lose it all. After everything, after you fought the bear, after you woke me, to leave now would be worse than if you had never come!"
He held her hands. "Listen, I understand that wearing women's clothing is a..." He struggled for a word for tabu. "A sin. When we get near the village, I'll wait in the woods until you can bring me men's clothing." Gingerly he removed the hoose and handed it back to her.
She looked at him with disgust, refusing to touch the garment. "Do you expect me to wear this now that it's been around your loins?"
"No," said Ivan. "No, I see that you can't wear it now." He reached out and dropped the hoose into the chasm. "It's gone."
Her disdain was undiminished. "Nothing is gone," she said. "You just gave the hoose to the Widow."
"I was just down there," he said. "She wasn't there."
"She makes the rules, not you," Katerina said. "I have to marry you, but you're a fool. She must have picked you out herself."
That really pissed him off. "Maybe you have to marry me, but I don't have to marry you."
"Naked in the woods, a deformed peasant who wears women's clothing and speaks like a stupid child, it's not as though you had a lot of choices."
Her taunt was so ridiculously myopic that he had to laugh. He thought of Ruth back in New York, waiting for him. All this magic, these dreams of childhood, the evil monster he had beaten, the princess he had kissed, what were they? Foolishness, he could see that now. He didn't belong here. The rules made no sense to him. Clearly she expected him to go through with a real marriage. Like the rules in a china shop: You break it, you bought it. Only in this case, you kiss her, you've married her.
Well, he didn't like the rules. He didn't like the idea of marrying someone who thought he was a deformed cross-dressing peon, and even less did he like the idea of getting caught up in some kind of struggle with a mythical witch from the nightmares of fifty generations of Russian children. He'd done his part. He woke her up and set her free. The prince didn't have to stay. Especially when he wasn't a prince.
"Look," he said.
"I've already seen enough," she said.
"I mean listen."
"If you mean listen, say listen," she said. "Why do you talk so funny? Twisting all the words around?"
"Because I'm not from here!" he said. "Your language isn't my language." To prove it, he burst into modern Russian. "You speak a language that is already dead, that is hinted at only in fragments of ancient manuscripts, so you're lucky I speak any language you can understand at all!"
She looked at him now with dread. "What kind of curse was that? You spoke of death. Did you curse me to die?"
"I didn't curse you," he said in Old Church Slavonic. "I spoke in my own language."
But then he wondered what language was his own. Russian was the language of his parents' home, but the language of his childhood was Ukrainian. But all these years of thinking, speaking, writing in English - didn't that make English his language, too? When he was married to Ruth, wouldn't English be the language of their children? For that matter, didn't Old Church Slavonic have as much claim to be one of his languages? However badly he might speak it, it had been the private language he and his father once shared. And now, could he really pass up the chance to learn a dialect of proto-Slavonic, the true spoken language, after all these years of knowing and using the shadow of it that had survived?
Yes, he could. He had a life, and this wasn't it. He had done what he came to do - he cleared away the leaves, defeated the beast, crossed the chasm, woke the princess. That was as far as the stories ever went. None of the stories included shivering naked between forest and pit, the princess scorning you as a peasant, sneering at the symbol of your childhood covenant with God and loathing you for daring to try to cover your nakedness.
Well, actually, that wasn't true. Western stories ended with getting married and living happily ever after. And Russian fairy tales went far beyond that - to betrayal, adultery, murder, all within that romantic marriage that the wanderer stumbled into. The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French