Chapter 22: Blood Atonement
Even if Bellatrix was an erratic factor on the top, and perhaps precisely because, unlike the other Death Eaters, she did not make a pretence of stability, her staff's work was surprisingly good. They were used to implementing her brilliant schemes, and Aurora was not substantially different from the other daring actions they had undertaken for her, except that she now turned against her Master, the Dark Lord.
What followed was four and a half hours of precise and systematic actions. Helicopters moved across the front quickly, and tanks crossed what had been the lines, to support allies who were former enemies. Small teams working with Wizards and Witches moved deep behind the lines, some of the Wizards having been carefully selected to work with teams from the various Spetsnaz units.
What there was not was extensive use of armed force. This was a matter of talking, of intimidation, of forcing surrenders, and of the application of force like the scalpel: The precision elimination of those targets which were bound to otherwise provide resistance. A Russian witch would distract a Wizard loyal to Voldemort, make him report an infiltration to a command staff that was now his enemy, his own men would shoot him in the back. Or he would be pinned in place and dealt with by a sniper, or hit with overwhelming force of five or six Wizards at once. In this way they went through a list of four hundred who would not defect, and eliminated them quickly or secured them. A few hundred more had already been detained or disappeared the night before by Bellatrix's men, and some more subjected to the Imperious curse.
As the sun rose in the sky, these swift and sharp actions occasionally punctuated a position with gunfire. But they did not lead to large-scale fighting. Large scale fighting would mean the death of them all early on, and as the operation progressed and Hermione grew more hopeful, the risk instead became that Phase II would be imperilled and impossible, rather than a total failure of the operation.
These heroes, who had been born as normal men and women, who were Wizards or Muggles, had been trained in special tasks or had come to them by assignment to the crack units or the Wizard Protection Battalions. Likely, most of them had not sought out an assignment where each bullet might tell the fate of an operation which would either doom them, or liberate tens of millions. But all of them executed their orders, and dared to win.
Then the sun was high in the sky, fighting to make itself seen through the snow flurries. The faint cracks of the rifles, the dramatic colours and roar of magical combat, faded away. The radio channels had remained silent. The means of long-ranged magical communication had been seized. There was a slowly dawning realisation that they had won.
It was not some single dramatic moment. The situation reports began to simply say "all is well", "situation under control", "all targets neutralised". This is the way that the situation slowly became calm. In these isolated valleys and hillsides, there was peace again, though since it was winter, only the jackdaws rose into the air under the lightly falling snow.
Outside, Hermione could hear singing, though she could not identify the language, or the song. Nonetheless, it made General Diaz stiffen, and then smile, faintly. He acknowledged one more status report, and then cleared the boards, opening all the channels. "Secure from Aurora, maintaining security posture Alpha. Resume all normal radio traffic. Headquarters, Out."
Bellatrix looked up sharply. "General Diaz?"
"Madame Black," he answered, and his voice was cool but calm, and very matter-of-fact, "We have secured the front."
"That's only half-fucking-way," Bellatrix muttered, and pushed herself to her feet, looking around with eyes that seemed sallow and baggy, her exhaustion creeping through. "Still, it is done, Lady Tamar."
"It is done," Tamar Dadiani agreed. "You have done your utmost, and from Makhachkala to Vladikavkaz, from the Ossetian frontier to Grozny, you have restored our position to what it was in September. Of course, while I understand the temptation to rest on your laurels, Madame Black, the reality is that our agreement is quite clear. You need to begin the Crimean Operation, under the terms you agreed."
Bellatrix's expression turned baleful for a moment, and she reached down for her wand, but just held her hand against it, and spun sharply away on the heel of one of her boots to turn her back, lest anyone think she meant to fight. "I said it was only half done, Dadiani!"
"They want to see Madame Black," General Diaz murmured, interjecting. "They want to know she really led them, that she's really on their side, that the second most powerful Witch in the world is still here to protect them in this stroke. Give us a few more minutes."
Bellatrix looked to her own subordinate with a quizzical expression for a moment, then she gave a firm nod. "Lead on, General."
