Prince Ivan (29 page)

Ivan said nothing. Instead he bowed low to the worthy animal, walked out of the stable, and the kremlin, and returned to where Burka was tethered.

And then he rode out of the lands of men.

*

Ivan couldn’t tell if he had ridden east for many hours or few. It seemed a little time, and yet a long, since he left Koshchey’s kremlin far behind, but in that long or little time the world had changed. The green steppes of Mother Russia were gone from under Burka’s hoofs, and now there was a rolling plain of ash and cinders, black and grey, dusty and dead. If ever there was somewhere in the world well-suited to a fiery river, this was it. And yet there was no sign of any river, filled with flame or filled with water, even though the thought of water in this desert was an ugly joke.

East, always east, was the sole direction he had been given, and east, always east, was the direction he rode though there was no sun in the grey sky for him to follow. Sky and ground, horse and rider, all were the same colour. Burka had been grey before, but within ten minutes of their reaching the ash desert, Ivan had turned grey to match. He stopped the horse and looked about him though there was nothing to see but the long, dense plume of dust that marked their passage through the ash. He wondered for a moment if he had lost his way in this trackless waste and had been riding north or south instead, but then he sniffed at the dry, unmoving air and knew he wasn’t lost after all.

It wasn’t the smell of smoke but the smell of fire itself that hung before him, and far, far away on what might have been the horizon had not grey run into grey without a boundary, he saw a shimmering of heat. Ivan didn’t gallop towards it: he had no desire to come upon the river of fire too suddenly to stop, and in this strange world where near was far and far was near, that risk was all too real. Instead he swung down from the saddle and took Burka’s bridle in his hand, and side by side they walked carefully towards the distant dance of shimmer on the air.

And without warning, as suddenly as he had feared, they stood right on its brink.

The river of fire lay within the chasm it had eaten for itself out of the very living rock of Mother Earth – if this place was any part of the wide world at all – and in the featureless grey landscape it crouched invisible from sight until he was close enough to look straight down into the chasm. And almost close enough to fall into it.

In his mind the river of fire had been like an impossibly long hearth, all leaping flames and glowing embers. There were flames here indeed, but few of them, small licking tongues of ghostly white, and no embers at all. But there was a glow like the maw of a furnace and an upward blast of heated air that stirred Ivan’s hair around his face, rising from a broad and sluggish stream of molten rock that looked and moved like incandescent honey. Tsarevich Ivan gazed down at it and listened to the vast eternal muttering of the earth-fires that kept it hot. He wiped his streaming eyes and shivered just a little bit, despite the heat. If anyone should fall into that river there would be no swimming to shore, and neither drops nor buckets of the Waters of Life and Death would do a thing to help.

He backed away with beads of sweat glinting like diamonds on his face and looked at Koshchey’s whip. It was no more than a wooden handle bound in leather, and a plaited bullhide lash. Vicious to be hit with, certainly – Ivan’s face and Koshchey’s horse both knew that much – but so very ordinary for the task it was supposed to do. Yet he would have to try it, to find if it worked or not, or turn back now and admit defeat. At least waving a whip in the air cost little effort, and if nothing happened and he looked foolish, there was no one here to witness it save Burka. And
he
at least couldn’t repeat what he had seen.

Right now the grey horse was flicking his ears in disapproval of the heat, the dust, and most especially the low rumbling growl that drifted up from the fiery river. Ivan patted his noble steed on the neck, raising a cloud of dust. Either there would be a bridge for them to cross, or there would be no crossing. The chasm was too wide for any horse to jump. He put his right hand through the wrist-strap of the whip, gripped it tightly with his fingers, wondered if there were some words he had to say then waved it anyway, once, twice and three times.

And had he not worn its wrist-strap, the whip would have dropped as sharply as his jaw.

