“A pity,” he said, flopping back into the saddle. “There’s nowhere in our world like this. If it looks like this in the summer, there’s always the winter to follow; and if you ride far south to be sure of the sun, it’s too hot and dry and it never stays green.”
“There’s the melancholy that makes the Rus reach for their vodka-flasks,” said Mar’ya Morevna with just a touch of disapproval. “Always revelling in the dark side of things.” She snorted a little laugh. “I think it’s just a fine romantic excuse to have another drink or two. Or three.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But who needs excuses?” He raised his hat mock-politely. “Certainly not such a noble commander of armies as you…”
Mar’ya Morevna looked at him, then flicked playfully but accurately at the hat with her riding-whip. After that she sat smiling for several minutes and made helpful comments as he fished for it among the tangle of elder, raspberry and bramble that grew so profusely between the trees.
“And of course,” she said as he eventually retrieved it, both of them slightly the worse for wear, “such weather encourages vigorous growth throughout the year.”
Ivan picked bramble-hooks from fur and figured velvet, yelped slightly, and put a well-thorned finger in his mouth. “So I notice,” he said in a somewhat muffled voice, then clapped the hat back on his head after a despairing look at its egret-feather plume. “Is there truly never winter here?”
“If there is, I’ve never seen it,” said Mar’ya Morevna. “And I’ve been here eight, maybe ten times, for one reason and another. It might have been named the Summer Country because of that, or, and I can’t say with anything like certainty—”
“Or put more simply, it isn’t confirmed by any books in the library…”
“Perhaps it’s because you find what your mind expects from a name. I could call this place the Winter Country, and perform exactly the same spell as I did in the courtyard not ten minutes ago, and we could have ridden into a place where the sun never shone and the snow would never melt away. Which would you prefer?”
Ivan cupped his hands and blew on them dramatically, not needing to say more than that. “And what about the Firebird? Where does it live?”
“Firebirds live wherever they please.”
Ivan took the wrong meaning from that, and laughed. “I shouldn’t think anyone would try shooing them away!”
“Far from it. They come and go as they please, and they visit the kremlins and the mansions of this place.”
“Why would they do that? To steal things?”
“Hardly! The folk of the Summer Country take a dim view of thieves. They hate them almost as much as those who don’t speak the truth. The Firebirds are gentle creatures,” Ivan thought of the incinerated guard and snorted derisively, “whose principal joy in life is gossip.”
“Gossip? You must be…No. You’re not joking, are you?”
“No, I’m not. Call them newsbearers, if it makes you feel better, but gossip is most of it.” Mar’ya Morevna slapped the saddlebag containing her manuscript of spells and useful information, and smiled wryly. “At least that’s how they’re described here.”
“But the Firebird’s been stealing from my father’s kremlin. How can that be justified, if its world’s so set on honesty and truth?”
“Anything can be forced to act against its nature. What we have to learn is who’s been doing that forcing, and why.”
“If it can be forced to steal, it can be forced to tell us.”
Mar’ya Morevna reined in and turned a cold blue stare on her husband. “I hope,” she said, “you meant that other than how I heard it. There’ll be no more forcing. That, among other reasons, is why we came to the Summer Country instead of merely Summoning the Firebird as any common sorcerer might do.” She managed to make the words ‘common sorcerer’ sound like the worst sort of insult, then made a click-click with her tongue and shook Chyornyy’s reins. “Walk on. And anyway, I lack the proper tokens for a Summoning, even if I wanted to perform one. Which I don’t. And won’t.”
“So you keep saying. What do we do, then? Invite it to drop in for a chat?”
“Yes.”
This time it was Ivan’s turn to saw back on the reins, so abruptly that if there hadn’t been a bit in the way, his black stallion would have had words to say on the matter. As it was, Sivka kept quiet, for the expression on his little master’s face was fit to curdle milk. Teasing he could take, but being actively mocked even by his own dear wife was another matter altogether. “We could offer it wine, I suppose,” he said, the sarcastic rasp in his voice very close to the surface. “And a dish of fresh honey-cakes.”
Mar’ya Morevna laughed softly at him, quite unruffled by a flash of petulance caused more by the worries he held in check than by any real bad temper, and Ivan felt the tips of his ears burn.
“Your problem with any book of sorcery is that you look for the interesting bits. Or the horrific bits, so you can be properly scandalized. Look at the means to an end, not just the end itself. You’re so often nearly right that I think you’ve got real talent.” Mar’ya Morevna rode a little closer, close enough to lean across and kiss him. “At least where magic is concerned. Where some of your other talents are concerned, I already know.”
Prince Ivan made a grab at her, just an instant too late as she swayed back and heeled Chyornyy around. “Ride on,” she said, still grinning. “And next time, read everything.”
“Not honey-cakes and wine, then?”
“Not quite. Try vodka set aflame in a silver cup, and a golden platter of hot coals from a fire of applewood or cedar. Something fragrant, and preferably expensive. That’s the way to get a Firebird’s attention. Oh, and a place of honour for it to perch.”
“A golden birdcage?” hazarded Ivan. “Jewelled, maybe?”
“Not a cage, a falconer’s perching block made of gold and iron. The one for respect, the other so that everything won’t melt. But no cage, jewelled or otherwise; the Firebird’s a guest, not a prisoner.”
“The one we’re dealing with is a servant.”
“A pressed servant, no better than a slave,” said Mar’ya Morevna. “I plan to offer it a chance at freedom, if I can. After that we can maybe come to some sort of arrangement with it, you and I. But we have to find it first.”
*
They rode where the undergrowth was thinner than elsewhere, and after a while it became a trail running through the woods. Soon the surface changed from soft rotted leaves and crushed vegetation to a firm paving of great wooden discs, sawn from logs and rammed into the earth, proving it had been made by human effort, unless – his thought left Prince Ivan both amused and unsettled – the wood-beavers of the Summer Country were much more advanced than those in Russia.
The trail continued through the forest, meandering here and there like a sluggish river, until it reached a clearing. That was when Ivan loosened his sabre in its scabbard, because the clearing was perfectly circular and he’d seen such a place before. Baba Yaga’s sinister hut had stood there on its hen’s legs, ringed by her ghastly fence of bones and the staked heads of all those who had gone there before him.
There was no such unpleasantness here: the clearing was empty except for a squat column of stone set exactly at the centre. As he rode cautiously into the clearing, Ivan could see how the trees and brush had been cleared away, the ground rolled flat, and the grass cut as short and neat as any Tsar’s formal garden. Three other pathways ran from the clearing, paved like the first with sliced tree-trunks and pointing like an arrow toward a cardinal point of the compass.
“Someone went to a lot of trouble here,” said Ivan thoughtfully. “Clearing the place, laying down the roads so precisely, paving them… This was all done for a reason.” Mar’ya Morevna looked along each one in turn, then at the stone.
“And what do we always say about that?”
“Be careful?”
“Well done. Remember it.”
The stone was four-sid
ed and as tall as a man, with words carved into each face. They were carved deep, because when Ivan thrust his index finger into one of the letters it went almost as far as his knuckle. Those words were meant to last a long time.
“There must be something more behind this than just a warning,” he said. “All right, maybe it’s no more than an elaborate way of saying ‘go no further’, but look at how the letters are shaped. It’s like something you’d see in church. This is old.”
“A small mystery only, Vanya,” said Mar’ya Morevna. “Here’s a bigger one.” She dismounted, jabbed an arrow into the ground to mark the side from which they had approached the stone, then handed Chyornyy’s reins to Ivan and walked around the stone, studying each face in turn and reading its inscription until she came back to where she started. “Yes, a mystery indeed. Because no matter what direction you come from, the wording is exactly the same. One might expect it to change…”
Ivan swung one leg over the pommel and slid gently to the ground, taking care to move quietly even though nobody had yet suggested it. Where threats were concerned, no matter how obscure, he no longer treated them as anything but real. He walked around the standing stone as Mar’ya Morevna had done, then back in the opposite direction.
“Handsomely done. Expensively done. But why repeat the same threat four times? Once is usually enough.”
Sivka followed Prince Ivan on a third circuit of the stone, then nosed at it and snorted. “This smells bad,” he said. “Foul and ominous. I don’t like it.” Ivan glanced sidelong at the horse and realized something he hadn’t considered before. Just because Sivka, like all the horses of Baba Yaga’s herd, could understand human speech, it didn’t follow that the animal could also read. “So tell me, little master: what does it say?”
“The man who goes left will lose his life,” Ivan read, aloud this time and tracing along each word with his open hand as he did so. “The man who goes right will lose his horse.” Sivka blew and stamped at that, and both horses laid their ears flat back. “The man who goes straight on will lose his way. The man who goes back will lose the time he spent here.”
The black horses looked at their riders and then at each other, but it was Sivka who spoke. “I think we won’t be going right.”
“And I think,” said Ivan, “we may have to.”
“In that case, little master,” said Sivka, baring his teeth ever so slightly, “you’ll walk on your own legs and not on mine.” His stable-brother said nothing, but poor Chyornyy was looking so frightened that Ivan pitied him at once.
“In that case, my lady and I will both walk.” He glanced quickly at Mar’ya Morevna, who nodded, but then a memory half-buried by other concerns and the thought of the Firebird came back with a jolt. “Just how specific is a spell in its written form?”
“Very,” said Mar’ya Morevna absently, her mind on other things. Then she turned to look at him and at the warning on the standing stone, snapped her fingers and said, “Of course! Chyornyy, can you find your own way home?”
The black horse perked up at once. “Across thrice nine Tsardoms, mistress,” he said.
“I thought so,” said Mar’ya Morevna. She knotted the reins securely across the high pommel of her saddle, pulled various useful items off it – especially the saddlebag that held her carefully copied manuscript of spells – and patted Chyornyy on the nose. “Then I command you: go home, be safe, wait for me there.”
Chyornyy turned and began to trot back along the path in the direction from which they had come; but even before he reached the edge of the clearing he began to fade, like smoke. There was a momentary gust of freezing wind and a handful of snowflakes came whirling out of nowhere to melt in the warm air of the Summer Country and patter like rain onto the clipped grass. By the time they were gone, Chyornyy was gone too, back to Khorlov and the safety of his own stable.
Sivka looked from Ivan to Mar’ya Morevna and then back again. “I promised, little master, that I would serve you faithfully,” he said. “But even the most faithful of servants is entitled to ask why he has to die.” There was no fear in the great bass voice, nor accusation, nor condemnation. All Ivan could hear was simple curiosity.
“You won’t die,” said Ivan. “I won’t permit it. But Chyornyy suffered enough fear in his time with Koshchey the Undying, and was suffering needless fear again. I won’t permit that either. You, black Sivka, have never been truly afraid of anything in your life. Not even me.”
Sivka stared at them both for a moment, then turned his head to gaze at the standing stone and the carving he couldn’t read, but whose meaning needed no reminders. “If we take the right-hand road—”
“—I lose my horse, if I had a horse.” Ivan cuffed gently at where the horse’s sleek black neck became a sleek black shoulder. “But I don’t, because I’m giving him to my wife.”
One of Sivka’s flattened ears went forward, but the other stayed back as the horse swished his tail thoughtfully.
“The nature of spells is this,” said Mar’ya Morevna. “They’re words, but words that give a certain shape and form to intention and to power. So at all times they must be clear and accurate.”
“As if I said not merely ‘go’, but ‘go to such-and-such a place and do such-and-such a thing when you get there’,” said Ivan. “Otherwise who knows what might happen?”
“And this,” Mar’ya Morevna waved one hand at the carving on the stone, “refers to a ‘man’ suffering all of these promised difficulties. A ‘woman’ is nowhere mentioned. Whoever carved it plainly didn’t expect women to be so bold.” She winked at Ivan. “Or maybe, so foolish.”
