“Perhaps the condition of humiliation and of subjugation in which our clergy and people have found themselves in past centuries; perhaps an intuitively felt need; perhaps the realization that nothing is more important than knowledge to move the people forward– are the reasons that learning and education are an ideal for all of us towards which our young people strive even at an age when they scarcely understand what constitutes true knowledge…”

  – Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky

  Yana, like many of the other children of the village, survived an uneventful infancy. The hills and fields of the steppe provided for everything her family could want for. And more!– spring brought with it living water and mosquitoes, while in the autumn, the cucumbers and the beetles alike came out of their garden. Occasionally, a travelling trader would bring on his mule some beads of coral, cloth from the town, perhaps a shovelhead or scythe of dull grey iron, and news of the world below the steppes, and the village would buzz with gossip for a day and a night.

  But when she was old enough to walk, when she had learned to talk, when she had laughed and then asked questions about the nature of the sun and sky, of the clarity of water and the weight of iron, her parents saw in her gleaming eyes the seed of an intelligence that far, far outshone their own in its brilliance and ardency.

  And so they brought her, smiling and sucking on her thumb, to the only person in the village– in their lives!– whom they knew might be able to teach her. That was the old woodcutter Jeremiah, who lived near the woods where the pines still reached for the mountaintops, and who came into town twice every week to teach the children.

  Some were tempted to say that her parents spoiled her, an only daughter, come late in their lives. But it would not be fair, the other villagers mused, unless you had ever had a child of your own. Try not to spoil them then!

  It was not that the villagers distrusted the old man. He had been a stranger when their grandparents were their age, and by this time, he no longer was strange to them.

  Neither was it that he had some inscrutable past. It was all clear enough; he was a man of some learning from one of the coastal cities, fleeing the innumerable wars that bloomed and extinguished like flowers trampled underfoot.

  He had come to the village with some books and no money. In those days, the laws of hospitality were still observed, if not sacred, and the men of the village got together to build him a cottage at the edge of the woods, while their wives baked some extra loaves of bread, and the elder gave him an old, dull, but still-solid iron axe.

  There must have been something in the air or the water, for he soon gained a vitality that glowed from his cheeks, and friendliness came into his voice. The villagers were content enough to bring food to him for the firewood and charcoal that he brought them in turn.

  If any were worried that the wars would follow him to their village, those worries were quickly forgotten, and trepidation dissolved into indifference. The children quickly outgrew their fears and began to pester him about the world beneath the steppes, where he had come from, and he told them stories of great cities with thousands of people (he had to explain the concept of a thousand as well), streets paved with stone and thronging with activity, of the ocean and the wooden ships that sailed on it, of lords and kings of lords, of magicians at their courts who summoned fire and dragons, and of many more other things besides.

  But none were curious enough to see that world for themselves. Their parents smiled at them, patted their heads, and had nothing to add, for they themselves had never witnessed such things.

  They did, however, understand that the quiet young man held in his mind a great store of knowledge, and thought that their children might do well to learn from him. Knowledge, after all, was something that they valued greatly.

  So to three generations of children, the woodcutter taught of the cycle of the seasons, of how still water brought with it disease, how to oil and polish iron, how to care for wounds, and all those other things that a farmer might want to know. There was no-one in the village who was unfamiliar with him now, and there was even talk of making him the next elder, though he refused with a smile every attempt to sound him out on the matter.

  In that way, he had stayed out of the affairs of Man for years upon years, and that seemed to be all that he asked for. He had not taken a wife of his own, and there was some small talk about that, in the usual fashion of gossip, but nothing more came of it.

  It was to such a man that Yana’s parents brought her, though much of his story had by then spilled into the sands of collective memory.

  What a joy she was to him! To finally have someone who would listen– for just a few sentences, at first, and then, for longer and longer, as the curiosity of her childhood stoked into full fire, until they would stay behind at the village centre for whole afternoons after his lessons ended, talking about anything and everything that struck her fancy that day.

  The villagers who passed by could not help but overhear their conversations. At first, they wrinkled their eyes in smiles as the old man taught of things that they themselves already knew. The rise and fall of the sun’s path; the shapes of the moon; the times of crops; the sounds of animals. Time plays tricks on the act of remembrance– perhaps he had taught them those same things when they were still so young, they reasoned.

