Prince Ivan

by Morwood, Peter

“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?”

  “Because every other time they rode an ordinary horse. This time they ride my youngest brother, who is almost as good as me!”

  “So and indeed?” said Koshchey in a deadly voice. “But you did not say that they ride double, while you carry only me. I dislike deceitful servants almost as much as I hate those who aid my enemies. One way or another, when all is done today I shall own a steed who knows what it means to cross me – and for the other, I shall feast on freshly roasted horsemeat.” He drove his wicked spurs into the black horse’s flanks. “Now move!”

  *

  “Beware, Prince Ivan,” said black Sivka, “we aren’t alone! Koshchey is near!”

  Ivan exchanged a startled glance with Mar’ya Morevna, then looked over his own shoulder. Nothing could be seen, but he knew enough to trust what Sivka said. “Why haven’t you outrun him?” he demanded. “You’re a horse as good or better than the one he rides.”

  “But he rides alone,” Sivka replied, “while I carry both you and your lady.”

  “And besides, Koshchey knows when to beat his horse,” said Mar’ya Morevna in a low voice.

  Ivan took the import of her words at once, putting a hand to her shoulder and swinging her around with a glare such as Mar’ya Morevna had never seen directed at her before. “I’m not Koshchey,” he said, softly enough that Sivka couldn’t hear, “and I don’t beat my friend when he gives me the best he can!”

  “The best he thinks he can!” said Mar’ya Morevna. “Call him your friend, or call him your brother, but riders don’t wear whips and spurs just for cruelty’s sake!”

  Tsarevich Ivan drew breath to say something he might have regretted, then let out the breath in a great gasp of shock as Sivka wrenched sideways hard enough to almost unseat both of his riders.

  And in the same instant, the edge of a sword hissed past Ivan’s neck.

  Koshchey the Undying reeled in his saddle, thrown off-balance by the force of his own two-handed stroke. He raised his great cleaver to cut again, and the point of a well-honed sabre slammed through his armpit into his chest.

  Koshchey Bessmertny reeled sideways, coughing as the steel blade ripped clear. Then he coughed twice more, clapping one hand to his body, and was whole and uninjured again. He leered into Prince Ivan’s cold blue eyes, swinging his sword at the youthful face, hating it and despising it both at once.

  Ivan deflected the cut with his sabre, but was smashed back in his saddle by its force. The sabre spat sparks and was notched, and the sound of the notching was like a church bell put to the torments of Hell. He had neither the strength nor the weight nor the thickness of sword to do other than glissade Koshchey’s cuts, but with Mar’ya Morevna in front of him, and Sivka beneath him, he dared do nothing but block. To do otherwise, even to duck or to dodge, would have been to let that awful ragged edge get past and into his wife or his horse.

  And once that happened, either way, all would be over.

  Then there was a shrill crack, and a shriller squeal, and Sivka heaved beneath him. The drumbeat of hoofs increased in its tempo, and though Koshchey was riding at full gallop, he fell back and back until he was no more than a vague shadow in the dust flung up by Sivka’s hoofs. The crack and the squeal and the heave were repeated, and within seconds Koshchey was lost in the haze of their passage. Ivan glanced back, then looked forward – then grabbed his wife’s wrist, and twisted the tails of the reins from her fingers, and for an instant was on the point of using them on her as she had just used them on Sivka.

  “Do it,” said Mar’ya Morevna, not taunting, not daring, just looking him full in the face. “The blow will prove something, beside what I just proved to you and your horse. It will prove you’re alive to do it.”

  Had it not been for the sword-swinging shape somewhere in their wake, Ivan would have hauled Sivka to a standstill, the better to have words with the pragmatic lady that he loved. But Koshchey was out there somewhere, still in pursuit, still carrying that dreadful cleaver he called a sword. And anyway, Mar’ya Morevna was right. He let the reins drop, and put them instead to their proper use.

