The Flood of Andrei
Or, how to cleanse your sins at the end of the world
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Now, to the main event, The Flood of Andrei
This story is part of The Vanishing People series, which is made up of standalone stories that follow a rough timeline. The Flood of Andrei is the last in the series.
Andrei and Eva Plot a Revolution
The Flood of Andrei
The Flood of Andrei
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Far gone and away from the thunderous blows and throbbing rhythms, people felt the Earth shake and sought shelter.
Up close, wandering near to where drummers pounded blistering sequences, people plugged fingers or bits of rags in their ears to stymie the percussive shocks.
The North was on the move. Maris’s Blood, the clan from the North, bobbed through time and space like ducks on the wave.
Andrei knew he could count on Maris, the hairy-faced lad, even while others had scoffed.
Some thought Maris too young and untested, but he’d make good. He had mustered the North, answered the call.
Andrei would need them before the day was out, all 124 at last count, carrying as weapons their hand-forged plowshares, their pikes but most important to Andrei, their arrows. Renowned shooters every one.
The sky darkened; smells in the air burned skin.
Andrei cast his vision west, far West, stretching his sight, searching for a lifeboat, a raft, a god-damned branch in the seas.
No sign of Osman. Andrei was afraid of this. Osman could be erratic.
But suddenly, there he was. Osman had heard after all and was marching with 250 shining men and women of the West, cracking warriors every one.
Osman marshalled his Blood toward the Prophet Drabarav’s village, as Andrei willed it. They kept tight on the Path, toe to heel, and clanged knives to shields, feverish for the fight.
Andrei twisted. South this time, the land of the Franson Blood, where 400 thieves and outlaws to the Order charged headlong in a disorderly swarm.
Andrei never doubted Franson, not for a second. Her clan was a hands-on bunch of dexterous killers, every one. They’d make quick work of the march, run the course true and strong and be ready when it counted.
Franson’s clan could have strode the bogs and hills without help, but Andrei’s Reading cut their trip 10-fold.
Andrei shaped the landscape to his will, folded the earth like a tablecloth as the four lost Bloods marched. He twisted mountains into tunnels, expansive flats into small meadows, bogs and forests into gardens. Then snapped time and space back after the clans passed, shortening the journey.
The last of the four lost Bloods, Andrei’s own clan of the East, would soon be on the move, too. Comprising 550 of the angriest men and women on Earth, they were moulded from thick-trunked stock with steel backs and iron resolve. They may not all be warriors like the Fransons, but Andrei knew he could count on every one.
The so-called lost Bloods were eager for the fight. They vanished from the People’s script years ago, “gone lost” was how they put it, escaping Drabarav’s chains and degradation.
Talk of them was banished in the Prophet’s encampment.
The time to end that was now. The lost Bloods were coming out of hiding and Andrei would get them to the Prophet’s lair.
The land braided and twisted. Fold, bend, snap, straighten. The pong and the violet air swirled, while Earth sped over and behind the Marises, the Osmans, the Fransons.
Not long now, Andrei thought, and we’ll be at the Prophet’s gate.
He had everything detailed down to the finest grain of sand.
Everything but Maria. Andrei hated leaving so much dependent on her, but it was too late to stop. Second thoughts were for the next life.
They had to get rid of Drabarav and it was up to Andrei to make it happen. Readers didn’t kill, but Andrei had to bite this one off.
In the Prophet’s village, Maria sensed the approach of the lost clans. She was no Reader like Andrei, but her skin tingled with his approach.
Her son, a bald and pale child born three-years ago and marked for greatness because of being conceived in the sulphurous caves, confirmed her suspicions with its agitated cries.
A plan three years in the making was coming to life, but it wouldn’t go Andrei and Eva’s way.
Maria resented, still, how Andrei and his wife, Eva, had lorded over her and thrust her into the middle of their schemes.
Andrei and Eva had cast her out from the Blood of the East, along with a dozen disgruntled young men and women. They pushed them out for voicing small grievances and ensured they had no other option but to join Drabarav’s village.
Maria was the only one in the group aware of Andrei and Eva’s plan, that they had been cast out in the name of a greater good — so that Maria could connive her way into Drabarav’s inner circle and become Andrei and Eva’s spy.
At the time, her decision was simple as grass. The Prophet Drabarav had to be dealt with. That was that.
But Maria resented it, most of all, for how they threw Titus at her. She was barely an adult at the time and kids her age didn’t say no to elders. They certainly didn’t say no to the great Reader.
Eva scheduled Titus and Maria to work the same crews, orchestrated time away together, working fields, hunting, scouting.
At night, the mineral springs and the warm caves worked their sorcery and the couple did what bored, isolated couples often do. Maria became pregnant.
She believed Eva that the unborn child would make her irresistible to the Prophet. When she showed up at his gates pregnant with a child conceived in the eastern caves, the unworldly dens where Readers were created, Drabarav couldn’t refuse her.
The Prophet was desperate for a new Reader, had been since Andrei deserted him.
It worked a damn. Drabarav greedily filched Maria’s child as his own, consecrated her as Wife Number Eight and gloated openly at taking ownership of one of Andrei’s prized possessions.
Maria played her part. She stitched together a network of rebels — guards, blacksmiths, farmers, gardeners, hunters — anybody not best pleased at the state of the Prophet’s paradise.
Andrei would need them all before the day was out.
According to legend, Andrei should have been Prophet. He was born in the underground vents of the mountain. Yet, Drabarav, the son of a worker’s third-best donkey, had somehow fumbled his way into power.
Andrei would fix it. He didn’t want to be Prophet, but he couldn’t let Drabarav stand. He had to set things right.
