The Ice Queen by Bruce MacBain

brawls, in the midst of which some men puked and others keeled over. I felt I might do either one, as I tried to match drink for drink with these Rus. Einar Tree-Foot slipped in beside Old Thordis on the bench, and, as far as I could see, made himself quite entertaining.
    Yaroslav, too, became ardent after downing half a dozen goblets of mead, and pulled Ingigerd onto his lap and kissed her several times.
    While we feasted we were entertained by the palace dwarfs, who performed feats of tumbling and stilt-walking. The head of the troupe was that same Putscha whom I have already described. With him was Nenilushka, his daughter.
    (On the subject of these dwarfs, I should explain that they are not the same as the dwarfs one hears of in stories, those tireless miners who delve in the earth for gold. Nor are they of the Lappish race, whom I had met on my travels. They are not, in fact, a race different from ourselves at all, but merely sports of nature. The Rus keep them as pets, and a man or woman will do anything, no matter how shameful, in a dwarf’s presence, as though it had no more sense than a dog or a piece of furniture. As far as I could discover, however, their feelings are no different from ours.)
    The dwarfs performed their handsprings and vaults with great skill—Putscha especially, who was able to support a pyramid of the other three on his shoulders. Seeing him stripped to the waist, I was surprised by his muscularity; there was considerable strength in that little body.
    A feast is an ideal occasion for studying one’s hosts. Drunk, they will show you more of themselves in a few hours than in a week sober. And so I took this opportunity to observe the brothers Vladimirovich.
    Yaroslav had a homely face with a rather large nose; his graying hair was cut in a bowl, his beard spade-shaped. He wore rings on all his fingers as well as other costly jewelry, and yet his clothes were plain and even threadbare. He was a man, I concluded, who liked to boast his wealth, while at the same time caring little about his person.
    Mstislav presented (as I have already said) the strongest contrast to his brother. About the same age as Yaroslav, he enjoyed a great reputation for boldness in battle and generosity to his retainers. (His druzhiniks, it was rumored, ate with silver spoons where we had to be content with wooden ones.)
    This night he wore a bear-skin cloak, one pearl earring of great size, and a necklace of wolf’s teeth—and not just any wolf but a particularly crafty old fellow, whom he had patiently tracked to its lair and dispatched with only a knife. His trousers, to use a poetic figure of the Rus, were as wide as the sea, and his boots had arches so high that a sparrow could fly underneath them. He was a stupendous drinker and seemed always, as I observed in the days to come, to be somewhere between drunkenness and sobriety.
    â€œAle!,” he bellowed and, impatient to be served, strode over to the vat, thrust his whole head in, and brought it up with the foaming liquid dripping from his hair and his long moustaches. “Hah! Ha, ha! Drunkenness is a blessing sent by God, eh, brother? ‘Strong drink is the joy of the Rus, they cannot live without it.’ I’m quoting our father’s very words.”
    I found it hard to believe that he and Yaroslav were sons of the same father, but they were—and in a family not noted for brotherly love. In the past they had fought each other to a draw over who should possess their father’s capital of Kiev. The result was that Yaroslav had promised not to move his court there for so long as Mstislav lived. To make certain of it (for Yaroslav would not have been the first in that family to break an oath), Mstislav installed himself as Prince of Chernigov, from where he could keep his eye on Kiev, only a few miles distant.
    In the five years that had passed since then, the two brothers—considering their bad beginning—had got on