Enchantment (48 page)

Then, ashamed of the bloodthirsty thought, he stepped forward. “Matfei, my father, my king, and my lord,” said Ivan, “may I have Dimitri’s sword?”

Matfei lowered the sword, then laid it across Ivan’s hands.

Ivan made no effort to put his hand on the hilt. Rather he kept the sword as he had received it, lying across his hands. Ivan turned back to face Katerina. “May I give this sword to the king’s true servant?”

“You may,” said Katerina. “When we hear his oath and his plea for pardon.”

Dimitri did not hesitate. Weeping, he gave his fervent oath of loyalty to King Matfei, and to Katerina and Ivan too, for good measure. Then he begged for pardon for his dire offenses, and swore to be true to Christ as well, whose atoning sacrifice would make him clean again, if only the king would pardon him.

King Matfei, speechless still, nodded gravely.

“Let my husband, Ivan, return the sword of a true knight to you,” said Katerina.

Ivan knelt before Dimitri, so their eyes were nearly level, though Ivan had the advantage of height, even kneeling. He held out the sword.

Dimitri took it from him. Tears flowed down his cheeks. He looked sincere. But beyond appearances, Ivan had no way of measuring Dimitri’s heart. He had been humiliated here today. If he was a good man, he would now be the most fervently loyal soldier in Taina’s army, the most faithful of King Matfei’s druzhina. But if he was not a man of honor and goodness, he would already be plotting his revenge for this humiliation. Someone would die for this day’s work. There’d be no more talk, if he betrayed the king again.

But for now, the appearance was all that counted. The king reached down and raised Dimitri up. Katerina did the same for Ivan. The four of them together turned to face the crowd. Only one more step was needed. Katerina reached out her hand to Father Lukas. The priest came forward and took his place between Katerina and her father, with Ivan on the other side of her, and Dimitri on the opposite end of the line, beside the king.

Katerina raised her voice and let it ring out across the crowd. “In the holy name of Christ our Savior, the kingdom of Taina is whole again!”

The cheers were deafening, as the people shouted. Taina! King Matfei! Katerina! Dimitri! Even the name of Ivan could be heard.

Their first victory together. And Katerina had chosen to heed his counsel. Now Ivan could only hope that his counsel had been wise, or, if he was wrong, that the price of Dimitri’s pardon would not be too high.

Baba Yaga

“It’s so good to be home, my love,” she said to Bear. “Did you miss me?”

“I felt your absence every moment you were gone,” said Bear.

“How ambiguous you are,” said Baba Yaga. “But I’m content, for here you are, and here I am, and this is our happy home.”

“I see a familiar thirst for blood in your eyes,” said Bear.

“But not
your
blood, so you shouldn’t mind,” she said. “The pretty little princess and her husband have just defeated my puppet.”

“You always said that he was just a toy to you,” said Bear.

“Oh, I know. I didn’t expect much. But I thought at least he’d go out with a splash of blood. That he’d kill the king, or at least that annoying Ivan, before he went down.”

“It’s always tragic when you don’t get your way, my love,” said Bear.

“Never mind. No loss. The fools haven’t even killed him. They’ve given him back his sword—because he promised to be loyal. Don’t they know that once I’ve won a man’s heart, he’s mine forever?”

“You know, you haven’t actually tested that proposition,” said Bear.

“Do you doubt it?” she asked. Her temper was ready to flare, for despite the unconcern that she affected, Bear knew that it bothered her very much to have been defeated in the first skirmish of the war.

“I merely point out that in order to know a man is yours forever, you would have to wait an infinitely long time.”

“Not infinite,” said Baba Yaga. “Only until the man is dead. That’s forever as far as
he’s
concerned.”

“Ah,” said Bear. “I see your point.”

“And I see yours, don’t think I missed it. Let me assure you, my dearest darling swatch of fur, that the spells that helped you discover your deep abiding love for me will never dim with time, and there is no one alive with the power to break what I have bound.”

“Technically speaking,” said Bear, “
I
have that power.”

“But since I have bound your power to my will, and I don’t will you to be free of my binding, I can’t think how your power could ever be used to break those bonds of affection and devotion and humiliating servility that make us such a perfect couple. So the word
forever
seems to apply in your happy case, as well. Aren’t you glad?”

“I am as happy as you wish me to be,” said Bear.

She cackled with delight at the deftness of his answer. “Oh, Bear, the best thing I ever did was give you speech! Only you are worthy of me! I shall be entertained forever, because I have you!”

