Enchantment (12 page)

“Saving my daughter was
nothing
?” asked King Matfei.

“No, no, Father,” said Katerina, glaring at Ivan. “My beloved Ivan is merely waiting until your other knights have gathered, to tell the glorious tale of his triumph over the Widow’s fiendish and hideous bear.”

Ivan realized his mistake at once. He knew this from his studies. Modesty wasn’t valued in this culture. A man boasted about his exploits and won extra points if he told the story well. What else was he forgetting?

Ivan tried to cover his faux pas by taking another draught of borscht, draining the bowl entirely.

“Then let’s gather them all,” said King Matfei. He called out to the naked boys who were sweeping and strawing. “Run and summon my boyars!”

The boys dropped broom and straw where they might fall, and took off for the door.

“Won’t they be cold?” asked Ivan.

Katerina rolled her eyes. “You see how compassionate my rescuer is?” she said to her father. “He even cares for the comfort of slave boys, as if he were forgetting they would stay warm by running.”

“You talk funny,” said King Matfei to Ivan. “Are you a foreigner, or are you simple in the head?”

“Simple in the head,” said Ivan at once.

Katerina glared at him. “He jokes.”

“On the contrary,” said Ivan. “Your daughter has made a great effort to tell me just how stupid I am.”

King Matfei turned to face the princess, and for a moment she seemed to wither under his gaze. Then he laughed and smiled and hugged her close to him. “How can I think for a moment you would be ungracious to your rescuer!” he cried. “The man is jesting!”

“You’d be amazed at all the funny things he does,” said Katerina. Her smile could freeze steam.

“I speak differently,” Ivan explained to the king, “because I learned another dialect of your language as a child, and there are many words I don’t know. I promise to learn as quickly as I can.”

“Katerina will help you,” said King Matfei. “She knows
all
the words!” With that he roared with laughter, and hugged Katerina even tighter.

She smiled and hugged her father back. Such a happy family, thought Ivan. What the hell am I doing here?

This is the first day of happily ever after, that’s what I’m doing.

And, when he made the effort to see past his own fear and his resentment at the way Katerina had disdained him, he had to admit that Katerina and her father really
did
seem happy. King Matfei teased her, but treated her as someone to be proud of, someone to like as a person, not just as a property to be married off. Apparently women were not so oppressed as they would become in later centuries.

“I was so afraid for you, my daughter!” said the king. “I thought I might never see you again. All my boyars went in search of you, and found no track or trace or rumor. The dogs found no scent, and the prayers of Father Lukas went unanswered. I was going to set them all again to searching—or praying—but here you are, rescued, betrothed, and sooner than I could have hoped.”

“I was enchanted only a few months,” said Katerina. “Though Ivan thinks it was a thousand years.”

“How could it be a thousand years?” asked King Matfei of Ivan.

“To you it seems only a few months,” said Ivan, “but I assure you that in my land we know of a thousand years of history that passed while she slept. I think that your boyars couldn’t find the princess Katerina because the Widow did not merely hide her in the forest, but hid her in the centuries as well.”

“It makes no sense to me.”

“Such are the ways of witches,” said Ivan.

“I know nothing of the ways of witches,” said King Matfei, “except they are of Satan and must be resisted with all our power.”

“I am even more ignorant of them than you are,” said Ivan, “for up till the day I fought the bear and freed your daughter, I did not believe that they existed.”

“Well, that was stupid of you,” said King Matfei.

“Yes,” said Ivan. “I see that now.”

“You weren’t joking, then, when you said you were simple in the head.”

“There are many things I don’t understand,” said Ivan. “I hope that you’ll give me time to learn.”

“Are you so clumsy that no one gave you any work to do?” asked the king. “Look at your arms and shoulders—I don’t know if you could lift a basket of flowers.”

“I lifted the stone that blinded the bear,” said Ivan, getting a little annoyed.

Katerina looked concerned. “My father is teasing you,” she said.

Ways of showing humor must have changed a lot over the centuries, then. It sounded to Ivan like he was being insulting.