  It wasn’t enough. Sivka’s pace had barely begun to slacken before they heard the thudding of other hoofs drawing closer again. Ivan swore a bitter oath and drew his sabre again. Its bright edge was sadly marred, and all to no avail; but it was the only weapon he possessed, except for the thoughts that were running ever faster through his mind. “I have to stop him, or slow him at the very least,” he said between his teeth, “if I just knew how to do it!”

  Sivka, still galloping as fast as he thought he was able without the encouragement of a whip or the tails of the reins, turned his head in a flurry of black mane. “I’ve borne you far from the dark kremlin, and far from the lands that Koshchey knows. When you fight, as fight you must, then pick a ground that favours you instead of him.”

  “Leave that to me,” said Mar’ya Morevna. “I was trained in such skill by the best my father could hire – and that means the best in the wide white world!” She laid hand to the reins, and Sivka slackened his headlong pace enough that she could study how the land lay. They had passed beyond the steppes by now, leaving the flat plains behind, and had ridden out into rolling country where an ambuscade was possible amongst the wrinkled earth and the coarse shrubs that covered it.

  “There,” said Mar’ya Morevna, pointing. What she had seen was no more than a gully cut by the run-off from a rainstorm, but it was fringed so thickly with scrubby plants that they might have been placed there to conceal an ambush. “Oh, that I’d thought to bring a bow from Koshchey’s kremlin,” she said, for the place was perfect for archery from deep cover.

  Ivan shook his head. If a poisonous enchanted sabre had been of little use, then an ordinary arrow was of none at all. “I thought of several things like that,” he said, helping Mar’ya Morevna slide down to the ground, “but at last decided not to waste my time on arrows, poisoned blades, or anything else.”

  His wife stared at him with horror on her face. “Then Koshchey will do again what he did before!” Her voice was tremulous with anger at a needless waste. “He’ll cut you to pieces, and leave me a widow, and Vanyushka dearest, I won’t bear that again!” Mar’ya Morevna hesitated as the wind brought a distant thundering of hoofs to her ears. “Help me up again,” she said, “and ride like the wind towards our own kremlin. If I can reach my books, then we might just have a chance!”

  “I have a better chance right here, my loved,” he said, drawing his sabre and resting it across his saddle. “Koshchey expects us to run, and I’ve grown weary of doing what he wants.”

  Mar’ya Morevna looked up at her husband and the anger faded from her face, replaced by hope and even
by the faintest hint of amusement. “I begin to suspect,” she said, “that you’ve done much more. What’s in your mind, Prince Ivan?”

  He leaned down from Sivka’s saddle and kissed Mar’ya Morevna on the lips. “That, for one. As for the rest, watch.” His sabre lifted, pointed to another gully further on, and came back to rest again. “But watch from safety. I don’t want to lose you.”

  She laughed hollowly. The approaching horse was drawing ever closer, and Mar’ya Morevna had seen enough fights between mounted men to know exactly what her husband meant. Beneath the wildly dancing hoofs of war-horses, a bystander was nothing more than something to be trampled into a secure footing. But before she went to the gully, she reached to the back of her belt and pulled a small dagger from its sheath. Ivan looked from her hand to her face, and in his expression was appalled, perfect understanding.

  “I said it before, my beloved,” she said, compounding the certainty. “We live together, or we die together. Koshchey can’t make me his prisoner unless you’re dead – and if you are dead, he won’t make me his prisoner again.”

  A cloud of dust and grass-shreds became visible beyond a small rise in the ground, then the sound of hoofbeats grew suddenly deafening as Koshchey the Undying came charging over it, and there was no more time to think of anything except action. Mar’ya Morevna had chosen her ground with a cunning eye, for there was only a single route by which Koshchey could approach, one that took him straight past Ivan’s front into the perfect position for a charge from cover at his flank.

