Enchantment (11 page)

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“A thousand years have passed, you said,” she said scornfully. “But it’s been no more than a few months. The same fields are still being planted, no new ones have been cleared. And so few new houses—Dimitri, Pashka, Yarosz—they were all betrothed when the Widow’s curse caught up with me. And none of the old ones abandoned or burned.”

“Those are houses?” asked the oaf.

“What do you think they are, hayricks?” How stupid was he?

“I just mean they’re—small.”

“Not everybody is as tall as you,” she said. “I don’t imagine you could even lie down straight in a regular house. Not without sticking your head out the door and your ass in the fire.”

“You have such a pretty way of talking,” he said. “Like a princess.”

“Of course I talk like a princess,” she said, baffled that he would say such an obvious thing. “Since I am one, however I talk is the way a princess talks.”

He raised his eyebrows in obvious mockery. What right did he have to be so hateful? She couldn’t help thinking back over the conversation to see what he could possibly have thought was unprincesslike in her words. Was it because she had spoken of a man lying down? She hadn’t said anything about lying down
with
somebody, had she? Wherever he came from, they must be such prudes, to be so fussy about a man’s nakedness and take offense at mere words.

She felt the warmth of exertion radiating from his body. His bare skin was so close to her, and yet he hardly smelled at all. And he was taller than she had realized. She was uncommonly tall for a woman, and she didn’t even come up to his shoulder. In fact, she was almost eye-to-eye with the nipples on his chest. Which, she noticed, were shriveled with the cold. The breeze was picking up, too, and his skin was mottled and seemed to have a bluish cast. Again she thought of the clothing she had denied him.

She reached down, took hold of his hand, and started leading him into the village.

At once he pulled back, fighting her like a donkey that didn’t want to carry its burden.

“What?” she demanded.

“I’m naked!” he said.

“Yes, you stone-skulled ninny, that’s why I’m taking you to my father’s house, so you can get out of the wind!”

“Can’t you go fetch clothes for me?”

“Am I your servant? You’re my betrothed—would you leave me to enter the village alone, with you cowering in the woods, not even seriously injured?” She yanked his arm and began dragging him on. She glanced over her shoulder and saw, to her shame, that he was cupping his genitals with his other hand like a toddler who had just learned to play with himself. Was he really
that
determined to make himself utterly ridiculous?

“Stop that!” she hissed at him. “Stop handling yourself!”

He rolled his eyes in obvious exasperation, but he obeyed and uncupped himself. But he also pulled his hand away from hers, and walked beside her, refusing to follow her or to be dragged along. Good—he was asserting his right as her husband to walk beside her, without claiming to be her lord and walk ahead.

As soon as she was recognized, women began coming out of their houses and children began to gather in the lane, shouting and cheering and jumping up and down. Some of the more eager boys and girls ran on ahead to her father’s house, so her father was waiting for her at the door when she arrived.

Tears streaming down his face, King Matfei embraced and kissed her. Only after many such hugs and kisses did he finally give any notice to the naked man beside her.

“King Matfei, my father, here is the man who crossed the chasm and blinded the bear and kissed me to waken me from the spell.”

If Father noticed that she had used the word
mozhu
instead of
vitez
—
man
instead of
knight
—he gave no sign of it. He simply took the cloak from his own back and placed it over the man’s shoulders.

Naturally, the oaf began shivering almost at once. Naked, he doesn’t shiver; put a warm cloak on him, and he acts like it’s snowing. Was he determined to look like a fool?

“Come inside, come inside,” said the king. “The man who brings me my daughter from the Widow’s power will always be honored in my house. But you must tell me your name before you come inside.”

The man hesitated, as if he didn’t even know his own name, before finally saying, “Ivan.”

Ivan, the name of the Fourth Evangelist, the one beloved of the Lord. What was a Jew doing with a name like that?

“Ivan,” said Father, “you have brought joy to my house and hope to my people here today. Come inside, for this is now
your
house and
your
kingdom; as God is my witness, you shall have nothing but good from me and mine.”

