The Ice Queen (35 page)

“You milk-sucking babies,” roared Harald, “must I do everything for you!” He took one more cut at my face with the knout, but his aim was off. The guard at my side staggered away, clutching the place where his ear had been. Flinging the knout away and drawing his long sword, he raced for the door. Even without a horde of warriors at his back Harald was formidable.

“Out through the kitchen to the back stair!” cried Bishop Yefrem, and showed us the way by being the first to bolt in that direction. The mayor's guards herded us behind him while the flogger applied his knout to our backs.

Hurrying us through streets that were thick with fighters, the mayor's men returned Putscha and me to the jail, and formed a cordon around it.

I can scarcely describe my feelings. As much as the blow that Harald dealt me seared my flesh, Inge's words burned still hotter in my brain. Her betrayal was the more unforgivable. Harald was goaded by anger and humiliation which any man may feel. But she! From the very start she'd done nothing but lie to me, and now, just as coolly, lied about me.

As I paced my cell in silent rage, I barely noticed the shouting and clash of arms that sounded nearby—now approaching, now receding, then again coming nearer. It was about twilight that the street directly outside the jail erupted in fighting between the Rus and the hated outlanders. Torches flared, bodies lurched back and forth across the narrow field of vision afforded by our window, and the night rang with shouts.

The glimmering of a chance to escape this wooden prison released me from the prison of my thoughts. Here, at least, was something I could grapple with. “Putscha! Get up!”

He lay, as he had for hours, on his stomach, with his arms outspread; his back livid and oozing blood.

“Let me be.”

“No, listen. We must run for it now while the guards are busy defending themselves; we won't get a second chance. Here, stand on my shoulders. Your hand is small enough to reach up between the bars of the
grating and pull out the bolt. Then lift up the grate and throw down the rope ladder.”

“I can't move, I tell you!”

From outside came the footsteps of more men running, and the clangor of arms grew louder.

“Up you get, little man—scream all you like, you won't be heard above the noise outside.”

Scream he did, as I jerked him to his feet and swung him up in the air with a hand under each arm.

“Never mind the pain.”

“What d'you know about pain?” he hissed between clenched teeth.

“Now, now. If it were Ingigerd here instead of me, she'd be standing on
your
shoulders and you'd be thanking her for the privilege. Feet on my shoulders, now. All right, I've got your ankles.” His height added to mine—and neither of us tall—just barely brought his fingers in reach of the bars. “Can you get your hand between them?”

He sucked his breath between his teeth and grunted against the pain. A mere Norseman would have screamed the house down.

“Good fellow! Can you feel the bolt?”

“I have it but it won't come.”

“Putscha, look out, a torch! Push it away, man!”

“Can't, too far—”

A flaming brand had landed on the grating. Someone—Swede or Norwegian—meant to cook us. An ember drifted down onto the straw-covered floor, just beyond the reach of my foot.

“The bolt, Putscha, as you hope to live, pull harder!”

A wisp of smoke curled upwards from the straw.

“No—no—wait, I have it!”

“Right. Feet in my hands, now, I'm going to lift you straight up. That's it, knees on the ledge, keep low or they'll see you from the street. Can you see the rope anywhere?”

With my hands free, I turned to stamping out the fire—only to send bits of flaming straw whirling in all directions. With a rush and crackle the floor burst into flame in a dozen places at once. In a flash of memory, I was back in my father's house, our enemies screaming outside, the roof collapsing in flames, my mother's hair burning, the flames scorching my feet …

My blood turned to water. I screamed and screamed again. “The rope, the rope, hurry, damn you!”

But, instead, the dwarf glared down at me from his safe perch, his bloody lips twisted in a sneer. “Burn, is it? I, Putscha, could take twelve strokes of the knout for all you cared. Twelve strokes, outlander, there's burning for you. Why shouldn't I let you burn?”

I danced amid the leaping flames. Seeking escape too, were the roaches and rats—whole tribes of them hidden in the straw. They climbed my legs, crawled under my shirt, and clung to my back.

“For pity's sake, Putscha, don't do this to me!”

“What, won't you call me ‘little man,'? I do love to be so addressed.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Oh, I'm sure your sorry now. Oh, yes.”

