The Dreaming Land I: The Challenge (The Zemnian Series Book 5) Read online

  The Dreaming Land I

  The Challenge

  E.P. Clark

  Copyright © E.P. Clark 2018

  All Rights Reserved

  Published by Helia Press

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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  Also by the Author

  Amazon US links:

  The Zemnian Series

  The Midnight Land I: The Flight

  The Midnight Land II: The Gift

  The Breathing Sea I: Burning

  The Breathing Sea II: Drowning

  Unplanned Parenthood

  Amazon UK links:

  The Zemnian Series

  The Midnight Land I: The Flight

  The Midnight Land II: The Gift

  The Breathing Sea I: Burning

  The Breathing Sea II: Drowning

  Unplanned Parenthood

  From the Author

  Hmmm, where to start, where to start…do I explain the background of The Zemnian Series, my trilogy in seven volumes? The cultural influences and allusions in this and all the other books? The language and naming conventions? Why and how I came to write these books? These are the difficult choices that face an author wrapping up an epic fantasy series.

  I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to clarify the overall structure of the series. I originally envisioned it as a trilogy, starting with The Midnight Land, continuing with The Breathing Sea, and ending with The Dreaming Land. Each book would follow one central character and her heroic journey to some kind of wisdom, courage, and self-understanding.

  But as Robert Burns tells us, the best laid schemes gang aft agley. Each of the three books flourished wildly as I tried to tell their stories, and I ended up splitting them into two or three volumes for ease of printing and publication. I recommend viewing the entire thing as a TV series, and each of the multi-volume books as a season, with each volume as an episode. Why not? If TV-watchers, hardly the most erudite and sophisticated of mortals (and I count myself amongst their number), can grasp something like that, then surely readers can too.

  The world of Zem’ (“Earth” or “Land”) is based partly on that of Rus’, the medieval collection of loosely-allied principalities in what is now Ukraine and Western Russia; and Muscovy, the much more centrally controlled and authoritarian country that rose in its place following the Mongol-Tatar invasion; with hints at Russia proper, the multi-ethnic empire that, under the Romanovs, spread from the Baltic to the Pacific and from the White Sea to the Black Sea.

  However, Zem’ is by no means a faithful reproduction of Rus’, Muscovy, or Russia. I have taken considerable creative license in its construction. Most obviously, I have made it a matrilineal society in which women rule.

  This may not be so far-fetched. There are hints of matrilineal and matriarchal societies in what would become Russia in The Tale of Bygone Years, the medieval chronicle of the creation of Rus’, societies that were destroyed by the Viking Rus or Ruotsi who gave the fledgling nation of Rus’ its name and its ruling family, the House of Ryurik. Further back, the Amazonians lived on the Black Sea, and the Scythians with their women warriors roamed the steppe. Meanwhile, in North America, a number of the Native tribes had matrilineal family structures. The culture of Zem’ hints at all these things, while still being its own, unique creature, one that is meant to explore women’s stories in a world in which women hold power. As readers of the previous books can attest, my woman-centered world is no paradise. To put it bluntly: people are people, no matter where you go or who’s in charge. At the same time, I find it ridiculous to believe that women and men are completely the same, and that a matrilineal, matriarchal society would treat men the way that women are treated in a patrilineal, patriarchal society. Readers are often shocked at how badly men are treated in my books, but that says more about how incredibly coddled and lionized men are in our society than anything else. The biggest struggle of my female characters is often against their own desire to be too nice to men who have no intention of returning the favor—a criticism of our own society as much as anything, but also a speculation on how and why we women allowed our own oppression to take place.

  That being said, I deliberately focused more on male creations and male characters as inspiration for my heroine Valya. The scene in which Valya almost squashes a duckling, for instance, is a reference to a scene in Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, itself a reference to Anna Karenina. My inspiration also took a decidedly Westward turn. When I first started writing Valya, I imagined her as a combination of Eowyn from The Lord of the Rings, Benedict Cumberbatch’s depiction of Sherlock Holmes in the recent BBC TV series, and John Sheppard from Stargate: Atlantis. Valya, however, had ideas of her own, as she always does, so it is my hope that she managed to shake off those male-created, Western origins and stand tall on her own two, proudly Zemnian, feet.

  A word on naming conventions: Zemnians, like Russians, have three names: a given name, a middle name based off their parent’s given name, and a family name. The difference is that Zemnians get their middle name from their mothers rather than their fathers. These matronymics are formed by adding -ovna/evna for a daughter and ovich/evich for a son to the mother’s first name. Family names are also passed down from mother to daughter. Therefore, Valya’s full name is Valeriya Dariyevna (Valorous Daughter of Darya, or “Gift”) Zerkalitsa. However, in order to strengthen her claim to the steppe and soothe the fears of those who worry that she might press her claim to the throne, she often uses her father’s family name, Stepnaya. A man would have the masculine forms of those family names, so Zerkalitsev and Stepnoy.

