Enchantment (19 page)

It wasn’t childish to follow in the footsteps of a distinguished father, was it?

But his father hadn’t stayed in the cocoon. Years before anyone guessed that the Soviet Union would collapse, Ivan’s father had decided he had to get his family out. So he declared himself a religious man, let them slice him up, lost his home and his job, risked years of deprivation and harassment, and finally won, taking his family to a new land of freedom. But to do it, Father had given up the idea of ever teaching another class in his native tongue, of ever walking the streets of his native city. Afterward the world changed, so some of these things might be possible again—but Father hadn’t known it would happen.

Compared to that kind of risk, what am I? I took the leap, yes, but I didn’t like the ledge where I landed—I fought the bear, I kissed the princess, but now I don’t want to be king. Well, where in the fairy tales did it ever say that Cinderella had to like being queen, or that Jack got to choose whether to marry the king’s daughter or whatever it was that happened to him after he killed the dragon or the giant or whatever the hell he did? When Father got the family to Austria, he didn’t say, “Never mind, too scary, let’s go back.”

OK, so Father couldn’t turn back. Neither can I. I’ve got to do it, so maybe I should get my ass in gear and do it for real.

Ivan stood up, closed the book of the Gospels, and set it aside. Then he took the single parchment sheet of the lexicon and turned it over and set it on top of the other pages Father Lukas had been given by Saint Kirill . . .

The lexicon was blank on the other side.

And most of the other sheets also had at least some space on the back. Room for a lot of writing, if it were small enough. Room for Sergei to do all that Ivan wanted him to do.

Except for one small problem. How could Sergei hide it from Father Lukas, if it was written on Father Lukas’s own papers?

By dinnertime, Ivan had come up with an answer. As usual, King Matfei listened carefully to the concerns of the boyars before giving the rest of the meal over to the singing of a minstrel slave who had recently been given to him as payment of a debt from another kingdom over the mountains to the west. Ordinarily, Ivan would have listened carefully to the song. But tonight, he leaned to the king and said, “I’m ready to be baptized.”

King Matfei raised his eyebrows. “Father Lukas says not.”

“Father Lukas judges that I’m not ready to be a priest, and he’s right. But am I ready to take the covenant of baptism and confirmation as a Christian? I think so. What more is needed than that I believe in Christ?”

“That’s precisely the point on which Father Lukas says you are lacking.”

“And I say that I believe well enough for baptism,” said Ivan. “Am I a liar, or is he mistaken? I am the only fit judge of what is in my heart, I think.”

King Matfei looked off into space, bemused. “A complicated question, now that you put it that way.”

“Until I’m married to Katerina,” said Ivan, “the kingdom is in danger. What is to stop the Pretender from sending assassins?”

“The high king in Kiev would not allow her to take possession if it were known she had murdered to get the kingdom. More important, though, there are spells that my late wife’s sisters added to the curse. If the witch raises a hand against the royal house of Taina, then the curse falls upon the witch herself.”

“Until I’m married to Katerina, killing me would not be killing a member of the royal house.”

“Then why aren’t you already dead?” asked the king, reasonably enough.

“Because she knows what a terrible soldier I am, that no one would follow me into battle. She thinks the marriage would work to her advantage. When I’m discredited completely
and
married to Katerina, she’ll be content.”

King Matfei looked at him strangely. “
You
say this?”

“I am not going to be a terrible soldier forever. I’m going to work very hard until I
can
wield a sword and be useful in battle.”

If King Matfei had an opinion of the likelihood of this ever happening, he kept it to himself.

“If the Widow gets word that I’m improving,” Ivan continued, “then it will be in her interest to kill me. I want to be baptized and married. Let’s get on with the journey and see where the road takes us.”

“Father Lukas won’t baptize you until he thinks you’re ready.”

“I will continue my studies,” said Ivan. “In fact, I want to. But let it be here. Let Sergei bring the books and papers into your house and train my mind here, during meals and before bedtime, so I can spend all the daylight hours training my body to be a soldier.”

“I’ll think about it,” said King Matfei.

The next day, Sergei showed up soon after dawn with a dozen parchments and the book of the Gospels in a basket. “Father Lukas is furious,” said Sergei. “But your baptism will be day after tomorrow. And here I am, living in the king’s house!”

