General History of Snezhnaya Supplement

General History of Snezhnaya Supplement (I)

... Concerning Emperor Monomakh's mortal enemy, the Grand Suzerain of the Volkodlak Alliance, the "Blood-Devourer" King Miscislav: Nothing can now be ascertained of his early life and deeds. The Volkodlak kindreds never had any tradition of setting their history down in writing, and the songs they pass from mouth to mouth are oft embellished. Setting aside every absurd and unfounded legend, we know only one thing: That Miscislav was born into the Arkudino kindred, the youngest son of the chieftain Bodvar. In that age, they were vassals of the Cirnareka people, rendering tribute at fixed intervals in exchange for protection. According to The Volkhov Chronicles, after the "Knyazhna of Blood" Yalyane Morevna had slain the Beastlord of Cirnareka, she went in person to the Arkudino kindred. Bodvar, knowing himself no match for her, opened the gates of his own accord. Robed in white woven cloth, bearing a wooden tray proferring bread and salt, he knelt to receive her coming. He promised Yalyane that he would gladly "obey her every word as one serves a mother," and would render three times the tribute he had paid his former overlord, begging only that she might in her mercy spare the lives of the aged, the weak, the women and the children of his kindred. But Yalyane answered: "You have betrayed your mother. I have not. Your tribute is unlovely, and your blood is unlovely also." Thereupon she killed Bodvar. One bizarre account (found at first only in the Anecdota of the Pale Star Court, a work which Grand Duke P. N. Kostomarov holds to have been written after the accession of Tsaritsa Anastasya) tells of how she nailed Bodvar inside a dreadful instrument of torture cast from brass in the shape of a bull, and let him bleed until he was but a drained husk; and that the device was most ingeniously contrived, so that the blood would always run out from this brazen bull's mouth, for her to sip at her pleasure. Such an outlandish record plainly issues from the imagination of a later age, whose authors did not so much as know how long blood takes to congeal. So playwrights of later years were obliged to claim that the brazen bull could also be heated, so that the blood might not clot, all to make sense of the tale. Yalyane did, however, raze Arkudino by means of incomparably savage cruelty, and from that time the name of this kindred vanished utterly from history. No surviving source permits us to conjecture what Yalyane thought. Yet, we can be sure that she never once accepted the submission of a defeated foe. The Tables and Lives of the Beast Lords records the following story (for the original manuscript, see the appendix): After Yalyane had conquered the Harjatsk kindred (this being the ancestral land of those Volkodlak whose form is that of hares), she commanded her disciple — none other than the future Emperor Monomakh — to find her a Domovoy, and to put to death all who stood taller than that Domovoy. The young Monomakh, both clever and merciful, asked her whether a person standing is always taller than a person seated. She answered, "Yes." Whereupon Monomakh lifted the Domovoy up and set him upon her high throne, so that not one ear in all the Harjatsk kindred stood higher than the crown of that Domovoy's head. By this means did he preserve their lives. Although the majority of fae historians, the author of The Davograd Chronicles among them, hold that there is nothing credible in the record of the Tables and Lives of the Beast Lords, this absurd story nevertheless reflects a single fact — that after meeting with the young Monomakh, Yalyane's slaughter of the fae grew ever less. No doubt this came about because the young Emperor Monomakh, by the exalted virtue native to him, instructed her and transformed her cruel, barbarous nature. Centuries later, before war had yet broken out between Emperor Monomakh and the Volkodlak Alliance, the Harjatsk kindred, who had formerly served that Alliance, of their own accord went over to the royal court of the Pale Star. Their chieftain Sveneld Porfiry named the young Emperor "the Savior" and labored alongside Grand Duke Alvis to sustain commerce, mining, and the apportionment of tribute made to Kitezh, and his one hundred and ninety-two children did likewise. In any case, Bodvar's blood brought no merciful peace. Legend has it that before his death, he asked Yalyane thus: "What rage will the old bear's pain awaken in the cub?" (The Volkhov Chronicles) That cub was his one surviving youngest son: the "Blood-Devourer" who would, in latter days, found the Volkodlak Alliance, Miscislav Bodvarovich. ...