The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) Read Online Free PDF

ice, and his soul resonated with a constant mournful howling, like the lonely wolf song of his ancestral Steppe, echoing the vast frozen distances that separated him from the companionship of his kind. He harbored a pain that could never be extinguished and a hunger that could never be fed, and his flawed diamond of a mind was a glittering repository of barely contained incandescent rage that yearned to shatter into brittle shards and slash the face of the mocking world to ribbons. For revenge.
    In his defense, his formative years on the banks of the River Don had not exactly been an uninterrupted series of nostalgic sepia-colored picture postcards of pastoral innocence and bucolic idyll, and his particular Don did not flow quietly. And never would.
    Growing up in brutal poverty and privation in a harsh land, he enjoyed neither parental affection nor any kind of solace in the company of his fellows, who feared and rejected him with the instinctive loathing of the herd for the different, the deformed, the Frankenstein’s thing despised. The girls were disgusted by his repugnance. As he grew in strength, the only thing he was spared was mockery, for none dared.
    He was born six days’ ride from Rostov, on a night notable for its bleakness even in a succession of such nights, and despite the weather the orthodox priest who christened him Yermak Timovitch would not keep vigil and rode out into the bitter cold and driving snow, crossing himself on the threshold and never looking back. His mother, Yelena, bled to death in the snow three days later, her cries unheard and unheeded above the screeching gale, and his father, Constantin, a hard and cruel man in any case, never forgave him for it, and spoke barely a word to the boy other than in recrimination for the next thirteen years.
    If not for his sister, Alyona, he would surely not have survived his infancy. Alyona was his only light, his only warmth, his only consolation, his only touch, his only confirmation of his own existence and worth, the only one who ever held him or cherished him. In later years he carried as icons the warm, sweet, smoky smell of her hair and the loving look that glowed in her eyes by the dim lamplight, sacred images in the reliquary of his mind that was otherwise devoid of souvenir or memento.
    But even she was taken from him. The father begrudged him even that candlelight of hope, and sent her to Moscow, to labor for kopeks in the kitchens of some commissary. When he was eleven, Yermak was dispatched to the farthest outpost of the settlement, to guard the sheep through the winters, and apart from the spring herding lived in virtual isolation for years. It might have been the saving of him. It might have. If the vindictive harpies that had singled him out for his fate had released him from their spiteful whims, he might have been rescued from the bitter flood of bile that was sweeping him remorselessly to his destiny. Out there in the solitude, under shimmering oceans of stars and endless pristine skies, listening to the wind and the water in the rills, living off the land, he began to discover a new meaning to his life. He learned that the problem was not himself. It was the others. The ones who hated him, and spurned him. Out there, he was not different, for there was no one to be different from. He almost found peace. Almost.
    One day, in his fourteenth year, as he was sitting outside his rude cabin smoking a pipe, watching the sheep dotted over the low brown hills across the stream, and watching the rabbit he had snared smoking over his fire, and watching the way the flitting insects disturbed the smooth surfaces of the melt pools that stretched away down to the river and ruffled the reflection of the solitary pink cloud that floated there, he heard something in the tree line. He stood and quickly fetched his ancient Berdan rifle from where it leaned against the doorframe. He watched. A gray muzzle peered from behind a tree and sniffed the wind.