The Bear and the Nightingale

by Katherine Arden

  Vasya hesitated a long moment. She remembered, unwillingly, the priest praying beside Timofei’s stiffening corpse, mouthing the words long after his voice had gone. She remembered him holding the boy’s mother upright when she would have fallen weeping to the snow. The girl set her teeth and shook her head.

  The rusalka threw back her head and shrieked. And then she wasn’t there at all; there was only sun on the water, weeds, and tree-shadows. Vasya caught the priest’s hand and yanked him away from the edge. He looked down at her and awareness came back to his eyes.

  KONSTANTIN’S FEET WERE COLD, and he felt strangely bereft. Cold because he was standing in six inches of water on the very brink of the lake, but he wondered at the stab of loneliness. He never felt lonely. A face was swimming into focus. Before he could put a name to it, the person caught his hand and dragged him stumbling back to dry land. The light glanced red off the black braid and suddenly he knew her. “Vasilisa Petrovna.”

  She dropped his hand, turned and looked at him. “Batyushka.”

  He felt his wet feet, remembered the woman in the lake, and felt the beginnings of fear. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “Saving your life,” she replied. “The lake is a danger to you.”

  “Demons…”

  Vasya shrugged. “Or the guardian of the lake. Call her what you will.”

  He made as though to turn back to the water, fumbling at his cross with one hand.

  She reached forward and seized it, breaking the thong that held it around his neck. “Leave it, and her,” the girl said fiercely, holding the cross out of reach. “You’ve done enough damage; can you not let them be?”

  “I want to save you, Vasilisa Petrovna,” he said. “I will save you all. There are dark forces that you do not understand.”

  To his surprise, and perhaps to hers, she laughed. Amusement smoothed the angles of her face. Caught, he stared at her in unwilling admiration.

  “It seems to me, Batyushka, that it is you who do not understand, as it was your life that needed saving. Go back to the work in the barley-fields and leave the lake alone.” She turned without waiting to see if he followed, feet noiseless on the moss and pine needles. Konstantin fell in beside her. She still held his wooden cross between her two fingers.

  “Vasilisa Petrovna,” he tried again, cursing his clumsiness. Always he knew what to say. But this girl turned her clear gaze on him, and all his certainty grew vague and foolish. “You must leave your barbaric ways. You must return to God in fear and true repentance. You are the daughter of a good Christian lord. Your mother will run mad if we do not exorcise the demons from her hearth. Vasilisa Petrovna, turn. Repent.”

  “I go to church, Father,” she replied. “Anna Ivanovna is not my mother, nor is her madness my business. Just as my soul is not yours. And it seems to me we did very well before you came; for if we prayed less, we also wept less.”

  She had walked swiftly. Through the tree-trunks he could see the palisade of the village.

  “Mark me, Batyushka,” she said. “Pray for the dead, comfort the sick, and comfort my stepmother. But leave me alone, or next time one of them comes for you, I shall not lift a finger to stop it.” She did not wait for a reply but thrust his cross back into his hand and strode off toward the village.

  It was warm from her hand, and his fingers curled reluctantly around it.

  The blinding afternoon sunlight gave way to honey-gold, and at last to amber and rust. A faint half moon showed just above a line of pale yellow sky. The heat of the day went with the light, and the men in the barley-field shivered in their cooling sweat. Konstantin put his scythe over his shoulder. Bloody blisters had blossomed beneath the hardened skin of his palms. He balanced the scythe with his fingertips and avoided Pyotr Vladimirovich. Longing closed his throat and wrath stole his voice. It was a demon. It was your imagination. You did not cast her out; you crawled toward her.

  God, he wanted to go back to Moscow—or Kiev—or further yet. To eat bread hot and plentiful instead of starving half the year, to leave the plowing to farmers, to speak before thousands, and never lie awake, wondering.

  No. God had given him a task. He could not lay it aside half-finished.

  Oh, if I could but finish.

  His jaw set. He would. He must. And before he died he would live again in a world where girls did not defy him and demons did not walk in Christian daylight.

