The Battle of art is very much like war. All fame goes to the leaders, while the rank and file share the reward of a few lines in the order of the day; and the soldiers who die in the field are buried where they lie – one epitaph must do duty for a score of thousands.
–Henri Murger, The Latin Quarter

Part One
The Seasons

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
–John Donne, “The Sun Rising”

Prologue
The Rainy Land

Foreigners called the land by many different names, but in their own language, the local people called it the rainy land, as if they still remembered some sunnier country their ancestors had come from. Mists and showers were more common than clear days, and massive thunderheads rolled across the low green hills and valleys from spring until fall. The ancient gods were still very close to ordinary people in this part of Europe. Lightning strikes were so frequent that the old people placed prayer books or crucifixes on the windowsills to protect themselves, or fell to their knees to say the rosary if they were caught outside in a tempest. The rosary was no guarantee of safety. If you were struck by lightning and could still move, you were to heap earth over your chest so it could pull the electricity out of your body. The trick did not work if you were already dead.

This green and rainy country was one of the great forests of Europe. In the deep wild woods, the last aurochs lingered and wood bison snorted and huffed among the giant oaks and thorny undergrowth of the forest floor. The grand dukes and grafs and great landowners rode out from their dvars, hunting among the moss-covered fallen trunks and peat bogs for game that had disappeared from the rest of Europe hundreds of years before. Half-wild woodland people cultivated small clearings in the forests where they planted tiny fields of rye and flax and dried the skins of beaver, fox and marten. Somewhere in this forest lay a line beyond which the animals ruled, the wood bison and the bear, the wolf and the polecat, the boar and the stag, and if the hunter stumbled beyond this line, he might be ripped apart or trampled by the true citizens of the forest.

Time moved more slowly in the rainy land, whose people had been the last in Europe to accept Christianity. They had done so cleverly, with a sort of peasant cunning, to throw off the invading crusaders who were intent on building a Northern Jerusalem. The inhabitants took on Catholicism and clutched it to their breasts like stolen treasure. But the Christian saints and martyrs joined, rather than displaced, the old gods of sun and thunder. The woods and the fields remained full of demigods, and also full of devils.

For a time in the Middle Ages, the people of the rainy land had reared up like angry beasts to charge to the Black Sea in the East and to crush the Teutonic Knights in the West. Eventually they joined with Poland to form a great eastern union, the terror of Moscow. But over the centuries, the rainy land seemed to melt into Poland, and in time, Poland itself began to diminish, too, as it was nibbled by Prussia, Austria and Russia. Finally, Empress Catherine took one last bite, and Poland disappeared. The rainy land became a remote czarist province.

The rainy land slumbered, forgotten by everyone in the West except Baron Munchausen, whose adventures there nobody would believe, although the locals would have found nothing extraordinary in anything he said. The place stirred as Napoleon marched through twice, but his passage changed nothing. Then came brief flames of revolt in the nineteenth century, after which the countryside was covered with gibbets, reminders of the futility of resistance. The forests filled with fleeing rebels who died there or adapted to the woods to become new forest folk, feral after decades in the wilderness.

One such man, a rebel of 1831 named Stumbras, came out of the forest years later and bought the land for his farm with money of uncertain origin. He stank of the swamp, and may well have been part woodland monster. If he was a monster, he was a shrewd one. The thirty hectares he bought were fertile, and the ancient town of Merdine was conveniently close by if one needed to obtain some product of civilization, such as lamp oil or matches. Once Merdine had been a fortified city, a bulwark against the crusaders, then a provincial market, and finally, in Stumbras’s time, a crumbling country town that was shrinking into a village.

While surges of momentum prevailed in the West, where railways and factories sprang up, the law of inertia endured in the East. The Stumbras sons and grandsons prospered modestly generation after generation, innovating slowly, adding a chimney to the house to replace the primitive hole in the thatched roof, and adopting the long-handled scythe to replace the short one.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the village of Merdine gave little sign of its ancient prominence except for the church and the empty cellars of a ruined fortress on the hill. The village was made up of fewer than two hundred wooden houses of squared timbers, huddling close to the narrow sandy roads. It did not even have a proper main street, just a collection of twisting alleys. The heart of a very old town remained, but all of its outlying houses had been lost to the encroaching fields and orchards. The local manor house stood beyond the village, a fine building of yellow brick and fanciful turrets, inhabited by Graf Momburg, the descendant of a German who had done favours for a friend of the czar. The estate had seen better times. Most of its fields had been sold off to enterprising peasants, and the raging old graf was busy drinking up what remained.

The only vestige of glory in Merdine was the church just down from the remains of the old fortress. The town wags claimed Merdine was the safest place in the world to commit adultery because the couples could perform the sin in the castle ruins and then roll down the hill to say confession in the church below. Barring a lightning strike on the way down, they could have their earthly pleasures and their divine ones as well.

Napoleon himself may once have remarked on the beauty of the Renaissance church, but the place had been remodelled twice since he’d passed through. White plaster had been laid over the brickwork, but it never held very well, and came off in patches the size of a woman’s palm. Green moss grew up the walls on the cemetery side, and smelled strongly of urine. No clerical interdiction seemed able to control the bladders of the town drunks, with the exception of the most prominent drunk among them, Graf Momburg, the German, who felt that as a Lutheran he shouldn’t piss on a Catholic church.