“Thank you, sir,” he said. Did he not know a guest-pledge was expected from him in return?

But Father paid no heed to the lapse in courtesy, and led the man inside.

Katerina paused for a moment at the threshold of her father’s house, and turned to face the gathered crowd. “Soon I will have a husband,” she said to them, “and then Taina will be safe from the Pretender.”

A momentary hush fell over the crowd. Of course she had not said the name of Baba Yaga, but they all knew whom she meant.

Then they erupted in cheers. King Matfei and his daughter Katerina would keep them safe from the baby-eating monster who turned all men into slaves and was married to a bear. The witch’s curse had been overcome. All was right with the world.

You get used to being naked, that’s the first thing Ivan discovered. Crashing through thick brush with branches snagging at your bare skin, you stop worrying about who’s looking and spend your time trying to keep yourself from being flayed alive. He got shy again when they entered the village, but once he decided simply to let the gawkers gawk, he found himself much more interested in what he was seeing than in what they were.

He hadn’t realized it till now, but he came to this village with two sets of expectations. As a scholar, he had a very clear idea of what a medieval Russian village should look like, and what he saw was pretty much what he expected. The houses of skilled tradesmen attached to the king’s household were bunched up like a town, close to each other and close to their work sheds. There were stables and pigpens with all the smells that one might expect. And just beyond the king’s town the forest opened up into many stump-dotted fields, each with its little hut for the family that farmed there. Other plots were fallow, going back to woodland, with saplings rising among the ancient stumps, all trace of farming subsumed in the grasses being grazed by sheep and cows.

What Ivan hadn’t expected was the sheer numbers. A village like this was supposed to have only a tenth of the population that this land obviously sustained. Ivan remembered the professor who scornfully dismissed the stories of vast armies ranged together for battle: “The whole population of Europe at that time could not have assembled an army that large.” Well, if Taina was any guide, it was the medieval writer and not the modern professor who knew what he was talking about. The fields went on and on, and other villages and manor houses could be seen, or at least guessed at from the smoke rising from unseen cook fires. Taina was no Paris or London, but then, there were more students at Mohegan University than there were citizens of either Paris or London in the 800s c.e.

The king of Taina was no tribal chieftain. This was a settled land, and the king could field a sizeable army if he needed to—many dozens of knights, if each manor house supplied one or two, and hundreds of armed villagers for infantry. No wonder Baba Yaga was resorting to subterfuge instead of conquest. And with the land so bountiful, feeding such a large population, it was no wonder Baba Yaga coveted it. Ivan wondered if this land was so productive and well-populated even today.

Yet even as he recognized and admired the medieval village he had expected, Ivan had to wrestle with a completely different set of expectations, courtesy of Walt Disney. Wasn’t it Sleeping Beauty he had kissed? Then where was the magnificent palace? Never mind that Disney’s movie version of the story was set in some weird combination of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries—Ivan couldn’t help being let down at seeing—and hearing, and smelling—such a coarse reality instead of a magical dream.

The king didn’t live in a palace at all, or even a castle. His house was made of timbers instead of sticks, and was large enough to enclose a banquet hall and many rooms, but it was all one story in height, thatch-roofed and completely unfortified.

For defense, there was a nearby hill-fort of pre-Roman design—earthworks with a palisade of wooden stakes at the top, designed with plenty of gaps for bowmen to shoot through. And in the middle of the fort, a tall watch tower arose, allowing several villagers to stand and watch out over the whole surrounding forest—but also allowing an approaching enemy an easily visible landmark to march for.

No palace, no castle, no stoneworks of any kind. Everything was built of wood, easily susceptible to fire. But why not? There were plenty of trees to rebuild anything that might burn. And defense came from the strength of arms and, Ivan supposed, whatever magic the local people might know how to wield. And since magic worked here, perhaps they could count on the protection of their gods.

Gods? Only at that thought did Ivan notice what he should have spotted first of all. Just down the slope from the king’s house was a wooden chapel with an Orthodox cross above the door.

