The Girl in the Tower Page 7

  Faintly, Vasya heard the tinkling of bells, and then a line of sleighs piled high came around a bend. Bells hung on the bright harness of horses, and lumpish strangers, bundled to the eyes, came riding or running beside them, shouting back and forth.

  Vasya watched them pass, entranced. The men’s faces—what she could see of them—were red and rough, with great bristling beards. Their mittened hands lay sure on the leads of their horses. The beasts were all smaller than Solovey, stocky and coarse-maned. The caravan dazzled Vasya with its speed and its bells and the faces of strangers. She had been born in a small village, where strangers were vanishingly rare, and every soul was known to her.

  Then Vasya raised her eyes, following the line of sledges. The haze of many fires showed over the trees. More fires than she had ever seen together. “Is that Moscow?” she asked Solovey, her breath coming short.

  No, said the horse. Moscow is bigger.

  “How do you know?”

  The horse only tilted an ear in a superior fashion. Vasya sneezed. More people appeared on the sledge-road at her feet: riders this time, wearing scarlet caps, with embroidery on their boots. A great mass of smoke hung like clouds above the skeleton trees. “Let’s go closer,” Vasya said. After a week in the wilderness, she craved color and motion, the sight of faces and the sound of a human voice.

  We are safer in the forest, said Solovey, but his nostril crooked uncertainly.

  “I mean to see the world,” Vasya retorted. “All the world is not forest.”

  The horse shivered his skin.

  Her voice dropped, coaxing. “We’ll be careful. If there is trouble, you can run away. Nothing can catch you; you are the fastest horse in the world. I want to see.”

  When the horse still stood, undecided, she added, ingenuously, “Or are you afraid?”

  Ignoble, perhaps, but it worked. Solovey tossed his head, and in two bounds he was on the ice. His hooves made a strange dull thud as they struck.

  An hour and more they traveled the sledge-road while the smoke hovered tantalizingly ahead. Vasya, despite her bravado, was a little nervous to be seen by strangers, but she found herself ignored. Men lived too near the bone in winter to bother with things that did not concern them. One merchant, half-laughing, offered to buy her fine horse, but Vasya only shook her head and nudged Solovey on.

  A clear sun hung high and remote in the winter-pale sky when they came around the last bend in the river and saw the town spread out before them.

  As towns go, it was not a large one. A Tatar would have laughed and called it a village; even a Muscovite would have called it provincial. But it was far larger than any place Vasya had ever seen. Its wooden wall rose twice the height of Solovey’s shoulder, and its bell-tower stood up proudly, painted blue and ringed with smoke. The great, deep tolling came clear to Vasya’s ears. “Stop a moment,” she said to Solovey. “I want to listen.” Her eyes shone. She had never heard a bell in her life.

  “That is not Moscow?” she asked again. “Are you sure?” It seemed a city to swallow the world; she had not dreamed that so many people could share so little space.

  No, said Solovey. It is small, I think, to the eyes of men.

  Vasya could not believe it. The bells rang again. She smelled stables and wood-smoke and birds roasting, faint in the cold. “I want to go in,” she said.

  The horse snorted. You have seen it. There it is. The forest is better.

  “I have never seen a city before,” she retorted. “I want to see this one.”

  The horse pawed the snow, irritable.

  “Just a little while,” she added meekly. “Please.”

  Better not, said the horse, but Vasya could tell he had weakened.

  Her eyes went once more to the smoke-wreathed towers. “Perhaps you should wait for me here. You’re a walking inducement to thieves.”

  Solovey huffed. Absolutely not.

  “I’m in much more danger with you than without you! What if someone decides to kill me so they can steal you?”

  The horse put his head around angrily, biting at her ankle. Well, that was answer enough.

  “Oh, very well,” Vasya said. She thought a moment more. “Let’s go; I have an idea.”

  HALF AN HOUR LATER, the captain of the small, sleepy gate-guard of the town of Chudovo saw a boy coming toward him, dressed like a merchant’s lad and leading a big-boned young stallion.

  The horse wore naught but a rope halter, and despite his long-limbed beauty he came ungainly up the ice, tripping over his own hooves. “Hey, boy!” called the captain. “What are you doing with that horse?”