Within moments, Ivan had shown him all the blank spaces on the parchments.

“Write on
these
? The very parchments written by the hand of Kirill?”

“And then we’ll seal them all up and hide them to be found in a thousand years,” said Ivan.

“You’re serious about this,” said Sergei.

“It’s the second most important thing I’ll ever do here in Taina.”

“And what’s the most important?”

“I have to learn to be a knight, so I can be a king, so I can be a husband.” He did not add aloud the most important point: So I can go back home.

Baba Yaga

Yaga found her husband tearing at a human thigh. It was disgusting, the way he let blood drool onto his fur, making a mess of everything. On the other hand, the ligaments and tendons and veins stretched and popped in interesting ways. It made Yaga wish that Bear hadn’t disassembled the body. She liked to see how everything connected with everything else. And Bear absolutely refused to eat humans while they were still alive, with the feeble excuse that when they weren’t dead they made too much noise and moved around too much. To Yaga, that was just another proof of Bear’s laziness. Godhood was assigned to the most unworthy people.

Still, he
was
pleasant company, much of the time, and he was more or less permanent—he was the only male she’d ever slept with that she couldn’t kill no matter how much she sometimes wanted to. As a result, he stayed around long enough for them to develop something akin to friendship.

“How are you with the broadsword?” Yaga asked her husband. “Or has losing an eye made it impossible for you?”

“Having no thumb makes it impossible for me.” He talked with his mouth full, of course. “I’ve never needed a sword. I knock swords out of men’s hands. I bite off the ends of their spears. I roar at them and they shit themselves and run stinking into the woods.”

“This bridegroom of Katerina’s—you know, the fellow who put your eye out—he didn’t shit himself, did he?”

Bear cocked his head to remember. “He ran.”

“But not away. I distinctly recall that he ran around and around until he made you stupid. Oh, wait—you started that way.”

“We’re not in a good mood today, are we, my love?” said Bear.

“He’s practicing with the sword. Doing exercises. Hours a day, till he staggers back to Matfei’s squalid little hut of a palace and falls asleep. Lifting bags of stones on a yoke to make his thighs and back stronger, directing the fletchers to make light javelins with hard metal points and teaching the boys to throw them. He might make something like a king out of himself after all. He’s becoming a nuisance.”

“Poor Baba Yaga.” Bear let the bone drop on the floor. Later, one of the servants would pick it up and give it to the cook to add to the stew for the prisoners and slaves. Still, it annoyed Yaga that he was so untidy. And sarcastic, too, as he added a little jab. “I thought you said that telling the people he wore a dress would undo him.”

“It will,” said Yaga, feeling surly but knowing that the dress thing hadn’t worked out quite as she hoped. “It still might. But they seem to have let the rumor wash over them. Maybe they’re waiting for him to make some stupid mistake, and then they’ll say, We knew it all along, after all, he wore a dress.”

“Is Queen Yaga learning a bit about human nature?”

“Bestial nature. They scarcely deserve the name of human.”

“I’m sure they feel the same about you.”

“
Nobody
thinks of
you
as human.”

“To my enormous relief.”

“If this unmanly foreigner becomes a real king, then he’s lost his usefulness to me.”

Bear finally got it through his head what she was asking. “If you think I’m going to go roaring into Taina and bite his head off, think again. I heard what you said about javelins. This fellow aims projectile weapons far too well.”

“Are you a coward?”

“I lost an eye for you already. Must I die for you?”

“You can’t die, you fool. You’re immortal.”

“Yes, well, I thought my eye would grow back, too, but it hasn’t.”

“You’ve lost faith in yourself! Isn’t that rich? A god who has become a self-atheist!”

“You don’t even know what it means to be a god. The burden of it.”

“You should have remained a weather god like your father. Taking on a totem only subjected you to the pains of mortality. Without even the release of death.”

“The whole father-son thing doesn’t have the same meaning in my family,” said Bear. “We don’t breed true. Weather god was never my option. This people didn’t need a sky god. They needed a god to keep winter under control. Like any
good
king, we respond to the needs of the people. We become what they need us to be.”

