Prince Ivan (32 page)

There were many saddles, bridles and whips on their racks along the wall. Ivan picked the sturdiest harness he could find, since a ‘quiet little mare’ from
this
horse-herd might prove a bigger handful than the fiercest charger he had ever ridden. But he didn’t need a whip; Koshchey’s long-lashed
nagayka
was still pushed like a dagger through his belt, and nothing Baba Yaga’s stable had to offer could have matched it.

To his surprise, the chestnut mare accepted bit and bridle, then the saddle and his weight, without a trace of protest. Though he endeavoured not to show it, Ivan was pleased. This was where he had suspected his first trouble might occur, because Baba Yaga wouldn’t simply let him herd her horses for three days then choose the best of them and ride away. It was the whip that quieted the mare, even though he hadn’t used it. The braided lash smelt of Koshchey
Bessmertny
’s brutal use of it on his own steed, the one he owned and supposedly took care of. Koshchey would have lashed Baba Yaga’s horses even more, since whipping them meant the difference between a mount under his saddle or a stake under his chin.

Ivan gripped the mare’s well-fed barrel chest between his knees and looked down at Baba Yaga. “Where do your horses graze?” he asked, feeling more at ease.

“Take them to pasture in the meadow,” said Baba Yaga, smiling. “Follow yonder path until you reach another clearing, and there it lies.” She pulled back the stable door and the horses streamed out, tossing their manes and neighing loudly, glad to be in the open air once more. “But remember what I told you, Prince Ivan. Lose a single one and I’ll use your head to decorate my fence!”

Ivan didn’t reply, already busy counting the number of horses he was supposed to guard. Despite the way they milled about between the stable and the fence and sometimes galloped underneath the hen-legged hut for no reason other than high spirits, he could see no more than twenty. With the one he rode, that made twenty-one, and with Koshchey’s whip to aid him the task was hard but not impossible.

“Here,” said Baba Yaga, throwing him a parcel wrapped in a cloth. “Good food for a good day’s work.” Ivan caught the parcel warily, not certain what Baba Yaga would regard as proper rations and unwilling to find out. “Bread,” she said scornfully, seeing the expressions chase one another across his face. “Black bread, and mares’-milk cheese, and a horse-hide leather bottle of
kumys
. If you’ve ever met a Tatar, you ought to know how those will taste. Food proper to a guardian of horses, little Prince. But I’ll waste no more meat on one too squeamish to enjoy it; and when I have a fresh supply you won’t be here to help me eat it.”

The point went to Baba Yaga, well and wickedly scored, and Ivan scowled down at her from the horse’s back, aware – as was she – that the mare was by no means big enough to give his glare its full effect. Such an expression needed a tall charger, brightly burnished rings of mail, a spired helmet with a nasal to stare past, and perhaps a spiked mace swung with all the strength of his right arm to drive the lesson home. But instead he waited until his anger cooled then looked long and hard at Baba Yaga, who met his gaze grinning.

“This between me and all harm,” he said, “and between me and you for always and always.” Then he made the sign of the life-giving cross over himself, devoutly, brow to belt-buckle, right shoulder to left, and Baba Yaga hissed like a scalded snake while her iron teeth ground together like shears being sharpened.

Ivan didn’t smile at his small victory, for it would have been improper. The cross of the White Christ was a sign of the triumph of light over dark, but it was no more Ivan’s doing than any other sign he might have made. Half a hundred years ago, in Novgorod the Great, he would have made the spread-fingered sun-sign for bright Belebog and Svarog of the All-seeing Sky, for fiery Svarovich his son and for Dazhbog bringer of summer. Three hundred years and more past that, among his long-fathers the Norsemen, he would have made the sign of the hammer to honour red-bearded Thorr the Thunderer, or covered one eye in respect to deep-minded Allfather Othinn, Lord of the Battle-slain.

