The Hanged Man: Part 6: Ostara (Entire)
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Part 6: Ostara
(O-STAR-ah) Spring equinox; balance point between Yule and summer solstice. Increasing fertility and creativity.
The Card: The High Priestess
Female power and wisdom
CHAPTER 18
MIRMIR
“The firsst to arrive iss Baba Yaga. She doesn’t know she’s arrived, for she sleeps, lying flat on her back with her chin and nose curving over her mouth, snoring. Her bed is rather greasy, as there hasn’t lately been a skivvy to wash her laundry. The bed stands in a room and the room is in a house on scaly chicken legs and the chicken legs have done the work of travel and are quite happy to reach the end of the journey. The legs stand in the sun, looking peaceful, slightly cocked at first one knee and then the other, like a horse. The house’s eyelids are closed and a long thin string of sticky saliva falls from the lock on the front door, which is made of a bony snout with sharp teeth. Baba Yaga has tasks to do and preparations to make, but for now she sleeps.”
“Sleep ends abruptly, and with it, peace. Baba Yaga wakes with a strangled snore, springs out of bed with fire on her tongue, throws open a window, making the human finger bone catch rattle, and lets a magnificent flow of cursing and shrieking come up from the bottom of her iron-tipped dirty feet.”
“Ugh,” said the Hanged Man.
VASILISA
Vasilisa and her companions, sitting in a quiet group near the edge of a sun-filled glade a respectful distance from the dozing chicken legs, jumped in surprise when Baba Yaga appeared at the window, as did the chicken legs, executing a comical hop as they momentarily lost their balance.
Nephthys recovered herself first. She stood up, facing the shrieking, gesticulating figure in the window.
“We didn’t wake you up,” she called. “We were quiet. We were invited to the party, and we’ve come!”
Vasilisa envied Nephthys’s assurance. Her previous experience gave her no confidence in dealing with Baba Yaga. She groped in her apron pocket with two fingers and felt the doll her mother had given her. The doll had seen her through her first encounter with the Mother of Witches, and she’d been alone then. Now she was with friends, and perhaps someone who offered more than friendship would be here as well. Rumpelstiltskin had told her and Jenny initiation was a choice, an invitation to growth and power, but Vasilisa knew both would come at a price if Baba Yaga took a hand in things, and she feared the price.
In fact, her initial encounter with Baba Yaga had not been her first brush with deep magic. It seemed strange to her that an impoverished peasant girl of no importance and no family should encounter anyone with great power, yet she had. Perhaps the doll her mother made her attracted magical energy. Power was a fearful thing, and she didn’t want to attract it, but the doll was all she had left of her dead mother and she couldn’t lay it aside. In an effort to remain unobtrusive and unworthy of either punishment or notice, she’d worked hard to be kind and accommodating since childhood.
Even so, magic and power found her, and here she was, yet again, in proximity to Baba Yaga.
She lifted her chin. She would see it through. She would not be cowed. If her hopes were realized, she would step across the threshold of this initiation into a new life — the life of a woman. She would hold fast to that.
Baba Yaga withdrew inside the house, but they could hear her muttering and cursing as she moved about, slamming doors and cupboards and knocking objects over. They heard a smash, as if a plate had been hurled against a wall. The front door opened and Baba Yaga appeared and stomped down the stairs to the ground. Without so much as glancing at the group watching her with varying degrees of amusement, interest and horror, she bent over a huge greasy black cauldron, stirring the unseen depths with her bony arm. The stirring released a stench that reached the circle on the grass. Baba Yaga emerged from inside the cauldron with a long bone gripped tightly in her hand. Grumpily, she stumped to a flat piece of ground well away from the trees. She used the bone as a stick and drew a large circle in the earth.
“Fire pit,” she said briefly, glaring. “You,” her needle-like gaze on Jenny, “and you,” this to Vasilisa, “dig and lay stones.” Her eyes moved to Rose Red. “You gather wood.” They looked back at her in fascination for a moment, and then she opened her mouth and roared, “Do it now, brats!”
They did. Baba Yaga completely ignored Rumpelstiltskin, but he didn’t appear to take this to heart. As Vasilisa bent her back over her shovel, she watched him go to a large piece of rock near the edge of the woods, study it, tap it with his mallet, take out his chisel and split it into thin slabs, perfect for lining the fire pit. He lent a hand with the digging, helped drag the pieces of rock to the pit and showed Jenny and Vasilisa how to fit them together as a lining, then went with Rose Red under the trees with a hatchet and saw. In an unbelievably short time, they’d made a fire pit and laid it with kindling, ready for lighting.
Meanwhile, Nephthys dragged her folded piece of cloth over to Baba Yaga’s cauldron and the child and crone bent their heads together over the contents.
The fire pit finished, Vasilisa returned to where Mary and Artemis sat. She tried to see what Baba Yaga and Nephthys busied themselves with. She suspected the knotted dragging cloth contained bones, and if so, she thought she might know what would come next.
Artemis’s attention was on something, and Vasilisa followed the direction of her interest. A rabbit moved slowly out into sunlight from the cool shadows under the nearby trees, hopping and pausing to feed in the leisurely manner of a rabbit without fear. It moved to and fro, nibbling busily, ears twitching as an insect or long green stem tickled. To Vasilisa’s surprise, the rabbit approached Mary as though it knew and trusted her. Tentatively, looking amazed, Mary reached out a hand and stroked its back. Its fur was a soft brown, warm with sun.
