Where were we? Oh, yes.
On the morning following the Baptism of Kiev, Aleksandra was summoned to assist in attending to one of the visiting boyars, Gleb of Smolensk, and his wife Helena. Gleb was immediately taken with Aleksandra’s understated beauty, and the objects of his fascination never escaped an encounter with the boyar without harm.
Helena knew all too well of her husband’s wicked ways, but she loved him still. When she sensed his intentions for the servant woman, she found it difficult to conceal her jealousy and wanted to eliminate her competition. Uncertain how to act, Helena ordered her own servant to follow Aleksandra and learn everything she could about her.
Helena’s servant girl reported back her mistress after a week. The boyar’s wife, who was born a Christian, was delighted to discover that Aleksandra appeared to be less than enthusiastic about having Christ in her life. Prince Vladimir had made it clear that paganism was no longer allowed in his Christian state, and so Helena found it all too easy to discredit her rival. That evening, while in the company of her peers at court, she let it slip that she worried that Aleksandra was an упир (which is insufficiently transliterated into Roman characters as upyr and pronounced vaguely like ooh-peer). Even though she pronounced it with the leaning drawl of her native dialect, everyone knew what she meant. Everyone knew that Helena believed that the servant woman Aleksandra was a witch.
Poor Aleksandra hadn’t noticed that the boyar’s wife had it out for her, for she had been too busy trying to avoid the boyar himself. Gleb had made a habit of accosting her at every opportunity. Fortunately, all of his attempts had been foiled by the luck of someone turning the corner to interrupt his advances, giving Aleksandra the split second she needed to sneak away from him.
The boyar’s persistence frightened her. She set a chair against her chamber door each night to prevent him from entering her room while she slept, and before she drifted into a deep sleep every night, she prayed to Perun to reward her faith and service with the punishment of those who didn’t recognize the lightning god’s awe and might.
As Midsummer approached, life grew still more difficult for Aleksandra. Not only had the boyar pursued her without relent for more than two solid weeks, but she had also been ordered to handle some of the more difficult work around the court. She didn’t complain, for she honored Mariya’s dying wish to serve the court despite vehemently disagreeing with the Prince’s conversion to Christianity. However, it was worrisome to notice that the nobility were punctuating her name with whispers of contempt for reasons she didn’t understand.
Worse still was that the feast of Perun was on the first of August, and she realized with despair that she would have to make her sacrifice to honor the great god in secret, for none of the other servants in the court would dare to make the sacrifice with her for fear of being unfairly accused of acts of high treason. She also knew that she wouldn’t be able to obtain any animals to offer Perun, for the gamekeeper kept track of the animals for consumption and would notice if any went missing. She knew that all that she had to offer were her own flesh and blood.
On the eve of the first of August, Aleksandra lifted a bowl and a carving knife from the kitchen. A few hours after night fell, she sneaked out of her chamber and listened carefully for the guards behind a column near the eastern palace gate. The guards lazily relaxed their watch after an hour, and when the coast was clear, she ran out into the darkness with the knife, the bowl and her wooden statue of Perun.
She found a small clearing where the moonlight shone through the trees. She set up her small wooden statue and the bowl. In an act of great bravado, she begged Perun’s forgiveness for her weak offering, and she cut into the flesh of her arm. She hacked off a small patch of flesh and placed it into the bowl.
Aleksandra fell into tears as she lamented how her life had seemed to fall
(Humans eat more than any other creature. Maggie, Sage’s mother, has summoned me to another meal. More later. Dominus tecum.)