Enchantment (10 page)

“Slavery!” he cried. “What does my being a Jew have to do with slavery?”

Her fear eased. “If you’re not a peasant and you’re not a knight, then I thought you might be a trader, and then I thought of the Jews who traffic in slaves, carrying people west to sell them to the Franks.”

Ivan remembered his history. In this era all the traders dealt in slaves.

“Traders don’t steal slaves, they buy them. War captives. Debtors.”

“But the bishop says that—”

Of course. No sooner are these people converted to Christianity than the Church starts in with the calumnies against Jews. “The only thing the bishop knows about Jews is the lies the Christians made up about us.”

Her face flushed. “How dare you say that Christians are liars.
I’m
a Christian and I never lie.”

“Well, I’m a Jew and I never captured a slave in my life. Or bought or sold one either. And I never met a Jew who did.”

She glared at him. “What a lie,” she said. “I have watched my father buy slaves from Jews himself!”

“Well, if you
buy
the slaves, what right do you have to criticize a Jew for selling them?”

“In my father’s kingdom, Christian slaves earn their freedom by fifteen years of work.”

“Oh, but Jewish slaves would stay slaves forever?”

“All our slaves convert to Christianity.”

“Of course they do!” cried Ivan, exasperated. “If Christians are the only ones you set free!”

“But Jews sell Christians into slavery,” she said.

“And who do you think they sell them
to
?” he demanded. “Christians like your father. I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. Dealing in slaves is evil when Jews do it, but perfectly all right when Christians do it, is that the rule?”

“Why should I argue with a boy?” she said.

“You shouldn’t argue. You should listen and learn the truth. I’m a Jew and I’m not a prince and I don’t want to marry you, I want to go home and marry Ruth. According to you I also wore women’s clothing. Nobody’s going to want me to be king, so let’s forget the whole thing. Let me go back across that bridge.”

She was adamant. “The man who kissed me is the man I have to marry,” she said, “or the Widow rules over the people of Taina.”

“So you’d even marry a slave-stealing Jew?” he said.

“Now you admit it!” she cried triumphantly.

“No, I don’t admit it!” he shouted back. “The only thing I admit is that I don’t want to marry you!”

“You gave your word!”

“There was a bear!”

She squared on him like a trapped badger. “And there will be another bear, or worse. I will marry you for the sake of the people. Maybe you don’t care about them, maybe you
have
no people, maybe you come from a land where other people’s suffering means nothing. But in my land, even a peasant would die for his people, would stand against Hun or Saxon if it would save the life of even one child. Because in my land, even the peasants are
men
.”

He looked at her, and remembered how she had looked to him before he kissed her, the ethereal beauty, the perfection of her. Well, that was gone. But there was a different kind of beauty now. Or perhaps it wasn’t beauty at all. Nobility. She made him ashamed.

“They’re not my people,” he murmured.

“But they’re
my
people, and if I’m to save them, I have to marry you, even a man who wears women’s clothing and lies to my face.”

“Is the Widow so terrible?” he asked.

“Terrible enough to choose you as the one she let past the bear to wake me.”

“Hey,” he said. “Nobody
let
me past that bear! I
beat
him.”

“You hit him with a rock,” she said scornfully.

“I set you free of that spell.”

“Someone else would have eventually.”

“When? It was already more than a thousand years from your time to mine.” The language she spoke was at least that old.

She gasped. “A thousand years! But . . . in a thousand years . . . my people . . .”

She turned from him, gathered her skirt, and plunged into the woods.

He ran after her, which worked fine on the grass but immediately became quite uncomfortable in the forest, with harder ground and nuts and stones among the fallen leaves. “Wait!” he called out.

“They’re all dead by now!” she cried.

“You don’t know that!” he called after her. “In all the stories, the king and his people slept while the princess did!”

She heard him; she slowed, but not enough.

“Slow down, you have to wait for me! I don’t know the way!”

She stopped and watched him pick his way gingerly along the broken ground. “You walk as if the ground were on fire.”

“I usually wear shoes,” he said. “My feet aren’t used to this.”