  Neither Koshchey the Undying nor his horse had expected anything but a fleeing adversary. The charge, and the hulking size of the horse that charged, took both of them off-guard. Ivan felt the thudding impact through his close-clamped knees as Sivka rammed his own eldest brother and then, just for a single instant as they went crashing past, nothing else existed in the world except for his sword-arm, his already-swinging sabre, and a line that only he could see.

  It ran across the top of Koshchey’s head.

  The blade struck home with a heavy clank that jolted Ivan to the teeth, and as he twisted half around to wrench the sabre free, he saw Koshchey Bessmertny spill out of his saddle like a burst bag of meat.

  Koshchey hit the ground as limp as a corpse, skidding between the iron hammers of his own horse’s feet, and then he lay still. Ivan wheeled Sivka and watched from carefully out of the necromancer’s reach with his sword poised.

  It was just as well.

  Koshchey twitched, then shuddered, then rose to his knees. He put both hands to his head, horribly sliding the shattered pieces of his own skull back together as a man might adjust the sit of his hat. Then he bent down, lifted his sword, and waved it at Ivan. “Come down and fight,” growled the necromancer as he scrambled to his feet, Ivan’s sabre-cut already no more than a livid stripe above his brows. “Come down and show me what the courage of the Rus looks like!”

  Ivan stared at this old man who flung back challenges that had been offered him for centuries past, and shivered deep in the marrow of his bones. There were plans in his mind, and cunning stratagems; but they were nothing against an enemy who had just scooped his own brains back into place as anyone else might have tucked loose strands of long hair behind his ears.

  “You know well enough what Rus courage looks like,” he said at last. “And a Rus heart, and eyes, and all the other things you cut from me when I fought on your terms. Now you’ll fight on mine.”

  Koshchey muttered something in his beard, and tossed his ugly cleaver of a sword from one hand to the other like a knife. “Unless you run while you can, Prince Ivan, you are a dead man.”

  “I was alive, then dead, and now alive again, while you have never been more than a corpse without a grave to lie in.” Ivan lowered his sabre’s point and levelled it between old Koshchey’s burning eyes. “And if you think I’ll run to save my life, and leave my wife with you…” He paused, and gave Koshchey a grin.

  The necromancer was still waiting for Ivan to complete his bold words when the Tsarevich slammed heels to his courser’s flanks and Sivka lunged forward just far enough. Ivan leaned over, sword swinging around and then down with all of his hatred riding on its edge, and Koshchey’s right arm came off at the shoulder.

  “…Then think again,” Ivan finished at last. He dropped his sabre and twisted sideways, kicking one leg over his pommel to slide swiftly down and snatch up the severed arm before Koshchey could reach it. The necromancer, stunned but still living, closed his scrabbling fingers on emptiness.

  Ivan all but dropped the arm again, because of its weight and the way that it felt, for it was like no limb he had ever touched before. There was no warmth, and no yield of flesh; instead it was as hard and cold and gnarled as a dead branch. But it had Koshchey’s sword gripped tightly in its hand, so what he held looked like a scythe such as Death might carry.

  Koshchey the Undying thought so too, for he began to slowly back away, glaring balefully at Ivan. He can’t be slain by any man, Mar’ya Morevna had once said. Or by any weapon wielded by the hand of man. Men died, Koshchey did not die, therefore Koshchey was no man.

  And what Prince Ivan held was a sword grasped by Koshchey’s own unhuman hand.

  “Ivan, no…!” cried Mar’ya Morevna, and there was warning in her voice. But then she saw how Koshchey was retreating, and fell silent.

  For long seconds that silence continued, save for quick, harsh breathing. And then the silence broke.

  “Brother, why do you serve this monster? You owe him nothing!” Black Sivka gazed into the red eyes of Koshchey’s horse, then stared at Koshchey the Undying while a red fire kindled deep within his own dark eyes. “Leave him helpless here, while we find the spells to end his wicked life!”

