Thus it was done. My father was introduced to my mother’s troops as an immensely wealthy Russian nobleman closely linked to the Tsar by ties of blood, all of which was true enough for Germans. A grand wedding at Castle Falkonstein was followed by a whirlwind tour of Europe—I was born in Paris before its close.

  Our return to Falkonstein was precipitated by restlessness among the Baits. Within a month of our arrival, my mother set out on a fresh expedition, intending to capture, despoil, and burn Memel, Libau, and Mitau; my poor father remained behind, a martyr to indigestion and diarrhea.

  Here I must return, if only briefly, to the night before their wedding. On that night, my mother had treated my poor father to a tour of Castle Falkonstein, and during the course of that tour had cautioned him concerning a certain door in its dungeons. To this door (or so she had informed him) no key existed; it opened upon a bottomless pit communicating with the nether reaches of Hell. I need scarcely add that her army was hardly lost to sight when my father searched her apartments, discovered the key, and opened the door. You would have been wiser, I feel sure; but I know that I would have done the same thing myself. Legend declares that at the christening of our family’s founder a somewhat deaf fairy who had been asked to render him and his descendants mettlesome, made us meddlesome instead.

  Conceive of his surprise when the single, flickering taper he carried revealed no pit, but a chained man of great stature, horribly emaciated, with skin the color of iron. My father, who had expected to discover the graf, was thunderstruck. “I am Koshchei the Deathless, Prince Ivan,” gasped this forbidding prisoner.

  Now tell me, if I were to say here that Koshchei thundered forth dire threats against my aunt Marya as soon as my father freed him, and vanished in a cloud of sulfurous smoke, would you believe me?

  I thought not. You and I are educated people, after all, not superstitious peasants. Yet that is what our peasants will tell you. My aunt Marya used to recount the story to visitors, you see, and as was only to be expected, she was overheard—most imperfectly and with very little comprehension—by the servants. The whole matter has become what is called common knowledge, eh? You know as well as I how terribly common such knowledge is.

  He did nothing of the sort, to be sure; but explained to my father that he was a Lettish king captured by the countess, who had condemned him to perish of hunger and thirst. My poor father fetched him several buckets of water—a bucket being the only container he could find—and explained in turn that he himself was a Russian prince—

  Oh, the iron-colored skin? It was tattooing. Those pagan Baits tattoo boys throughout their adolescence, and the higher a boy’s rank, the more tattooing he gets. Koshchei was of very high rank indeed, and his boyhood must have been a continual torment.

  Where was I? Well, it doesn’t matter. Let it suffice that my father freed and fed him, and installed him in a guest room near his own. Neither of them cared for Prussians, and that formed a bond between them. By the time that my father’s digestive complaint had cleared up, they had agreed on terms of peace; and together they rode away to convey this happy news to my mother.

  Alas, it was not to be. Koshchei, beholding her for the first time without her armor and a sentence of death in her mouth and so forth, fell helplessly in love with her. She had picked up several hundred prisoners by then, and he contrived to free them and steal some horses. Away went he and they and she, she quite literally slung across the successful suitor’s saddlebow.

  As for my father, he returned to Falkonstein with a broken heart. There, in a year or two, he received a letter from the Holy Roman Emperor inquiring about the countess, his wife, and stating very firmly that if she was dead the castle must revert to the von Falkonstein family, in this instance embodied by a most objectionable Prussian Junker, a cousin-german of my late uncle the graf, who delivered it.

  I need hardly say that this would not do. My poor father sent Koshchei an urgent message reminding him of the kindness shown him, blessing his union with my mother (for my father had by then discovered that his digestion was vastly improved in her absence), and imploring him to permit her to write to the Emperor declaring that she was yet among the living.

  Koshchei responded in the friendliest possible fashion, urging that my poor father visit him in Riga, bringing some high official of the church who could subsequently affirm my mother’s continued life and good health. As it happened, the Bishop of Rheims was in the vicinity, and my father persuaded him to make the trip.

