King Stakh's Wild Hunt

by Uladzimir Karatkevich

  All was obvious: somebody had sent the letter to lure Śvieciłovič out of the house. He believed every word. He evidently knew very well the person who had written it. Something subtle had been planned here. He shouldn't come to me, they wrote they had spoken with me, that I had left for town, I would be awaiting him somewhere at “ain” where three pines stand alone. What is this “…ain”? At the plain?

  Not a minute to be lost!

  “Kandrat, where are there nearby three big pines on the plain?”

  “The devil knows,” he thought awhile. “Unless it's those near the Giant's Gap. Three enormous pines stand there. It's there that King Stach's horses — so people say — flew into the quagmire. But what's happened?”

  “This is what's happened: Mr. Andrej is threatened by great danger… He left long ago?”

  “No, an hour ago, perhaps.”

  I dragged him out onto the porch, and he, almost in tears, pointed out to me the way to the three pines. I ordered him to remain in the house, and I myself ran away. This time I did not alternate running with walking. I flew, I tore on as fast as I only could, as if I wanted to fall down dead there at the three pines. I threw off my jacket as I ran, and my cap, threw out of my pockets my gold cigarette-case, the pocket edition of Dante which I always carried with me. Running became a little easier. I would have removed my boots, if I could have done that without stopping. It was mad racing. As I timed it I should turn up at the pines some twenty minutes after my friend. Terror, despair, hatred gave me strength. Suddenly a wind arose behind me, pushing me ahead. I hadn't noticed the sky become completely covered with clouds, that something heavy, depressing was hanging over the earth: I kept tearing on madly…

  The three great pines were already visible in the distance, and above them such dark clouds, such a pitch darkness, such a dim sky… I rushed into the bushes, trampling them under my feet. And here… ahead, a shot sounded, a shot from an old pistol.

  Wildly I yelled, and as if in answer to my yell, the silence was broken by a mad stamping of horses' hoofs.

  I jumped out into a clearing and saw the shadows of ten retreating horsemen who turned about in the bushes at a gallop. And under the pines I saw a human figure slowly settling down on the earth.

  By the time I had run up to him, the man had fallen down face upward, with hands widely outstretched, as if wishing to protect his land from bullets with his body. I had time yet to send a few shots in the direction of the murderers, it even seemed to me that one of them had reeled in his saddle, but this unexpected woe made me throw myself down at once on my knees at the side of the body lying there.

  “Brother! Brother mine! My brother!”

  As if alive he lay there, and only a tiny little wound from which almost no blood flowed, told me of the truth, a cruel and irremediable truth.

  The bullet had pierced his temple and left through the back of the head. I looked at him, at the ruthlessly ruined young life, I grasped him in my arms, called to him, pulled at him and howled like a wolf, as if that might help.

  Then I sat up, put his head in my lap and began to smooth his hair.

  “Andrej! Andrej! Wake up! Wake up, my dear friend!”

  In death he was beautiful, unusually beautiful. With his face tnrown back, his head hanging down, his slender neck as if carved from marble, he lay in my lap. The long, light-coloured hair had become entangled with the dry yellow grass which caressed it. His mouth was smiling as if death had solved one of life's riddles for him, his eyes were closed peacefully, and his long eyelashes overshadowed them. His hands so beautiful and strong, hands which women might have kissed in moments of happiness, lay alongside his body, as if in rest.

  As a mother grieving over her son did I sit there, on my knees my son who had undergone torture on the cross. I howled over him and cursed God who was merciless towards people, towards the best of His sons.

  “God! God! All-Knowing, Ail-Powerful One! May You perish! You Apostate, having sold Your people!”

  Overhead something thundered, and in the following instant an ocean of water, a terrible shower, came pouring down on the swamp and the waste land, so lost and forgotten in the forests of this territory. The firs, bent down under it to the earth, moaned and groaned. It beat against my back, slashed at the earth.

  I sat as one having lost his senses, noticing nothing. Ringing in my ears were the words that I had heard uttered some hours ago by one of the best of people.

