A Terrible Vengeance

XVI

A crowd had gathered around an old bandore player in the town of Glukhov and had been listening for an hour to the blind man’s playing. No bandore player sang so well and such marvelous songs. First he sang of the leaders of the Dnieper Cossacks in the old days, of Sagaydachny and Khmelnitzky. Times were different then: the Cossacks were at the height of their glory, they trampled their foes underfoot and no one dared to mock them. The old man sang merry songs too, and looked about at the crowd as though his eyes could see, and his fingers with little sheaths of bone fixed to them danced like flies over the strings, and it seemed that the strings themselves were playing; and the crowd, the old people looking down and the young staring at the singer, dared not even whisper.

“Now,” said the old man, “I will sing to you of what happened long ago.” The people pressed closer and the blind man sang:

“In the days of Stepan, prince of Sedmigrad (the prince of Sedmigrad was also king of the Poles), there lived two Cossacks: Ivan and Petro. They lived together like brothers: ‘See here, Ivan,’ said Petro, ‘whatever you gain, let us go halves; when one is merry, the other is merry too; when one is sad, the other is sad too; when one Wins booty, we share it; when one gets taken prisoner, the other sells everything to ransom him or else goes himself into captivity.’

And, indeed, whatever the Cossacks gained they shared equally: if they drove away herds of cattle or horses—they shared them.

“King Stepan waged war on the Turks. He had been fighting with the Turks three weeks and could not drive them out. And the Turks had a Pasha who with a few janissaries could slaughter a whole regiment. So King Stepan proclaimed that if a brave warrior could be found to bring him the Pasha dead or alive he would give him a reward equal to the pay of the whole army.

“‘Let us go and catch the Pasha, brother,’ said Ivan to Petro. And the two Cossacks set off, one one way, one the other.

“Whether Petro would have been successful or not there is no telling; but Ivan brought the Pasha with a lasso around his neck to the King. ‘Brave fellow!’ said King Stepan, and he commanded that he should be given a sum equal to the pay of the whole army, and that he should be given land wherever he chose and as many cattle as he pleased. As soon as Ivan received the reward from the King, he shared the money that very day with Petro. Petro took half of the King’s money, but could not bear the thought that Ivan had been so honored by the King, and he hid deep in his heart desire for vengeance.

“The two Cossacks were journeying to the land beyond the Carpathians that the King had granted to Ivan. Ivan had set his son on the horse behind him, tying the child to himself. The boy had fallen asleep; Ivan, too, began to doze. A Cossack should not sleep, the mountains paths are perilous…! But the Cossack had a horse who knew the way; it would not stumble or leave the path. There is a precipice between the mountains; no one has ever seen the bottom of it; it is deep as the sky is high. The road passed just above the precipice; two men could ride abreast on it, but for three it was too narrow. The horse began stepping cautiously with the slumbering Cossack on its back. Petro rode beside him; he trembled all over and was breathless with joy. He looked around and thrust his sworn brother into the precipice; and the horse, the Cossack, and the baby fell into the abyss.

“But Ivan grasped a branch and only the horse dropped to the bottom. He began scrambling up with his son upon his back. He looked up when he was nearly at the top and saw that Petro was holding a lance ready to push him back. ‘Merciful God! better I had never raised my eyes again than I should see my own brother holding a lance ready to push me back…! Dear brother, stab me if that is my fate, but take my son: what has the innocent child done that he should be doomed to so cruel a death?’ Petro laughed and thrust at him with the lance; the Cossack fell with his child to the bottom. Petro took all his goods and began to live like a Pasha. No one had such droves of horses as Petro; no one had such flocks of sheep. And Petro died.

“After he was dead, God summoned the two brothers, Ivan and Petro, to the judgment seat. ‘This man is a great sinner,’ said God. ‘Ivan, it will take me long to find a punishment for him; you select a punishment for him!’ For a long time Ivan pondered what punishment to fix and at last he said:

“‘That man did me a great injury: he betrayed his brother like a Judas and robbed me of my honorable name and offspring. And a man without honorable name and offspring is like a seed of wheat dropped into the earth only to die there, if it does not sprout, no one knows that the seed has been dropped into the earth.

“‘Let it be, O Lord, that none of his descendants may be happy upon earth; that the last of his race may be the worst criminal that has ever been seen, and that at every crime he commits, his ancestors, unable to rest in their graves and suffering torments unknown to the world of the living, should rise from the tomb! And that the Judas, Petro, should be unable to rise and that hence he should suffer pain all the more intense; that he should bite the earth like one possessed and writhe in the ground in anguish!

“‘And when the time comes that that man’s wickedness has reached its full measure, let me, O Lord God, rise on my horse from the precipice to the highest peak of the mountains, and let him come to me and I will throw him from that mountain into the deepest abyss. And let all his dead ancestors, wherever they lived in their lifetime, come from various parts of the earth to gnaw him for the sufferings he inflicted upon them, and let them gnaw him forever, and I shall rejoice looking at his sufferings. And let the Judas, Petro, be unable to rise out of the earth. Let him lust to gnaw but be forced to gnaw himself, and let his bones grow bigger and bigger as time goes on, so that his pain may be the greater. That torture will be worse for him than any other, for there is no greater torture for a man than to long for vengeance and be unable to accomplish it.’

“‘A terrible punishment thou has devised, O man…!’ God said. ‘All shall be as thou hast said; but thou shalt sit forever on thy horse there and shalt not enter the kingdom of heaven!’ And so it all was fulfilled; the strange horseman still sits on his steed in the Carpathians and sees the dead men gnawing the corpse in the bottomless abyss and feels how the dead Petro grows larger under the earth, gnaws his bones in dreadful agony, and sets the earth quaking fearfully.”

The blind man had finished his song; he began thrumming the strings again and singing amusing ballads about Khoma and Yerioma and Stkyar Stokoza…. But his listeners, old and young, could not rouse themselves from reverie; they still stood with bowed heads, thinking of the terrible story of long ago.