Ivan shivered, and shook his head as thoughts uncalled-for ran like ice-melt through his brain.
Where
will
I
go
when
at
last
I
truly
die
? he wondered.
To
Christ’s
Heaven
,
or
beyond
the
sky
,
or
the
halls
of
the
old
gods
? He was afraid as no man who has not already died can fear – but good or ill, heaven or hell, he knew that eternity was of little account unless he could spend it with Mar’ya Morevna. Far away from her and in peril of his life, it was too easy to slip into that dark melancholy which was the plague of the Rus, and for which vodka and jollity were the only cure.

There was no vodka here, nor jollity either.

*

Mar’ya Morevna paused a moment to massage the pounding in her temples, to drink down several beakers of cold water, and to eat the best part of a roasted chicken. She felt far less bright and merry than Koshchey suspected, but would have died of shame and black affront before letting him to know it. The amethysts of last night and the small spells said over them had done much to save her from how he was feeling. The quickness of her hand in spilling much of what she seemed to drink had been good as well, and her wisdom had been best of all.

Mar’ya Morevna was a commander of armies, and had learned a great deal during her campaigns about keeping a clear head in the morning. Water was one part, food was another, and sleep was a third. Since it was out of her control she had dismissed her concern for Ivan to a quiet corner of her mind, then gone to bed and slept as well as she was able.

And then she had got up next morning and set about distracting Koshchey the Undying by indicating to him that though he had her as his prisoner, he wasn’t going to enjoy it. The more he was concerned with his aching head, and with all the noises clanging through his kremlin, the less he would wonder about questions that no widowed prisoner had need to ask. Because what would happen if he did begin to wonder, and remember, was something that Mar’ya Morevna preferred not to think about…

*

Ivan found another cure for melancholy when he and the horse-herd reached the meadow, for that was when all of the mares, and the stallion too, flipped up their tails and galloped off in as many directions as there were horses in the herd. The mare under him reared up on her hind legs, so high that for an instant he thought that she would topple back with him beneath. That was when he snapped the long plaited lash of Koshchey’s whip against her rump. Without Koshchey’s long, cruel practice it didn’t even break her glossy chestnut skin, but it still felt like the biggest horsefly in all the Russias and convinced her not to complete that crushing backward fall.

The mare’s forefeet slammed back against Moist-Mother-Earth with a solid impact that only Ivan found comforting, and then her head swung around so that one eye could stare at her rider. There was a dull red glow within it, but after staring into the furnace eyes of Koshchey’s great black steed, this glow wasn’t enough to warm his hands. He reeled in the yard-long whiplash and doubled it until the plaited strips of leather creaked one against the other, then met the mare’s red eye stare for stare. Whether she could talk or not was of no concern to him right now, but from the look in her eye he felt certain that she could understand good Russian spoken clearly.

“Behave,” he said like a schoolmaster, “or you’ll smart all day.”

The mare snorted noisily, blowing out her lips and spattering Ivan’s red-heeled boots with the green froth of a horse who had been sneaking mouthfuls of grass past her bit. He looked at the mess and decided he could live with the clash of colours.

“Good,” said Ivan to the mare, “we understand one another. So understand this also: we’re going to pursue your stablemates. And if I think that you’re giving less than your best effort, I’ll get that effort out of you with this.”

He let the long lash uncoil again, then snapped it a little down by the ground, cutting the tips from grass-blades and no worse. An ordinary horse might have started from the noise, but the mare just turned her head to study the whip, then back again to stare at Ivan. He didn’t like the way she showed her sharp, unhorselike teeth at him, it was too much like Baba Yaga’s grin, but he hadn’t warned the mare off threats. Not yet.

“One other thing,” he said, tucking the whip-stock through his belt in its customary place. “If you’re thinking you could bite off my kneecap—” he smiled crookedly as guilt flickered through the mare’s red eye, “—just bear in mind that I could have your head off.”

