Fierce Enchantments

by Janine Ashbless

  Zorya, who did not dare set foot outside for fear of the river, would sit for hours at the window of her bedroom, looking out across the trees and down into the rushing sweeps of water. One day she let a tear fall. She could not tell if it struck the river below, but she saw the water suddenly seethe with foam.

  “Vodyanoi,” she whispered.

  “What’s that?” asked Olga, whose ears and eyes were still sharp, looking up from her sewing. “Did you say something?”

  “Nothing,” said Zorya, blinking back her other tears and swallowing hard.

  As that afternoon drew on, the sky grew black with clouds and it began to rain. The gutters overflowed, and water ran from every eave, and the trees sagged under the weight of their sodden branches. Zorya, who was sitting with Olga in the great hall by that time, wondered when her husband would return. She ordered candles to be lit even though it was hours to sunset, but they didn’t seem to dispel the gloom. It was as if they were living underwater, she thought: the air seemed thick and green.

  “Ugh,” said Olga suddenly. “There’s water coming in under the door!”

  There was; it was creeping across the floorboards. Zorya stood quickly, lifting her skirts. “Let’s go upstairs!”

  “Do you think the river has burst its banks?” Olga asked, hastily gathering up the embroidery frames.

  Zorya shook her head; she didn’t like that thought at all. They retired up the stairs to the royal antechamber. Up here, the rushing of the river sounded louder than ever. And in among it came a rhythmic noise, muffled but steady. Zorya’s eyes widened as she first recognized it.

  “What’s that sound?” said Olga, cocking her head.

  “It must be water dripping on a hollow beam,” said the Tzarina rather desperately.

  “It sounds like—”

  “The drip of a leak in the roof, I’m certain—”

  “—Footfalls.” Olga frowned. “Perhaps the Tzar, God bless him, is home.”

  But the Tzar’s feet had never made that noise on the stairs: that deep hollow knock, as if of a giant walking miles away, far beneath the earth. Zorya felt the wooden bench beneath her fingers tremble with each blow. Her heart seemed to be trying to climb out of her throat.

  “What is it?” Olga got abruptly to her feet and advanced on the door to the stairwell. “Is there someone on the stairs?” Zorya followed at her shoulder, though her legs felt like they were too weak to walk properly; she had the strongest desire to seize the lady-in-waiting and throw her away from the door.

  “Who is it?” Olga called querulously as she pulled upon the latch. The door swung wide to reveal the wooden steps they had just climbed, descending into gloom—and below them on the stairs something moved.

  For a second Zorya thought it was a snake, black and gleaming, that mounted the stairs; then she saw that it was water. A rivulet of water, that fell up from step to step as if it were finding its way downhill—and yet, impossibly, it was climbing.

  Hollow footfalls echoed in their ears.

  Olga fell back. “Witchcraft,” she stammered: “it must be witches! We must … Guards …” Then she opened her mouth and filled her lungs to shout, and at that moment Zorya grabbed her braided hair and wrenched her head back, fumbling a hand over her mouth.

  “Don’t! Be quiet!”

  Olga uttered a muffled squeal and for a moment the two women struggled. Then Zorya saw from the corner of her eye that the water was spilling into their room, forming a puddle on the red-dyed hides that lined the floor: it looked like a pool of blood. She froze, clamping the old woman in her arms, staring.

  Step by step out of the puddle, as if he were climbing from his millpond, the Vodyanoi rose. His narrow eyes glittered. Without a word he advanced upon the women, and Zorya released Olga from her numb hands. For a second the old woman stared, her mouth and eyes round with disbelief. Then he put his hand on her face, casually, and she fell to the floor with water bubbling out from her nose and lips, and flopped about like a fish until the spill of water was joined by a white froth. But the Vodyanoi, most cold-hearted of spirits, didn’t spare her another glance. All his attention was fixed on Zorya. She herself had no time to worry about Olga; she was too busy retreating before him.