“No doubt you’ll strive to keep me entertained as well.”

“Why yes,” she said. “For instance, I have all these useless people that came along with my flying house. I have no interest in feeding them. They’re not good at any service I require. So you may sport with them however you like. In fact, I resolve not to feed you again until you’ve rid me of them all.”

“I don’t require food to live,” Bear pointed out.

“But you
like
to eat. And winter will come, and you’ll wish to be nice and fat, won’t you? Be a dear, and kill at least a few of them tonight.”

“Do you really, truly want me to?” asked Bear.

“Oh yes, I do.”

“And may I really, truly choose whether to eat them now or not?”

“Of course! It wouldn’t be entertaining otherwise.”

“Then I choose to take a nap. If you want to eat them, go ahead, but I’m not interested in doing your bloody-handed work right now.”

She almost said the words that would compel him to obey. But instead she laughed. “Play your games with me, my pet. There’s one enemy I think you’ll
want
to kill.”

“Which one is that?” he asked.

“Why, the one who took your eye,” she said.

And she was right. That one he would gladly tear to bits. “When will I have him?”

“As soon as their little army moves against us,” said Baba Yaga. “Soon. Now take your nap, my dear.”

17

War

They held a council of war that night, all the soldiers, all the elders of the villages of Taina, Father Lukas, and King Matfei and his family. No one questioned Ivan’s right to be there, but he was wise enough to speak only when spoken to. His prestige was high right now, but few would take him seriously when it came to any aspect of war but bombs and Molotov cocktails and the ungainly hang glider they were already building.

It was unnerving to have the king so silent. But every word he did not say was a reminder of Dimitri’s treason, so Dimitri, at least, was not the one to fill the gap. Instead, Katerina quietly led out in the conversation, calling upon each man for counsel who seemed to want to speak, and then deferring to her father whenever a question was raised. He wrote his answers to her in a tray of dirt that rested before him on the table, but his writing was slow and inaccurate, for literacy was only somewhat within his grasp.

Of course the command was reorganized, with those most loyal to Dimitri replaced by those most loyal to the king. Everyone understood, and beyond that there was no punishment or recrimination. It’s not as if the peasant portion of the army would be expected to stand against anything but other peasants, while knights would fight only other knights.

Then it was time for Ivan to explain what his new weapons could do. To his surprise, there was vehement opposition to the use of fire against men. At first Ivan thought it was some misguided notion of chivalry and fair play that was causing the druzhina to object. Then he realized that the problem was using peasants to attack knights. They didn’t like the precedent.

“The weapon is terrible,” Katerina admitted, “but remember that we’re outnumbered greatly. Our hope is that the grenades and cocktails will terrify the Pretender’s peasants into running away. They have no love for her anyway. And as for their knights, putting his weapon in the hands of boys and old men helps redress the balance between her swordsmen and ours. I will give you spells and charms, and so will she, but hers will be more powerful. Shouldn’t we use whatever magic we have to counteract her strength?”

When they saw it as magic against magic rather than peasants against knights, the opposition melted away.

The next morning, Father Lukas led the women in carefully loading gunpowder into as many canisters as the smithy could produce. Sergei supervised the boys in making Molotov cocktails, which did not require as much care to avoid blowing off a finger or a hand. And Katerina and Ivan worked with several of the more skilled woodworkers and seamstresses to make the hang glider.

By afternoon, they had something that would fly; but it would not bear much weight. This meant it could only be Katerina who would fly in it, and not in the voluminous clothing she normally wore, either. She carefully announced to the women that in Ivan’s world, there was special clothing for those who flew. She would have them make the women’s version of that clothing—which consisted of slender trousers, which differed from a man’s only in not having an opening through which a man could urinate. Since trousers were not widely accepted as a part of the male costume yet, no one questioned her declaration.

It was this mission that most frightened Ivan, for many reasons. Katerina would be alone, with no one to help her. And while she would be fenced around with charms and spells—many of them patterned after Mother’s—there was no possibility that in a face-to-face encounter she could withstand Baba Yaga. Yet someone had to get inside her house to free the captives who were imprisoned there—if any of them survived—and perhaps to do some other mischief, even if it was nothing more than burning down the house with whatever charms and potions the witch might have stored there. What they had going for them was surprise—Baba Yaga had seen airplanes fly, but never an individual person in a hang glider—and also Baba Yaga’s well-known custom of riding into battle on the back of an ass, so she could trot from place to place, screaming orders and casting spells.