  “He is my father’s horse,” called the boy, a little shyly, with a rough, country accent. “I am to sell him.”

  “You won’t get any price for that fumble-foot, this late in the day,” said the captain, just as the horse tripped again, nearly going to its knees. But even as he said it, he ran an automatic eye over the horse, noted the fine head, the short back, the long, clean limbs. A stallion. Perhaps he was only lame and would sire strong offspring. “I would buy him from you; save you some trouble,” he said, more slowly.

  The merchant’s boy shook his head. He was slender and not above medium height: no hint of a beard. “Father would be angry,” said the boy. “I am to sell him in the city; that were his orders.”

  The captain laughed to hear Chudovo referred to so earnestly as a city by this rustic. Perhaps not a merchant’s son but a boyar’s, the country-bred child of some minor lord. The captain shrugged. His glance had already leaped past the boy and his nag, out to a caravan of fur-merchants pushing their horses to reach the walls before dark.

  “Well, get along, boy,” he said irritably. “What are you waiting for?”

  The boy nodded stiffly and nudged his horse through the gate. Strange, the captain thought. A stallion as docile as that and wearing nothing but a halter. Well, the beast is lame, what do you expect?

  Then the fur-merchants were there, shoving and shouting, and he put the boy from his mind.

  THE STREETS WOUND FORWARD and back, stranger than the trackless forest. Vasya kept a negligent hold on the irritated Solovey’s lead-rope, trying (and mostly failing) to look unimpressed. Even the deadening effect of her cold could not erase the stink of hundreds of people. The smell of blood and beasts, offal and worse things, made her eyes water. Here were goats; there the church soared above her, its bell still ringing. Hurrying women jostled her, their bright heads wrapped in kerchiefs; sellers of pies thrust their good-smelling wares toward passersby. A forge steamed, its hammer beating counterpoint to the bell overhead while two men brawled in the snow, onlookers cheering them on.

  Vasya pushed through it all, frightened and intrigued. People gave her space, mostly for Solovey, who appeared ready to kick anything that so much as brushed them in passing.

  “You are making people nervous,” she told him.

  That is good, said the horse. I am nervous as well.

  Vasya shrugged and resumed gawping. The roads were paved with split logs: a welcome innovation, the footing pleasantly firm. The street wound on, past potters and forges, inns and izby, until it came to a central square.

  Vasya’s stare turned to outright delight, for in this square was a market, the first she had ever seen. Merchants shouted their wares on all sides. Cloth and furs and copper ornaments, wax and pies and smoked fish…“Stay here,” Vasya said to Solovey, finding a post and looping the rope around it. “Don’t get stolen.”

  A mare with a blue harness slanted an ear at the stallion and squealed. Vasya added, thoughtfully, “Try not to entice any mares, either, although perhaps you can’t help it.”

  Vasya—

  She narrowed her eyes. “I would have left you in the woods,” she said. “Stay here.”

  The horse glared, but she was already gone, lost in delight, smelling the fine beeswax, hefting the copper bowls.

  And the faces—so many faces, and not one she knew. The novelty dizzied her. Pies and porrid
ge, cloth and leathers, beggars and prelates and artisans’ wives passed under her delighted gaze. This, she thought, is what it means to be a traveler.

  Vasya was beside a fur-merchant’s stall, a reverent fingertip stroking a pelt of sable, when she realized that one of those faces was staring back at her.

  A man stood across the width of the square, broad-shouldered and taller than any of her brothers. His kaftan dazzled with embroidery—what she could see of it beneath a cloak of white wolfskin. A careless sword-hilt thrust up over his shoulder, molded at the tang in the shape of a horse’s head. His beard was short and red as fire, and when he saw her looking back, he inclined his head.

  Vasya frowned. What would a country boy do, beneath a lord’s thoughtful look? Not blush, surely. Even if his eyes were large and liquid and drowning-dark.

  This man began crossing the crowded square, and Vasya saw that he had servants: thick, stolid men, who kept the crowd back. His eyes were fixed on her. Vasya wondered if it would be more conspicuous to stay or to flee. What could he want? She straightened her back. He crossed the whole square, accompanied by whispers, and stopped before Vasya, at the fur-merchant’s stall.

