But Lizabeta did not turn to run. When the men appeared, ferocious and covered in blood and soot and sweat, mad with the taking of lives and treasure, Lizabeta knelt amid the roses. “Mercy,” she pleaded. “Mercy for my father, for the merchant, for the wise men who cower in their houses. Mercy for me.”
The men were mad with bloodlust and triumph. They roared as they rushed the clearing, and if they heard Lizabeta’s pleas, their steps did not waver. She was a sapling before them to bend and be trampled. She was a river that must part. She was nothing and no one, a girl on her knees with prayers on her lips, full of terror, full of rage. From the hives surrounding the clearing came a low, thrumming note, a song that rose, vibrating through the air. The bees emerged in dense, whirring clouds, like smoke from a village set ablaze, swarming over the soldiers, swaddling them in crawling bodies, and the men began to scream.
The soldiers turned their backs on Lizabeta and her tiny army, and ran.
If only this were where the story ended, Lizabeta would be made a hero, a statue of her raised in the town square, and the wise men would meet beneath it each day to remind themselves of their own cowardice and to be humbled in the shadow of a girl.
But none of these things came to pass. Word spread, of course, that the raiders had come to the coast and marched inland. But no one outside the village knew why they’d suddenly changed their course and fled back to the sea. There were rumors of some fantastical weapon, others of a terrible plague or a curse brought down by a witch.
Word of the town that had been mysteriously spared reached a general who was assembling a great army to face the raiders when they returned. With a few of his best men, he marched to the village where the enemy had ceased their invasion. He went to the wise men who met in the town square, and when he asked them how they had turned the tide of battle and sent such fearsome enemies running, they looked to one another, afraid of what the general might do if they told him silly stories of girls and bees. “Well, we cannot say,” the wise men offered. “But we know a merchant who can.”
When the general reached the manor house, the merchant said, “It is difficult to explain, but the beekeeper down the road will know.”
And when at last the general came to Lizabeta’s home and knocked on the door, her father saw the fearsome men with their armor and their hard faces and he trembled. “I cannot be certain what happened,” he told them. “But surely my daughter will know. She is in the meadow, tending to her hives.”
Lizabeta met them there. “What made the enemy turn in their tracks?” demanded the general of the girl in the meadow. “What made them flee this nothing of a village?”
Lizabeta told the truth. “Only the bees know.”
Now, the general was tired and angry and had walked many miles only to be taunted by a young girl. He was out of patience. His men bound Lizabeta’s wrists and her ankles and placed the ropes over the bridles of four strong horses. Again, he asked Lizabeta how she had stopped the soldiers.
“Only the bees know,” she whispered. For she hadn’t any idea how she’d done it or what miracle had transpired.
The general waited, certain that the girl’s father or the merchant or the wise men of the village would come to her aid and tell him their secrets.
“Do not bother waiting,” she said. “No one is coming.”
So the general gave the order, as generals do, and Lizabeta’s body was torn apart, and the bees hummed lazily in their hives. It’s said her blood watered the roses of the field and turned the blossoms red. It’s said the blooms planted on her grave never perished and smelled sweet the whole year round, even when the winter snows came. But the bees have long since left those hives and want no business with those flowers.
If you can find that meadow, you may stand and breathe in the perfume of its blossoms, speak your prayers, and let the wind carry them west to the sea.
The roses remember, even if wise men choose to forget.
Lizabeta is known as the patron saint of gardeners.
SANKTA MARADI
On a great bay on the coast of Novyi Zem, two families had fished for many generations, and had squabbled over the rights to those waters for just as long. Addis Endewe and Neda Adaba could scarcely speak a civil word to each other. As their competing fleets grew, so did their profits—and so did the enmity between them. The fishermen in their employ were known to cut each other’s nets, tear holes in their rivals’ sails, and pull their boats alongside so that the crews could better punch and kick each other.
But then, as is the way of these things, on a market day, Addis Endewe’s son, Duli, went with his friends to buy jurda at the very same time that Neda Adaba’s daughter, Baya, had a craving for sweet oranges. There, amid the fruit stalls and shouting fishmongers, Duli and Baya fell immediately in love. Perhaps, if their families hadn’t hated one another, it would have been a passing infatuation and nothing more. Or perhaps they would have fallen in love anyway. Maybe some people are destined for one another and lucky enough to know it when they finally meet.
Handsome Duli and beautiful Baya began meeting in secret on the property of Sankta Maradi, who lived near the shore. When people left the old woman gifts, the skies had a way of clearing and lost ships somehow found their way to harbor. She let the lovers meet on her little dock, where they mended nets together, and watched the stars, and hatched a plan to run away. They agreed they would each steal a boat from their family fleets and meet beyond the bay, where their parents’ rivalry could not touch them.
Duli crept out after dark, secured a small skiff, and sailed off beneath a cloudy and starless sky. But Baya’s father caught her trying to escape, and in his rage, had his entire fleet smashed to splinters rather than see his daughter wed to his enemy’s son.
Baya would not be deterred. Despite the darkness, she leapt into the sea, her limbs fighting the pull of the current as she struggled through the waves, calling out to Duli.
Their names echoed across the bay as they tried to find their way to each other, but the sea was cold and the clouds hung heavy, blocking the light of the moon. From her lonely pier Sankta Maradi heard them calling back and forth, back and forth in the darkness. She took pity on the lovers who wished for a new world together instead of an old world divided. With a single gesture from Maradi, the clouds parted and the moon emerged, gilding the world in silver light.
Duli and Baya found each other across the glimmering waves. Duli pulled his love up into the boat and they sailed to safety, far away from their families. They began a new life, on a new shore, and chose a new family name: Maradi, and this is where the Zemeni tradition of choosing names began.
Every year, the Maradi family made a path of white stones, each one round as the moon, down to the water, where they said prayers of thanks for the life they’d been able to make together.
Sankta Maradi is known as the patron saint of impossible love.
SANKT DEMYAN OF THE RIME
In the icy eastern reaches of Fjerda, a cemetery stood, and among its rows were both humble graves marked by nothing but wooden staves, and fine mausoleums hewn of marble, grand houses for the dead.
A forest grew up around this cemetery, and at first the people paid the trees no mind, happy for their shade. But soon the birches grew so thick and so dense that no one could reach the cemetery to tend to the graves of their family members or pay homage to their ancestors.