Prelude:

The Crone, Fire and Snow

The old woman leaned back in her chair, a pile of mending in her lap. She chuckled deep in her throat at the young man seated at her table. The fire on her hearth snapped and crackled as the flames uncovered a hidden pocket of moisture in the wood. Outside, the first flakes of winter snow drifted silently against the window. An orange cat stretched and yawned on the hearthrug, then, after the manner of cats, curled up again. "So, you want to know the story of our Rusalka?" The old woman turned and looked into the fire. Her voice was the sound of old paper, handled seldom, in a book carefully stored in an even older library: thin, transparent, a whisper of what once had been. Her face, bathed by the glow of the flames, was as lined and filled with crags and furrows as the raw peaks of the Carpathian Mountains that ringed the tiny dell where her farm lay. Sadness crossed her features: an old grief, which, like stone, is worn away by time, but never completely lost. "She was my sister-in-law."

The young man sitting before her choked, burning his tongue on the hot tea. He looked at her sharply, disbelief overlaying smooth features.

"A child, really; we were all children, then: Mikhail, that was my husband; he died of fever - oh, years ago, after Sasha, my eldest, went to live in Kryvorivnya with the Hutsuls; Yuri, who died in the wars; and Polya, and Vasily; and, Valasha, of course." She caressed each name with her voice, as she would have touched rare and precious jewels, or children at her breast. "It killed her father, old Yefgeny Kotsulof. This was his farm. I’m the only one left, you see. Sasha - Sergei - my son; comes to plant in the spring. It killed Vasily, too. Although they say it was the fever that made him mad. He brought it back from the war. Or the Vodany..."

As the old woman spoke, the snow brushed lightly against the windowpane: cat paws against silk. The room became still, warm from the fire, and the young man relaxed as the story wove its spell around him. He, Ivan Askastoft, a scholar from the city, had come to the high mountain village to collect stories for other scholars to ponder. He drifted away with the old woman’s words, to this same farm, this same village, a generation before: to a time when the outside world was far away - a rumor, a tale of cities and places too fabulous to believe. "I’ve heard that the village has - had - a bargain with the… the Vodany," the young scholar began.

The old woman smiled a crooked smile, a bitter smile. "A bargain!" She spat and then licked her lips as she leaned back in her chair, all her years seeming to fold in with her. She stayed that way for so long that the young man thought she had dozed off, as the very old sometimes do. As he was about to speak, she sat up suddenly, sharp-eyed and birdlike. "A bargain!" She clipped her words, turning so she could look directly into his eyes, taking measure of him like four for bread, "I will tell you the story. Go on, take out your little book, you will need it. Then take it back to your university and remember. Promise me only that you will remember."

With the audacity of youth, he deliberated, scratching his beard. (When that beard had grown long and time had peppered it with snow, Ivan Askastoft’s beard would be famous among his students, and that very gesture lampooned with great frequency and hilarity over beer.) Ivan fished out an inkpot from a pocket in his greatcoat and a worn, leather-covered journal from another and arranged them exactly before him on the abraded surface of the table. He poised his quill over the page and suddenly shivered as a stray draft found its way across the back of his neck. These old farmhouses are drafty, he thought, glancing at the requisite icon of a wide-eyed Madonna and Child over the hearth. He had filled the pages with folklore gathered over a summer of travel through these mountains; he hoped to gather more before the winter began in earnest. He would, in his time, become a respected scholar of folklore, an intrepid sage who combed the countryside collecting the tales of farmers, old wives, and nurseries for posterity, before this age of computers and video. These stories we now read, for better or ill, to our children, as we tuck them into bed. We call them fairy tales, things of no consequence, and laugh a little at the quaint beliefs of our ancestors. Of all the tales of lost lambs, mad horses, youngest daughters; of household sprites wrecking havoc in larders, eldritch beings haunting lonely waysides, Baba Yaga in her hut made of chicken legs, and Vasilisa the Fair; no more fantastic nor sadder tale would fill the pages of that little book than this story, told as the snows began, by an ancient crone while her needle flashed in and out of the linen in her lap.

Part I:

Valasha

Ivanku, Ivanku, buy me rouge
so that I may rouge myself to go to the dance.