  A blush crept over Vasya’s neck. Her hair was bound in a fur-lined hood, tied about her chin, and she wore her hat over that. She was as sexless as a loaf of bread, and yet…She pressed her lips together. “Forgive me, Gospodin,” she said sturdily. “I do not know you.”

  He studied her a moment more. “Nor I you,” he said. His voice was lighter than she would have thought, very clear, the accent strange. “Boy. Though your face is familiar. What is your name?”

  “Vasilii,” said Vasya at once. “Vasilii Petrovich, and I must be getting back to my horse.”

  His eyes, curiously intent, made her uncomfortable. “Must you?” he said. “I am called Kasyan Lutovich. Will you break bread with me, Vasilii?”

  Vasya was startled to find herself tempted. She was hungry, and she could not take her eyes from this tall lord, with that hint of laughter in his eyes.

  She gave herself a mental shake. What would he do if he realized she was a girl? Would he be pleased? Disappointed? Either one did not bear thinking of. “I thank you,” she said, bowing as the peasants did to her father. “But I must be home before dark.”

  “And where is home, Vasilii Petrovich?”

  “Up the river,” said Vasya. She bowed again, trying to look servile, beginning to be nervous.

  Suddenly the dark gaze released her.

  “Up the river,” he repeated. “Very well, boy. Forgive me. It seems I took you for another. God be with you.”

  Vasya piously made the sign of the cross, bowed, and made her escape, heart beating fast. Whether that was from his stare or his questions, she could not have said.

  She found Solovey, thoroughly irritable, standing where she had left him. The mare was being dragged away by her owner, tail high, more irritable still.

  A honeycake (bought from a glorious stall all wreathed in steam) restored Solovey’s good humor. Vasya mounted the horse now, eager to leave. Though the red-haired lord had gone, his thoughtful stare seemed to hang before her eyes, and the din of the city had begun to hurt her head.

  She was only a little way from the city gate when she happened to turn her head to look through a gaily-painted archway. Behind the archway lay an inn-yard, in which there stood, unmistakably, a bathhouse.

  All at once, Vasya’s aching head and chilled limbs reasserted themselves. She stared into the yard with longing. “Come on,” she said to Solovey. “I want a bath. I’ll find you some hay and a bowl of porridge.”

  Solovey loved porridge, so he merely gave her a resigned look when she slid down his shoulder. Vasya marched boldly in, pulling the horse behind her.

  Neither of them noticed the small, blue-lipped boy who detached himself from the shadow of the overhanging buildings and darted off.

  A woman came from the kitchen, gap-toothed and fat with the remains of summer’s bounty. Her face had a rose’s sere beauty, when it is past its best and the petals are yellowing. “What will you have, boy?” she asked.

  Vasya licked her lips and spoke up boldly, like the boy Vasilii Petrovich. “Grain and stabling for my horse,” she said. “Food and a bath for myself. If you please.”

  The lady waited, arms crossed. Vasya, realizing that something must be traded for these delights, reached into a pocket and handed the inn-wife a piece of silver.

  The woman’s eyes grew round as cart-wheels and her manner at once softened. Vasya realized that she had given too much, but it was too late. The inn-yard was flung into motion. Vasya led Solovey into the tiny stable (he would allow no stablehand near him). The stallion suffered himself to be tied for show to the common rail and was even sweetened by another honeycake and a flake of hay, brought tremblingly by the stable-lad.

  “My horse must have a bowl of porridge, still warm,” Vasya told the boy. “And leave him alone otherwise.” She strode out of the stable with a fair show of confidence. “He bites.”

  Solovey obligingly laid his ears back, whereupon the stable-lad squeaked and ran for porridge.

  Vasya took off her cloak in the well-kept kitchen and sat down on the bench beside the oven, blessing the heat. Why not stay here the night—or three? she wondered. I am in no hurry.

  The food came in waves: cabbage soup and hot bread, smoked fish with the head on, porridge and pasty, and eggs cooked hard. Vasya ate until even the stolid inn-wife’s eyes misted at the hunger of growing boys. She gave Vasya a great slab of milk baked with honey to eat with her mug of beer.