  Step by step she fell back into the furthest room, the royal bedchamber. Even there he did not cease his slow pursuit, until he had her backed up against the wall of the great boxed-in bed with its carved relief of Adam and Eve. He put his hands flat on the wood either side of her to pen her in: one hand on the Apple, one on the Serpent. His smile was full of ancient wickedness.

  Then Zorya lifted her own hands and slid them about his bare neck, and lifted her lips to his cold mouth and kissed him, full and warm and breathless.

  She didn’t do it out of fear, you understand—although she most certainly was afraid. She did it out of nights dreaming of him and days remembering, out of the discontent of her greedy heart and her empty sex. She was under the spell of her own desire. The mortal flesh of womankind is ever subject to these fierce and foolish enchantments, and always they pave the way to trouble. But it took the Vodyanoi by surprise: he startled at her touch and hesitated a long moment, before pressing home to take full advantage of the kiss. His mouth, she discovered, was no warmer within, though his tongue was sweet.

  When they broke the kiss she could see the question in his eyes and she lowered her own, unable to answer him. He was dressed just as she remembered from the first time, his torso bare and his flat nipples faintly blue. She took a deep breath and ran her hands down the cool hard planes of his chest, down to his waist and hips. It was her turn to be surprised: he winced at her touch and black bruises blossomed under his skin, like the dark soft fans of fungus that grow upon the branches of elder trees.

  “Are you hurt?” she whispered.

  He laughed, a little uncomfortably. “I had to fight the Vodyanoi of this river to come upstream and find you.” He plucked off the kerchief that covered her bosom and looked down with approval at the twin swells of her breasts, pent behind the bodice of her dress. “He was a territorial old toad and he did not want me sharing his river.”

  “I’m sorry,” said she faintly.

  He put his hand on her head and pulled away the sheer white veil that covered her hair. “Well, you owe me now.”

  “For what?”

  “For my pain.” His hand brushed the stiff head-dress from off her scalp; the strings of pearls that had hung from it and framed her face fell suddenly apart. Pearls pattered and bounced upon the floor like hailstones. “It will cost you.”

  “You said you only wanted an hour …”

  “My mercy is limited, as I’m sure you understand.”

  Zorya shivered, as he drew his finger down the tiny buttons that closed the front of her thickly embroidered robe. The loops broke and the dress split open, revealing the low-cut lawn shift beneath. “What will you do?”

  “Guess.”

  “Will you drown me?”

  His smile was cruel. “What do you think?” He took the front of her shift in both hands and it rotted at his touch like cloth that had been immersed in a pond for years, falling apart to gray shreds and then to nothing. The great weight of her robe fell from her as the warp and weft disintegrated; Zorya took a sharp breath and could not help looking down. Only the golden threads embroidered into the fabric were left, quite uncorroded; a fragile net that lay now against her goose-fleshed skin. The Vodyanoi chuckled. Then he stooped to kiss her throat, and his long wet hair hung upon the orbs of her breasts and clung to her puckering nipples, dragging at her when he raised his head. Zorya stifled a gasp.

  “Please … What good will I be to you dead?” she asked.

  “Oh, I think you will look very fair, down among the pebbles and the rippling half-light.” His tongue lapped at her ear, his voice low and husky as his fingers explored her exposed b
reasts, playing amid the softness with the tightening halos of her pinkly-pale nipples. “Your hair will wave with the long weed, and minnows will chase around your pretty bones, and your soul will shine in the palace of my green dreams.”

  Zorya was unable to stop herself arching her spine, lifting herself to his hands.

  “Just think how peaceful it will be,” he murmured. “And how beautiful.”

  “But,” she said, reaching down to the gap in his skirt and sliding her hand beneath the slimy leather, “while I’m alive, I can do this.” She found his member. Substantial in girth and length, it was already all but erect, only the weight of his garment keeping it from standing—and though it was cold when she first grasped it, beneath the skin a warmth burned. She ran her fingers up its rippled length, and it jerked in response.

  “Ah,” said he.

