King Stakh's Wild Hunt (5 page)

My feet stepped softly along the coniferous path. Smoke came from the left and I went in the direction of the smell. Soon the trees were not so dense anymore and an overgrown wing with boarded-up windows came into view.

“About half a mile from the castle,” I thought. “If, let’s say, someone took it into his head to kill the owners – nobody would hear anything, even if a gun were fired.”

At the very windows a small cast-iron pot stood on two bricks, and an old hunchbacked woman was stirring something in it with a spoon. The stoves produced too much smoke and therefore the food was prepared in the open air until the late autumn.

And again the green but dismal alleyway of trees. I walked until I came to the place where we had entered the park the night before. The marks that our carriage had made were still visible. The forged iron fence, a surprisingly fine piece of work, had fallen down long ago, and broken into pieces it lay there thrown aside. Birch trees had grown through its curves. Behind the fence, where the alleyway turned to the left and dragged on leading to nobody knew where, lay a brown endless plain with twisted trees here and there, enormous stone boulders, and the green windows of the quagmire, into one of which we had, evidently, almost fallen yesterday. At seeing this I grew cold with terror.

A lonely crow was circling above this distressing place.

I returned home from the farmstead towards evening, so exhausted I could hardly pull myself together. I began to think that this would last forever. These brown plains, the quagmire, the people more dead than alive from feverish mania, the park that was dying of old age – all this hopeless land was nevertheless my own, my native land, covered in the day by clouds, and in the night by a wild moonlight, or else by an endless rain pouring down over it.

Nadzezhda Yanovsky awaited me in the same room and again that strange expression on her distorted face, that same indifference to her clothes. There were some changes only on the table where a late dinner was served.

The dinner was a most modest one and did not cost the mistress a kopeck, for all this food was prepared from local products. In the middle of the table stood a bottle of wine and it too was apparently from their own cellars. The rest was a firework of flowers and forms. In the middle stood a flower vase and in it two small yellow maple branches. Beside it, though probably from another set, a large silver soup bowl, a silver salt cellar, plates, several dishes. However, it was not the layout of the table that surprised me, not even that the dishes were all from different sets, darkened with age, and here and there, somewhat damaged. What surprised me was the fact that they were of ancient local workmanship.

You no doubt know that two or three centuries ago, the silver and gold dishes in Belarus were mainly of German make and were imported from Prussia. These articles, richly decorated with “twists and turns”, with figures of holy men and angels, were so sugary sweet that it was nauseating, but nothing could be done about it, it was the fashion.

But this was our own. The clumsy stocky little figures on the vase, a characteristic ornament. And the women depicted on the salt cellar had even the somewhat wide face of the local women.

There stood also two wine glasses of iridescent ancient glass which today cannot be bought even for gold. The edge of one wineglass, the one standing at my hostess’s place, was somewhat chipped.

The last and the only sun ray that day shone in through the window, lighting up in it dozens of varicoloured little lights.

The mistress had probably noticed my look and said:

“This is the last of three sets which were left by our forefather, Roman Zhysh-Yanovsky. But there is this stupid belief that the set had probably been presented to him by King Stakh.”

Today she was somehow livelier, did not even seem to be so bad-looking, she evidently liked her new role.

We drank wine and finished eating, talking almost all the time. It was a red wine, red as pomegranate, and very good. I became quite cheerful, made the mistress laugh, and two not very healthy pink spots appeared on her cheeks.

“But why did you add to the name of your ancestor this nickname ‘Zhysh’?”

“It’s an old story,” she answered, becoming gloomy again. “It seems it happened during a hunt. An aurochs charged the somewhat deaf king behind his back and the only one who saw it was Roman. He shouted: ‘Zhysh’! This in our local dialect means ‘Beware’. And the King turned about, but running aside, fell. Then Roman shot, at the risk of killing the King, and the bullet struck the aurochs in the eye. The aurochs fell down almost beside the King. After that a harquebus was added to our coat-of-arms and the nickname ‘Zhysh’ to our surname.”

“Such incidents could have occurred in those days,” I confirmed. “Forgive me, but I know nothing that concerns heraldry. The Yanovskys, it seems to me, go back to the 12th century?”

