Engagement

If he leaps toward the stars, will he fall back into the mud?

You can't be sure of anything in life; the entire fair is a discovery of certain patterns, the apparent equality of day and night, the spinning wheel of coffins and cradles, green trees and lizards, what they eat and what they shit on. If you've raised your hand a hundred times, do you think it will always be like this?

Elesibrote stands under a shattered oak tree, circling the anthill faster and faster. Ritual chants from nearby huts introduce further unrest into the tangle of thoughts he considers his very being. He searches for whispers emerging from behind the marshy bushes. Uncertainty.

So he continues to listen to the sounds of the lumberjacks' drums. Only the chopping of wood, the brutal thrashing of the village lame woman, sent out for years to collect sewage from the barn, permeates his posture. Still, Hagentia doesn't enter their hideout with a secret snap, a birchbark roll that, in its simplicity, signifies consent. Old Bisamta must, after all, give her consent.

The elders have been deliberating since evening, the ruling of the Great Council shrouded in secrecy, yet Elesibrote has an unquenchable premonition that matters will unfold according to his desire. During a diabolical ritual, hurling delicate veils of lust from all sides, they fan the candle flame until the tiniest wicks of Evil Iffe's body are completely consumed.

Evil Iffe raises her robes on the hilltop and announces to her surroundings the lowing of cow thighs. The servants, usually inscrutable in their musings, now organize themselves into an unwritten hierarchy, led by the eldest, with an inseparable staff that gives courage amid matters as mysterious as a female's desires.

Elesibrote gazes at the stars, ancient fathers, trying to discern within them a portentous symbol whose glow would give him strength. The nightlong wait unsettles his mind, hundreds of treacherous questions arising, unworthy of a nobleman's soul.

The first apprentice ascends the mountain with his trouser legs rolled up. Male tradition and destiny propel him to his destination, but when he sees the gaping cunt of Evil Iffe, he ceases his pro-church meditations and begins to fuck, fuck with all his might, like a wild boar, like a repulsive beast with only one purpose in life.

Elesibrote tries to resist the temptations of his loins, but what can the youthful fervor of a falconer do? After all, stalking the crickets, catching them, and cruelly cutting them into pieces with a dagger couldn't help. Killing is fun, but only for a moment. Then the emptiness returns, and one must settle for another fairy tale—fucking or dancing with vodka, that's all the village has to offer.

He doesn't want to kill; a trampled cricket flickers, trampled under his sandal, as the last of its amusements. He needs something else, he must learn to ignore the howl of Evil Iffe, whose pleasure manifests itself in a flurry of moaning shots into the forest wilderness.

The first apprentice returns exhausted to the valley, rubbing his cock and suggesting the meeting to the passing peasants with a lascivious flick of his tongue. The dripping sweat speaks volumes; in fact, he hasn't worn himself out like that since fourteen years ago, when, using the cover of darkness, he raped the miller's son in the barn.

Elesibrote slowly clenches his fists, turning his eyelids into hiding places. The retching groups of sentries are damned irritating; may the loud footsteps of these fools be damned, how dare they show signs of joy while he waits... While he awaits the judgment of the lewd, wild-eyed shaman, owed the truth to him, Hagentia, yet still unpredictable, still slithering like a poisonous snake.

For the first time in this night full of ghosts, this terrifying thought crossed his mind. And if... No, this tower is too armed, it's because of those torches climbing the hilltop and summoning the spirits of angry fathers to debauchery. It's a mad darkness, and cawing crows whisper sinful ideas into your ears. Old Bisamta is indeed cruel, taking revenge on life for its ugliness, for the pimples covering her cheeks, but she's also greedy. And yet he gave ducats. Lots of ducats.

Evil Iffe continues the dwarfs' dance, cackling maliciously, foaming at the mouth. Delighted as a rabid dog, biting the necks of all travelers weary of sex. Tonight is her night; during the drinking, the peasants don't think, devils hurl them against the walls amidst an orgie of church bells, forcing them to do things that even savages wouldn't do without shame.

Elesibrote averts his face, unable to watch the copulation any longer, his gaze falling straight to the chimney of the Great Council, from which smoke billows without the slightest change. Trying to guess what the elders are now discussing now makes his throat raw; he already sees a woman's shadow in the window, probably Hagentia with white curls. Just to close his ears to the moans, the rasping panting of the simpletons and the maiden, he can listen to anything, but not this. Not this, not things beyond human endurance...

He doesn't want to, he resists, but he already knows. The evil spirit in his chest begins to seriously consider climbing the mountain peak, he desires this, it will lull his vigilance into dilemmas, he will stop considering the possible responses of old Bisamta.

A gnawing intention demanded its rights, tugging at his chest with the sharp fangs of a wolf, urging and whispering, "Do it, she can't see, you'll find relief, waiting is beyond human capacity." And suddenly he remembered the times when, walking among the spring leaves, they would tell of lovers' betrayals. Elesibrote, the noble falconer, had grown accustomed to believing that no great harm was done by leaping into another bed, licking fortunes from another thigh. The answer of Hagentia, the youngest of the shaman's many daughters, terrified him so much that from that morning on, he dared not sully even his dreams, those lands full of wonders.

The seemingly endless, at first, multitude of thirsty male bodies is exhausted. The vodka and the late moonlight, interspersed with the gloomy song of the eagle owl, slowly sap the last vestiges of strength left after the harvest. The peasants have fallen asleep on the ground, in the mud, among dogs kicking with hunger, begging for another small morsel of food. And Evil Iffe continues to sing her song of lust; tonight is her night, after all, that one night of the year.

