Enchantment (9 page)

“I don’t want a war with the Rus’,” said Yaga. “And you know why.”

Bear roared in frustration.

“Ah, yes, my love. You thought you could trick me, didn’t you? But I know that as god of this land and all its people, you’re god of the Rus’ as well, and if the high king went to war against me, it would weaken my hold on you. Everything must be done legitimately, my pet. Including my conquest of Taina. You’re their god, too, aren’t you?”

That was a sore point between them, since the king of Taina had converted to a religion that refused to recognize the power of Bear.

“We’re really on the same side in this, my love, remember that,” said Yaga. But as she looked at his matted fur, his blood-soaked muzzle and chest, she couldn’t help but think: If this winter god, this walking rug, this one-eyed whining bear is the magical guardian of Russia, then Russia is going to have a very troubled future. “Tell me all about the knight who threw the rock at you.”

“He wasn’t a knight,” said Bear. “He was practically naked.”

“Come here and let your Baba Yaga put something on that wound.”

He shambled over and put his head in her lap. She began to clean around the wound and apply a salve to it.

“He carried no weapon. He didn’t really fight. He just ran and ran.”

“How did he get to the princess?” asked Yaga. She had to know, because there was always the fear that somehow Bear had got himself free of her bindings enough to throw the contest against her.

“Jumped the chasm,” said Bear. “Which you said no man could ever do. You said any man who tried would end up in the pit where I could take his head off.” He scooped up a pawful of brain and ate it sloppily while she worked on his eyesocket.

Bear winced at the salve, as well he should, since she had deliberately left the pain-deadening herbs out of the mix.

“I can’t be right about everything, can I?” said Yaga. “After all,
I’m
not a deity.”

“Yaga, Yaga, Yaga,” he said, as if she had made a foolish joke.

How she hated that nickname! And yet the name had stuck, until now it was the name she used for herself.

Her late husband King Brat had given her the name when he brought her to Kiev as his twelve-year-old bride. That was the pet name he murmured to her tenderly as he raped her immature body, and again as she pretended to weep over the grave of the first baby he sired on her. His dear Yaga, his sweet pet Yaga, Yaga the loving mother who pressed the face of his greedy slurping spawn into her breast long after it stopped struggling for breath and then, wailing, laid his firstborn son in the very lap that had forced it on her. It was a message, though Brat never understood it, dense heavy-armed warrior that he was, a message that people understood
now
, with him deposed from his throne and then dead of a withering disease, and his widow married to a husband who at last
looked
like what every human husband secretly was, a hairy stinking drooling beast. A simple message: If you make Yaga do what she doesn’t want to do, you won’t like the result.

And maybe the message had changed over the years, and now it was more along the lines of: If you try to stop Yaga from doing what she wants to do, you and everyone you ever liked will be destroyed. But in spirit, in origin, it was really the same message. If she had to leave the gloriously beautiful coastland of her childhood and then the bustling traders’ town of Kiev to live in this crude woodland, at least she would control all the kingdoms around her and run things her way.

The only drawback was that she always had to have some husband with the title of
king
, or no one would take her seriously. Well, she showed all those suitors who pursued her after Brat died. They thought they could get her and her late husband’s kingdom, too. But she wouldn’t settle for any of these petty princes. Her consort would be a god.

So Brat’s precious “Yaga” was Bear’s wife now, and no one even remembered that she had once been Olga, a hopeful young princess in a lovely kingdom on the south shore of the Baltic Sea. And now that she happened to be getting on in years, they were starting to call her
Baba
Yaga—grandmother, of all things! Of course it was ironic. A term of endearment, used for someone they hated and feared so much? The accusation that she ate babies was so widespread that she was tempted to cook one up and taste it someday, just to see what all the fuss was about. Grandmother, indeed.

She got up from her place beside Bear and carried the dead eye to her dressing table, where she could see herself in the mirror. Of course she had marked the mirror with several wards, so no passing spirit could leap out of the mirror and harm her. There was so much envy of her power and beauty.

