There lived a husband and wife, and they had no children. They asked God to send them a son, even the smallest one. They asked and asked, and their son was born, small as a pea seed. So they called him Pea.
As soon as he was born, he said to his mother:
- Mother, I want bread.
His mother gave him a loaf of bread. And he ate it and asks for more. My mother gave me more, then more and more. Pea ate ninety loaves one after another and said to his mother:
“Bring me, mother, our donkey and get some food for my father, I’ll take it to the field for him.”
“Where should you go, you’re still young!”
- Bring it, you’ll see.
What are you going to do here, the mother brought the donkey and tied up a basket of food. Pea jumped up, grabbed the basket, climbed over the withers and climbed into the donkey's ear. Shouts from there:
- Hey, let's go! Hey, let's go!
So he urges the donkey, and she obeys. In the middle of the road they met gypsies. The gypsies see that the donkey is walking alone, and they say:
“There’s a donkey without an owner, let’s take her for ourselves.”
And Pea shouts:
- Don’t touch her, she has an owner! Don't touch her, she has an owner!
The gypsies heard this, decided that the donkey was enchanted, and ran away in fear.
And Pea came to his father and shouted to the donkey:
- Whoa!
The donkey stood up, and the father did not know what to say from surprise. Hears:
“Help me, father, get out of my ear, I brought you some food.”
The father was surprised and helped. And Pea found himself on the ground and said:
- You, father, eat, and I’ll plow the field.
- Well, no, you’re too young to work.
- But it’s not small, look how I handle it.
He jumped onto the yoke of the oxen and shouted:
- Hey, let's go, Piebald! Hey, let's go, Motley!
The oxen started moving. Before my father had time to look, the field was already plowed. Pea took the oxen under the shed, and he lay down to rest with Motley in the feeding trough. The ox didn’t even notice how he swallowed Pea. The father is looking, but his son is not there. He began to call:
- Pea, where are you?
And Pea in response:
“I’m in Motley’s belly, father!” Kill him, and I’ll give you back twenty of them.
What can you do, Motley’s father killed him, ripped open his belly, but no matter how much he looked for Pea in the ox guts, he never found it. And at night a wolf crept up and ate the intestines, and with them Pea.
The wolf began to climb the mountain, and Pea shouted:
- Shepherds, shepherds, hold the wolf! Shepherds, shepherds, stop the wolf!
The shepherds ran out of the huts, rushed at the wolf and killed him. They rip open his belly, and Pea comes out:
- Be careful, don't hit me! Be careful, don't hit me!
The shepherds searched the wolf's belly, but they never found Pea.
Then they made a drum out of wolf guts, and Pea ended up in the drum.
And the robbers attacked the shepherds. The shepherds fled and abandoned the drum.
The robbers sat down under a tree and began to divide the booty: they had stolen a lot. Their leader says:
- This jug is for you, this one is for him, and this one is for me.
The pea will scream from the drum:
- What about me?
- What's happened? Who is this voice? Who disagrees here?
The robbers looked at each other. The leader for his:
- This cup is for you, this one is for him, and this one is for me.
And Pea again:
- Is it okay for me?
- What's happened? — the leader got angry. “Who is that voice again?”
The robbers are silent. Then Pea hits the drum. The robbers saw the drum playing by itself, they rushed in all directions, throwing away all the loot.
And Pea made a hole in the drum with his fingernail and climbed out. He collected the spoils of the robbers and went home. The father and mother were delighted: the son was alive and had brought so much good. Pea says to his father:
“I promised you, father, that for one Motley I would return twenty.”
So they lived in joy and contentment until robbers came to the village. One of them wanted to drink and knocked on Pea's house so that they could bring him water. The mother came out and gave the robber some water in whatever was available. And this was one of those cups that the robbers had stolen. The robber grabs her and asks:
-Where did you get this cup from? After all, she is mine.
The mother got scared and quickly locked herself in the house. And the robber says to his companions:
- I found out where our treasures are. We'll get them this night.
But Pea didn’t waste any time when his mother told him everything:
“Don’t put out the fire, mother, you never know what you’ll need.”
And he settled down near the hearth, prepared an armful of brushwood and put a cauldron of resin on the fire. At midnight he hears: robbers have climbed onto the roof and are whispering. And the leader stuck his head into the chimney and said:
- This is where we’ll climb. Tie a rope around me and I'll go down.
The pea instantly blew up the fire, threw in some brushwood, lit it properly, and the resin began to boil. The leader will shout:
- Get up, I'm burning! Get up, I'm burning!
Before the robbers had time to catch him, he plopped straight into the cauldron and was boiled alive. And the rest fled and never showed up in those places again.
Baby bell, this is the end of the fairy tale, dandy, dandy, a lesson for small children.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru