A Terrible Vengeance

I

There was a bustle and an uproar in a quarter of Kiev: Gorobets, Captain of the Cossacks, was celebrating his son’s wedding. A great many people had come as guests to the wedding. In the old days they liked good food, better still liked drinking, and best of all they liked merrymaking. Among others the Dnieper Cossack Mikitka came on his sorrel horse straight from a riotous orgy at the Pereshlay Plain, where for seven days and seven nights he had been entertaining the Polish king’s soldiers with red wine. The Captain’s adopted brother, Danilo Burulbash, came too, with his young wife Katerina and his year-old son, from beyond the Dnieper where his farmstead lay between two mountains. The guests marveled at the fair face of the young wife Katerina, her eyebrows as black as German velvet, her beautiful cloth dress and underskirt of blue silk, and her boots with silver heels; but they marveled still more that her old father had not come with her. He had been living in that region for scarcely a year, and for twenty-one years before nothing had been heard of him and he had only come back to his daughter when she was married and had borne a son. No doubt he would have many strange stories to tell. How could he fail to have them, after being so long in foreign parts! Everything there is different: the people are not the same and there are no Christian churches…. But he had not come.

They brought the guests spiced vodka with raisins and plums in it and wedding bread on a big dish. The musicians began on the bottom crust, in which coins had been baked, and put their fiddles, cymbals, and tambourines down for a brief rest. Meanwhile the girls and young women, after wiping their mouths with embroidered handkerchiefs, stepped out again to the center of the room, and the young men, putting their arms akimbo and looking haughtily about them, were on the point of going to meet them, when the old Captain brought out two icons to bless the young couple. These icons had come to him from the venerable hermit, Father Varfolomey. They had no rich setting, there was no gleam of gold or silver on them, but no evil power dare approach the man in whose house they stand. Raising the icons on high the Captain was about to deliver a brief prayer… when all at once the children playing on the ground cried out in terror, and the people drew back, and everyone pointed with their fingers in alarm at a Cossack who was standing in their midst. Who he was nobody knew. But he had already danced splendidly and had diverted the people standing around him. But when the Captain lifted up the icons, at once the Cossack’s face completely changed: his nose grew longer and twisted to one side, his rolling eyes turned from brown to green, his lips turned blue, his chin quivered and grew pointed like a spear, a tusk peeped out of his mouth, a hump appeared behind his head, and the Cossack turned into an old man.

“It is he! It is he!” shouted the crowd, huddling close together.

“The sorcerer has appeared again!” cried the mothers, snatching up their children.

Majestically and with dignity the Captain stepped forward and, turning the icons toward him, said in a loud voice: “Away, image of Satan! This is no place for you!” And, hissing and clacking his teeth like a wolf, the strange old man vanished.

Talk and conjecture arose among the people and the hubbub was like the roar of the sea in bad weather.

“What is this sorcerer?” asked the young people, who knew nothing about him.

“There will be trouble!” muttered their elders, shaking their heads. And everywhere about the spacious courtyard folks gathered in groups listening to the story of the dreadful sorcerer. But almost everyone told it differently and no one could tell anything certain about him.

A barrel of mead was rolled out and many gallons of Greek wine were brought into the yard. The guests regained their lightheadedness. The orchestra struck up—the girls, the young women, the gallant Cossacks in their gay-colored coats flew around in the dance. After a glass, old folks of ninety, of a hundred, began dancing too, remembering the years that had passed. They feasted till late into the night and feasted as none feast nowadays. The guests began to disperse, but only a few made their way home; many of them stayed to spend the night in the Captain’s wide courtyard; and even more Cossacks dropped to sleep uninvited under the benches, on the floor, by their horses, by the stables; wherever the tipplers stumbled, there they lay, snoring for the whole town to hear.