Alexander, Soldier's Son

by Alma Boykin

  “Zolnerovich?”

  Alexi swallowed hard. “Ah, I think it’s related to a family problem.”

  “Oh?”

  He really didn’t want to say anything, but Alexi took a deep breath and crossed his fingers. “Someone stole my daughter and my wife’s missing.”

  He could feel Miller’s eyes on him, and looked at the mare. The red horse stayed quiet, her tail swishing back and forth. “You’re supposed to go on leave in four days. Scram, Z. We’ll sort it out. And God be with you.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Miller looked at the mare. She stamped and nodded. “Here, sir, so the paperwork’s not any worse than usual.” Alexi removed his issue field equipment, then backed up. The mare jumped onto the wall walk as easily as she’d stepped over the barbed wire fences.

  “God speed, Z.” Miller backed away and Alexi mounted the red horse. She pivoted and raced up, into the starry night, running as fast as the wind between the stars.

  How fast did they travel? Alexi had no idea. The might have gone east of the sun and west of the moon for all he knew. He napped a little, secure in the red mare’s war saddle. They might have been outside of the world, for he saw none of the lights of Europe or the eastern Americas during his ride. The moon hung steady in the west, the Summer Triangle passed overhead, and still the red horse galloped on, untiring. What did the people below them see? Probably thought it was an airplane or a shooting star, if anyone even noticed them. The wind felt cold but not terribly so, likely moderated by the horse’s flames. Alexi napped again, half dreaming as he wondered if the red mare had come because he’d been killed by a sniper in the darkness, and everything with the captain had been a dream or vision before he started the trek to Valhalla.

  “No, Alexander Soldier’s Son, you do not dream and you are not dead.” The mare sounded amused. “Baba Yaga has presumed too far and endangers more than just your blood. For this reason the north wind called her son, who asked for my aid. I took you to my service, and I shall aid you.” She stopped speaking for a moment and he felt her flanks shift as she took a deep breath. “A battle comes you must fight on your own, Alexander Soldier’s Son. More I cannot say.”

  Alexi had plenty, more than plenty, that he wanted to say, but kept his thoughts to himself. Later, he growled, later he would demand answers, assuming the horse of flame deigned to give them. Later he would ask the Little Humpbacked Horse what was going on, and would take away Ivan the Purrable’s phone until the cat gave him the truth. But for now he rode the road between the stars on the Horse of War and wondered how he was going to defeat the undying witch this time.

  After only the Lord knew how long, the mare slowed her pace and began trotting down, down from the sky toward a grey world far below. Alexi tried not to look. He trusted the horse, but gravity had never been his friend. The eastern stars seemed fainter than before, and the moon ahead of them disappeared behind—mountains? Yes, snow touched mountains in the distance, and a forest below them. A flat forest, he noticed as details appeared, not the pines of the Colorado mountains. Where were they? He had no idea. The trees got bigger and greener and Alexi gulped. He didn’t see a hole in the canopy below and he didn’t really care to make his own, like that helicopter had in Rwanda. Just as he reached inside his collar and touched his St. George medallion, the red mare swerved, wove between branches, and stopped on the ground, her flanks heaving. She let her head droop. “There, Alexi, follow the signs. I must rest.”

  He dismounted by kicking loose of the stirrups, pulling his leg over the top of the war saddle, and falling to the soft ground. Leaf litter and fluffy soil cushioned the impact, and he breathed deep of the wet, dark leafy smell, then scrambled to his feet. “Can I help you, ma’am?”

  She shook all over. “No. Go. Time is passing.”

  Right. He looked around the woods and noticed what seemed to be a trail. Alexi pulled a challenge coin out of his pocket and flipped it: tails. He walked past the red mare in the direction her hindquarters faced, following the faint path. The bare dark dirt gave a little under his boots, and a few leaves lay here and there on the ground. He did not see footprints, and began to wonder if he’d gone the wrong direction, or if this was a trap. Alexi rounded a gentle bend into a brighter area and—

  “MrrroOOOOww!”

  —almost died of heart failure as a ball of white hurled itself at his chest, meowing and chattering.

