The Bear and the Nightingale(37)

Vasya kept her pledge. It was never much. A withered apple. A gnawed crust. A drip of honey-wine, carried on her fingers, or in her mouth. But the vazila came for it eagerly, and when he ate, the horses quieted. The days darkened and drew in; the snow fell as though to seal them up in whiteness. But the vazila grew pink and content; the wintertime stable grew drowsy as of old.

Just as well. The season was a long one, and in January the cold deepened until even Dunya could remember nothing like it.

The remorseless winter dusk drove folk indoors. Pyotr had plenty of time to suffer the sight of his family’s pinched faces. They huddled by the fire, chewing at bread and strips of dried meat, taking turns adding wood to the blaze. Even by night, they did not dare let it burn low. The older folk murmured that their firewood burned too fast, that it took three logs to keep the flames high, where before they had needed one. Pyotr and Kolya decried that as nonsense. But their woodpiles dwindled.

Midwinter had come and gone; the days lengthened once more, but the cold only worsened. It killed sheep and rabbits and blackened the fingers of the unwary. Firewood they must have in such cold, come what may, and so as their stocks ran low, the people dared the silent forest under the glare of the winter sun. It was Vasya and Alyosha, out with a pony, a sledge, and short-hafted axes, who saw the paw prints in the snow.

“Ought we go after them, Father?” Kolya asked that night. “Kill some, take their skins, and drive the rest away?” He was mending a scythe, squinting in the oven-light. His son Seryozha, stiff and silent, huddled against his mother.

Vasya had given the enormous basket of sewing a dispirited look and seized her ax and a whetstone. Alyosha shot her an amused look over the haft of his own ax.

“See?” said Father Konstantin to Anna. “Look around you. In God’s grace is your deliverance.” Anna’s eyes were fastened on his face; her sewing lay forgotten on her lap.

Pyotr wondered at his wife. She had never seemed so much at ease, though this was the bitterest winter in memory.

“I think not,” said Pyotr, in answer to his son’s question. He was inspecting his boots; in winter, holes could cost a man a foot. He put one down near the fire and picked up the other. “They are bigger than boarhounds, the wolves from the high north; it has been twenty years since they came so near.” Pyotr reached down and caressed Pyos’s gaunt head; the dog gave him a dispirited lick. “That they do so now means they are desperate, that they would hunt children if they could, or slaughter sheep under our noses. The men together might take on a pack, but it is too cold for bows; it would be spear-work, and not everyone would come back. No, we must look to our children and our livestock, and only go into the forest in daylight.”

“We might set snares,” put in Vasya, over the scrape of her whetstone.

Anna gave her a dark look.

“No,” Pyotr said. “Wolves are not rabbits; they would smell you on the trap, and no one will risk the forest on such a small chance of gain.”

“Yes, Father,” Vasya said, meekly.

That night was deadly cold. They all huddled together on top of the oven, packed like salted fish and covered with every blanket they possessed. Vasya slept badly; her father snored, and Irina’s small, sharp knees dug into her back. She tossed and turned, tried not to kick Alyosha, and at last, near midnight, fell into a shallow sleep. She dreamed of wolves howling, of winter stars swallowed up by warm clouds, of a man with red hair, a woman on horseback, and last of a pale, heavy-jawed man with a look of hunger and malice, who leered and winked his single good eye. She woke up gasping, in the bitter hour before dawn, and saw a figure cross the room, outlined by the light of the banked oven-fire.

It is nothing, she thought: a dream, the kitchen cat. But then the figure paused, as though it sensed her regard. It turned a fraction. Vasya hardly dared to breathe, for she saw its face, a pale scrawl in the dim light. The eyes were the color of winter ice. She drew breath—to speak or to scream—but then the figure was gone. Daylight was filtering in round the kitchen door and from the village there came a wailing cry.

“It is Timofei,” said Pyotr, naming a village boy. Pyotr had risen before dawn to see to his stock. Now he came briskly through the door, stamping snow from his boots and brushing away the ice that had formed in his beard. He was hollow-eyed from cold and sleeplessness. “He died in the night.” The kitchen filled with exclamations. Vasya, half-awake on the oven, remembered the figure that had passed in the darkness. Dunya said nothing at all, but went about her baking, lips set. Her glance flicked often and worriedly from Vasya to Irina. Winter was cruel to the young.

At midmorning, the women gathered in the bathhouse to wrap his wasted body. Vasya, spilling into the hut behind her stepmother, caught a glimpse of Timofei’s face: he was glassy-eyed, the tears frozen on his thin cheeks. His mother clutched the stiffening body to her, whispering to him, ignoring her neighbors. Neither patience nor reason would draw the child from her, and when the women tugged him forcibly from her arms, she began to scream.

The room dissolved into chaos. The mother flew at her neighbors, crying for her son. Most of the women had children themselves; they quailed at the look in her eyes. The mother clawed blindly, scrabbling. The room was too small. Vasya thrust Irina out of harm’s way and seized the reaching arms. She was strong, but slender, and the mother was wild with grief. Vasya clung and tried to speak. “Let go of me, witch!” screamed the woman. “Let go!” Vasya, disconcerted, loosened her grip and an elbow caught her across the face. She saw stars, and her arms fell away.