If only they could be sure that Katerina would even reach Baba Yaga’s house. They were counting on warm updrafts to keep the hang glider aloft, that and dumb luck, for it had a long way to go, and not that high a hill to launch it from. It was downhill, generally, all the way to Baba Yaga’s lands, but her house itself was in the middle of a fortress high on a hill. To arrive so low that Katerina couldn’t get over the wall would be a disaster.

And Ivan wouldn’t know whether she had succeeded or failed. If he died in battle, then the question was moot; but if he lived, if they were victorious, only to learn that she had died falling from the sky before ever reaching Baba Yaga’s house, it would be unbearable. Why had he ever thought of a hang glider? Damn that little brat Terrel and his kite!

Yet the thought
had
come to him, and they knew of no other way to get someone over the wall, and once inside Baba Yaga’s house, there was no one with a better chance of getting out again alive. So Katerina it would be.

Ivan’s part in this battle might be crucial, but his role would still be small. He had command of the boys with grenades and cocktails. Not that they really needed a commander. Their job was to dodge in and out among the fighting men; they were counting on the men to ignore them as unarmed children until it was too late. Each boy would be on his own in this. Ivan’s role would be little more than telling them to fire.

Not that Ivan had not volunteered for more important work. A soldier he was not, but he could read, and so he asked to be the man who would stand beside Matfei, reading his instructions as he wrote them during battle and shouting them out for others to obey. In the end, though, Ivan knew that it was impossible. It could not be his voice that the men heard ordering them into battle. Instead, Father Lukas would read out the orders, shout the commands. Even though his proto-Slavonic wasn’t as good as Ivan’s, his voice was more familiar here, and he hadn’t earned the resentment of every man who had ever dreamed of marrying Katerina.

Katerina, of course, questioned whether it was right for a man of God to be so centrally involved in war. Father Lukas only laughed sharply and said, “If Baba Yaga wins, then all my work here is undone, and the name of Christ might not be heard again in this land for centuries. Besides, I carry no weapon, I harm no man. I will do nothing more than read in a very loud voice, which is what I do in church.”

There was appreciative laughter at that bit of sophistry. Everyone understood that it was not hypocrisy but exigency. Father Lukas hated war, but the wolf was coming, and these were his sheep.

In the morning, it was agreed, they all would march to war. They knew where Baba Yaga’s army was gathered—not far from the large meadow where scouts reported that a big white house on chicken legs was moving back and forth at her command.

Even after the council ended, Ivan and Katerina had no time alone, not for hours; instead they settled into a candlelit room with King Matfei, Father Lukas, and Sergei, telling all that had happened to them in Ivan’s country. They had not told a word of it to Sergei and Father Lukas back in the forest, and it was only at the king’s insistence that they told it now, for they did not expect to be believed.

“Ivan’s mother is a witch?” Father Lukas sharply asked.

“I never knew till now,” said Ivan.

“Bad enough when she was just a Jew,” Father Lukas grumbled.

“She saved my life a dozen times,” said Katerina. And then she held up the dozens of charms that she had made during those long days in the woods. “Our soldiers will also wear these, of her design, but with my power in them. Aware will make them quicker to recognize their enemy’s intentions. Baffle will confuse the enemy, while this potion, which they must drink just before going into battle, will make their movements faster, their aim more accurate. You can be sure that the Widow will have her own charms on every soldier in her army—but her designs are not as deft as Mother Smetski’s.”

It didn’t reconcile Father Lukas to this whole business of relying on witchcraft, but he was a practical man, and there would be time enough to stamp out charms and potions after the war was won, the witch defeated. Someday when a woman gave a gift to a departing soldier, it would be nothing more than a token of her love, and not an amulet with powers in it to protect him in the fight.

As for the tales of flying across oceans, no one seemed to doubt them because no one understood what they really meant. What was an ocean to them, who had seen only forest in their lives? What did it mean for a huge house to fly, when there was no house that they had seen as large and heavy as a transcontinental jet? They had never heard a noise so loud as the engines of a plane. They had never seen anything move as swiftly as a car on the interstate. So whatever mental picture they received from Katerina’s account, it could not be very close to what had really happened.