“Do you recognize him? He recognizes you!”
Vasilisa looked up, startled. A young man stood there, pushing straight black hair out of his eyes. His skin was olive and his eyes almond shaped. He grinned at Mary, cheeks bunching into firm rounds.
Careless of the rabbit, Mary sprang to her feet in one swift movement and flung her arms around him.
“Kunik! Kunik! I can’t believe it! What are you doing here?”
MARY
“Girl!” It was a shriek of impatience, as though the caller had been at it for some time.
Mary, released from Kunik’s embrace, turned and found Baba Yaga, standing with hands on hips, radiating contempt. Nephthys stood next to her, looking rather bored.
“Come here!”
Mary immediately obeyed, feeling dazed by the sudden and wholly unexpected appearance of Kunik, and greatly reluctant to approach the old hag. Baba Yaga watched her come with a beady eye. She tapped a sharpened tooth with an iron fingernail. Mary stood before her, looking at the ground so as to avoid the Baba’s fierce gaze and also in an effort to palliate the stench coming from her. Baba Yaga walked slowly around Mary and it seemed to the young woman her eyes saw through her clothing and skin into her very soul. The Baba came back in front of her, looked at Nephthys with a raised sarcastic eyebrow, and snorted magnificently through her nose, shooting out a virulent green blob of mucus.
“Show me your seeds, Seed-Bearer,” demanded Baba Yaga. In spite of the sneer in her voice, the title gave Mary courage. She raised her gaze to the Baba’s cold eyes and reached into her tunic for the seeds. Nephthys gestured towards the ground and Mary knelt next to Nephthys’s cloth and laid out her bundles and bags of seeds.
She unpacked the pouch of birch bark made so long ago in Janus House, lined with sealskin and holding carefully labeled twists of seeds. There were the pouches from Elizabeth and Demeter and the red silk bag from Anemone. There was the sandy bag from Nephthys. Mary laid out, one by one, every bundle and twist and pouch she’d collected on the road. When she had displayed them all, she stood again and looked silently at Baba Yaga.
“Hmmph,” said the Baba, pleased and yet not pleased. “Is that all?”
“Yes,” said Mary, feeling inadequate but too intimidated to defend herself.
“Hmmmmppphhh,” repeated the Baba, drawing out the sound nastily. “Very well. Go away.”
Mary retreated gladly, conscious of the Baba’s eyes on her all the way back to the group sitting in the sun. She took care to go slowly and keep her back straight.
Kunik sat in the circle with the others, looking quite comfortable and at ease. Mary remembered the shy boy she’d met on a winter day at the edge of the icy sea. She remembered the strange, heartbreaking story Kunik had told, the wonder and tenderness of his drumming, how he’d created picture and sound and movement with the instrument. But she couldn’t remember a rabbit. A rabbit at the edge of the winter sea?
She reached the group. Kunik was speaking.
“…and so, the white rabbit became a brown rabbit and when at last the burrow he’d found became unblocked, he went through and found himself back at home, in the place where he’d started, now a lovely, scented place with green grass, shy flowers and damp earth, and, best of all, other little brown rabbits.”
The little brown rabbit, nestled close to Kunik’s knee as he told the story, hopped over to Mary and crouched in front of her, looking up with dark eyes.
“Surrender!” she said. “It’s you? You’re real?”
The rabbit dropped his gaze and nibbled at a bit of clover between his front paws.
Mary looked at Kunik helplessly, not even knowing how to frame a question.
Kunik laughed. “Oh yes, he’s real.”
“I don’t understand,” Mary began, but the rest of her words were lost.
VASILISA
A rough track wound out of the trees across the clearing, and a brightly painted wooden cart drawn by a horse appeared. On the side of the cart the words, “Come and be welcome. Go and be free. Harm shall not enter.” were painted. At the reins lounged a lean man with dark hair and shirt sleeves rolled up over hard-looking forearms.
Two men on foot followed the cart, walking together in easy companionship.
“Artyom!” Vasilisa called, and ran to meet the shorter of the two men.
He looked just as she remembered, with his short sandy hair, his wide chest and the clothes he wore when hunting or traveling without the trappings of his royal birth and station. She noticed with pride he wore one of the linen shirts she’d embroidered for him. She wanted to throw herself into his arms the way Mary had greeted Kunik, but she was conscious of all the eyes upon them and Artyom’s position. He smiled warmly, but embraced her formally, kissing her on each cheek, and she endeavored to match his restraint.
Artyom’s walking companion was Radulf, an older man with thick grey-flecked hair, a short beard and deep-set eyes.
After a few minutes of jumbled introductions and excited talk, which Baba Yaga pointedly ignored, order was restored.
Vasilisa watched the cart driver move gracefully across the clearing to where Baba Yaga bent, muttering and clawing among piles of seeds and bones.
“Weeelll!” sneered the Baba, deigning to take notice.
“Good day to you, Grandmother,” he said respectfully, but his eyes gleamed with mischief.
The Baba glared at him, tapping a bony foot impatiently, huffing in an aggravated manner. Suddenly she stopped, strained briefly, and farted loudly.
“Oh, get out of my sight,” she snapped. “You’re far more trouble than you’re worth.”