  Zorya raised her gaze to look him in the face. She read appetite there and a kind of twisted grudging fascination, and wondered if he could read the emotion in her own face. Wordlessly she sank to her knees and kissed his pale skin, the bruised flesh of his torso. She pulled at the wet thonging that held up his strange garment and it slopped to the floor in heavy folds.

  He was not formed as a human man. Did I not tell you that a Vodyanoi takes human shape only to trick the foolish? And we are made in the image of God, which such evil spirits may not mimic with perfect accuracy. His male member was not blunt and crowned like a man’s: it came instead to a point, like the prow of a boat. Zorya saw this but did not recoil, though her heart hammered under her breastbone in trepidation.

  What she did then not even the whores of Kiev will do. Such a thing is reserved for a husband alone, for the intimacy of the marriage bond. She took his pale bestial length, already oozing at the slitted tip with eager moisture, into her hot mouth. The Vodyanoi groaned at that just like a real man. She used tongue and lips to explore his girth and his strange contours and then worked him deep into her throat, sucking warmth into that chill staff. It gave her satisfaction in unexpected places to suck him like this, and she felt her own sex flutter as her fingertips weighed the heavy pouch of his stones, finding water still dripping from the black ringlets of hair at his groin.

  Shifting his weight forward, he leaned into her. His legs were tense, almost as hard as the iron of his pike. His hips jerked as her head rose and fell in supplication, and he pressed his cock so far to the back of her throat that she gagged and tears welled in her eyes.

  I could choke here, she thought, snatching her breath in the backstroke. It wasn’t a new idea though—her husband had similarly used her. The Tzar was an older man and would sometimes take so long that she’d weep for the ache in her jaw—but that wasn’t to be the case this time. She felt the Vodyanoi’s rhythm grow fiercer, then become a stutter, and suddenly her mouth was awash with his slippery flood. Instantly—so copious was the flow—her fear of choking became a fear of drowning, and she jerked her head back with a gasp. His cock shuddered upon her tongue as the liquid, as cold and clear as mill water, overflowed her mouth and ran down over her chin.

  He tasted of nothing at all: just like water.

  The Vodyanoi withdrew from her open lips, glaring at her. Swallowing hard and struggling to get her breath back, Zorya nevertheless felt a strange bereavement now it was over, and a dread as to what would come next. Would he grow contemptuously indifferent now—or irritable—as her husband often did?

  But her paramour was a Vodyanoi, and unlike a mortal man a single spasm of sin was not enough to sate him. Even as he stood back, his spend still drizzled down the underside of his rigid shaft, as if his balls were too full and now boiling over. He tilted his head, clearly weighing the options, as his gaze raked her kneeling body. “You have certain uses, alive,” he admitted.

  Then stooping, he lifted her, his muscles moving like waves under his skin. He turned her from him and thrust her toward the side of the royal bed—a piece of furniture so high that there was a padded bench to facilitate climbing into it. Zorya was pushed down to kneel upon that bench, her elbows on the bed itself. Then the Vodyanoi crouched behind her, lifted up the golden net that was her only garment, and spread her rump cheeks with his hands to reveal her most private parts.

  Such shame! What man would do that to a woman? What man would thrust his face into that cleft and lick her, his tongue slithering over her pearl and into her well and then up between the orbs of her bottom to lap at the tight pucker between? It was as if the water spirit were trying to devour her earthiness. Zorya buried her face in the coverlet of the bed, rubbing her cheek upon the silver fox-fur as the Vodyanoi’s tongue—longer and stronger than any human man’s—danced and probed in her most private places, forcing entry into those treasure chambers that only her husband ought to access, and making her cry out.