“In my land,” said Ivan, “I’m regarded as a . . .” He had no idea how to say
athlete
in Old Church Slavonic. It wasn’t a concept likely to be useful in the liturgy or histories. “As a good runner.”

The king’s face went white. “They say this to your face? That you run?”

Ivan had to think frantically to guess at what he had said wrong. Then it dawned on him. “Not running from battle,” he said. “Running races. Two men side by side, then they run and run and see who arrives first.”

“We have slaves carry our messages,” said the king.

“Then I suppose no one but the slaves will run races with me,” Ivan said, chuckling. But he found himself chuckling alone. So much for humorous banter. Apparently the jokes would only go one way around here.

“I’ll bet you’re not Christian, either,” said the king.

“No, sir,” said Ivan. Was there any defect that he lacked? Whether he could father children had not yet been tested.

“He’s a Jew,” said Katerina. Trust the princess to come up with another flaw—though to her credit her lip didn’t curl and her tone didn’t curdle when she said it.

“Never mind,” said King Matfei loudly. “Father Lukas will teach you of Christ and you can be baptized in plenty of time to marry my daughter.”

“I’ll be glad to speak with Father Lukas,” said Ivan. “But if there’s some way around this marriage idea—”

“What he means,” said Katerina, “is that all of this is new to him and he will learn
everything
that is required of him.” Her eyes made it clear to Ivan that this was not a good time to throw the marriage into question.

King Matfei whispered to his daughter again. He apparently believed that no one but she could hear him, though of course his harsh whisper was audible in every corner of the room. “How did somebody as stupid as this defeat the Pretender’s bear?” And then, in a voice even softer, though still clearly audible: “Are you sure he isn’t sent by her as a trick?”

“For the answer to that,” said Katerina softly, “you’ll have to ask Mikola Mozhaiski.”

“Yes, well, he hasn’t been by here in years. Not since you were little. I don’t know if he even remembers I exist. After all, I’m only a king.” Looking up into the beams of the thatched roof above his head, Matfei bellowed, “Does Mikola Mozhaiski talk to anyone but the gods?”

Ivan thought he was joking, and smiled a little. Matfei saw his expression and twisted in his chair to face him square on. “Is that funny to you?”

“I’ve never met Mikola Mozhaiski,” said Ivan. “I don’t know anybody here.”

“You know my daughter,” he said. It sounded like he wasn’t pleased about it.

“She doesn’t like me,” Ivan said, determined that some of the truth, at least, would come out.

The king roared with laughter. “What does it matter if she likes you! She’s going to
marry
you! You’re getting more than any other man will have!”

It was in that moment of surpassing banality, sitting at the dining table, surrounded by the stink and noise of a medieval hall, the king himself showing complete disregard for the fact that his daughter might not like the man who was supposed to marry her, when it dawned on Ivan that he wasn’t going to be able to beg off the way he might have done back in Tantalus, politely turning down an invitation to have dinner with a new acquaintance or attend the Mormon pageant at Palmyra. If the king decided Ivan was going to marry his daughter, turning him down was going to be a little tricky. And as for getting baptized, well, history was littered with the bodies of people who didn’t find quite the right way of saying
no thanks
to a fervent evangelist with a sword.

It was like the moment when a war correspondent realizes for the first time that the bullets whistling around him don’t notice or care that he is a noncombatant with a notebook or a tape recorder or a steadycam. And, like that imaginary war correspondent, Ivan wanted nothing more than to hug the ground and shout to someone in a hovering chopper, “Get me out of here!”

But Ivan kept his poise and showed no sign of his moment of panic. He must concentrate on the details of the moment. Whatever else happened, he was still a scholar getting field experience like no other grad student in history. He must live in the moment and forget the future. He spread lard on his bread and ate it, smiling at the king. He didn’t insist that he was already engaged to someone else. He didn’t mention his disinclination to become a Christian. He didn’t burst into tears and call for his mother. He just chewed and swallowed, hoping that the knot in his stomach wouldn’t cause him to throw up.

He wasn’t getting out of here without Katerina’s help, which she wasn’t likely to give. There’d be no ticket home. He wasn’t even on standby.