He turned and walked back to the group of fascinated onlookers around the cart. Vasilisa could see him chuckling to himself. The horse, still in his traces, shifted his weight from one hind foot to another, cocked his tail and farted in echo of Baba Yaga, but with much better-smelling results. Nephthys, still with the Baba, giggled delightedly, and Vasilisa exchanged smiles with the others, but remained prudently silent.
Vasilisa and Rose Red helped lay food out on blankets while the others fetched water, unloaded the cart, and unharnessed the horse, who was called Gideon.
Rumpelstiltskin and Rose Red found wild strawberries. They were tiny, the size of the end of Vasilisa’s thumb, and tartly ripe. Artemis invited Baba Yaga and Nephthys to sit down and eat. Baba Yaga glared, snorted, and stomped up the stairs to her front door, which she slammed, making the chicken legs twitch. Nephthys, smiling to herself, skipped over and plopped herself down next to Mary. Kunik gave Surrender a mound of strawberries and evicted him from the middle of the circle of people.
They finished the meal with handfuls of strawberries. The cart driver, Dar, took a soft velvet cloth from an inside pocket and unwrapped a bone flute, banded with silver and decorated with gems. He polished it, though it looked to Vasilisa as though neither speck nor smudge marred it. He put the flute to his lips and began to play.
Next to her, Artyom lay back in the grass, hands folded over his stomach and eyes closed. Vasilisa feasted her eyes on him, the strong blade of his cheek with its gleam of blond stubble, his broad hands, a gold ring on the little finger of his left hand, and his dusty boots. He was there. Her fears about the initiation and the price Baba Yaga might exact for it drained away. With Artyom at her side, she could face a dozen Baba Yagas. And after initiation…well, she would learn to be the wife of a ruler. She would be worthy of him.
Theirs had been a strange courtship, mostly at a remove, with the Firebird as a go between. She would never forget the first day she’d seen Artyom in the market. His servant bought Vasilisa’s linen for Artyom’s shirts, but the linen was so fine he couldn’t find a seamstress, so the young ruler himself came to ask her to make the shirts.
They came from the same land of deep forest, though he was a ruler’s son and she a peasant. They shared a common language, and they shared the Firebird, the magical creature every child in their country knew stories about. The jeweled Firebird could lead you to your treasure, legend said. Vasilisa, imagining such a creature, embroidered Artyom’s shirts with a border of Firebirds in red silk thread, and like some hero out of the old stories, he’d brought the Firebird out of myth into reality and it became their courier.
At her first encounter with Baba Yaga, the old hag gave Vasilisa a human skull on a stick, a fearsome object that reduced her stepsisters and stepmother to piles of cinders while Vasilisa slept. At times it burned with a fiery light, and at other times it appeared to be nothing more than a rather battered old skull. This weird object made Vasilisa more nervous than the doll her mother had made. That at least had been a gift of love, a gift made out of her mother’s blood and tears. The skull was a different matter, yet Vasilisa found her reluctance to set it aside was greater than her reluctance to keep it with her. In an odd sort of way, it seemed to watch over her and guide her, like the doll. The skull could be deadly, however. She did not mourn her stepmother and stepsisters, who had done their best to destroy her, but she hadn’t wished them burned to cinders, either. No doubt it had been difficult to share husband and father with a daughter from a previous wife.
The skull and the Firebird demonstrated a strange affinity. The skull invariably lit in the Firebird’s presence. Noting this, Vasilisa impulsively loaned the grisly thing to Artyom the second and last time she’d seen him. Like the Firebird, the skull connected them is some deep way. It was an unlikely love token, but it was one of her two most powerful and valuable possessions.
It also assured she would see him again, at least once, to retrieve it.
After that second visit, they’d written nearly every day. Now, at last, they came together again to take part in this initiation, and the skull rested on Artyom’s discarded coat on the ground beside him.
Vasilisa leaned back on her elbows, closed her eyes, and felt the warm sun on her face. The taste of strawberries lingered in her mouth. Her stomach felt comfortably full. A strand of tough dried meat was trapped between two of her teeth. She felt it dreamily with her tongue, trying to dislodge it. The notes of the flute idled, leading her thoughts this way and that in the same way Surrender hopped slowly in the grass. The music moved, then paused. Moved one way, then another. Back tracked. Moved quickly for a few notes and then slowed down again.
Vasilisa realized the music had stopped. She lay next to Artyom in the warm grass, completely at ease. She thought perhaps she’d fallen asleep for a moment. No one spoke and a deep, easy feeling of relaxation settled on the circle. She felt alert but disinclined to move.
Rumpelstiltskin began to speak.
“She arrived in a world of people who didn’t recognize her. She arrived in a world that knew no word for her. She was named, but not by the world she was born into. She was of the world, her bones of the world’s clay. Water, root and leaf knew her and welcomed her. Insect, bird, reptile and furred creature took no more notice of her than of a crystal of frost, a dewdrop, a fallen petal.
But to the world of men, she was like the coming of a cataclysm.
She was named ‘gift of all,’ ‘all giving,’ ‘all gifted,’ ‘all endowed.’ She was named Pandora.
Her dowry was an unremarkable lidded clay vessel.
So much for the bones. Now what of the flesh?”
Rumpelstiltskin paused, looking around at the circle of faces.
“What is a woman?
