Владимир Короткевич - King Stach's Wild Hunt

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! And 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 Wednesdays and Fridays.”

“Strange ghosts... And on Sundays?” The desire to give this inert, weak-willed, porcelain fellow a good slap on the face was growing ever stronger within me, for such as he are unable to perform any kind of deed, be it good or evil. They are not people, but grass-lice that choke the flower-beds. “But on St. Philip's Day, on St. Peter's Day they appear if they are such holy saints, don't they!”

“God allows them to on Sundays, for, if you remember, it was on Sunday that Stach was killed,” he answered quite seriously.

“So what then is He, this God of yours?” I barked at him. “Has He then bumped into the devil? You mean to say that He takes the lives of innocent girls in whose blood there is perhaps but one drop of Raman's blood?”

Bierman was silent.

“A four thousand and ninety-sixth part of Raman's blood flows in her veins,” I counted up. “So what is He good for, anyway, this God of yours?”

“Don't blaspheme!” he groaned, frightened. “Whose part are you taking?”

“Too much devilry is going on here, even for such a house...” I didn't give in. “The Little Man, the Lady-in-Blue, and here, in addition, the Wild Hunt of King Stach. The house has been surrounded from without and within. May it burn, this house!”

“M'm, to be frank with you, Honourable Sir, I don't believe in the Little Man or the Lady.”

“Everybody has seen them.”

“I haven't seen, I've heard them. And the nature of the sound is unknown to us. And add to that the fact that I am a nervous person.”

“The mistress has seen him.”

Bierman lowered his eyes modestly. He hesitated and said quietly:

“I cannot believe everything she says... She... well, in a word, it seems to me that her poor head hasn't been able to cope with all these horrors. She... m-m... she's peculiar in her psychic condition, if not to say anything more.”

I had also thought of that, therefore I kept silent.

“But I, too, heard steps.”

“Wild fancy. Simply an acoustic illusion. Hallucinations, Honourable Sir.”

We sat silent, I felt that I myself was beginning to lose my reason, what with the adventures going on here.

In my dreams that night King Stach's Wild Hunt silently raced on: the horses silently neighed, their hoofs landed, and their engraved bridles rocked. Beneath their feet was the cold heather, bending forward, the grey shadows raced on, marsh lights glittering on the foreheads of the horses. And above them a lonely star was burning, a star as sharp as a needle.

Whenever I awoke I heard steps in the corridor made by the Little Man, and at times his quiet pitiful moaning and groaning. And then again the black abyss of heavy sleep, and again the Wild Hunt, as swift as an arrow, galloped across the heather and the quagmire.

The inhabitants of the Giant's Gap were, evidently, not very fond of attending large balls, because it is a rare occurrence in. such a corner for someone to inherit a large estate on coming of age. Nevertheless, within two days no less than forty persons arrived at Marsh Firs. I, too, was invited, although I agreed with great reluctance. I did not like the provincial gentry, and in addition, had done almost no work these days. I had made almost no new notes, and most important of all, had not advanced in unravelling the secret of this devilish den. In an old 17th century plan there weren't any air-vents for listening, while steps and moaning sounded with an enviable regularity each night.

I wracked my brains over all this devilry, but could not think of anything.

So thus, for the first time, perhaps, in the last twenty years, the castle was meeting guests. The lampions above the entrance were lit, the covers on the chandeliers were removed, the watchman became the doorman for the occasion, three servants were taken from the surrounding farmsteads. The castle reminded one of an old Grannie who had decided to attend a ball for the last time, and got herself all dressed up to recall her youth and then to lie down in her grave.

I do not know whether this gathering of the gentry is worth describing. You will find a good and quite a correct description of something like it in the poetic works of Phelka from Rukshanitzy, an unreasonably forgotten poet. My God, what carriages there were! Their leather warped by age, springs altogether lacking, wheels two metres high, but by all means at the back a footman (footmen's hands were black from the earth they worked on). And their horses! Rocinant beside them would have seemed Bucephalo. Their lower lips hanging down like a pan, their teeth eaten away. The harnesses almost entirely of ropes, but to make up for that here and there shone golden plates with numbers on them, plates that had been passed on from harnesses of the “Golden Age”.

“Goodness gracious! What is going on in this world? Long ago one gentleman rode on six horses, while now six gentlemen on one horse.” The entire process of the ruin of the gentry was put into a nut-shell in this mocking popular saying.

Behind my back Bierman-Hacevič was making polite but caustic remarks about the arriving guests.

“Just look, what a fury (in the Belarusian of the 16th century a jade was called a fury). Most likely one of the Sas' rode on her: a merited fighting horse... And this little Miss, you see how dressed up she is: as if for St. Anthony's holiday. And here, look at them, the gypsies.”

It was really an unusual company that he called “gypsies”. A most ordinary cart had rolled up to the entrance, in it there sat the strangest company I had ever seen. There were both ladies and gentlemen there, about ten of them, dressed gaudily and poorly. They were seated in the cart crowded like gypsies. And curtains were stretched on four sticks as on gypsy carts. Only the dogs running under the cart were lacking. This was the poor Hryckievič family roaming from one ball to another, feeding themselves mainly in this way. They were distant relatives of the Janoŭskis. And these were the descendants of the “crimson lord”! My God, what you punish people for!

Then there arrived some middle-aged lady in a very rich antique rather shabby velvet dress, accompanied by a young man as thin as a whip, clearly fawning upon her. This “whip” of a fellow gently pressed her elbow.

The perfume the lady used was so bad that Bierman began to sneeze as soon as she entered the hall. And it seemed to me that, together with her, someone had brought into the room a large sack of hoopoes and left it there for the people to enjoy. The lady spoke with a real French accent, an accent, as is known, that has remained in the world in two places only: in the Paris salons and in the backwaters of Kabylany near Vorša.

And the other guests were also very curious people. Faces either wrinkled or too smooth, eyes full of pleading, worried, devouring eyes, eyes with a touch of madness. One dandy had extremely large, bulging eyes like those of the salamanders in subterranean lakes. From behind the door I watched the ceremony of introductions. (Some of these close neighbours had never seen one another, and probably never would again in the future.)

Sounds reached me badly, for in the hall the orchestra was already piping away, an orchestra that consisted of eight invalids of the Battle of Poltava. I saw oily faces that gallantly smiled, saw lips that reached the mistress' hand. When they bent down, the light fell on them from the top, and their noses seemed surprisingly long while their mouths seemed to have vanished. They shuffled their feet without making a sound and bowed, spoke noiselessly, then smiled and floated off, and new ones came floating over to take their place. This was like an awful dream.