Another scornful look from her.

“Excuse me for not living up to your image of manhood.”

“Jesus Christ is my image of manhood,” she said coldly.

He realized that he had used the word for
icon
, for that was the word he and his father had adapted to mean
image
or
concept
. But to her it would still have only religious connotations. She had no idea of who he was and what his world was like. It was childish of him to be angry at her for her ignorance. He at least had studied her world; she could not possibly imagine his.

“The land I come from,” he said, “leaves me ill-prepared to live in yours. I need your help.”

Her expression softened. She was beautiful again. “I’ll help you. Will you help me?”

“I’ll do what you need,” he said. “I’ve come this far. I might as well see it through.”

The English idiom became a meaningless phrase in Old Church Slavonic. Ivan and his father had done a lot of that, translating idioms word for word as they developed their own version of the dead language. It began as an anachronistic joke, but then became a habit of speech that he would find hard to break.

“I don’t understand you,” she said.

“Nor do I understand you,” he answered. “But I’ll do my best to help you save your people from the witch. After that, I can’t promise anything.”

“After that,” she said, “it doesn’t matter what you do.”

“You’ll take me back here and let me go home?” he said.

“I’ll lead you across the bridge,” she said. “You have my word on it.”

In the bottom of the chasm, the hoose rose from the ground as if a woman’s body filled it, though it was empty. It turned around and around. Dancing. Then the spinning grew faster, faster. The skirt of the hoose spread wider, until the hoose lay flat in the air, rotating like a helicopter’s blades. Leaves began to drift into the chasm, then get caught up in the whirling of the hoose, until a tornado of leaves rose up from the pit.

It lasted for a few moments, then dissipated, the leaves settling back down in the meadow around the chasm.

And down in the pit the hoose clung to the outside wall, hanging from a dozen knives that stabbed through the fabric into the earth. From each knifepoint a black oily liquid flowed. And out from behind the fabric, first one, then dozens of spiders scurried, spreading across the face of the wall.

The most important thing that Katerina had to figure out was whether this boy was her rescuer or just another vile trick from Baba Yaga. There was plenty of evidence for the latter. The strange clothing he was wearing when he kissed her—pantaloons like a rider from the deepest steppe, boots so low and flimsy he couldn’t wade through a stream; yet a fine, tight weave and astonishingly expensive colors. His strange language—intelligible yet accented, and laced with new and foreign words whose meaning she couldn’t begin to guess at; how could she tell conversation from incantation and spell casting? The chopped-up body of a Jew, though his head was uncovered. The smooth, white skin of a boy who had never worked or fought in his life, and yet a posture of utter boldness, as if he had never met an equal, let alone a superior. His face had the peace of someone who had never known hunger or fear, and though he hadn’t the forearms of a warrior or the thighs of a plowman, he wasn’t scrawny, either. And he was so strangely clean and odorless, except for the tang of sweat from his recent exertion. There was a beauty to him that for just a moment had stirred in her a kind of recognition, perhaps a desire; the thought passed through her mind, Is this how angels look, beneath their robes, shed of their wings? Certainly in the proud, commanding tone of his voice there might be the authority of an angel; it was plain he considered himself as regal as she. And yet he was so oblivious to shame that he would take clothing from her body and put it around his own.

It was possible to imagine him touching her, his clean young body possessing hers, yes, even with that strange maiming of a Jew. She would not shudder at that part of her wifely duty. But it was impossible to imagine such a man being king.

But he was just the kind of strange, perverse seducer Baba Yaga might try to force upon the kingdom of Taina.

Was he sent by the witch Baba Yaga? It seemed so unlikely, for hers was not the only power, or even the greatest one, in this shifting high-stakes chess game. If there were no governance upon her, Baba Yaga would simply have killed Father long ago—and Katerina, too, no doubt—or, failing simple assassination, she would have brought her army to Taina where her brutal slaves and vicious mercenaries would no doubt have brushed aside Father’s army of ardent but relatively unskilled farmer-soldiers.