“To the 13th,” she said. “And better if they didn’t. These laws concerning one’s origin are pure foolishness, but you cannot fight them. These fireplaces, this necessity for one of the heirs to live in this house, the ban on selling it... Whereas we are actually beggars. And this house, this awful house... It is as if some curse has been put upon us. We were twice deprived of our family coat-of-arms, were persecuted. Almost none of our ancestors died a natural death. This one here in the red cloak was still alive when the church performed the funeral service over his body. This woman here with an unpleasant face, a distant relative of ours, by the way, also a distant ancestor of the writer Dostoyevsky, killed her husband and attempted the same with her step-son. She was condemned to death. It cannot be helped, all this must be paid for by descendants, and with me the Yanovsky family ends. But sometimes I ache so to lie in the warm sun, in the shade of real trees, trees that do not grow here. At times I dream of them – young, very large, airy as a green cloud. And spas, such bright, such full spas that take your breath away, that make your heart stop with happiness. But here this ugly, loathsome quagmire and gloom, these firs...”

The flames in the fireplace had brought a slight flush to her face. Behind the windows the dark night had already fallen and a heavy shower seemed to have begun.

“Oh Mr. Belaretsky! I am so happy that you are here, that a living person is sitting at my side. Usually I sing aloud on such evenings, though I don’t really know any good songs, all are old ones from the manuscripts gathered by my grandfather. They are full of horrors. A man leaves a bloody track on the dewy grass, a bell that was long ago drowned in the quagmire tolls at night, just tolls and tolls on and on...”

The days come and the days go,

she began her song, her voice deep and trembling.

The days come and the days go,
A shadow looms over the land.
Skazko and Kirdziay, the Rat,
Raging, fight day and night.
Blood everywhere flows,
Flames spread, steel rings.
Falls our Skazko and calls:
“Where are you, my friends?”
Unheard are his cries.
But Lubka Yurzheuna hears.
Gathers her brethren.
Mighty and brave
Far and wide
They stormily rude
To the distant red marshes.

“The rest is bad, I don’t wish to sing it. Only the last lines are good:”

And they loved each other
And in concord they lived
While over the land
Sunshine did reign
Till into the ground
Together were laid.

I was touched, to the very depths of my soul. Such a feeling can arise in a person only when he deeply believes what he is singing about. And what a wonderful song of olden times!

But she suddenly buried her face in her hands and began to sob. Upon my word of honour, my heart bled. I couldn’t help it – I have an inexcusable and deep compassion for people.

Today I don’t remember the exact words I found then to comfort her. I must say, dear reader, that up to this point in my story, I have been a severe realist. You must know that I do not very much like novels in the spirit of Madam Radcliffe, and would be the first to disbelieve, were anybody to tell me the things that took place later on. And therefore the tone of my story is going to change significantly.

Believe me, were this a product of my imagination, I’d have invented something entirely different. I sure hope to have a good taste, but not a single novelist with even a slightest amount of self-respect would dare to offer serious people anything like what I am about to tell you.

Mind you, I am relating the simple truth, as I mustn’t lie. The subject concerns me personally, so important it is for me. Therefore I shall tell everything just as it happened.

We were sitting silent for some time; the fire was dying out and darkness had settled in the corners of the enormous room when I looked at her and was frightened: so wide were her eyes, so strangely bent her head. And her lips so pale, they were invisible.

“Don’t you hear anything?”

I listened. My hearing is very good, but only after a minute did I indeed hear what she had heard. Somewhere in the hall, to our left, the parquet was creaking under someone’s footsteps.

Someone was walking through the long, endless passages. The steps quieted down for a moment, then were heard again. Tap, tap, tap... went those stamping feet.

“Miss Nadzeya, what on Earth’s the matter with you? What’s happened?”

“Let me be! It’s that Little Man! He’s here again, coming after my soul!”

From all this I understood only that somebody was amusing himself with stupid jokes, that somebody was frightening a woman. I paid no attention when she seized me by the sleeve in an attempt to hold me back. I grabbed the poker from the fireplace and rushed off down the steps into the hall. This took only a moment and I opened the door with my foot.

Half of the tremendous hall was drowning in darkness, but I could very well see that no one was there. Nobody was there! Only the footsteps were there, they sounded as previously, somewhat uncertain, but quite loud. They were near me, but little by little they moved farther on to the other end of the hall.

