Chain of Sorrows 2

My earliest memories are of the ochag, that stone flagged, or in our family’s case, a single great stone, hearth. Ochag more accurately refers to the hearthstone on which the fire rests in the tagan, that metal framework we build the fires upon, to make them safer and give better heat. And strangely enough, we call the family an Ochag, for a family gathers around the hearth, and the Tagan is the protector of the family, keeper of its records, settler of its disputes. For us, home and family are important. More important than wealth, fame, and in some cases, even the plemya, that gathering of ochags into bands and tribes. We may wander away from them, but in the end, we find our feet on the path to our hearthstone. Even if it lies now somewhere else.

But our family had no Tagan, no teller of stories to enchant and teach the values of the hearth, the plemyi and of history. At least not then. In those early days, all there was at our ochag each evening was father, mother, and myself, and on rare occasions, some guest my parents had offered the warmth and comfort of our fire to.

So we were not a traditional family, there was no dyedushka or dyadya, the grandfather or uncle. There was no babka or tyotya, grandmother or aunt. So my parents had to take on not just the chore of raising me, but teaching me the things every karlykn must know by heart, and learn in the home. In those days, I would learn in school later, our nation had been beset by a series of disasters, fires, floods, earthquakes, famines and diseases. Many ochags had suffered, and many ochags were as tattered as ours was. Some, I came to learn, had no father, mother, or both were missing, others had only a mix of the family left. And a very few, who had no other related ochags, had lost all their hearth, and sat in what to us were the most shameful place we had built, orphanages for those without any family. The shame was not just for the orphans, but those who had not stepped forward to claim some relative, to take them to an ochag and raise.

Our hearth was lonely for me by day, but once the sun was low or below the horizon, either mother or father, normally both, came home to build up the fire, and try to keep the flame of family from going out. It was not a shame in those days, as some stories told us it had been in the past, to have the fire burnout. The Zhakon, the Laws given us by the gods to guide our lives, even had allowances for the fire to fail on an ochag, as long as the tagan or some family member could relight it in a space of four settings of the sun, during times such as we lived in.

I had a strange sense of my parents work. I knew that I lived in the Zamok, the castle, which was one of the largest buildings in town. But it never truly sank in on me that father was the Tsar. When he spoke of his job, that he did on the four working days of our week, he was full of humor, and sometimes anger. In those days, father’s temper was better, he was calmer, and his anger was more at being late for dinner around the ochag with me and mother, than at his will being thwarted by the Dvoryets and his advisors. No, in those days, to entertain his young son, he had taken to speaking of the various raveitalei as the animals they reminded him of. My young mind took an iron grip to the idea that father dealt with all manner of animals, and as we did not travel, we were not a circus, so father was a zoo-keeper. Don’t laugh too hard, I am sure we all had strange ideas about our parents lives beyond the walls of our homes.

Mother’s work was in the infirmary. She was a healer, not the kind other peoples have, of magical restoring of health, but the traditional kind, who bandaged wounds, set bones and gave herbs and other treatments to those with various maladies. She was often missing at meals or evenings, dealing with some injury or illness. But she made sure that I always at least got to see her wave at me from across the courtyard, even those nedyelya, as we called our five day week, when she had to stay in quarantine, so we would not get the disease she was treating. This was hard to understand, until she got the spots one time from a patient, and at her nightly waving and shouting at us, we saw her scratching madly.

It was that incident that brought home to us that while father sometimes led out war bands, mother was at risk every day. To something neither he nor I could protect her from. But mother worried about father just as often, about those war bands he led from time to time to protect the borders from the gierdra, those great lizards with many heads that had driven my folk from their homeland. And something else, They feared something called yubeitsa, and it was not until much later that I learned that was not some beast of the field, but instead meant a killer in the night, or to be more honest, an assassin.

