King Stakh's Wild Hunt (25 page)

Everything turned dark before my eyes, and when I came to, the horsemen had vanished.

Throughout the marshes spread a frightful, inhuman cry filled with terror, anger and despair – the devil knows what else. But I felt no fright. By the way, I have never ever been afraid of anything since that time. All the most awful things that I met with after those days seemed a mere trifle in comparison.

Carefully, as a snake, I crept up to the dead body darkening in the grass. I remember that I feared an ambush, was myself thirsting to kill, that I crept on, coiling and wriggling in the autumn grass, taking advantage of every hollow, every hillock. I also remember to this very day, how tasty was the smell of the absinthe, how the thyme smelled, what transparent blue shadows lay on the Earth. How good was life even in this awful place! But here a man had to wriggle and coil like a snake in the grass, instead of breathing freely this cold, invigorating air, watching the moon, chest straightened, walking on his hands out of sheer happiness, kissing the eyes of his beloved.

The moonlight was brushing over Bierman’s dead face. His large meek eyes were bulging, on the distorted face an expression of inhuman suffering.

But why had they killed him? And why him? Wasn’t he guilty? But I was certain that he was.

Oh! How bitter, how fragrant the smell of the thyme! Herbs, even dying, smell bitter and fragrant.

At that very moment I instinctively, not yet comprehending what was wrong, turned back. I had crept rather far away when I heard footsteps. Two persons were walking there. I sneaked under a large weeping willow, got up on my feet, merging with the trunk so as the men would not notice me and, pulling myself up with my hands, climbed into the tree and hid among its branches like an enormous tree frog.

Two phantoms came up to the murdered man. The moon was shining directly on them, but their faces were hidden behind pieces of dark cloth. Strange figures they made. Dressed in very old fashioned boots and coats with long capes over them, with long hair over which they wore some kind of a head gear made of woven strips of leather such as could have been seen in the Vilnia museum. They came up closer and bent down over Bierman’s corpse. Fragments of their conversation reached my ears:

“Both fell for one and the same bait... Likol... Ha, ha! How they believed this childish nickname. Both, that brave young one and this pig here. Likol... Likol’s paid them.”

And suddenly one of them exclaimed in surprise:

“Look, Patsuk, this isn’t him!”

“What do you mean, not him?”

“I am telling you this isn’t him. This... this is that queer fish, the manager of the Yanovsky’s estate.”

“What the hell are you saying? Ah, anyway, hardly a problem.”

“For this ‘hardly a problem’, mate,” said the second one darkly, “Likol will have our heads cut off. It’s bad, brother. Two men dead – horrible! The authorities might become interested in this.”

“But why did he show up instead of the other one?”

The second man did not answer. They left the corpse under the tree in which I was sitting. Had I wished it, I could have let my feet down and stood on the head of each one of them, as I chose, or else, I could have shot twice from my revolver. At such a distance a child would have hit the mark. I was trembling with excitement, but the voice of cold reason told me that I must not do that – I would scare away the rest of the gang. To put an end to the Hunt, one must do it with one hit! I had, as it was, already committed too many blunders, and should yet Nadzeya Yanovsky perish in addition to this all – then the only thing left for me would be to go to the Giant’s Gap, jump into it, and hear the wild roar of the air escaping from out of the swamp over my head.

“Why does he hate this Belaretsky so much?” asked the one called Patsuk.

“I think because Belaretsky wants to marry young Yanovsky. And then the castle will slip out of Likol’s hands.”

“What does he need it for anyway? It’s a moulding coffin, not a castle.”

“Well, it’s not that you don’t have a point, but... This coffin may be of no use to the Yanovskys even though it’s a family estate, still for an outsider the castle has great value. And he is, in addition, in love with antiquity, in his sleep he dreams of being the owner of a tremendous castle, a castle like his ancestors once had.”

They stopped talking, then a light flashed and curls of tobacco smoke began creeping up to me. It was already clear to me that those standing there were local aristocrats. Their crude local speech, coarse and infested with words of Polish origin, was hurting my ear. The voices, however, seemed familiar to me.

“It seems,” growled Patsuk after a lengthy pause, “that there’s yet one more reason for this – the serfs.”

