Prince Ivan (35 page)

The horses were watching him as he took his platter of bread and cheese from where it had been set in the usual place, on an upturned bucket. As he sat down on the bucket and began to eat, he could see they were no longer staring with the hatred of last night, but instead with a wary, nervous respect. He’d seen that look on a horse’s face before, when Guard-Captain Akimov or one of his Cossacks was breaking a new mount to the saddle. It was a look that came when the horse was growing tired of fighting the inevitable, and had started to consider that perhaps doing as its rider wished would be simpler in the long run. Baba Yaga’s horses looked like that. He wouldn’t try any of them with a saddle, and he most certainly wouldn’t turn his back on any one of them, the stallion least of all; but if he had undertaken to herd them for four days instead of three, then it was possible that on the fourth day, they would prove as docile as so many little lambs. Or equally they would lose their tempers once and for all, and stamp him to a sticky wet spot in the centre of the meadow. Three days of this was long enough. Ivan finished his food, drank water, and lay down to sleep.

But no matter how the horses looked, he didn’t forget the way their mistress looked as well, and kept his sword close by.

*

Drawn up in their battle ranks by torchlight, the army of Khorlov looked grim, purposeful and impressive. Tsar Aleksandr hoped that the enemy would think as much – once Dmitriy Vasil’yevich had determined just who the enemy was, Kiev or Novgorod, Novgorod or Kiev. The names rolled like a litany through Aleksandr’s head, questions without answers. Had he the strength of men, and sufficient confidence in those other lords and princes who claimed to be his allies, he wouldn’t have needed those answers at all. He would have marched out at the head of his hosts and crushed them both.

Kiev or Novgorod; the answer would have been much more simple had the question been
Who
do
I
crush
first
? Simple indeed:
Whoever
I
encounter
first
. And if, for some reason, neither Pavel and Boris of Novgorod, nor even Yuriy of Kiev, had been responsible for the attack on his son, what then? They would be crushed anyway, as a man might remove a thorn in his flesh that had been tolerated for far too long.

Dreams. Nothing more.

With neither the strength in men or in sorcery to fulfil those dreams, all he could do was watch his soldiers draw up in their ranks by torchlight, and wait for Strel’tsin to tell him who the enemy really was.

*

“No cunning tricks this morning?” said Baba Yaga, watching all her horses running free. “Why, Prince Ivan, you disappoint me.”

“I hope to continue doing so, Baba Yaga. I like my head where it is.”

Baba Yaga frowned, wondering at his new confidence, and Ivan closed his mouth in case he said too much. He had done so before, to his sorrow, and with success so close it would be nothing short of madness to throw it all away just for a point gained in this constant war of words. Instead he took the familiar pack of provisions, though by now he was growing thoroughly sick of bread and cheese, then walked behind the horse-herd as it ambled out towards the meadow once again. He wondered if wolves liked cheese. Foxes did…

Though he’d been expecting it on some part of the path before they reached the meadow, the suddenness with which the stallion and the mares went crashing into the deep forest still took Ivan by surprise. Aware Baba Yaga was still watching him from the door of her hen-legged hut, he played the part she expected to see: running frantically up and down, waving his hands and shouting before charging through the bracken in futile pursuit. In the far distance a shrill, cackling laugh proved Baba Yaga was convinced by his performance, but he made certain to run well out of sight before he dared slow his noisy, headlong pace. And then he perched on a stump, made himself comfortable, and had a bite to eat.

The day went more slowly than he had expected, for without the impetus of fear to make him run about, time hung heavy on Ivan’s hands. There was still apprehension at the back of his mind, which had to do with Baba Yaga and how she would react when he claimed the horse she’d promised him three nights ago. If she was ready to go back on their arrangement and try to kill him just from spite, then his sword was as effective now while she snored beside the stove as it might have to be this evening. As effective as it would have been yesterday, or the day before. And Ivan had rejected it on those days as he rejected it now, for the same reason. It was a reason that would have made both Baba Yaga and Koshchey the Undying laugh aloud, and even cause Mar’ya Morevna to raise an eyebrow and smile her smallest, thinnest smile. Murdering even a murderer in cold blood would make him no better than her.

