Though he’d been expecting it on some part of the path before they reached the meadow, the suddenness with which the stallion and the mares went crashing into the deep forest still took Ivan by surprise. Aware Baba Yaga was still watching him from the door of her hen-legged hut, he played the part she expected to see: running frantically up and down, waving his hands and shouting before charging through the bracken in futile pursuit. In the far distance a shrill, cackling laugh proved Baba Yaga was convinced by his performance, but he made certain to run well out of sight before he dared slow his noisy, headlong pace. And then he perched on a stump, made himself comfortable, and had a bite to eat.
The day went more slowly than he had expected, for without the impetus of fear to make him run about, time hung heavy on Ivan’s hands. There was still apprehension at the back of his mind, which had to do with Baba Yaga and how she would react when he claimed the horse she’d promised him three nights ago. If she was ready to go back on their arrangement and try to kill him just from spite, then his sword was as effective now while she snored beside the stove as it might have to be this evening. As effective as it would have been yesterday, or the day before. And Ivan had rejected it on those days as he rejected it now, for the same reason. It was a reason that would have made both Baba Yaga and Koshchey the Undying laugh aloud, and even cause Mar’ya Morevna to raise an eyebrow and smile her smallest, thinnest smile. Murdering even a murderer in cold blood would make him no better than her.
A cold nose pushed at his hand, and a deep voice with a growl in it said, “If you don’t want that cheese, Prince Ivan, give it to me.”
Ivan didn’t actually jump halfway up a tree, he only felt that way. Once he finished saying all the things under his breath that nobody with sense says aloud to wolves who know the speech of men, he opened the packet and gave Mother Wolf the cheese. Though she wolfed it down as was right and proper, she did so with a deal more daintiness than he might have expected.
“I didn’t know that wolves liked cheese,” he said with interest as she finished.
Mother Wolf licked her lips thoughtfully. “Some do. I don’t. But it was food and we all like food.” Food, to a Russian wolf, was whatever could be eaten and Ivan took due note. “I told you when last we met, that I would give you aid unasked. That aid is given, and thus I repay you for my cub.”
“Baba Yaga’s horses?”
“Are running for their stable as though their lives depended on getting there. Which they don’t…this time.”
“This time.”
The wolf looked at him with her green-yellow eyes and lolled her tongue, grinning with huge white teeth. “Horsemeat is food, Prince Ivan. And very good food, too. But as I say, not this time.” She glanced up at what little sky was visible between the trees, then back at Ivan. “There’s the matter of another horse to deal with. Your horse, earned from Baba Yaga by your efforts, and a little help from those who owed you kindness. Get back to the clearing and the stable, claim your prize, and if you’ll take a word of warning at no extra charge, sleep lightly tonight.”
Without a sound, the wolf was gone.
Baba Yaga wasn’t gone. Again Ivan could hear her screams and scolding as he walked slowly along the forest path to the clearing with its ghastly fence, but this time he didn’t pause to listen. There was nothing to hear that he hadn’t heard before.
He was polite as always when he reached the stable, wishing Baba Yaga a good evening and asking after the health of the horses. They were well enough, though wide-eyed and sweating, and somewhat nibbled around the fetlocks. As Ivan stepped into the stable they stared, started and shied to the backs of their stalls as if he was himself a wolf and not merely the one who seemed to command so many birds and beasts to do his bidding.
“You seem to have taught them manners,” said Baba Yaga, more mildly than Ivan had expected. “Well, you can pick the best or worst of them come morning.”
She put as good a face on the matter as one so very ugly could, and Ivan might have thought she was taking her defeat as well as she was able, but he could sense tension jangling in the air as plain as the stench of boiling vinegar. It suggested that her good face and her good faith were both as little to be trusted as ice in springtime, and that Mother Wolf was right to warn him. Far from sleeping lightly as he had done all along, Ivan determined not to sleep at all; nor did he even relax his guard until Baba Yaga left the stable.
