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Rüütel means knight. Her grandmother told her so every time she read her a book of fairytales. Come here, little swordfighter, she’d laugh. Or, are you done dragonslaying yet?
“Were mom and dad knights, too?” little Salme asked.
“Of course,” said Granny Annika. “She had a golden two-handed sword as long as you’re tall, and he wore a silver helmet encrusted with the biggest, reddest rubies. They owned a pair of bay horses, whose chanfrons were full of iron spikes so as to scare off any enemy.”
It took Salme a few years to realize that Granny Annika was full of it. She did some reading on medieval claymores, too, and realized that a golden one would be impossible to wield and completely useless in a fight.
Still, sometimes, when she thought of herself, she’d envisage a girl in a suit of armour slashing at any problems or obstacles with a giant sword. It became her own private joke. Slash! There goes the director of their lyceum, that nasty bespectacled weasel. Woosh! Her exam papers are shredded to ribbons. Swish! The uncomfortable chair in room 307 gets chopped into firewood.
It was a fitting mental image. Salme was strong and bright and full of life. She kissed her first boy at 14 and her first girl at 15. At 16 she tried alcohol; after a foaming pint of pink pear cider, she felt barely drunk at all. When Granny Annika became old and ill, Salme worked first as a strawberry picker and then as a seamstress to pay for the doctor.
Sewing was tedious work and far removed from the fairytales of her childhood, but Salme did her best to carry on. The silvery sparkle of the needle in her fingers was enough to spur her imagination onwards and occupy her with fantasies of sun-heated metal and horseback duels while she produced yet another pair of grey cotton stockings.
It was high summer of her nineteenth year when the Scarlet Skein came to the borders and took the little Võro village of Hino. Within a month, half of the region fell to the Venlish assault. Fellin was lost, and then Veleh. The red brick walls of Dorpat, erected a century ago to defend against cannon fire, never stood a chance.
After Salme buried Granny Annika, she fled north towards Reval. What remained of the Estlish government consolidated its forces there, and for a while the refugees from the south knew a surreal semblance of normality. Salme was assigned to one of Reval’s sewing factories; only now she was making linen footwraps rather than cotton stockings.
One day, a man knocked on her door. He was dressed in an old uniform of the Estlish regular army, but his bars had been cut off and his blue cocarde was smeared with green paint.
“Who are you?” Salme asked.
“Uku,” he said, with a hint of reproach. “Don’t you remember me?”
She squinted a little. He had a scraggly blond beard and a strange, hungry look about him now, but she had known him once. Uku Lillenberg, baker’s son. He’d left the Dorpat lyceum years ago to join a cadet school.
“Come on in, then,” Salme said, without enthusiasm. Her fingers ached from the needle, her hair was a cloud of frizz around her head, and there was dried soup stock on her dress. All she wanted was to close her eyes and rest without anything calling for her attention, be it the invading Venlish forces or Uku Lillenberg.
Uku, clearly preoccupied with some pressing concerns of his own, never noticed her tiredness. Eagerly accepting her invitation, he came in, sat down at the table, and gulped down three glasses of sugary tea in a row.
Salme was beginning to suspect that the hunger she’d seen in his eyes was not metaphorical. She gave him a slice of fruity rye bread with curd and he ate it quickly and sloppily, getting the curd all over his beard.
“My entire squadron is gone, Salme,” he said, without prelude. “Until a week ago, we were holding the ford at Lambahanna. The Venlish attacked us head on and we couldn’t stop them. There are too many.
“There were hardly two dozen of us left. The commander disbanded us, told us to run. I boarded a supply train to Reval.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. There were no words in her vocabulary she felt were appropriate to the situation.
“So,” she said.
“Yoldia will not hold,” he said bluntly.
Salme, who was about to cut another slice of bread for him, put the knife back down. “You can’t know that.”
Uku’s features tensed. He was her age, but he looked so much older now, his expression hard. “Of course I know that, girl. Yoldia is gone. It fell at Lambahanna.
“Do you remember Arno?”
She nodded. Arno Rhoden. Arno the Bookworm. The funny lanky boy who had never heard a teacher ask a question he didn’t want to answer. The Niemcish know-it-all who’d turned his big nose up at school dances and offers of drinks at the local inn.
“When the Skein took Dorpat, they arrested his parents,” said Uku, enunciating each word with an intensity bordering on cruelty. “His father is Volgan Niemcish. After the Revolution, he hid from the Venlish in Yoldia. Now they have caught up with him after all.
“They’re already shipping our families East by the wagon. Yoldia will not hold.”
Salme dipped her knife in curd and started methodically spreading it on another slice of bread. Her throat felt like it was constricting around a cube of ice.
“So,” she said.
“So,” said Uku evenly, and produced something black and metallic from his belt. “Me and a few others, we’re going into hiding. We will form an irregular resistance cell. Move through the forest. No one knows Yoldia’s forests like we do.
“Come with me, Salme.”
Salme looked at the thing he slid across the table towards her. She was staring down at a small, compact automatic pistol.
This, she thought dimly, was her chance. Rüütel means knight. Here was her glory in battle; her golden claymore; her ruby-encrusted silver helmet.
But there was something simple and ruthless about that little killing machine that said, there is no glory in fighting. That was no sword; it offered no chance for a dramatic stand-off or a dying monologue. It whispered, kill or die; it’s all the same to me.
And if there was one thing Salme was suddenly aware of, above her anger at the Venlish, above her pity for Arno Rhoden and Uku Lillenberg, it was that she wanted desperately to live.
“No, Uku,” she said, and cleared her throat so that her voice would sound steadier. “I’m staying here.”
Uku looked at her for a long moment. Then he shrugged.
“Suit yourself, Rüütli.”
He retrieved the pistol, carefully wrapped the second slice of bread with curd in a piece of cloth, and stood from the table.
“I hope they spare you when they come,” he said. Salme didn’t answer.
After Uku was gone, she sat at that table still and watched the sun outside her windows redden and descend into the grey mist at the horizon. She poured herself a shot of buckthorn liqueur and then another, until the world around her turned into a warm nauseating blur.
Salme Rüütli wasn’t a knight; she was a survivor. Even as the Venlish bled her land to the last drop, even as Uku Lillenberg died of his wounds under the weeping Estlish skies somewhere in the forests around Dorpat, even as Arno Rhoden weakened with self-imposed starvation in the occupied Narov, she would live. And there was a kind of dark strength in that, one she could have never imagined when she’d listened to Granny Annika’s fairytales.