Traditional folksong from the Trans-Carpathian Ukraine
Fine Leather Boots

When the man from the Capitol came to the village, he came along a little used mud-filled excuse of a road that led into the mountains; along a cackling, chattering river that twisted and wound into the forested slopes like a pixilated viper. The river, swelling with the thaw, was clogged with ice snags in narrow bends in the channel. It left off its chattering and began to roar as he ascended into the higher slopes: a stentorious rolling rumble like the thunder which forebodes midsummer storms. He rode a blooded horse and was attended by a troop of soldiers who rode horses no less fine for their lack of breeding. He had been chasing a group of bandits, who had fled into these cursed mountains with horses and booty from his camp on the plains, far below. Six men had been lost, men who must be replaced to fight the Czar’s war. The river led him, where it was still frozen in its course, to a tiny village. The rumble was, for now, quiet in the last ragged days of winter. The village bore, with stolid peasant fortitude, the contrary name of Paraska: an old Hutsul word. It made him smile: if a Hutsul came this far north, he’d eat his hat. These villagers were Ukraininskya. Generations ago, their ancestors had fled to these mountains because of religion; damned Papists, the lot. He would have preferred to clean them out with fire and sword, but today he had a different purpose. His name was Captain Valentine Ulanovich, and, when he dismounted, he carried a walking stick of dark polished wood and was dressed in silk and sable. His feet were clad in fine black leather boots, and, as he led his entourage to the tavern, it was seen that he walked with a limp. An old wound from early in his campaign, but one he cursed as he cursed these mountains: with creativity, alacrity, and often. He stabled the horses and billeted himself and the soldiers at Vova Golkof’s tavern and paid the keeper with a coin stamped with the face of the Russian Czar. With much noise and confusion, more than old Vova had seen in a lifetime of innkeeping, the soldiers devoured all the bread and stew his wife, Ludmilla, could produce. Katrina, his middle daughter, hid from them in a closet after finding a rough hand under her skirt. She refused to come out until the "kussack beasts" had left the village, entirely. When he found his eldest, Anjelika, a saucy girl with an upcurved smile to melt a heart of stone, flirting and gossiping with a receptive young soldier - a fellow whose glances foreboded something less than his plans for his daughter - he locked the girl, over her vociferous protests, in her bedroom. He raised his old, paternal eyes to the ceiling and fervently hoped the company’s departure would arrive forthwith. Katya, his third daughter, thank all the saints, was too young a maid to heed the pretty words of profligates in uniform.

In the afternoon, as the setting rays of the sun bathed the world in gold, Captain Valentine leaned against the door of the tavern and drank vodka. From that vantage, he watched the young men of the village with an appraising eye over the rim of his glass as they went about their affairs. As a third son of a relatively short line of third sons, descended of an important Boyar, fourth cousin to the Czar, he believed that he had inherited superior judgment concerning the character and mettle of men, and the carriage of nobility, however distant, in his blood. He exercised both of these legacies while leaning with studied nonchalance against Vova’s painted doorpost. Vova Golkof swore, later, that he finished only one glass of vodka all that afternoon as he lounged against the door frame and watched; watched Yuri, the carpenter’s son, repair the church roof, which had begun to leak the week before. The ancient priest stood all the while below, gesturing with his cane and shouting instructions. He watched Polya (the Younger), the tanner’s son, sell a hide to Marya Roskalnikovna (who will play a role in this tale...) and the butcher’s strapping son, Pagel, lead a hog to the slaughtering shed. As the afternoon dimmed into evening, the young men drifted into the tavern. The man from the Capitol saluted them, one by one, and bought vodka for all. He spoke of distant places, of sloe-eyed maidens, of adventure, of important matters, and of war. At the last, he spoke of war: of battles in distant fields, where cannon roared and horses charged, carrying brave hearted men on their backs, doomed for glory. And of women won, and lost, and won again. Of riches and glory for the young men who joined the Czar’s army.

Vasily Andryef, the blacksmith’s son, stopped in the road outside the tavern. He held a mended hatchet for Vova Golkof in one hand and a basket of eggs for Babushka Polynovna in the other. What stopped him, as he turned to enter the tavern, were the soldiers lounging about on the doorstep. It was, in point of fact, the fine black polished leather boots each soldier wore.

Vasily, hearing their talk, forgot that he was standing in mud and pig shit up to his ankles; that the clouds were gathering to send pellets of steely rain down on his head. He forgot his father, the blacksmith, and his mother, Marya Roskalnikovna, who believed that she would be lifted bodily by the Blesséd Virgin to dwell in Heaven as Her Holy Handmaiden.

As Vasily entered the tavern, past the eyes of the soldiers appraising his muscular arms, his wide shoulders and open, innocent features, he saw the man from the Capitol. Saw the dark gleam of his polished walking stick, the darker gleam of fine leather boots, and the texture of wool and sable. He forgot that he was the blacksmith’s son, that he was betrothed to Yefgeny Kotsulof’s daughter, Valasha Yefgenova.

He forgot the hatchet in his hand, the eggs in the basket - which dipped precariously toward the floor - and sat beside Polya at a worn plank table. A part of him was already on the road, down from the Carpathians to seeing Places and doing Things. Perhaps he, also, would be given a pair of fine black leather boots.

The man from the Capitol curled his lip ever so slightly under his mustaches and offered Vasily a glass of vodka. Vasily looked at Polya, then at Yuri, and smiled. Although Vova retrieved his hatchet, the eggs sat, forgotten, under the table as the man from the Capitol bought bottle after bottle of vodka.