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A wild child, they said at first — maybe even raised by a wolf-mother! Mikolaiki were not bound by any of the customs and traditions found among the families who have found shelter in Amatodate Abbey. Presenting himself to each of them, in turn, wandering just as he was used to, Mikolaiki learned the Pripyatine dialect from the friars, classical Turkish from Osman-bachi and his family, and Lowland Taimir in the company of Irannika Yasin and her servant-girl, Olivia Hutanonoyong. These he mastered, curiously enough, in the same amount of time they got him to eat using utensils instead of his own bare hands. This boy is precocious! they all said. They trusted him enough to delegate to him the cleaning chores, then to the kitchen, then to the gardens, a position that little Mikolaiki took to with relish.
The garden was where Mikolaiki revealed himself to be something like a miracle child. Green fingers — that was they said of people who took care of plants very well — the fingers of Mikolaiki are amazingly green. The vegetable patches flourished in the days after he took up duties. In the spring, when some of the manpower were succumbing to illness, a roster had to be drawn up to divvy the work between the helpers. The groundskeeper swore that the garden looked to be in much better shape on the days the boy was in charge. Around this time, the pear tree at the northern corner, which everyone assumed was dead, bloomed and sprouted leaves for the first time in years! Of course they said that young Mikolaiki did it. And they all began to fear him.
The summer of the following year, General Tansukchin had ousted his own lord in Totte Muran, rallied the other lowland satraps through tactics persuasion and intimidation, and gathered an army to march northward to meet the men of Hakim Sultan. He named the Abbey of Amatodate a prime target in this campaign, as it had admitted casualties from the Sultan's army into its tents, and also abducted the Princess from the House of Yasin. Yes, everyone can see that Amatodate had apostatized from the true faith, along with whichever Christian who chose to take shelter with them. The abbey shored up their defenses, amassing a hundred fighting men and women from the inhabitants to match the thousands who now march upon them. When the abbot had finished the count, all were murmuring in dismay, uncertain of their survival. But little Mikolaiki spoke, his eyes fixed to the chapel:
"Not a hundred, Father Abbot, but tens of thousands have joined us."
The chapel was empty at that time; everyone knew that. Few heard the random nonsense of a miracle child, even if his fingers were very, very green. The ones who did knew what it entailed to see things which are not there, and chose to pay no comment to Mikolaiki. But they still told me after everything had happened, and that is how I knew.
In the kid's eyes, the chapel must have appeared very crowded indeed.
The abbey's fighters fought valiantly in the siege, weathering the first and second waves of assault. Few would think such an outcome possible; the abbot had anticipated the abbey's total annihilation, going the same way as its previous incarnations. My personal opinion would be that we had help from elsewhere: from the guardian angels, from the faithful of faraway lands, the "tens of thousands" counted by the miracle child during the counting. Those who were near Mikolaiki at the time heard him say these words, and so we know they are true.
As everyone knows, the abbey did not survive the third assault, when the reinforcements opened with their fateful artillery barrage. Thanks to the borrowed time, most of the inhabitants fled before the fall. We remember among the slain the Father Abbot, Princess Irannika Yasin (whose remains have never been found to this day), and a small company of friars who had taken charge of the evacuation but failed to leave themselves. Tansukchin took Mikolaiki alive, knowing him to be close to the Princess. He hoped to learn of the whereabouts of the Princess from him, but found him unresponsive and tight-lipped. The next interrogator was called in: the Satrap of Toyogarov, a wretched and evil man. In a fit of sadistic rage (for the Princess had been his betrothed), he had the boy's tongue ripped out, his eyes gouged, and left him to die in agony in his cell.
Note that I do not know if the things that happened to Mikolaiki after the fall of the abbey were true or not. Of course, I was not there to see them happen. But more than a few people who I met later knew the story and told them this way, and a few of them I know to be close to the Satraps, and so I think them reliable. The version of the story that I shall tell now comes ultimately from the words of Toyogarov himself, who has become insane. I came to know of it thanks to people who took the trouble to sift through his increasingly incomprehensible ravings for snippets of sensible speech. This is what they heard him say:
Three weeks after they had buried the child, the Satrap woke up in midnight, in cold sweat, only to find the boy standing at the foot of his bed, alive. The resurrected Mikolaiki lacked the distant air and unearthy mien which typified such apparitions. He appeared as if no death or trauma whatsoever had happened to him — he had all his features seemingly restored, his disposition human. Except, to the Satrap's horror, he was holding: in his left hand, a pair of eyeballs; in his right, a severed tongue. "You have nothing to be afraid of." said the boy to him.
"You have nothing to be afraid of!" raved the Satrap to his advisors ever since that night. And because nothing new has happened after that time, I will end my story here.
Notes
1. The name "Mikolaiki" comes from the Polish name of St. Nicholas's Day.
2. The apparition to Toyogarov is loosely based on the story of Saint Lucia of Syracuse.
3. The stories of Irannika Yasin and many other characters mentioned here will be written in future posts.
