King Stakh's Wild Hunt (8 page)

“These capes are blown about by the wind behind the riders’ backs. Their lances extend upwards in the air, and they race, race like an invasion.”

“Again I must beg your pardon. But tell me, perhaps at supper at your neighbour’s you had been treated to some mead?”

“I don’t drink,” Bierman–Hatsevich compressed his lips with dignity. “And I can tell you, they didn’t even leave any imprints, and the horses’ hoofs were hidden by the fog. The King’s face was calm, lifelessly dull, dry if you wish, and quite grey, like a fog. Most importantly, they arrived at the Yanovskys’ castle that night. When I returned home I was told that at midnight the ring on the door thundered and a voice cried: “Roman of the twelfth generation, come out!”

“Why Roman?”

“Because Nadzeya, the last of Roman’s descendants, is exactly the twelfth generation.”

“I do not believe it.” I said again, resisting to the very end at seeing Bierman’s really pale face. “Give me the Yanovsky family register.”

Bierman readily dragged out and unrolled the parchment manuscript with the family tree. And indeed, eleven generations appeared in the list. From the time of Roman the Old. Below the eleventh generation, again Roman, a handwritten entry was made in small letters: “October 26th, 1870 my daughter, Nadzeya, was born. She is the last one, our twelfth generation, and my only child. Cruel fate, remove your curse from us, let only the eleventh generation perish. Have pity on this tiny bundle. Take me, if that is necessary, but let her live. She is the last of the Yanovskys, I set my hopes on you.”

“This was written by her father?” I asked, deeply moved, and I thought that I was eight years old when this little girl was born.

“Yes, by him. You see, he had a presentiment about it... His fate is a proof of the truth of the legend about King Stakh. He knew it, they all knew it, for the curse hung over these unfortunate people like an axe. One will go mad, the other will be killed for his brother’s money, and another will perish while hunting. He knew and he made preparations for it. He provided the girl with an income, though a miserly one, it’s still an income. He found guardians in good time, drew up his will. By the way, I am afraid of this autumn, many of the Yanovskys did not live to see their coming of age. Her birthday will be in two days, and the Wild Hunt has already appeared twice at the walls of the castle. Roman never left the house at night. But two years ago Nadzeya went to visit Kulsha’s wife, a relative on her mother’s side. The girl stayed there till late. Roman was very nervous when she didn’t come home. The Kulsha’s house stood near the Giant’s Gap. He saddled his horse and rode off. The little girl returned home with Ryhor, the Kulsha’s watchman. But the master hadn’t come. He was searched for. It was autumn, however, the time when King Stakh’s Wild Hunt appeared particularly often. We followed in the tracks of the master’s horse, me being Ryhor and I. I was afraid, but Ryhor – not a bit. The tracks led along the road, then turned and began to make loops across the meadow. And Ryhor found other tracks on the side.

He is a good hunter, this Ryhor. How horrible, sir! Those tracks were made by twenty horsemen! And the horseshoes were old ones, with tridents resembling forks. Their like has not been forged here since forever. At times the track disappeared, then within twenty or thirty steps they appeared again, as if the horses had flown across the air. Then we found a wad from the master’s gun, I’d have recognized it among hundreds. Ryhor recalled that when he was carrying the little girl home, someone had fired a shot near the Gap. We drove the horses faster, for about five hours had passed; the night had grown dark before the dawn. Soon we heard a horse neighing somewhere. We came out onto a large glade overgrown with heather. Here we noticed that the horses of the Wild Hunt had begun to gallop faster. But the master’s horse had stumbled several times, apparently tired.”

Bierman’s voice became wild, and broke off. “And at the end of the glade just where the Gap begins, we saw the horse still alive. He was lying with a broken leg, screaming as terribly as if he were a man. Ryhor said that the master had to be somewhere nearby. We found his footprints, they stretched from the quagmire. I moved on in their tracks which led to the horse and disappeared right at it. Here, in the damp ground were dents as if a person had fallen there. And nothing more. No footprints nearby. The Hunt had turned about two metres or so from this pace. Either Roman had risen or else King Stakh’s horses had reached him by air and taken him away with them. We waited about half an hour, and in the darkness preceding the dawn Ryhor clapped on his forehead and ordered me to gather heather. I, a man of the gentry, obeyed this serf. At that time he had such authority over me as if he were a baron. When we had lit the heather he bent down over the footprints. “Well, what can you say, sir?” he said with an air of apparent superiority. “I don’t know why he had to go away from the quagmire, how he got there,” I answered, perplexed. Then that boor burst out laughing... “He didn’t even think of going away from the quagmire. He, Honourable Sir, he went towards it. And his feet weren’t at all turned backwards forward, as you are probably thinking. He retreated to the quagmire, from something fearful. You see, right here he hit against the ground. The horse broke his leg, and Roman flew over its head. He sprained an ankle. You see the print of his right foot is bigger and deeper, that means that he sprained his left foot. He moved backwards towards the quagmire. Let’s go there, there we shall probably see the end.”