  “Judas priest on a pogo stick, damn it!” Alexi detached the cat’s claws from the front of his uniform. He switched to Russian for a few choice words, then back to quieter English. “What’s going on, Belle?” And what in the name of little green apples was his cat doing in the middle of a forest? Besides shedding, he groaned as he saw the white on his tan tunic.

  “Oooohh, mrr mroooww.” She leaned in his hands.

  “That way?”

  The cat nodded and he set her down. She trotted a few steps, tail lashing back and forth, then looked over her shoulder to confirm that he was following. Alexi trailed behind the white cat into a clearing with a large rock at one end and what looked like a decorative well. A well in the woods in the middle of nowhere? That didn’t make sense. Then he saw a slender, black-haired woman lying on the mossy ground beside the black stones of the wooden-roofed well. “No, dear Lord no.”

  Catherine Mary lay on her side, one arm under her head, a wooden bucket and a plastic water bottle beside her. Alexi knelt and felt her throat. Her heart beat, slowly but steadily, and he could see her chest rising and falling. Asleep or unconscious, not dead. He rocked back a little and ran a hand over his barely-there sun-faded hair. Okay, she was asleep and uninjured. But why? And why was Belle going nuts, bouncing on her paws and acting as if she wanted him to feed her or put ice in her water bowl? Alexi took Catherine’s hand and rubbed it. Nothing. “Catherine. Catherine, love, wake up.” She did not respond to his touch or voice.

  Alexi looked around the clearing and his eyes stopped at the well and the water bottle. “Water,” he thought aloud. “Something about water, going for water, oh come on what was that story? Dangerous water, that was it, and deadl— That’s it! The water of death, that’s what’s wrong.” And the stories all said that where you found the water of death, you also found the water of life. Alexi laid his wife’s hand back down and stood. He needed to find the other water source, assuming that the well held the water of death. As he listened and watched the woods, he noticed nothing moving: no birds, no wind, no sound or sign of live other than the plants and his frantic cat. The water of death, Alexi decided, glaring at the well.

  “Mreep, mew, mee.” Belle wound around his leg, then trotted a few steps, then repeated the dance.

  “Yes, yes, I know, I need to find the other well.” He started in a curving arc around the edge of the clearing, moving farther and farther from the dark well, just like Catherine Mary had taught him to do searches in the woods. On the third sweep he found a faint track that might have been a hint of a trail, barely visible in moss and lush ferns. “For wide is the path that leads to damnation, but narrow the path and strait the gate that lead to my Kingdom,” he recalled a plethora of chaplains reciting. Well, he had to look somewhere, so he shrugged and set off, the ferns swishing around his pantlegs.

  Several hundred meters down the little trail, he heard water sounds. That reminded him . . . Alexi stepped into the woods for a moment before resuming his hike. He found the source of the sound in a cluster of weathered, grey and brown rocks almost hidden by ferns, moss, and thin-stemmed violets. Birds scattered up as he drew near, birds in brilliant colors not usually found in Colorado or Kansas. Now he could see what looked like deer tracks, and something’s paw prints. He didn’t recall any tracks near the well. Water bubbled out of a space among the rocks, dancing into a little pool before disappearing in a trickle below the plants. A flash of silver revealed a minnow in the pool. He’d found the water of life.

  Alexi dug the omnipresent plastic water bottle out of his pocket, emp
tied the few remaining drops well away from the spring, and knelt. He filled the bottle and capped it. A little water splashed his hand and he crossed himself before touching his tongue to the drops. The colors around him grew brighter, more alive, and he felt his weariness disappearing. It was better than those energy drinks his men chugged in the desert, better than chocolate-covered espresso beans (although Catherine Mary might disagree with him on that). He cupped his hand, took a little of the water from downstream of the pool, and drank just a little more. “Spazibo,” thank you, he whispered before standing.

  Alexi hurried back to the original clearing. Bella bounced as he crouched beside his wife. Alexi worked his arms under Catherine, lifting her until she rested against his chest. He then opened the bottle with the water of life and dripped a tiny bit into her mouth, then capped the bottle and prayed.

  Catherine Mary rustled a little, yawned, and blinked. “Wha—? Where?” She blinked again.

  Alexi took his life in his hands. “Ah, good morning, Curry.”