  And now for some historical background: At the end of The Breathing Sea, Darya Krasnoslavovna, the heroine of that little miniseries of books, had just decided to go as an emissary of Zem’ to the Rutsi, who are fleeing into, or possibly invading, her land in order to escape from the invaders of their own land. Dasha dreams of making the world, or at least her corner of it, a better place, one in which Zem’ can live in harmony with their neighbors, and humans can live in harmony with non-humans, instead of locked in cruelty, exploitation, and killing. She even takes an oath before the gods that she will do no harm to any living thing, and that she will not allow the killing of wolves or the capture and confinement of other wild animals, and she swears that her line will uphold her pact. Dasha is a visionary—she even has actual visions—and an idealist (I modeled her in part off of the Buddha), and while she knows that the road ahead will be long and hard, she cannot help but believe that soon, if only people could see the truth that she sees, Zem’ will become, if not an earthly paradise, at least a much better place.

  But things rarely work out the way we want. In the intervening 100+ years between the end of The Breathing Sea and the beginning of The Dreaming Land, humans have not suddenly become dramatically better than they were before. While most people more or less—sometimes less, as we shall soon see—adhere to the prohibition against killing wolves that Dasha instituted, the overall harm done to the creatures of the forest and the land they roa
m has if anything only increased, and the creatures of the barn and farm are as unprotected as they ever were, something that Valya, our heroine of these books, has to wrestle with as she digs into the trade in all kinds of flesh, human and non-human alike.

  And while Dasha was successful in preventing the Rutsi, the Tanskans, and the distant empire from the Middle Sea from overrunning Zem’ completely, it was a very close thing, with the Rutsi uniting and nearly taking Krasnograd during the reign of Dasha’s granddaughter Raisa. You can read about that in the free collection Winter of the Gods and Other Stories, available here. They were repelled with the help of the mighty steppe army, but the experience left deep scars and caused a rift between the different branches of the Zerkalitsy, the ruling family of Zem’. It is now up to Dasha’s great-granddaughters, the first cousins, or as the Zemnians call them, second-sisters, Valya and Sera, to heal the breach and their country, even as they face an insidious but growing threat from their borders to both the East and the West…

  A note on weights and measures: The Zemnian measurement of distance is a verst (pronounced vyorst), which is approximately the same as a kilometer. The currency is a chervonets. When counting the plural is chervontsa for amounts ending in 2,3, and 4, and chervontsev for amounts ending in 5 and above (20 chervontsev, 21 chervonets, 22 chervontsa, and 25 chervontsev. If you’ve ever taken Russian, it will all make sense, and if you haven’t taken Russian, now you’re really going to want to).

  Epigraph

  Night darkness lies on the hills…

  The river roars before me.

  I am sad and at ease; my sorrow is bright…

  Nothing torments my desolation,

  Nothing disturbs it.

  And once again my heart burns with love,

  Because love it must.

  ASP

  Chapter One

  I was teaching my daughter to ride when the summons to Krasnograd came.

  Well, not exactly teaching her to ride. Like any child of the steppe, she had started riding before she could walk, and at eight, she was already an accomplished horsewoman. But I was trying to teach her the finer points of training a young horse to jump. It was already apparent to all three of us—her, me, and most especially Romashka, the poor pony I had chosen for our ill-advised training session—that this had been a big mistake, as neither my daughter nor I were known for our patience. But since neither were we known for our willingness to give up, even when doing so would be advisable, we were stubbornly pressing on, growing ever more short-tempered, until a woman I didn't know appeared by the fence of our paddock and saved us from our own foolishness.

  “Valeriya Dariyevna?” she called, bowing. “May I have the honor of a word with you at your earliest convenience?”

  “Let her trot around and look at the rails one more time, and then walk her out and put her away,” I told my daughter. “She’s had more than enough for the day, poor thing. Give her an apple, too.”

  “Next time I think you should ride her, or have Irina Yaroslavovna work with her,” said my daughter. “Trying to tell me what to do isn’t working and doesn’t make any sense, especially when you don’t have a plan yourself.”

  “If you don’t practice, you’ll never learn,” I told her. “Repetition is the mother of learning. If you want to become as good as Irina Yaroslavovna, you'll have to practice lots.” For such was my daughter's ambition, to become as skilled a horsewoman as Irina Yaroslavovna, our mistress of horse. It was a laudable ambition, and one I encouraged, and perhaps it would have been better served by having Irina Yaroslavovna herself conduct my daughter’s lessons. Such thoughts often come after the fact, at least to me.

  “Is that Miroslava Valeriyevna?” asked the unknown woman, bowing in my daughter’s direction. “Greetings, young princess!”

  My daughter waved at her distractedly and then, to my relief, trotted the long-suffering Romashka, who had never done anything in her blameless three years of life to deserve being made my daughter’s practice pony, over the poles scattered around the paddock without incident, and then pulled her up and began walking her out. Innochka, the stable girl in charge of Romashka, came over and said she could take care of things from there, and I turned to see what my surprise visitor wanted.

  She was a few years older than me, and had the lean figure and weathered face of someone who spends most of her time on the road. “A messenger?” I asked.

  “From Krasnograd, Valeriya Dariyevna,” she said with another bow. “From the Tsarina herself, in fact.”