We lived on like this until my tenth year. That is when at last another family member arrived at our hearth. Actually many members. Dyadya Muryev and his children and wife came home from the far away lands they had been in when my grandfather had died. I never knew my dyedushka, but was told he had held me many times in his final days, as one of his old wounds at last claimed his spark of life. Until this day, father had not claimed to be Tsar, he merely ruled until the Dvoryets could have all the heirs before them. This was the day I learned of father’s real job, not the one I had imagined.
I remember father’s face, when some stranger had pounded on the door loudly, after hours. I had seen that look a few times, it was the worried look that ran across his face when soft knocks on the door came, those nights when mother was working late at the infirmary, when he feared another disease had come into the hospital, and she would be in danger and away. But mother was already home, and had a samovar of cha started for our evening around the fire. Her face was the one I had seen when I thought the animals in the zoo were loose, and father had grabbed that great hammer in the past, to be gone for weeks, fighting the beasts that threatened our borders.

She and father exchanged glances until we heard a bellow outside the door, a jovial one. “Thragrun! Open up and let us get warm! I can smell the cha, little brother!” And with that, both my parents faces relaxed. Father had stood and moved rapidly to the door.

“Muryev, finally.“ He had said to mother, as he opened the great door, hollering back. “Welcome home to the ochag, brother! I see you have your blood with you. Enter and take your places at the fire, and warm your bodies and souls on the stone that nurtures our family!” I had never heard such a statement from father in inviting people in. It was formal in words, but the way he said it made it not that way. He meant every word that came from his lips, you could feel the love and happiness in the air as several of our kind had entered the room rapidly. There was the great badger of a Karlykn in the door, who hugged father roughly, a female who mother stood up to help unbundle, and hang her furs on the rack beside the door. Three others, smaller Karleekie came in as well.

I had never met family, but my parents had taught me well on the protocols, I stood up and rushed over to help hang coats, and greet them as best I could. I was still shy around others then, not as sure of myself as I would become. Still I stammered greetings, as best I could. As I met my uncle, aunt and three cousins. After they had settled in, and mother and I had gathered up what we could in the kitchen to give them food and drink both, as our traditions of greeting family require. Everyone settled into the chairs father had pulled up, around the broad flagging of stones around the vast ochag.

I had just a wooden stool to sit on that night, as we shook up my world that night. Not all in bad ways, for I found that I actually liked these people who had suddenly claimed a space on the ochag I had thought of as being just mine and my parents. The two boys, Roman and Bogdan, were roughhouses, while the girl, who was much older, almost of the age to marry, was such a lady of courtly skills that mother would often later tell me that Ksyenia was a better Tsarina than she was.

But that night, as Tyotya Fyedosya came to our hearth, she brought discord. Never did she have a kind word for me or my parents. To her, we were the guests, on the hearth her husband would rule, and from it, by her control over him, she would rule the world. Or so she acted. To her, nothing here was right, everything was wrong. She started in right away on her pecking at us. My clothes and bearing were not princely enough for her. Mother was wasting her time saving lives of the “commoners” and like at the hospital. The Ochag, spotless as it was, was filthy with chairs that did not project the image of the power on that hearthstone.

Luckily, my uncle was not so inclined, and spent much of his evening reminding her that there was no Tsar at the time, so the hearth being a family one, not an imperial jewel, was not only fine by him, it was home.

“Bah, ‘Dosya, this is how we of the Boyen premyi keep our homes, and this is how this hearth was when I was a child. The stone in the Velekie Zala is the Imperial one, not this one. This one is the stone of our family, not the Tsar.” He laughed at her sputtering. “I told you when we married that we do things differently here in our homes, and that while in your own home you could keep to your ways, here, we follow the traditions I was raised in.” He looked at mother and smiled. “Pjalsta, Dorala, ‘Dosya has never been to one of our ochags, forgive her, and grant her some leeway. They do things differently in those hills she is from.”

Mother had always been mother to me, even my parents names had been mysteries to me until that night. They had called each other Otyets and Mat until then around me. I found myself liking this large karlykn.