2
Zillah Moody
the snowflakes into flurrying, sharp needles of ice. Important events
had been decided in the course of these two momentous seasons involving
the destiny of many nations. Thousands upon thousands of
individual crises, matters of life and death, were unfolding daily, the
results of a gross miscalculation. Most were anonymous, never to be
recorded for posterity, only to be suffered to the bitter end in anonymity,
the awful legacy of a doomed enterprise.
The peasant Kadišius family, in common with the other serfs who
peopled this landscape, now cursed the foreign army which had despoiled them
of their crops and animals the summer before. Their
survival this year would depend upon how well they could eke out
whatever they had managed to hide from the French. They had
contended with upheaval imposed upon them by the visitation of
these foreign soldiers who had marched amongst them. But now it
was over they settled back into the servitude and complacency of their
mundane existences. The struggle for food and warmth was paramount in
this seasonally barren, snow covered Lithuania. The odd,
desperate, lone person was out with traps and snares using all their
inherited country skills and the guile of the Lithuanian serf in order
to pit their wits against nature in this the harshest of winters. Others,
more elderly, infirm or wretched, remained snowbound huddled in
their farms and hovels, in a struggle for survival on the little they had
managed to lay up the summer before. Some would never see another
spring. Such had been the effect of war, the ravaging of the territory
that the advancing horde had passed through. Events had only added
to the misery of the already fragile balance which existed in their communities between
good years and bad, adequacy and famine, life and
death, in this impoverished land.
But shortly after the turn of the year one particular Russian hunter
would be descending upon that family who would affect them for
ever, in a meeting which they may well have preferred to avoid.
The Cossack was relentless, terrifying in his determination. He
came from the Ukraine from the right bank of the River Dnieper but