His supper was beneath the bucket, and Ivan wrinkled his nose when he saw it. Bread and cheese again, and a leg of chicken. He stared at it for several minutes, then dropped the bucket back again. He had eaten enough bread and cheese in the past three days to last him for months to come, and he wasn’t about to eat it on his last night under Baba Yaga’s roof. Rather than that, he preferred to go hungry. The chicken was more interesting, but just now his stomach was still fluttering enough that putting anything in it would be a temporary pleasure at best.
As he sat awake with his chin propped on his sword, he could see from the lights and shadows moving about in Baba Yaga’s hut that he wasn’t the only one unwilling to sleep. She, of course, had slept right through the day as usual, while he had taken no more than a cat-nap in the forest, but he could also hear the gurgling sound of boiling water, and that made him suspicious.
Tsarevich Ivan had left his trusting nature behind a long time ago, and while still willing to accept the best from people without too many questions, when that best was missing he could be as cynical as his own dear wife. Now was just such a time. It would be in keeping with Baba Yaga’s character to let him take away a horse, then get it back because whatever she was brewing up had left him with no further interest in owning anything. Ivan’s mouth quirked downward at the thought, and he resolved not to eat or drink a thing that Baba Yaga offered him, whether wine to celebrate his victory or merely more of the damned bread and cheese for him to eat on his journey home.
Bread and cheese. And chicken…
Suddenly he was fully alert and pulling the bucket aside once more. There was the strong smell of the cheese, and the sour smell of the black rye bread, and the savoury aroma of the roasted chicken, but under it was something else.
Eat no meat, the queen bee had warned. He had thought she meant man’s-flesh, which was so obvious as to need no warning at all. But tonight, for no reason, he had been given something that was safely and obviously no more than a joint of temptingly roasted fowl. He sniffed warily at his untouched supper, and through the scent of herbs and butter and crisped skin was something bitter. Ivan knew nothing about drugs or poisons except for the one time when he had put poison on his swords in an attempt to kill Koshchey the Undying; but he knew that what he smelt right now was nothing to do with feeding him, and everything to do with putting him to sleep.
A sleep from which he would never have awoken.
He looked out of the stable window at the hut on hen’s legs, and wondered what was boiling. Some witch’s brew – or a stew-pot waiting to have meat put in it.
“Baba Yaga is hungry,” said a soft, deep, growling voice from just beneath the windowsill, and then the wolf reared up to gaze at him from between her propped forepaws, a green-eyed shadow in the darkness outside. The horses stirred, but dared do nothing else. “You had best make haste if you want to see the sunrise.”
“She tried to poison me!” whispered Ivan shrilly.
“Poison would have been the least of your problems,” said the wolf. “Are you going to discuss this, or are you going to leave?”
Ivan was through the stable door before the wolf had dropped her forepaws back onto the ground. “She said that I should pick my horse come morning,” he hissed. “So which one should I take?” He froze, listening, as a faint, familiar sound drifted through the still night air. Baba Yaga was sharpening a knife. Ivan’s face was white and ghostly in the starlight. “Or should I even wait?” There was desperation in his voice, the beginnings of horror at not knowing what to do any more. Another few seconds
and he would have run headlong in any direction but the right one.
That was why Mother Wolf sank her great teeth into the sleeve of his coat, and held on tight. “You wait,” she said, voice muffled through her nose like someone with a cold. “And you come with me.” Leading him by the sleeve and by the arm inside it, she took him around to the back wall of the stable where he had never been before. That was hardly surprising since the dung-heap was there, glowing with a faint rotting phosphorescence that grew brighter as Ivan’s eyes became used to the dark. And then he swore as something moved in the sickly glow, and wrenched his sabre from its scabbard.
Mother Wolf let go of his arm and sleeve and rumbled low in her chest. “I knew I should have held your sword-arm!” she growled. “Now put that thing away before someone gets hurt.” Ivan had the good sense to sheathe the curved blade quietly, and then he squinted through the gloom to see whatever else had frightened him tonight.
It was a colt.
