“No, dovey! Soldiers are crown property; no one is allowed to eat them.”
Here the last hoop snapped: on to the horse jumped the Soldier, and through the duga, and then set off running backwards. The witch leapt out of the coffin and tore away in pursuit. Lighting on the Soldier’s footsteps she followed them back to the horse, ran right round it, saw the soldier wasn’t there, and set off again in pursuit of him. She ran and ran, lighted again on his footsteps, and again came back to the horse. Utterly at her wit’s end, she did the same thing some ten times over. Suddenly the cocks began crowing. There lay the witch stretched out flat on the road! The Soldier picked her up, put her in the coffin, slammed the lid down, and drove her to the graveyard. When he got there he lowered the coffin into the grave, shovelled the earth on top of it, and returned to the merchant’s house.
“I’ve done it all,” says he; “catch hold of your horse.”
When the merchant saw the Soldier he stared at him with wide-open eyes.
“Well, Soldier!” said he, “I know a good deal! and as to my daughter, we needn’t speak of her. She was awfully sharp, she was! But, really, you know more than we do!”
“Come now, master merchant! pay me for my work.”
So the merchant handed him over two hundred roubles. The soldier took them, thanked him, and then went home, and gave his family a feast.
[The [next chapter] will contain a number of vampire stories which, in some respects, resemble these tales of homicidal corpses. But most of them belong, I think, to a separate group, due to a different myth or superstition from that which has given rise to such tales as those quoted above. The vampire is actuated by a thirst which can be quenched only by blood, and which impels it to go forth from the grave and destroy. But the enchanted corpses which rise at midnight, and attempt to rend their watchers, appear to owe their ferocity to demoniacal possession. After the death of a witch her body is liable, says popular tradition, to be tenanted by a devil (as may be seen from [No. iii].), and to corpses thus possessed have been attributed by the storytellers the terrible deeds which Indian tales relate of Rákshasas and other evil spirits. Thus in the story of Nischayadatta, in the seventh book of the “Kathásaritságara,” the hero and the four pilgrims, his companions, have to pass a night in a deserted temple of Siva. It is haunted by a Yakshini, a female demon, who turns men by spells into brutes, and then eats them; so they sit watching and praying beside a fire round which they have traced a circle of ashes. At midnight the demon-enchantress arrives, dancing and “blowing on a flute made of a dead man’s bone.” Fixing her eyes on one of the pilgrims, she mutters a spell, accompanied by a wild dance. Out of the head of the doomed man grows a horn; he loses all command over himself, leaps up, and dances into the flames. The Yakshini seizes his half-burnt corpse and devours it. Then she treats the second and the third pilgrim in the same way. But just as she is turning to the fourth, she lays her flute on the ground. In an instant the hero seizes it, and begins to blow it and to dance wildly around the Yakshini, fixing his eyes upon her and applying to her the words of her own spell. Deprived by it of all power, she submits, and from that time forward renders the hero good service.[368]]
In one of the skazkas a malignant witch is destroyed by a benignant female power. It had been predicted that a certain baby princess would begin flying about the world as soon as she was fifteen. So her parents shut her up in a building in which she never saw the light of day, nor the face of a man. For it was illuminated by artificial means, and none but women had access to it. But one day, when her nurses and Mamzeli had gone to a feast at the palace, she found a door unlocked, and made her way into the sunlight. After this her attendants were obliged to allow her to go where she wished, when her parents were away. As she went roaming about the palace she came to a cage “in which a Zhar-Ptitsa,[369] lay [as if] dead.” This bird, her guardians told her, slept soundly all day, but at night her papa flew about on it. Farther on she came to a veiled portrait. When the veil was lifted, she cried in astonishment “Can such beauty be?” and determined to fly on the Zhar-Ptitsa to the original of the picture. So at night she sought the Zhar-Ptitsa, which was sitting up and flapping its wings, and asked whether she might fly abroad on its back. The bird consented and bore her far away. Three times it carried her to the room of the prince whose portrait she had so much admired. On the first and second occasion he remained asleep during her visit, having been plunged into a magic slumber by the Zhar-Ptitsa. But during her third visit he awoke, “and he and she wept and wept, and exchanged betrothal rings.” So long did they remain talking that, before the Zhar-Ptitsa and his rider could get back, “the day began to dawn—the bird sank lower and lower and fell to the ground.” Then the princess, thinking it was really dead, buried it in the earth—having first cut off its wings, and “attached them to herself so as to walk more lightly.”
After various adventures she comes to a land of mourning. “Why are you so mournful?” she asks. “Because our king’s son has gone out of his mind,” is the reply. “He eats a man every night.” Thereupon she goes to the king and obtains leave to watch the prince by night. As the clock strikes twelve the prince, who is laden with chains, makes a rush at her; but the wings of the Zhar-Ptitsa rustle around her, and he sits down again. This takes place three times, after which the light goes out. She leaves the room in search of the means of rekindling it, sees a glimmer in the distance, and sets off with a lantern in search of it. Presently she finds an old witch who is sitting before a fire, above which seethes a cauldron. “What have you got there?” she asks. “When this cauldron seethes,” replies the witch, “within it does the heart of Prince Ivan rage madly.”