And really, we did see the end. With his torch Ryhor lit the way for us to a precipice in the quagmire, and he said, “You see, here he slipped.” I held him by the belt, and he bent over the edge of the precipice and then called to me: “Look!” And here I saw Roman’s head sticking out from the brown, oily, dung water of the Gap and I saw his twisted hand with which he had managed to catch at some rotten tree. We dragged him out with great difficulty, but we dragged out a dead man. You see, in these marshes there are often springs in the depths of the pools, and he simply froze there. Besides that, his heart had failed him, the doctor told us afterwards. My God! The fear on his face was so terrible, a fear it was impossible to endure and remain alive! There was a kind of a bite on his hand, his collar was torn off. We tied the corpse to my saddle and rode off. Hardly had we ridden thirty paces than we saw through an opening in the forest vague shadows of floating horses. Surprisingly, there were no sounds of hoofs. And then a horn began to blow somewhere from quite another direction, and so stifled, as if coming through cotton wool. We rode on with the corpse, greatly depressed, the horses were nervous, – they sensed the dead body. And the night was, oh! What a night! And somewhere there blew the horn of the Wild Hunt. Afterwards it appeared only from time to time. Now it’s back again... The hour of vengeance has come.”

He stopped talking, burying his face in his hands, his white, artistic fingers about twice as long as the fingers of an ordinary person. I kept quiet, but suddenly I lost all patience:

“You should be ashamed of yourself. Men, grown up men, you are unable to defend your mistress? Were it even the devil himself – you should fight, damn it! And why doesn’t this Hunt appear all the time? Why hasn’t it been here since I’ve come?”

“Often though they appear, they don’t ever come on the eve of holy days or on Wednesdays and Fridays.”

“Right... Strange ghosts. How about Sundays?” The desire to give this inert, weak-willed, porcelain fellow a good slap on the face was growing ever stronger within me, for such men as him are unable to perform any kind of deed, be it good or evil. They are not people, but grass-lice that choke the flower-beds. “On St. Philip’s Day, on St. Peter’s Day they do appear if they are such holy saints, don’t they!?”

“God allows them to on Sundays, for, if you remember, it was on Sunday that Stakh was killed,” he answered quite seriously.

“So what then is He, this God of yours?” I barked at him. “Has He then bumped into the devil? You mean to say that He takes the lives of innocent girls in whose blood there is perhaps but one drop of the forefather Roman’s blood?”

Bierman was silent.

“A four thousand and ninety-sixth part of Roman’s blood flows in her veins,” I counted up. “So what is He good for, anyway, this God of yours?”

“Don’t blaspheme!” He groaned, frightened. “Whose part are you taking?”

“Too much devilry is going on here, even for such a house...” I didn’t give in. “The Little Man, the Lady–in–Blue, and here, in addition, the Wild Hunt of King Stakh. The house has been surrounded from without and within. May it burn, this house!”

“M-m, to be frank with you, Honourable Sir, I don’t believe in the Little Man or the Lady.”

“Everybody has seen them.”

“I haven’t seen them, I’ve heard them. And the nature of the sound is unknown to us. And add to that the fact that I am a nervous person.”

“The mistress has seen him.”

Bierman lowered his eyes modestly. He hesitated and said quietly:

“I cannot believe everything she says... She... well, in a word, it seems to me that her poor head hasn’t been able to cope with all these horrors. She... m–m... she’s peculiar in her psychic condition, if not to say anything more.”

The same had previously occurred to me, therefore I kept silent.

“But I, too, heard steps.”

“Wild fancy. Simply an acoustic illusion. Hallucinations, Honourable Sir.”