That’s right, Katerina had spoken of Christ. Yet this land was so far north and west—there was no record of a missionary journey that resulted in the conversion of this kingdom in the foothills of the Carpathians.

The reason was obvious, of course. Such a missionary journey would only have been recorded if the kingdom itself had survived. The very fact that Ivan had never heard of the conversion of Taina—indeed, had never heard of Taina at all—suggested that it got swallowed up in a kingdom that was
not
Christian, its identity lost, its brief flirtation with Christianity forgotten. Whatever cultural influence the Byzantine priests might exercise here would amount to nothing. This place was doomed—the cross on the chapel was a sure indicator of that.

With that doleful thought in mind, Ivan stood behind Katerina as she embraced her weeping father and then introduced him, in all his splendid nudity, shivering from the cold and bleeding from a hundred scratches. When the king took the cloak from his own shoulders and wrapped it around Ivan, he was moved by more than the graciousness of the gesture. This man will lose his kingdom, Ivan was thinking. The story of the sleeping princess will survive and spread all over Europe, but the witch will have her way with this kingdom after all, and waking the princess from her slumber would turn out to be no blessing to these people. Ivan thought of this place in flames, and shivered, even though now, with the cloak around him, he was not so cold.

When King Matfei asked his name, Ivan almost blurted out “Itzak Shlomo.” What was he thinking? It took a moment even to think of his Russian name. And then to decide against the familiar
Vanya
and use the formal
Ivan
. And then to remember to pronounce it the Russian way, instead of like an American. “Ivan,” he finally said. He decided against giving a surname, since family surnames were not in use at this time, except for royal dynasties. Besides, Ivan was in a fairy tale now, wasn’t he? And in the fairy tales, Ivan was always Ivan, just as in the English tales Jack was always Jack.

With a gracious speech and promise of hospitality, the king brought Ivan inside. Behind him, he heard Katerina address the crowd, but did not linger to listen to what she said. He was more interested in the room surrounding him. It was smoky from the large fire in the center; the hole in the center of the roof drew most of the smoke upward, but left enough behind that Ivan’s eyes stung. A deer’s carcass was sizzling and spitting over the fire as a servant lazily turned the spit.

King Matfei sat, not on a throne, but on a large chair at the head of the banquet table, while Ivan was shown to a seat at his right hand—the place of honor. Still, except for the cloak, no clothing had been offered to him, but as Ivan’s eyes got used to the interior darkness he realized that he was not the only naked or nearly-naked man here. A goldsmith working at a second fire in one corner of the great room wore nothing but his apron, and now Ivan realized that most of the smoke that was irritating his eyes came from the goldsmith’s hearth. It took only a moment for Ivan to understand why this craftsman was laboring in the king’s house instead of his own work shed—this was the king’s gold the man was working with, and it didn’t leave the king’s house. There were also two boys of perhaps eight or ten years who wore nothing at all as one of them swept the floor of old straw and the other strewed new straw behind him. Slaves—that’s who went naked here.

The king had shouted instructions to his servants from the moment he entered the house, and Ivan was no sooner seated than bread and cheese and mead were set out in front of him. Moments later, a steaming bowl of borscht was added, and, lacking a spoon, he picked up the bowl and drank from it eagerly. It was a rich broth, beety and strong.

The crowd was cheering outside and shouting the names of Katerina and Matfei, as Katerina herself made her way into the great room and took her place at the king’s left.

“So,” said King Matfei. “You saved my daughter!”

“Yes, sir,” said Ivan. He drank again from the soup bowl. Borscht dribbled from the sides of his mouth, down his chin and onto his chest. The bright red dripping broth would look for all the world as if he had bitten into the raw, warm heart of a fresh kill in the forest and let the hot blood run. For a moment he felt like a savage indeed, who had triumphantly brought back the prize from the teeth of the bear.

“He wants you to tell him the story,” said Katerina. Her tone of voice added an unspoken epithet:
idiot.

“It was nothing,” said Ivan. “Really.”

Matfei and Katerina looked at him as if he had just peed on the table.