make it. The bear was going to join him here. And it would be no good jumping down into the chasm, for he'd never get out of there again. He had no choice but to prevent the bear from climbing up.
Don't kick at its head, he told himself. Those jaws are quick and they won't let go.
Instead he clambered up onto the bed and jumped with all his strength down onto the bear's arm.
It accomplished nothing except to send pain shooting up from his left leg as the wound reopened and blood seeped out onto his crusted ankle. He groaned in pain. The bear roared again, and got the other paw farther up onto the grass.
Ivan rolled down and knelt beside the bear's claw - was it this one that had torn open his leg? - and pulled to try to get the bear to fall backward into the pit. Instead, the bear lunged upward, snapping at his hand with its great teeth. He recoiled, bounded away, over the body of the woman.
What will the bear do to her? he wondered, filled with a new dread. But then he realized that if the bear were going to harm her, it would have made this climb long ago. She was safe enough. Only he was in danger.
Well, if he was going to die, she was going to watch him do it. There would have to be one witness, at least, to how much he gave for this woman who meant absolutely nothing to him except that she had haunted his dreams since he was a boy.
As the bear heaved its chest up onto the pedestal, Ivan knelt beside the bed, leaned down, and kissed the woman's lips.
They were soft and alive. She kissed him back.
Her eyes opened. Her lips parted. She gave a soft cry, drew her head away from him.
He knelt up to look at the bear. Its hind legs were now scrabbling for purchase on the pedestal.
She stammered something in some language. A Slavic language, but very oddly pronounced. He knew he should understand it.
After a moment, it registered on his brain. Though the accent was unfamiliar, she had to be speaking a dialect of proto-Slavonic, closely related to the Old Church Slavonic that he and his father had spoken together so often.
"What did you say?" he demanded in that language.
"What?" she asked back.
Speaking slowly, trying to emphasize the nasals and bend his pronunciation toward the accent he had heard from her, he repeated his question. "What did you say?"
"Prosi mene posagnõti za tebe," she said slowly, each word separated. He understood now - easily, in fact: Ask me to marry you.
This was hardly the time for romance, he thought.
But her gaze was fixed on the bear. It towered over them, its arms spread wide, its mouth open as it brayed out its triumphal cry. Ivan realized that she wasn't proposing a romantic relationship, she was telling him how to vanquish the bear.
"Proshõ tebe posagnõti za mene!" he shouted in Old Church Slavonic. Will you marry me!
For a moment she hesitated, her face a mask of anguish.
"Ei, posagnõ!" she answered.
The bear was gone, even as the last echo of its roar rang in the air.
Ivan rose to his feet, walked to the edge of the chasm. No sign of the animal. No sound of it, either, snuffling along the bottom. Nor were the leaves returning. They were gone, all the leaves that had filled the moat only moments before.
But there was something new in place. A bridge, a span of smooth white stone reaching across the chasm to the other side.
"Thank God," he whispered. He walked to the bridge, stepped on it, tested it. Firm and true. He took two more steps.
The woman cried out. He looked back at her. She gazed at him in awe, perhaps even in horror.
"You walk in air!" she cried.
"No, on a..." He wanted to say bridge but he didn't remember the Old Church Slavonic word. He tried it in Russian, Ukrainian. She only shook her head. Then she pointed to the opposite side of the chasm.
"This way," she said. "Here is the bridge."
He recognized the word at once when she said it, because it wasn't that far from the Russian word after all. So she must have understood him.
He watched in shock as she stepped off the edge of the chasm and walked three steps out into the middle of the air.
"Wait!" he cried. It was clear she was being held up by