  But as the breadth of their conversations grew wider, as their depth grew more profound, the others about them could comprehend less and less, until one day, the realms of their understanding stood separate from that of the village, past an invisible, intangible, impenetrable wall.

  In none of their lives had the villagers heard of such things as philosophy, ecology, geography. They understood just the experiences at their fingertips and beneath their feet, but these two– this old man and this precocious girl– they together seemed to be able to peek past the shroud of their immediate world and see faraway into some realm inaccessible to the others.

  The villagers could not help but feel some– was it envy? fear?– to catch even the briefest fragments of such thoughts. But one look at the old man’s kindly wrinkled face, and the young girl’s own, burbling and brimming with pure joy, and nobody could feel anything but a sympathetic warmth.

  Eventually, she came to spend less and less time playing with the other children. Her parents, loving to a fault, allowed her to visit the woodcutter in his cottage, and there she learned, from the precious books that lined a single shelf along one of its walls, how to read and write. She would always come back with a chunk of charcoal, gleaming, almost silver, that rang like metal when struck, and with her sweaty hands sooty from carrying it, smiling a grin as wide as her face could make it.

  Every few months, when a tiny little pile had accumulated, her father would set up a small cooking fire and roast on wooden skewers some vegetables, mushrooms, and meat, marinated in a secret mix. He would often say that that charcoal was the best fuel he had ever cooked with.

  Though some villagers waggled their tongues behind closed backs, they quietly decided among themselves that it would be a good thing to have another teacher in the village before the old man got too far along in years. Once, when the gossip got particularly vicious, her mother interjected and shushed them.

  “What do you know?” she scolded. “The girl will learn more than all of us put together, and she still will have a kinder tongue than you busybodies.”

  Girlhood bloomed into womanhood, and as she blossomed into the springtime of her life, there was yet more talk in the village of whom she would take as a husband. Perhaps Ostap the baker, who was hardworking and well-to-do? Or Svyryd the herdsman, who had been her friend in childhood?–

  – She was a handful, aunts and mothers alike agreed, and not likely to be familiar with domestic life, and her parents might not afford a great dowry besides. But she was good of heart, with beautiful black eyebrows over her glittering brown eyes, and long black hair that curled just the slightest as it draped itself beside her round cheeks. Surely she would not make a bad wife.

  But she would not choose, and her parents would not hear anything of having that choice made for her, and that was that.

  Of course, they longed to see her married. What parents would not? But more than that, they could not bear to quench their child’s spirit– let alone break it– and so they decided instead to let her indulge herself in her learning. She might still settle down one day, they figured, and one day, they might yet hold a grandchild in their arms.

  That day would not come.

  Inevitably, war eventually found its way to the village, though by then, it had forgotten the old man who lived by the woods.

  It came at the end of summer when the men had returned from their lord’s campaign and the fields were ripe for the harvest. It came not as the storm that creeps upon the horizon, not as the tide that crashes upon the shore, not as a force of nature, but crawling on its belly, as the creeping sickness of a man who covets of his neighbours.

  She had made the trek up to the familiar cottage not very long ago. It sat on a little plateau with a winding trail leading up to it that had its curves broken up with the regular lines of wood slats. The cottage itself was squat and white, with a roof of wood shingles painstakingly split from logs of cedar instead of the usual thatch, and a wide overhang by the front under which great cords of split and stacked firewood waited for their winter. The broad, wavy stump of some impossibly old oak, scored and banded with cuts, lorded over the grass on the other side.

  She grabbed her skirt and skipped up.

  – Knock, knock, knock, on the door, as was her custom.

  “Uncle Jeremiah! Are you in, old man?”

  “Yes,” came the reply, almost instantly.

  “Are you sure?” she cheekily responded.

  “Now, would I lie to you?”

  The words escaped from his lips as the door swung quietly inwards.

  A smiling face greeted her, bronzed by the sun, creased about the edges of every feature, glossy with oil. His flesh wrapped tightly about his bones, as though it begrudged him every expression, and a thin, graying moustache drooped towards his long chin.