  Let us be charitable and say that it was shame that caused her to whimper and gasp and call upon God as the Vodyanoi’s tongue slid in and out of her—for no woman is entirely devoid of shame, not even a headstrong wanton such as she. Let us assume that it was an attempt to dull the pain that caused her to thrust her fingers down between the smooth fur of the coverlet and her own rougher fur, as he rose up behind her and breached the portal of her sex with his ram. His hand was heavy between her shoulder blades, pinning her to the bed. His hard thighs slapped against the backs of hers and his scrotum bounced on the cushioning lips of her sex, so deep did he delve with each thrust. Zorya heaved her hips against his invasion, but if she regretted her witch’s bargain it was too late now. He rutted inside her just as he had done in her mouth: swift and ruthless, taking his pleasure without regard for her delicacy of feeling. There was a minor difference, in that this time her throat was not stuffed with his meat and he could clearly hear her moans rising in pitch as he stretched her wide. But the result was the same: a great and sudden outpouring, flooding her to such an extent that when he pulled out it ran from her furrow and splashed upon the padded stool. Yet still his prick stood erect, quivering with eagerness, and he had one further use for it. Smearing his own issue up into her split with brazen-bold fingers, he redirected that slick and narrow tip to the juicy clench of her anus and pressed home his advantage, forging deep into forbidden territory.

  Zorya felt every inch. His inhuman member was as slippery and muscular as an eel and it surged inside her as if swimming upstream. Under his touch she was becoming a river: everything fluid, everything falling. She could hear the rain drumming on the wooden shingles overhead and it was like it was falling into her soul. Her body gave up all resistance and yielded, unable to withstand the waves of sensation rippling up her spine and out along every limb to the tips of her spread fingers. She pawed the pelisse beneath her and sobbed into it, her heat soaking the fur. The Vodyanoi was laboring too, nothing like so swift or so casual this time—instead he bent low, his hair brushing her shoulders, and drew long and ragged breaths as he twisted into her. She saw his splayed hand braced on the coverlet, and the webbed skin at the base of his fingers. She felt his cold sweat splash upon her like the raindrops falling outside, and she felt the ripples radiate through her skin.

  Then the river within her turned to gold as if the sun had come out from behind a cloud, and everything was transformed in the glory of it, and she felt him shoot through her like a fish, flashing silver.

  It seemed a long time before she was Zorya again, flesh and bone, and the Vodyanoi’s flesh was heavy on her, his arms sagging, his body no longer taut with passion but loose-limbed and clumsy. Slowly he lowered himself to rest upon her and for a moment they lay in silence, as still as a millpond under the dappled shadows of summer. She felt no desire to move, now or ever again. Then his lips brushed the skin between her shoulders and she felt him sigh.

  He slipped from her without a word. Zorya turned her head. She was awash. “Don’t go,” she whispered.

  The Vodyanoi paused in the act of picking up his leathern kilt. In his jeweled toa
d eyes there was no malice anymore, only a troubled wondering. But he did not reply. Fastening his garment about his hips he moved to the window, and as she raised herself from the bed to watch, he stepped through it into the void beyond, still looking back at her, still frowning as he dissolved into the rain.

  ♦♦♦

  The Tzarina recovered her composure in good time before her husband returned that night. He was soaked to the bone and in a black temper suited to the overcast sky. She’d had time to wash and dress, to summon servants to take the body of poor faithful Olga—who, she pointed out, had suffered some kind of fit, as witnessed by the white foam plastered about her lips—and lay her out in the chapel for the priest to pray over. Zorya was ready with her hair combed out loose the way her husband liked it and a roaring fire and a flagon of mulled wine, when the Tzar marched in throwing his muddy coat and hat to the floor, grim with vexation. He dismissed the servants and downed the first goblet of wine, stripping off his clothes one-handed while Zorya hurried to fetch a fresh dry robe from the press.

  When she turned she found him half-naked, staring into the dark recesses of their boxed bed.

  “What’s this?” said he.

  “What’s what, husband?” she asked uneasily.

  Without a word the Tzar reached in to the top of the bed, and brought out her golden ball from its shelf, its pride of place, brandishing it in front of her. Only now it wasn’t golden; the gilt had flaked off some base metal blotched with corrosion, and its metallic sheen was as eaten up as if it had soaked for years at the bottom of a pond.

  “What,” he said, in a low and horrible voice, “have you done, wife?”

  “I—” she said, and then stopped, because there was no defense in the face of this inhuman witness, no lie big enough to mask her guilt. She went as white as the belly of a fish, her eyes huge. She felt quite sick.