My friend, Giselle Marks, and I have put together a small illustrated booklet of poems on the Ukraine and Russian aggression called 'War on the Steppe' available in both kindle and paperback version. The royalties are pledged to go to humanitarian aid for the people of Ukraine. I understand it might take a few days to be available as a pb in Europe; apologies. If you're not interested yourself, please will you do what you can to spread word about it to those who might be? it's a mixed bag, running through all the emotions.

I can draw T72's but the Sukoy-27 was a bitch. I know more about tanks than aircraft.

Chapter 20

"How's it going, Aleksej?" asked Jeremi.

The portly tsar glared at him.

"Do you want to add to my torments by making me talk about them?" he growled. "And what is happening to my wife and family?"

"Actually, I genuinely wondered how much you had learned," said Jeremi. "I went to the trouble of finding you a foreman who is a philosopher, a rare and valuable man to find from amongst the ranks of serfdom, many of whom have any finer thoughts ground out of them by sheer overwork and tiredness, lack of sustenance from an early age, which saps intellect, will, and ability, and fear of the knout the only incentive. Now I wager you are too tired to think much and yet your former serfs, who are now your work colleagues, consider the work we have them set to as a relative rest cure, since they get three good meals a day, decent clothes provided, enough to drink, permission to go and use the latrines at need, and they don't get beaten to make them work faster. And you know what? I'm prepared to wager I have more work done than with serfs working under the knout, half-starved, and unwilling. How would you fare if you had this across your back when you were slacking?" He produced a knout and whacked it hard on the marble of a statue in the palace.

The marble split.

"Don't do that! You'll break it!" cried Aleksej.

"Oh, so breaking a man's back doesn't matter?" said Jeremi. "Listen, Aleksej, I believe you to be a clever, well-educated and moderately enlightened man, but unless and until I can put you in charge in the expectation that you will curb the excesses of your boyars, I may have to give permission to the Cossack directing the digging to use the knout on you. You're sufficiently well-padded that you'd take less damage than the average serf. You have a unique opportunity, because all the men you are working with, who are not prisoners, are former serfs; and you can hear for yourself that they are not animals. I put you in plain clothes to protect you. Some of the other boyars are getting a bit of rough justice. Plato does not know who you are so he will tell it like it is. I told him you were a palace servant I needed to have an education in reality to put you back in a suitable position as an aide to whoever is in charge. You can learn from this."

"I have learned to loathe you instead of fear you," said Aleksej.

Jeremi laughed.

"Oh, my dear fellow, I have hardly done anything to make you loathe me," he said. "Why, if you were on an inadequate dish of groats once a day, in lice-ridden clothing because you only have one change and can't afford enough firewood to wash often, and you had a heavy whip across your backside and legs every time you paused to take breath, then you'd have the right to loathe me. As your own serfs loathe their masters, but are beaten and starved to the point they can barely express the feeling which settles into a dumb resentment, too much overlaid with pain, exhaustion and hunger to be able to escape. Well, I will give the Cossack in charge permission to start you with his little nagajka. It is not as fearsome as the knout; indeed, we Cossacks use it for massage after our steam baths. But it may remind you what you are learning, which is to say a small, a very small, taste of life as a serf. You won't get treated as a serf because I won't have any of God's children treated the way you blasted Moskale think it suitable to do so."

"I... I have never considered the lot of the serf," said Aleksej, defensively. "I've never questioned how things have always been."

"You have with some things," said Jeremi. "You've started trying to modernise your army. You want to explore eastwards. You should explore closer to home. If you can understand well enough to abandon serfdom, and be a better Christian thereby, you may save your soul by going by the words of Jezus, who said, 'who does this to the least of my people, does it also to me,' rather than letting nasty-minded old men prate about excommunicating people for a minor difference in finger position or pronunciation. I've handed that fellow Nikon over to the Kiev church to try for heresy; the fellow is far more guilty through his desire to stir up trouble than anyone with a mildly different ritual."

Aleksej gaped.

"But he said it was important!" he said.

"Suppose you lost your hand in an accident so you had no fingers to hold in the prescribed style?" said Jeremi. "Does that cut you off from God? Of course it does not. You people need a little more tolerance of all kinds. And it's one more thing that makes us laugh at you as uncivilised."

"But he is a Patriarch!"