A woman is a creature of malice and cunning. She has honey on her tongue and blackness in her heart. She’s a trickster, a twister, a snake. She’s a sharp knife buried in a man’s gut as she calls from his body the helpless moment of pleasure. She’s a seductress, a succubus who feeds on male essence. She’s a whore, a hag, a black cunt, a bitch. Her name is a lie, a cunning deceit, a twisted irony from the heart of Evil.
Plague and pestilence, pain, toil, sorrow and mischief were the gifts nesting in Pandora’s jar. Her jar was a prison, her treacherous hand the key. The only help, the only palliative to dark destruction that overcame mankind because of cursed Pandora remained fast in that prison, for she closed the lid too soon and locked away Hope, the last thing to emerge from the jar. Hope, that might provide a ray of light, a way forward, a glimpse of paradise lost. Hope, that fluttered with fragile wings around and around its dark cage and then lay crumpled, weightless and still in the bottom of the resealed jar.
Such was the first woman, Pandora, mother of all women, chalice of all evil in the world.”
After a pause, Rumpelstiltskin continued.
“A woman is a chthonic force, the spirit of Earth herself. She’s Gaia in human form. Within her move tides of fertility, creativity, cycles and seasons. She’s the cauldron of life and inexorable wisdom of death. She’s neither merciful nor cruel. She is.
Pandora, first woman, carried a jar. The jar contained everything needed to transform Earth into a world of infinite beauty, self-organizing and wise. In the jar were opportunity and choice. The jar contained life, neither good nor bad, but simply itself. When it was time, wind blew the jar over. Rain melted the lid’s seal. Freeze and thaw joined hands with snow and sun and the jar broke into fragments, like a hatchling’s egg. One thing remained among the shattered shards of Pandora’s jar. Hope lingered, grieving for the loss of how it had been, hoping for things to get better.
Such was Pandora, All Mother.”
“A woman is a question,” said Rumpelstiltskin. “A woman is one who sees with her nipples and speaks with her cunt and loves what’s real. A woman holds, heals, supports, renews life and cradles death. She strokes, stretches, urges on, licks, sucks, feeds and nurtures growth. A woman is source, fountainhead, cool dark well.
Pandora, she of all gifts, carried all blessings. Her jar served as an inexhaustible pantry. Freely, she gave her abundance, but a certain man wanted more. He wanted … more. Why should he not be the one to give … or withhold? Why did this creature called Pandora possess power and he didn’t?
He lifted the jar’s lid, meaning to capture all blessings and hold them fast until he decided how best to use them. Foolish man! The blessings slipped away and were forever lost. At the last moment, he clapped the lid back on the jar, keeping Hope safe. Hope. And the man said, ‘Didn’t I save the best thing?’ and ‘Wasn’t the greatest gift preserved by my quick thinking?’ in an effort to distract others from his act. And all agreed. Pandora was to blame. Pandora and her jar. Pandora and her tempting gifts. Naturally, men wanted the power to dispense such gifts.
No one discerned the two faces of Hope.
Such was Pandora, first woman.”
Again, Rumpelstiltskin paused.
“A woman is a tool, a chattel, an animal, a subnormal child. She must be kept ignorant and powerless. A woman is a pussy, a tit, a hole in which to find pleasure. A woman is a scapegoat and a satisfying splitting of skin under knuckles. A woman can be taught to cringe, to flinch, to obey. A woman can be adornment, servant and slave. A woman can be manipulated. A woman is weak. A woman is a piece of property. A woman is sly and curious and disrespectful. A woman is a stupid creature.
Pandora was ordered to carry the jar and keep it safe but to never look inside it. She arrived in the world of men, a place of ease and leisure and comfort, a place of full bellies, sleep, indolence, pleasure of all kinds, a place of paradise, in fact, and out of female weakness and curiosity she opened the jar and released the contents into the world. When she realized what she’d done, she slammed the lid back on the jar. The only thing left in it was Hope. Hope, the only anodyne to a world of misery created by Pandora’s disobedience.
Such was the nature of the first woman and all women who come from her bitter seed.”
“Bravo, maggot,” said Baba Yaga from behind Vasilisa, making her jump. “You saved the best for last. Women are tit and ass, empty hole and empty head. Useless, weak, puling creatures, women! Know nothing and want to know less than that!” She preened, sticking out her chest, bending a knee and standing hipshot in dreadful parody of female invitation. “I, on the other hand, I’m Storm Raiser! Ha! Lady of Beasts, they call me! Primal Mother! Hag! Crone! There’s power! Who was Pandora? Meddlesome wench! Poking her long nose where it wasn’t wanted! She destroyed Paradise accidentally. I’d do it on purpose!” She spat contemptuously on the grass inside the circle. Surrender bolted, making for the cover of trees in a flash of white tail.
“Ha!” said Baba Yaga, watching it go. “Rabbit stew! Not so good as child flesh, but still…” She walked away, toward her chicken-legged hovel.
The group behind her relaxed, returning their attention to Rumpelstiltskin.
“How do you know so much about Pandora?” Jenny asked the Dwarve.
“Because Pandora and a Dwarve named Jasper began it,” he said. His rugged face broke into a smile. “They became the first to join hands in the long line of dwarves and young women bound together by respect and love. Because of them, the tribes of women and Dwarves are each strengthened.”
“What did you mean about the ‘two faces of Hope’?” Vasilisa asked Rumpelstiltskin. Hope is a good thing, isn’t it? What’s the other face?”