“I don’t look like a grandmother,” she said.

“Yes you do,” said Bear. “You know those spells don’t work on me.”

“I don’t care what
you
see,” she said.

“I’ve never seen the point of using magic to fool yourself.”

“I have to live surrounded by beauty,” she said. “Even in the mirrors.”

“So you’re going to make me
seem
to have both eyes?” he murmured.

Yaga ignored his self-pity. “About the princess Katerina.”

“You know the story. He kissed her, she woke up, and they walked over the bridge.”

“
Which
bridge?”

“Her bridge. I thought you were so sensitive you’d feel it when she came back into the world.”

“I did feel it,” said Yaga. “I thought it was gas.”
Had
she felt it? No. What went on at that place was undetectable to her. But as soon as Katerina left the place and returned to Taina, then Yaga would know her every movement.

“Well, now you’ve got Katerina awake and headed for Taina with a husband who runs very, very fast and hurls a mean stone.”

“He’s not a husband yet,” said Yaga.

“You mean to cast a spell to make a eunuch of him? He fell in love like any dog when he saw her, lying there giving off her love smell like a bitch in permanent heat.”

“Sometimes I regret having given you the power of speech.”

“So take it away again,” he said. “I’d never miss it. Not like an eye.”

“I don’t need a spell to make a man into a eunuch,” said Yaga.

Bear murmured something.

“I heard that.”

“No you didn’t,” he said.

“Well, I know what you meant to say, anyway, and it wasn’t funny.”

“We’ll see what the servants say when I repeat it to them.”

“Go ahead,” she said. “I’ll just have to kill every one of them you tell.”

“You should only kill what you intend to eat,” he said. “It catches up to you, in the end, all this murdering.”

“It’s not murdering, it’s my life’s work,” she said. “Besides,
you
killed this fellow.”

“Yaga, Yaga, Yaga,” he said.

“Shut up,” she murmured sweetly, and sat on his lap. “I’m glad to have you back, darling.”

“Are you?” he said. “It occurred to me, as I was running around and around in the moat, trying to stay between the peasant and the princess, it occurred to me that your plan could only be for no one to ever kiss the girl, in which case your loving husband would be trapped in the chasm forever.”

“Don’t be silly. As soon as her father died I would have brought you home.”

His huge claws caught at the cloth of her dress and delicately shredded it right off her body without so much as scratching her skin. Then his paws rested firmly, tightly, crushingly against her belly and chest, pulling her so closely against him that she could hardly breathe.

“I don’t think you should send your loving husband on any more permanent errands,” he whispered in her ear.

“Well, why would I, anyway?” she wheezed, struggling for breath. “Do remember how much you love me, my
pet
.”

His arms relaxed. She sucked great gouts of air into her lungs.

“Not killing you,” he said, “is just an old bear’s way of saying I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said.

If only she knew some way to break down the last barrier and take his magic whole, so she didn’t need him at all. Take his immortality, his godly powers, and then be rid of him the way she was rid of Brat. But if there were spells for emptying and discarding a god, she hadn’t found them yet. Maybe the Christians should be encouraged. Maybe if everyone stopped believing in these forest totems, they’d lose their power.

In the meantime, Bear was hungry and needed feeding. Then he’d void himself wherever he felt like it, all over the house. It had taken her all these months to get the stink out of the house while he guarded the sleeping princess. Now the odor would be back in force. If only she could . . .

If only, if only. No matter how much power she had, there was always something else to wish for.

5

Naked

Ivan stepped off the bridge onto the grassy meadow and his clothing disappeared.

Startled, he let go of Katerina’s hand and tried to cover himself, then realized how pathetic he looked, clutching his genitals, and turned his back on her.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “Peeing?”

Since all his sphincters were firmly clamped down, that wasn’t likely. “I’m naked,” he said. “What happened to my clothing?”