Free of the whip’s encumbrance, his right hand drew his sabre from its scabbard too fast for the mare to follow. All she could have seen was that his hand went in an eyeblink from empty to full of sharp blade. This time she did start, whether from the movement or the spoken warning. Ivan didn’t care. At least she had taken note of both.

*

The horses of Baba Yaga had run all across the wide meadow at the edge of the forest, and in every direction; but it was clear they hadn’t reckoned on Prince Ivan still being astride one of their own. Without striking the mare more often or harder than he might have rapped an ordinary dumb horse like his own lost Burka, Ivan rode from north to south and east to west across the flat pasture-land, gathering the horse-herd together with all the skill of a Tatar or Cossack born to the work.

It was almost noon before he rounded them up, and some of the loose horses needed more than just a tap from the rolled
nagayka
whip. One, the stallion, leader of the herd and determined to prove it, came at Ivan squealing, lips curled back from his great teeth so that their unsightly sharp points glistened like the fangs of a wolf. Ivan let him make his charge and then, with heels and knees and one hand on the reins, he made his own mount sidestep as neatly as a dancer. The stallion went barging past with ears flat back and eyes half-closed and got his first lesson in manners as a stripe between his tail and withers that would take a week to fade.

“Enough?” said Ivan as the stallion bucked at the sting, and poised the whip behind his shoulder. Black and bright as broken coal and with a heart as dark and hard, the stallion of the herd skidded around on long torn tracks of soil with his head lowered like a bull. “You’re a fine creature,” Prince Ivan told the black stallion, watching as he might watch any other armed and deadly enemy, “and I’ve no desire to hurt you – but you’ll get over this lash sooner than I’ll get over being trampled.”

They stared at one another for several minutes, neither moving, neither willing to grant his adversary any advantage, until quite suddenly the stallion blew through his distended nostrils then ducked his head down and began to crop the grass. Ivan didn’t relax for some seconds after that, and the too-quick pounding of his heart took many minutes more before it became slow and normal again. He knew quite well that if he’d been on foot, either he wouldn’t have caught the horse-herd in the first place, or the stallion would have bitten and pounded him into something like the chopped raw mutton which the Tatars ate, which was no fit state in which to meet Mar’ya Morevna again.

Ivan thought about what she would say to him if he dared appear in such a condition, and grinned a more wholesome grin than had crossed his face since he first came to Baba Yaga’s country.

He was still grinning when the mare began to rear again, then changed halfway to a head-down back-arching buck that flung Tsarevich Ivan and the saddle both together to the ground. His knees were still clamped tight around the saddle-flaps, his feet still though the stirrups, but there was no horse under him any more. He hit the soft ground of the meadow with a jarring thud, saw all the stars of a clear night in winter, and rolled up through those stars with Koshchey’s whip in one hand and his sabre in the other, mindful of far too many teeth and hoofs.

There was no attack. Instead the horses stood around him, far enough away to be well out of reach, and gloated over his humiliation. Ivan had been thrown by horses far too many times not to realize that there were some who took malicious pleasure in the act, but these…

These were Baba Yaga’s horses, with the wit of men at all times, and the speech of men when they saw fit, and though they didn’t speak or even neigh and whinny it was plain they were laughing at him. Not because he’d been thrown from his mount, but because of what that throwing meant. They would eat a richer mash tonight because of it.

Ivan’s stomach clenched as it had done when Koshchey the Undying dropped his sabre at his feet and dared him to bend and pick it up. At least Koshchey hadn’t given him from noon till sunset to think about his fate: but Baba Yaga’s horses weren’t men or even creatures in the shape of men, and expecting human feelings from them was like expecting warmth from frost.

Ivan’s mare was standing closest, the imprint of the saddle still plain against her hide, and as he watched she grinned like a dog, spat the bit out past her teeth and shook her head until the bridle’s buckles came undone and the whole thing fell away. Ivan looked at the bridle, at the girth-straps of the saddle still entangled round his feet, and then at the mare.