A Terrible Vengeance

XV

A holy hermit sat alone in his cave before a little lamp and did not take his eyes off the holy book. It was many years since he had first shut himself up in his cave; he had already made himself a coffin in which he would lie down to sleep. The holy man closed his book and fell to praying…. Suddenly a man of a strange and terrible aspect ran into the cave. At first the holy hermit was astounded and stepped back upon seeing such a man. He was trembling all over like an aspen leaf; his eyes rolled in their sockets, a light of terror gleamed in them; his hideous face made one shudder.

“Father, pray! pray!” he shouted desperately, “pray for a lost soul!” and he sank to the ground.

The holy hermit crossed himself, took up his book, opened it, and stepped back in horror, dropping the book: “No, incredible sinner! There is no mercy for you! Away! I cannot pray for you!”

“No?” the sorcerer cried frantically.

“Look! the letters in the holy book are dripping with blood…. There has never been such a sinner in the world!”

“Father! you are mocking me!”

“Away, accursed sinner! I am not mocking you. I am overcome with fear. It is not good for a man to be with you!”

“No, no! You are mocking, say not so… I see that your lips are smiling and the rows of your old teeth are gleaming white!”

And like one possessed he flew at the holy hermit and killed him.

A terrible moan was heard and echoed through the forest and the fields. Dry withered arms with long claws rose up from beyond the forest; they trembled and disappeared.

And now he felt no fear. All was confusion: there was a noise in his ears, a noise in his head as though he were drunk, and everything before his eyes was veiled as though by spiders’ webs. Leaping on his horse he rode straight to Kanev, thinking from there to go through Cherkassy direct to the Crimean Tartars, though he knew not why. He rode one day and a second and still Kanev was not in sight. The road was the same; he should have reached it long before, but there was no sign of Kanev. Far away there gleamed the cupolas of churches; but that was not Kanev but Shumsk. The sorcerer was amazed to find that he had traveled the wrong way. He turned back toward Kiev, and a day later a town appeared—not Kiev but Galich, a town further from Kiev than Shumsk and not far from Hungary. At a loss what to do he turned back, but felt again that he was going backward as he went on. No one in the world could tell what was in the sorcerer’s mind; and had anyone seen and known, he would never have slept peacefully at night or laughed again in his life. It was not malice, not terror, and not fierce anger. There is no word in the world to say what it was. He was burning, scalding; he would have liked to trample the whole country from Kiev to Galich with all the people and everything in it and drown it in the Black Sea. But it was not from malice he would do it: no, he knew not why he wanted it. He shuddered when he saw the Carpathian Mountains and lofty Krivan, its crest capped with a gray cloud; the horse still galloped on and now was racing among the mountains. The clouds suddenly lifted, and facing him appeared the horseman in his terrible majesty…. The sorcerer tried to stop, he tugged at the rein; the horse neighed wildly, tossed its mane, and dashed toward the horseman. Then the sorcerer felt everything die within him, while the motionless horseman stirred and suddenly opened his eyes, saw the sorcerer flying toward him, and roared with laughter. The wild laugh echoed through the mountains like a clap of thunder and resounded in the sorcerer’s heart, setting his whole body throbbing. He felt that some mighty being had taken possession of him and was moving within him, hammering on his heart and his veins… so fearfully did that laugh resound within him!

The horseman stretched out his mighty hand, seized the sorcerer, and lifted him into the air. The sorcerer died instantly and he opened his eyes after his death: but he was dead and looked out of dead eyes. Neither the living nor the risen from the dead have such a terrible look in their eyes. He rolled his dead eyes from side to side and saw dead men rising up from Kiev, from Galicia and the Carpathian Mountains, exactly like him.

Pale, very pale, one taller than another, one bonier than another, they thronged around the horseman who held this awful prey in his hand. The horseman laughed once more and dropped the sorcerer down a precipice. And all the corpses leaped into the precipice and fastened their teeth in the dead man’s flesh. Another, taller and more terrible than all the rest, tried to rise from the ground but could not—he had not the power, he had grown so immense in the earth; and if he had risen he would have overturned the Carpathians and the whole of the Sedmigrad and the Turkish lands. He only stirred slightly, but that set the whole earth quaking, and overturned many huts and crushed many people.

And often in the Carpathians a sound is heard as though a thousand mills were churning up the water with their wheels: it is the sound of the dead men gnawing a corpse in the endless abyss which no living man has seen for none dares to approach it. It sometimes happens that the earth trembles from one end to another: that is said by the learned men to be due to a mountain near the sea from which flames issue and hot streams flow. But the old men who live in Hungary and Galicia know better, and say that it is the dead man who has grown so immense in the earth trying to rise that makes the earth quake.