“Please, please, Putschaaa!”

“‘Please' is it? I don't reckon there are many you've said that to.” He squinted at me against the rising smoke. “Shall I let you live, then? Well, brave druzhinik, here's your rope.”

I leapt for it and climbed with the strength that only terror lends us; I and pounds of frenzied rats who sank their claws into me. But my cell-mates I could not carry. The woman, her screaming baby under her arm, hung on my belt. I kicked her away—I was long past caring for any human being but myself. I reached the top with the seat of my pants scorched. The rats and other vermin departed at once for safer havens.

All around me buildings flared and the air was thick with flying ash, to which was added the smoke that billowed up from our cell. I could hear the screams of those wretches we had left below.

“Putscha, you filthy little brute, I'll pay you back for this!” On hands and knees, I made a grab for him, intending to push him back into the flames.

“Hands off!” he warned, backing away with his tiny fists raised in self-defense.

I grabbed for his throat but missed.

“You aren't safe yet, Haraldsskald. Where will you go, eh? Where will you hide so your master doesn't find you?” Again, with an acrobat's quickness, he dodged out of reach. “But I know a place where we can lie low. Food and shelter, anything you like—”

Smoke stung my eyes, the wooden planks under my hands and knees were hot. This was senseless; I could never catch him up here.

“Follow me if you dare!” He made a running jump from the roof. Whether to strangle him or accept his promise of safety amounted to the same decision: I must follow.

Balancing on the narrow ledge, I looked below me. The street was littered with bodies. Warriors hacked and slashed at each other, though it was impossible to see in the cluttered air who was who.

Putscha was disappearing down the street. I jumped and landed running. Dashing this way and that with me hot on his heels, he threaded a maze of back streets—past blazing houses, past mobs of battling men—until we came out at last on the verge of the wild land beyond Lyudin End.

“Stop and let us rest a minute,” I gasped. “Where are you taking me?”

“I'm not taking you anywhere; follow or don't, it's all the same to me.”

“Are all footstools as bad-tempered as you, Putscha, or does it take a princess' heel marks on your rump to make you so high and mighty?”

“Mightier than you, anyway; ‘Putscha pleeease,' he mimicked me.”

I grabbed for his throat again but he danced out of reach, laughing, and took off downhill into a ravine choked with brambles. They must have torn his raw skin cruelly but he never slowed his pace.

All that dark blue night we pushed our way through woods and marsh, stopping only to drink water in greedy gulps from a brook. As the sky lightened, we arrived at a clearing in the woods. In the center of it stood a tiny hut built all of sticks with a roof of bundled twigs. Tethered before the door a solitary goat cropped the grass.

“It's to this you bring me—?”

The dwarf drew himself up to his full height and made a face like a thundercloud at me. “Hold your tongue, outlander! The Princess Ingigerd was not too proud to visit my mother—not once but often.”

“Your mother?”

“And see you address her respectfully. Lyudmila Ilyavna is her name. She was born beside the far-off Volga, and the blood of Rus, Slav, and Royal Khazar is mingled in her veins. If you are polite, she will help you. If not, she will eat you up.”

“Eat me! I've run all this way to meet a troll hag?”

“Silence, I say!”

At these words the bearskin that served the cabin for a door was pushed aside by a thin hand and a woman stepped into the light. I had
expected the mother of a dwarf to be a dwarf; my imagination had already conjured up some evil, shrunken thing like Old Louhi of Pohjola.

But Lyudmila Ilyavna was as tall as I.

She had been a beautiful woman once and was still a handsome one. Her hair, in which wild flowers were twined, fell in two snow white plaits to her waist. They framed a face that was finely shaped and uncommonly smooth for a woman of sixty winters or more. It was more like the face of a maiden, except that the blooming color had faded from it as if from an old fabric washed too often. Her lips, too, lacked of redness, though they were full and rounded. Her eyes were as pale as water.

“My child—? Ahh, what has happened to you!”

She ran and knelt before the dwarf, pressing his head to her bosom. (A bosom, I could not help but notice, that was ample and of a certain firmness.)

“Who is guilty of this? Speak, my darling.”

Seeing them together, I had to remind myself that Putscha was a middle-aged man with a grown daughter of his own and not, rather, some unnaturally grey-headed little boy.

