Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [8]
But his mind was elsewhere.
She smiled, seeing his eyes on the sunlit floor. ‘What do we say about the sunlight?’ she asked softly.
‘Sweet milk poured
On her floor;
Neither knife nor your teeth
Will ever get it off.’
He chanted obediently, looking out of the window. The breeze from it stirred his fair hair.
‘And what about the wind?’
‘Father has a stallion fine
Not all the world can him restrain.’
Already he knew a dozen such sayings. The women knew hundreds of them – homely riddles, word games, proverbs – likening light to spilt milk, the wind to a stallion. In these countless sayings the simple folk delighted in the gentle wordplay of their Slavic tongue.
In a moment she would let him go. He longed to run to the door. Would the cub be there?
She quickly examined his teeth. He had lost two milk teeth but grown two new ones. One more felt loose, but at present none was missing.
‘Two little perches, full of white hens,’ she murmured happily. Then she let him go.
He ran to the doorway, into the passage and to the outer door.
There was a vegetable patch opposite the hut from which, the day before, he had helped his mother pull a large turnip. To the right of it, a man was loading farm implements on to an old wooden wagon with sturdy wheels each carved from a single block of wood. To the left, a little further off beside the river, was a small bath house. It had been built only three years before and was not for the present members of the village, who had a bigger one of their own, but for the ancestors. After all, Kiy knew, the dead liked to take their steam bath, just like the living, even if you did not actually see them. And as everyone in his young life had told him, the ancestors became very angry if one left them out of anything.
‘You wouldn’t want people to forget about you, after you’ve gone, would you?’ one of his father’s other wives had asked him; and he had thought no, he would not like to be forgotten, cut off from the warm company of the village.
He knew that the dead were there, watching him, just as he knew that in the ground under a corner of the barn in front of the elder’s house, lived the tiny wrinkled figure of the village domovoi – his own father’s grandfather – whose spirit presided over all that passed in the community.
He stepped outside. Nothing. He looked right and left. The bath houses, the huts, all looked the same: there was no sign of the bear cub. The little fellow’s face fell; he could not believe it – hadn’t he seen Mal and the old man slip by in the night?
The man by the cart, who was a brother of one of his stepmothers, turned and looked at him.
‘What are you looking for, little boy?’
‘Nothing, Uncle.’ He knew he must not say anything.
The pit of his stomach became cold and the bright morning sky seemed suddenly grey. He wanted warm tears to bring relief but, since Mal had sworn him to secrecy, he bit his lip instead and sadly turned back into the hut.
Inside, his grandmother was scolding the women about something, but he was used to that. He noticed his mother’s tambourine hanging in one corner: it was coloured red. He loved the colour red; to him it was warm and friendly. Indeed, it was natural that he should think so, for in the Slav tongue the words ‘red’ and ‘beautiful’ were one and the same. He gazed at his grandmother’s heavy face: how large her cheeks were – they reminded him of two lumps of lard. She noticed his gaze and stared at him balefully, pausing to indicate to his mother that he constituted an interruption.
‘Go outside, Little Kiy,’ his mother said tactfully.
As he came out, he saw Mal.
It had not been a good night for Mal. Together with one of the older hunters he had set a trap for the bear cub in the woods, and they had nearly been successful. He’d have had the cub now if he hadn’t lost his head at the last moment, made a false move, and been chased away by an infuriated mother bear. It made him blush just to think of it.
He had been planning to help the men get the hay in that day – attract the attention of the elder with