Free Russka by Edward Rutherfurd

forward on his chest and he slept.
    Twice her husband touched her and murmured: ‘Come.’ Twice she shook her head and continued to dance. She too had drunk, though less heavily than the others, and now her body was suffused with warmth. Excited by her own dancing, she began to crave him; but still she danced and drank, to bring herself to the moment when she would truly want him.
    Gradually, as men and women alike reeled drunkenly out into the night, Lebed too allowed her husband to put his arm round her waist and lead her out. All around, by the huts, towards the field, indiscriminate couplings were taking place: who knew, who would remember, who had lain with whom? Who would know whose child was whose, in any results of that general sexual encounter? It did not matter. By such careless means the life of the rod would go on.
    They went down to the river, past long grasses where thefireflies were shining in the darkness. Together they gazed at the river, that gleamed in the moonlight. To this little river, the villagers had given a name, taken from the horsemen of the steppe they feared. For as the Slavs knew well, some of the greatest of the Alans had described themselves, in their Iranian tongue, as Rus – meaning ‘light’, or ‘shining’. And so, since to a Slav ear this word had a pleasing feminine sound, well suited to a river, the villagers had called the little gleaming waterway Rus – the shining one.
    It was a good name. And no doubt it would have pleased them still more had they known that this same Iranian name – Rus or Rhos – was also to be applied in these early ages to that mighty river far to the east that later times would call the Volga.
    Rus they called the river; and the hamlet beside it they called, similarly, Russka .
    The night was quiet. The stream shone, moved, yet did not move. They lay down on the grass. High above in the starlit summer sky, pale clouds came from time to time, like horsemen in an unhurried procession, glowing softly in the reflection of a crescent moon that rode to the south – and who knew, out in the forest, what bear or fox, wolf or firebird might be moving through the shadows, or what horsemen camped by their fires upon the endless steppe?
    But the only sound that Lebed heard was a whisper in the leaves, as the wind moved softly over the land.

The River
    In the year of Our Lord 1066, in the month of January, a terrible sign appeared in the heavens. It was seen all over Europe.
    In the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England, threatened with William of Normandy’s invasion, it was recorded in the chronicles with gloomy expectation. In France, Germany and all round the shores of the Mediterranean it was seen. In eastern Europe, in the newly formed states of Poland and Hungary, the dreadful object dominated the nights. And beyond them, on the eastern borderland where forest meets steppe and the broad River Dniepr runs down to the temperate Black Sea, the great red comet hung, night after night, over the white and silent landscape; and men wondered what new evil was to befall the world.
    And how that world had changed. In the nine turbulent centuries since the days of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, western civilization had passed from classical to medieval times in a series of huge events. Rome had become Christian; but soon after, its sprawling empire, now divided between its western and eastern capitals of Rome and Constantinople, had collapsed under the weight of huge barbarian invasions.
    From the Mongolian lands above the Great Wall of China they had come, wave after wave from the east, crossing the great southern crescent of mountain ranges and sweeping down on to the desert and steppe of the vast Eurasian plain. Some white, some Mongoloid, mostly speaking forms of Turkish, these terrible invaders swept all before them. Thus came Attila and his Huns; after them the Avars; then the Turks. But it was not their sudden invasions, nor their huge, short-lived empires in the