Liubava

History

Liubava was never strong. What she could do was keep going all day.

The mill stood below Bohuslavl, on the Ros itself, and her father kept it. The family was not wealthy but lived securely: they ground grain almost the whole year round, and at harvest carts from the surrounding villages would wait days at a time by the mill. Liubava carried sacks, watched the grain, ran into town for people or tools, checked the water upstream. If her father sent her off in the morning she would come back, take the next errand and go again, barely thinking how far she had already walked. She liked the movement itself. The worst days were when the mill broke and everyone simply waited for the millwright.

She first picked up a sling there too: the birds the grain drew were usually driven off with shouting or thrown stones, and one of the workers showed her how to plait a simple sling from strong cord. At first Liubava could not hit a tree. Her brothers laughed until she broke a clay pot by the door; after that her father forbade her to practise near the mill, and she simply went further off. There were stones enough along the Ros and room enough beyond the town.

The sling started going everywhere with her — on the way to the water, out at pasture, waiting by the road — and in time throwing from it became as natural a movement to her as throwing a stone by hand.

Using it in a fight she learned much later, and from a stranger. Guards from merchant caravans often stopped by the mill, and an elderly slinger named Yaryna, having watched Liubava practising a few times, was the first to explain that accuracy is only half the business.

Yaryna made her do the opposite of everything she was used to. Throw — move away. Ready the sling. Throw from somewhere else. Shift again. At first Liubava did not see why: her aim got worse, she tripped over her own feet and lost time. Yaryna explained that anyone who stands still is very easy to find a second time — especially once the first stone has already hit an enemy. A good slinger, in her view, has to make the enemy work out where the slinger is, every time.

She liked the idea. Liubava began picking several spots along the bank and moving between them, learning to ready a sling on the move, gathering stones in advance, remembering where she would fall back to after the next shot. That was when her endurance first became an advantage in a fight: she could not throw a stone harder than a big man and did not always shoot better than an experienced slinger, but after the twentieth throw she was still moving almost as fast as after the first.

She saw her first real fight at nineteen, when several armed men attacked carts waiting by the mill. Liubava could have stayed inside. She did not. She threw from behind a stack of logs until one of the attackers saw her, then remembered Yaryna and moved: the next stone she threw from the other side of a cart, then from the bank, then from back near the mill again.

Afterwards she could barely remember whom she had hit. What she remembered clearly was the arrow that stood in the logs exactly where she had been a few moments before. Liubava looked at it for a long time — not because she was frightened, but because she had understood very sharply for the first time the difference between a good position and a position that had been good a moment ago.

After that she began travelling with caravans: at first to neighbouring settlements, then to Kyiv, then a few days further along the trade roads. Her father did not like it, but he could see there was no keeping her at the mill in any case. Liubava never wanted glory in war — she simply liked work in which you had to keep looking around and not wait for danger to come to you on its own.

The sword appeared after her first serious mistake. During a raid on a caravan she watched the men in front of her too long and did not notice one who came round the carts from the side; he was on her before she could ready a stone, and all she had was a knife. Liubava backed away between the carts until another guard cut the man off. After the fight he told her that next time he might not be in time.

She bought a sword in the first large town they came to and spent several months honestly trying to learn to fight with it, then understood she would never be a good swordswoman: standing close enough that your opponent can reach you with the same motion you are reaching him with struck her as a bad trade. She did learn to defend herself — parry a blow, make a thrust, make an opponent stop for a moment. But the sword has only ever had one purpose for her: to buy enough time to open the distance again. She never says she is good with it. She says she is good at knowing when to stop using it.

In a fight she almost never stays where she is after a throw — even if the enemy is far off, even if nobody is looking her way yet. Moving after an attack stopped being a decision long ago; it is a habit. Liubava tries always to keep enough space between herself and the nearest enemy to have a choice: another throw, a step aside, a withdrawal, a way round, a different target. She does not like places where that choice is gone — narrow passages, corners, a close-packed line, walls at her back. And she particularly dislikes people who say there is nowhere to fall back to from here. In her view, if that is genuinely true, somebody made a mistake earlier.

Her light armour follows the same logic. A stone or an arrow arriving from a distance is something Liubava will neither see nor avoid — against those she needs some layer at least. It is not free: every step under iron costs more strength, and that cost she accepts. Beyond it the trade stops being worth it: denser gear takes away part of her ability to get out of the way, and the heaviest makes every change of position cost more besides. Liubava builds her whole fight on there being no blow at all — leaving the line, opening the distance, being somewhere other than where they aimed. Armour that takes exactly that from her protects not her but whoever reaches her.

Which is exactly why Predslava is hard for her to understand. They have stood in the same line a few times, and each time Liubava was astonished again: Predslava can deliberately take a place she has no intention of leaving and feel perfectly calm in it. Predslava answers that a person does not always have the right to choose the distance. Liubava agrees — and then checks anyway whether there is open ground behind her.

With Yanka it is the other way round. The very distance Liubava works so hard to create, Yanka crosses willingly, and every time Liubava thinks it will end badly. Sometimes it does. Far more often Yanka comes back whole and thoroughly pleased with herself, which irritates Liubava more still.

Away from battle she is calmer than she seems in a fight: not loud, no lover of large company, able to listen to other people's talk for a long time without joining in. What she cannot do is sit still, and she thinks best walking — if a hard decision has to be made, she almost always finds a reason to go somewhere. She looks after the sling very carefully, replaces worn cord before it starts to fray, and carries a few particularly good stones with her far longer than there is any practical sense in.

Her worst mistake came after several years of service. A small company was taking people through a wooded stretch of road, and they were attacked suddenly, from two sides at once. A guard Liubava had served with for nearly a year was cut off from the rest. Liubava could see her. She could have tried to get closer. She did not — she stayed at a distance and went on throwing stones at the men around her. One struck. The second went wide. Then it was too late.

After the fight she convinced herself many times that closing would have changed nothing. Perhaps both of them would have died. Perhaps she would only have been in the others' way. Perhaps her decision was right. The worst of it is that all of that may be true at once.

Since then Liubava dislikes hearing caution confused with cowardice. But what irritates her more is when somebody calls caution any decision that let him personally survive. Because she now knows how easy it is to explain the distance to yourself after you have already decided not to close it.

In the autumn word came from home that her father was ill. That same evening Liubava worked out how many days the journey would take, chose the caravan she would travel with, and told two people about it. The caravan left without her. The next one she chose just as carefully. One more step back, a little more time, one more position with a better view of things — in a fight that saves her life.

Yaryna lived to be grey-haired and died in her own bed. Liubava thinks of this every time somebody calls her way of fighting cowardice. She has never once said out loud that she is now in her third year away from the mill, though the road there takes four days.