King Stakh's Wild Hunt (6 page)

I took her hand and pressed it hard, desiring to bring the girl back to her senses, to somehow divert her thoughts from the horrors she was speaking about as if in her sleep.

“You mustn’t worry. As far as that goes, I’ve also become interested in this. There’s no place for apparitions in the Steam Age. I swear that the two weeks left for me to spend here, I shall devote to solving this mystery. The devil with it, such nonsense! But one thing, you mustn’t be afraid.”

She smiled faintly:

“Oh! Don’t mind me... I’m accustomed to it. This kind of a parade goes on here every night.”

And again the same expression on her face that had spoiled it so, and the one I couldn’t understand. It was fright, chronic, horrible fright. Not the fright that makes one’s hair stand on end for a moment, but the fright that finally becomes a habitual state impossible to get rid of even in one’s sleep. This unfortunate girl would have been good looking, were it not for this constant, terrible fear.

And notwithstanding the fact that I was beside her, she moved up still closer to me to avoid seeing the darkness behind me.

“Oh! Mr. Belaretsky, it’s dreadful. What am I guilty of, why must I answer for the sins of my forefathers? An excessive weight has been laid on the weak shoulders of mine. It’s a clinging weight and a heavy one. If you could know how much blood, and dirt, how many murders, orphans’ tears are on every coat-of-arms of the gentry! How many murdered or frightened to death, how many unfortunates! We haven’t the right to exist, even the most honest of us, the very best of us. The blood in our veins is not blue, it’s dirty blood. Don’t you think that we are all up to the twelfth generation responsible for this and must answer for it, answering with suffering, poverty and death? We were indifferent to the people that suffered tortures side by side with us and from us, we considered the people cattle, we poured out wine, while they shed their blood. They had nothing but bad bread. Mr. Dubatowk, my neighbour, once came to my father and told him an anecdote about a peasant woman who took her son to the priest and the priest treated them to “kuldoons”, those delicious baked potato pancakes stuffed with meat and cheese. The child asked what they were. The mother with that innate peasant delicacy pushed him with her foot under the table and whispered: “Hush!” The child ate up what was on his plate, then sighed and said quietly: “And I’ve eaten a dozen of these hushes.” Everybody who heard this anecdote laughed, but I was ready to slap Dubatowk in the face. There’s nothing funny in the fact that children have never seen “kuldoons”, have never eaten any meat. Their hair is thin, their legs are crooked, at the age of fourteen they are still children, but at twenty-five they are ancient, their faces wrinkled and old. No matter how you feed them, they give birth to the same kind of children, if they do, at all, have any. They answered us with rebellions, savage rebellions, because they suffered unheard of wrongs. And then we had them executed. This one here on the wall, with a beaver collar, tortured his cousin to death because he had deserted to the detachment of Vasil Vashchyla, the leader of the 1740 rebellion.

His cousin’s name was Aghei Hrynkievich–Yanovsky. How indifferent we were to everybody and everything. The same two-footed people as we are, they lived on grass, although our land is generous and bountiful. We bartered our land, sold it to greedy neighbours, to anybody who wanted it, while the peasants loved the land like their own mother, and starved for a lack of bread. And who will blame them when they take up their pitchforks and thrust them into our chests? It seems to me that even after a hundred years when we have all died out, if the descendants of these unfortunates accidentally find one of the gentry – they will have the right to kill him. The Earth is not for us.”

I looked at her in astonishment. This vehement inspired outburst made her face look unusual. And I suddenly understood she was not at all ugly, not at all! Here before me was an unusual girl, surprisingly beautiful, with a mixture of madness and beauty. Gracious me, what beauty it was! In all probability such were our ancient “prophetesses” who fought in the detachments of Murashka and the Peasant Christ, the leaders of the rebellions around Miensk and in Prineman in the 17th century. It was an unearthly beauty, a tormented face with bitter lips and enormous dry eyes.

And suddenly it all disappeared. Again here in front of me was sitting the previous creature, puny and starved. Only now I knew her true worth.