Unexpectedly, Artemis answered. “Hope is essential, yes, but it’s not enough.”
“What else is there?” asked Artyom.
Nephthys jumped to her feet. “Hope is the last light to be extinguished, the honey in the mouth, the nice thing that forgives and forgives again its enemies!” Her childish voice recited the words. She slid a gold bracelet off her wrist and threw it into the air. As it fell, a silver shaft pierced its center and silver and gold dissolved into thick liquid and white fragments falling through the air. Nephthys reached out and caught the shattered remains, closing her fist around them. Her hand gleamed with viscous strings and drops.
Artemis was on her feet too, poised with her bow, bared arms strong and steady, having shot an arrow through the falling gold bracelet.
“Hope is the River Von, the slobber dripping from Fenrir’s jaws.” said Artemis. “Hope is the Challenger, the Warrior, insipid alone and indomitable combined. Hope is the tamed, the civilized, the captured, and the final abdication.”
Nephthys flung the contents of her hand into the center of the circle. A small pile of slippery wet teeth with sharp points fell in the grass.
“Fenrir was a monstrous wolf out of legend,” said Radulf unexpectedly. “Foam from his jaws formed the River Von, river of hope or expectation.” He picked up one of the teeth with something like reverence and examined it, eyes hooded and head bent.
“You’re saying hope must be combined with intention,” said Rose Red to Artemis. “You told me your bow means focused intention.”
Artemis put aside her bow and resumed her seat. “Well done, Daughter,” she said. “Hope is an invitation, an open doorway to change, but it’s weak and ineffective without intention and action. That paradox underpins Pandora’s story in all its versions. How useful is Hope? Is it different from plague, pestilence, and the rest? Is it blessing or is it abdication? Many people live wretched lives with hope in their mouths, but take no action to fulfill it.”
“Don’t give up your hope,” said Artemis to the circle. “But understand hope without action, hope without intention, is powerless.”
A shrieking high-pitched cackle of laughter, erupted into the sun-lit clearing. “Oh, but teacher, hope is such a pretty word,” jeered Baba Yaga, “so nectarous and winsome!” She squatted some distance away on an overturned barrel with her knees spread wide apart under her ragged skirt, displaying much more of herself than Vasilisa wanted to see or even think about. She held a half-gnawed bone in her hand.
Radulf, ignoring the interruption, left his examination of the tooth and looked across the circle at Rumpelstiltskin.
“Pandora is a woman’s story. Why did you tell it to us?” he indicated Artyom, Kunik and himself.
“Women are mothers to men,” Rumpelstiltskin replied. “Pandora is the hidden thing. Her business is secrets, things lost, things misleading. She’s shape hidden within shape. She’s greatest evil or greatest blessing, and her stories are hard stories of loss and truth. I told you her story because you’re here to be initiated into your own power, and woman or man, your power is incomplete without that which is hidden from you.”
Baba Yaga broke in again. She pointed at the skull next to Artyom with the bone. “I see you brought back my property, boy!” Artyom, avoiding all eyes and looking expressionless, nodded curtly. Baba Yaga turned her malicious gaze onto Vasalisa. “This one stole it one dark night, didn’t you, my little fledgling?”
“Yes, Grandmother,” said Vasalisa submissively, although Baba Yaga had in fact given the fiery skull to Vasalisa. It wasn’t fiery now, just a worn-looking human skull, rather sad in its fragility and age.
“Weeellll,” said Baba Yaga, drawing out the sound as her eyes traveled around the circle. The look on her face was both pleased and not pleased. “It sees secrets, never fear, but it won’t speak. Silent as the grave! Silent as the crypt! But I, on the other hand… “Her voice rose and she snapped her fingers with a sound like a bone breaking.
“Come and join us, Old Mother,” said Dar suddenly in a coaxing voice. The young women looked astonished, the men horrified. Artemis’s lips twitched and Rumpelstiltskin hid a smile in his beard. Dar moved over, practically into Artemis’s lap, and smiled seductively at Baba Yaga, patting the ground next to him in invitation. “I’ll let you play with my flute if you come,” he said, grinning at her like a boy. “I’ll let you look at my marbles.”
“It’ll be your last look, puppy! Soon they’ll be my marbles!” She stood for a moment, glaring, and then turned and clumped away, radiating contempt.
Dar grinned at Artemis, who pushed him away. “You can’t resist, can you?”
“Serve you right if she’d come and sat in your lap, you young devil,” said Rumpelstiltskin. “What’s this about marbles?”
“Next week is the spring marble championship,” said Dar. “She plays. So do I.”
“She does not!” said Rumpelstiltskin.
“She does,” Artemis assured him.
“Well, anyway, we got rid of her for the moment,” said Dar.
“She’ll be back,” said Artemis.
“Everything lost is found again,” said Nephthys suddenly.
“Yes,” said Rumpelstiltskin, returning his attention to the discussion at hand. “Thank you, Nephthys. We were talking about Pandora and the hidden thing.”
“What about private matters, information nobody needs to know?” asked Artyom. “Shouldn’t we have the power to reveal or conceal our own truths?”
“Certainly,” replied Rumpelstiltskin. “But in exercising that power we limit ourselves. We stay small to conceal a secret.”
Artyom shook his head slightly, biting a fingernail.