He recited all the events that had led up to our escape.

“And our poor, dear princess,” she asked, “has she escaped as well?”

“Mother, I know not if she's alive or dead.”

“And Nenilushka?”

“May she dream of the Devil! I have no daughter anymore!”

“Oh, no, you can't mean that! It's pain that makes you talk so.”

Still embracing him, though carefully so as not to hurt him, she turned angrily to me. “And you, my princess's lover—why were you not flogged? Of course, they hesitate to punish a Northman. No, they scarcely dare raise a hand against you, while they beat my poor child nearly to death because of what he is.”

Mindful of Putscha's warning, I answered as politely as I could: “Good woman, you are hasty. I was betrayed by my own master and ill-used—it grieves me to say so—by that princess you admire. As for your son, he would not be here if I'd not helped him to escape. I beg you to shelter me for just a night or two.”

She looked doubtful. “Darling Putscha,” she said, tenderly kissing his forehead, “I will send him away if you wish it.”

“He can stay,” answered the dwarf sullenly, “provided he makes no more
allusions to a person's size or a person's office.”

“You have my word on it, little—er, gospodin Putscha,” I said.

We made a cozy party inside the tiny hut. Leaves, berries, and herbs of every sort hung in bunches from the roof together with such familiar stuff as garlic and toadstools. Picking from here and there, she mixed ingredients in a mortar and pounded them to a paste which she applied gently to her son's back. She allowed me to take one finger of the stuff for my wounded shoulder, and it did numb the pain.

While she was occupied, I had a look round and saw that there were neither icons, candles, nor crucifix on the walls. Putscha might be a Christian—at least, he regularly attended mass with the Princess—but his mother plainly was not.

“And now drink this, my darling, and sleep,” she said, holding a cup of something to his lips. Where had I met that sickly sweet smell before? Ingigerd's poison! Though hers was, no doubt, a more potent mixture.

In a few minutes the dwarf was snoring loudly.

“Outlander, you may take a drop too, if you like.”

“Not just now, thank you.” I wasn't so sure of her that I would let her drug me.

“Then it's time I milked the goat. You'll excuse me.”

“I'll come along.”

“Please yourself.”

She sat on a three-legged milking stool and began to pull the teats in a steady rhythm. I sat cross-legged on the grass beside her.

“Lyudmila Ilyavna, your son told me that Ingigerd used to visit certain old women in the villages, but that was a blind, wasn't it. It's you who are the witch she comes to for charms and potions.”

Her eyes filled with fear. She said, “I did not like to give her so much of the sleeping drug, but she wouldn't be put off. You must believe me, gospodin …”

“Don't be afraid, woman, I'm no hanger of witches. I leave that to the Christmen. I cleave to the old ways, as you do.”

A brindled cat materialized and began to rub against her legs in hope of getting some of the milk. She squeezed a stream into its mouth.

“I have some little knowledge of herbals,” she said carefully. “Putscha makes too much of it.”

“You don't eat your guests?”

“No,” she smiled, “I don't.” Her dimpling cheeks looked very girlish.

“What was his father? If a stranger may ask.”

“You mean, don't you, was his father a dwarf? The answer is no; the dwarfs are all in my lineage. His father was a Rus warrior, Churillo Igorevich, by name. He was as tall as an oak and ruddy as the sun. A fighter and trader who fared all the way to the Volga, from where he brought me back as his bride.”

“To live here in the forest?”

“No, gospodin, to live in Novgorod in a fine wooden house with red shutters and a red rooster on the door. I loved that house. I was still very young. My handsome Churillo enlisted in the druzhina and was greatly prized for his strength and courage.

“Then one day old Vladimir, who was still Grand Prince then, decreed that all the Rus must turn Christian. My husband was one of those few who refused. There was fighting in the streets when the soldiers came from Kiev, and we fled, first to his village, and finally—to escape the whispering of our neighbors—to this lonely spot. I had already given birth to a daughter and here I bore a son—both dwarfs. As I said, they are common in my family, we don't know why. After the second one—Putscha—was born, my husband hanged himself one night from the elm tree yonder, believing that he was cursed by Vladimir's new god.”