The entire group began to move. Larissa whispered something to Aiman Sadykova, who remained behind and went for her duffel bag. But Bellatrix was at least not there to see it.
Easily more than three thousand troops had gathered in front of the headquarters. The sight brought Bellatrix to a stop. Then, something seized her. She extended an arm to Jorge Diaz, and the man supported her as she hefted herself up onto the bonnet of a Land Rover from the staff pool. Standing there, she drew her wand and powered a simple spell to drive a beam of blacklight into the sky.
The blacklight shined in strange ways off of the clouds which occasionally brought down the snow, its reflection lost before it reached the mountains shrouded in the mist. Bellatrix seemed to entrance the men, who quieted down to turn toward her. Then Hermione realised she was looking, too. Bellatrix had, unsurprisingly, enchanted herself with a particularly powerful charm spell, and done it subtly as she moved to hop up on the auto. The reality was that if a Witch wanted a large group of muggles to pay attention to her, she could have that happen.
Bellatrix began to speak, then, confident and boisterous. "I have been told that we will be the troops of the British Government in Exile. Accordingly, we will be liberating all of your homelands. We're going to fucking win. That's all I've got to say for you lot of muggle blackguards and scoundrels."
Bellatrix had been unable to resist being derisive to the men. But the casual way she had cursed her way through a short and blunt speech, actually was exactly what these brutal veterans preferred to hear. And they interpreted—intentionally or otherwise—her old-fashioned English a somewhat different way.
"Black Guards! Black Guards! Black Guards!"
Their voices reached a roaring crescendo, as Bellatrix stood there, still holding her light aloft. She was confused, Hermione was sure, but also adapting with terrifying speed. Some of the archaic, stuffy language that still used thanks to her upbringing in the House of Black had also let her use a word that, as a joke—and if it was a joke, Bellatrix didn't realise it—or as a sincere gesture, if a somewhat mocking one, the former Janissaries had taken as their own. They were Bellatrix Black's troops, they were under blacklight from her wand in the hour of victory, and … They were the Black Guards.
Men began to fire their guns into the air. It was a moment when discipline was either lost, or created.
General Diaz leapt up onto the bonnet of the Land Rover with Bellatrix. "Viva la Guardia Negra!" Almost all the men from the Latin countries understood this at once, and a second roar ripped through the mass.
Hermione pressed up to the more senior officers. "Is this… Good ?" She asked, tautly.
"Yes, it is," Colonel Kabanov answered, surprising Hermione. "Councillor, we will have to rely on these men for much of the offensive operation, because we cannot get our own in position in time. They are establishing an esprit d'corps which will let them fight hard enough to do their job despite their defection and the loss of their purpose and chain of command. So we will let this happen."
"Thank you, Colonel," Hermione answered automatically. She shifted to be closer to Larissa, and before speaking, wordlessly took the Russian woman's offer of a light for a cigarette. "Lara, that song from before—I think it was from that group, over there." Hermione pointed to one group of soldiers. "I think you recognised it?"
"Yes," Larissa answered. "It's called 'Wo alle Straßen enden'. When All the Roads End. Like most German songs, it's quite bloody-minded, but especially so, since it dates from the First World War: The chorus, 'Wir sind verloren', translates as 'We Are Lost'."
"Merlin. And they sing it with such a jaunty air…" Hermione shook her head.
"I would, if I was a German," Larissa tossed back at her with a jaunty grin of her own and then took a drag on her cigarette. "She worked up those mercenaries pretty nicely. Of course, when the rush is all over, all they'll care about is that we've taken over paying them at the same rate."
"You think that's all that matters to them?"
"Not all, but most. They did volunteer to be Janissaries, after all. Fuck them." Larissa shrugged. "At least the Germans, when they came, were fighting for something they believed in. It was wicked and evil, but they had convinced themselves it mattered to their country and family. These guys just don't care."
"Like the Catholic mercenaries who sacked Rome in fifteen twenty-seven, and almost killed the Pope," Hermione answered thoughtfully, from her study of military history. "I suppose you're right."