  At first everything went swimmingly. There were feasts, fetes, tournaments, and so on, with some very decent hunting and hawking thrown in; but it was not to last. The Prussian knights my father had brought considered my aunt Marya—that is to say, the Countess von Falkonstein, my mother—the true object of their loyalty; and she, detesting both Koshchei and Riga, declared herself homesick for Falkonstein and never for a moment permitted the bishop to forget that she was united by the bonds of Christian marriage to her brother. Ill-feeling grew, harsh words were exchanged, and not to put too fine a point on it, my poor father, Aunt Marya, and the bishop and his retainers left Riga in flames. It was on this occasion that my father was awarded his sobriquet of “Bold,” though in fact he was not, as I have tried to show.

  Koshchei then inquired whether they might be overtaken, to which his horse—actually his master of horse, presumably—is supposed to have replied, “It is possible to sow wheat, wait till it grows up, to reap it and thresh it, to grind it into flour, to make five pies of it, to eat those pies, and then to start in pursuit—and even then to be in time.”

  In short, my suffering parents’ pack mules were so heavily laden that they could scarcely be induced to move faster than a walk. Not surprisingly, they were overtaken by Koshchei’s army at the crossing of the Vendava, where a slam-bang fight ensued. My father, as I’ve told you, was by no means a warlike man; but faced with the possibility that he might never return to these, our family estates, he surprised himself by displaying the sort of desperate resolution sometimes seen in the mildest at their last resource. Taking his stand before the baggage train, with sword and mace he beat off charge after charge. Koshchei and his Balts had recaptured my mother, however, and returned with her in triumph to what remained of Riga.

  As for my poor father, he retreated to Falkonstein with his wounded and his dead, and was able to build a little dacha on the Black Sea. It’s still in the family, and a charming place, though one is apt to become lost until one masters the arrangement of the rooms; I winter there occasionally.

  You would have thought he’d have the wit to leave Koshchei alone after that. And he did have the wit, although he was a foolish enough fellow, as I am myself. What he did not have was the heart. He was forever thinking of his sister, and the games they’d played as children, and how Riga had no proper samovars; after a year or so, somewhat strengthened by a couple of thousand Cossacks and some Swiss, he marched north again, firmly resolved to make amends for the earlier unpleasantness and resume what he by then considered his old friendship with Koshchei the Deathless.

  Truth, it is said, makes her home at the bottom of a well. Her sister Peace is still less hospitable, flying fastest from those who pursue her with the greatest ardor. My poor father was captured, held in Riga for nearly a year, and released only when he reminded Koshchei the Deathless—

  Oh, that? It means nothing, really. All of the kings of that line were named Koshchei, and there was a pagan pretence that they were all the same ruler. You know the sort of thing, I feel certain.

  As I was saying, my poor father reminded Koshchei of his kindness to him in the dungeon—kindness that he very much regretted by then, I feel sure—and Koshchei agreed to let him go. My aunt Marya, who was at least as anxious to put the whole Baltic coast behind her as he was, contrived to borrow armor and accompanied him in the guise of a knight banneret of Pomerania. My father ought never have permitted it; but you, conversant with our character as you are by this time, will have anticipated that he did.

  Again—this according to the legend, you understand—Koshchei questioned his master of horse, who assured him, “It is possible to sow barley, to wait till it grows up, to reap it and thresh it, to brew beer, to drink ourselves drunk on it, to sleep our fill, and then to set off in pursuit—and yet be in time.”

  He was correct upon this occasion as well, unfortunately. My aunt Marya, as I was forced to call her here in Russia, and my poor father were apprehended and returned to Riga in chains, where Koshchei explained to my father that even the most deeply felt gratitude has limits. My father replied graciously that he was in full agreement, and that if Koshchei freed him again he would deed him full and uncontested right to my aunt Marya, and endeavor to secure her sisters for him in addition.

  Koshchei declined.

