Chapter Text
"The Turks are coming."
The last words any family living in one of the subjugated states of the Ottoman Empire wants to hear. The last words anyone wants to hear. Infamous for their barbarism, you had to be a madman on the level of Vlad Tepes or possesses the manpower of numerous first rate nations to even have a hope of driving the Turkish Empire back, for the few years it would take before it recovered and tried again.
"Janissaries?" Asks a local ruler, sweat beaded on his brow although the day is cool. Ruler of a town that is, since the Ottomans allow no native to have any great sway in Bulgaria.
The messenger, who has riden at full speed from a high plateau where he has been keeping watch in the direction of Constantinople, nods, and says breathlessly:
"Led by a princeling. They are going to strip this place for their damned blood tax."
For a moment all the people in the room, fathers, husbands, wives, mothers, those few lucky aristocrats high enough up the ladder to hear the news, stand petrified, swimming ashen faced in memories of other times the Turks have come to collect flesh, before they spring into action. Hide the children. Hide the boys under sixteen. Hide, hide, hide. The Ottoman's are crafty as foxes, one must not be too thorough. In the presence of a prince they have hope though. Princes are lazy. Eager to return to their women, their wine and dice. Never mind that Islam forbids alcohol. Never mind what it allegedly forbids.
A flurry of activity consumes certain members the prosperous town hugged between the orange and white arms of twin cliff sides. Mothers rush into the scrub and woods with their children, pulling at their arms to hurry them along, hushing screams of protest. Trying not to let their neighbours know what they are doing. Boy and girls - no one is safe. God, let the Ottomans not have cause, real or imagined, to massacre the entire settlement. And they always have cause, since they hate and distrust Christians, which is partly why the sultan forms his elite army, his bodyguard, solely out of Christians boys brainwashed to be loyal to him alone. No doubt he finds their exoticism attractive on top of satisfying. The other side is that he cannot trust his own people. However there are rumours, rumours that the janissaries are beginning to do what all imperial bodyguards eventually do - grow more powerful than the emperor.
But that in no way helps the people of an innocent Bulgarian town, people who form the main recruitment population for this feared force. If parents manage to survive slaughter after attempting to protect their offspring, they will never see their sons again, or they will see them as brainwashed golems for the Ottoman machine, ready and more than able to murder their own.
Half an hour later, hoof beats pound along the dirt path to the town, but not all its members have managed to hide themselves or their loved ones in secret holes and crevices.
"Viktor? Viktor! Where are you?" A woman cries for her eldest child, a headstrong boy of nine. "Viktor?! Come out!" Is he hiding, or is he playing? She anxiously asks her unwary neighbours. Ever since the news was related to her she and her husband have been looking for him, but they have had to secure their other children too. I must find him, she told her husband, I will not cower while I know not where he is. So the poor man has gone to hide his children, memories of what happened to his own father flashing through his mind. His wife will likely survive if the oppressors come upon her while in a bad mood, but…
But up and down the main street there is no sign of the boy, so she dodges into her wood and stone home, and prays, hoping for a miracle.
Moments later, tall white hats crest the hill, followed by a royal feather decorating an ostentatious turban. The hoof beats saw on the nerves of all the people but especially the headman, who staggers out of his door to greet his visitors, falling to his knees before the splendid white horse of the prince, the man with the feather, the man in gold, satin, and jewels. At thirteen he's merely a boy to many, but a man to the Ottomans, who declare such a state to arrive at twelve. A man with more than thirty half-brothers, all of whom may order him to be strangled with a silken cord should they ascend the throne and become sultan instead of him. Or, if a softer heart be found amongst the siblings, the new ruler may simply order that his brothers be kept in perpetual gilded confinement, living in the harem, looking over its courtyard, but without access to it, never to step into the sun again. Erased, but not dead. Not physically.
"Sehzade Sultan, how may this worm serve you?" asks the supplicant, his face in the dirt at the horse's hooves, his head within crushing distance. Around him shocked and fearful townspeople peer from around walls or through windows, their blood turned to ice.