  Koshchey’s horse glared at his master, and reared back with his great shod fore-hoofs cutting arcs of polished iron across the air. Then he squealed and fell back as Koshchey the Undying struck out with his long nagayka whip, splitting the horse’s soft muzzle in a diagonal scarlet slash. The necromancer laughed, and cracked the lash of his whip so that red blood spattered across the ground. “Fool! He will not leave me!” snarled Koshchey. “He serves me because he loves me! Because he fears me! Because he knows what would happen if he did not!”

  Then he grunted, a thick, ugly noise, for Ivan had taken the opportunity that God gave him. Koshchey turned from beating his horse once too many times, and stared down at the wide blade of his own ugly sword. Most of that blade was between his ribs. Though Ivan’s hands were crossed over the weapon’s pommel to drive it home, it was Koshchey’s own cold fingers still wrapped around its hilt, just as if he had stabbed himself.

  “Not by the hand of man,” said Ivan quietly, and released the pommel. Koshchey looked at him, then at the sword, then at nowhere as the eyes rolled back in his head. Blood bubbled from his mouth and down his beard, and he fell backwards to the ground.

  Ivan watched the body for a long time, eyes narrow and wary; then recovered his own sabre before helping Mar’ya Morevna up to Sivka’s high saddle. This place stank of death, and he was eager to leave it and go home. Koshchey he would leave as a gift to the scavengers who had been cheated of their rightful food for many centuries; there was neither a spade to dig his grave, nor any inclination to so much trouble. “You cried out,” he said. “What was wrong?”

  “I was frightened.”

  Ivan raised his eyebrows, for that word wasn’t one often heard from his wife. “You? Frightened?”

  “Of your great, original plan. Have you any idea of how dangerous that was?”

  “No more dangerous than anything else. And it worked.”

  “Because no one ever thought of that before? I’m sorry, Vanya. I thought of it years ago, but none of my books would confirm that it would work and, and,” she lowered her gaze and said in a small voice, “I was too afraid of him to take the chance.”

  Ivan smiled. “No more of that,” he said, and turned towards Koshchey’s horse. �
�And no more beatings for you, I promise.” Then he heard the tiny noise behind him, where no such noise should be, and swung around with one hand dropping to the hilt of a sabre he knew was useless.

  Koshchey the Undying sat up, fitting his arm back into its socket as a man might put on a glove.

  “You always hear, Prince Ivan,” he said in a voice as cold as stone, edged with such eagerness as a headsman’s axe might display when laid ready across the block, “but you never listen. What matter that you kept my hand around my sword: it was you who thrust it through my body and not I. You used sword and hand as your weapon, and all of it was yours as surely as if you had used that foolish sabre. With as much effect.” He stood up, lifting the cleaver, and pointed it at Ivan. “I grow weary of this. Now you die.”

  There was a quick thud of hoofs and Ivan felt a sudden wrench of pressure that encompassed his fur collar and a good handful of his hair; then Mar’ya Morevna succeeded in dragging him far enough from the ground that he could heave himself up behind her into Sivka’s saddle. They were already pounding along the gully when they heard Koshchey’s first screech of frustration and knew he would soon be after them again.

  “What now?” There was despair in Mar’ya Morevna’s voice, something that Ivan had never heard before, and it frightened him as much as the sight of Koshchey recovering from what Ivan had been sure was a killing blow.

  He shook his head, unable to think of anything except that dreadful scrawny shape putting itself back together after being butchered ten times over. “It should have killed him,” he said. “I was sure it would have killed him. I was so sure.”

  Then he curled up the reins until they hung from his free hand like a twin-tailed quirt, and patted Sivka’s neck in apology for what the next few minutes might force him to do. “Now,” he said firmly, trying not to betray how his voice wanted to tremble at the thought of his death following him again, “we ride fast. Can we reach your kremlin ahead of Koshchey?”

  Mar’ya Morevna shrugged helplessly. Ivan didn’t repeat the question; he didn’t want to ask Sivka anything while steeling himself to beat such a willing and great-hearted horse. It would only have compounded the cruelty and made him no better than Koshchey.