“Even so, I do not want to die, not at all. How I wish to see the sun, the meadows, so different from those I know, and to hear childish laughter. My desire for life is great, although I haven’t the right to live. It is only the dream of life that has given me the strength to endure the experiences of the last two years, even though there is no way out for me. These steps that we hear here at night, the Little Man, the Lady-in-Blue... I know that I shall die. And this is King Stakh’s doing. If not for this Wild Hunt of his – we should probably yet live. The Hunt will kill us.”

If previously I had been almost entirely indifferent to this emaciated child of the gentry, after her passionate outburst I understood that some miracle had occurred and changed her into a real person. I felt it necessary to help her.

And thus, lying with my eyes open in the darkness of the night, I thought almost till the very morning, that if yet yesterday I had decided to leave this abominable place and this high-born hostess of mine within two days, I should now remain here a week, two weeks, a month, as long as it takes to find the answer to all these secrets and return to this lady the peace she deserves.

The first thing that I did the following day was to break down the board from the door that was fastened with nails and in which the Little Man, if he were a being of flesh and blood, could have hidden himself. The nails were rusty, panels on the door were whole and a layer of dust three fingers deep covered the room. No one could have hidden himself there and I nailed the door up again. Then I examined all rooms in the other wing and was convinced that no one could have hidden himself there either. Above the hall where I had heard steps, there was an attic in which there were no traces of any footsteps either. To the right there was a door into my room and the room of the mistress of the house, behind which there was a blank wall and behind that the park.

My head was spinning from this all. Could it possibly be that something supernatural really existed in the world? I, a confirmed atheist, could never accept that.

I decided to go to the library and find out at last whatever this Wild Hunt was, about which it was inconvenient for me to question the mistress of the house. Incidentally, I had hopes of finding some old plan of the house there, and to be able afterwards to begin making a methodical search. I knew sometimes special mechanisms were built into the walls of old castles, so-called “listeners-in”, that is, secret gaps. In them “voices” – specially shaped pitchers – were usually bricked up to amplify sounds. Thanks to them, the master of the house being at one end of the house could distinctly hear what his guests or servants were saying at the other end.

Perhaps something of the kind was to be found here, too. Some servant or other walked about at night on the ground floor, and his steps resounded up above. It was a faint hope, but truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.

With that in mind, I made my way to the library which was between the ground and first floors in a separate wing.

Seldom had I seen such neglected rooms. The parquet was broken here and there, the enormous windows were covered with dust, the chandeliers, hanging from the ceilings, were in dusty covers. This was, perhaps, the most ancient part of the house, around which the rest of the castle was later built. This thought struck me when I saw a strange room just in front of the library. And here, too, I found a fireplace, but such an enormous one, that an aurochs could have been roasted in it, and nests for the spits even remained in its walls. The windows were small, made of stained glass, the walls were crudely plastered, and the ceiling was crossed by heavy, square, carved beams all covered with smoke. On the walls hung crude old weapons.

In a word, this was a room of “the good old times” when the masters of the house, being the Polish landowners, together with their serfs gathered in one room and sat beside the fire. The women of the household and the servants would be spinning yarn while the master would be playing dice or another game “Twelve Fingers” with the boys. Those idyllic old times!

Forgive me, my dear readers, that I cannot omit describing even a single room. It can’t be helped, in his old age a man becomes garrulous. And in addition, you have never seen and never will see anything the like of this, and perhaps it will be interesting to somebody.

The library was in the same style as the entrance hall. High arches, columned windows, armchairs covered with leather that now turned brown with age, enormous closets of moraine oak and books, books, and more books.

Well, how can I pass them by without saying at least a few words! My heart stops beating at these memories. Ancient parchment books, books made of the porous paper, first of its kind, books in which the paper had become yellow with time, paper smooth and glossy. Books of the 17th century which you can immediately recognize by their leather bindings. The red leather of the bindings of the 18th century; the wooden boards, bound with thin black leather, that covered the books of the 16th century.