Elesibrote continues to ponder the sound of those sentences, saying that the body is a prison for the soul, and the desire of the body is irrelevant. But Hagentia stopped dead in her tracks, crushed the rowan twigs in her hand, and whispered in a terrifying voice

, "If someone does something wrong to someone," her eyes glowed in the darkness like a holy image, "then that evil will one day return to them..."

The message itself wasn't so terrible; he had heard it many times from his grandmother, but back then it had been an empty platitude, another of those fables about the unification of confused senses. Now the gods had delivered it; at the moment of speaking those words, an ancient truth, he clearly felt the energy vibrating in the bushes, as if an army of evil spirits stood behind him, ready at any moment to avenge his betrayal. Hagentia is a star from the sky, her every word glittering for all time, coiling around white curls.

Evil Iffe is urging. A naked body glides among the protruding treetops, reflecting the dark shadow from the foot of the hill, tempting the distraught falconer, leaving him with no other choice. Forcing.

He doesn't know how it happened; his memory holds no moments between the thought, the breaking of the vertical cross, and the moment he touched the woman's thighs. In that moment, he is a powerless machine, a cart rushing forward, carried by horses, with no more talk than a girl being fucked by drunken old men.

He lies on the woman's body, clutching the folds of a belly spilling out from under torn rags, scorched by nights heated by the howling of a wolf pack. Pleasure, immense pleasure, flowing into every corner of the man, blinding him with a lightning whip devised for the delight of the poor. Between the thighs, there is no turning back, no spells will make him turn back, not even Hagentia's cries, creeping between the handfuls of thoughts.

Once inside, feeling the soft leather mattress that fits better than sand, he loses himself in the rush, disappearing between the moaning lips of the queen of kings, who has ruled for centuries across all the glaciers. The rhythmic movements of her hips, so extraordinary, each of them threading him onto the needle of salvation, bringing him closer to the earth-shaking storm, whose lightning bolts will soon strike the earth.

Iffe craves kisses; they're the most honorable candy that falls from the lord's table. From her girlhood, when she'd go out to fuck everyone in the bushes, she'd dreamed of unattainable kisses like her, of the homage bestowed upon ladies in ballads. Such was the unwritten agreement—young men lost the cursed yoke of virginity, while she, behind a closed pair of eyelids, grasped the due tribute.

Bad boys learned, after many trials, to hold her neck so artfully, so deftly, that she couldn't raise her head to their lips and sully her with a kiss. They laughed at her clumsy attempts, filled with stifled tears, and told each other legends, calling her a dishtowel.

Elesibrote didn't harm the girls; in his boyish shyness, he learned to respect them by blushing, treating each of them as superior by birth to the male pack. Pressing his neck to the ground can't get past the orders; he just turns his head, fleeing the sow, drooling insultingly. And she jumps higher and higher.

He feels perfectly that at the moment of the kiss, his betrayal will no longer be graced by the eternal male law of fucking; it will be more, an unquestionable personalization of the object of his fuck, a choice of another, no matter if it's for the blink of an eye. The kiss is a magical temptation, a treacherous snake slithering across the path of the princess's castle. Another inert stone, interrupting the flow of pleasure, hangs around his neck the way beekeepers used to extract swaths of honey from decayed hives. Iffe comes dangerously close to his mouth, causing an inexplicable yet perfectly clear sensation. Something whispers in both ears that with every inch closer to the kiss, the specter of his betrothal with Hagentia recedes. His imagination suggests scraps of bleeding flesh, on the surface of which the Grand Council forbids marriage. And despite the further steps he takes in the village whore's garden, he can't shake this terrible premonition.

So he grabs Iffe by the neck, pressing her harder to the ground, imbuing his movements with a more decisive power, reminding him of the whipping of a washerwoman, a thief. He dominates, he is the true master in this moment, he can calmly strangle her like a sick bitch unfit to guard the cottage, and yet he himself feels strangled, more intensely than ever, strangled by Iffe's gripping legs, by this magical night of demons, by the village elders' meetings.

"If someone does something wrong to another, that evil will one day come back to them..."

The wailing words from the holy face pierce powerfully, precisely at the moment sparks shoot into the barn, the axe strikes a sawn-off board with the clamor of a bear. He leaps from the arms of the harlot, spattered with fresh semen, delighted with the unexpected gift that will enable him to produce a noble offspring, and runs into the forest, wanting to scream, wanting to howl and beg the gods for forgiveness.

Cursed desires, for which one's hands were broken three times in the mill as a child! Untamed tongues of flame, consuming will and commands, climb the infernal ladder, leading to another humiliation, another moment ruled by other forces! Will vanishes with the movement of potatoes spouting from the fire, scorched to ash in the flames. Elesibrote has no spiritual existence.

Amidst the scurrying thoughts, there's the faint sound of breaking branches, a sign of the approach of a being unable to deceive his trained hearing. He leaps to his feet, trying to conceal from his fiancée what he's just done. He wipes the remnants of his seed from himself with nearby leaves, assumes a warrior's stance, and presents a stony face, watching for the guest in his terrible hiding place.

But this is not Hagentia, it is old Bisamta dressed in rags, holding in her right hand a severed head with white curls, from which persistent drops of blood drip, coloring the ground red, although in the moonlight many would call this color black.