And she began to beseech him and the Prince to pardon her. She confessed all her sins, and swore an oath always to love Prince Ivan, and to obey him in all things. Prince Ivan forgave her, and began to live with her in peace and concord. The hero who had been blind remained with them, but Katoma and his wife went to the house of [her father] the rich merchant, and took up their abode under his roof.
[There is a story in the “Panchatantra” (v. 12) which, in default of other parallels, may be worth comparing with that part of this Skazka which refers to the blind man and the cripple in the forest. Here is an outline of it:—
To a certain king a daughter is born who has three breasts. Deeming her presence unfortunate, he offers a hundred thousand purses of gold to anyone who will marry her and take her away. For a long time no man takes advantage of the offer, but at last a blind man, who goes about led by a hunchback named Mantharaka or Cripple, marries her, receives the gold, and is sent far away with his wife and his friend. All three live together in the same house. After a time the wife falls in love with the hunchback and conspires with him to kill her husband. For this purpose she boils a snake, intending to poison her husband with it. But he stirs the snake-broth as it is cooking, and the steam which rises from it cures his blindness. Seeing the snake in the pot, he guesses what has occurred, so he pretends to be still blind, and watches his wife and his friend. They, not knowing he can see, embrace in his presence, whereupon he catches up the “cripple” by the legs, and dashes him against his wife. So violent is the blow that her third breast is driven out of sight and the hunchback is beaten straight. Benfey (whose version of the story differs at the end from that given by Wilson, “Essays,” ii. 74) in his remarks on this story (i. p. 510-15), which he connects with Buddhist legends, observes that it occurs also in the “Tuti-Nameh” (Rosen, ii. 228), but there the hunchback is replaced by a comely youth, and the similarity with the Russian story disappears. For a solar explanation of the Indian story see A. de Gubernatis, “Zool. Mythology,” i. 85.]
Of this story there are many variants. In one of them[325] a king promises to reward with vast wealth anyone who will find him “a bride fairer than the sun, brighter than the moon, and whiter than snow.” A certain moujik, named Nikita Koltoma, offers to show him where a princess lives who answers to this description, and goes forth with him in search of her. On the way, Nikita enters several forges, desiring to have a war mace cast for him, and in one of them he finds fifty smiths tormenting an old man. Ten of them are holding him by the beard with pincers, the others are thundering away at his ribs with their hammers. Finding that the cause of this punishment is an unpaid debt of fifty roubles, Nikita ransoms the greybeard, who straightway disappears. Nikita obtains the mace he wants, which weighs fifty poods, or nearly a ton, and leaves the forge. Presently the old man whom he has ransomed comes running up to him, thanks him for having rescued him from a punishment which had already lasted thirty years, and bestows on him, as a token of gratitude, a Cap of Invisibility.
Soon after this Nikita, attended by the king and his followers, reaches the palace of the royal heroine, Helena the Fair. She at first sends her warriors to capture or slay the unwelcome visitors, but Nikita attacks them with his mace, and leaves scarce one alive. Then she invites the king and his suite to the palace, having prepared in the mean time a gigantic bow fitted with a fiery arrow, wherewith to annihilate her guests. Guessing this, Nikita puts on his Cap of Invisibility, bends the bow, and shoots the arrow into the queen’s terema [the women’s chambers], and in a moment the whole upper story is in a blaze. After that the queen submits, and is married to the king.
But Nikita warns him that for three nights running his bride will make trial of his strength by laying her hand on his breast and pressing it hard—so hard that he will not be able to bear the pressure. When that happens, he must slip out of the room, and let Nikita take his place. All this comes to pass; the bride lays her hand on the bridegroom’s breast, and says—
“Is my hand heavy?”
“As a feather on water!” replies the king, who can scarcely draw his breath beneath the crushing weight of the hand he has won. Then he leaves the room, under the pretext of giving an order, and Nikita takes his place. The queen renews the experiment, presses with one hand, presses with both, and with all her might. Nikita catches her up, and then flings her down on the floor. The room shakes beneath the blow, the bride “arises, lies down quietly, and goes to sleep,” and Nikita is replaced by the king. By the end of the third night the queen gives up all hope of squeezing her husband to death, and makes up her mind to conjugal submission.[326]
But before long, she, like Brynhild, finds out that she has been tricked, and resolves on revenge. Throwing Nikita into a slumber which lasts for twenty-four hours, she has his feet cut off, and sets him adrift in a boat; then she degrades her husband, turning him into a swineherd, and she puts out the eyes of Nikita’s brother Timofei. In the course of time the brothers obtain from a Baba Yaga the healing and vivifying waters, and so recover the eyes and feet they had lost. The Witch-Queen is put to death, and Nikita lives happily as the King’s Prime Minister. The specific actions of the two waters are described with great precision in this story. When the lame man sprinkles his legs with the Healing Water, they become whole at once; “his legs are quite sound, only they don’t move.” Then he applies the Vivifying Water, and the use of his legs returns to him. Similarly when the blind man applies the Healing Water to his empty orbits, he obtains new eyes—“perfectly faultless eyes, only he cannot see with them;” he applies the Vivifying Water, “and begins to see even better than before.”
In a Ryazan variant of the story,[327] Ivan Dearly-Bought, after his legs have been cut off at the knees, and he has been left in a forest, is found by a giant who has no arms, but who is so fleet that “no post could catch him up.” The two maimed heroes form an alliance. After a time, they carry off a princess who is suffering from some mysterious disease, and take her to their forest home. She tells them that her illness is due to a Snake, which comes to her every night, entering by the chimney, and sucks away her strength. The heroes seizes the Snake, which takes them to the healing lake, and they are cured. Then they restore the princess, also cured, to her father. Ivan returns to the palace of the Enchantress Queen who had maimed him, and beats her with red-hot iron bars until he has driven out of her all her magic strength, “leaving her only one woman’s strength, and that a very poor one.”