"I usually am." Larissa grinned. " When we finish our smoke, we should go get some food. Before what happens next, I mean." Her look was distant for a moment. "Something to settle the stomach."
Larissa's words, innocent enough, still made Hermione think of the magnitude of what she had just agreed to, and the risks she was about to undertake. And it was clear from Larissa's distant look that her friend was fully cognizant of it, too. "Yeah…" A shiver ran through her, and she took a hard drag of her cigarette. She watched Bellatrix accept General Diaz's help down from the bonnet of the Land Rover, then she turned away with her friend. It made her look somewhat vulnerable to accept the help down, and softened her. Mentally, Hermione didn't feel like she was ready to deal with the fact that the Death Eater was on her side now, but it didn't matter; she had already committed herself to it. So what the hell is Lara going to find for me to eat that I won't throw up?
That thought, at least, made her grin, as she kicked out the stub and followed Larissa to find the chow.
When Hermione and Larissa returned from lunch, they were hustled upstairs to where, in the largest suite of the old lodge, the others were waiting. They entered the main room to see Bellatrix there, standing and frozen in place as Aiman Sadykova laid out a beautifully engraved golden limb, setting and adjusting pins on the end. A cauldron bubbled with what looked like angry blood, and a sizeable tub waited on the floor. There were bandages, and a rack of potions in greens and yellows close to a chair draped with towels, and another tub below it, empty.
Aiman was wearing a sharply curved Aldaspan at her side. She pointedly ignored Bellatrix as if they had already had a sharp exchange.
Bellatrix had looked as frozen as a statue, but when Larissa and Hermione entered, she came alive and spun to face them. When she did, the anger in her eyes flashed at Larissa, first. "We have come this far, we have been this successful and you're really going to go forward with having this steppe Shaman cut my fucking arm off when we're in the middle of battle? What is it really, Naryshkina? Some sense of blood vengeance for your people, a literal pound of blood before you let me go?"
"As I explained once already," Lady Tamar spoke before Larissa could answer, "this was part of the agreement. It's necessary to dupe Voldemort into thinking you are still at the front, still commanding your Army. You agreed to it, and it's a condition of your pardon. And let me add that you're damned right we're going to take our pound of flesh. You're wounded our land and killed our people. We extend to you the hand of friendship and merely ask you to sacrifice alongside of us. So stop harassing the Junior Councillor for her suggestion because I am the one who assented to this Dark Magic for the sake of our victory, I am the one who holds the command responsibility here, and I will see it through, Bellatrix Black!"
Bellatrix's face stiffened in a rictus for a moment, though her eyes flickered to Hermione, before she turned back to face Lady Tamar. "Then let's get on with it." She sneered at Sadykova. "You better make sure that blade is sharp. I won't give you a second swing to torture me for your own kicks, Shaman."
"You are masking your fear with haughtiness and anger, Madame Black," the woman answered in a smooth but heavy accent, drawing the sword, and swinging it in the room, ignoring the close proximity to others. They were used to danger, and did not flinch. She spun the blade faster and faster, until it lightly hissed through the air. "You are a noblewoman, so I'm going to use a sword . Can you at least be brave?"
"Witch of the First Class Sadykova, that will be enough," Lady Tamar said sharply. "Don't bait her. Madame Black, get in the chair, please."
Bellatrix stood there. She looked down at her bare hands, at her covered sleeves. Then she looked up again. "What happens if I don't?"
"We have a fight, and kill you, because your unbreakable vow will only apply if you go ahead and follow through with the whole deal, including the Crimean Operation. In fact, depending on how the Vow interprets the situation, it might kill you for me," Tamar shook her head, chuckling. "I would say, Madame Black, that you simply have no alternative."
Bellatrix glared at her, and then took the steps, and flung herself into the chair. "Alright. Here I am. Sitting in the chair," her voice sing-songed, sounding almost like a child. "Are you quite happy now?"
"Fabulous," Lady Tamar shrugged with droll sarcasm.