  “How do you do it?!” she exclaimed, even as she stepped into an embrace, kissing him on the right cheek, then the left, then the right again. “Every time! You can’t be waiting at the door for me, can you?”

  “Can I not?” he inquired, the terseness of the words at odds with the warmth of his smile.

  “You obviously can,” she replied, “but how do you do it?”

  She quickly glanced around, not waiting for his reply.

  “And don’t say that I’m not looking around hard enough, because I am. You couldn’t have seen me through a window like that. I know I wasn’t singing today. Do you have some method of sensing, maybe, the vibrations of the earth?”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Vibrations of the earth, indeed!” he chuckled, which grew into a low, stuttering rumble as he stepped away from her. “There are machines that are sensitive to that, working on the principle of conduction, but your footsteps hardly cause enough of a stir to affect them.”

  “No,” he continued, nodding sagely. “Perhaps I have the ability to tell the time of day accurately and precisely, mmm?”

  “The time!” she huffed. “On what principle?”

  A moment passed by, and her eyebrows narrowed toward each other as she contemplated what she had just been told.

  “No way!” she snapped, as the realization hit her. “I can’t tell the time myself, even if you can! No, it’s got to be something you do.”

  He grinned and stepped back into the hallway. She trotted past the threshold and bowed daintily, closing the door behind her, hearing the latch clink softly against its wood.

  “Are you so sure?” he asked again. “You do come here at the same time every day, you know.”

  “Nah, that can’t be it,” she returned without much thought. “I’d’ve known if I was doing it.”

  He paused to let the thought sink in. A petulant frown took over her lips, and a slight redness rose to her cheeks.

  “Alright,” she conceded, “I might’ve been doing it. I just didn’t notice it.”

  He said nothing, but waggled his eyebrows, waiting for the excuse.

  “But you only told me about how the sun rises and falls in the sky last week!” she retorted.

  “Oh no,” he replied, “it was many years ago. Also, didn’t you notice it yourself?”

  “You always said never to look at the sun!”

  “Ah, perhaps,” his voice echoed from the kitchen, almost drowned out by the tinkling of water being poured into the kettle. “But did I not also tell you that we may observe a great many things only from their effects? You must have noticed the changes in the shadows and in the lengths of the day throughout the years.”

  By now, her frown had turned into a full pout.

  “Well, alright, maybe I’ve not been paying so much attention.”

  She put herself into the rocking chair by the window, and gave the table leg a flippant kick to get the chair started. There was a lighter area of scuffed wood already around the spot she kicked.

  “No, you have not,” he lazily remarked, as he came back to the table. “Pay attention, Yana, as much as you can. It’s learning that sets us free.”

  Behind him, on the stovetop, steam lazily rose to the roof from the spout of the kettle. He sat himself down in the other chair, groaning softly as he did.

  “But,” he continued, “blaming ourselves doesn’t help us solve the problem, does it?”

  “… No, it doesn’t,” she replied. Her eyebrows furrowed again and, resting her elbows on the armrests, she intertwined her fingers and propped her chin on her thumbs. Teetering back and forth in a chair built for someone taller and wider than she, her head almost sunk into her chest, she looked like a heron shading the water to attract its prey.

  The sight was utterly comical.

  “A hint,” he offered. “Your initial guess was on the right path. I wasn’t observing you.”

  “Aha! So it must be the time!” she replied, without changing her expression.

  A short time passed, and he walked to the stove just as the the kettle boiled, measured a small spoonful of leaves into two cups, poured piping water into each, and returned to the table.

  She broke the barrier of her brows and glanced at him.

  “Do you… count the time?”

  He laughed again.

  “No, no, not at all,” he chuckled. “Do you?”

  He sat down and picked up one of the cups. She took the other, gasped softly at its heat, and set it back down.

  “It’s much simpler, to tell the truth,” he began, though she returned the sentiment with a good helping of scepticism, generously doled out by the gaze she fixed him with. “I just can tell the time.”

  “The…”

  “No, I mean it,” he continued. “And it’s something I can’t explain. I simply know when it’s time for something, though I have to have thought about it beforehand. It must be something that my body or my mind does without my active participation.”

  He sipped the tea. She looked at her little wooden teacup and briefly considered another guess.

  “It’s a– skill, perhaps– that I picked up when I was in the Army.”