  When at last Vasya sagged on the bench, the woman tapped her on the shoulder and told her the bath was ready.

  The bathhouse was only two little rooms, dirt-floored. Vasya stripped in the outer room, pushed open the door to the inner room, and breathed greedily of the heat. In a corner of this room stood a round oven made all of stone, with a fire lit and drawing. Vasya ladled water onto the rocks and steam billowed up in a great concealing fog. She sank delightedly onto a bench and closed her eyes.

  A soft scraping noise came from the vicinity of the door. Vasya’s eyes shot open.

  A little naked creature stood just inside the threshold. His beard floated like steam, framing his red cheeks. When he smiled, the eyes disappeared into the folds of his face.

  Vasya watched him warily. This could be no other than the bannik, the bathhouse-guardian, and banniki could be both kind and quick to anger.

  “Master,” she said politely, “forgive my intrusion.” This bannik was strangely gray; his fat little body looked more like smoke than flesh.

  Perhaps, Vasya thought, towns do not agree with him.

  Or perhaps the constant church-bell reminded folk too often that banniki should not exist. The thought made her sad.

  But this bannik still considered her in silence, with small, clever eyes, and Vasya knew what she must do next. She got up and poured out some hot water from the bucket on the stove, broke off a good birch-branch and laid it before him, then added more water to the rocks on the seething oven.

  The chyert, still unspeaking, smiled at her, climbed up to the other bench, and lay back in companionable silence. His cloudy beard writhed with the steam. Vasya decided to take his silence for permission to stay. Her eyelids drooped shut again.

  Perhaps a quarter-hour later, she was sweating freely, and the steam had begun to die down. She was about to go drench herself in cold water when the squeal of a furious stallion ripped through her heat-sodden senses. A resounding crash followed; it sounded as though Solovey had come bodily through the stable wall. Vasya came gasping upright.

  The bannik was frowning.

  A scraping noise at the outer door, and then the sound of the inn-wife’s voice, “Yes, a boy with a big bay horse, but I don’t see why you have to—”

  Thick silence followed the inn-wife’s outraged shriek. The bannik bared its foggy teeth. Vasya was on her feet and reaching for the door. But be
fore she could lift the latch, a heavy step sounded on the floor of the outer room.

  Stark naked, she stared wildly around the little shed. But there was only one door, and no windows.

  The door thundered open. At the last instant Vasya shook her hair forward, so that it provided meager concealment. A bar of watery daylight pierced her flinching eyes; she stood sweating in nothing but her hair.

  The man at the door took a moment to pick her out of the steam. A look of surprise crossed his face, then one of oafish delight.

  Vasya pressed herself against the far wall, terrified, mortified, the inn-wife’s shriek still ringing in her ears. Outside, Solovey bugled again, and there was more shouting.

  Vasya struggled to think. Perhaps the man would leave her an opening to dart around him. A voice in the anteroom and a second hulking figure answered that question.

  “Well,” said the second man, looking startled, but not displeased. “This is not a boy at all but a maiden—unless it’s a water-nymph. Shall we find out which?”

  “I go first,” his companion retorted, not taking his eyes from Vasya. “I found her.”

  “Well, then, catch her, and don’t be all day about it,” said the second man. “We have that boy to find.”

  Vasya bared her teeth, hands shaking, mind blank with panic.

  “Come here, girl,” said the first man, wiggling his fingers as though she were a dog. “Come here. Relax. I’ll be good to you.”

  Vasya was calculating chances, wondering whether, if she flung herself on the first man, he might fall against the oven. She had to get to Solovey. Her hair fell a little away from her throat and the jewel gleamed between her breasts. The first man’s eye fell on it, and he licked his lips. “Where’d you steal that?” he said. “Well, never mind, I’ll have it, too. Come here.” He took a step forward.

  She tensed to spring. But she had forgotten the bannik.

  A gush of hot water came flying out of nowhere and doused the man from head to heel. He fell back screaming, tripped on the red-hot oven, struck his head with a crack, and went limp, sizzling horribly.