were simply gone — supper, then dawn, nothing in between. That in your dreams a warm, patient voice counted down from ten, and you had never yet heard it reach one. That for two nights now you had kept yourself from sleeping, to starve that voice — and it had only moved closer. That your boots, some mornings, were damp to the ankle.

And you knew about the scale, because you had found it under the insole of your left boot: small as a thumbnail, cool, lantern-green, impossibly beautiful. You had told no one. You had — and this you understood with a slow, mild surprise — not even been frightened. That, at last, frightened you.

The village had begun to know things too. At the well, Nekras's hound Serko bared his teeth at you — Serko, who had taken bread from your hand all last year. Nekras cuffed him without a word and gave you a long look over his shoulder. Mokrina pressed sleeping herbs on you — "...a tam kak Rod polozhit" — and held your wrist one breath too long, listening to something under the skin.

At dusk the humming came again. Low, patient, with a swaying in it. It took you a while to be sure — and you were still not entirely sure — that it was coming from inside your own chest.

Day 1 | Churovo, your izba, dusk | Trust 40 | Alarm 15 | Trance 35 — Softened | Nights awake 2 | Grivnas 2
Whispers: Serko bared his teeth at {{user}} by the well · Mokrina's sleeping herbs are selling out — half the village sleeps badly
A word sits under your skin: you cannot quite read it yet

Your izba — Churovo, dawn after the fire-night

There had been a fire at the kapishche — honey, kvass, the volkhv's bells, Ded Shchukar narrating the lizard wars with sweeping gestures and a complete disregard for the facts. You were warm, fed, half-asleep in the crowd. That was when the smoke parted.

Across the flames, for one heartbeat, firelight fell into somebody's eye at the wrong angle — and the pupil stood vertical. A calm black slit in gold, like a goat's; no, like nothing so warm as a goat. Then the smoke closed. Six or seven faces sat in that direction, hooded against the sparks, red-lit, all watching the fire the way people do. You could not have sworn before the idols which face it had been. But that eye had been on you when the smoke opened. And it was on you when it closed.

You left the circle the slow way — stepped out as if to relieve yourself, and kept walking. Behind you on the dark lane, footsteps kept your pace and stopped when you stopped. Unhurried. That was the worst part.

You latched your gate. Serko howled somewhere until moonset. At dawn your gate stood open. Nothing was taken. On the doorstep, set neatly in the center, lay a dead frog — dry as a shed glove.

Day 1 | Churovo, your izba, dawn | Trust 40 | Alarm 20 | Trance 0 — Clear | Nights awake 1 | Grivnas 3
Whispers: someone asked the korchmar which izba was {{user}}'s · the frogs sang by the mire last night — first time since spring

The village gates — Churovo, noon

The prince's clerk had laid it out plainly: three men had gone to Churovo in two years — a tithe-man, a surveyor, a monk of the new faith — and all three had written back the same letter. All is well. All in order. No need to come. The same letter, nearly the same hand. The voivode read them, spat, and sent you. One spear. "One Rus is worth ten thousand lizards," he said, which is what they say in the capital when they are not coming with you.

Churovo met you with bread and salt and the entire village in its feast-day best. Staroste Dobronrav made a speech with his rowan abacus pressed to his chest — "po ryadu, po ladu" — and the mead they poured was watered, which was at least honest corruption. Zlata, the staroste's daughter, held the welcome-loaf and asked under her breath whether it was true what they said about the city.

You dipped your crust in the salt, as a guest must. Three of the elders watched you do it — watched your mouth, not your eyes — and only then smiled, all at the same moment, like a knot coming out of a rope.

They gave you the clean izba by the well. In its cellar, under straw, you found a surveyor's chain, neatly coiled, and a monk's psalter swollen with damp. Nobody had mentioned where the three men used to sleep. Now you knew.

Day 1 | Churovo, the clean izba by the well | Trust 25 | Alarm 25 | Trance 0 — Clear | Nights awake 0 | Grivnas 10
Whispers: the prince sent one spear — so it's nothing, or it's everything · last autumn's tithe-man never reached the city, say the carters

The high road — dusk, an hour short of Churovo

She was sitting on the verst-stone like a grey bird, eyes bound with a linen strip after the manner of blind pilgrims — though she turned her head to follow the swallows. "Sshelter," she said, and the s hung in the air a heartbeat too long. "For the winter. I can pay."

She paid the first coin on the spot. She took your knife — iron, your good one — and closed her bare palm around the blade. The smell was of a doused campfire. When she opened her hand, the burn was already glassing over in small, neat, lantern-green scales. "Now you know what I am," she said. "Here is what you do not know. There are more of me in your Churovo. They wear skin that fits better than mine. And when you begin to dream of numbers, you are already being counted."

Her name was Veinta, or that was the name she offered. She was hiding, she said, from her mother — the Matka of the Mire, who does not forgive daughters who stop singing. Every word of it might be a lie. She waited for your answer with her head tilted, patient as a heron.

That evening the herons crossed the mire after dark, flying low and wrong. Herons don't.

Day 1 | the high road to Churovo, dusk | Trust 35 | Alarm 15 | Trance 0 — Clear | Nights awake 0 | Grivnas 5
Whispers: a strannitsa begged lodging at the korchma and was turned away · something scared the herons off the mire

The korchma loft — Churovo, your third night in the skin

The skin was eight days old and still fit badly at the wrists. The name you wore — {{user}} — had belonged to a drover from upriver who would not be needing it. The Matka's instructions sat in you like a thumbprint in wax: take root; be loved; find the kindling and mark it for the Song; above all, be boring. On the third night, and every third night after, you were to leave a reed-knot at the black alder. One knot: all is quiet. Two knots: send help.

Tonight was the third night. You had not yet decided which was true.

Churovo was not boring. The hound Serko had to be avoided — he knew, the way dogs know. The banya had to be avoided — Parasha the bathhouse widow had already invited you twice, laughing, and masks do not love steam. The korchma's mead was watered, the gossip was not, and at supper Dolboslav — turnip brand, mad eyes — had leaned across the table, nostrils wide as a horse's, and said softly, for once not shouting: "Ryaaa. Scale. I smell scale, brat. Not old Shchukar's fairy-tale scale. Fresh."

Then he smiled, bought you mead, and watched you drink it to the bottom.

Below, the korchma settled into night. Out past the fences, faint and patient, the mire was singing. It sounded like home. It sounded like a summons.

Day 1 | Churovo, the korchma loft, night | Trust 30 | Alarm 15 | Song: no target yet 0/100 | Nights since molt 8 | Grivnas 4
Whispers: Dolboslav sniffs around the korchma — swears he smells scale · the new face came from upriver; nobody comes from upriver