It made him even more nauseous, and the pain played through his temples like a needle, but he got up. He got to his feet and collapsed. He vomited some kind of sludge, probably bile juice.
After that he felt a little better, though not for long. The warder kept demanding to get up, and it was unclear to the metropolitan himself how, but he succeeded. After shouting something directly at him, the SS officer went out and locked the bars behind him.
Samokh fell back into his bunk and, without even trying to make himself comfortable, fell into sleep. He dreamed of Nevrokh. Finally, someone who had given him the right advice, from whom he had learned to defeat his enemies and to weigh his strength before he acted.
– There is a man who is very dangerous to us. – the patriarch told him. – A man, not a plague.
Who is more dangerous to us than anyone else. Don't be a fool like others, don't think that people are weaker than us just because we once defeated them. Don't underestimate your enemy – there is a very high price to pay for that Don't underestimate your enemy. Don't underestimate your
enemy....
The last catches swirled in a merry-go-round around Samoh's consciousness. In the middle of the night he woke up remembering that dream. And then he remembered another one, where Bazankhr with general's epaulettes tells him about self-confidence, vanity and bluster. It all comes from misconceptions about his enemy. An enemy who now seeks to break him and make him beg for leniency.
– There will be no leniency. – The Metropolitan whispered aloud. – There will be nothing but one. The fires of the Holy Inquisition, which will make everyone tremble at the mere mention of it.
He felt a fever inside him even greater than the one he'd felt when he'd contracted this virus.
A heat that burned away all the sickness, all the weakness, all the indecision. His eyes seemed to come back to life, and he began to see clearly. At the same time, his hearing began to return to him. And then the screams from the cell across the hall.
Samoh winced. Pain shot through his temples from one to the other, a little nausea and it seemed harder to breathe. His eyes darkened momentarily, but he kept moving anyway. And the sensations of reality took hold stronger than the pain.
It was dark, for at night only a single light bulb at the beginning of the corridor illuminated the passage, but the prisoner in the cell opposite was clearly visible.
The Metropolitan stood up and walked to the door grate, still staring at the screaming madman. Raising one hand and pointing it palm up at him, Samokh said:
– Blessings on your healing, my son..... Only Jah's faith will heal you.....
Bolotnikov
That inane inability of people to become better than they can be. And the anger with which they meet any attempt at change. They see you as the enemy. An even bigger enemy than the person who actually made them live worse and make themselves worse. And weaker. What a hard line those two words have.
Weaker and stronger. If we allow ourselves to change, is it strength to change things, or weakness to allow change? Or conversely, is it strength that leaves us the same, or weakness that prevents us from changing error to truth?
Colonel Bolotnikov had no answers to these questions now. He was simply leading the very ten percent of people who had accepted the new changes, and agreed to be free against the will of the majority. About seven hundred people in all. And how they were still being looked at when they left. They even tried to shout phrases like "weaklings", "broken", and even "damned", the latter even caught on amongst themselves. When Bolotnikov gave them the opportunity to choose a name for the new Maquis unit they were now, they all eventually agreed on the word, and it was now the Cursed Battalion.
And the timing was perfect. They really were the cursed ones who stayed. Who didn't want to leave. Who didn't want to give themselves a chance to be free. And take responsibility for it. This word for Bolotnikov became something like a red rag for a bull. He always took responsibility for himself, as if it were a gift, not a burden to be carried on his back.
It was that word that brought him so close to his entire new squad. And everyone could see that their commander was someone who was just as damned as they were. And who has nowhere to retreat to, who, like them, also has all the bridges burned behind him. Want to even go back, and they'll tear you apart on arrival just for not dying when you were without them. That's the kind of hatred you can't confuse with anything.
When people who have let someone go start wishing hard for the suffering, pain and death of the one they let go. While outwardly saying that this is a pattern – a natural position of the wrong decision that was made about them. And internally realizing that if this person succeeds, it will mean that they themselves are wrong.
And they cannot allow themselves to be wrong, first of all, for themselves. Therefore, any return will be interpreted by them as a victory of their opinion and their way of life, which means that it is necessary to punish those who denied it, resisting it. And this will also mean the complete abolition of any framework of punishment for this, because the punished will be a priori infinitely guilty.
The "Damned" battalion was moving from the "Archa" sector towards Poltava, to then reach Kharkov. There was to be a small base of Detachment-14 there, and Bolotnikov expected to meet some of his own, to at least find out the latest news, and what status he himself was now in: deserter, traitor, or whatever. Frankly speaking, he was not much concerned about what word they could call him, but more about the fate of "Detachment-14" itself, which in his understanding had gone down with Khmelnitsky's overthrow. And now it remained only to find out where this bottom was, and how his former comrades-in-arms would behave on it.
And how Misha and Natasha were doing was also important. Still, there were almost no close friends left. And the fewer of them there were, the more precious became those who still existed. After all, you can't lose friends indefinitely. You can only keep their memory endlessly....
And especially now he was curious to ask if they were having the same dream as he was. After all, no one among the "damned" had ever had such a dream. He had asked several of them, and then somehow he had asked them at the general meeting in the evening. He had nothing to be embarrassed or ashamed of being misunderstood or thought he was crazy. He had long ago passed those boundaries, and the only criterion for him was the practicality of something, not how it looked from the outside.
No one laughed or looked askew – it was just that no one had ever dreamed anything like this. He stood at the edge of a grove and saw that in the middle of the grove, where everything was illuminated by light, stood a girl and a boy in smart white clothes. "Only together with Mary can you discover the secret of the Black Stone," he only heard from their side.
Raven
"He has a man in there who will blow himself up along with everyone else if ordered to do so," those words loomed in Raven's mind as he stood in the corridors outside the main hall in the Diza Sector administration building. Of course, Cobra's men had let him and his escort of 120 fighters through, pointed out the right roads, led him past the mine barriers where necessary, and now all he had to do was press the button for the elevator to take him downstairs.
But he remembered those words of Cobra's at the meeting. Where he'd said that the prefect's authority was different from the authority within the Kiwi units. The miners followed the prefect's orders as if the sword of Damocles hung over every one of them and would cut them in half for the slightest offense.