  “The–! ”

  “Yes, the Army,” he said, finishing her thought. “Though not the one you’re thinking of. ‘Army’, with a capital letter ‘A’.”

  “Is that something from that other place?”

  For the first time that day, his expression softened into something like detached neutrality, as though the muscles of his face had lost their nerve. The barest hint of a twinkle remained in his eyes.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry–”

  “No, don’t be,” he said, and a spring came back to his cheeks. “Never be sorry for asking, at least, not with me. I’ll tell you if it’s a question I don’t want to answer.”

  She glanced down, saw the teacup, and decided to spend a little time observing her surroundings.

  They were in the kitchen of the cottage, a wide, squarish room, opposite the great oven on the other side. Their table sat underneath a single window, large by her standards. It was sealed to the outside with a thin layer of some almost-clear stone, perhaps a crystal, that let ample light in while still keeping out the wind. By their table hung a few rows of shelves on the wall. The top shelf held a smattering of the usual religious icons. Right below them sat a small row of precious, precious books.

  She briefly wrinkled her nose as she took in a whiff of the tea. It was floral and fragrant, with a hint of sweetness in the nose, but not on the tongue. The weather was a little warm for drinking something hot, but she was grateful for it anyway.

  “Dandelions?” she asked, peeking into the cup.

  “Chrysanthemums,” came the reply. “And a touch of burdock.”

  “Chrys-anthemums?”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling. “I grow a few in the garden.”

  “What’s their, uh, phylogeny?”

  “I don’t know myself.”

  “Can I get some? We haven’t seen a peddler in a while.”

  He sipped at his tea, and she hers.

  “You can, after you help me with describing and cataloguing them. There’s a great many things that I don’t know,” he continued, “and the work of understanding those things will have to be someone else’s work.”

  “Hmmph,” she harrumphed. “I don’t think I’d want to do that work.”

  He laughed aloud at that.

  “Maybe not, but don’t think that you’ll always manage to get off so easy. Nothing is done without work, and good work, at that, so you might as well learn how to do it properly.”

  “Which reminds me!” he mused, interrupting his own pause. “What did you want to study today?”

  “Ethics, please!” she beamed.

  “Ethics!” he repeated. “Ah, it’s just as well, now that you’ve come of age.”

  “What does that have to do with anything!” It was more of a protest from her than a question.

  “Oh, I’m sorry I brought that up,” he offered in conciliation. “But ethics, as I see it, is the work–” she scrunched her face at him– “the work of making not only the right decision, but also the best one.”

  “Isn’t the right choice always the best one?” she asked.

  “Or the best one the right one?” he countered. “No, because in asking what is the ‘best’, we must also consider, ‘best for whom?’. And then in asking what is ‘right’, we again are considering the question of value, perhaps from a different perspective.”

  A distant look came onto her face, one that he recognized as her considering her next question. It was such a strange thing to see, and one almost terrifying to conceive, that a– youth!– had such depth of thought.

  “What… should we value?” she eventually offered. “And how do we figure out how to– how to get it?”

  He opened his mouth to reply, but her own thoughts interrupted her.

  “No, it’s the same problem, isn’t it?”

  He grinned from cheek to cheek.

  “Yes, exactly. Those are just two parts of the same problem, and there’s a third, besides: how do we actually do something that we’ve decided is right?”

  He finished off his tea and swirled the dregs absentmindedly.

  “There are many ways of choosing value in the world,” he eventually spoke. “Many people will tell you what they value, but always remember that you have that power and that right as well. And behind every system of ethics is someone’s system of value.”

  He glanced at her, and her intent gaze told him that she had heard and understood.

  “And that is how the ethics that I will teach to you is special, because it acknowledges that you and the people around you both take part in the– call it the assignment– of value. Any other system merely pretends to be universal when it is in fact some individual’s values disguised as such.”

  “Many different things in life are widely considered to be good, and all these are in between two bad extremes. Courage is found between cowardice and foolhardiness; generosity between miserliness and extravagance. So the work is in finding that best course of action in the middle, devising a plan to achieve that objective, and then, to actually do those things.”

  He paused to let his words sink in, as a matter of habit, but such an act was hardly necessary with Yana, who devoured all knowledge and made it a part of herself.

