The village of Rechitsy clung to the edge of the Mertvitsa bog. Three dozen crooked little houses, thatched with straw and moss, huddled together as if afraid of dissolving in the morning mist. The village was so small that you could walk from one edge to the other while a splinter-torch burned down — though only if you went around the boggy mire that separated the dwellings from the pastures and fields. Narrow paths laid along along log causeways and footbridges led to the hay meadows and kitchen gardens, but on foggy mornings they seemed like tracks to nowhere.
The bogs breathed. Each morning they exhaled a thick, viscous fog that wrapped the village like a shroud. Sounds sank in that fog — the bleating of goats, the creak of the well sweep, the muffled voices of people waking. Only the croaking of frogs and splashes in the still water reminded one that the Mertvitsa lived its own life, hidden from human eyes. The old folk said the bogs remembered when a primeval forest roared here, and that the souls of the dead still wandered the mire, seeking rest.
No one remembered why the village was called Rechitsy — there was no river nearby, only bog channels and oxbow backwaters choked with reeds and water lilies. Perhaps long ago a river truly did flow here, but now the water stood, quiet and dark, reflecting the leaden sky and the few birches that grew on the hummocks. Life here moved at an even pace, in step with the turning of the seasons, and everyone knew their place and task.
Jaromir woke earlier than anyone. Not for love of morning—sleep left him at cockcrow; no use lying abed. He rose quietly so as not to wake the household, pulled on trousers and a shirt, took his bow and quiver of arrows. Hunting fed his family better than their small patch of garden on the soggy marshland — where his wife toiled from dawn to dusk. There was plenty of game in the area — ducks and geese stopped at the bogs during their migrations, and hares lived in the thickets. Sometimes deer even wandered in from distant forests.
He checked the string, ran his eye over the arrows—habitual, calming motions that steadied him for the hunt. The bow was a good ash-wood one, made by his father. Jaromir forged the arrowheads himself. Boris, who passed for the blacksmith, spent more time with sickles and plowshares than with weapons.
Jaromir's house stood at the very edge of the village, almost in the bog. A log hut thatched with straw, with small windows covered with ox bladder instead of glass. Inside it was cramped but warm — one half for him and his wife Katara, the other for the children, eight-year-old Mirek and six-year-old Agata. In the corner, on a low bench made specially for him, slept Bogdan, Jaromir's younger brother, who had come back from the war without legs.
Katara lay turned to the wall, her fair hair scattered over a pillow stuffed with goose down. Asleep she seemed very young, though she had borne two children and worked alongside the men. Jaromir loved to look at her sleeping face — calm, without the weariness that came by evening. The children breathed softly, huddled together under a sheepskin blanket. Bogdan slept on his back, arms flung wide — the sleep of a maimed man was uneasy, and at night he often groaned as if his legs still hurt.
Jaromir did not complain about life. He had a family, a home, a craft that fed them. There were no rich people in Rechitsy, but no one starved either — the bogs gave fish, game, berries, mushrooms. He believed the gods were just, and that if you lived honestly, did not wrong the weak, and helped your neighbor, life would be kind to you. He had inherited this faith from his father, who had it from his grandfather, and it seemed to Jaromir that it had always been so and always would be.
He left the house quietly, like a shadow. The door creaked barely audibly — Jaromir knew at what angle to ease it open so as not to wake the household. The morning air was cool and damp, steeped in the scents of the bog — slime, rotting leaves, blooming water lilies. The fog had not yet lifted completely; tatters of it clung to the reeds and alder bushes, turning the familiar landscape ghostly and indistinct.
The path to the hunting grounds was known to few in the village. It led through the most treacherous places in the Mertvitsa, winding between floating mats and quagmires over barely visible hummocks and fallen trunks. Jaromir stepped carefully, testing each step — one wrong move and the bog would seize you for good. But he knew these places from childhood, could read the signs: where a hummock was firm and where it only seemed so, where you could ford a backwater and where it was better to go around.
In places the path climbed small ridges — patches of dry ground overgrown with birch and alder. Here he could rest, look around, listen to the sounds of the bog. Each morning Jaromir walked this way, and each morning the bogs greeted him differently — sometimes with silence broken only by a fish's splash, sometimes with the clamor of waking birds, sometimes with a troubling crackle of insects that made him tense and freeze.
After about two kilometers the path brought him to firm ground — to a rutted track that linked Rechitsy with neighboring hamlets. In the dried mud lay the prints of yesterday's carts — deep grooves from wheels, the marks of oxen's hooves. Jaromir knew these tracks: heavily laden wagons carried grain from the fields that lay beyond the bogs, on the fertile land between forest and river.
The fields stretched far — feeding Rechitsy — and then passed into the neighbors' lands, where tall grass hid leaning boundary posts. The earth here was good, black soil, giving generous harvests — wheat, rye, oats, barley. Flax and hemp grew thick and fast; gardens bulged with cabbage and turnips. But The choicest strips — fat, well-watered, close to the road — were in Elder Stanislav's hand. How it came to be, no one really remembered — whether he bought them, seized them for debts, or inherited them from the previous elder, his uncle. What mattered was this: most of the harvest ended up in Stanislav's granaries.