Bellatrix shot her a glare, before reaching down and beginning to slowly strip off the engageante on her left arm. As she did, Hermione could see a little quiver slip through her. When it reached the end of her arm, Hermione could see, revealed after one last moment of hesitation, something in a way more awful than the Dark Mark. The Dark Mark gleamed with sinister power.
The wicked, hideous, piled up scar on her wrist, which surely must still hurt or make movement of her wrists painful at least, that was another matter. That had been created by the massive chains which bonded her in Azkaban, spending fourteen years in chains.
Fourteen years in chains, while the waves boomed against the walls, and the Dementors sucked away any happiness that she felt. Fourteen years, with the manacles rubbing those scars raw again and again, and then building up, and generating a new, ugly layer, until they were left almost like a hideous ring of distorted flesh, torn and twisted and raised, where a delicate wrist should have been.
Now, Hermione finally clearly understood Bellatrix's veritable uniform, the choice of clothing to always conceal her arms despite the fact that she might well have had pride in the Dark Mark, and the real reason for it. She closed her eyes. How did we all just go along with this?
Then she forced herself to open them again. I will be a witness. I will not flinch from what this woman must do. She watched as Bellatrix extended her arm across the simple and quickly made wooden frame to hold it secure. Bellatrix settled her arm down onto the crudely made padding of a chopped up blanket.
It was then that Hermione could see the look of the woman's face. The discomfort, and the hints of real fear that she had tried to restrain for so long. She had cast herself alone in the entire world, and now the people who had promised her a pardon, were also about to cut her arm off to rid her of the Dark Mark. It was not a group of people that Bellatrix could remotely trust.
She was having to trust them anyway.
Aiman set the sword aside for the moment, and came to Bellatrix, offering a jar with bubbling potion in it. "Drink this."
"Is it for the pain?"
"It's to prevent infection and prepare the body to help with healing," Sadykova answered. "The next will be for pain."
"All right." Bellatrix drank it. The room, with its faded skiing pictures on the walls and faded comforter on the bed, felt smaller than it had a moment before. The pretences were stripped away. The Dark Magic of Voldemort was about to be pitted against the Dark Magic of the Black Court of Koldovstoretz.
Aiman quickly handed her the second potion, and watched as Bellatrix drank all of that, as well. "Let me know when you're comfortably numb."
As the second potion hit her, it reduced Bellatrix's inhibitions. "Darling, you don't know Pink Floyd like I know Pink Floyd," she muttered, watching with what was now kind of a detached interest as Aiman coated a paste of some kind of third potion on her upper arm.
"Hmm?" The Kazakh witch, who was now very much in control of the situation, glanced with arch curiosity to Bellatrix for a moment.
"English bands," Hermione felt herself moved to say. "I.." She really listened to muggle music? "Muggle bands," she added, with a bit of defiance.
"Music's music," Bellatrix slurred, and turned to Hermione. For a moment, the eyes of the two women met. Hermione could plainly see the fear that now laced through Bellatrix's eyes. Where once they had been so grey and morbid, now they were relaxed, and betrayed, like the rapidly-changing clouds above, her real fear.
Hermione was frozen in place by that look. She wanted to believe there was someone, anyone, on the planet who would treat the person behind those grey eyes with dignity and respect, even if she didn't really believe it was warranted. She wanted to think that Narcissa would welcome her sister back. Perhaps, that Andromeda would welcome her sister back.
They were both far away, and Bellatrix was here, now, in the process of having her arm which bore the Dark Mark severed from her body by a sword. Will you be measured by hate, or by forgiveness? Hermione asked herself. Then, very deliberately, she took a step forward, and then another. She reached out—her gloves pulled off before for lunch, and kept off in the warmth—and wrapped her bare hands around Bellatrix's right hand, and held it.
"Mudblood, what the hell are you doing?"
"Holding your hand," Hermione answered matter-of-factly as she clasped Bellatrix's in both of her own, and electing to ignore the barb.
Bellatrix focused on her and keened a sharp laugh. "No shit? I thought they said you were smart, muddy. I repeat: What are you doing? I'm quite sorry, but most of those words were already monosyllabic, so I can't make it simpler for you..."