“But you told different versions of the Pandora story,” Jenny said to Rumpelstiltskin. “What is the truth? What does it mean, exactly?”
Shape within shape,” said Kunik promptly.
Nephthys said, “Truth is bone.”
“Seed is truth,” said Mary.
“Love and intuition?” asked Vasilisa.
“Truth is a fearful thing,” said Rose Red in a low voice, “shattered and sharp.”
“It’s elusive,” said Radulf with unexpected roughness. “It hides just out of sight, never showing itself, but letting you know you’ve failed to understand.”
“All wrong, poppets,” sneered Baba Yaga, who had returned unnoticed, making several people jump. “All wrong, my little pustules!” She flapped her skirt, unfolding a thick, eye watering smell of greasy fish, old blood and urine. She grasped her ragged tunic with both hands and pulled it apart, revealing a sagging, wrinkled potbelly the color of a dead fish. She caressed herself with her iron-tipped hands, cradling her own flesh in a grotesque mockery of a pregnant woman. She leered from one face to another, moving her hands slowly up to cup flaccid, drooping, sac-like breasts and then dropping them again to her obscene round abdomen.
“Truth is Death!”
“If truth is death, then you know very well truth is birth, too,” said Dar crossly. “If you claim the one, you must include the other.”
“Hhhhmmmph!” said Baba Yaga. “Maybe so, but this belly holds death and rot!” She opened her mouth wide, then wider, impossibly wide, so they could see grey sharpened teeth curving upwards into tusks. She blew out a breath, a fetid charnel house wind that clogged in their throats and made their eyes water. On and on it went, blowing over them, the smell coating their skin and hair and clothing.
Jenny retched helplessly. Rose Red swallowed thick saliva and willed herself not to gag.
Baba Yaga inhaled dramatically. “I’ll show you truth, my pretty little toads.” She cackled. “May it burn your eyes out! May it haunt you forever! I’ll show you! I’ll pry your innocent eyes open until they stretch and tear and bleed and pop out and roll on the ground in agony! Oh, yes!” She rubbed her hands together, chortling and rocking where she sat. “We’ll open jars and boxes and baskets and look behind screens aplenty, my little festering froggies! Old Baba will show you the Truth, never fear!”
She bounced to her feet. “But not now! Not yet! Now there’s work to be done!” Her voice rose into an unearthly shriek that made Vasilisa wince. Baba Yaga skipped forward, bent and picked up the skull Artyom had brought to the circle of story. She held it high over her head and the skull ignited into a fiery blaze that spilled out every orifice and crack in the bone. Vasilisa realized the sun would soon set.
“This needs a throne, a pedestal, a place from which to watch you miserable moppets! Plant a post for it, lackbrains! Build me a fence, nestlings! Find your bones and build me a scaffold! Raise gallows, a rack, a fortress, a prison! Build me a gate, a threshold, a bridge to Hell! Build me an arena in which to die!” she went off into mad laughter, the skull glaring in her upraised hand.
The group looked at her in fearful fascination and then Nephthys jumped to her feet and skipped past Baba Yaga to where her dragging cloth lay. Mary, remembering her seeds lying there with the bones, followed her, and then the others. They stood uncertainly around the jumble of bones and neatly laid out rows of seeds. Nephthys carefully set the seeds aside and spread out the bones. Some were stained and yellowed with cracks and chips, and others were white and hard looking. On the ground lay a careless pile of shovels, picks and other tools.
“We’re to build a fence,” said Vasilisa with certainty.
The chicken legs, which had stood quietly for most of the day, now moved. Each leg stretched slowly and voluptuously, clawed feet spreading wide, toes wiggling. Baba Yaga’s house swayed and dipped slightly above them. One foot extended, the toes clamped together and dragged along the ground while the other foot hopped. The legs made a slow oval, scratching a deep line in the ground. When the oval was complete, the legs carried the house into its center and stood still again. The fire pit lay in one rounded end, blooming suddenly with flames.
“Find your bones!” said Nephthys gaily. They received no further instruction.
Vasilisa heard a sound of tapping. Baba Yaga squatted by the fire pit, a slender bone in each hand. On the ground between her bony knees sat the fiery skull, once again cold and dull. She tapped on the skull’s dome, maintaining an even, steady beat. The tap, tap of the sticks strengthened and deepened, became reverberant, as though the skull was a large hollow thing covered with skin. Boom-boom. Boom-boom.
Jenny sat next to her, and Vasilisa was glad to be near a friend. The drumbeat rolled against her, insistent and breathless. She reached in the pocket of her apron with her left hand and felt the doll. With the other hand, she explored the pile of bones, brushing lightly through them. The sky darkened and the fire burned high, sparks rising above it. Firelight threw strange shadows over the heaps of bones.
The others were intent upon the task, sifting and sorting. Artyom crouched across from her, face shadowed, running his hands delicately over one bone, then another. His hands drew her gaze, the sureness and tenderness of his touch. The drumbeat itched in her body, in her blood. She shuddered, aroused, and then the doll in her pocket stirred against her hand and she remembered what she was doing and turned back to the task.
ROSE RED
Rose Red settled and calmed. Boom-boom. Boom-boom. She remembered the Night of Trees. She remembered power in her hands like green fire. She closed her eyes and kicked off her shoes. The ground felt cool and springy beneath her bare feet. She drew in a deep breath and opened herself. Boom-boom. Boom-boom. She rubbed her hands together and then ran them over cheeks, collarbone, breasts, belly, hips and thighs. Boom-boom. Boom-boom. She crouched and laid her hands lightly, questioningly, on a bone.
