Prince Ivan (36 page)

“Do you wish to lay its lash across her now or later?” snapped the wolf, her patience at an end. “If you stay much longer, she’ll be down to find her supper. I’ve given aid unasked, Prince Ivan, and help unlooked-for. What you do with it is your affair. Now go!”

She took her own advice, for an instant later Ivan found himself alone but for the colt. He looked at it, and it looked at him, and then they both looked up towards the hut with hen’s legs. The sounds of sharpening steel and boiling water were coming from it more loudly than ever.

“I think Mother Wolf is right,” said Ivan, his voice just a little bit unsteady. He didn’t know if this was yet another talking horse, and didn’t really care. His sole concern right now was that it should gallop very fast in whichever direction took him furthest from Baba Yaga. “We should leave. Now.” He lifted the reins and flicked them, jabbing with his heels.

It was as if he had unleashed the whirlwind in a horse’s shape. Ivan could do no more than crouch low jockey-style as the colt shot across the clearing like an arrow, if arrows moved as swiftly, and cleared the vile fence of dead men’s bones without breaking his stride. Then he galloped down the forest path that led away from Baba Yaga’s hut and out across the ash desert to the fiery river, accelerating all the way…

*

The army of Khorlov was on the march, with Tsar Aleksandr at its head. They had an enemy at last, but only the Tsar and his First Minister knew that enemy’s name. It wasn’t the Prince of Kiev, nor the two Princes of Novgorod.

It was Koshchey the Undying.

When Strel’tsin brought the name at last, he wasn’t running but walking like a man on his way to execution. Tsar Aleksandr hadn’t known why until matters were explained and then, to the Steward’s horror, he refused to be impressed.

“If what you say is true,” said the Tsar, “this Koshchey has been defeated before, and by the very weapons we have here. An army—” he gestured at the ranks of armoured men with their tall shields, “—and a sorcerer.” The hand clapped against his shoulder felt to Dmitriy Vasil’yevich like the first practice swing of a headsman’s blade. With his stomach twisting itself in knots, he tried to explain again about Koshchey
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, but the Tsar either couldn’t, or more likely wouldn’t, understand what he intended fighting.

Strel’tsin swallowed sourness and shivered inside the chilly armour the Tsar had insisted he put on. He’d hoped to die in bed, as was right and proper for a politician, but now it appeared he had a chance to do something much more original. And painful. Then he smiled a crooked little smile of relief. The army had to find Koshchey’s kremlin before they could besiege it, and if they went in the wrong direction—

That was when he saw the birds, spiralling down to land right in front of the Tsar’s horse.

Lightning flickered briefly, and then three sorcerer princes came forward with offers of help and guidance. Dmitriy Vasil’yevich looked at them, saw once again the prospect of his own messy death, and was promptly sick.

*

At the same instant that Tsarevich Ivan rode a stolen horse towards the borders of her country, Baba Yaga’s hut stamped its hen’s legs once, twice and three times, so hard that her stew-pot fell off the stove with a splash. She knew at once what had happened, and even if she did not, the receding drumbeat of hoofs gave her a clue that something was amiss down by the stable. With a screech that was one-third pain at her scalded feet, clean for the first time in only the good God knew how long, and two-thirds rage and frustrated appetite, she limped and hopped across the floor as fast as ten parboiled toes allowed.

Although she owned a herd of horses and fed them on mans’-flesh as often as it was available, Baba Yaga did not herself ride a horse. She was afraid of horses and deathly afraid of her own, having taught them evil appetites and then seen what they could do – and besides, no horse in its right mind could bear to carry her.

Instead, she sprang into a great iron mortar and began to beat it with an iron pestle until the metals of both rang with that pounding like an unholy bell. A trembling passed through the mortar, and a shuddering, and a shaking that stirred it where it sat, until within a minute it had begun to bound across the clearing in thunderous pursuit, with Baba Yaga crouched inside, flogging it to greater efforts with the pestle and sweeping away the tracks it left with her long kitchen broom.