"He puts on his trousers one leg at a time and he pisses and shits the same as any other man. You cannot set up a single man to be higher than the Almighty, you poor fool, for that is blasphemy, and Nikon blasphemes in his desire to be taken more seriously than our Lord. Jezus said nothing of crossing ourselves; we do it in remembrance of his sacrifice, and it is that we do it for that not the way in which it is done which makes it holy to us. The important thing that we do is to hold Communion, for at that last supper He said, 'Take, eat; this is My body. Do this in remembrance of Me' of the bread; and of the wine, 'Drink; this is My blood. Do this in remembrance of Me.' At no time did he say 'hold your fingers thus because it is the proper way.' He taught us the Lord's Prayer. He encouraged us to keep the Sabbath, and I have seen your boyars making their serfs break the Sabbath, which is a sin, and of far greater significance. As to how His name is pronounced! Why, if it is by Greek custom, doubtless it is in the Greek fashion, and was Jezus a Greek? He was not, you poor fool, he was a Jew, and it is why we honour the Jews who are His people, though they did not claim Him in his lifetime. And this, too, was by God's design, so anyone who condemns them for being part of God's design and Holy Will also blasphemes." He paused. "You would do better to worry about a supposed Jewish Messiah, who might have been looked for as the second coming, but for word I have heard of his lack of humility. I will humbly ask forgiveness if I am wrong, but I believe him a fake, and a fraud, and will worry about dealing with trouble between Jew and Christian when it arises. Jurij has some ideas of dispersing crowds by burning gunpowder with onion juice to make those in the crowd cough and sob and want to go home."

oOoOo

Battles were sporadic as pockets of resistance were found, and overcome. The artillery had been used to bombard a small castle, and, with regret, to break massed ranks of serfs forced to fight, indeed, some of them believing their priests that they must fight as the tsar and nobility were sacred.

"And what sort of message is that!" said Jurko in disgust. "Blasphemy indeed; 'Thou shalt have no other gods before Me,' the primary command Moses brought from the mountain, and yet they set up the tsar as if he were a saint, more than a saint. These Moskale pretend to be Christian, but I've scarcely seen an ounce of Christian feeling from them, save the simple peasants and serfs, who are wrongly led but at least are devout enough."

"I confess myself horrified," said Longinus, who had appointed himself Jurko's bodyguard. "I almost feel as though I should swear another oath until we have the Moskale civilised."

"I wouldn't do that, if I was you," said Jurko. "In case we're still trying in three or four hundred years' time. Just marry Jadwiga and shag her senseless, will you? Or shag her senseless and then marry her, the order isn't that important. The rest of us are putting up with her being snippy because you are frustrating her, and it's getting wearing."

Longinus stared.

"You would not mind?"

"She's been longing for you since before you went to Sweden, and she was too young then. Now she's old enough. She's my sister, and I want to call you my brother. And then you can breed a host of little Trouser-snatchers in Doggyguts."

"Hood-snatcher is the banner, and it's Myszykiszki, Gut-mice," said Longinus.

"Well, if you have enough offspring to protest it, fewer people will laugh at it," said Jurko. "Jadwiga, take your knight away and show him what you learned spying on Helena and me."

"At your command, my lord-brother," said Jadwiga. "Come, my knight; I have my orders from our most puissant and noble prince, puĊ‚kownik of shovels, and Admiral of the highways."

"Jadwiga, I... I am afraid that I am not indifferent to you, and that if you are... dear me, if you tease, I do not answer for the consequences. I am not made of stone."

Jadwiga investigated.

"Part of you is," she said. "Now you can kiss me, and we start exploring."

Longinus gave up.

His expression for several days was somewhere between totally bemused and elated.

oOoOo

Helena was still spending a lot of time with the royal children rather than on the front lines; this, after all, was part of her job, to make them happy to go with her. The Tsarina had free run of the palace. She visited the children for an hour each day to play sedately and tell them a bedtime story.

"I take it that your choice is to stay with your husband when your children go as hostages, and you are withdrawing from them gradually so they get used to seeing less of you?" said Helena.

The tsarina stared.

"What do you mean?" she said. "This is what I normally do; I give them some personal time every evening. I am normally too busy for anything else. It proves you are not royal at all if you do not comprehend this."

"I hate being away from my children, but when we are at home or in Warszawa, I expect them to come to me after their morning lessons, to have their meals with the family, and if I have things to do, to stay with me, reading or playing, and we usually have a couple of hours romp. My husband joins us for this, before dinner, and then one of us reads them bedtime stories," said Helena. "They learn better how to be princes by watching Jurko, and me, and their grandsire."

"But who is their grandsire? I still don't know how you rank and I cannot address you properly if I do not know how you rank," said the tsarina, helplessly.

"Why, I call you 'Maria' and permit you to call me, 'Helena,'" said Helena. "My father-in-law is the king, which means I do you a favour in permitting you my first name."

"But I am married to the Tsar of all the Russias!" said Maria.