Ivan had an impression of big eyes, a long mane and tail all sadly tangled and thick with dirt, and legs that went on forever in all directions. Even allowing for the darkness and the dung, the colt looked both as unlikely a steed as he had ever seen, but one that was full of possibilities.
“What do you think of him?” Ivan made some sort of noise that came out half-formed before he meant it, and the colt’s big eyes looked at him reproachfully. Mother Wolf wasn’t reproached in the slightest. “I know what you mean,” she said. “But I have two messages which might help. One is that even the swiftest hawks don’t have clean nests, and the other is that that ugly grubs can grow to butterflies.”
“Where do I find a saddle?” said Ivan.
Mother Wolf looked at him, and blinked her eyes patiently. “You’ve just spent three nights sleeping in a stable. Why ask me?”
Feeling foolish, Ivan fetched the saddle and bridle he had used when he first tried to herd the horses, wondering briefly who had brought it back from where the mare had shaken it and him onto the ground. Though the colt seemed unbroken, there was no resistance to the harness or when Ivan mounted up, but he laid his ears flat back and showed his teeth at the smell of Koshchey’s nagayka whip. Despite the darkness, Ivan saw that they were ordinary horse’s teeth and not fangs. He patted the colt on the neck as he had been used to pat lost Burka, and said softly, “This whip isn’t for you, but Baba Yaga.”
“Do you wish to lay its lash across her now or later?” snapped the wolf, her patience at an end. “If you stay much longer, she’ll be down to find her supper. I’ve given aid unasked, Prince Ivan, and help unlooked-for. What you do with it is your affair. Now go!”
She took her own advice, for an instant later Ivan found himself alone but for the colt. He looked at it, and it looked at him, and then they both looked up towards the hut with hen’s legs. The sounds of sharpening steel and boiling water were coming from it more loudly than ever.
“I think Mother Wolf is right,” said Ivan, his voice just a little bit unsteady. He didn’t know if this was yet another talking horse, and didn’t really care. His sole concern right now was that it should gallop very fast in whichever direction took him furthest from Baba Yaga. “We should leave. Now.” He lifted the reins and flicked them, jabbing with his heels.
It was as if he had unleashed the whirlwind in a horse’s shape. Ivan could do no more than crouch low jockey-style as the colt shot across the clearing like an arrow, if arrows moved as swiftly, and cleared the vile fence of dead men’s bones without breaking his stride. Then he galloped down the forest path that led away from Baba Yaga’s hut and out across the ash desert to the fiery river, accelerating all the way…
*
The army of Khorlov was on the march, with Tsar Aleksandr at its head. They had an enemy at last, but only the Tsar and his First Minister knew that enemy’s name. It wasn’t the Prince of Kiev, nor the two Princes of Novgorod.
It was Koshchey the Undying.
When Strel’tsin brought the name at last, he wasn’t running but walking like a man on his way to execution. Tsar Aleksandr hadn’t known why until matters were explained and then, to the Steward’s horror, he refused to be impressed.
“If what you say is true,” said the Tsar, “this Koshchey has been defeated before, and by the very weapons we have here. An army—” he gestured at the ranks of armoured men with their tall shields, “—and a sorcerer.” The hand clapped against his shoulder felt to Dmitriy Vasil’yevich like the first practice swing of a headsman’s blade. With his stomach twisting itself in knots, he tried to explain again about Koshchey Bessmertny, but the Tsar either couldn’t, or more likely wouldn’t, understand what he intended fighting.
Strel’tsin swallowed sourness and shivered inside the chilly armour the Tsar had insisted he put on. He’d hoped to die in bed, as was right and proper for a politician, but now it appeared he had a chance to do something much more original. And painful. Then he smiled a crooked little smile of relief. The army had to find Koshchey’s kremlin before they could besiege it, and if they went in the wrong direction—
That was when he saw the birds, spiralling down to land right in front of the Tsar’s horse.
Lightning flickered briefly, and then three sorcerer princes came forward with offers of help and guidance. Dmitriy Vasil’yevich looked at them, saw once again the prospect of his own messy death, and was promptly sick.