No, the witch was still bound by rules, such as they were. Some said that Mikola Mozhaiski still watched over the land and people of Taina, though he had not been seen in years, and that he would not permit Baba Yaga to violate the deep, underlying law. The person of the king was still sacred, and no magical spell could take a royal life or sever the kingdom from its rightful ruler unless he acted in such a way as to lose the right to rule. And since her father, King Matfei, had always acted honorably as king, taking nothing from his people but what he needed to bring about their own good, and giving to them all that was required for their safety and sustenance, his right to the crown was unassailable. Baba Yaga could not brush aside the natural order of the universe. Not yet, at least, although they said that she had harnessed to her will the terrible power of a god.

Father, however, was convinced that it was not Mikola Mozhaiski who kept Baba Yaga in check, but rather his conversion to Christianity and his ordination as king by Father Lukas. “The same authority by which the Great Imperator sits upon the throne of Constantinople,” he often told her. She never spoke disrespectfully to her father, and so her answer remained unspoken: If Christian ordination had the power to keep a throne attached to a man’s buttocks, so many Great Imperators would not have been deposed or killed in years past.

The Holy Trinity created the heavens and the earth, she believed this absolutely; but she
knew
that it was Mikola Mozhaiski to whom the power had been given to protect sailors from the dangers of voyaging and kings from the dangers of politics. And unlike God, you couldn’t pray to Mikola Mozhaiski, you couldn’t curry favor with him, he asked of you neither baptism nor mass. You either kept to the rules or you didn’t. If you did, even a witch like Baba Yaga had no power to destroy you, and if you didn’t, he had no help for you.

So if it wasn’t Baba Yaga’s little trick, how did Katerina end up with this naked bumbler crashing barefoot through the woods behind her? He had already managed to lose the path several times even with her leading the way—he had no sense of the forest at all. How did he survive childhood without falling in a pit or getting bitten by a snake? Why didn’t some merciful wolf run across him as a lost child—he must surely have spent half his childhood hopelessly lost—and send him on to heaven? Well, not heaven. He
was
a Jew.

How in the world did a man like this get past the bear?

She asked him.

“I jumped across,” he said.

Jumped across. A chasm that wide and deep?

That gave her pause. A magical bear was sure to stop an ordinary knight. But a man so light that his body was like a boy’s, and yet so strong that he could leap over the bear’s head, fly across the chasm like a bird, like an angel . . .

Was his very boyishness the reason he was chosen? In that case, was it not a virtue to be admired, and not a failing to be despised?

She stopped and looked at him again. After a few moments of pushing branches away so they wouldn’t scrape him as he passed, he finally looked ahead and noticed that she wasn’t moving. That she was looking at him.

He became shy again at once, turning his body sideways, as if that would hide his genitals instead of displaying them in profile. A biting fly distracted him—he slapped himself. The movement was very quick. The man was agile. His body was so tightly muscled that no part of him, not even his buttocks, quivered after the sudden movement. This was the only sort of body that could have overleapt the bear and woken her with a kiss. And in the marriage bed, wouldn’t he lie more lightly upon her than any of the hulking knights who had looked at her with covert desire?

“What?” he said.

“I was waiting for you to catch up,” she said. “We’re almost there.”

The main village—Taina itself—was unchanged. It surprised her a little. No new lands had been cleared because the old soil was worn out. Even the houses were all in the same places, with only a few new ones for couples who had been married since she pricked her finger on the spindle and fell into the dream in which the bear chased and chased her until she could run no more and fell exhausted on the stone, to lie there watching as the earth all around her collapsed and the bear leapt into the chasm, and then to sleep. A dream in which she fell asleep. And yet it was no dream, was it? For there was the chasm when she woke again, and there the bear. And here was the kingdom of her father, the land that she lived to serve.

She stood at the edge of the wood, surveying the familiar scene, when her newly promised bridegroom finally came to stand beside her. His baby-tender skin was scratched and raw from pushing through bushes and brambles. He could have used the protection that a length of cloth might have given him. She felt a pang of guilt for having shamed him into casting away the hoose—though such feelings were irrational, she knew. Better to have a thousand scratches than to offend God.