  Konstantin passed the mown barley and skirted the horse-pasture. The edge of the wood threw hungry shadows. He turned his face away, toward Pyotr’s herds grazing in the long twilight. A flash of brightness showed among the grays and chestnuts. Konstantin narrowed his eyes. One horse—Pyotr’s war-stallion—stood still, his head up. A slender figure stood at the beast’s shoulder, silhouetted against the sunset. Konstantin knew her at once. The stallion curved its wicked head around to nibble at her braid, and she laughed like a child.

  Konstantin had never seen Vasya so. In the house, she was grave and wary, careless and charming by turn, all eyes and bones and soundless feet. But alone, under the sky, she was beautiful as a yearling filly, or a new-flown hawk.

  Konstantin forced his face to coldness. Her people offered him beeswax and honey, begged him for counsel and prayers. They kissed his hand; their faces lit when they saw him. But that girl avoided his glance and his footstep, yet a horse—a dumb beast—could charm that light from her. The light should have been for him—for God—for him as God’s messenger. She was as Anna Ivanovna named her: hard-hearted, undutiful, unmaidenly. She conversed with demons and dared to boast that she’d saved his life.

  But his fingers itched for wood and wax and brushes, to capture the love and loneliness, the pride and half-blossomed womanhood written in the lines of the girl’s body. She saved your life, Konstantin Nikonovich.

  Savagely, he quelled both thought and impulse. Painting was for the glory of God, not to glorify the frailty of transient flesh. She summoned a devil; it was the finger of God that saved my life. But when he tore himself away, the scene was burned on the backs of his eyelids.

  IT WAS VIOLET EVENTIDE when Vasya came into the kitchen, still flushed with the day’s sun. She seized her bowl and spoon, claimed a portion for herself, and took it to the window. The twilight greened her eyes. She tore into her food, pausing from time to time to glance out into the long summer dusk. With stiff, deliberate steps, Konstantin placed himself beside her. Her hair smelled of earth and sun and lake-water. She did not look away from the window. The village was starry with well-tended fires; a faint half moon soared in a cloud-fretted sky. The silence between them stretched out, amid the bustle of the crowded kitchen. It was the priest that broke it. “I am a man of God,” Konstantin said, low. “But I would have been sorry to die.”

  Vasya gave him a swift, startled glance. A ghost of a smile showed in the corner of her mouth. “I don’t believe it, Batyushka,” she said. “Did I not rob you of your quick ascent to heaven?”

  “I thank you for my life,” Konstantin went on, stiffly. “But God is not mocked.” His hand was suddenly warm on hers. The smile left her face. “Remember,” he said. He slipped an object between her fingers. His hand, roughened with the scythe, slid over her knuckles. He did not speak. Suddenly Vasya understood why the women all begged him for prayers; understood, too, that his warm hand, the strong bones of his face, were a weapon, to use where the weapons of speech had failed. He would get her obedience thus, with his rough hand, his beautiful eyes.

  Am I as great a fool as Anna Ivanovna? Vasya threw her head back and pulled away. He let her go. She did not see his hand tremble. His shadow wavered on the wall when he walked away.

  Anna was stitching linens on her stool by the hearth. The cloth slipped to her knees and, when she stood, fell unheeded to the floor. “What did he give you?” she hissed. “What was it?” Every spot and line stood out on her face.

  Vasya had no idea, but she lifted the thing for her stepmother to see. It was his wooden cross, with
the two reaching arms, carved of silky pine-wood. Vasya gazed at it in some wonder. What is this, priest? A warning? An apology? A challenge?

  “A cross,” she said.

  But Anna had seized it. “It’s mine,” she said. “He meant it for me. Get out!”

  There were several things Vasya might have said, but she settled on the safest: “I am sure he did.” But she did not go; she took her bowl to the hearth, to charm more stew out of Dunya and steal a heel of bread from her unwary sister. In a few minutes Vasya was dabbing her bowl with the crust and laughing at Irina’s bewildered face.

  Anna did not speak again, but neither did she take up her sewing. Vasya, for all her laughter, could feel her stepmother’s burning stare.

  ANNA DID NOT SLEEP that night, but paced from her bed to the church. When a deep, clear dawn replaced the blue summer midnight, she went to her husband and shook him awake.

  Never once, in nine years, had Anna come to Pyotr of her own will. Pyotr seized his wife in a very businesslike choke before he realized who it was. Anna’s hair straggled, gray-brown, about her face, and her kerchief hung askew. Her eyes were like two stones. “My love,” she said, gasping and massaging her throat.