"Bring me your boys. His Highness has need of them." says the emperor's son, confidently, his voice still unbroken and sweet as a girl's. If he weren't surrounded by his retinue and elite bodyguard, many of whom are Bulgarian themselves, their features aligned with the people of the place, than he would appear comical, sitting on a large horse, carrying a large dagger, but being sent on this mission, so close to Constantinople, means he is highly favoured by his father, and likely to be the next emperor, the next barbaric oppressor who will steal children and women to be slaves, and slaughter men out of endless greed and lust.
"Boys. Boys. Yes. I shall call the people together so they may present their sons. Thank you, Master." The town leader crawls backwards and climbs to his feet, going to a bell set up by the well in the centre of the settlement, the natural meeting place. His betrayal weighs on him, but if more than a few children were hidden, it would cause the Turks to react as they always do - with the sword. Killing a certain number of infidels guarantees them heaven, after all.
With the bell still ringing in their ears to summon the unlucky to have their hearts ripped out of their chests, people stumble out of their homes, watering, fearful gazes passing over the the soldiers, their precious prince and the carts destined to carry slaves back to the capital, hands clutching tight the thin shoulders of their sons. It's one thing to lose them to slavery, it's another to know that God and heaven will lose them too, as the Ottomans will forcibly convert them to Islam, preventing loved ones from meeting in the afterlife. There can be no thought more painful.
"Not my son, please. Not mine." Goes the whisper, kept soft.
But not soft enough.
A janissary, hoping to prove himself to the heir presumptive, takes exception to a whisper he catches, his lips curling under his blond moustache, his hand on the pommel of his long, curved sabre. "Dissension? Are you wretches resentful of the emperor's generosity in taking your sons away to a better life? To the true faith?" He pulls the blade an inch from its scabbard, the sword flashing silver, grinding a metallic growl.
"Calm yourself." orders the boy-prince, his reedy voice acquiring borrowed authority from his status and the blood flowing through his veins. His mother is a slave risen to be a favourite, and his father is the son of a woman just like her, as his father was before him. Worthless pomp and circumstance given a patina of glory by marble, gold, and jewels. The irony never hits.
With tensions diffused, for now, the boy Viktor's mother and father join the crowd having their sons conscripted, conspicuously sans children aside from the youngest girl, who wouldn't cease crying and who began screaming as soon as her father attempted to leave her in hiding. It is this very lack of sons, so unusual amongst strong Balkan stock, which causes the Turkish prince to turn his attention to them, his dark eyes flat as a shark's.
"Where are your sons? I know you have them. It is in your eyes and the way your muscles tense. Do not lie. Tell me where they are, and I will take only one." he says mildly, his horse snorting and stamping, underlining his calm words.
Viktor's father swallows, them steps forwards. Never trust an Ottoman, but the choice offered is certain death, for him, for everyone, or the slimmest, faintest hope that the boy will keep his word. It is no choice at all for a good man, and at least he can say he tried.
The prince keeps his word. When the trembling father and mother lead him and his blond guard plus one other to where the children are stashed, he orders that all be slaughtered.
"No!" shouts the poor father, before his voice is drowned in blood.
His wife falls to the mushy ground, not yet dead. Not yet useless. The blond beast accompanying the prince licks his blood flecked lips and adjusts his sash. Desire to degrade and dominate overcomes him as he's hit with a backwash of bloodlust, and he falls upon the dying woman. In response, the prince, his lip curling to show his first display of emotion in this place, uses his own dagger to stab the man in the back, his other guards finishing their 'brother' off without either murmur or hesitation.
"Mother! Father!" A little boy's voice causes the killers to turn, curved swords wet with his family's and his family's murderer's blood, their eyes wide as those of furious animals.
"Take him." says the prince, replacing his dagger in its sheathe and issuing the counter order before Viktor can be murdered. After that he climbs back onto his huge horse with the help of his tutor and wheels about, onto the next repository of slave stock.