Prince Ivan

by Morwood, Peter

  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 Bessmertny 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.

  There was a way to find out, God knew, but despite all he had seen and heard and lived through, he still felt less than easy talking to his own horse. It was a thing done by men who drank too much vodka, and that the horse might speak to him again unsettled Ivan almost as much as the thought that it might not and he’d imagined those few words heard beside the bridge over the river of fire. Certainly it hadn’t spoken since. But he asked at last, moved more by curiosity than the fear of looking foolish. After all there was nothing but a horse to see it if he was wrong, and if he was wrong the horse couldn’t talk about it afterwards.

  Except that this horse could. “She left me in the muck because I wouldn’t eat the meat of men,” said the colt, and if he sounded annoyed with the memory, Tsarevich Ivan couldn’t blame him. “I have neither the teeth nor the taste for it.”

  Ivan considered for a long moment that he was indeed holding conversation with a horse, and wondered what he might have said to anyone making the same suggestion just a year ago. Then he shrugged; it was all last autumn’s leaves in the wind by now. “Like the horse that Koshchey the Undying rides?”

  “Yes,” said the colt. “My eldest brother.” Then he lowered his head and began to crop the grass of the wide plain that ran along the river’s edge. Ivan watched, chewing a straw, surprised that he owned a horse of the same blood as his dearest enemy, but pleased with the delicious irony.

  “And can you outrun him?”

  The colt raised his head and blinked. “Koshchey?” he said, feigning astonishment and doing it quite well.

  Ivan had encountered the dumb beasts who trod on his feet for fun, and the malicious mares of Baba Yaga, but a horse with a dry and wholesome sense of humour was a new experience. He liked it. “No, your brother,” he said, and smiled thinly.

  The colt snorted, laughing like a horse rather than a man. “Of course I can, little master.” Then he looked down at his long legs, where knees had been added almost as an afterthought. “But I could do it better if I was fully grown.”

  “Wonderful!” snapped Ivan, no longer smiling, and flung his well-chewed straw into the river Don. “And how long will my wife b
e a prisoner while we wait for that?”

  The colt stared at him, and had a horse’s face worn eyebrows, and had those eyebrows been visible through the silky fringe of mane that hung over its forehead, it would have raised them in surprise. “Seven days,” he said. “Why? Didn’t you know?”

  “Seven days,” echoed Ivan, feeling the blood go cold and thick within his veins. “Know this, horse of mine. The moon’s on the wane. If I – we – haven’t rescued Mar’ya Morevna by sunset of your seventh day, before the night of moon-dark, she’ll remain Koshchey’s captive until he chooses to release her.”

  The horse snorted expressively. “As I said, little master. Seven days.” And then he fell to eating grass again, with more determination than before.

  Ivan pulled himself another straw and ground his teeth down on it, feeling foolish. It was one thing not to ask too many questions, but it was another thing entirely not to ask a question just because you thought you knew the answer. Especially in the matter of a talking colt, where reality had already packed its bags and gone away. If a horse could speak good Russian and outrun the wind, then all the other reasons and excuses as to why it couldn’t come to its full growth in seven days were already set aside. Just as he had set aside his own disbelief a long time ago, for the sake of sanity.

  He chewed on the straw, and watched the colt, and began to count the days.

  *

  Remembering lost Burka, whose name had come from an old story, Ivan took another of those names and called the black colt Sivka. Since his first bath in the river Sivka was no longer a grubby creature, and as he grazed on the rich green grass his body expanded to fit those long, long legs, until by the time a week had gone by he was no longer leggy, nor indeed a colt, but a coal-black stallion eighteen palms high. Ivan looked at him and nodded.

  “You should do,” he said.

  He had spent a restless night, and wakened before dawn early enough to see the last mocking sliver of the old moon climb up into the glow of the eastern horizon. In less than an hour its pallid arc was gone, washed from sight by the glare of the newly-risen sun. There would be no moon tonight. And no more time.

  The old saddle from Baba Yaga’s stable still fitted Sivka’s back, but the buckles of its girth-strap barely fastened after encircling that cask of a chest. Tsarevich Ivan looked at the great platters of hoofs at the ends of legs no longer gangly but corded with long muscles beneath the sleek black skin. “I should have had those shod,” he said.

  Sivka raised a forehoof and pawed at the air, then scraped it across the ground to carve a deep gouge into the soil. “There’s been no time to waste on such luxuries, little master,” he said in a huge voice, soft and mellow as the deepest oktavist singer in the biggest cathedral in all the Russias, “and unless there’s more money in your belt than I suspect, I doubt you could pay for so much iron just yet.” He stamped, twice, so that Ivan felt the impacts shiver through the soles of his boots. Those hoofs weren’t platters at all; they were hammers such as the Polskiy horsemen carried, and weapons just as lethal. “Besides,” said Sivka, “Moist-Mother-Earth is soft beneath my feet, and it’s good to run unshod for a little while.”

  “As you wish.” Ivan hopped for a few awkward seconds with the pointed toe of one boot through a stirrup and his knee up near his chin, then gave up the attempt. Sivka, grown into a huge courser such as armoured knights might ride in Frankland, and so almost half as big again as the small, quick horses of the Rus, was too tall to mount in the ordinary way. Too tall at least for Ivan, who stood less than six feet even in his red-heeled boots, and couldn’t even see over Sivka’s shoulders without standing on tip-toe. Instead he mounted as the Cossacks and the Tatars sometimes did, bracing one hand on the pommel, then bouncing once on his toes and vaulting up.