“I don’t know,” said Katerina. “Your skin is very smooth. Like a baby’s.”

It bothered him that she didn’t seem bothered by his nudity. He sidled toward the bridge. “Maybe if I cross over to the middle again, I’ll get my clothes back.”

“They’d just disappear again the minute you came back here,” said Katerina impatiently.

If
I come back, Ivan thought.

“Your skin is so smooth,” she said again. “And white. Have you been sick?”

Her comment annoyed him. He was proud of having a decathlete’s body. She was looking at him as if he were . . . what? Unmanly.

But there were worse things to worry about than her rude assessment of his body. The bridge was invisible again, and he couldn’t remember quite where it had been.

“Take my hand again so I can see the bridge,” he said.

“No,” she said.

“I need my clothes.”

“You can’t have them,” she said.

“I don’t like being naked in front of you.”

“I already saw,” she said. “You don’t have to hide your deformity.”

Deformity?

It took him a moment to realize what she meant. In America practically everyone in the locker room had been circumcised. But to Katerina’s people it would be rare. Nudity, however, must be common. Well, it wasn’t common to him.

“I need to wear something,” he said.

“I know, it’s cold. Too bad you couldn’t get the skin off that bear.”

“Give me your . . .” He tried to think of the Old Church Slavonic word for
hoose
, but if he ever knew it, he didn’t know it now. “Your clothing. Robe. Coat.” That about exhausted the approximations he could think of.

No answer.

He looked over his shoulder at her. She was, finally, blushing.

“What, I can be naked and you can’t part with one piece of clothing?”

“Are you trying to shame me?” she whispered.

“I’m trying
not
to shame us both,” he said. “I can’t walk into your parents’ house naked.”

“Better naked than wearing women’s clothing,” she said.

“I’m not going to wear it like a woman,” he said. “Now give it to me before I freeze to death standing here.”

Sullenly she dropped her hoose off her shoulders, then leaned down to pick it up from the ground. She looked away as she handed it to him.

True to his word, he didn’t put it over his shoulders—since it was open-fronted, it would hardly have served his purpose that way. Instead he wrapped it around his waist and tucked it like a bath towel.

“Good,” he said, facing her again. “I’m covered.”

But she who had stared frankly at his nakedness would not look at him now.

“I’m wearing it like a soldier’s kilt,” he said.

“When people murmur that the husband of the queen once wore her clothing, I will be able to say, I never saw him wear any such thing, and I can swear to it by the Holy Virgin.”

“Are you telling me that it’s better for me to come to your parents’ house naked?”

“It would be better for you to come to my parents’ house dead than wearing women’s clothing.”

“Well, here’s an idea. How about if I don’t come to your parents’ house at all? Give me your hand so I can see the bridge, and I’ll be on my way.”

She whirled around to face him, to clutch at his hands. “No, no, wear whatever you want. You can’t leave, you
must
come to my house, you have to marry me or we lose it all. After everything, after you fought the bear, after you woke me, to leave now would be worse than if you had never come!”

He held her hands. “Listen, I understand that wearing women’s clothing is a . . .” He struggled for a word for
tabu
. “A sin. When we get near the village, I’ll wait in the woods until you can bring me men’s clothing.” Gingerly he removed the hoose and handed it back to her.

She looked at him with disgust, refusing to touch the garment. “Do you expect me to wear this now that it’s been around your loins?”

“No,” said Ivan. “No, I see that you can’t wear it now.” He reached out and dropped the hoose into the chasm. “It’s gone.”

Her disdain was undiminished. “Nothing is gone,” she said. “You just gave the hoose to the Widow.”

“I was just down there,” he said. “She wasn’t there.”

“
She
makes the rules, not you,” Katerina said. “I have to marry you, but you’re a fool. She must have picked you out herself.”

That really pissed him off. “Maybe you have to marry me, but I don’t have to marry
you
.”

