I could feel the hairs on my neck raise up along with the hammer above me, though I was looking at the floor; I could sense its presence. As the hammer started to come down, I dove sideways into a roll.

A loud squawk sounded, and a cry: “Stop the thief from escaping!”

I ran around the outer perimeter of the barrow, hoping to evade pursuit and grab the rope. When I turned, I realized I wasn’t being chased; skeletons were climbing up the rope, and a black feather was floating down from above.

The king was furious; but for the moment, his fury was not directed at me. I felt unreasonably indignant for a brief moment; how dare they forget about me in favor of a new thief to catch and kill? Unfortunately, his soldiers were blocking the only exit I knew of. I continued my circuit of the barrow, looking outwards, hoping to find a tunnel; but there was no such luck. I slowed, then stopped. Perhaps if I held very still, the dead king would not realize I was still here.

“You. You brought that black bird here.” The king directed his empty-socketed gaze directly at me.

No tunnel; and the dead king had not forgotten about me. I pleaded ignorance. Why, hadn’t he himself said that the carrion birds were eager to see me dead? It was just his poor luck that the carrion bird also found shiny things interesting; and worth flying off with. No accounting for priorities – perhaps the raven hadn’t been too hungry today. While ravens aren’t picky about their fare, they can be distracted by other things. And, I added, that had been an early bird, one too impatient to wait long enough for a man to die. Surely, if he killed me, far more birds would come later to pick my corpse clean. I paused to look around meaningfully at the barrow; there were other shiny things around, I noted.

“No birds came to feast when he came.” The king gestured at the broken-limbed skeleton I’d nearly landed on and had definitely stepped on repeatedly while trying to escape his grasp.

“And he took his time about dying.” He made this pronouncement with the authority of a death sentence.

I continued to argue for my innocence, suggesting that perhaps the birds hadn’t realized there was a pit here. Or were too shy to approach it until after they realized there was nothing living down here that might try to eat them as they dined. Flying down into a dark hole is not a particularly sensible move. And now that one had come here, I added, more were sure to follow. Ravens do talk to each other, after all; they are quite gregarious birds. I concluded my arguments by expressing doubts his soldiers would be able to hunt it down before it had spread the gossip about all the shiny things down the hole. His only hope lay in consulting an expert on birds, who might be able to work out a way to deter them.

“And would you, then, claim to be such an expert?”

The humble soldier Mikolai Stepanovich (yours truly) admitted that he perhaps did know a thing or two about birds, and asked how he could serve his most royal highness. Tears welled up in my eyes – partly, I think, the effect of the grave dust I had gotten in them when I rolled. (As I said, I think I may be allergic to such stuff.) I then commented that I expected more birds to show up at any minute, so if his most royal highness permitted, I would aid him in his plight before a plague of birds set upon him and his men to strip them of all valuables.

The king seemed skeptical; then he heard cawing, drawing nearer; then the light from the hole darkened. The king ordered the hole blocked with a stout shield, but dozens of birds flew in before the skeleton bearing the shield could finish making his way up the rope. The birds attacked the dusty old skeletons of his servants, swirled around the cave, and generally made nuisances of themselves.

One even dropped a fur-lined hat, as if adding insult to the injury of the theft of the crown. However, soon enough, the soldier with the shield made his way up the rope; and the hole was blocked, leaving the barrow dark. Too late, I realized that my shoulder was coated with lantern oil and sprinkled with broken glass, and that the lantern had been crushed and gone out.

It was very dark in the cave. From the chaos I witnessed, I think neither the birds nor the skeletons could see each other well in so little light. Soldier struck soldier; bird collided mid-air with bird. Seeing this, I hunkered down and covered my face with my arms, hoping to wait out the chaotic violence by staying as far out of the way as possible.

There was the ringing of metal on metal; the clatter of bone; the scrape of talons; the whooshing of feathers; the cawing of birds; the loud crack of a rifle, not too far off; and the angry shouting of the king as he fended off the would-be avian jewelry thieves. I tried to sort out the din in my head; and then light broke back into the barrow, seeping in around the edges of my arms.

I risked a quick look; the skeleton holding the shield lay shattered on the ground in a pile of scattered bones, a cut length of rope lying on the ground around him. The tip of a rifle waved over the hole, but evidently whoever was on the other end of it couldn’t see into the barrow, even with the light from outside pouring in; because they made neither a comment nor a shot.

Whoever they were, they were living; or at least, more recently living than the king. In a moment of inspiration, I stripped to the waist, swiping my undershirt over the oily patch on my coat. I then wrapped it around my hatchet and set it on fire with a match. This may sound like an involved process, but believe me when I tell you I did it in less time it would take me to explain what I had done aloud, and my torch soon illuminated the barrow.

As the torch lit, there was one last squawk, and then silence. In the torchlight, it was clear that the fight with the birds in the dark had cost the king some of his servants and soldiers, their bones prized apart by beak and talon, the survivors bearing numerous scratch marks. The king himself, however, was unharmed (and unscratched). He was surrounded by a ring of dead birds, each bearing the mark of his hammer. The fight was over. He was turning his head back and forth; taking stock of the situation, and, if my experience as a commander is any guide, counting his casualties. He was not pleased.

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“Maikoli Stenapovek,” the king said, mangling my name to a nearly unrecognizable state, “I do not know by what foul and unnatural magics you have brought these birds upon me, but I will end you.”

It didn’t seem particularly fair for an undead creature to accuse me of foul and unnatural magics.