We sat in silence. I felt that I myself was beginning to lose my sanity with that entire hullabaloo going on here.

In my dream that night King Stakh’s Wild Hunt silently raced on. The horses neighed, their hoofs landed, and their engraved bridles rocked. Beneath their feet was the cold heather, bending forward, the grey shadows dashed on, marsh lights glittering on the horses’ foreheads. Above them a lonely star was burning, a star as sharp as a needle.

Whenever I awoke that night I heard steps in the hall made by the Little Man, and at times his quiet pitiful moaning and groaning. On with the black abyss of the heavy sleep again; the Wild Hunt, as swift as an arrow, galloped across the heather and the quagmire.

The inhabitants of the Giant’s Gap were, evidently, not very fond of attending large balls, because it is a rare occurrence in such a corner for someone to inherit a large estate on coming of age. Nevertheless, within two days no less than forty persons arrived at Marsh Firs. I, too, was invited, although I agreed with great reluctance. I did not like the provincial gentry, and in addition, had done almost no work these days. I had made almost no new notes, and most important of all, had not advanced in unravelling the secret of this devilish den. An old 17th century plan of the castle didn’t contain any air vents for listening, while steps and moaning sounded with an enviable regularity each night.

I wracked my brains over the entire devilry, but could not think of anything.

So thus, for the first time, perhaps, in the last twenty years, the castle was meeting guests. The lampions above the entrance were lit, the covers on the chandeliers were removed, the watchman became the doorman for the occasion, three servants were taken from the surrounding farmsteads. The castle reminded one of an old Granny who had decided to attend a ball for the last time, and got herself all dressed up to recall her youth and then to lie down in her grave.

I do not know whether this gathering of the gentry is worth describing. You will find a good and quite a correct description of something of the like in the poetic works of Phelka from Rukshanitzy, an unreasonably forgotten poet. My God, what carriages there were! Their leather warped by age, springs altogether lacking, wheels two metres high, but by all means at the back they had a footman whose hands were black from the soil they had worked on. And their horses! Rocinant beside them would have seemed Bucephalo. Their lower lips hanging down like a pan, their teeth eaten away. The harnesses almost entirely of ropes, but to make up for that here and there shone golden plates with numbers on them, plates that had been passed on from harnesses of the “Golden Age”.

“Goodness gracious! What is going on in this world? Long ago one gentleman rode on six horses, while now six gentlemen on one horse.” The entire process of the ruin of the gentry was put into a nut shell in this mocking popular saying.

Behind my back Bierman–Hatsevich was making polite but caustic remarks about the arriving guests.

“Just look, what a fury – in the Belarusian of the 16th century a jade was called a fury. Most likely one of the Sas’ rode on her: a merited fighting horse... And this little Miss, you see how dressed up she is, as if for St. Anthony’s holiday. And here, look at them, the gypsies.”

It was really an unusual company that he called “gypsies”. A most ordinary cart had rolled up to the entrance with the strangest company I had ever seen. There were both ladies and gentlemen, about ten of them, dressed gaudily and poorly. They were seated in the cart, crowded like gypsies. And curtains were stretched on four sticks as on gypsy carts. Only the dogs running under the cart were lacking. This was the poor Hrytskievich family, roaming from one ball to another, feeding themselves mainly in this way. They were distant relatives of the Yanovskys. And these were the descendants of the “crimson lord”! My God, what you punish people for!?

Then arrived some middle aged lady in a very rich antique and rather shabby velvet dress. She was accompanied by a young man, as thin as a whip and clearly fawning upon her. This “whip” of a fellow gently pressed her elbow.

The perfume the lady used was so bad that Bierman began to sneeze as soon as she entered the hall. And it seemed to me that, together with her, someone had brought into the room a large sack of hoopoes and left it there for the people to enjoy. The lady spoke with a real French accent, an accent, as is known, that has remained in the world in two places only: in the Paris salons and in the backwaters of Kabylany near Vorsha.

And the other guests were also very curious people. Faces either wrinkled or too smooth, eyes full of pleading, worried, devouring eyes, eyes with a touch of madness. One dandy had extremely large, bulging eyes like those of the salamanders in subterranean lakes. From behind the door I watched the ceremony of introductions. Some of these close neighbours had never seen one another, and probably never would again in the future. The decaying palace, perhaps once in the recent eighteen years, saw such a storm of eager visitors.