Vilageidiotx — Roleplayer Guild

Volgograd

It was rare for Sahle to reflect on a certain strange fact of his life, but in his quieter moments it sometimes came to him. Even here and now, when he felt like a wounded animal fleeing through a forest he did not know, it still took him no effort to attract women. It didn't come as a surprise when he was called to Radmila's hotel room that night to discuss the curriculum of their student the Tsarina. And when he went to her room and found her standing naked in front of a mirror, performing as if he had walked in on her changing, the situation seemed completely natural to him. She feigned to hide her self with her arms, but she was no actress. A nipple slipped from below her pale arm, while below the blackness of her wild bush snuck between her partially splayed fingers. He knew what was going on, and when he shut the door the ruse melted away. She wasn't necessarily his type; pale and smooth as milk except for a vaguely tanned and aging face; and breasts that, if they had once been like ripe plums, were now beginning to prune. She was older than him by half a decade. But she was a nice enough woman, and it was better than sleeping alone. 

She undressed him and led him into the bed, and they became a tangled knot of ebony on ivory fucking. She didn't feel as fragile as Aaliyah had. There was more wiry muscle in this woman than it looked. When he closed his eyes he imagined the woman Aaliyah had shot in Sevan, Vladmira with the blonde hair and perfect ass. Sahle lost himself in her; both the girl he was with and the girls he compared her to.

When he woke up he realized he didn't remember which one of them had went to sleep first. It nagged at him that maybe, just maybe, this was a sign of old age. Over the hill at thirty three. After laying twisted in the sheets for a while he rationalized and decided memory lapse was caused by a lack of any decent high except for the cheap alcohol that was so easy to procure in Russia. 

"Do you realize you are closer to royalty than any person alive?" he said when he saw her eyes open. He felt clever in saying it, and more like his old self than he had in a while. She didn't say anything, but her eyes were affixed on him as if he were impossibly heroic, and that made him feel like at least the shadow of a hero. Certainly not old anymore.

"I had a dream" Radmila took in a deep, hearty breath and stretched her bare limbs. "There was a giantess on the hills outside of Volgograd. I think she was here to help us."

Sahle smiled. "I suppose we won't have a room like this again for a long time." he said.

"No." she said in a soft, feminine way. "We will be going away soon. If all goes well we may have a room in Moscow. Maybe even Saint Petersburg."

"So tonight is it." he sighed. She said nothing, but she didn't need to. Tonight Regina's identity would be revealed to Volgograd and the world as the Tsarina of Russia, and Sahle would find his new benefactors become a council of war. 

They lay quiet for a short while until two harsh knocks at the door stirred them.

"Radmila." a hard voice came from the other side. "You are needed. Regina needs to meet with you."

"I'll be there." she answered. She crawled out of bed and walked across the room to get dressed. Sahle watched her ass and, while it was a flat ass, it was still something to watch.

"The Queen is going to need you too in a few hours, your majesty." Radmila spoke to Sahle in a hushed voice. She said 'your majesty' with no particular deference, as if it were his name.

"I don't know what to say to her." Sahle replied. The subject reminded him how deflated he had felt the night before, and all the predicaments of Russia reentered his mind at once. "If I knew how to teach ruling a country, I wouldn't be here. And what is there to teach? Don't fuck up. That is the main rule." 

"That's the rule to most things, except being a clown." she replied, smiling. Her tongue pressed against the gap in her front teeth. The gap was a feature he was always quick to notice though he had known her a couple of weeks already. "You need to teach her how not to... fuck up, as you said."

"Somebody should tell me." he mumbled.

"Try, your majesty." she said. "See what happens. You might be a better teacher than you think."

He saw she was mostly dressed by now in her military fatigues and he made a curious face at her. "Aren't you going to take a bath..." his head flicked down at the place in the bed she had just left.

"Oh." she smiled. "No, I didn't think about it. That's a luxury in these days, not really a rule anymore." 

He nodded. "Well, I think you smell good anyway." She smiled sweetly and left him alone. 

