Prince Ivan (37 page)

There was a way to find out, God knew, but despite all he had seen and heard and lived through, he still felt less than easy talking to his own horse. It was a thing done by men who drank too much vodka, and that the horse might speak to him again unsettled Ivan almost as much as the thought that it might not and he’d imagined those few words heard beside the bridge over the river of fire. Certainly it hadn’t spoken since. But he asked at last, moved more by curiosity than the fear of looking foolish. After all there was nothing but a horse to see it if he was wrong, and if he was wrong the horse couldn’t talk about it afterwards.

Except that this horse could. “She left me in the muck because I wouldn’t eat the meat of men,” said the colt, and if he sounded annoyed with the memory, Tsarevich Ivan couldn’t blame him. “I have neither the teeth nor the taste for it.”

Ivan considered for a long moment that he was indeed holding conversation with a horse, and wondered what he might have said to anyone making the same suggestion just a year ago. Then he shrugged; it was all last autumn’s leaves in the wind by now. “Like the horse that Koshchey the Undying rides?”

“Yes,” said the colt. “My eldest brother.” Then he lowered his head and began to crop the grass of the wide plain that ran along the river’s edge. Ivan watched, chewing a straw, surprised that he owned a horse of the same blood as his dearest enemy, but pleased with the delicious irony.

“And can you outrun him?”

The colt raised his head and blinked. “Koshchey?” he said, feigning astonishment and doing it quite well.

Ivan had encountered the dumb beasts who trod on his feet for fun, and the malicious mares of Baba Yaga, but a horse with a dry and wholesome sense of humour was a new experience. He liked it. “No, your brother,” he said, and smiled thinly.

The colt snorted, laughing like a horse rather than a man. “Of course I can, little master.” Then he looked down at his long legs, where knees had been added almost as an afterthought. “But I could do it better if I was fully grown.”

“Wonderful!” snapped Ivan, no longer smiling, and flung his well-chewed straw into the river Don. “And how long will my wife be a prisoner while we wait for that?”

The colt stared at him, and had a horse’s face worn eyebrows, and had those eyebrows been visible through the silky fringe of mane that hung over its forehead, it would have raised them in surprise. “Seven days,” he said. “Why? Didn’t you know?”

“Seven days,” echoed Ivan, feeling the blood go cold and thick within his veins. “Know this, horse of mine. The moon’s on the wane. If I – we – haven’t rescued Mar’ya Morevna by sunset of your seventh day, before the night of moon-dark, she’ll remain Koshchey’s captive until he chooses to release her.”

The horse snorted expressively. “As I said, little master. Seven days.” And then he fell to eating grass again, with more determination than before.

Ivan pulled himself another straw and ground his teeth down on it, feeling foolish. It was one thing not to ask too many questions, but it was another thing entirely not to ask a question just because you thought you knew the answer. Especially in the matter of a talking colt, where reality had already packed its bags and gone away. If a horse could speak good Russian and outrun the wind, then all the other reasons and excuses as to why it couldn’t come to its full growth in seven days were already set aside. Just as he had set aside his own disbelief a long time ago, for the sake of sanity.

He chewed on the straw, and watched the colt, and began to count the days.

*

Remembering lost Burka, whose name had come from an old story, Ivan took another of those names and called the black colt Sivka. Since his first bath in the river Sivka was no longer a grubby creature, and as he grazed on the rich green grass his body expanded to fit those long, long legs, until by the time a week had gone by he was no longer leggy, nor indeed a colt, but a coal-black stallion eighteen palms high. Ivan looked at him and nodded.

“You should do,” he said.

He had spent a restless night, and wakened before dawn early enough to see the last mocking sliver of the old moon climb up into the glow of the eastern horizon. In less than an hour its pallid arc was gone, washed from sight by the glare of the newly-risen sun. There would be no moon tonight. And no more time.

The old saddle from Baba Yaga’s stable still fitted Sivka’s back, but the buckles of its girth-strap barely fastened after encircling that cask of a chest. Tsarevich Ivan looked at the great platters of hoofs at the ends of legs no longer gangly but corded with long muscles beneath the sleek black skin. “I should have had those shod,” he said.