What interested them was the soap opera—the jilted lover, coming with charms to win Ivan back or punish him, only to discover that the witch had tricked her, and both the potions had the power to kill. And then the adventure of detecting the witch in the flying house, and their departure just before it flew away and disappeared—that one, too, was sure to be added to the fund of folklore.

I have already changed the future, thought Ivan. There will be different folktales now, to take into account in my dissertation. The lists and charts will be altered.

And then he wondered: What if the folktales I studied already included what we added here? What if the Ivan of the Russian folktales—Ivan, who was as common as Jack was in the English tales—was really Ivan Smetski, a Jewish boy from Kiev?

Now that he thought about it, he could see that he was right. For he had proof. He knew the origin of the tales of Baba Yaga’s house that stood up on chicken legs and ran from place to place at her command. In all his years of study, he had never seen a single speculation from a folklorist or literary historian that the original of the witch’s walking hut might be a hijacked 747. Yet there were the stories all along.

So everything that is happening now had already happened before I was born, thought Ivan. The hijacked jet. The coming of a common peasant named Ivan, untrained in battle but blessed with magical charms and gifts from his mother. The man who marries the princess, but then finds himself in mortal danger. He had read these tales before, never guessing that he would live through the originals.

What, then, of the tales that Sergei had written down at his behest? Those were the pre-Ivan tales, the stories from the time before Baba Yaga got her walking house. The lore of the folk before being corrupted by his backward passage through the centuries.

But what did the stories say the outcome would be? Ivan won in most of the tales Ivan knew, but that didn’t guarantee a victory in this case, for not one of the tales told of Ivan commanding a group of grenade-throwing boys in the midst of battle. Did the silence mean that they would lose today, their exploits forgotten because everyone who witnessed them had died? Then only the women of Taina would be left, to tell the tales that they already knew before the battle’s start.

No, no, he could not reach any conclusion from the silence. Besides, there were more Ivan stories that were nothing like the things that he’d already done. Couldn’t he live to have more adventures? Only if they had a victory today, for it was certain that in defeat there would be no escape for him.

Of course, those other Ivan stories might be more embellishments, told about a legendary figure who was dead.

Russian fairy tales were the only ones he’d read that were so grim, even the princess sometimes died.

Why couldn’t I have been born a nice Protestant boy from Omaha or Sacramento? Why couldn’t Katerina have been the unattainable girl that somehow agreed to let me take her to the prom? Why couldn’t I have been the track star with the letters on my jacket, instead of making bombs and Molotov cocktails, and sending my wife into the air to face a dire enemy alone?

Lost in thoughts like these, Ivan let the conversation drift around him until someone called him back. Misunderstanding his inattention, Sergei whispered to him, “Don’t be afraid. I believe God has chosen you for a great work.” To which Ivan, just as quietly, replied, “He chose his own son, too, and look how that turned out.”

At last the councils and the conversations ended. Ivan and Katerina slept then, their first time together on the straw mattress of her bed in King Matfei’s house. They did not make love, but only held each other, whispering their happiness over the time they had together, plus a few hopeful comments about the baby that yes, indeed, Katerina carried in her womb.

It was a fine morning for a war. They set out with songs and tears—the songs of men putting on a show of bravado, the tears of women mourning in advance while protesting through their sobs that they knew God would protect him—husband, son, brother, father. It was a scene that had played out ten thousand times already, and would play again ten thousand more.

They marched that day and slept that night, consuming half the food they carried with them. What more was needed? If they won, they would have Baba Yaga’s lands to pillage; if they lost, there would be no need for food at all. The second half of their supply was only to feed them if by some chance the battle lasted until a second day.

Somewhere behind them, on a high hill, Katerina would be launched at dawn, the few men she had with her watching her out of sight, then rushing to bring their report. Ivan tried not to think of that, but rather to concentrate on the task at hand. A dozen match boys, including Sergei, who—though a good thrower—could not possibly dart in and out among the fighting men. Four times as many who carried a half-dozen grenades and cocktails each. The grenades, they knew, were to throw once at the start, to frighten the peasants of Baba Yaga’s army, and then to hold in reserve, for they were too dangerous to use among the soldiers, where the shrapnel could kill a man of Taina as easily as his foe. For the close-in work, the cocktails would do the job, and when a boy had run out of his supply, he was to flee back behind the line of battle, to wait. If the worst came, and they lost the day, then these boys were to be the rear guard, using their grenades to cover a retreat, delaying the enemy long enough that there might be hope for some, at least, to get away.