And the titles, my God, what titles:
The Royal Roussian Catechism, An Authentic Chronicle of the Life of Yan Zbarowski, Varlaam the Indian, A Parable about Fame,
old
Six-Day
manuscripts telling of the creation of the world, collections of ancient legends,
Gesta Romanorum
consisting of two hundred stories,
Trishchan and Izota,
the Belarusian variant of
Bova, Apephegma, Speech of Mialeshka.
Full house! And there were newer books written in a mannered style, with long titles, such as
Cupid Contrives, or One Thousand Ways and Means an Adoring Lover Can Apply to Make His Beloved Consent to Love’s Greed.
Enough already, for otherwise I risk never finishing my narration. I was so carried away by the books that I did not immediately notice another person in the room with me. The man, in the meantime, got up from his armchair and was expectantly looking at me with a pleasant smile on his lips, his eyes smiling too. With one hand on his belly he was timidly holding together the sides of his house coat. We introduced ourselves:

“Andrey Belaretsky.”

“Ihnash Bierman–Hatsevich, the estate manager,” his voice was quiet, affable.

We seated ourselves. I looked at this man with great interest. What was it that held him in this awful place, this Marsh Firs? Money? But there wasn’t any. And he, as if anxious to answer my thoughts, said:

“Look at all these books. They are the ones I am living here for. I am a book lover.”

The book-lover was a small badly built man. His face, soft, gentle, too gentle for a man of mid thirties, looked so lifeless, so much like a porcelain doll. In all respects he was too “doll-like”. Large grey eyes, long eyelashes, a straight little nose, pleasantly-formed lips. Like a little shepherd on a snuff-box... And his beard hardly grew, as was the case with many Belarusians living in the unhealthy marshland.

“You are from the northern parts of Greater Miensk, aren’t you?” I asked.

“Oh, the gentleman is not mistaken, yes,” he answered. “Previously I lived in a provincial city, but now here.”

Were I asked which trait stood out most of all in this little man, I should say “old fashioned gallantry”. He was extremely well bred, this little doll-like man, bred in the spirit of that provincial gallantry of the gentry, a gallantry that makes us laugh. When you look at such people, it seems that the children of their families, while playing hide-and-seek hid themselves under their grannies’ woollen, six-pieced skirts, while grannies – not skirts – busied themselves knitting stockings or darning new socks so that they should not wear through too quickly.

This impression, however, soon vanished. Something of cruelty and puritanical standoffishness was in his eyes, in his pursed lips. But the man that he was, that could not be taken away from him. He was a real connoisseur of books. That I understood in about twenty minutes. And moreover, I became convinced that this self-taught man knew ancient literature no worse than I did, being a man with a university education.

Therefore I directed our conversation towards the subject of the “Wild Hunt”.

“Why does this subject interest you?”

“I am an ethnographer.”

“Oh, then, of course. However, I doubt whether my modest person can tell you about that in a way required by so lofty a guest. Perhaps better to allow the yellowed pages of the books to do that. The gentleman understands the literary language of the 17th century, doesn’t he?”

With an artistic movement of his thin, twice as long as normal fingers he opened one of the bookcases.

And there on my knees was an enormous volume written in a calligraphic hand in small letters turned brown with age: “The year one thousand six hundred and one knew no peace on this land. Judge Balvanovich has only just now investigated the murder – the ferocious murder – of His Worship Yanuk Babayed, committed by his serfs. And in other places, too, there was no peace. The cudgel came to the city of Vitsiebsk, to Krychaw and Mstsislaw, and here too the serfs brought death and murder and savagery. Fourteen landowners were killed, and it was said that three more were beaten so hard that it was uncertain whether they would live.”

But it is probably too long winded to copy this in full. Therefore I shall relate the contents of this legend in a simple way.

In those days it was not only the serfs who rebelled. The ancient Belarusian gentry, deeply offended by the new order, also rebelled. In the vicinity of Marsh Firs the situation was particularly restless. Here, in the Chadanowsky virgin forest, sat the lame Father Yarash Shtamet who supported the high-born Belarusian landowner Stakh Horsky, a relative through his ancestors of the Vilnia Prince Alexander. This proud young man had but one aim: to achieve independence. He had everything on his side: the royal blood which flowed in his veins and was very important at the time, the support of the Greek Orthodox Church believers and the “Forest Brethren”, the talent of a warrior, and what was most important – the awful poverty, the hopeless situation of the peasantry. The young leader was already called King throughout the entire region.