“But I’m still Prince Ivan’s horse, regardless of who sits in my saddle,” Sivka persisted, as well he might with his life under threat if Mar’ya Morevna was wrong. “All the Tsardom of Khorlov knows that. It can’t be changed.”
“It can,” said Ivan. “I’m a Prince and a Tsar’s son, and my words have as much authority as any spell. And I say this, while I stand under the blue sky, that I give you to my wife Mar’ya Morevna; I give her your strength for her service, your speed for her help, and your faithfulness for her trust, if she accepts the gift.”
“While I stand under the blue sky,” said Mar’ya Morevna, “I accept all these things, if you, black horse, black Sivka, are willing in your turn.”
Sivka looked at the standing stone, then at Ivan, and finally at Mar’ya Morevna, and lowered his head so she could lay her hand between his ears. “I will bear my little mistress wherever she is pleased to go across the wide white world,” he said, “and for as long as she is pleased to have me do so. But I would hope that when my task is done that she would think it fair to return me to Prince Ivan.”
Ivan drew his long kindjal dagger and cut a piece of turf from the ground in front of the standing stone. It took him only a few moments to build a little fire of twigs on the square of bare black earth, then light it with the tinderbox from his belt. Mar’ya Morevna watched his preparations with an expression that suggested she knew what he was doing, but not why.
Ivan caught the quizzical look, and smiled. “The writing on the stone is old,” he said. “It might be best to confirm our arrangement with an oath in that old way. It can’t do any harm, and it might do some extra good.” He turned to face the standing stone and bowed low to it, right arm extended until the fingers of his open hand almost touched the ground, as he might have done to show respect to his father or any other important personage dignified by age. Then he took the water-bottle that hung from Sivka’s saddle and poured a little into the cupped palm of his hand.
“This horse is not mine,” he said, “for I have gifted him to my wife, freely and of my own will. I travel in the Summer Country on my own feet. I swear to the truth of this in the old way, by Earth and Air and Fire and Water.”
He pursed his lips and blew across the water in his palm, poured it carefully to soak into the bare earth without quenching the tiny fire, then finally snuffed it by pressing the pat
ch of grass back into its recess. “And I swear it by cold iron and warm blood.” With the edge of his dagger he made a little cut across the tip of his left thumb and caught a drop of the welling blood on the dagger’s point.
Ivan made sure the little ruby bead stayed on the steel, then reversed the weapon and thrust it down through the centre of the newly restored piece of turf into undisturbed earth, making all whole once more. “Let any argue now,” he said, cleaning the kindjal on the grass then sheathing it so he could concentrate on sucking his bloody thumb.
“Cleverly done, Prince Ivan.” The deep voice, sharp and harsh as knapped flint, seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once: from the sky, the forest, the earth, even the air around them. “My mother said that you were clever. Almost clever enough to be a wolf ….”
*
Castle Thorn of the Teutonic Order
1234 A.D.
“The inquisitors want to witness this,” said Hermann von Salza.
“Why not?” replied Baba Yaga. “There must be little enough excitement in their lives.”
“They want to witness the Summoning,” said von Salza again, “but first they want to purify the room.” He looked nervous, an expression unusual on the aquiline features of a Grand Master. “You told me once, before all this began, that the spells you employed weren’t…”
“Devil’s work?” Baba Yaga finished for him. “No, von Salza, they aren’t. Let your inquisitors purify and cleanse as much as they please. This spell won’t offend your God, or any god that you or they have heard of.”
They were standing together in the doorway of the library of Burg Thorn, and Hermann von Salza was trying to ignore the newly-scrubbed places on the floor where two of his men-at-arms had died with their hearts torn from their armoured chests, at the hands of the same shrivelled old hag who now stood at his elbow.
Now there was a cage in the middle of the room, set on a little pedestal of bricks between those two excessively clean patches of tiling. Its walls and floor and roof were bars of dull grey iron, and a heavy iron mesh filled the spaces in between. The bars, the mesh and the thumb-thick iron hasp on the door all suggested that whatever the cage was meant to hold was far stronger than its size suggested.
Firebird (Tales of Old Russia Book 2) Page 21