Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [71]
He had succeeded in masking his losses. Using his reputation, and his father’s good name, he had got credit from merchants as far afield as Constantinople. And now that debt had become a mountain, the size of which no one guessed – neither his father, his brother, nor his own children.
And so the monsters came to him in his sleep.
Sometimes his debt came as an eagle – a huge, brownish bird sweeping over the Caucasus Mountains, flying swiftly over the bones of his camels in the steppe, soaring over the forest in search of him until at last, with talons outstretched, its huge wings filling the sky, the furious bird swooped and he awoke with a cry.
Another night, searching in the forest, he came upon a girl, lying naked upon the ground. Coming up to her, he saw to his excitement that she was the most beautiful creature in the world – even lovelier than the Saxon girl his brother had taken from him. But as he reached down to touch her, she had turned to solid gold.
With even more joy, he lifted her and carried her on his horse until, coming to a small hut in the forest, he decided to rest.
It was empty. He carried her in and laid her on the table by the stove. ‘I’ll carry you to Kiev and melt you down,’ he muttered, and turned round to look for water. But as he turned back the golden girl was gone.
And in her place, sitting on the table, with a leering grin on her wrinkled face, was Baba Yaga the witch.
He felt himself go pale and cold. Her hands reached out to him.
‘Let me go!’ he shrieked.
But Baba Yaga only laughed, with a cackle drier than the sound of cracking nuts. The room had filled with the acrid, stale smell of rotting mushrooms, and she replied: ‘Pay me your debt.’
Then turning to the stove and opening the oven door, her long, bony hand had grabbed him and drawn him slowly towards the flames, while he wailed, like a frightened child, in his sleep.
But the worst dream was the third. This was the one that haunted him. It began, always, inside a building, though whether it was a church, a barn or a prince’s hall he could never be sure, since it was dark. He would be trying to find a way out, searching for some sign of a window or door in the cavernous gloom. But as far as he looked, it always seemed that the high, empty spaces stretched away without end.
And then, before long, he would hear it coming.
Its heavy footsteps crashed upon the iron floor with a terrible reverberation, that echoed in the distant roof above. If he turned and fled, he would find that the awful footsteps were suddenly coming from the direction in which he was running.
And he knew that this fearful creature was his debt. It would come closer. There was no escape.
Then he would see it. The creature was as high as a house, and as broad. It was dressed in a long dark habit, like a monk so that its feet, which were surely made of iron, could not be seen. But far more frightening than this was its face: for the creature had none. It had only a huge, grey beard where the face should have been: no eyes, no mouth. It was deaf and sightless. Yet it always knew, infallibly, exactly where he was, and as it slowly, blindly crashed forward, he would fall helplessly on to the iron floor, unable to move his legs, and awake in a cold sweat and with a scream of terror.
‘There is only one way out,’ he told himself.
The Will of his father Igor was a simple one. In line with the princely practice of inheritance, the boyar’s did not concern itself with grandchildren, but only with sons.
The wealth remaining to Igor, which was now substantial, was to be divided equally between his surviving sons, who were to take care of their mother as long as she lived. That was all. If one of the two remaining sons died before the