368 AD
The solitary figure of a man receded into the distance.
He made his way slowly, but with purposeful step and determined gaze fixed on the unknown path before him. The warm southern plains had been good to his people. But more and more invaders—Orientals from the east, Huns and Celts from the European west—were now intruding into the land between the Dnieper and Don. And this was not a man who desired to fight other men. He would not take a life to retain even something he considered his own. He would rather battle the elements, and the earth itself. He had no stomach to contest against humankind.
Thus he had begun his sojourn away from that temperate region of the south. Behind him he left the conflicting mix of peoples already beginning to crowd in upon one another. He was of that breed that needed room and space.
He would take his Slavic bloodline to the north. There he would find a wife. There he would raise a family. There he would make his home, in a region where the snows were fierce and the earth hard. But at least he would not have to contend against others of his species. Something stirred within the heart of the lonely traveler, telling him that to do so was wrong.
As he walked, there was no smile on his rugged-featured face. His was an arduous life, the life of a nomad in search of a place to lay his head. In his veins flowed the blood of a people hardened and made somber by the ceaseless toil by which they wearily attempted to sustain themselves, a people only just learning to fashion implements and tools and weapons from what the earth begrudgingly gave them, a people calloused by the struggle just to stay alive with only their hands and what ingenuity they possessed to assist them. Hard work was the commodity of necessity, happiness a luxury reserved for scant moments around a fire at night, with a stomach full of roasted rabbit or wild sage-hen.
Onward he trudged. He could not hear them, but in time would be heard, somewhere in the regions of space above this land he traversed, the faint lonely tones, dark and somber, of a choir singing in minor key. They would be the sounds of the descendants, and would gradually during the coming centuries fill this land over which their progenitor now trekked. The voices of a hundred generations to follow would sing as a steadily rising tide as the people of this huge and awesome land. Now empty and silent, these voices would one day rise and ultimately step forward as one of the great peoples in one of the most powerful nations the world has ever known.
But for now, these voices remain silent, for the ears of future to hear.
And still the man plods on, ever northward, toward his destiny as one of the first of the great conflux of men and peoples and races which will one day be known as “the Russians.”