What could I do? Fight an invisible person? I knew that would come to naught, but I thrust the poker straight into the space where I heard the steps. The poker cut the emptiness and with a loud ring fell to the floor.

Funny? At that moment, as you may guess, I was far from laughing. In answer to my vainglorious knightly thrust something groaned, followed by two, three steps – and vanished in silence.

Only at that moment did I remember that my hostess was alone in that tremendous, poorly-lit room, so I hastened back to her.

I had expected to find her unconscious, gone mad with fright, to have died, anything except what I did see. Lady Yanovsky was standing at the fireplace, her face severe, gloomy, almost calm, with that same incomprehensible expression in her eyes.

“In vain you rushed off there,” she said. “Of course, you saw nothing. I know, because only I see him and sometimes the housekeeper does, too. And Bierman has seen him.”

“Who is ‘he’?”

“The Little Man of Marsh Firs.”

“But what is he, what does he want?”

“I don’t know. He appears when somebody in Marsh Firs must die a sudden death. He may wander around a whole year, but in the end he’ll get what he’s after.”

“It’s possible,” I joked unsuccessfully, “He’ll keep wandering for yet another seventy years, before your great grandchildren bury you.”

She threw back her head.

“I hate those who get married. And don’t dare to jest on this subject. Eight of my ancestors perished in this way. They are the only ones about whom we have records, and the Little Man is always mentioned there.”

“Miss Yanovsky, don’t worry, but our ancestors believed, by the way, in witches, too. And there have always been people ready to swear they had seen them.”

“And my father? My father? This was not notes, this I heard, this I saw myself. My father was an atheist, but he believed in the Little Man, even he believed until the very day when the Wild Hunt put an end to him. I hear him, you understand? Here you cannot convince me otherwise. These steps were heard in our castle almost every day before my father’s death.”

What could I do? Convince her that it had been auditory hallucinations? But I did not suffer from any hallucinations. I had distinctly heard steps and groans this time. To say that it was some cunning acoustic effect? I do not know whether that would have helped, although half the rumours about ghosts in old houses are based on just such tricks. For example, the famous ghost in the Luxemburg Palace in Dubrowna was finally discovered in the shape of a vessel filled with mercury and gold coins which some unknown joker had bricked up about a hundred years earlier in the flue on the sunny side. No sooner did the night’s cold make way for the sun’s warmth, than a wild howling and rustling arose in all the rooms on the second floor.

However, is it possible to make a foolish little girl change her mind? Therefore I asked her with an air of importance:

“But who is he, what is he like, this Little Man of Marsh Firs?”

“I saw him three times and each time from afar. Once it was just before the death of my father. The other two, not long ago. I’ve also heard him perhaps a hundred times. Nor was I ever frightened, except perhaps the last time... just a little, a very little. I went up to him, but he disappeared. It is really a very little man, he reaches up to my chest, skinny, and reminds one of a starved child. His eyes are sad, his hands are very long, and his head is unnaturally long. He is dressed as people used to dress 200 years ago, only in the western manner. His clothes are green. He usually hides from me around the corner of the hall and by the time I run up to him, he disappears, although the hall ends in a blank wall. There is only one room there, and it is bolted with long nails.”

I felt sorry for her. An unfortunate creature, she was very likely going mad.

“And that is not all,” she went on. “It’s perhaps three hundred years since the Lady-in-Blue has been seen in this castle – you see that one there in the portrait. The family belief is that she has quenched her thirst for revenge, but I do not think so. She was not that kind of a person. When they dragged her in 1501 to her execution, she shouted to her husband: ‘My bones shall find no peace until the last snake of your race has perished!’ And then for almost a hundred years there was no escape from her. It was either a plague or a goblet of poison poured by some unknown person, or death caused by nightmares. She stopped taking revenge only on the great grandchildren... But now I know that she is keeping her word. Not long ago Bierman saw her on the balcony that is boarded up, and others saw her too. I alone have not seen her, but that is her habit – in the beginning she appears before others, but not to the person she is after. That she does only at the hour of his death... My family will end with me. I know that. Not long to wait for it. They shall be satisfied.”