Sahle laid quiet for a while and did nothing but look at the room around him. It was like so much of Volgograd - decayed, not ruined, but decayed. The wallpaper pealed and the furnishing was skimpy. There was a stubby bookshelf in one corner with only three books - The Collected Poetry of Alexander Pushkin, History of the Four Tsarinas by Anastasia Nikolaevna, and a third which he could not make out the title. Aside from that, the bed, the mirror, an flat Orthodox Icon of a woman in red holding a cross with the name 'Tatiana' printed next to her, and an open trunk full of Radmila's things, there wasn't anything else to note. Listed out it sounded like plenty of furnishing, but his eyes told him this room was a spartan one. 

When he felt he had lain around long enough, he got up and got dressed. In the hall he could hear the Russian soldiers milling in the lobby. At the bottom of the stairs, he found where somebody had left a piece of bread and a half-drank bottle of Kvass on a window sill. He shrugged and picked them up. First he tried the bread. It was stale. He dipped it in the Kvass, drank the heady drink with its bread and honey flavor, finished both, and continued on his way. 

It was early enough in the morning that there was still a slight chill in the air. It smelled like diesel fumes and morning dew. The street had the lovely look of societal collapse. Dour citizens and Cossacks mingled in the middle of the road, and the roar of generators and diesel engines could be heard. It was early, but the people all seemed to be drinking. Where did all this liquor come from? There were no half-empty bottles left alone that he could see to snatch, and he had no money to buy his own, so all he could do was his job. He knew where he needed to go; there was no putting it off. He went to visit the Tsarina and pretend to be some sort of teacher for her. Or was he an advisor? He swashed that question around in his brain, trying to keep his mind distracted.

He found the Tsarina with Sorokin and Radmila in their apartments in the Duma building. It was a quaintly Russian place - tobacco smoke stains yellowing what used to be white walls, an outdated map of Russia (he could tell because it showed a united Russia), tables and desks pushed to the side adorned with half-drank bottles of Vodka, and a cigarette burned pull-out sofa doubling as a bed. Radmila was cooking pancakes on a hotplate in the part of the room where the liquor was the most frequent. Sorokin sat with Regina and was casually chatting with her. Even in this charming domestic scene everyone was wearing military uniform, and there was a rifle leaning against the wall.

"Sahle Yohannes!" Sorokin blurted. He seemed unusually friendly. He also didn't seem as distressed and sweaty today as he usually did. 

"Sahle." he corrected. "Well, I guess you can call me that. But Emperors don't usually adopt their father's name."

"I am sorry." Sorokin said sincerely. "I make no effort to offend. They use this form when talking about your brother."

"Pancakes?" Radmila offered. She acted like they hadn't spent the night testing out each others genitals. 

"No thanks, I already ate." He said slyly, and then he turned to Sorokin. "He invented that. Some Communist shit. I don't think he uses it anymore though..."

"That's what they use in newspapers." Sorokin replied.

"I think they get it wrong." Sahle found a seat on the edge of a table. There was a bed roll laying beneath his feet. The other three started on their pancakes. He noticed the weather worn looking horse-doll he had seen in Astrakhan laying on the ground nearby and shuddered at old memories.

"So, what do you think about me?" The nine year old Tsarina blurted. "It must be so weird knowing we are both a King and a Queen."

When he saw her now, he felt bad for her. How hard must it be, a child, an Empress, on the run from her title? And she had dealt with it so long too. She didn't seem phased by it at all. He smiled at the simple question. "Lucky. I can trust my own kind."

"I will be fair." she play-acted a regal voice. 

Sahle grinned. "I thank you, your highness."

"Well." Sorokin grunted, standing up and handing an empty plate to Radmila. When he got nearby enough to Sahle, the pungent smell of booze filled the latter's nose. "I need to meet with the Hetmans. We have tonight to plan. Gleb has us telling some of the men in advance to make sure there is some noise at the announcement. Regina, listen to this man, Emperor Sahle. He has been in your shoes, he knows more about your future than any of us."

"Yes papa." she said.

"You will do well." he looked back one more time, his face dropped into a pale anxious smile. 

"Have you arranged for our part? Regina is going to need instruction." Radmila collected Regina's plate as she talked.  

"I put Semen on it." Sorokin answered. "Her majesty should meet with him when she is ready." He opened the door slowly, and when he left it was like he had to peal himself away. 

There was an awkward silence. Sahle leaned forward. "I've never been a teacher before." he said, trying to hold back any nervousness in his voice. 

"Tell me what Africa is like." Regina bubbled confidently. "Or, tell me what the part of Africa that is your Kingdom is like."