The sun went down.
MARY
Mary thought of the feel of seeds in her hands, their subtle vibration, the golden threads of light hidden inside their hard cases. She laid her hands on bone after bone, hearing the drumbeat. The others worked around her, with her, needing nothing and giving nothing except their presence.
ARTYOM
Artyom knelt, scattered bones spread out in front of him. Vasilisa was nearby and he was aware of her throughout his whole body. He didn’t turn away from that awareness, but carried it with him inward and downward. He closed his eyes. Let me find a way to do it right, he thought. The drumbeat roused something deep and primitive in him. He thought of the Firebird, its vivid joyous color, its wild mystery, its breathless beauty. He closed his eyes and caressed the bones as though they were the body of a beloved woman. The drumbeat throbbed in his blood. He ran his hands tenderly over a landscape of bone, exploring, shaping his flesh to their contours. He felt their texture with sensitive fingertips, rubbed against them with his palms. He felt an impulse to raise them to his lips and lick them, press them against his cheeks. His hands roamed over the bones and then he felt warmth under one of his palms. He moved away from it, questing with his hands, and found only coolness. His hands returned and met warmth again. He opened his eyes and picked up the bone. It was getting dark. The drumbeat had died away. The bone in his hands looked quite unremarkable. Nothing distinguished it from the jumble on the cloth, but he set it aside and began searching through the pile again.
JENNY
Jenny had feared Baba Yaga ever since she’d known Vasilisa and heard of the terrible old hag. Now she found herself in the Baba’s presence with this strange group of people, and her fear diminished in their company. Rumpelstiltskin was near. She looked at the bewildering jumble of bones in front of her and didn’t know how to begin. The drumbeat invited her to fall into it, but she resisted. She remembered a stone cell and piles of dusty golden straw. She remembered a long night and Rumpelstiltskin’s voice.
The old cradle song rose to her lips, fought against the rhythm of the drum. She wanted to put her fingers in her ears, screw her eyes shut, and sing the song loudly, drown out the alien beat. She must remember the cradle song. She must! Panic rose in her, making it hard to breathe…and then the drumbeat softened, quieted. Was it? Or had she only imagined it? No — there — it diminished. Every beat sounded flatter, shallower. The rhythm slowed…slowed…now it was just a tapping, as it had begun. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. The fire popped and sounded louder than the drum. Tap-tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
The song rose from within Jenny, rose in a hum tasting of morning sun and honey, a sound full of heart, full of tenderness and love. She let it come, feeling it shape her tongue and lips. She felt the presence of her mother brush against her, warm and soft as sunlight.
From somewhere across the fire pit, another voice joined in the song, rather hoarse, gruff, a beloved voice. Growing in strength, it led her, dropped behind, followed her. Rumpelstiltskin. She laid her hands on the bones, singing, and waited for them to sing back.
KUNIK
Kunik heard the cessation of the drumming and the rise of the cradle song. The firelight caressed Mary’s head as though it loved her. Her hair was the color of sun on corn, rich and thick. The little girl with hazel eyes had grown into a beautiful woman. She’d shown him her seeds, and told him something about what she’d been doing. He thought of the little brown rabbit, Surrender, come out of Mary’s dream and his story from the deeps of winter to this spring night.
Surrender had guided him here, to the circle of firelight where he knelt with the others and sorted through bones. A selchie came to him as he floated in his kayak in the northern sea, bringing an invitation to initiation between one life and another. She told him he’d be provided with a guide if he chose to accept. She also told him secrets would be revealed, though she wouldn’t say what kind of secrets. Following the selchie’s directions, he’d come to shore and found Surrender, still in his white winter coat, waiting for him.
Together they’d traveled from North to South, from winter to spring, Kunik shedding his winter gear and Surrender shedding his white coat, until they’d reached this place, this spring night, this strange circle of people and his old friend Mary.
He was glad he’d accepted the invitation.
One of the young women sang, leading the other voice coming from somewhere outside the reach of firelight. He had a swift, elusive memory of another woman singing a song to a beloved child in a place where snow drifted like fallen stars and the night sky rippled with color, and then it was gone. He began to run his hands over the bones. Bones and seeds, he thought. Bones and seeds…
Methodically, one by one, Kunik picked up each bone, holding and turning it in his hands. He searched for shape within bone, shape of animal or bird or fish — or fence. He felt with the tips of his fingers and the receptive flesh of his palms for patterns, planes and lines and curves, the essence of the shape locked within.
Some bones were long and others small and rounded, or thin and blade-like, or curved. He piled some carefully at his side, putting the discards in a heap in front of Radulf, who sat next to him, stirring his hands and forearms through the pile as though in a dream. Kunik saw the others also discarded into this pile. Each one used his or her own method of finding their bones. Radulf was the only one up to his elbows in a pile.
RADULF
Radulf knelt before a pile of bones and thrust his hands into them, feeling smooth weight and rounded corners. His fingers found cracks and chips and pits in the bones. The bones made a clunking sound as he stirred them, bumping against his wrists and arms. He heard the drum beat and the song, but distantly. Some part of him remained aware of the fire, popping and cracking, warming the air around it, but distantly. He had no goal and no desire. He stirred the bones, flexing and moving his hands and fingers. He stirred the bones, round and hard, long and curved, whispering and murmuring in muted clicks.