She understood the thinly veiled criticism of her own kingship. “Did they need you to be a one-eyed cowardly old fart?” She poured him a dish of mead. “To help settle your meal.”

He looked at the dish but didn’t lap at it immediately. “I should never have let you seduce me,” he said.

“I didn’t seduce you, I enchanted you. There’s a world of difference.”

“Bears have no business marrying women. We’re unfaithful by nature.”

“But
you
kept your word, you sweet hunk of bear, you.”

“Hera let Zeus dally.”

“Hera was weak,” said Yaga. “She deserved what she got. And in case you’re thinking of going about betraying me with other women, I’ve put a charm on you. Try it and your balls fall off.”

“If Hera couldn’t do that to Zeus, I doubt you can do it to me. You’re not even a goddess.”

“Try it and see.”

“Don’t worry. I’m done with human women.”

“Good. Stick to swans and heifers or whatever it was that Zeus had a taste for. Or she-bears. But as far as humans go, you’re mine.”

“Why this charade of marriage? You only want my power. You don’t even think about me except when I come into your room.”

“I think about you all the time, my love,” she said, pretending to feel hurt.

“I’m not going to go kill that boy, not in the middle of Taina, surrounded by soldiers. He and I will have an accounting about this empty eyesocket of mine, but not now. Certainly not at your behest, my love, since
you’re
the one who sent me into that pit to fight with him.”

Yaga silently went back to combing her hair. They both knew, of course, that he would do whatever she told him to do, and if he tried to resist, she could make things very uncomfortable for him. A binding is a binding, and the one who is bound is bound. Anything else was just talk. When the time came, when she really meant it, Bear would kill whomever she wanted dead.

Apparently mistaking her silence for patience, Bear went on. “Do you have any idea how sad it is, to see you comb those few scraggly grey hairs of yours as if they were long luscious tresses? I can see your sallow scalp right through it, the hair’s so thin. I’ve seen bald men with more hair.”

She sighed. “
I’m
combing thick reddish hair tonight. Sorry if you don’t love me enough to see that.”

“And your dugs hang down to your knees.”

“Only when I’m sitting and leaning forward to see into my mirror.”

“I don’t have eyes enough to waste them looking at lies.”

“Since the truth can never be known,” said Yaga, “a wise woman learns to become a connoisseur of lies, choosing only the best and most satisfying to surround herself with. I sink into my lies like featherbeds, and they keep me safe and warm.” She got up and danced a little through the room.

“So you plan to kill the boy yourself?” asked Bear. “Won’t that cost you any chance for the throne?”

She shrugged and kept on dancing. “I’ll find other hands to do it for me. I always do.”

She began to sing a melody. The rhythm of it had nothing to do with her twirling steps. Bear lost interest. He lay down on the floor and fell asleep.

“I’ve
got
to find a faster-acting spell,” Yaga murmured. “It took you forever to fall asleep.”

Bear opened his one eye. “I didn’t take your damn potion,” he growled. “The stuff stank so bad I could hardly tell that it was supposed to be mead in the dish. You can’t poison a bear, you silly bitch.”

“I’ll try it again sometime when you have a cold!”

Bear snarled at her and went to sleep again. Or seemed to.

Living with a god is not what it’s cracked up to be, thought Yaga. They think their women should be grateful just to have them around.

She looked into her mirror again, but this time she shook into her palm a bit of dust out of a bag made from a ram’s scrotum. Then she blew across her hand. The dust flew toward the mirror, then clung to it as if it had been glued there.

“Bring me the sleeping warrior,” she whispered to the mirror, careful not to blow any dust from the mirror’s surface.

The face of King Matfei appeared in the mirror, shimmering.

“Not the king, the warrior. The mighty Dimitri.”

Nothing happened; the mirror went blank.

He must not be asleep, the fool.

Quickly she pulled a small wooden carving of a man’s head from a box near her dressing table. She anointed it with a dab of bearfat—a supply she replenished from time to time without particularly mentioning what it was to her husband—and then whispered the name of Dimitri over it, naming it so that whatever she did to it would be done to Dimitri. Then, laying it on the table, she poured out a thin trickle of sleeping sand onto the head.