Sahle cleared his throat. How to word something like that? "Imagine... imagine thousands of miles of wilderness."

"Siberia." Regina said instantly.

"Siberia. Yes, like that. There are jungles and mountains and plains, and all across it are tribes of people who still live in villages and barely know your name. Sometimes they join the army or move to a city or something, but most of the time they stay to themselves in their villages."

"Like Siberia." Radmila parroted, amused. Regina giggled.

Sahle went on. "There are places where there are cities and factories and mines though, and they know who you are there. They need your government in those places because important things need to be protected. So you have agents there, keeping things organized."

"So what did you do?" Regina asked.

What did he do? What did he do? He kept in power he supposed. Well, he didn't do that very well either. "The Emperor of Ethiopia is a boss. He watches over the government and makes decisions."

"So Ethiopia has a constitutional monarchy?" Regina asked. 

"It has a constitution now. My brother made that. When I was Emperor, it was a sort of... I don't know, we pretended to have that type of monarchy I guess."

"My grandfather was an autocrat." the little-girl Tsarina mused proudly "That is how we do it in Russia. Tsars have tried to make reforms, but the people don't know how to take them. That is what Radmila says. Russians need autocracy, somebody to rule them strongly, or else Bolsheviks get their way."

"Are you going to be an autocrat too then?" he asked.

The Tsarina nodded. "I am young though, so General Rykov will rule for me. He will be my Potemkin, except I won't sleep with him." she giggled.

Regina talking about sleeping with people made Sahle uncomfortable, and he exchanged a glance with Radmila. She saw his discomfort and grinned.

"You must feel sad that Spain is invading your country." Regina said sympathetically. 

"Yes." Sahle looked down. "The same way you feel about China. It's hard being responsible for so many people." Who had said that to him? His father? Baruti? Sahle never felt like he had been responsible. Yaqob was the responsible one. 

"Papa Sorokin told me that too."

"I think it is the most important thing." Sahle said thoughtfully. "You know, when I made a wrong decision, I didn't think 'Oh here I am going to make a wrong decision.' It just... you make a decision, and there are all of these repercussions. Some sort of chain reaction I guess. Your decision leads to some others things, and then those things cause other things to happen. It's echoes. What you decide will cause echoes throughout Russia, and you will not always be able to guess what these echoes will be, but you will have to live with them."

"I wonder if that is what the good Kings and Queens do, guess the echoes." Regina replied. Her voice was calm, and she sounded almost like a full grown adult. 

"I don't know that." Sahle replied. "I really cannot say."

"Do you recall the essays I had you read, your majesty?" Radmila entered into the conversation. "About the abolition of serfdom and the beginning of Bolshevism? Think of that as what Emperor Sahle means."

"I understand. I mean, I believe I understand..." she said.

Radmila went into a lecture on Russian history, but Sahle didn't hear any of it. Their conversation left him mentally exhausted, and he sunk thinking on his perch. Where had he went wrong exactly, when he had sat on the throne? There had been a time when he blamed the failures of his government on Hassan and his brother. After he got over that phase, he had assumed his values were in the wrong place, and he had made his decisions entirely based on pleasure. Perhaps it was that simple, but perhaps it wasn't? The simple act of pouring out buried ideas to this child had awoken deeply held thoughts imprisoned in the general anxiety that period of his life inspired in him now. And could he even say Yaqob had done that much better? His was a reign also known for its rebellion, and for the destructive war going on in Africa. How much of that could be blamed on him, and how much of Sahle's reign could be blamed on Sahle? There were webs here, difficult connections formed in the dark, and even trying to think of it made Sahle feel woozy and well beyond his skill level. 

The lessons ended. Radmila and Regina said their farewells and went to find Semen. They left to prepare for Regina's part in her own announcement. That left Sahle, who had no reason to loiter in Sorokin's apartment, so he grabbed one of the leftover bottles of vodka, took a swig, and pocketed the bottle. He went away to loiter somewhere else.

Where was Vasily, he wondered. Where was Uliana? He didn't know where they stayed. Perhaps she was on the other side of the wide Volga, in the trembling forest they had shared for a night. There was no use trying to find her there; he didn't know where to get a boat, and the thought of going too far scared him. There was nothing for him in this broken town. Nothing but drunk soldiers and civilians trying their best to ignore the drunk soldiers. He didn't want to go too far and get lost. Instead he went to Radmila's room again, finding the door unlocked just as he had left it. He climbed into the bed and just laid there as if he could transport himself back to the night before. When he was bored of that, he got up and plucked the book of poetry from her barren shelf and flipped open to a random page. 