Sivka raised a forehoof and pawed at the air, then scraped it across the ground to carve a deep gouge into the soil. “There’s been no time to waste on such luxuries, little master,” he said in a huge voice, soft and mellow as the deepest
oktavist
singer in the biggest cathedral in all the Russias, “and unless there’s more money in your belt than I suspect, I doubt you could pay for so much iron just yet.” He stamped, twice, so that Ivan felt the impacts shiver through the soles of his boots. Those hoofs weren’t platters at all; they were hammers such as the Polskiy horsemen carried, and weapons just as lethal. “Besides,” said Sivka, “Moist-Mother-Earth is soft beneath my feet, and it’s good to run unshod for a little while.”

“As you wish.” Ivan hopped for a few awkward seconds with the pointed toe of one boot through a stirrup and his knee up near his chin, then gave up the attempt. Sivka, grown into a huge courser such as armoured knights might ride in Frankland, and so almost half as big again as the small, quick horses of the Rus, was too tall to mount in the ordinary way. Too tall at least for Ivan, who stood less than six feet even in his red-heeled boots, and couldn’t even see over Sivka’s shoulders without standing on tip-toe. Instead he mounted as the Cossacks and the Tatars sometimes did, bracing one hand on the pommel, then bouncing once on his toes and vaulting up.

“Come on,” he said in Sivka’s ear, “let’s go make mischief!”

Sivka reared back, lashing his great hoofs and bugling a shrill challenge out across the river and the wide white world. Ivan stood in his stirrups astride a horse bigger, faster and more magnificent than any he had ever seen, and ripped his sabre from its scabbard. He raised it high above his head, whirling the blade across the hot eye of the sun so that light splashed in diamond sparkles from its edge. His beloved lady awaited rescue, and there was an enemy to defeat.

Prince Ivan threw back his head and laughed, feeling for the first time awake as he had felt before only in his dreams.

Like a
bogatyr
at last.

And a hero.

*

Mar’ya Morevna was walking along the parapets of Koshchey’s kremlin, staring at the slow, inexorable slide of the sun down the sky, when she heard the rumble of approaching hoofs long before there was anything to see. It was a sound that rose and drummed in her ears until, even to one who had heard a Tatar horde charging across the steppe, it seemed to cover all the world. And then she saw the horse.

At first she thought Koshchey the Undying had returned early from whatever wickedness had taken him out across the world, but his horse, poor harried, beaten creature that it was, had never looked as fine as this. And Koshchey didn’t wear a red coat trimmed with sable fur, or have pale-blond hair beneath his hat. Mar’ya Morevna closed one hand on the cold stone of the kremlin rampart, and closed her eyes, and softly said the name that for many days she had not dared voice aloud.

Say
the
name
,
and
summon
the
named
.

When she opened her eyes again, Ivan was in the courtyard far below, mounted on the biggest, blackest horse that she had ever seen. There was a sabre like a slice of sharpened moonlight in his hand, and he was looking up at her, and smiling.

“This time,” he cried in a voice that set the echoes booming between the eight walls of the dark kremlin, “let Koshchey catch us if he can!”

Mar’ya Morevna picked up her skirts and ran down the many stairways as a plover runs across a meadow, then burst out through the great double doors of Koshchey’s kremlin and leapt up breathless into the warmth of her husband’s waiting arms. She was a commander of stern armies, and a Tsarevna of wide realms, and such people didn’t cry; but she had seen the holder of her heart cut into pieces, and returned to her alive as she had never hoped to see this side of Heaven, and then, for her sake, he had ridden off towards the threat of such a death as in his innocence he couldn’t imagine. So Mar’ya Morevna held Ivan close, as if she would never let him go, and buried her face in the deep fur of the coat above his shoulder, and sobbed and laughed for the happiness of their reunion.

“If I might venture a personal opinion, dear little master,” said a vast bass voice that made her start, “the sun is setting. You could best express your love for your lady by leaving this vile place at once.”