I was armed with a hatchet, the efficacy of which was altered (not particularly for the better) by the fact the head was wound with a burning oily shirt. The dead king was holding his favorite weapon, the one he had been buried with. Even if it was an ordinary weapon, he knew it like it was an extension of his own arm – and what ordinary weapon shines like polished silver while having the hardness of tempered steel? I was not even sure what metal it was made of. He could swat nimble birds out of the air with it while blindfolded.

I would be lucky if the flaming shirt of my torch didn’t unravel mid-swing. Even had I been holding an enchanted axe with the sharpness to fell a tall pine in a single swing, I was no great warrior of the ages, nor had I a hundred lifetimes of bored practice in a sealed tomb during which to refine my technique. It was all I could do not to make a fool out of myself on the battlefield with my steam-powered armor on, and I did not have that mechanical enhancement to rely on now. I was nevertheless willing to fight for my life. I saw no other alternatives.

I thrust my makeshift torch at him with a fierce yell, and I was amazed to see him stumble backwards, with a sharp deep crack that sounded as loud as a cannon in the quiet room. Then I heard another loud crack, not quite as deep, and a hole appeared in his robes of office. He looked around warily; another sharp crack. I could not resist looking up. The rifle barrel had returned, along with a pair of pistols and a spot of red hair. Then both vanished, and there was a sound of hammering as Katya worked at pushing another bullet down the barrel of her rifle.

“Foul sorceress!” the undead king shouted. “What devil’s bargain have you made, to throw thunderbolts with that wand? No human wields such magics on her own! Or are you human?”

He did not seem fully convinced that Katya belonged to my species. It took a real effort to keep my attention on the present after briefly noting to myself that this confirmed my earlier estimate of his age. I held the torch high, trying to provide better light. The rifle dipped down, and there was another loud report; the king’s skull dropped to the ground, still talking.

“Maikoli Stenapovek, I forgive you. I did not know you were a slave to a demon walking in the skin of a woman.”

His body hunched forward, holding the hammer to the side while it groped around for his skull. He couldn’t quite see what he was doing; his skull had rolled to face the wall when it landed. There was another sharp crack, and his skeletal body tumbled to earth in two pieces, its spine severed. He, in his several parts, began flailing about in blind panic.

I stepped forward cautiously, then started trying to smash the bones with my hatchet-torch. After the first few blows, the torch part had been extinguished, the blade having severed enough of the burning cloth that it fell off, no longer secured in place. The last thing the king’s skull told me was to free myself from demonic influences, to fight the foul and unnatural magics that left me a pawn to a fiendish mistress. I sighed heavily.

“Would that I could have talked to him without him trying to kill me,” I said to myself, out loud.

I had so many questions I had wanted to ask; it is not every day that you meet someone over a thousand years old. It is one thing for some old country grandmother to tell you tall tales about the days of yore, but another entirely to hear it from someone who had been there. As old as the little old ladies are, I doubt that many (any, even) of them are more than a hundred years old. More likely, they just start to forget how old they are and start to confuse stories they’ve told about their younger days with stories their own elders told them once upon a time.

For example, I remember the little old grandmother out in the woods telling me a tale about when Khoryv sailed up the Slatuvich with his sister and two brothers. She told it as if she had been there, even though that took place many centuries ago. The logical conclusions are either that she was a bit confused, or that she was simply reciting the story word for word as it had been told to her by her own grandmother, who had it from hers, and so on, passed on from generation to generation.

I decided to risk whatever curses the pulverized king might rain down on my head and filled my bags with jewelry before I headed up the rope. I also took his hammer. I’m not sure whether I intended it as the rightful spoils of war or if I wanted to make sure he wouldn’t have it with him if his bones re-assembled themselves. Both reasons came to mind afterwards.

If he did regenerate from his smashed state, then he would surely want revenge. If we had merely inconvenienced him, rather than destroying him and he climbed out of the hole to chase us down and revenge himself upon us, I didn’t want to leave him his favored weapon. How do you kill what’s already dead? My education was sorely lacking in this area, and I hoped it wouldn’t prove an important deficiency later on.

Katya asked me if I’d retrieved her hat; evidently, a bird had snatched it from her, and she had ridden hard after the bird until she saw it fly into a hole. The hole, she told me, was one with me down inside of it, surrounded by the undead, in the process of getting myself messily killed by those undead. And her back was still stained from the ink. She’d washed it, she informed me, several times, and her undershirt would never be the same. And would I please not get myself killed in a dark hole in the swamp? Please? She liked me. She meant she really … well, really liked me. And she cared if I got myself trapped with a horde of ravening undead.

She buried her face in my chest. She really really cared about me, she informed me, her icy cheeks and nose pressed against my bare chest, hugging me tight. The chill wind whipped across my back, reminding me I’d left my coat behind as well. She mumbled something nearly inaudible and entirely into my chest, then took a deep breath.

“Katya?” I said, cutting her short.

As warm as my heart felt on hearing her work up the courage to say what she meant, the rest of my torso was experiencing a contrasting sensation, and I was beginning to fear frostbite.

“I know. I love you, too.” I picked her up and kissed her firmly before setting her back down.

“I’ll be back up with your hat and my coat. Hold this,” I said, handing her the hammer.

“And this.” I emptied the bags and pouches tied around my waist, leaving a pile of jewelry at her feet.

“Oh. And this.” I handed her the somewhat singed hatchet.

I descended into the barrow once again; this time, risking a careful look around before I descended the last stretch. For the moment, it was quiet in the barrow. Although I was tempted to refill my bags again with more grave goods, I didn’t linger any longer than necessary to quickly pull on my coat and her hat, climbing back up the rope with all due speed.