  “Come on,” he said in Sivka’s ear, “let’s go make mischief!”

  Sivka reared back, lashing his great hoofs and bugling a shrill challenge out across the river and the wide white world. Ivan stood in his stirrups astride a horse bigger, faster and more magnificent than any he had ever seen, and ripped his sabre from its scabbard. He raised it high above his head, whirling the blade across the hot eye of the sun so that light splashed in diamond sparkles from its edge. His beloved lady awaited rescue, and there was an enemy to defeat.

  Prince Ivan threw back his head and laughed, feeling for the first time awake as he had felt before only in his dreams.

  Like a bogatyr at last.

  And a hero.

  *

  Mar’ya Morevna was walking along the parapets of Koshchey’s kremlin, staring at the slow, inexorable slide of the sun down the sky, when she heard the rumble of approaching hoofs long before there was anything to see. It was a sound that rose and drummed in her ears until, even to one who had heard a Tatar horde charging across the steppe, it seemed to cover all the world. And then she saw the horse.

  At first she thought Koshchey the Undying had returned early from whatever wickedness had taken him out across the world, but his horse, poor harried, beaten creature that it was, had never looked as fine as this. And Koshchey didn’t wear a red coat trimmed with sable fur, or have pale-blond hair beneath his hat. Mar’ya Morevna closed one hand on the cold stone of the kremlin rampart, and closed her eyes, and softly said the name that for many days she had not dared voice aloud.

  Say the name, and summon the named.

  When she opened her eyes again, Ivan was in the courtyard far below, mounted on the biggest, blackest horse that she had ever seen. There was a sabre like a slice of sharpened moonlight in his hand, and he was looking up at her, and smiling.

  “This time,” he cried in a voice that set the echoes booming between the eight walls of the dark kremlin, “let Koshchey catch us if he can!”

  Mar’ya Morevna picked up her skirts and ran down the many stairways as a plover runs across a meadow, then burst out through the great double doors of Koshchey’s kremlin and leapt up breathless into the warmth of her husband’s waiting arms. She was a commander of stern armies, and a Tsarevna of wide realms, and such people didn’t cry; but she had seen the holder of her heart cut into pieces, and returned to her alive as she had never hoped to see this side of Heaven, and then, for her sake, he had ridden off towards the threat of such a death as in his innocence he couldn’t imagine. So Mar’ya Morevna held Ivan close, as if she would never let him go, and buried her face in the deep fur of the coat above his shoulder, and sobbed and laughed for the happiness of their reunion.

  “If I might venture a personal opinion, dear little master,” said a vast bass voice that made her start, “the sun is setting. You could best express your love for your lady by leaving this vile place at once.”

  Mar’ya Morevna stared about, and realized at last that it was Ivan’s black horse which had spoken. The huge beast met her stare with gentle eyes, and snuffled at her hair, then looked past her to Ivan. “I understand how you wouldn’t want to live without such a companion, little master. But if Koshchey the Undying returns unlooked-for, or the sun sets with both of you within these walls, then she may have to live again without you. It would be as well, when he comes back, that we were all long gone.”

  “Sivka, your wisdom goes beyond your days on earth,” said Ivan, helping Mar’ya Morevna to a better seat side-saddle. “There’s nothing more in this place that I want.” He released the reins, and held his wife about the waist, and let Sivka have his head. “So act as you advise.”

  The black courser snapped around in his own length and galloped towards the kremlin gate just as the sun slipped stealthily beneath the horizon. In that same instant a great lurching shudder rippled through the ground, and the dark kremlin trembled. Sivka whinnied as his hoofs briefly lost their grip on the skull-domed cobbles of the courtyard, then gathered himself and sprang through the gateway, crossing the bridge and causeway that ran across its moat with a single lofting bound.

  Earth and air shifted together, and a massive gust like the exhalation of a
giant mingled with a single monstrous rolling boom. The horse squealed, pain and fright and stallion’s outrage all mingling in that one high, shrill noise. Then, with Ivan and Mar’ya Morevna hanging on for dear life, he began to gain real speed.

  With her hair whipping about her face, Mar’ya Morevna leaned back into Ivan’s embrace and laughed as she watched the wide white world blur by, then said as best she could above the whistling wind of their passage, “Koshchey will know now, as he knew before.”

  Tsarevich Ivan smiled, though what little warmth was in it stopped far short of his eyes. “As he may know the north wind blows,” he said. “But let him catch it!”

  Behind them there was no longer anything that resembled a kremlin. Instead a mountain of bare black rock reared up into the darkening sky, and had any paused to look they might have seen, clamped in a crack that might once have been a gate, a fistful of hairs pulled from a horse’s tail.

  *

  At that very moment, in a far Tsardom where Koshchey the Undying rode through the burning ruins of a village, his black horse stumbled beneath him. Koshchey caught at the flowing mane to save himself from falling, and wrenched it cruelly as he dragged himself back to his saddle; but he was too astonished yet to beat the black horse for its clumsiness.

  Instead he sat stock-still and sniffed the air, and then said, “No! I do not believe it!”

  The black horse shook pain from the muscles of its neck, where all of Koshchey’s stringy weight had hung from its mane and from the skin beneath. Then it winded the smoke-thick air with flaring nostrils that were as wide and red as pits full of blood. “Believe it, Koshchey the Careless,” said the horse, “as you believe no other thing beneath the bright sun. There is a Russian smell within the dark kremlin, where none should be. And because no other man across Moist-Mother-Earth could be so bold, it can only be Prince Ivan, come again to steal Mar’ya Morevna from your domain.”