the threshold of her father's house, and turned to face the gathered crowd. "Soon I will have a husband," she said to them, "and then Taina will be safe from the Pretender."
A momentary hush fell over the crowd. Of course she had not said the name of Baba Yaga, but they all knew whom she meant.
Then they erupted in cheers. King Matfei and his daughter Katerina would keep them safe from the baby-eating monster who turned all men into slaves and was married to a bear. The witch's curse had been overcome. All was right with the world.
You get used to being naked, that's the first thing Ivan discovered. Crashing through thick brush with branches snagging at your bare skin, you stop worrying about who's looking and spend your time trying to keep yourself from being flayed alive. He got shy again when they entered the village, but once he decided simply to let the gawkers gawk, he found himself much more interested in what he was seeing than in what they were.
He hadn't realized it till now, but he came to this village with two sets of expectations. As a scholar, he had a very clear idea of what a medieval Russian village should look like, and what he saw was pretty much what he expected. The houses of skilled tradesmen attached to the king's household were bunched up like a town, close to each other and close to their work sheds. There were stables and pigpens with all the smells that one might expect. And just beyond the king's town the forest opened up into many stump-dotted fields, each with its little hut for the family that fanned there. Other plots were fallow, going back to woodland, with saplings rising among the ancient stumps, all trace of farming subsumed in the grasses being grazed by sheep and cows.
What Ivan hadn't expected was the sheer numbers. A village like this was supposed to have only a tenth of the population that this land obviously sustained. Ivan remembered the professor who scornfully dismissed the stories of vast armies ranged together for battle: "The whole population of Europe at that time could not have assembled an army that large." Well, if Taina was any guide, it was the medieval writer and not the modern professor who knew what he was talking about. The fields went on and on, and other villages and manor houses could be seen, or at least guessed at from the smoke rising from unseen cook fires. Taina was no Paris or London, but then, there were more students at Mohegan University than there were citizens of either Paris or London in the 800s C.E.
The king of Taina was no tribal chieftain. This was a settled land, and the king could field a sizeable army if he needed to - many dozens of knights, if each manor house supplied one or two, and hundreds of armed villagers for infantry. No wonder Baba Yaga was resorting to subterfuge instead of conquest. And with the land so bountiful, feeding such a large population, it was no wonder Baba Yaga coveted it. Ivan wondered if this land was so productive and well-populated even today.
Yet even as he recognized and admired the medieval village he had expected, Ivan had to wrestle with a completely different set of expectations, courtesy of Walt Disney. Wasn't it Sleeping Beauty he had kissed? Then where was the magnificent palace? Never mind that Disney's movie version of the story was set in some weird combination of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries - Ivan couldn't help being let down at seeing - and hearing, and smelling - such a coarse reality instead of a magical dream.
The king didn't live in a palace at all, or even a castle. His house was made of timbers instead of sticks, and was large enough to enclose a banquet hall and many rooms, but it was all one story in height, thatch-roofed and completely unfortified.
For defense, there was a nearby hill-fort of pre-Roman design - earthworks with a palisade of wooden stakes at the top, designed with plenty of gaps for bowmen to shoot through. And in the middle of the fort, a tall watch tower arose, allowing several villagers to stand and watch out over the whole surrounding forest - but also allowing an approaching enemy an easily visible landmark to march for.
No palace, no castle, no stoneworks of any kind. Everything was built of wood, easily susceptible to fire. But