  “Some people call it a system of ‘virtues’, but that is to mistake the label for the result,” he said, twirling the tip of his graying moustache around his finger. “More properly, it is a system of habits; to do the right thing by practice, to want to do the right thing, and to have it come naturally.”

  He looked at her again. She was staring out the window.

  “And one part of those good habits is listening to others–”

  “It’s a fire.”

  “A– !–”

  He shot upright and pivoted on the balls of his feet with a swiftness incongruent with his age. In a few quick strides, he was at the shelves, and from behind the books, he pulled out a battered, tarnished spyglass.

  Yana was already at the door, creaking it open, peeking outside. He rushed after her.

  “Wait,” he commanded, but she had already stopped in the threshold.

  “It’s… should we go to help?” her voice quavered as she spoke.

  He raised the spyglass up to his eye and looked through, and as he did, the look on his face fell. For a moment, there was a horrific darkness in his expression; then it passed, and he grabbed her hand and pulled her back into the cottage, closing the door behind them and latching it. She did not have the presence of mind to protest.

  “Soldiers.” He moved quickly while explaining, gathering the books from the shelf as he spoke. “Horsemen. There’s cavalry in the village. You’ll be safe here. Come to this–”

  She shook off her shock.

  “What about– mom and dad? Will they–”

  He moved into the doorway beside the oven and looked back from it, waving her over urgently. She mutely followed.

  “We can’t go to them, not now,” he managed to get out through thin, pressed lips.

  The oven extended far beyond its front and into the bedroom, its thick clay walls easily holding many days’ worth of heat for warmth in winter. A flat shelf had been molded into its great rounded back, and some blankets were piled on top of it, no doubt for sleeping on. The books lay in a small heap at the foot of the shelf.

  As he was finishing his sentence, Jeremiah flung the blankets aside, then scrabbled his fingers into the clay, searching for something. He winced as he found it, breaking a fingernail, and grunted as he pulled upwards on two wooden planks. The clay all around them cracked, until suddenly they came off, like a lid, and he lifted them off, setting them down nearby. Then he bent over the bed and lifted out a pile of straw, and then a couple more wooden boards.

  He turned his head towards her, and the look on his face summoned her feet. Beneath the floorboards, underneath where the straw had been, she saw the first step of a steep staircase, leading downwards into pure lightlessness.

  She glanced at him, finally understanding what he meant.

  “Can’t– maybe they won’t know we’re here?” she asked, the fear in full bloom on her pale face.

  “They will have seen the smoke.”

  “If we run?”

  “Footprints. I see horses as well. We can’t outrun or lose them.”

  “What about?–” she gasped, suddenly conscious of some other worry, but he thrust the books and spyglass into her arms, and set her teacup on top.

  “Go,” he urged, with a desperation in his voice. “They’re coming here. Feel on the walls for metal pots. There will be water in them. Make no sound. Bite into some cloth if you have to. And don’t come out until there’s been silence for at least a day.”

  “Are you–”

  “Go.”

  She looked at him for– would it be the last time?– then hurried down the steps, bracing herself as the darkness surrounded her, then gasping as the boards fell back into place above her and a rain of dried clay spattered onto the ground. The stairway was narrow enough that she could feel it with her elbows, and she took a few steps in the absolute lightlessness until, finally, she fell to the ground, set the books onto the dusty floor, and fought the urge to– to do what?– she could not even tell.

  Then there was a silence that brought overpowering terror, and a darkness that offered no holds for her eyes to grasp onto, no stars nor moon to light her thoughts.

  Fear quickly set its fingers into her mind, as she worried about her parents, about her friends, about the village. A small ember of hope kindled itself: maybe Jeremiah had been wrong, maybe the soldiers wouldn’t come up here?

  That hope extinguished itself when, even through the wood and clay above her, she heard the cottage’s door break inwards with a sickening crack. Then there was the faint patter of footsteps; she heard her heart in her head, and brought her sleeve up to her mouth and bit down on it, barely aware that she was gasping; and then, once the shouts and sneers of the men turned into the shrieks and screams of revelry, her fear lost all semblance of cognition and overcame her with a savage, basal rapacity, and in its grip, she let herself go.