The sword swished through the air, and descended with the sharp skill of a well-trained fencer, and dancer of the flankirovka. The steel glinted in the artificial light of the room, the blade descended, and a splash of Toujours Pur blood flashed through the air, and whetted the hunger of the blade. The crack of bone cleanly cut followed it, sectioned neatly at one of the places where a surgeon would have been hard-pressed to make a surgical amputation nearly so skilled as this one wrought by the blade.
Those grey eyes were fixed in a rictus of perfect agony for one moment, and one moment only, and then she screamed, sharp and unbridled, wild and agonising. Bellatrix seemed to pour her soul into that cry, and everyone in the room, magically touched, Wizards and Witches, felt something, as if perhaps something had been severed from Bellatrix that was more significant to the magical world than just her left arm.
The Dark Mark, Hermione wondered, and squeezed the woman's hand, out of a sense of duty if nothing else. Out of a sincere conviction that nobody deserved to suffer alone, forgotten, and far from their family. It was one thing to kill. It was another thing to suffer, and she would never permit herself to tolerate it.
Or at least, so she told herself.
Aiman moved quickly now. She slathered another of the potions, a thick paste, onto the stump of Bellatrix Black's left arm. As she did, the bleeding immediately stopped. Then she took the arm itself from the frame, and placed it in one of the tubs on the floor. Over it, the contents of the cauldron was poured, and she began to chant in a tongue older than Latin, a tongue of the steppe. As she chanted, she approached Bellatrix's side, and took the tub which had collected the blood which had flowed from her arm.
At the culmination of the chant, she overturned the tub, and added Bellatrix's own blood to the blood-like potion which now ensconced the severed arm. A rippling of red light, a strange black miasma, flushed out from the tub, and washed over them with a cool and clammy feel.
For the first time in her adult life, Bellatrix Black was free of the Dark Mark. Her head lolled to the side. She no longer protested that Hermione was holding her hand. Her grey eyes flickered dimly, and the woman could not bring herself to focus on anything, let around the tub holding her severed arm, drenched in the contents of the cauldron and her own blood, and thus, in a strange way, kept still alive.
Aiman Sadykova knelt by the tub, and reached out to delicately put a finger in the slurry of potion and blood, and then raise it to her lips. She closed her eyes for a moment, and shuddered, then nodded. "Yes, it has worked."
"Bellatrix," Hermione said, trying to get her attention, "it's done."
"Ugh… My voluntary mutilation," the woman below her laughed hoarsely, completely manic and yet still numb, uninhibited, distant under the influence of the potion, managing it all at once. "Making myself uglier. Great. Just what I wanted! I… New arm?"
"I have to check, Madame Black," Aiman answered, rising to use a rag to clear some of the thick potion from the stump of Bellatrix's left arm. "Yes, it's physically complete, though the shock will linger for some areas, and there are more potions to give you."
Hermione helped steady Bellatrix while Aiman brought the next. The dark witch could barely keep it down, but she managed. Then there was a second, and a third, until Bellatrix was nearly growing with the discomfort of trying to swallow, to make her digestive system function, when her entire body wanted to curl in on itself in agonising pain and the disorientation and shock of having lost a limb. After that, the rest of the potion on the stump of the limb was finally cleared away.
Next, Aiman brought forth the golden limb. She pushed it into place, noted the length, and made a few adjustments.
Bellatrix didn't look. Instead, she kept her head turned away—toward Hermione. "You're still holding m'hand, muddy," her voice whispered in a tone that managed to be husky, to be sultry, even in a crazy, brutal moment like this.
So I am. "You still look like you need it."
Bellatrix cackled, shaking the cascade of curls on her head, and then winced at a particularly sharp motion as Aiman adjusted the pins and set the final length. "Muddy, what I need right now is a single malt scotch, not a sack of dirty blood keeping my hand warm."
She's a remarkably bad liar when she's in pain, Hermione thought, and refused to go anywhere.