  My father inquired, as between friends, whether Koshchei intended to put him to death, and Koshchei frankly and openly conceded that such was his intention. My father then made bold to request a final favor; he asked that his body be returned to his family—instancing Aunt Olga and Aunt Anna—from whom it might receive a proper burial. Koshchei assured him that he would do far better: he would provide his rescuer—that is to say, my poor father—with the largest tomb the world had seen; and he would, moreover, take care that his body should be preserved until the end of time. So saying, he chopped my poor father to pieces, threw the pieces into a barrel, and had the barrel filled with boiling pitch, sealed, and cast into the Baltic. Here my father’s story ends, and my own begins.

  I was brought up here by servants, packed off occasionally to that little place on the Black Sea I told you about, and now and then sent to the court of Poland, to Aunt Anna in Hungary, or to Falkonstein, which I came to detest. As was inevitable, there was gossip as it became increasingly noticeable that I resembled my late father in every respect, down to the smallest details. On my twenty-first birthday, the blow fell. Either I must turn the castle over to the von Falkonsteins, or I must bring the Countess von Falkonstein to court, where she would be examined regarding my parentage. After pondering the letter for a fortnight, I set out alone for Riga, earning my sobriquet of “the Simple.”

  Thank you, you are extremely kind. But it wasn’t courage, really; rather it was the realization that I am quite unfitted for military command, and that my estates could not bear the cost of another expedition, even if I desired one. I did not go straight there, however, as I should explain, though I had planned to. Like my poor father before me, I was utterly lost within a day—it’s a wonder I did not end up in your London. Do you know of Baba Yaga?

  No, no! Not the witch they talk of to frighten children. All that is purest superstition, though we call it now by the polite name of folklore. By “Baba Yaga” I intend the Grand Duchess, that terrible old woman. We never call her Baba Yaga to her face, to be sure. And yet…

  Well, never mind. I ended up on one of her estates after a great deal of wandering, and wondering how long the Emperor would wait, and sleeping in flea-ridden country inns; and as it happened she was there. She welcomed me with old-fashioned boyar courtesy—turning out her serfs to cheer, and the rest of it—and told me, as people had been telling me all my life, that I was spit and image of Ivan the Bold. After a day or two, I worked up the courage to explain my plight, and she advised me and got me tattooed.

  Right here. Wait, I’ll push up my sleeves. See the black lines? I’ve a lot more of them, too. Around my neck and knees and ankles and so forth, marking all the places where Koshchei had chopped up my father’s body. That was part of her advice, and as it happened there was an old man on the estate who could do it, although every tattoo made me ill for days on end and hurt dreadfully.

  She lectured me about women, too. I think that was really much more important; and so must she have, because she kept me there for months, getting tattooed and getting sick from it and recovering, while she recounted long stories from her past and asked, when she had finished each of them, how the woman at the center of it would act. What her decision would be and whether she’d stick to it. Often they don’t—but no doubt you knew that.

  When I was better—recovered from one tattoo, but not quite ready for the next—we took long rides over the steppe. Meadows or moors or uplands you call them in England, but I won’t use any of those terms, which would be like calling the sea a basin of water. You do that, you know, speaking of the Mediterranean basin and so forth; it’s nonsense and the worst and most poisonous sort of nonsense too. You and I spoke last night of your great moors, and you told me about your walking tour, in which you crossed one such great moor in three days. Well mounted, Baba Yaga and I couldn’t even have reached the Dnieper in three days, and there the steppe has scarcely begun. If you were to try to ride it from one end to the other on the best horse in the world, that horse would die long before you had reached your goal, and you with it.