“Right you are. And if we kill this one, too, they’ll quiet down, like mice under a broom. For they’ve become too impudent. The recent uprising, the murder of Haraburda’s steward. Looks impudent. Look at them, now particularly bold after the arrival of that Svetsilovich. The skunk lived here only one month, but had done more harm than a fire. He got four serfs out of the hands of the court and complained about two nobles. Things got worse since this Belaretsky has appeared here, now no life at all. Belaretsky goes to their huts, writes down foolish stories. Well, no matter, they’ll grow quiet, the boors will, if we also strangle this betrayer of our gentry... If only we knew who the leader of these brazen fellows is. I’ll not forgive him my burnt haystacks.”

“I think that I might know who he is – Ryhor, Kulsha’s watchman. What an ugly mug, like a wolf’s. He has no respect for anybody.”

“Never mind, he’ll be belching too, soon.”

Again they were silent. Then one of them said:

“Truth be told, I’m sorry for Miss Yanovsky. To drive such a woman to madness or to kill her... stupid, a stupid thing to do. People used to kiss the feet of such a woman like herself. You remember, don’t you how she danced at the ball in that very old fashioned dress, floating along like a swan?”

“Yes, and our master regrets it,” the other one said. “But it can’t be helped.”

And he suddenly burst out laughing.

“Why are you laughing?”

“We got the wrong guy! We are out of luck, but he is even more so. You remember how Roman screamed when he was driven into the bog? He said that he would reach us from his grave. But, as you see, he’s keeping quiet.”

And they walked away from the tree.

I heard Patsuk pronouncing in his bass voice:

“Never mind, we’ll soon visit this one, too.”

I slipped down from the tree without making any noise and moved on after them. My feet stepped noiselessly on the grass and here and there I again crept.

And, of course, again I turned out to be a fool, having neglected the fact that they might have come on horses. They hid behind the shrubs and in fear of running into them I slowed down. The following instant I heard the tramp of horses’ hoofs.

When I came out onto the road, in the distance I saw two horsemen driving their horses madly south-westward away from Roman’s cross.

I returned to my sad thoughts. Having learned that they were hunting Lady Yanovsky and me, that no mercy could be expected, I allowed two bandits make their escape, and also I had been so cruelly mistaken about Bierman. I was convinced that his was a suspicious character, he had opened a letter addressed to me, and for some reason or other went to this dreadful place where he met his death. In itself the fact of this death pushed into the background the rest of his sins from me. But I had learned a great deal from the conversation that I had overheard and, first and foremost, now I knew one of the Wild Hunt. The story about the burnt haystacks gave him away. The haystacks that had been burnt had belonged to Mark Stakhievich. I had seen him at the drunken revel at Dubatowk’s place. And it was this man who had been Varona’s second. Well, let’s say I had been mistaken as to Bierman, but there’s no mistake, it seems to me, about Varona. And he shall be mine. Only now greater determination is necessary.

And late in the evening King Stakh’s Wild Hunt appeared again. Again it howled, wailed, cried in an inhuman voice:

“Roman of the last generation, come out! We have come. We shall put an end to all! Then we shall rest. Roman! Roman!”

And again, lying hidden in the bushes at the entrance, I shot at the flying shadows of horsemen that flashed by at the end of the lane lit up by a misty moon. When I shot the first time, the horses threw themselves into the thicket and disappeared, as if they had never even been. It resembled a horrible dream...

It was necessary to put an end to things. I recalled Mark Stakhievich’s words spoken beneath the tree, concerning Roman’s promise that after his death he would give away the murderer, and I thought that Roman might have left some clue in the house or at the place of his death. A clue that even Ryhor’s vigilant eye had overlooked.

And when Ryhor came we hurried together to the place where Roman had been murdered. I am not a bad walker, but I could hardly keep up with this leggy figure. It might have seemed, looking at him, that Ryhor was walking slowly, but his movements were measured, and his feet he placed not as ordinary people do, but with his toes turned inward: all born hunters walk that way. By the way, it has been observed that this makes every step approximately one inch longer. Along the way I told him about the conversation between Mark Stakhievich and some Patsuk.

“Varona’s men,” Ryhor angrily growled. And then added: “But we had thought that ‘Likol’ is the beginning of a surname. You, sir, hadn’t asked the right question. ‘Likol’ is evidently a nickname. You must ask Miss Yanovsky who is called that way. If Svetsilovich knew this nickname and, perhaps, even Bierman, it means that she must also know it.”

