Free King Stakh's Wild Hunt by Uladzimir Karatkevich Page A

dawn. Soon we heard a horse neighing somewhere. We came out onto a large glade overgrown with heather. Here we noticed that the horses of the Wild Hunt had begun to gallop faster. But the master’s horse had stumbled several times, apparently tired.”
    Bierman’s voice became wild, and broke off. “And at the end of the glade just where the Gap begins, we saw the horse still alive. He was lying with a broken leg, screaming as terribly as if he were a man. Ryhor said that the master had to be somewhere nearby. We found his footprints, they stretched from the quagmire. I moved on in their tracks which led to the horse and disappeared right at it. Here, in the damp ground were dents as if a person had fallen there. And nothing more. No footprints nearby. The Hunt had turned about two metres or so from this pace. Either Roman had risen or else King Stakh’s horses had reached him by air and taken him away with them. We waited about half an hour, and in the darkness preceding the dawn Ryhor clapped on his forehead and ordered me to gather heather. I, a man of the gentry, obeyed this serf. At that time he had such authority over me as if he were a baron. When we had lit the heather he bent down over the footprints. “Well, what can you say, sir?” he said with an air of apparent superiority. “I don’t know why he had to go away from the quagmire, how he got there,” I answered, perplexed. Then that boor burst out laughing... “He didn’t even think of going away from the quagmire. He, Honourable Sir, he went towards it. And his feet weren’t at all turned backwards forward, as you are probably thinking. He retreated to the quagmire, from something fearful. You see, right here he hit against the ground. The horse broke his leg, and Roman flew over its head. He sprained an ankle. You see the print of his right foot is bigger and deeper, that means that he sprained his left foot. He moved backwards towards the quagmire. Let’s go there, there we shall probably see the end.”
    And really, we did see the end. With his torch Ryhor lit the way for us to a precipice in the quagmire, and he said, “You see, here he slipped.” I held him by the belt, and he bent over the edge of the precipice and then called to me: “Look!” And here I saw Roman’s head sticking out from the brown, oily, dung water of the Gap and I saw his twisted hand with which he had managed to catch at some rotten tree. We dragged him out with great difficulty, but we dragged out a dead man. You see, in these marshes there are often springs in the depths of the pools, and he simply froze there. Besides that, his heart had failed him, the doctor told us afterwards. My God! The fear on his face was so terrible, a fear it was impossible to endure and remain alive! There was a kind of a bite on his hand, his collar was torn off. We tied the corpse to my saddle and rode off. Hardly had we ridden thirty paces than we saw through an opening in the forest vague shadows of floating horses. Surprisingly, there were no sounds of hoofs. And then a horn began to blow somewhere from quite another direction, and so stifled, as if coming through cotton wool. We rode on with the corpse, greatly depressed, the horses were nervous, – they sensed the dead body. And the night was, oh! What a night! And somewhere there blew the horn of the Wild Hunt. Afterwards it appeared only from time to time. Now it’s back again... The hour of vengeance has come.”
    He stopped talking, burying his face in his hands, his white, artistic fingers about twice as long as the fingers of an ordinary person. I kept quiet, but suddenly I lost all patience:
    “You should be ashamed of yourself. Men, grown up men, you are unable to defend your mistress? Were it even the devil himself – you should fight, damn it! And why doesn’t this Hunt appear all the time? Why hasn’t it been here since I’ve come?”
    “Often though they appear, they don’t ever come on the eve of holy days or on