  “My heart aches… they go on, stray, perish, because it is shameful to stand still… and there is no resurrection for them after the crucifixion… But do you think that all were strangled? Years and years are ahead! What a golden, magic expanse is ahead! The sun!”

  I began to groan. The future, murdered and growing cold in the rain, was lying here in my lap.

  I wept, the rain flooded my eyes, my mouth. And my hands continued stroking this youth's golden head.

  “My country! Wretched mother! Weep!”

  Chapter The Twelfth

  Crows sense a corpse from afar. The following day a police officer, a handsome man with a moustache, appeared in the Janoŭski region. He arrived without a doctor, examined the place of the murder, and with an air of importance that became a murder, said that because of the shower it was impossible to discover any traces of the crime. (Ryhor, who had accompanied him, only smiled bitterly into his moustache.) After examining the body of the murdered man, he turned the head around with his white fingers, and in a solemn voice, said:

  “We-well! Finished him off how? Fell immediately.”

  Then he drank vodka and had a bite to eat in Svetilpvich's house, in the room next to the hall in which the old servant was bitterly crying, his tears choking him, while I was sitting literally crushed by woe and remorse. At this time nothing existed for me besides the thin candle which Andrej held in his hands: it was throwing rosy streaks of light on his white shirt, the front of which was made of lace. It was an old shirt that the servant had dug out from a trunk. But I had to find out what the authorities thought about this murder and what they intended to do.

  “Nothing, to our regret, nothing,” the police officer answered, his voice pleasant and well-modulated, his black velvety eyebrows playing. “This is a wild corner — impossible to carry out investigations here. I appreciate your noble grief… But what can be done here? Some years ago there was a vendetta here.” He pronounced it ‘vandetta’ and it was apparent he liked the word very much. “And we were powerless to do anything. Such a really damnable place. For example, we could have made you, too, answerable for this, because, as you yourself say, you applied a weapon against these… m-m… hunters. We won't do that. It's none of our business, not at all. Perhaps he was murdered because of a person of the beautiful sex. People say he was in love with this (he moved his eyebrows in satisfaction)… this lady, the mistress of Marsh Firs. Not bad… Or perhaps, this was a suicide? The deceased was a ‘melancholic’ fellow, ha-ha, suffered for the people.”

  “But after all I myself saw the Wild Hunt.”

  “Allow me not to believe you. Fairy-tales have outlived themselves… It seems to me that your acquaintance with him is, in general, somewhat m-m-… s-suspicious. I have no desire to complicate matters for you, however… it is also highly suspicious of you striving so stubbornly to shift the attention of the investigation onto others, onto some Wild Hunt.”

  “I have a paper showing that he was enticed out of his house.”

  The police-officer turned purple, his eyes became shifty.

  “What paper?” he asked avidly, and he reached his hand out to me. “You must hand it over, and if it is considered that this scrap of paper is worth something, it will be filed with other material concerning this case.”

  I hid the paper because neither his eyes nor his greedily outstretched hand inspired trust.

  “I'll hand it over myself when and to whom I consider it necessary.”

  “Well, so be it,” the police-officer swallowed something, �
�that's your own affair, most respected one. But I advise you not to tempt fate. The population here is a barbarous one,” he significantly looked at me, “they can kill.”' “I am not very much afraid of that. I can only say that if the police engage in discoursing instead of fulfilling their direct obligations, then it becomes necessary for the citizens themselves to take up their own defence. If the authorities exert all their efforts to hush up an affair, things give off a most unpleasant odour and make people think the most unpleasant thoughts.”

  “What is this?” The brows of the police-officer began creeping smartly somewhere towards his hair: “Insulting the authorities, are you?”

  “God forbid! But this gives me the right to send a copy of this letter to the provincial centre.”

  “That's as you like,” the police-officer said, picking his teeth. “However, my dear Mr. Biełarecki, my advice to you is to reconcile yourself to things. And besides, it will hardly be pleasant for the authorities in the province to learn that a scientist is defending a former sedition-ary in this way.”

  Gallantly, in a chesty baritone, he was persuading me: a father could not have been more attentive to his son than he was to me.

  “Just a moment,” I said, “is there any such law that liberals are outcasts and must be outlawed? A villain can murder them and bear no responsibility?”