  So, something serious, then, but, judging by her manner, not too serious. If the Empress were, say, dead, she would not have been so calm. Probably the long-threatened summons.

  “Is the Tsarina calling me to Krasnograd, then?” I asked.

  “I see tales of your acuity have not been exaggerated, Valeriya Dariyevna,” said the messenger, with another bow. “She begs me to deliver this message from my hand directly into yours, and to await your reply, before returning at all speed to convey your answer.”

  “You're very fair-spoken for a messenger,” I said, taking the scroll case she handed me. I noted her slanted gray eyes, wide sharp cheekbones, and lithe slender body of a steppe warrior. In a certain light we could be sisters. “Are we by any chance kin?”

  “Very distantly, Valeriya Dariyevna,” she said with yet another bow. “My mother is a many-times younger sister of the Stepnaya line. The Empress took me into her service in order to carry the most sensitive messages, ones that could only be entrusted to blood kin. Do you have a reply, Valeriya Dariyevna?”

  “Well, I'll have to go, obviously,” I said, having opened the scroll case and read the message by then. It merely said, in what I recognized to be the Tsarina’s own hand, Come to Krasnograd at once. Bring Miroslava. Your sister. I rolled it up and put to back in its case. “At once, it seems.”

  “Very good, Valeriya Dariyevna. When should I say you can be expected to arrive?”

  I looked up at the sky. It was a fine summer day, the Black God take it, and it was likely to be a fine summer day the next day and the next. No excuses for delay there.

  “Two weeks,” I said with a sigh. “Two weeks from tomorrow. No doubt we will be ready to set off tomorrow morning, and the weather is fair. Even at Miroslava’s pace, it should take us no more than two weeks, perhaps less if we are lucky.”

  “Very well, Valeriya Dariyevna. I will set off directly to convey your response.”

  “At least spend the night,” I said. “You should rest after your journey, and it’s a sad day when a Stepnaya can't stay at Stepnoy Dom.”

  The messenger bowed yet again, but said, “Thank you, Valeriya Dariyevna, but I must set off as soon as I have a fresh horse. Irina Yaroslavovna has already promised to have one saddled for me.”

  “Oh very well,” I said. “What prompted all this haste, anyway?”

  “I'm sure I couldn’t say, Valeriya Dariyevna,” said the messenger, bowing again and disappearing into the stable in quest of a fresh horse, leaving me to inform my daughter and the rest of my family that Miroslava and I would be setting off for Krasnograd first thing the next morning, the gods help us.

  ***

  Predictably, Miroslava was thrilled down to the marrow of her bones at the news, and just as predictably, my parents were not.

  “What do you think it is?” fretted my mother, while my father looked at the scroll with distaste and said, “It’s not as if she’s even your real sister.”

  My mother and I both gave him a look.

  “Well, not your full blood sister,” he said. “Only a second-sister.”

  “Second-sisters are still sisters,” I said, sounding rather grim about it, to which my father could muster no argument. My poor father was not particularly cut out to be Prince Stepnoy and father to the Empress’s second-sister. No one who looked at him or spoke with him would ever guess that the blood of generations of steppe warriors flowed through his veins. He was tall and thin and had long
wispy brown hair going to gray and was only at home amongst his books and his scrolls and his herbs, and really would have been better off at a sanctuary, which is where both my uncle and my brother had elected to end up, after the wolf incident that we all preferred not to speak of.

  “Could it be about…the Eastern situation?” my mother said apprehensively. “I know you wrote to her about it, and so did I, but…”

  “I’d like to think so,” I said. “But then why would she send for me to come to Krasnograd? If it were about that, I’d think she’d send someone out here, not order me to present myself there.”

  “Well then, do you think...Valya, do you think she’s going to...name Mirochka as her...her successor?” asked my mother. Just as my father was no one’s idea of a steppe prince, no one at first glance would have guessed that my mother was a Tsarinovna, daughter, sister, and aunt to empresses. And possibly grandmother, if the succession played out in my daughter’s favor or disfavor, depending on how you looked at it. Where I came from, the gods alone knew. Both my parents had sworn a dozen times over that I was their true-born daughter and heir, and it was most likely true, but I resembled neither of them in mind or body. No one who had met me had ever doubted for an instant that I was the daughter of Tsarinas and steppe warriors. Luckily for all of us, since either the governance of the Stepnaya province, or the rule of all of Zem’, was going to fall to me eventually, and that was a burden that someone in the family needed broad shoulders for, and it was handy that that someone was obviously me. I had even managed to conceive an heir by my twentieth summer, which was more than most of my family could say. Out of wedlock of course, which didn't matter so much, but I hadn’t followed up yet with a second one, which did matter a lot. Both Stepniye and women bearing Imperial blood were thin on the ground right now. Which could mean...

  “I don’t know why the Tsarina summoned us,” I told my mother. “But I think if she were about to name Mirochka formally as her heir, she would have sent more of an escort. It wouldn't do for the future Tsarinovna not to be brought into Krasnograd by a dozen of the Imperial Guard’s best men, and a whole gaggle of princesses, too. No, I suspect something else.”