Ivan reined in the colt as they drew close to the fiery river; he hadn’t forgotten how the burning chasm could appear as if from nowhere right beneath his feet and had no desire, after surviving so much else, to fall into it now. He was still dazed with astonishment at the speed of the grubby colt, for it appeared that every minute of its gallop covered ground that had taken Burka an hour. But dazed or not, and even with his ears still ringing from the hiss of wind and the beat of hoofs, he wasn’t so deaf that he could ignore the commotion in their wake. What it was, Ivan didn’t know, but he was wise enough to guess it meant no good either to his steed or to himself.

As suddenly as last time the glowing gorge of the fiery river dropped sheer before them, hidden until almost too late by the flat, monotonous grey of the desert to either side. The colt backed hastily away and Ivan didn’t stop him; he had never been convinced of just how strong the chasm’s edges were, and didn’t intend to put them to the test if it could be avoided. Instead –with a nervous glance over his shoulder at where a fast-approaching cloud of dust was making noises like a gong in torment – he took Koshchey’s whip in his right hand and waved it once, twice and three times as he had done before. As the great bridge shimmered into existence, looking like a phantom summoned from the haze of heat itself, the colt flicked his ears back once, then forward again with the greatest interest.

“Most impressive,” he said, so unexpectedly that for a second or so Ivan almost forgot the threat of Baba Yaga. Then the colt looked from the bridge to Ivan, switched those expressive ears again and said calmly, “We should cross over, little master, while we can.”

After advice from every other animal he’d encountered in the past few days, advice from his new horse wasn’t as unusual as it might have been. Ivan nodded, dismounted, and led the colt across the bridge to safety. Then he turned and stared down into the rumbling outflow from the earth’s hearthfires and closed his eyes, but not from the glare or from the heat. Then, decision made, Ivan raised Koshchey’s riding-whip in his left hand and waved it once, then twice, but instead of the third time, he thrust it through his belt and drew his sword instead. Its sharp, sharp edge gleamed red in the dull light of the fiery river, and that reflection trembled just a little.

Baba Yaga came booming up, and beat the mortar to a standstill so it stood rocking on the far side of the gorge. She scowled at Ivan, waiting quietly at the far end of the bridge with his sabre resting on his shoulder, and looked as suspicious of deception as only a deceiver can. Far, far below, the river of fire grumbled softly in its bed like an old, hot-tempered man in fitful sleep. The fluttering of small white flames looked like the movement of his hair and beard.

Then Baba Yaga saw the grubby little colt which, caked in grey ash-dust like all else, had been invisible against the ashen desert until it moved. She gave a screech of outrage and, with a pounding from the pestle, beat the mortar forward in a great bound that came down on the middle of the bridge’s span.

She went straight through without an instant’s pause.

Baba Yaga screeched all the way down to the river of fire, and screeched no more thereafter. What words she had been crying Ivan never knew, and didn’t care. He waved the whip one final time so that the bridge faded away, then rolled its lash about the stock and tucked it through his belt again. As he turned his back to the fiery river and his face towards the lands of men, he patted his new horse and knew one thing was certain.

It was time Koshchey the Undying remembered him again.

CHAPTER TEN

How
matters
were
concluded

Each morning Mar’ya Morevna went into the stable to look at Koshchey’s saddle, and each morning saw the wrong whip looped from its pommel. Three mornings passed, then four, then five, and still the whip was wrong. By her calculations, and by what Koshchey had said in his drunken stupor, Ivan’s task of serving Baba Yaga with the herding of her horses should have taken no more than five days at the most. One day to go, three days to serve, and one day to return. If he had been successful. Whereas if he had not…

Mar’ya Morevna bit her lip. For all her magic, she was locked far away from it, so didn’t know about the bear that had frightened Ivan’s horse and made him walk on his own feet for the best part of an extra day. And without that knowledge, valiant though she was, she could no longer suppress her fears.