"Be calm, o, Russia's banner's holder,
Look at the stranger's quickly coming end,
On their proud necks and void of labor shoulders,
The Lord's vindictive arm is laid.
Behold: they promptly run, without look at road,
In Russian snows their blood like river's flood,
They run in dark of night, felled by famine and cold,
And swords of Russians, from behind."

That was enough for the day. He took another swig of Vodka and put the bottle on the ground beneath him. The words echoed in his mind, but he was not comfortable enough with the language to completely understand it, and he was never much into poetry to begin with. He went back to bed and this time he nodded to sleep.

--

Sahle was awoken by Radmila. "It's nearly time, your majesty." she said in a hurried whisper. His eyes were blurred with sleep so that she looked like a ghost at the foot of the bed. "They are meeting in front of the Duma building." He woke up, dressed clumsily in the dark, and followed her.

The halls of the hotel were quiet now. It was dark inside, and the only things he could see was the moonlight through the windows and the flickering shadow of an unseen fire outside. They stumbled slow and awkward down the stairs, groping for what they could remember of the railing and the walls. Sahle spilled after Radmila out of the shadowy hotel and into the streets, where soldiers were strolling drunkenly toward the Duma building. Some held torches, others bottles. There was an absent chatter coming from the crowd, the sort you might here from any crowd, but the city and the night surrounding them was quiet enough to make the people and their torches the only sources of sound. No diesel hum, no motors. They had turned the city off. All that was happening in Volgograd this night was the announcement of the Tsarina.

The Volgograd military looked something like an army themed costume party in a poverty stricken hell-world. There were men and women, most dressed in fatigues or baggy clothing that looked something like fatigues. They wore ushankas and other fur hats. Some wore pointed cloth hats like modern renditions of those worn by ancient nomads. Others had the sort of flat caps that could be seen on old white men all over Europe. The weather that night was nice, not cold like it had been in Sevan, so he saw none of the coats that might be associated with Russians. There was no order to their uniform, and there was no order in how they presented themselves in the square. Some stood, or slouched, or gathered in clusters with friends. On the fringes near the walls and fences, some men squatted on the pavement like so many pigeons. Not everyone was armed, but many were, and every man and woman looked hard enough to destroy Sahle in a heartbeat. But they had no interest in him, or doing anything to him. Their focus was on their leader.  

The Hetman Gleb Apostol stood between the two lions in front of the Duma. He wore a Russian dress uniform with a big fur cape thrust over his shoulders so that he looked like a furious eagle perched on the stairs. Young smooth-skinned Cossacks, a near equal mix of men and women, stood at attention on his flanks. He started speaking, and his voice carried strong across the entire scene so that Sahle had no trouble hearing him from the back of the milling horde.

"Look at this place. Look at what you carry. You carry torches, my friends, like cavemen! And the light flickers in craters that were your roads." The burly Cossack said. Torches crackled. The crowd grumbled. A bottle broke somewhere, but nobody cared. The Hetman paused, looking around like he was seeing the city for the first time. He continued to speak alone, and he spoke so slow and careful that it took twice as long for him to say the words as it would for the average man to read them out loud.

"Your buildings, look at them! Look at this statued lion! It used to have a face, my friends, but the face has been gone for some time. This, this right here is Russia. I think this is Russia at its best now! We have our craters in peace here, and we can drink in them instead of rot in them. But is that it? Russian greatness, Slavic greatness, is that what this is? No, my friends. That cannot be true. Will we grow old here? Can you imagine yourselves in your sick beds, up there in one of those... rooms, we call them. Can you imagine yourself, dying, thinking about what you are leaving behind, and being happy with it? The Tsar died ten years ago. You all remember what it was like before. We were a strong people! Russia was the stone wall that stood between Communism and everything! This was the fortress, the castle. But now there are no castles. Have you seen the Pink Palace south of this city? Old mangy dogs piss in places where Tsars drank tea. Moscow is ruled by foreigners and Yids, and real Russians pick crumbs from under their windows and nibble them in the cold. Communists sleep in hammocks made from the dresses of Catherine the Great in Saint Petersburg. The Huns come over the Urals, and they look at those tiny scraps you have, and they plan to steal those from you too, so all that you will have is to be naked in the cold. The only thing protecting us from the Huns are those Yids in Moscow, with their constitutions and committees. Bah! They cannot even protect their own President! He was abducted in the capitol like a little child. That is who defends us? Defends Russia? If that is all I can hope for then shoot me in the brains right now so I can forget what happened to my beloved country."