A cold nose pushed at his hand, and a deep voice with a growl in it said, “If you don’t want that cheese, Prince Ivan, give it to me.”

Ivan didn’t actually jump halfway up a tree, he only felt that way. Once he finished saying all the things under his breath that nobody with sense says aloud to wolves who know the speech of men, he opened the packet and gave Mother Wolf the cheese. Though she wolfed it down as was right and proper, she did so with a deal more daintiness than he might have expected.

“I didn’t know that wolves liked cheese,” he said with interest as she finished.

Mother Wolf licked her lips thoughtfully. “Some do. I don’t. But it was food and we all like food.” Food, to a Russian wolf, was whatever could be eaten and Ivan took due note. “I told you when last we met, that I would give you aid unasked. That aid is given, and thus I repay you for my cub.”

“Baba Yaga’s horses?”

“Are running for their stable as though their lives depended on getting there. Which they don’t…this time.”

“This time.”

The wolf looked at him with her green-yellow eyes and lolled her tongue, grinning with huge white teeth. “Horsemeat is food, Prince Ivan. And very good food, too. But as I say, not this time.” She glanced up at what little sky was visible between the trees, then back at Ivan. “There’s the matter of another horse to deal with. Your horse, earned from Baba Yaga by your efforts, and a little help from those who owed you kindness. Get back to the clearing and the stable, claim your prize, and if you’ll take a word of warning at no extra charge, sleep lightly tonight.”

Without a sound, the wolf was gone.

Baba Yaga wasn’t gone. Again Ivan could hear her screams and scolding as he walked slowly along the forest path to the clearing with its ghastly fence, but this time he didn’t pause to listen. There was nothing to hear that he hadn’t heard before.

He was polite as always when he reached the stable, wishing Baba Yaga a good evening and asking after the health of the horses. They were well enough, though wide-eyed and sweating, and somewhat nibbled around the fetlocks. As Ivan stepped into the stable they stared, started and shied to the backs of their stalls as if he was himself a wolf and not merely the one who seemed to command so many birds and beasts to do his bidding.

“You seem to have taught them manners,” said Baba Yaga, more mildly than Ivan had expected. “Well, you can pick the best or worst of them come morning.”

She put as good a face on the matter as one so very ugly could, and Ivan might have thought she was taking her defeat as well as she was able, but he could sense tension jangling in the air as plain as the stench of boiling vinegar. It suggested that her good face and her good faith were both as little to be trusted as ice in springtime, and that Mother Wolf was right to warn him. Far from sleeping lightly as he had done all along, Ivan determined not to sleep at all; nor did he even relax his guard until Baba Yaga left the stable.

His supper was beneath the bucket, and Ivan wrinkled his nose when he saw it. Bread and cheese again, and a leg of chicken. He stared at it for several minutes, then dropped the bucket back again. He had eaten enough bread and cheese in the past three days to last him for months to come, and he wasn’t about to eat it on his last night under Baba Yaga’s roof. Rather than that, he preferred to go hungry. The chicken was more interesting, but just now his stomach was still fluttering enough that putting anything in it would be a temporary pleasure at best.

As he sat awake with his chin propped on his sword, he could see from the lights and shadows moving about in Baba Yaga’s hut that he wasn’t the only one unwilling to sleep. She, of course, had slept right through the day as usual, while he had taken no more than a cat-nap in the forest, but he could also hear the gurgling sound of boiling water, and that made him suspicious.

Tsarevich Ivan had left his trusting nature behind a long time ago, and while still willing to accept the best from people without too many questions, when that best was missing he could be as cynical as his own dear wife. Now was just such a time. It would be in keeping with Baba Yaga’s character to let him take away a horse, then get it back because whatever she was brewing up had left him with no further interest in owning anything. Ivan’s mouth quirked downward at the thought, and he resolved not to eat or drink a thing that Baba Yaga offered him, whether wine to celebrate his victory or merely more of the damned bread and cheese for him to eat on his journey home.