  “Don't magnify things, my dear Mr. Biełarecki,” the dandy said, drawing out his words, “you are prone to magnifying life's horrors.”

  This ridiculous grumbler (I can't think of any other word, most certainly considered the death of a person only a “magnifying of life's horrors.”

  “And I think,” I said vehemently, “that it is necessary to hand this case over to the court, that a legal investigation must be instigated. Here we have to deal with malicious intent. Here people are driven mad, of course with a definite aim in view. This gang holds the entire neighbourhood in terror, terrifies and murders people.”

  “Now do-on't, sir, no good going on like that, sir. This makes the people become more moderate. According to rumour, the murdered one was a follower of Bacchus, given to drinking and merrymaking. And it is dangerous to manifest obvious sympathy for such fellows. A political suspect, disloyal, not trustworthy and obviously, a separatist, taking the part of the mužyks, how should I put it?… bewailing his younger brother.”

  I was furious, but for the time being held myself in check.To quarrel with the police would be the last straw.

  “You don't wish to intervene in the case concerning the murder of Śvieciłovič?”

  “God forbid, God forbid!” he interrupted. “It's that we simply doubt whether we can unravel this case, and we cannot compel our investigator to do everything in his power to solve the case of a man whose ideas were directed in quite an opposite direction to those of all honest, loyal sons of our country.”

  And with a charming smile he waved his hand in the air.

  “Alright. If the Imperial Russian Court does not wish to force the investigator to establish the truth in the case of the murder of Śvieciłovič, an aristocrat, then perhaps it will wish to force the investigator to unravel the case concerning the attempt to deprive Nadzieja Janoŭskaja, the owner of Marsh Firs, of her sanity and her life?”

  Comprehensively he looked at me, turned pink at some pleasant thought, and smacked his lips several times, lips fat and moist, and asked:

  “But why are you taking such pains for her sake? You've decided, most certainly to make use of her yourself, haven't you? And why not? I approve of that: in bed she is, most probably, not bad.”

  The blood rushed to my face. The insult to my unfortunate friend, the insult to a beloved one, whom even in my thoughts I could not call mine, became united into one. I don't remember how a whip came to be in my hand. I choked with fury.

  “You… you… skunk!”

  And with all my might I dealt him a blow on his dark-pink face.

  I thought he would take out his revolver and kill me. But this strong fellow only groaned. Once again I struck him across his face and threw the whip away in disgust.

  Like a bullet he flew out of the room into the yard in great haste and only about half a kilometre away did he cry: “Help!”

  When Ryhor learned about everything, he didn't approve of what I had done. He said that I had spoiled everything, that I'd most certainly be called out to the district on the following day, and would be imprisoned for a week or banished from the region. But I had to be here, for the darkest nights had set in. I had however, no regrets. I had put all my hatred into that blow. And even if the district officials didn't lift a finger to help me, still, now I knew well who was my friend and who my enemy.

  Other events of this and the following day vaguely imprinted themselves on my memory: good old Dubatoŭk, bitter tears choking him as he cried over the dead youth, and still hardly able to move after the “treat” I had given him; Miss Nadzieja standing at the coffin, wrapped in a black mantilla, so beautiful, so pure in her mourning.

  As if in a dream I afterwards recalled the funeral procession. I was leading Janoŭskaja, holding her by the arm, and against the background of the grey autumn sky people walking with heads bared, the twisted birches throwing their dead, yellow leaves at the feet of the people. The face of the murdered man floating overhead.

  Peasant women, mužyks, children, old men following behind the coffin, and a quiet sobbing sounding in the air. In front of us Ryhor carrying on his back a large cross made of oak.

  And louder and louder still, soaring upward over the entire mourning procession, over the wet earth, the bewailing voices of the women.