  “How dare you—” she started to hit him before she realized who she leaned against. “Alex!” She twisted around, grabbed him and almost pulled him over as she kissed him. “Oh dear Lord I’ve missed you, I—” Their lips met again.

  He pulled back a little. “If I fall over and smush you and the furball, none of us will be happy.”

  “Point.” She let go of his neck and he leaned back, then stood, and helped her to stand. They embraced again and he smelled the talcum-powder and green scent he associated with his beautiful, India-born, Greek-by-adoption wife. “Um, at the risk of sounding stupid, what brings you here?”

  “The red horse. And your messages. And one from Ivan.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Cats.” She leaned against him. “Baba Yaga has the children.”

  The red veil appeared over Alexi’s vision again and he struggled to keep his rage in check. He counted as high as he could in several languages, then asked, quietly, calmly, "What happened?”

  “The Sweeper used a storm to hide her arrival. I heard Belle screaming and ran to the room, but she, the Sweeper, had punched through the window screen, magicked the latch and came in through the window. I packed two bags, grabbed Belle’s kit and mine, and got ready to follow.

  “I told Belle not to call Ivan.” Both humans looked at the white cat intently studying something on the bottom of one of her front paws. “So of course she did. He texted your father. Your father thought Babushka was having a stroke and asked me to go check on her.” Alexi shook his head. “I know. So I arrived at Babushka’s house in Golden with the car, the cat, and . . . Alex, I wanted to run around in circles screaming for someone to find our children.”

  So did Alexi just then. Instead he prompted, “What happened then, after you gave Ivan a good talking to.”

  Catherine Mary grinned a little. “I didn’t have to. As soon as she realized what he’d done, Babushka took away his phone because he’d hacked into her account instead of using his own. ‘Why pay bills if cat steal my data? Cat has own phone, bad cat.’” She mimicked his grandmother’s still thick Russian accent. “So Ivan was sulking, Gatta acting smug, and Babushka made tea and hot bread. Ask Vasili, she said.”

  She took a deep breath, then let it out. “So I did. I went out into the pasture that evening and, well, I thought really, really hard, like when I’d wish on a star when I was little, or how I wished for the Three Kings to bring me presents.” She blinked at him, wonder in her voice as she said, “And it worked. The Little Humpbacked Horse came.”

  Alexi didn’t know what to think. Catherine Mary continued her tale, sparing him having to respond to the news. “Vasili thought he knew where to start looking, but was not sure, so he said we should ask his mother. He took Gatta and I and our field gear to a place not far from the North Wind’s home. On the way, we noticed something odd in the forest, and after Vasili rested and asked his mother for news, he took us, the cat and I, partway back to the trail.”

  Catherine Mary shivered and Alexi held her closer. “Love, we saw those same damn giant chicken tracks like you and I’d seen in the mountains. Even you could have followed them, the Little House on Chicken Feet left such a clear trail. We got to the edge of a pine woods and stopped because the ground turned swampy.” Now it was Alexi’s turn to shiver. “We watched, Gatta and I, but didn’t see the big black thing. We did see a funny looking puddle, more like a pond, just inside the fence around the house.” She shook her head. “Um, how long has the Sweeper been collecting those skulls on the fence?”

  Alexi licked his lips. How to phrase it? “If you mean how old is she, I was brought up never to ask a woman’s age.” Catherine Mary’s dark eyes narrowed and he felt the storm starting to build. “If you mean how old the skulls are, anywhere from a hundred years or more to really fresh. And I mean really, really fresh.”

  His wife gulped. “That’s what I was afraid of. Um, so we watched for a while, and I thought, I thought I heard Katie’s voice, so I left Gatta with the bags and walked up to the house. The house kept turning around until I got mad and kicked it in the shin.”

  Alexi glanced down at his wife’s steel-toed forestry boots and winced.

  “That stopped it and I was able to get to the door. Guess who answered the bell.”

  “The Sweeper.”

  She shook her head. “No, think someone wetter.”

  He blinked. Someone wetter? What on earth did that mean? Surely not, it couldn’t be his obsessed ex girlfriend. “Um, a rusalka?”

