We are safer in the forest, said Solovey, but his nostril crooked uncertainly.
“I mean to see the world,” Vasya retorted. “All the world is not forest.”
The horse shivered his skin.
Her voice dropped, coaxing. “We’ll be careful. If there is trouble, you can run away. Nothing can catch you; you are the fastest horse in the world. I want to see.”
When the horse still stood, undecided, she added, ingenuously, “Or are you afraid?”
Ignoble, perhaps, but it worked. Solovey tossed his head, and in two bounds he was on the ice. His hooves made a strange dull thud as they struck.
An hour and more they traveled the sledge-road while the smoke hovered tantalizingly ahead. Vasya, despite her bravado, was a little nervous to be seen by strangers, but she found herself ignored. Men lived too near the bone in winter to bother with things that did not concern them. One merchant, half-laughing, offered to buy her fine horse, but Vasya only shook her head and nudged Solovey on.
A clear sun hung high and remote in the winter-pale sky when they came around the last bend in the river and saw the town spread out before them.
As towns go, it was not a large one. A Tatar would have laughed and called it a village; even a Muscovite would have called it provincial. But it was far larger than any place Vasya had ever seen. Its wooden wall rose twice the height of Solovey’s shoulder, and its bell-tower stood up proudly, painted blue and ringed with smoke. The great, deep tolling came clear to Vasya’s ears. “Stop a moment,” she said to Solovey. “I want to listen.” Her eyes shone. She had never heard a bell in her life.
“That is not Moscow?” she asked again. “Are you sure?” It seemed a city to swallow the world; she had not dreamed that so many people could share so little space.
No, said Solovey. It is small, I think, to the eyes of men.
Vasya could not believe it. The bells rang again. She smelled stables and wood-smoke and birds roasting, faint in the cold. “I want to go in,” she said.
The horse snorted. You have seen it. There it is. The forest is better.
“I have never seen a city before,” she retorted. “I want to see this one.”
The horse pawed the snow, irritable.
“Just a little while,” she added meekly. “Please.”
Better not, said the horse, but Vasya could tell he had weakened.
Her eyes went once more to the smoke-wreathed towers. “Perhaps you should wait for me here. You’re a walking inducement to thieves.”
Solovey huffed. Absolutely not.
“I’m in much more danger with you than without you! What if someone decides to kill me so they can steal you?”
The horse put his head around angrily, biting at her ankle. Well, that was answer enough.
“Oh, very well,” Vasya said. She thought a moment more. “Let’s go; I have an idea.”
HALF AN HOUR LATER, the captain of the small, sleepy gate-guard of the town of Chudovo saw a boy coming toward him, dressed like a merchant’s lad and leading a big-boned young stallion.
The horse wore naught but a rope halter, and despite his long-limbed beauty he came ungainly up the ice, tripping over his own hooves. “Hey, boy!” called the captain. “What are you doing with that horse?”
“He is my father’s horse,” called the boy, a little shyly, with a rough, country accent. “I am to sell him.”
“You won’t get any price for that fumble-foot, this late in the day,” said the captain, just as the horse tripped again, nearly going to its knees. But even as he said it, he ran an automatic eye over the horse, noted the fine head, the short back, the long, clean limbs. A stallion. Perhaps he was only lame and would sire strong offspring. “I would buy him from you; save you some trouble,” he said, more slowly.
The merchant’s boy shook his head. He was slender and not above medium height: no hint of a beard. “Father would be angry,” said the boy. “I am to sell him in the city; that were his orders.”
The captain laughed to hear Chudovo referred to so earnestly as a city by this rustic. Perhaps not a merchant’s son but a boyar’s, the country-bred child of some minor lord. The captain shrugged. His glance had already leaped past the boy and his nag, out to a caravan of fur-merchants pushing their horses to reach the walls before dark.
“Well, get along, boy,” he said irritably. “What are you waiting for?”
The boy nodded stiffly and nudged his horse through the gate. Strange, the captain thought. A stallion as docile as that and wearing nothing but a halter. Well, the beast is lame, what do you expect?