Mar’ya Morevna stared about, and realized at last that it was Ivan’s black horse which had spoken. The huge beast met her stare with gentle eyes, and snuffled at her hair, then looked past her to Ivan. “I understand how you wouldn’t want to live without such a companion, little master. But if Koshchey the Undying returns unlooked-for, or the sun sets with both of you within these walls, then she may have to live again without you. It would be as well, when he comes back, that we were all long gone.”

“Sivka, your wisdom goes beyond your days on earth,” said Ivan, helping Mar’ya Morevna to a better seat side-saddle. “There’s nothing more in this place that I want.” He released the reins, and held his wife about the waist, and let Sivka have his head. “So act as you advise.”

The black courser snapped around in his own length and galloped towards the kremlin gate just as the sun slipped stealthily beneath the horizon. In that same instant a great lurching shudder rippled through the ground, and the dark kremlin trembled. Sivka whinnied as his hoofs briefly lost their grip on the skull-domed cobbles of the courtyard, then gathered himself and sprang through the gateway, crossing the bridge and causeway that ran across its moat with a single lofting bound.

Earth and air shifted together, and a massive gust like the exhalation of a giant mingled with a single monstrous rolling boom. The horse squealed, pain and fright and stallion’s outrage all mingling in that one high, shrill noise. Then, with Ivan and Mar’ya Morevna hanging on for dear life, he began to gain real speed.

With her hair whipping about her face, Mar’ya Morevna leaned back into Ivan’s embrace and laughed as she watched the wide white world blur by, then said as best she could above the whistling wind of their passage, “Koshchey will know now, as he knew before.”

Tsarevich Ivan smiled, though what little warmth was in it stopped far short of his eyes. “As he may know the north wind blows,” he said. “But let him catch it!”

Behind them there was no longer anything that resembled a kremlin. Instead a mountain of bare black rock reared up into the darkening sky, and had any paused to look they might have seen, clamped in a crack that might once have been a gate, a fistful of hairs pulled from a horse’s tail.

*

At that very moment, in a far Tsardom where Koshchey the Undying rode through the burning ruins of a village, his black horse stumbled beneath him. Koshchey caught at the flowing mane to save himself from falling, and wrenched it cruelly as he dragged himself back to his saddle; but he was too astonished yet to beat the black horse for its clumsiness.

Instead he sat stock-still and sniffed the air, and then said, “No! I do not believe it!”

The black horse shook pain from the muscles of its neck, where all of Koshchey’s stringy weight had hung from its mane and from the skin beneath. Then it winded the smoke-thick air with flaring nostrils that were as wide and red as pits full of blood. “Believe it, Koshchey the Careless,” said the horse, “as you believe no other thing beneath the bright sun. There is a Russian smell within the dark kremlin, where none should be. And because no other man across Moist-Mother-Earth could be so bold, it can only be Prince Ivan, come again to steal Mar’ya Morevna from your domain.”

“You lie!” snarled Koshchey the Undying, and this time he smote the horse with his riding-whip until its blood spattered his boots. “I killed Prince Ivan! He is dead and gone!”

The black horse neither reared nor squealed beneath his rain of blows, suffering them as stoically as a cloud of midges on a summer’s day, but it turned its head to stare at him as he cut its shoulders to red ribbons, and all the fires of the hearths of Hell were burning in its eyes. “Koshchey the Undying,” it said, “or Koshchey the Fool. Of course you killed him. And he killed you. But because he killed you, do I imagine the stripes that split my shoulders?”

“Just so,” said Koshchey, and withheld further blows. He coiled the long lash of his whip so that red blood dribbled from his fingers to stain the grass beneath his horse’s feet. “I did not kill him well enough. I shall not make that mistake twice over.”

The black horse stirred beneath him and Koshchey looked down at it, frowning. “Why do you fret?” he said. “Surely it is possible to catch them?”

“It is possible,” said the black horse. “Perhaps.”

Koshchey spoke an oath, and struck the black horse between the ears with his clenched fist so that it staggered and all but fell. “Perhaps? Why talk to me of
perhaps
, when every other time you caught them with ease?”