  “But to whom then have you left us? And why have you fallen asleep, our own, our dear one? And why are your clear eyes closed, your white hands folded? And who then shall defend us against the unjust judges? While the aristocrats all around are merciless, no cross on them! Our beloved one, where then have you flown to, away from us, for whom have you deserted us, your poor little children? As if there were no brides for you all around, that you had to go and marry the earth, you our darling? And what kind of a hut have you chosen for yourself? No windows in it, no doors, and not the free sky over the roof — only the damp earth!!! And not a wife at your side — a cold board! Neither girl-friends there nor a beloved one! Then who will kiss you on the lips, and who will comb your little head?! And why have the little lights grown dim? And why are the conifers reproving? It's not your wife crying, your beloved! After all it's not she who is weeping, wasting herself away. It's people, good people, weeping over you! It's not a little star that's lit up in the sky! It's the tiny wax candle in your little hands that's begun to glow!”

  The coffin was accompanied by such sincere lamentations and weeping from the people of the neighbourhood, by moaning and groaning that cannot be bought from professional wailers.

  And here was the deep grave. When the time came to leave, Janoŭskaja fell on her knees and kissed the hand of the man who had perished for her sake. It was with difficulty that I tore her away from the coffin when the people began lowering it into the grave. About three dozen peasants dragged over an enormous grey stone on runners and began to pull it up the hill where the lonely grave had been dug. A cross was carved on the stone and also the name and surname — in crooked, clumsy letters.

  Lumps of earth began to thunder against the cover of the coffin, hiding the dear face from me. Then the enormous grey stone was placed near the grave. Ryhor and five peasants took old guns and began to shoot into the indifferent sky. The last of the Śvieciłovič-Janoŭskis had floated off into the unknown.

  “Soon the same will happen with me, too,” Janoŭskaja whispered to me. “The sooner the better.”

  The shots thundered. Like stone were the faces of the people.

  Then, in accordance with an ancient custom among the gentry, the family coat of arms was smashed against the tombstone.

  The family remained without a future. It had become extinct.

  Chapter
The Thirteenth

  I felt that I would go mad if I did not occupy myself in searching for and finding the guilty ones, and didn't punish them. If there is no God, if there is no justice to be found among the authorities, I myself will be both God and Judge.

  And by God, hell itself will tremble, if they fall into my hands: I shall pull out the sinews of the living.

  Ryhor said that his friends were searching in the Reserve, that he himself had examined the place of the murder and found there a cigarette butt. He had also found it was a tall, slender man who had smoked the cigarette under the pines while awaiting Śvieciłovič.

  Besides that, he had found a paper wad from the murderer's gun, and also the bullet that had killed my friend. When I unfolded the wad, I became convinced that the scrap of paper, too thick to be from a newspaper, was most likely a piece of a page from a journal.

  I read:

  “Each one of them is guilty of some offence when they are led to be executed. Forgive me, Your Highness, you've forgotten the crucifixion… Forgive me, God has deprived me of my reason…”

  These words reminded me of something very familiar. Where could I have met something similar? And soon I recalled that I had read just these words in the journal “North-West Antiquity”! When I asked Janoŭskaja who subscribed there for it, she answered in an indifferent tone, that besides themselves — nobody. And here a blow awaited me: in the library I found out that in one of the numbers of the journal a few pages were missing, and specifically those that I needed.

  I grew cold — things had taken a very serious turn: the instigator of the Wild Hunt was here in the castle. But who then was it? Not I nor Janoŭskaja, nor the foolish housekeeper, who every day now on seeing the mistress began to cry and moreover, it was apparent that she regretted her misdeeds. And this meant that only Bierman-Hacevič was left.

  This was logical: he was a runaway criminal, and was well-informed of all events. It was possible that it was he who had shot at me, who had torn out a page from the journal and had killed Śvieciłovič. I couldn't understand one thing only: why had he tried to convince me that the greatest danger was the Wild Hunt and not the Little Man? And also the fact that he, Bierman, could not have killed Raman since it was not he who had invited Nadzieja to the Kulša's, and during the murder he was at home. However, hadn't Śvieciłovič that last day said that it was a man beyond suspicion? And how frightened he became, this Bierman, when I came into his room! And then couldn't he have been simply the one who inspired this abomination? But really, how then in that case explain the existence of the Lady-in-Blue? And this is the most inexplicable fact in the entire affair. And most important of all it was impossible to understand what Bierman had to gain. But such a fiend might think up anything at all.