Enchantment (22 page)

A great tumult arose outside. Cheers and laughter. The arrival of the bride.

Lukas went out to greet Katerina and bring her and the ladies who had sewn the dress onto her into the church.

“One last confession before the wedding,” said Katerina.

Father Lukas led her to the one bench at the front of the church. In most churches it would have been reserved for the king and his family, but King Matfei insisted that old men and women use it while he stood during mass. Now, though, it was available for hearing confession. He seated her so that she would be facing the icon of Christ the Judge on the wall. “Keep your voice low,” he reminded her.

Her confession was simple and rather sweet, as always. Father Lukas did his best to remain dispassionate during confessions, but it was hard to keep from being judgmental. The people whose confessions were always lies made him tired; others, though, made him seethe with the small-mindedness of their view of sin, or with their ignorance of their real sins. Some even spent their confessional time confessing the sins of others—always couched, though, as confessing the sin of “wrath” at this or that person, followed by a recital of all the awful things the person did to provoke their poor victim to sin. Wake up! he wanted to shout.

But never with Katerina. Her confessions were pure, laying no blame on anyone but herself. For instance, Father Lukas was well aware of how annoying—nay, disturbing—this Ivan fellow could be, yet not a word of complaint from Katerina. Rather she confessed to having neglected him, and failed to help him; by the time she was through Father Lukas was persuaded that indeed she could have done better. This was disturbing to him because he was quite aware that he himself had done much worse. It wasn’t a pleasant thing, when the priest was guiltier of a sin than the parishioner who confessed it to him.

Which is perhaps why, when he had absolved her with advice about how to do better—but no further penance—he then unburdened himself to her. He told her what Sergei had overheard, and the obvious danger that Ivan was in.

“But that’s so foolish,” said Katerina. “There is no widow-right under the new law. If they’re looking to the Widow to behave consistently with her own situation, it’s in vain. If they kill Ivan before I have his child in me, they will have done the witch’s work. It will give her the pretext she needs.”

“Perhaps Sergei misheard them.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “He truly has no idea who the plotters are?”

“It could be anyone, though it’s likely to be knights of the druzhina, or perhaps a few boyars.” A conspiracy among boyars was less likely, if only because they were scattered on their manors throughout the kingdom, while the druzhinniks were always together in such a manner that conspiracies could grow like mushrooms, overnight.

“What can we do?” she asked. “If I ask men to guard him, then in all likelihood I’ll be inviting at least one of the conspirators to protect against himself.”

“I foresee the real danger on the practice field,” said Father Lukas. “I hear that Ivan is working very hard now—but accidents can happen during practice, and who could prove it was anything else, should a passing blow inadvertently pass through his throat.”

She was about to come up with something else, but at that moment the shouting began outside.

“Fire! Fire!”

Father Lukas rose to his feet and walked toward the door. “What a time for one of the kitchen fires to get out of hand,” he said. “I hope it’s not at your father’s house.”

“No,” said Katerina. “I think it’s here.”

Sure enough, the flames were already licking in at the windows and crackling along the ceiling. The church was entirely of timber, with almost no daub in it at all, and it was bone-dry. The fire might have started only two or three minutes ago, and already it was almost too late to get out of the church.

“Run!” shouted Father Lukas as he headed for the door. By the time he got to it and held it open, Katerina had her skirt hitched up and was ushering toward him the old ladies who had been praying in the church. The slowest of them she finally picked up and bodily carried out the door. Only when they were all outside did Father Lukas remember that the precious books and parchments were all in the tiring-room.

“O God, help me!” he cried as he headed back into the church.

“No!” cried Katerina. “It’s too late! Come out! I command it in the name of the king!”

What was the king’s word at a time like this? thought Father Lukas. It was the authority of the fire itself that stopped him, for he wasn’t two steps inside the church when the roof collapsed over the altar. The tiring-room was gone. Father Lukas barely made it back to the door before the rest of the roof gave way, and as it was, flames shot out the door after him so fiercely that his robes caught on fire. He fell to the ground and several of the people fell upon him, to smother the fire with their own clothing and bodies. Except for the singeing of his hair, he wasn’t even burned. But the church was gone, his books and papers were gone, even his robe was in ruins.