“Naked in the woods, a deformed peasant who wears women’s clothing and speaks like a stupid child, it’s not as though you had a lot of choices.”

Her taunt was so ridiculously myopic that he had to laugh. He thought of Ruth back in New York, waiting for him. All this magic, these dreams of childhood, the evil monster he had beaten, the princess he had kissed, what were they? Foolishness, he could see that now. He didn’t belong here. The rules made no sense to him. Clearly she expected him to go through with a real marriage. Like the rules in a china shop: You break it, you bought it. Only in this case, you kiss her, you’ve married her.

Well, he didn’t like the rules. He didn’t like the idea of marrying someone who thought he was a deformed cross-dressing peon, and even less did he like the idea of getting caught up in some kind of struggle with a mythical witch from the nightmares of fifty generations of Russian children. He’d done his part. He woke her up and set her free. The prince didn’t have to stay. Especially when he wasn’t a prince.

“Look,” he said.

“I’ve already seen enough,” she said.

“I mean listen.”

“If you mean listen, say listen,” she said. “Why do you talk so funny? Twisting all the words around?”

“Because I’m not from here!” he said. “Your language isn’t my language.” To prove it, he burst into modern Russian. “You speak a language that is already dead, that is hinted at only in fragments of ancient manuscripts, so you’re lucky I speak any language you can understand at all!”

She looked at him now with dread. “What kind of curse was that? You spoke of death. Did you curse me to die?”

“I didn’t curse you,” he said in Old Church Slavonic. “I spoke in my own language.”

But then he wondered what language was his own. Russian was the language of his parents’ home, but the language of his childhood was Ukrainian. But all these years of thinking, speaking, writing in English—didn’t that make English his language, too? When he was married to Ruth, wouldn’t English be the language of their children? For that matter, didn’t Old Church Slavonic have as much claim to be one of his languages? However badly he might speak it, it had been the private language he and his father once shared. And now, could he really pass up the chance to learn a dialect of proto-Slavonic, the true spoken language, after all these years of knowing and using the shadow of it that had survived?

Yes, he could. He had a life, and this wasn’t it. He had done what he came to do—he cleared away the leaves, defeated the beast, crossed the chasm, woke the princess. That was as far as the stories ever went. None of the stories included shivering naked between forest and pit, the princess scorning you as a peasant, sneering at the symbol of your childhood covenant with God and loathing you for daring to try to cover your nakedness.

Well, actually, that wasn’t true. Western stories ended with getting married and living happily ever after. And Russian fairy tales went far beyond that—to betrayal, adultery, murder, all within that romantic marriage that the wanderer stumbled into. The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia, and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale.

Ivan dropped to his knees in the grass and crawled along the edge of the chasm, reaching out with his left arm to try to feel the invisible bridge.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Going home,” he said.

She sighed. “You won’t find it.”

He stopped probing for the bridge. “Yes I will.”

“You’ve already put your hand through it several times,” she said. “It isn’t there for you.”

“You mean it only
exists
when you’re holding my hand?”

“It exists all the time,” she said. “For me.”

“So I can’t get back home without your help.”

“Why would you want to leave, anyway?” she said. “When you marry me, you’ll be a prince. Heir to the throne. Someday you’ll be king of Taina.”

“I’ve never even heard of Taina,” he said. “I don’t want to be king of anything. I want a doctorate and tenure at a university and a wife and children who love me.” Of course he used the modern Russian words for
doctorate
and
university
and the English word for
tenure
, since he’d never had to say it in Russian and wasn’t sure how.

She was baffled by the strange vocabulary, of course, but tried to make sense of it. “So you’re on a quest?” she said. “To find this . . .
tenure
?”

“Yes, exactly,” said Ivan. “So if you’ll be so kind as to help me back over the bridge, I’ll find my own way home from there.”

“No,” she said.

“Listen, you owe me. I woke you up.”