  “What is wrong?” Pyotr demanded. He slipped from his warm bed and hurried into his clothes. “Is it Irina?”

  Anna smoothed her hair, straightened her kerchief. “No—no.”

  Pyotr dragged a shirt over his head and did up his sash. “Then what?” he said in no very pleasant tones. She had startled him, badly.

  Anna trembled, her eyelids downswept. “Have you noticed that your daughter Vasilisa is much grown since last summer?”

  Pyotr’s movements faltered. The infant day threw lines of pale gold across his floor. Anna had never taken an interest in Vasya. “Has she?” he said, bewildered now.

  “And that she is grown quite passably attractive?”

  Pyotr blinked and frowned. “She is a child.”

  “A woman,” snapped Anna. Pyotr was taken aback. She had never contradicted him before. “A hoyden, all arms and legs and eyes. But she will have a good dowry. Better to see her married now, husband. If she loses what looks she has, she might not marry at all.”

  “She will not lose her looks in the next year,” said Pyotr curtly. “And certainly not in the next hour. Why rouse me, wife?” He left the room. The nutty tang of baking bread gladdened the house, and he was hungry.

  “Your daughter Olga was married at fourteen.” Anna followed him breathlessly. Olga had prospered since her marriage; she was become a great lady, a fat matron with two children. Her husband was high in the Grand Prince’s favor.

  Pyotr seized a new loaf and broke it open. “I will consider the matter,” he said, to silence her. He took a great ball of the steaming insides and filled his mouth. His teeth ached sometimes; the softness was not unwelcome. You are an old man, Pyotr thought. He shut his eyes and tried to drown his wife’s voice with the sound of chewing.

  THE MEN WENT TO the barley-fields at daybreak. All morning, they scythed the rippling grass with great howling strokes, and then they spread the stalks to dry. Their rakes went to and fro with a monotonous hiss. The sun was a live thing, throwing its hot arms over their necks. Their feeble shadows hid at their feet, their faces glowed with sweat and sunburn. Pyotr and his sons worked alongside the peasants; everyone worked at harvest-time. Pyotr was jealous of every kernel. The barley had not grown so tall as it ought, and the heads were thin and poor.

  Alyosha straightened his aching back and shielded his eyes with a dirty hand. His face lit. A rider was coming down from the village, galloping on a brown horse. “Finally,” he said. He put two fingers in his mouth. A long whistle split the midday stillness. All across the field, men put aside their rakes, rubbed grass-ends from their faces, and made for the river. The deep green banks and the chuckling water gave a little relief from the heat.

  Pyotr leaned on his rake and pushed the wet, grizzled hair from his brow. But he did not leave the barley-field. The rider was coming nearer, galloping on a neat-footed mare. Pyotr squinted. He could make out his second daughter’s black braid, streaming behind her. But she was not riding her own quiet pony. Mysh’s white feet flashed in the dust. Vasya saw her father and swung an arm in salute. Pyotr waited, scowling, to reprove his daughter when she came nearer. She will break her neck one day, that mad thing.

  But how well she sat the horse. The mare vaulted a ditch and came on at a gallop, her rider motionless except for the flying hair. The two came to a halt at the edge of the wood. Vasya had a reed basket balanced before her. In the bright sunlight, Pyotr could not make out her features, but it struck him how tall she had grown. “Are you not hungry, Father?” she called. The mare stood still, poised. And bridleless—she wore nothing at all, not so much as a rope halter. Vasya rode with both hands on her basket.

  “I am coming, Vasya,” he said, feeling unaccountably grim. He set his rake on his shoulder.

  The sun glanced off a golden head; Konstantin Nikonovich had not quit the barley-field, but stood watching the slender rider until the trees hid her. My daughter rides like a steppe boy. What must he think of her, our virtuous priest?

  The men were flinging the cold water over their heads and drinking it in great handfuls. When Pyotr came to the creek, Vasya was off her horse and among them, passing a skin bag full of kvas. Dunya had made an enormous pasty in the oven, lumpy with grain and cheese and summer vegetables. The men gathered round and sawed off wedges. Grease mixed with the sweat on their faces.

  It struck Pyotr how strange Vasya looked among the big, coarse men, with her long bones and her slenderness, her great eyes set so wide apart. I want a daughter like my mother was, Marina had said. Well, there she was, a falcon among cows.