There was no kitchen fire close to the church. There was no lightning to spark a flame. It had to have been set. Who would set a fire?

As if in answer to his unspoken question, Sergei’s mother let out a wail. “She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead!”

Who? The old lady, Father Lukas soon learned, the one who lived out in the forest, the one who had brought the hoose to her, which she had so carefully related to him in confession—another of the ones who so gladly confessed other people’s sins. Lukas expected to see a corpse, though the old woman was so dried-up that it was just as likely she had burned instantly to a single sheet of grey ash that wafted up into the breeze and was gone.

Gone, that was where she was. There was no body.

“I say she set the fire,” said one of the men. Father Lukas looked around. It was Dimitri, the master-at-arms. “Who else? She’s not here, she didn’t burn, this fire was set.”

“Why would she do it?” asked Sergei’s mother.

“Are you that stupid, not to see it?” said Dimitri. “No wonder your son’s such a dunce. This old woman from the woods, who else is it but the Widow herself? And you took her into your house!”

Father Lukas sighed inwardly at the way Dimitri refused to say Baba Yaga’s name outright.

“She ate at my table,” said Sergei’s mother. “Would an evil witch do that?”

“She’d do it if it got her close enough to burn down a church,” said Dimitri.

“It’s no use arguing about this,” said Father Lukas. “The building may be gone, but the Church itself cannot be destroyed by fire. If it could, the devil would be laying fires all over Christendom. What was taken by fire can be built again by sweat.”

“Well said, Father Lukas!” cried Sergei. But Father Lukas was under no illusions about the reason for his enthusiasm. Anything to ease the blame that was bound to come to Sergei’s mother for having brought the old woman here—especially if it really was Baba Yaga in disguise.

“Father Lukas,” said Katerina, “what matters now is this: Shall we postpone the wedding?”

“Whatever you wish,” said Father Lukas. “We could easily postpone the marriage to another day.”

“No!” roared Dimitri. “Every day that passes brings more danger! Don’t you see that the fire was set with Princess Katerina inside? This wedding must go on, so that the curse is swept away at last and Taina can be free of the Widow’s claims!”

“If only it were that easy,” replied King Matfei as he strode toward the group, Ivan jogging along behind him. They both went directly to Katerina, and Father Lukas was pleased to see that Ivan did look genuinely concerned for his bride, taking her hand and looking her up and down to make sure that she had not suffered harm from the fire.

“My lord,” said Dimitri, “every moment we delay plays into the Widow’s hands. I say we proceed with the wedding without delay!”

“Your kind suggestion is well meant, and I thank you for it,” said King Matfei. “But let us take at least a moment to assess the damage that was done here.”

Flames still burned hotly in the ruins of the church. There was no approaching it, the heat was so intense. King Matfei walked around it, Father Lukas following close behind. Only when they reached the end where the tiring-room had been did Lukas realize that not all the books and papers would have been destroyed. “Sergei!” he cried out. “Sergei, the book of the Gospels that you took up to the king’s house! The manuscripts you were using to teach Ivan!”

Sergei’s face brightened, but then almost at once he grew sad, and then began to weep. “Ah, Father Lukas! This morning Ivan told me to bring the parchments back here to the church, and I did it.”

Father Lukas whirled on Ivan. It could not possibly have been his fault, and yet Father Lukas was filled with an entirely unjustified rage against him. “Could you not have studied for one more day!”

Ivan blushed. “Father Lukas, what study would I do on my wedding day? We thought to bring them here as the safest place to store them.”

Father Lukas had not wept in the aftermath of the fire, but to have his hopes raised and then dashed again was too much for him. “Ah, God, I have been an unworthy servant, to let thy Gospels perish in the flames of hell.”

“Not the Gospels,” said Sergei. “I left the Gospels there in Ivan’s room, because he was still reading them. It was all the parchments that I brought back.”