The crowd had shouted whenever the Hetman paused to breathe, or for effect. They were enraptured. It reminded Sahle of a stage show in Sevan. There were the chorus girls, replaced by the young men and women that flanked Apostol in solemn silence. Between the lions was the unseen imaginary stage light, and Apostol himself the trained actor. There were few differences between the soldiers and a drunken Sevan crowd at a show too.

"My country." he started to talk, but paused briefly again as if in deep thought. "But are we not still Russians? You are the same people who lived in the Tsar's Russia, are you not? Capable of the same things. More even, now you have lived through such hard times. We have tried Communists, and Constitutions, and Warlords, but none of them have reforged Russia. We are not a people made in a factory. You cannot stamp a piece of steel and call it Russia! We are made of the old Iron. We yearn for the old Iron! They knew, so they smashed what they could find. Remember Michael the First, Remember Peter the Great at Poltava! Catherine the Great! Alexander who conquered to Paris! Nicholas the Second who vanquished the anarchists! Peter the Fourth! Peter who they murdered. They shot him, they stabbed his daughter, they killed his elderly sister and they tossed her in a mine shaft. They destroyed all the old Iron they could find. But they failed."

The Hetman looked down as if in prayer. The shouts had came to a crescendo until Peter died. After that, silence but for the torches. When Apostol started to speak again, he started with a feigned quiet like a whisper that could be heard by all the crowd. 

"I was told a story years ago, and I tell that story to you now. I couldn't believe it when I heard it. A Doctor, and a good man, stood and watched a pale woman bleed to death on the carpet of her own hotel. The Royal blood of a Princess murdered by terrorists. The Princess was pregnant, she carried a child and died with it suffocating in her womb. That is how far they went to destroy the old iron. But the doctor and the good man, they saved the child. They went to show it to its grandfather, but the terrorists who killed the daughter killed Peter the Fourth, they shot him between the eyes and burned down his country! But the child lived. She saw the fire! She grew up in the smoke!"

By the end of his speech he was roaring out his words loud and fast. The crowd responded with their own roar, just as loud and just as fast, and Sahle didn't think they knew what they were cheering for. Not truly. These drunken men, the smell of vodka breath collected in the air around them, were ready for their blood to be up. Sahle watched the Hetman stare at them, satisfied. But where was Regina?

Tanks ambled into the square, moving especially slow so that the crowd may part. These were old machines, battered by war and makeshift repair, bearing the stumpy shapes of old Polish manufacturing. No art, no beauty. They had turrets like gnarled fists rising up from rivet-pocked armored cars. On the front of the first stood Regina. She balanced herself by holding on to the barrel like a monkey, and her feet rested on the plated armor as if she were preparing to sprint into battle. She wore no Imperial regalia, but instead wore the same fatigues he has saw her in earlier. The moonlight caught her, alabaster skin soaking the blue moon and harsh orange torchlight. She looked cold, and Sahle thought she might be trembling, but when she squealed out to address them in her child-like voice she sounded exactly like a ten year old girl having fun riding on the front of a tank.

"I am Regina Romanov, granddaughter of the Tsar." Her voice barely carried and she had to force it. "I am going to Moscow! I am going to Moscow! Who wants to follow?"

They heard her. An army shouted at her all at once, a manly thunder of one thousand voices or more. Random gunfire snapped into the air. Sahle wondered if he was the only one who knew he had just witnessed a show. They all seemed to accept it for what it was. He could feel it, the spirit of the thing, coming from all of these people. Pure hope. The knowledge of history and glory. He wondered if they even cared about Regina. Did they believe she was a Queen, or did they just want to drunkenly march to Moscow? But she stood there, a small girl soaking in the enraged adulation of thousands of surly Cossacks and militias. He didn't know if she was scared and dumbstruck, or if she was standing proud.

From where Sahle stood it looked like pride.
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