With the pins set, Aiman coated the joint of the limb in the drying remains of the blood which Bellatrix had shed, and began a new incantation, though it was in the same tongue. At the end, the limb jerked, and with it, Bellatrix's whole body, as if she had had a muscle spasm or an electric shock.
"Merlin! Fuck. " Bellatrix cursed, and then blinked, realising she had an arm which again responded to commands, sensation, and feeling. It was just gleaming and made out of hollow golden tubes, covered with golden plate, formed into the shape of a natural human arm, but covered in ancient runes.
"You will," Aiman observed coldly, "Be in a great deal of pain and discomfort. You see, normally one must let the stump heal for at least a week before the integration of the artificial limb begins, but I was informed that was not acceptable in this circumstance. Likewise, your natural arm will remain alive for two weeks, so you have those two weeks to complete your mission in. I do wish you luck, Madame Black. While you have insulted me, and my family is as old and pure as your's, even if we had yurts and a herd of Pegasuses and not your fancy mansion, I do want you to succeed, and will forgive much if it happens." She straightened. "I am done here," she then announced matter-of-factly, and turned to begin assembling her things.
"Then who will help me into that damned bed?" Bellatrix asked with a cold sweat across her brow.
"Mudblood, apparently," Hermione couldn't help a smirk.
Notes:
1. The sack of Rome in 1527 was a fairly legendary moment when the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V's Army mutinied, marched on Rome, and sacked the city, very nearly killing the Pope, despite the fact that the Emperor Charles himself was, of course, a Catholic. But this is what happens when you don't pay your mercenaries. The situation was somewhat more complicated than that, sure, but the bottom line is that what Bellatrix is engineering here is much the same. Thanks to her reading in military history since the war began, Hermione would be quite acquainted with the event. Voldemort's forces have no loyalty to him, so Bellatrix essentially offered them a better deal, and they flipped quickly. They are mercenaries.
2. The English translation of the German song the mercenaries sing, I provide below:
We are lost...
Where all roads end
our path doesn't stop.
Wherever we turn
time takes its course.
The heart burned
banished in pain.
So we go lost through, the grey no-man's land.
Maybe none of us will return, back to our homeland.
We are lost...
It is a real German marching song of the First World War, that the soldiers sang as the end drew near on the western front. German bloody-minded songs of this type are often sung to quite the intense or jaunty tune. Another good example is "Wir lagen vor Madagaskar", in which you happily sing about the plague and thirst killing everyone on your wrecked ship. However, this is by no means unique to the Germans, in fact, I think Russia has a better talent for making songs about everyone dying sound stirring and patriotic.
3. Guards/Guard. This is a funny English-ism. In most languages you would straightforwardly translate the name of an elite unit as "Guard", without the plural - adding the plural makes it sound like a group of actual guards, not a single unit. However, in English an elite military unit is properly referred to as a "Guards" unit with the plural. In Russian the word is Гвардия (Gvardiya), which creates a clear difference from a simple "Guard" whereas in English the use of the word is totally contextual, except for this plural.
4. Aldaspan is the name of a kind of Kazakh scimitar.
5. The fundamental tension of this scene, I think, is that the act is absolutely necessary, because they must hide Bellatrix's movements from Voldemort until the operation is over. So she has to lose her arm. But still, are these people, who are patriotic, and in the midst of war, feeling a bit bloodthirsty that this Death Eater, this criminal, will be allowed to escape justice, and therefore giving in to the fact that, at least, cruel necessity gives them the opportunity to take a "pound of flesh"? Yes, this is absolutely the case, and I feel that it's necessary and totally human to portray them this way. It in no way impeaches on their character. They are soldiers, and they are about to, for the sake of victory, be friendly with someone who was in Voldemort's inner circle when the nukes flew. They want some kind of expatiating sacrifice. But it was necessary; it was no easy magic to remove the Dark Mark from Bellatrix, it demanded a cruel sacrifice in blood, for it is Dark Magic too powerful to accept anything else.
6. The Flankirovka is a kind of dance with swords. I'm using the term somewhat generically here to refer to any such custom of the steppe, whereas properly it refers to the dance of the Cossacks.