  “In the, well, not exactly in the flesh, but yeah, one whiney rusalka, a little charred around the edges if you can believe it. No I don’t know and I didn’t ask. Anyway, she let me into the house and there were Katie and Peter, both asleep. Alexi, Peter’s grown, he’s not a baby anymore. And then the back door opened and your iron-fanged friend stomped in. I think she’d had a bad day.”

  “She is a bad day.” He felt Catherine Mary trembling and stroked her head and shoulder. She leaned on him for a few seconds and took a shaky breath.

  “The Sweeper offered a trade. I bring the water of life for the rusalka and she lets our children go. Otherwise,” she gulped. “Otherwise,” she buried her face against his shoulder.

  Was that what the red horse meant, about Baba Yaga overstepping the limits? And how had the rusalka survived the forest fire? Alexi tried to recall what he’d heard and read about Baba Yaga, or had observed himself. The first time they’d met, she’d been thinning the ranks of Denver’s rapists and other two-footed predators, as well as kidnapping his grandmother. Nowhere in any of the tales did he recall anything about her kidnapping and killing children, only adults, and those usually after they trespassed and overstepped the rules of hospitality, or failed tasks she’d assigned them. And he certainly didn’t remember anything about her raising other spirits from the dead, assuming that’s what she’d done for (or to) the rusalka that had once been Alexi’s obsessed former girlfriend Stacie. “Right,” Alexi said after much thought. “So you and puffball found your way here.”

  “It wasn’t hard. I’ve seen less well-trod logging roads. So I got here, found the well, pulled up the bucket and started to fill the bottle. A little splashed on my hand and I licked it off. That’s all I remember until, um,” she blushed. “Until I tried to slug you. You know I hate that nickname.”

  Yeah, he did, which was why he’d used it. Her brother called her Curry and she rose to the bait every single time. He let go of her and stepped back a pace or two, in part because his body had decided to remind him just how much he’d missed her. This was not the time to be thinking with that head, thankyouverymuch. “Right.” He looked at the well. “So we need to get the water to the Sweeper and rescue our children.” Alexi frowned as he looked at the black stones, an idea starting to form. “No, scratch that. You need to take the water to her, but not the water of death.”

  “What?” She looked over her shoulder at the well, then back to him. “That’s not the water of
life?”

  He shook his head and pulled the second bottle out of his pocket. “No, love, this is the water of life. The spring is farther on, up a little trail that way.” He pointed to the ferns. “You found the water of death, as I’m sure You-Know-Who fully intended. If you’d drunk any more than that single drop . . .”

  Catherine Mary’s eyes narrowed and her hands clenched into fists at her sides. “That bitch. I’ll kill her with a fire shovel.”

  Since she almost had, the first time she’d met Baba Yaga, Alexi had no doubt that his wife would give the forest spirit a hell of a headache and sore shins at the very least. Too bad iron didn’t work on Russian spirits like it supposedly did on Irish and Scottish ones. “Sneaky, not shovel, at least not at first. I think this is what we should do.” He looked around for the white cat. She’d found a rock and basked in a bit of sun, looking supremely feline, her long fluffy tail sweeping back and forth. “You too, cat.”

  “Mrrf.”

  Alexi crouched in the thick underbrush and wished he’d been in Europe instead of the Sandbox when the red horse had come calling. He blended into his surroundings about as well as a nun in a nudist colony. He watched as Catherine Mary opened the gate around the Little House on Chicken Feet and walked up to the building. Apparently the house remembered her first visit, because it stopped moving as soon as she got close, crouched down, and let her climb the steps without trying to get away from her. Alexi gave the House points for survival instinct—Catherine Mary’s kick packed quite a wallop. His mother had not been sure about his marrying a forest ranger, but had decided that Catherine Mary being a nice Greek-by-adoption Orthodox girl overrode her choice of professions. Now Alexi watched and waited. They’d walked back to the Little House on Chicken Feet together, reviewing their plans and sorting out what to do once she got the children. Each grab one and run seemed like the best option, assuming that Baba Yaga kept her word, assuming that the rusalka didn’t notice Alexi or try to hurt Catherine Mary and the children, assuming that Baba Yaga’s boss remained in Russia and was not waiting for them to get into the woods and then turning them into snacks. And everyone knew what assuming did. Alexi fingered his St. George medallion and prayed.