“I asked her.”

“You asked her about a surname, said that ‘Likol’ was its beginning, but not that it’s a nickname.”

Long story short, we approached the well known place which I have twice described, the place where Nadzeya’s father had perished. We sought all over in the dry grass, although it was stupid to look for anything in it after two years. And finally we came up to a place where there was a precipice, not a large one, over the quagmire.

Over the abyss a rather small stump met our sight sticking out from the ground, the remnant of the trunk of a tree that had grown there long ago, its roots now spreading throughout the abyss like mighty snakes, roots reaching downwards into the quagmire, as if there to quench their thirst, roots simply hanging in the air.

I asked Ryhor to recall whether Roman’s hands had been visible over the quagmire.

Ryhor’s lowered his eyes, trying to remember:

“Indeed, they were. The right one was even stretched out, he must have wanted to catch hold of the roots, but couldn’t reach them.”

“But perhaps he simply threw something there where a hole is visible under the roots?”

“Let’s look.”

And holding onto the roots, and breaking our finger nails, we let ourselves down almost into the very mire, hardly able to hold onto the small slippery ledges of the steep slope. A hole did indeed turn out to be under the roots, but there was nothing in it.

I was about to climb up to the top, but Ryhor stopped me:

“Stupid we are. If there really was something here, then it is already under a layer of silt. He could have thrown something, but you know, two years have passed, the soil there in the hole would have crumbled and buried it.”

We began scratching the caked silt with our fingers, emptying it out of the hole, and – believe it or not, soon my fingers hit on something hard. In the palm of my hand lay a cigarette case made of maple wood. There was nothing else in the hole.

We climbed out and carefully wiped off from the cigarette case the reddish silt, mixed with clay. In the cigarette case we found a piece of white cloth which Roman had evidently torn out from his shirt with his teeth. And on this little rag were written hardly decipherable reddish letters: “Varona mur...”

I shrugged my shoulders. The devil knows what this meant! Either evidence that Varona killed Roman, or a request to Varona to kill someone. Ryhor was looking at me.

“Well, so now it’s clear, Mr. Andrey. Varona drove him here. Tomorrow we shall take him.”

“Why tomorrow? He may come today even.”

“Today is Friday. You, sir, have forgotten this. People say: ‘Look for the cut throat in the church.’ Really too holy and godly. They kill with the name of the Holy Trinity on their lips. They will come tomorrow because they’ve lost all patience. They have got to get rid of you.” He became silent, a harsh flame blazed in his eyes. “Tomorrow, at last, I’ll bring the muzhyks. With pitchforks. And we’ll give you one, too. If you’re with us, then you’re with us to the end. We’ll lie in wait at the torn down cross. We’ll finish them off, all of them. To the very roots, the devil’s seed.”

We went together to Marsh Firs and there we learned that Miss Nadzeya was not alone. Mr. Haraburda was with her. Yanovsky had been avoiding me lately, and when we met she would turn her eyes away, eyes that had grown dark and were as sad as autumn water.

Therefore I asked the housekeeper to call her out into the lower hall where Ryhor was sombrely looking at St. Yuri, himself as powerful and tall as the statue. Lady Yanovsky came in and Ryhor, ashamed of his dirty footprints all over the floor, was hiding his feet behind an armchair. But his voice when he addressed her was as formerly, rough, though somewhere deep down within him, something trembled.

“Listen, clever Miss. We have found King Stakh. It’s Varona. Give me a pair of guns. Tomorrow we’ll put an end to him.”

“And by the way,” I said, “I was mistaken when I asked you whether you knew a person whose surname began with ‘Likol’. Now I want to ask you whether you know a person whose nickname
is
Likol, simply Likol. He is the most dangerous man in the gang, perhaps its leader even.”

“No!” she screamed suddenly, her hands clutching at her breast. Her eyes widened, frozen with horror. “No! No!”

“Who is he?” Ryhor asked darkly.

“Be merciful! Have pity on me! That’s impossible... He is so kind hearted and tender. He used to hold Svetsilovich and me on his knees. Our childish tongues at that time couldn’t pronounce his name, we distorted it and that gave birth to the nickname by which we called him only among ourselves. Few people knew this.”