Bread and cheese. And chicken…

Suddenly he was fully alert and pulling the bucket aside once more. There was the strong smell of the cheese, and the sour smell of the black rye bread, and the savoury aroma of the roasted chicken, but under it was something else.

Eat
no
meat
, the queen bee had warned. He had thought she meant man’s-flesh, which was so obvious as to need no warning at all. But tonight, for no reason, he had been given something that was safely and obviously no more than a joint of temptingly roasted fowl. He sniffed warily at his untouched supper, and through the scent of herbs and butter and crisped skin was something bitter. Ivan knew nothing about drugs or poisons except for the one time when he had put poison on his swords in an attempt to kill Koshchey the Undying; but he knew that what he smelt right now was nothing to do with feeding him, and everything to do with putting him to sleep.

A sleep from which he would never have awoken.

He looked out of the stable window at the hut on hen’s legs, and wondered what was boiling. Some witch’s brew – or a stew-pot waiting to have meat put in it.

“Baba Yaga is hungry,” said a soft, deep, growling voice from just beneath the windowsill, and then the wolf reared up to gaze at him from between her propped forepaws, a green-eyed shadow in the darkness outside. The horses stirred, but dared do nothing else. “You had best make haste if you want to see the sunrise.”

“She tried to poison me!” whispered Ivan shrilly.

“Poison would have been the least of your problems,” said the wolf. “Are you going to discuss this, or are you going to leave?”

Ivan was through the stable door before the wolf had dropped her forepaws back onto the ground. “She said that I should pick my horse come morning,” he hissed. “So which one should I take?” He froze, listening, as a faint, familiar sound drifted through the still night air. Baba Yaga was sharpening a knife. Ivan’s face was white and ghostly in the starlight. “Or should I even wait?” There was desperation in his voice, the beginnings of horror at not knowing what to do any more. Another few seconds and he would have run headlong in any direction but the right one.

That was why Mother Wolf sank her great teeth into the sleeve of his coat, and held on tight. “You wait,” she said, voice muffled through her nose like someone with a cold. “And you come with me.” Leading him by the sleeve and by the arm inside it, she took him around to the back wall of the stable where he had never been before. That was hardly surprising since the dung-heap was there, glowing with a faint rotting phosphorescence that grew brighter as Ivan’s eyes became used to the dark. And then he swore as something moved in the sickly glow, and wrenched his sabre from its scabbard.

Mother Wolf let go of his arm and sleeve and rumbled low in her chest. “I knew I should have held your sword-arm!” she growled. “Now put that thing away before someone gets hurt.” Ivan had the good sense to sheathe the curved blade quietly, and then he squinted through the gloom to see whatever else had frightened him tonight.

It was a colt.

Ivan had an impression of big eyes, a long mane and tail all sadly tangled and thick with dirt, and legs that went on forever in all directions. Even allowing for the darkness and the dung, the colt looked both as unlikely a steed as he had ever seen, but one that was full of possibilities.

“What do you think of him?” Ivan made some sort of noise that came out half-formed before he meant it, and the colt’s big eyes looked at him reproachfully. Mother Wolf wasn’t reproached in the slightest. “I know what you mean,” she said. “But I have two messages which might help. One is that even the swiftest hawks don’t have clean nests, and the other is that that ugly grubs can grow to butterflies.”

“Where do I find a saddle?” said Ivan.

Mother Wolf looked at him, and blinked her eyes patiently. “You’ve just spent three nights sleeping in a stable. Why ask me?”

Feeling foolish, Ivan fetched the saddle and bridle he had used when he first tried to herd the horses, wondering briefly who had brought it back from where the mare had shaken it and him onto the ground. Though the colt seemed unbroken, there was no resistance to the harness or when Ivan mounted up, but he laid his ears flat back and showed his teeth at the smell of Koshchey’s
nagayka
whip. Despite the darkness, Ivan saw that they were ordinary horse’s teeth and not fangs. He patted the colt on the neck as he had been used to pat lost Burka, and said softly, “This whip isn’t for you, but Baba Yaga.”