back in the forest, and it was only at the king's insistence that they told it now, for they did not expect to be believed.
"Ivan's mother is a witch?" Father Lukas sharply asked.
"I never knew till now," said Ivan.
"Bad enough when she was just a Jew," Father Lukas grumbled.
"She saved my life a dozen times," said Katerina. And then she held up the dozens of charms that she had made during those long days in the woods. "Our soldiers will also wear these, of her design, but with my power in them. Aware will make them quicker to recognize their enemy's intentions. Baffle will confuse the enemy, while this potion, which they must drink just before going into battle, will make their movements faster, their aim more accurate. You can be sure that the Widow will have her own charms on every soldier in her army - but her designs are not as deft as Mother Smetski's."
It didn't reconcile Father Lukas to this whole business of relying on witchcraft, but he was a practical man, and there would be time enough to stamp out charms and potions after the war was won, the witch defeated. Someday when a woman gave a gift to a departing soldier, it would be nothing more than a token of her love, and not an amulet with powers in it to protect him in the fight. As for the tales of flying across oceans, no one seemed to doubt them because no one understood what they really meant. What was an ocean to them, who had seen only forest in their lives? What did it mean for a huge house to fly, when there was no house that they had seen as large and heavy as a transcontinental jet? They had never heard a noise so loud as the engines of a plane. They had never seen anything move as swiftly as a car on the interstate. So whatever mental picture they received from Katerina's account, it could not be very close to what had really happened.
What interested them was the soap opera - the jilted lover, coming with charms to win Ivan back or punish him, only to discover that the witch had tricked her, and both the potions had the power to kill. And then the adventure of detecting the witch in the flying house, and their departure just before it flew away and disappeared - that one, too, was sure to be added to the fund of folklore.
I have already changed the future, thought Ivan. There will be different folktales now, to take into account in my dissertation. The lists and charts will be altered.
And then he wondered: What if the folktales I studied already included what we added here? What if the Ivan of the Russian folktales - Ivan, who was as common as Jack was in the English tales - was really Ivan Smetski, a Jewish boy from Kiev?
Now that he thought about it, he could see that he was right. For he had proof. He knew the origin of the tales of Baba Yaga's house that stood up on chicken legs and ran from place to place at her command. In all his years of study, he had never seen a single speculation from a folklorist or literary historian that the original of the witch's walking hut might be a hijacked 747. Yet there were the stories all along.
So everything that is happening now had already happened before I was born, thought Ivan. The hijacked jet. The coming of a common peasant named Ivan, untrained in battle but blessed with magical charms and gifts from his mother. The man who marries the princess, but then finds himself in mortal danger. He had read these tales before, never guessing that he would live through the originals.
What, then, of the tales that Sergei had written down at his behest? Those were the pre-Ivan tales, the stories from the time before Baba Yaga got her walking house. The lore of the folk before being corrupted by his backward passage through the centuries.
But what did the stories say the outcome would be? Ivan won in most of the tales Ivan knew, but that didn't guarantee a victory in this case, for not one of the tales told of Ivan commanding a group of grenade-throwing boys in the midst of battle. Did the silence mean that they would lose today, their exploits forgotten because everyone who witnessed them had died? Then only the women