The land shifted again; mazes of mountains and trees formed dead-end traps and infinite loops. Andrei stood in the cave surrounded by his Blood as the land rolled backward, over and around them. Light sliced through holes in the dark ceiling. Water dripped down and steam rose up through the cracks.
Andrei strained; folded entire mountain ranges, moving inexorably forward.
He caught action to his right. Could it be?
In the distance, moving along the same plane Andrei had created for his own Blood, the Voris clan marched, all 500 members from the Plains of Melancholy.
It was shaping up to be a good day. A very good day.
Andrei folded the canvas of the land once more and snapped it back.
All arrived.
The drums pounded, and shouts rang out over the hills. The Prophet’s village of bricks and mud and sod huts lie at their feet.
The villagers froze at the sight of invaders emerging from thin air.
For a few silent seconds, the universe stopped. Nothing stirred, not bees nor wind.
Then the terrible rush began, and termites of people scurried, fled in a mound of panic.
The Osman Blood stormed down the hillside. All 250 men and women jogged straight-backed into the angry face of the enemy. They formed the tip of the spear and targeted the centre of the beast.
Archers of the Maris Blood rained down cover, while women and men of the clan shouldered axe, plowshare and club, and followed Osman heels down the hill. They fanned out, then turned back in to test the enemy’s flank.
Andrei watched from the hilltop. The plan worked so far. Not a single one of Drabarav’s Elite Guard was in sight. Not a single blue sash.
The Franson Blood rushed in next to join the battle at its thickest, where the fight was at its most gruelling and cruel. They hit the centre like a cannonball, tearing the heart out of Drabarav’s meagre defence.
The Fransons, grisly veterans of battle, howled at the slaughter and dipped their hands in the blood of the dead and the fallen. They soaked their faces red, caught up in the scent and ripped into every man, woman and child caught in their path.
The Osmans, spurred by the sight of the Franson berserkers, stepped up their own assault and tore and stabbed like giants among children.
Bugles cried out from within the village’s centre ring, the Prophet’s inner compound. Blue-sashed fighters, confident as bears, surged outward through the four gates of the compound, only to be cut down like dry stalks of wheat.
As the grass turned crimson and the water flowed purple, the horror of his creation swelled up full in Andrei’s vision.
It had to be so, Andrei told himself. Prophet Drabarav must face justice. Everything would be worth it.
Next, the Voris Blood stepped into the savagery, slipped in from the south, from behind the village. Their hollow eyes and disease-scarred faces spread terror on sight.
The Prophet’s Elite Guards howled and ran. Every man, woman and child in the village would be sacrificed before the day was out.
Maria showed her face as the Prophet’s end drew near. She stepped to the edge of a rock face before one entrance to the Prophet’s compound.
She signaled and her band of rebels flowed effortlessly through the gate, past the paid-off guards.
Andrei turned his vision to an anvil-headed young man standing dumb-faced and blank beside her. Titus.
Titus hadn’t been in Andrei’s premonitions. He wasn’t supposed to be here.
Titus raised a club, shouted an executioner’s cry and staved in the head of an unarmed farmer, perhaps a defenceless priest.
And still the killing ground burned red-hot around them. Andrei was helpless to stop it. The instruments he’d set loose swept through the Prophet’s guards, and turned their attentions to the citizens, the labourers, the helpless and the children.
His invaders walked over bodies, strewn about like driftwood — armless, legless, headless.
Titus appeared once more, carrying a child, no more than three years. He raised up the child by one arm and hurled him against the rocks. The boy lie writhing until Maria ended the boy’s misery with her knife.
She shouted the roar of lions, her own son, a cast-off pile of meat and skin at her feet.
She waved her followers forward, calling on them to find Drabarav and drag him out.
Andrei tried to comfort his conscience. He wielded no weapon himself but the truth sank deep and cancerous. The invasion tainted everything and would treacle through histories. It would stain all clans, forward and back. Every Blood chief, every blacksmith, scout, farmer, carpenter, tanner, hunter, builder, fisher, mother, child, husband, wife.
This day had ruined his people.
None of it can stand, Andrei thought. The story of this day must be unmade.
He let the hill unspool and now Maria stood before him, Titus at her heel.
Andrei set down his knife. He bent low to search Maria’s face.
She beamed. “Three years and you’ve come at last. But it’s my time. You can’t have it. ”
Andrei shrugged. He glanced at the dead boy at her feet.
“No price too high. Even your own son?”
Maria showed not a tinge of regret.
“My son was conceived in the caves. He would have become a Reader, like you. He would have taken over when he reached the age and I can’t let that happen. I am the new Prophet.”
Andrei understood that he was the nub of her suffering and it was his duty to make her well.
He stared into Maria’s face, watched it disintegrate into fear, then resignation as the hills swept down in avalanches of fire and earth and dragged her under.
Titus fell into the rolling Earth after her.
Eva, now next to him, nodded approval. She saw it better than he. A few days ago, she laughed in his face over his delusion.
“You think because you don’t raise a weapon you are blameless?” She threw a stone at the back of his head when he tried to leave.
Andrei walked away from Eva again, this time through the gate into the inner compound and surveyed the chaos.
The Maris Blood, the Fransons, the Osmans, the Vorises and the Blood of East were winding down the killing, spearing hearts and heads of the last gasping survivors. Celebrations would follow soon.
Andrei bent his will once more, gathered up the land and turned it under. He would fold up the valley whole, taking with it everything — mountains, the flatlands, the unending forests, the names of his people, their stories.
He had to scrape away the shame.
Just finished this story series. You say so much about human nature, human failings, and why we are so unfit to lead anything. The end, bloody and definitive as it is, is possibly the only one possible. Great writing!