Was this going to be his life? To marry this beautiful barbarian woman and spend his life eating pork and crossing himself? Sure, until the day he had to face some knight in combat using a sword he probably couldn’t even lift. Or until the day Baba Yaga sent an extremely resentful one-eyed bear to do the job right this time.

Death was the least of his worries. Looking around, he realized that long before someone got around to killing him, he would have to deal with a thousand much more tedious afflictions. He was bound to be infested with fleas—he could almost see them hopping around in the straw on the floor. And what of the unsanitary water? He would definitely stick to alcoholic beverages here, trying to strike some balance between drunkenness and dysentery. And what would happen to him, living on a diet from the era before refrigeration and flavor? Already he was wishing for a simple chocolate-vanilla swirl from TCBY, with just one scoop of chocolate sprinkles.

Never again.

The boyars were gathering, and the knights of King Matfei’s
druzhina
. There were women present, too, wives or relatives of these men of high station. The slaves brought out more and more food, and the guests ate with gusto. This was the king’s table, and what he had to provide for the lords and knights who were loyal to him was a free lunch.

Of course their table manners were shocking—slabs of bread were their plates, knives and fingers their only utensils. The women ate with as much gusto—and as much splashing and dripping and dropping—as the men. Ivan noticed that even though they all conversed with each other, few could look at anything but him, sizing him up, wondering why he was naked except for the robe over his shoulders. No doubt they were as disappointed in his physique as Katerina and her father had been. If only he knew the local idiom for “beggars can’t be choosers.”

The king had been conversing with some of the boyars seated nearby, but now turned again to Ivan. “My future son seems distracted,” said the king. “You can’t be drunk on the little bit of mead you’ve had.”

“I’m sorry,” said Ivan. “I don’t always understand what you’re saying.”

“Believe me, we don’t always understand
you
, either!” said the king with a laugh.

But at that moment Ivan realized that one of the women on the other side of the room might be choking. She sat rigidly, her eyes wide with fright yet also glazing over, her fingers scrabbling at the table’s surface as if she were trying to get a grip on it. No one around her noticed.

Ivan rose to his feet, toppling his stool, and would have rushed to her around the outside of the tables except that too many slaves and diners were crowded there. So he stepped up onto the table and jumped off the other side, the robe falling from his shoulders as he did. He strode through the open space in the midst of the tables until he stood opposite the choking woman. She didn’t even see him, she was so far gone in her silent agony. He swung himself over the table, upsetting several cups. Ignoring the protests of those whose mead he had spilled, Ivan squatted down, reached his arms around the woman’s waist and clasped his hands just under her sternum. There was no rigid underwear to interfere with the Heimlich maneuver, so he dragged her to her feet, held her body close to him, and gave one swift inward jab with his hands.

A piece of half-chewed meat flew out of her mouth and out into the middle of the floor. The woman gasped and sobbed for breath, leaning over the table as Ivan let go of her.

At once several rough hands seized her, and Ivan was surrounded by shouting men, one of whom gripped him by one arm, tore him away from the others, and flung him against the wall. His head spinning, vaguely aware of splinters in his face and his naked shoulder, Ivan had no idea who had attacked him or why, but it was clear from the iron grip on his arm that the business wasn’t finished yet.

It would have ended badly if the king himself had not roared a command. “Stop, you fool! What are you doing to your future king!”

From the man who gripped his arm Ivan heard an answering growl. “No man, naked, may lay his hands upon my brother’s wife in such a way as that!”

“He saved her life, you blithering fool!” cried the king. “Are you blind? She was choking, didn’t you see it? And whatever he did—look, out in the middle of the floor, the bit of meat that was going to be your sister’s death!”

The grip on Ivan’s arm did not relax.

The woman, finally recovered enough to speak, turned around to face her brother. “Don’t hurt the man, Dimitri,” she said. “He held me only around the waist, as if we were dancing. And then he—popped the food out, and I could breathe again.”

“But he’s naked,” said Dimitri.

Dizzy and frightened as he was, Ivan couldn’t help but notice the irony that this was the first person who seemed to agree with him that his being naked was a very bad idea.