*
At the same instant that Tsarevich Ivan rode a stolen horse towards the borders of her country, Baba Yaga’s hut stamped its hen’s legs once, twice and three times, so hard that her stew-pot fell off the stove with a splash. She knew at once what had happened, and even if she did not, the receding drumbeat of hoofs gave her a clue that something was amiss down by the stable. With a screech that was one-third pain at her scalded feet, clean for the first time in only the good God knew how long, and two-thirds rage and frustrated appetite, she limped and hopped across the floor as fast as ten parboiled toes allowed.
Although she owned a herd of horses and fed them on mans’-flesh as often as it was available, Baba Yaga did not herself ride a horse. She was afraid of horses and deathly afraid of her own, having taught them evil appetites and then seen what they could do – and besides, no horse in its right mind could bear to carry her.
Instead, she sprang into a great iron mortar and began to beat it with an iron pestle until the metals of both rang with that pounding like an unholy bell. A trembling passed through the mortar, and a shuddering, and a shaking that stirred it where it sat, until within a minute it had begun to bound across the clearing in thunderous pursuit, with Baba Yaga crouched inside, flogging it to greater efforts with the pestle and sweeping away the tracks it left with her long kitchen broom.
Ivan reined in the colt as they drew close to the fiery river; he hadn’t forgotten how the burning chasm could appear as if from nowhere right beneath his feet and had no desire, after surviving so much else, to fall into it now. He was still dazed with astonishment at the speed of the grubby colt, for it appeared that every minute of its gallop covered ground that had taken Burka an hour. But dazed or not, and even with his ears still ringing from the hiss of wind and the beat of hoofs, he wasn’t so deaf that he could ignore the commotion in their wake. What it was, Ivan didn’t know, but he was wise enough to guess it meant no good either to his steed or to himself.
As suddenly as last time the glowing gorge of the fiery river dropped sheer before them, hidden until almost too late by the flat, monotonous grey of the desert to either side. The colt backed hastily away and Ivan didn’t stop him; he had never been convinced of just how strong the chasm’s edges were, and didn’t intend to put them to the test if it could be avoided. Instead –with a nervous glance over his shoulder at where a fast-approaching cloud of dust was making noises like a gong in torment – he took Koshchey’s whip in his right hand and waved it once, twice and three times as he had done before. As the great bridge shimmered into existence, looking like a phantom summoned
from the haze of heat itself, the colt flicked his ears back once, then forward again with the greatest interest.
“Most impressive,” he said, so unexpectedly that for a second or so Ivan almost forgot the threat of Baba Yaga. Then the colt looked from the bridge to Ivan, switched those expressive ears again and said calmly, “We should cross over, little master, while we can.”
After advice from every other animal he’d encountered in the past few days, advice from his new horse wasn’t as unusual as it might have been. Ivan nodded, dismounted, and led the colt across the bridge to safety. Then he turned and stared down into the rumbling outflow from the earth’s hearthfires and closed his eyes, but not from the glare or from the heat. Then, decision made, Ivan raised Koshchey’s riding-whip in his left hand and waved it once, then twice, but instead of the third time, he thrust it through his belt and drew his sword instead. Its sharp, sharp edge gleamed red in the dull light of the fiery river, and that reflection trembled just a little.
Baba Yaga came booming up, and beat the mortar to a standstill so it stood rocking on the far side of the gorge. She scowled at Ivan, waiting quietly at the far end of the bridge with his sabre resting on his shoulder, and looked as suspicious of deception as only a deceiver can. Far, far below, the river of fire grumbled softly in its bed like an old, hot-tempered man in fitful sleep. The fluttering of small white flames looked like the movement of his hair and beard.
Then Baba Yaga saw the grubby little colt which, caked in grey ash-dust like all else, had been invisible against the ashen desert until it moved. She gave a screech of outrage and, with a pounding from the pestle, beat the mortar forward in a great bound that came down on the middle of the bridge’s span.
She went straight through without an instant’s pause.
Prince Ivan Page 26