"Big deal," said Helena. "Aleksej is a small fish in the big and wicked pool of international politics. But my father-in-law has hopes that he may be able to learn to play with the rest of us. He has some ambition at least, though he needs to clean up his own country before he even tries to move into the wild eastern hinterlands."

"What can you mean? There is nothing wrong with Russia."

"Indeed? If you were brave enough, I'd show you, but I suspect you aren't capable of seeing, even if you had the courage to look."

"I do have the courage!" Maria stamped her foot.

"You do? Good. You have more to you than I feared. Tomorrow, we will rise at an unconscionably early hour by your standards, and I will bring you an outfit suitable for a peasant woman, and I will take you to listen and watch. And then you can tell me there is nothing wrong."

"V... very well," said Maria. "I do visit the poor and the sick, you know."

"Good! But you visit them dispensing charity, and when everyone around them is on their best behaviour. Tomorrow, you will see more."

oOoOo

Two peasant women joined the palace workforce, scrubbing floors. Maria knew very little about scrubbing floors, and Helena had to show her what to do. She was struck across the shoulders by a palace servant.

"What are you chattering for?" he demanded.

"Oh, please, my cousin is wanting and needs to be shown how; when she's shown she's very good," said Helena. She had used ash in a medium of beeswax and oil, making Maria frown to give her lines and age her, as well as the overall patina of grime. Getting the tsarina raped was not a good idea. Helena had treated her own face and hands the same.

"Well, you remember what your cousin tells you, here's a reminder." Maria cried out and fell as she was struck by the heavy leather strap.

"She will remember, your honour," said Helena, helping the tsarina back up to her knees.

She made sure that Maria overheard as many conversations as possible, and sheltered the woman from being noticed too much.

At last they might go to breakfast.

"Oh, thank goodness, is our shift over for the day?" asked Maria.

"Oh, certainly not. It's only nine in the morning; there's another twelve hours to go," said Helena.

Maria stared.

"How do people survive this?"

"They don't," said Helena. "They grow old beyond their time, frail from hunger and lack of sleep, and look like crones before they are in their forties."

They went to take their frugal breakfast, and an upper servant stopped them.

"New, ain't you?" he said.

"Temporary hires," said Helena.

He took out a kerchief and wiped Maria's face.

"Thought that was on top of a pretty face," he said. "Well, darling, you can give me a kiss now, and come to my bed tonight."

"How... how dare you! I am married!" said Maria.

"So? If your husband says anything, I'll arrange for him to be flogged to death. Now, kiss me."

"She doesn't want you to kiss her," said Helena, picking up Maria by the arms and putting her gently to one side. "Leave her alone."

"Oho, another pretty girl under disguise," said the man, looking at Helena's face. "Maybe I shall have two of you in my bed."

"In your stinking dreams," said Helena, and kicked him in the cods.

Several other footmen came over to seize the two women, and Helena grabbed the gruel ladle.

It was a makeshift weapon and was unbalanced, but she could get it whirling like a blade, and with Maria by one arm she backed away, keeping the men at bay.

It was bad luck that they backed into an equerry.

"Oh, you clumsy wenches! I'll have your backs raw for that!" he cried, then saw Maria's cleaned face, and grinned. "Unless you make me very happy."

"Cossacks! Cossacks to the rescue!" yelled Helena. This equerry had a cane to give him status and she kicked him in the ankle and grabbed it. That was more like a sabre, and she passed Maria the ladle.

The equerry shouted, "Guards! Guards!' and two palace guards arrived, swords drawn. Helena pushed Maria behind her, and prepared to sell her life dearly.

And then there were a couple of Cossacks coming.

"Women in distress! What else are Cossacks for!" it was the irrepressible Ihor.

"Ihor! It is Helena and a friend!" said Helena.

"You're as crazy as your husband," said Ihor, gaily. "So, may we eviscerate the guard?"

"Try to get them to stand down," said Helena.

"I want those women whipped to death!" cried the equerry.

"In your dreams, you slob," said Ihor. "That's my ataman's wife in disguise and... fuck me, an exalted friend."

"You're not her type, either, Ihor," said Helena.

"You should not leave your sabres at any time, your highness!" chided the other Cossack.

They managed to disarm the palace guards, and Helena guided Maria away as an increasing number of guards and Cossacks turned up and there was the makings of a brawl.

"He was right; I apologise, Maria, I should have carried my sabres to make short work of a quarrel. I knew it was bad, but it is worse than I realised."

The tsarina was sobbing as Helena got her back to her room. Where her maid set up a screech.

"Shoo! Shoo, you nasty creatures, stay away from my lady, you are menials!"

"Oh, shut your silly mouth, do," said Helena. "Go and get your mistress some hot chocolate; she needs it. If you can't recognise her in disguise, you don't deserve to be her tiring-woman."