The bridge was large and fine, high-walled to keep the heat away and paved with rough-hewn rock for a sound, safe footing. It arched out across the valley of the fiery river, a ghostly outline spanning side to side with the first wave of the whip, then taking form and solid substance in the remaining two. Prince Ivan cleared his throat in place of all the things he might have said, and finally said nothing. Burka flicked his ears again, and that tiny movement managed to express more meaning than Ivan ever could. He looked at the animal, and patted him again, raising more dust.

“I agree completely.”

It was an easily-crossed bridge, wide and comfortable for both man and beast, but Ivan refused to ride across and walked instead alongside Burka’s head. The walls were high to either side, but not high enough to keep an unseated rider from pitching over the top into a long fall from which there would be no returning. He walked, slowly and carefully and, despite the bridge’s strength, was glad to reach the other side.

It went away as swiftly as it came, vanishing like summer morning mist as he took Koshchey’s whip in his left hand and waved it thrice. Ivan coiled the long lash around its stock as he prepared to put the whip back in its place through his belt, then paused as a small frown furrowed his brow with thought. Changing hands again, he waved the whip just once and watched the first faint outline of the bridge return. He could see the fires through it, yet the structure looked deceptively solid. Ivan searched about for rocks or broken branches but without success; there was nothing on the ground save ash and finer ash. Finally he opened one of his saddle-sacks and took out half a loaf of black rye bread, making sure there was enough other food that he could spare it. Then he threw the loaf out on to the bridge.

It landed almost in the middle of the span, being somewhat stale, bounced twice. Then it simply lay where it had fallen. That wasn’t what Ivan had expected. He looked suspiciously at Koshchey’s whip, wondering what other little tricks it had in store, glanced back in annoyance at his half-loaf of bread – then gasped a small but heartfelt oath as it sank through the bridge like a hot rock through river ice and dropped into the fire. There was an insolently tiny puff of yellow flame, and it was gone as if it had never been. Ivan wondered how big a puff of flame he or Burka would have made, and guessed it wouldn’t have been much more. But he stored his discovery in his mind, and the whip in his belt, then mounted to his saddle and rode slowly onward, east and ever east.

*

The landscape changed again as Ivan rode away from the river of fire. Ash gave way to grass at last, and the world became green again. But this place wasn’t a steppe, and never had been: there were shrubs and bushes growing ever closer together in the shadow of the trees. Birch and pine, dark yew and bright maple all grew in profusion without regard for the way some trees couldn’t live in the same soil as others. Ivan cared little for that. Instead he halted Burka more than once just to sit still and enjoy the sight of something tall after an eternity of featureless steppe and ashen desert, to listen to the soft rustle of leaves and needles, to smell the scent of pine and sticky sap. It was a wholesome place, refreshing to the spirit after Koshchey’s kremlin full of death and the ashy desert that could never support a living thing.

Ivan breathed deeply in the cool, clean air and looked around him. There was enough dead wood to build a cooking-fire, and enough damp moss to build it safely. Thinking pleasant thoughts about the rich stew he could make with all the dried meat in his saddle-sack, Ivan kicked both feet from his stirrups and half-turned to slide onto the ground.

Then Burka reared back with a squeal of fright and he fell. Cushioned by the moss and the great drifts of pine-needles accumulated over many winters, Ivan bounced as though on a thick mattress, then saw what had so frightened a noble steed that had stood fast against Koshchey the Undying and the river of fire. To Burka, the huge brown bear that had risen from its sleeping-place among the bushes was a far more deadly threat than either.

As the bear woke up enough to realize there was food nearby Burka reared again, then galloped off with the bear lolloping in pursuit. Ivan scrambled to his feet and yelled, hoping to frighten the bear or to bring Burka back, but all to no avail. Hoof beats and crashing undergrowth faded away into the distance, until only the small noises of the forest remained to keep him company. He could also hear the small noises of his stomach, awakened just as much as the brown bear had been by the anticipation of some dinner – but with Burka gone, so were Ivan’s bow, his arrows, his blanket… And of course the saddle-sacks with his food and water.