  The men did not speak to her; they ate their pie quickly, heads down, and went back to the scorching fields. Alyosha tugged his sister’s braid and grinned at her in passing. But Pyotr saw the men throwing her backward glances as they went. “Witch,” one of them murmured, though Pyotr did not hear. “She has charmed the horse. The priest says—”

  The pasty was gone, and the men with it, but Vasya lingered. She set the skin of kvas aside and went to dip her hands in the stream. She walked like a child. Well, of course she does. She is a girl still: my little frog. And yet she had a wild thing’s heedless grace. Vasya left the stream and came toward him, gathering up her basket on the way. Pyotr had a shock when he looked her in the face, which is perhaps why he frowned so blackly. Her smile faded. “Here, Father,” she said, and handed him the skin of kvas.

  Oh, savior, he thought. Perhaps Anna Ivanovna did not speak so wrong. If she is not a woman, she will be soon. Father Konstantin’s gaze, Pyotr saw, lingered again on his daughter.

  “Vasya,” Pyotr said, rougher than he meant. “What is the meaning of this, taking the mare, and riding her so, without saddle or bridle? You’ll break an arm or your foolish neck.”

  Vasya flushed. “Dunya bid me take the basket and make haste. Mysh was the nearest horse, and it was only a little way, too short to trouble with a saddle.”

  “Or a halter, dochka?” said Pyotr with some asperity.

  Vasya’s blush deepened. “I did not come to harm, Father.”

  Pyotr looked her over in silence. If she’d been a boy, he’d have been applauding that display of horsemanship. But she was a girl, a hoydenish girl, on the cusp of womanhood. Pyotr remembered again the young priest’s stare.

  “We’ll talk of this later,” said Pyotr. “Go home to Dunya. And do not ride so fast.”

  “Yes, Father,” said Vasya meekly. But there was pride in the way she vaulted to the horse’s back, and pride also in the control with which she turned the mare and sent her cantering, neck arched, back in the direction of the house.

  THE DAY WOUND ON to dusk and past, so that the only light was the pale glow of summer that lit the nights like morning. “Dunya,” said Pyotr. “How long has Vasya been a woman?” They sat alone in the s
ummer kitchen. All around them the household slept. But for Pyotr, the daylit nights banished sleep, and the question of his daughter bit at him. Dunya’s limbs ached, and she was not eager to lie down on her hard pallet. She twirled her distaff, but slowly. It struck Pyotr how thin she was.

  Dunya gave Pyotr a hard glance. “Half a year. It came on her near Easter.”

  “She is a handsome girl,” said Pyotr. “Though a savage. She needs a husband; it would steady her.” But as he spoke, an image came to him of his wild girl wedded and bedded, sweating over an oven. The image filled him with a strange regret, and he shook it away.

  Dunya put aside her distaff and said slowly, “She has not thought of love yet, Pyotr Vladimirovich.”

  “And so? She will do as she is told.”

  Dunya laughed. “Will she? Have you forgotten Vasya’s mother?”

  Pyotr was silent.

  “I would counsel you to wait,” said Dunya. “Except…”

  All the summer, Dunya had watched Vasya disappear at dawn and return at twilight. She had watched the wildness grow in Marina’s daughter and a—remoteness—that was new, as though the girl was only half-living in her family’s world of crops and stock and mending. Dunya had watched and worried and struggled with herself. Now she made a decision. She plunged her hand into her pocket. When she withdrew it, the blue jewel lay nestled upon her palm, incongruous against the worn skin. “Do you remember, Pyotr Vladimirovich?”

  “It was a gift for Vasya,” said Pyotr harshly. “Is this treachery? I bade you give it her.” He eyed the pendant as though it were a serpent.

  “I have kept it for her,” replied Dunya. “I begged, and the winter-king said I might. It was too great a burden for a child.”

  “Winter-king?” said Pyotr angrily. “Are you a child, to believe in fairy tales? There is no winter-king.”

  “Fairy tales?” returned Dunya, an answering anger in her voice. “Am I so wicked that I would invent such a lie? I, too, am a Christian, Pyotr Vladimirovich, but I believe what I see. Whence came this jewel, fit for a khan, that you brought for your little daughter?”