The elder lived in the largest house in the village — a two-story place hewn from sound logs, with real glass windows. He had a wife, the buxom Gedwiga, who wore dresses of foreign fabrics and silver jewelry, and a son, Maciej, sixteen years old and already talking about studying in the city with some learned men. Stanislav's family ate meat every day, drank good wine, and generally lived as if they belonged to the nobility. They said his uncle had grown rich on army contracts during the war with Nilfgaard and had kin on the city council. Since then not only the gold had passed to the nephew but also a cushy post as tax collector, which he ran right from the village so his power would always be in plain view of the common folk.
Jaromir did not know Stanislav very closely — only trade connected them. The elder bought the hunter's best game, fresh duck and goose carcasses, hare meat, and sometimes venison if luck brought down a noble stag. He paid fairly, did not haggle, even overpaid at times — and because of that Jaromir found it easy enough to put up with him. Yet he still could not understand how the rest of the villagers endured Stanislav's antics — how the elder would take the best part of a peasant's harvest as a "tax," refuse to sell seed to a poor man, or demand that a debt be worked off in his fields at the very height of the season.
People kept silent. They endured. "It's always been this way"—that was how they lived. As if injustice were part of the order of things, like rain or drought. Jaromir did not understand that — but he was in no hurry to interfere. He had his own family, his own worries, and other people's troubles were no concern of his. At least that was what he told himself.
Somewhere to the left, in the sedge, something splashed. Or not a fish — the splash was too heavy, with the flutter of wings in it. Jaromir froze, on alert, set an arrow to the string. Ducks. No doubt a little flock of mallards feeding in the shallows among the reeds. He slowly turned his head, peering into the fog that still hung in tatters over the bog, and stepped toward the sound, soft and noiseless, as his father had taught him.
The flock was indeed there — about five mallards rummaging in the silt, searching for larvae among the soaked slime and algae. The drake, the largest, kept a little apart, now and then lifting his head to look around. Jaromir drew the string, took aim, held his breath. The arrow whistled and struck the drake square in the breast. He flailed his wings, tried to take off, but strength left him and he crashed into the water with a dull splash. The other ducks took off crying and flew away, leaving only rings spreading across the water.
The dead bird floated with the current, and Jaromir walked along the bank, watching for where it would be carried into the reeds. The current here was weak, barely perceptible, but the drake was heavy, and it drifted slowly toward the fields. Good — easier to reach the quarry there, no need to wade waist-deep into boggy muck.
The duck snagged on a stump jutting from the water right where the backwater came up to the edge of the field. Jaromir crossed a little bridge of poles that the local peasants had put up for convenience and strode over the plowed earth. The soil was soft after yesterday's rain; his feet sank into the black loam, but it was not hard going. He bent for the drake — a fine bird, close to two kilos, Katara would make an excellent soup...
And then he saw.
The body lay in a furrow, no more than ten paces from where he had picked up the duck. At first Jaromir thought it was a sack or a bundle of straw — something brown, shapeless, blended with the plowing. But then he made out human contours and realized he was looking at a corpse.
Kazik, the miller. Jaromir recognized him by his clothes — the patched shirt and leather trousers the miller always wore. But the face... there was almost no face. The skin had shriveled and darkened, as if Kazik had been dried in the sun like fish. The eyes had sunk, the lips had drawn tight over the teeth, and he looked like a mummy from old graves. Worst of all, sprouts were sticking from his mouth, nostrils, and ears — green shoots of wheat that had grown right out of the dead flesh. Roots had pierced the skin on his arms and neck, had wrapped his fingers, as if the earth had taken him for itself and turned him into a living furrow.
Jaromir recoiled, dropping the slain drake. His stomach surged to his throat; his mouth went sour and bitter. He had seen death before — at war, on the hunt; in the village they buried old folk and infants — but this was something else. This was sacrilege — a desecration. As if some malign will had wrung the life from a man and left a husk.
He forced himself to come closer, to look. Kazik had been dead no more than a day — the body had not truly begun to rot. From the corpse came a sweetish smell of withering herbs, in which there was an icy, metallic note. Around the body the wheat grew thicker and taller, as if the earth were greedily drinking what was left of the man.
Poor Kazik. Only yesterday he had been complaining in the tavern about a bad harvest, and today he lay dead, sprouted through with grain. He had left a daughter — Agnieszka, a sixteen-year-old girl who would now be a complete orphan. Her mother had died of fever three years ago, and she had no other relatives.
Jaromir picked up the drake from the ground and shook the dirt from its feathers. The hunt was over for today — this was no time for game. He had to return to the village and tell people what had happened. Though what exactly had happened, the hunter himself did not really understand. He strode back toward the bogs, glancing over his shoulder at the body lying in the furrow. The day had only begun, and it had already brought such vileness. He had felt it in the morning — something was wrong today, something ill hung in the air. He ought to have stayed home with his family.