“The book is saved?” Impulsively Father Lukas embraced the cripple. “God bless you, my son.”

“A happy day, then, after all,” said King Matfei.

“Let all see the wisdom in this,” said Katerina, “that the priest cried, not for the wood of the church, but for the words of the Gospels. The Church is in the words, not in the wood!”

A cheer went up at those words. Most were cheering for the heartening sentiment; Father Lukas, who was now going to have to go back to working out of a peasant hut, at least for a while, joined in the cheering, but his approbation was for Katerina’s cleverness in making a homily out of a church burning, and a lesson out of his own tears. She was very, very good at leading the people. A shame she had to have a husband at all.

“I wish I had been a more dedicated student,” said Ivan sadly, “and had not caused Sergei to return the parchments.” He turned to Sergei. “Go at once to my room and make sure the book of the Gospels is secure.”

“No need,” said King Matfei. “After the wedding is soon enough. Dimitri is right! Let there be no more delay. If this was the work of the Widow’s hand, then let her get no satisfaction from it! Father Lukas, to the bower we go!”

After all the tumult, the wedding was an anticlimax. With the bonfire still crackling and popping its way through the timber of the church, there was a sense of the end of the world in the ceremony, as if they were getting married in the midst of the ruin of civilization. Which is not far from the truth, thought Ivan. These people wouldn’t live to see it, but in historical terms, they would not have long to unite under the king of the Rus’ in Kiev before the Mongols would burst across the steppe, toppling kingdoms and bringing all under the sway of the Golden Horde. The soul of Russia would be fatally compromised then, with no king able to survive in resistance. When all rulers must be quislings, cooperating with the conquerors to wring taxes and tribute out of the people, then the people have no reason to regard any government as legitimate. Here, though, Ivan could see what the Golden Horde stripped away from the Eastern Slavs. In the way the people revered King Matfei and adored Princess Katerina, in the way these two royals lived right among the people, serving readily and leading boldly, without pomp and pretension, Ivan could see how it used to be, what was lost. A government with true legitimacy. Rulers that the people know and, more important, that know the people. What tsar ever went out and sweated through the harvest with the smerdy? What princess ever called all her subjects by name, and laughingly bore their wedding-night jests?

In this moment, Ivan loved these people and this place. Not the way Katerina loved them, because she knew each one and all their stories from childhood on; Ivan loved them as a whole, as a group, as a community. Maybe Cousin Marek had such a sense of belonging, but no one had it in Kiev, not even among the Jews, who did a better job than most of holding themselves together. And if this is community, he thought, then America has no communities, or none that I have ever seen.

Was it smalltown life, then, that made the difference? Perhaps. But we could have kept it, had we valued it, this feeling of belonging, of being known. Instead we have a century and a half of American literature harping on the evils of smalltown life. How everyone is always in your face and knows your business, about how the guardians of virtue are imperfect themselves and so have no right to judge. Those poor elitist fools—they hated community but had no idea of the emptiness of life after community had been killed. Here it was, the people in each other’s faces, the gossip as vicious as ever when the knives came out, no doubt the average number of plots and intrigues, hypocrisies and self-righteousness. But all that paled in the face of the great power of the place: that everyone knew who everyone else was.

Even Sergei. Everyone knows what he is and it’s not a good thing to be. Yet where else could he go? Who would he be in another place? Americans love to pick up, move on, start over. But instead of being somebody fresh and new, they become somebody lonely and lost, or, far too often these days, they become nobody at all, a machine for satisfying hunger, without loyalty or honor or duty. And with the death of Communism, that’s what my own people in Russia are becoming, too.

There it was again, that thought of the Russian people being his own.

The Orthodox ritual was strange to him. He had been too young to be aware of religion when he left Ukraine—if, indeed, his family had known anybody who would seek out a church wedding under the Communist regime. And since returning to Kiev, he had not known anyone who was getting married. He knew the American and English Protestant services through watching old movies now and then. The showy Catholic wedding in
The Sound of Music
. Greek Orthodox services didn’t show up much.