“Yes,” she said, “and because of that there’s no one else I can marry. After the wedding you can go search for your
tenure
.”

“Listen,” he said. “I’m betrothed to someone else.”

“No you’re not,” she said coldly.

“I assure you that I am,” he said.

“You are betrothed to me,” she said. “If you were betrothed to someone else, I would not have woken up when you kissed me. The bear would not have gone away when I agreed to marry you.”

“And how would the bear know?”

“The bear didn’t know. The spell knew. The universe knows when an oath is being made, and when an oath is broken.”

“Well, the universe just slipped up, because I was engaged to Ruth before I—” He heard his own words and stopped.

Before? What did
before
mean now? He was in her world—had been in her world since he reached the pedestal in the middle of the chasm. And by her clothing and her speech he was pretty sure her world was medieval, maybe 900 c.e., maybe earlier. So at the moment in time when he kissed her, he and Ruth hadn’t even been born yet.

But that was ludicrous. Because
he
was there, as a man in his twenties who had definitely given his word, earlier in his life, to marry Ruth. Therefore it was a betrothed man who kissed the princess.

But he kissed her centuries before his betrothal.

Round and round it went. What good were the rules of time when the rules of magic contradicted them?

Mother had told him that there was something wrong, some impediment to his marriage with Ruth. Was it this? Even though he hadn’t yet come here and fought his way to the princess, had this moment already happened centuries before? Did objective time—the flow of centuries—override subjective time, the flow of his own life?

There was no way he could even begin to discuss such concepts with Katerina. Even if he had enough Old Church Slavonic to speak these thoughts, he doubted she’d have the philosophical background to understand them. Just as he didn’t have the background to grasp the way things worked here. Bridges that existed for one person and not for another. Bears that lived for centuries in leaf-filled pits. Witches who put spells on princesses. It was great to read about these things, but living with them wasn’t half so entertaining. And he had a feeling that before he was done with all this, he’d like it even less.

“So I’m trapped,” he said.

“Yes,” she said coldly. “Poor you, a peasant boy trapped into marrying a princess so you can become a king.”

“I don’t want to be a king,” he said. “And I’m not a peasant. Or a boy.”

“You’re certainly not a knight.”

“I must be a knight,” he said. “Or else how could I get past the bear?”

“You’re too weak and soft and young to be a knight.”

No one had ever called him weak and soft, and he was older than she was. Almost by reflex he tensed his muscles, feeling them bulge and move under his skin. “How can you call me weak?”

In reply she took hold of his right forearm between her hands. Her fingers overlapped considerably. “This arm has never raised a sword.” She gripped his left upper arm. “Could this arm hold a shield for more than five minutes?”

“I’ve never needed to,” said Ivan. “But I’m hardly a . . .” He struggled to think of a word that would mean
weakling
.

“Smridu,” she said. Peasant.

“I’m not a smridu. I’ve never farmed in my life. I don’t even know what farmers do.”

“No, I can see that,” she said. “You have the manners of a peasant, but those thighs would never get you through a plowing season. They’d break like twigs.”

Her cold assessment of his naked body infuriated and shamed him. He had never tried to bulk up like a Schwarzenegger, he had tried for genuine all-around athleticism. Her scorn was so unfair, so culturally myopic—and yet he knew it would be pathetic to defend himself. “In my country I’m considered strong enough.”

“Then your country will soon be conquered, when real men see their opportunity. What are you, a
merchant
?” She glanced down at his crotch, continuing her assessment of his body. And then, suddenly, her eyes grew wide.

“What?” he said, fighting the urge to cover himself or turn away.

“I heard about this. The Jews do this.”

“Yes, that’s right,” he said. “I’m a Jew.”

Her gaze grew stony and she muttered an epithet that he didn’t understand.

Great, that was all he needed. Anti-Semitism, too.

“If you think you can sell the daughter of a king into slavery, think again,” she said. “My father will ransom me, and then he’ll come and hunt you down and kill you anyway.”