  But I was going to say that we’d ride out from Baba Yaga’s villa (which you would call a palace) in the morning, and never halt until the story was finished. On the ride back, I’d tell her how I thought the woman in it would have acted at the end, and why. If I was wrong (and at first I was in every case), she would show me where I had gone astray in my reasoning. No one, I think, has ever looked deeper into the human heart—info women’s hearts, particularly, for men’s are simple things by comparison—than old Baba Yaga. Once we came across a ryabchik and her brood, the chicks just big enough to eat. I had my bow, and I told Baba Yaga I’d kill a pair for us. The servants could pluck and roast them, and we’d have them with our luncheon. She shook her head and told me that the ryabchik was a woman, too, and we wouldn’t start home until I had made friends with her. I learned a great deal during that long afternoon, riding slowly after those seven birds and sitting cross-legged on the yellowing grass. Baba Yaga taught me how to charm wild bees, too—and how to leave their honey behind when I’d done it. Last of all the wolf, who is not the monster that we think her, but God’s dog, half mad with hunger and the memory of His hands upon her head.

  Yes, we Russians are all sentimentalists, as you say; and I’m not called Ivan the Simple for nothing.

  At the first snow I rode for Riga, taking Kinzhal and her half grown cubs. We surprised the Baits, you may be sure, but I dismissed my wolves at Izborsk out of fear that someone would harm them. It didn’t matter—their reputation rode faster than I. By the time I got to Riga, they had become a pack of hundreds, so that I felt like my own uncle, the Polish king.

  Thanks to them, Koshchei heard of my coming long before I arrived and was eager to see me. I let him glimpse the marks I showed you without ever mentioning where I’d acquired them, and when he wanted to know how it was that I was alive once more, I explained that my sisters had married an eagle and a raven; and the eagle—whose eyes were sharper than Saint Michael’s—had seen my barrel and towed it to shore. My sisters, I said, had restored my limbs to their proper positions, except that they had exchanged my right hand with my left. See here?

  Yes, of course it’s conjuring. But I won’t tell you how it’s done. We conjurors never do, and it’s the only trick I know.

  Then, I said, the raven had flown to the Fountain of Life and fetched back a bottle of water. My sisters had sprinkled me with it—and, well, he could see the result for himself. He didn’t believe my story any more than you would have; but he didn’t know what to think, and he was eager to keep me around until he had plumbed my secret. That was all I wanted, really, so I was quite content.

  As for Aunt Marya, she’d adapted to life among the pagans as well as a woman could, queening it over her subjects worse than Baba Yaga, taking part in their ceremonies with Koshchei—perfectly revolting ceremonies, some of them, which I dare say was how they got Koshchei as a king to begin with—and wearing a round ton of red gold and amber, with a handful of sapphires and rubies thrown in for good measure. I’ve always thought she must have guessed who I was; but she never betrayed it by a word, just told me I’d better stay out of her bed as long as Koshchei was alive. Thinking has never come easily to me; I scratched my head over the matter and after an hour or two decided that if she were to bear me a child it would be my son or daughter—and my half-brother or half-sister, too, as the child of my mother by a different father—and my cousin-german as the child of my father’s sister. I’d already seen far too much of cousins-german, and so I decided not to do it, though Aunt Marya was a remarkably attractive woman, even after all she’d been through.

  Not to try to put too fair a face on things, I avoided her whenever I could. For one thing I’d grown up without seeing my mother, except for the portrait over there; and I had formed my own picture of her, one that the Lettish queen fit badly. For another, she was forever dropping things for me to pick up, and calling me over to hear whispered secrets—anything that she could think of, and a lot of it excessively silly—or calling me into her private apartments and contriving to reveal one breast when she adjusted her gown.

  For a third, I had a great deal to tell the Lettish women at court that I couldn’t say in her presence: the things Baba Yaga and I had worked out about foreign queens and the like, and how the rest of Europe looked at it and them; I sympathized with the men’s discontents too, of course, and I soon got their wives to help me with it.

  Baba Yaga and I had estimated that it would be a year or more before the revolt, but they surprised us. It hadn’t been quite six months when the smell of smoke woke me. There was a lot of fighting—about half Koshchei’s bodyguard had remained loyal—but I took as little part in it as possible; my task was to saddle two fast horses and get Aunt Marya out alive. I had reminded myself of that, and where the horses were stabled, and how I could break into the tack room and all the rest of it, every night before I slept.