She fretted all that day, forgetting even to make Koshchey’s life a misery so he grew sober at long last, and slept badly when she went to her bed that night.

And awoke on the morning of the sixth day, when all was well again.

There was no sign of Tsarevich Ivan either in the kremlin or outside it, and if Koshchey’s black horse knew something of the matter, it stared at her from its bed among the straw and said nothing. But the whip that hung from the saddle wasn’t the same as Mar’ya Morevna had seen the day before, and when she put out one hand to touch it, the tingle of the power concealed by its simple shape ran burning up her arm. She looked at the ugly, ordinary thing, smelling of cruelty and old blood.

And she cried for pure relief and joy.

*

It galled Ivan that for a second time he had walked unseen into the dark kremlin, and for a second time been forced to leave without his wife. It galled him more that this time he hadn’t dared even to see her; but there had been an icy burning in his bones to tell him plain enough that the master of the fortress was at home, and he knew that neither he nor his horse were yet strong enough to meet Koshchey
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face to face and survive.

Instead, setting his back to Koshchey’s kremlin and his face to the rising sun, he rode the leggy colt for many leagues, heading south by east at an astounding speed into the wide green grasslands along the quiet flow of the river Don. It was there, according to Guard-Captain Akimov, that the finest horses in all the Russias could be found – and it was a view shared by the Don, the Kuban and the Terek Cossacks, whose opinions on horses and their breeding were held so strongly that questioning them risked answers with a sword.

Ivan watched as the colt rolled on the grass, and splashed in the river, and as he watched the muck of many weary days spent lying on the dung-heap was washed away. He knew he was riding a finer steed than any which had cropped the Ukraine grass before, but he knew equally well that nobody would believe a word of it unless he was prepared to do a deal of work with water, brush and curry-comb. There was just one problem: while there was plenty of water, the last brush and curry-comb he had owned had been in one of Burka’s saddle-sacks, last seen heading for Siberia with a bear in hot pursuit.

The next day a small band of Zaporozh’ye Cossacks passed them by, riding south in the furtherance of some small feud or other with their Black Sea brethren. The negotiation that followed was delicate, as Ivan asked for necessary tools to groom his horse and the Cossacks wondered whether to steal it. They decided not: Ivan’s adventures had left him with a deadly look that suggested he was all too ready to make use of the
shashka
sabre hanging at his hip, a look that implied he was done with taking nonsense from either man or beast.

The Cossacks eyed him for those few minutes then concluded that their feud was more sport than war, something to gain no more than a scar or two and brag-stories to impress their womenfolk. This fair-haired young Rus gazed at them in a way, with his faint unwavering smile and his cool blue eyes like ice that dared a man to pressure it, that said there would be no sport if he had to draw his sword. They gave him loan of grooming-brushes, without payment except to cook their food at his fire, and when he pressed them to take something more, asked only that he let his black colt run with their mares while they rested.

Ivan was willing enough for that, though he would have said the colt was scarcely old enough to show an interest in anybody’s mares. He was mistaken, and that was the first time he noticed just how fast the colt was growing.

The Cossacks made to ride on about their business, but spent an excessive time in exclaiming with amused envy about such horses as the colt being permitted to run free on the plain, without someone of business acumen to make his fortune from stud-fees. That was when both Ivan and the colt grinned at them with far too many teeth. They made whatever excuses were appropriate and rode quickly to their feud along the shores of the Black Sea, a place that though it might be alive with swords and arrows, was still far safer than where Prince Ivan was.

Once they were gone, Ivan sat down again on the bank of the river Don, flinging stones into its water and watching the colt run across the grass. Even now, leggy and gangly, it was the most handsome horse that Ivan had ever seen, and looked well set to be one of the biggest. Washed and brushed and combed, the colt gleamed black as jewellery made from polished jet and looked to be blood-kin of Koshchey’s steed; but it was finer boned, less massive and so less brutal-looking, and he wondered more than once why it had been left to roll in the mire.