All that remained of his possessions were his sword, his mace, and Koshchey the Undying’s riding-whip, none of them efficient tools for hunting. Ivan muttered something under his breath as he scrambled to his feet, then brushed off the pine-needles and the shreds of moss, turned towards the east again and began to walk.

Water he found easily enough, for there were many small streams running through the forest, but as the afternoon ran down to evening his need for food grew steadily more keen. With a lack of hunting weapons he began to forage, content enough to eat nuts and berries, but with steadily increasing annoyance and even a sense of betrayal he soon learned the same thing that had happened to many would-be foragers whose knowledge came from stories. Although the
bogatyri
in the old tales never had any trouble living off the land, almost everything Ivan found was out of season, not yet ripe, or had been consumed already by whatever bird or beast had got there first.

As he travelled further into the woods and they grew thicker and darker and more tangled around him, it became plain that as sombre pine and spruce and fir replaced oak and beech, so a dense layer of harsh brown needles replaced the soil in which things grew. The occasional growths of fungus on soggy fallen treetrunks became more frequent, but they were gross, liquescent things like pallid maggots on a rotting corpse, and even if had he been sure they were safe to eat, Ivan would still have been reluctant to go near them, much less touch or actually eat a single mouthful.

With the bear in mind he climbed high into a tree as night fell, and wedged himself as best he could into a fork of branches too high up for anything heavier than himself to reach. It was uncomfortable, but it was secure. Then, with a prayer to the good God that the notion of shaking trees to find out what fell out of them should be kept from the minds of every bear and wolf in Russia, he pulled the fur of his collar up and the fur of his hat down, and between them fell into a shallow and uneasy sleep.

*

Ivan awoke to a pair of equally unpleasant realizations: the first was that he’d never been so hungry in his life, and the second was that his hip-bones had worked their way up somewhere near the back of his neck. It took him three times longer to pry himself from the tree’s embrace than it had taken to fit into it last night, and as far as swearing was concerned, he was growing bored with his own repetitions. On top of all else, he had barely slept at all.

Ivan drank water from a nearby stream, water so cold that it made his teeth ache, then rinsed his mouth and face and hands in it until all thought of sleep was washed away. He no longer thought about the roots and nuts and berries mentioned in those lying tales; there would be other things to eat in a forest like this one, and he had a sword to kill and carve them with. Afterwards… Well, the Tatars ate raw meat, chopped up small and smaller yet then seasoned with spices, pickles, and with – Ivan looked up sharply at the sound of wings in a tree above his head – eggs.

Some physicians had begun to say the eating of raw eggs was unhealthy, and made the eater ill. Eggs, they said, should be boiled, or fried, or treated in a dozen other ways that Ivan had neither fire nor utensils to achieve. Though he was a long way from starvation yet, his hunger was such that he was willing to put sense aside if that sense stood between him and something to eat. Taking off his swordbelt and his heavy outer coat, he began to climb the tree.

There was an explosion of feathers as the roosting bird shot from her nest, wings clattering and beak agape in a cry of alarm. Ivan closed his eyes and held on tight as twigs and leaf-mould showered down on his head, then climbed a little further. He could see the nest, snuggled as tightly as he had been last night into the fork of three branches, and he could almost see the eggs.

And then the mother bird came back. He flinched, expecting wings beating his head or a beak pecking at his eyes, then blinked and stared as instead she settled on his outstretched index finger. She was a little larger than a thrush, but with the black cheeky eyes that Ivan had only ever seen on robins, and her plumage was a polished brown like the shell of a chestnut except for small tufts of golden yellow on her head, for all the world as if she wore a crown. It glinted in the sunlight as she bobbed up and down, flirting her tail and wings and gripping tight with tiny pointed claws.

Ivan looked into those bright button eyes, and saw there more than he might have expected from an ordinary bird. It was the same gleam of intelligence he’d noticed in the eyes of Koshchey’s horse, and he suspected, groaning inwardly, that it presaged the same ability.