Radulf had been traveling for a long time. He’d left behind youth, wealth, inheritance, his people and the life he was expected to live. He’d been married, once. The memory of that had kept him alone and on the move.
For years, he’d stayed near the sea. It hurt him, but he couldn’t leave it. At night it spoke to him, sang to him, clung to him. He’d nearly drowned at sea as a young man. He loved it, but after some years he felt haunted by it. Finally, he tore himself away and moved inland. He’d run across Dar a time or two, but preferred to travel alone and avoid notice.
Then he encountered Artyom, hunting on horseback with a group of nobles who stopped to question the stranger. Radulf drew himself up proudly and refused to give an account of himself. The forest wasn’t private; he had as much right as they to be in it. He looked, and indeed was, prepared to defend himself with skill and ferocity, and they left him there, stubborn and silent.
Artyom, near the back of the group, stopped and dismounted and had spoken so courteously and with such warm interest that Radulf unbent. They became cautious friends. Artyom was young and Radulf middle aged, but they were comfortable with each other. Artyom invited Radulf to stay with him and his entourage. Somewhat to his own surprise, Radulf agreed.
Artyom traveled with a human skull, a frail, worn looking object, not at all grisly. Radulf had first seen it one day when Artyom invited him to his room after the evening meal. The skull sat on a table from which perch it observed the whole room. Radulf stretched out his hand to pick it up, but thought better of it and withdrew before touching it. Artyom smiled somewhat ruefully, said “Light!” and the skull burst into a fiery glow. Radulf took a hasty step back.
Artyom left the skull burning while they sat down in front of an open window. It had been a damp night of fog. A fire burned on the hearth. The wet air felt pleasant on their faces, refreshing in the over-warm room. Artyom took off his coat, an elegant garment of brocade and gold thread, revealing an embroidered linen shirt underneath it.
“I’ve told you my father was a ruler.”
“Yes,” said Radulf. “And you’re traveling, making alliances, before going home to take his place.”
“Yes. My father’s advisors and ministers are taking care of business in my absence. While traveling, I heard of a woman who spins linen so fine it can be drawn through the eye of a needle. I was interested, and it happened I needed new shirts, so I asked a servant to buy a length of good linen from her. It was fine, so fine I couldn’t find a seamstress willing to put scissors to it. I tracked down the weaver, thinking perhaps she would make the shirts. I discovered one of my own countrywomen. It was the first time I’d heard my own language since I left home.”
“Remarkable,” said Radulf.
“Indeed. Her name is Vasilisa. She agreed to make the shirts, so I delivered the linen to her. In its folds, I laid a feather from the Firebird.”
“The Firebird?”
“The Firebird is a creature from my country, a fantastic bird with glowing feathers. Legend says it leads one to treasure. Many think it’s only a myth, but the Firebird has honored my family with its presence through generations, and I’ve seen it. It comes and goes as it will, but I’ve flattered myself it keeps an eye on me. Every child of my culture hears stories about the Firebird, and I thought Vasilisa would like the gift. The feathers glow, you see, even after the bird has shed them, and they’re particularly beautiful. I sent her an orange one.”
He extended a linen clad arm to Radulf. Around the cuff of the sleeve a flowing pattern of a bird with a long tail and graceful wings was sewn in red silk thread. “This is one of the shirts she made me. They’re each the same, sewn with this pattern of the Firebird around cuffs, collar and hem.”
Radulf fingered the soft linen.
“They’re beautiful. Kingly.”
“She told me she’d never seen the Firebird, only heard of it. She imagined what it might look like and came up with this pattern.”
“She sounds special.”
“She is. I’ve never met anyone like her. The skull,” he nodded to the fiery skull, sitting on the stone hearth, “is hers.”
Radulf raised an eyebrow.
“We’ve only spoken a handful of times face to face, but the Firebird flies back and forth between us with notes.” Artyom spoke with some embarrassment. “I know it sounds silly, but I must keep up appearances and she has her living to earn. She gave me the skull, though. Said it sees clearly and she wanted me to keep it for a while.”
“A strange love token,” said Radulf, “and an even stranger go-between.”
“The Firebird, you mean? Yes. But it leads you to your treasure, don’t forget. What if Vasilisa is my treasure — and I’m hers?” He gnawed at a fingernail, already bitten to the quick. It made him look very young.
“That’s what I keep thinking — what if? It must be so. Why would the Firebird be involved otherwise? I don’t know what the skull means to her, or how she came by it, but I suspect it can somehow tell her what it sees. I want to convince her we belong together. With her beside me I could be the man I was meant to be.”
Radulf looked uneasily at the skull. “You don’t think…you don’t think it can see inside you too, do you?” he asked.
Artyom looked down at the hem of his sleeve, running his finger over the flowing border of red silk firebirds. “Of course not,” he said shortly.
“I was married once.” Radulf stood by the fire, turning his back and letting it warm his legs. “It was a long time ago. I didn’t love her but it was the expected thing to do, a suitable political and social alliance, and so I did it. I abandoned her one day, left without a word and never returned.”
“Did you love someone else?” asked Artyom.
Radulf winced. “I don’t know. There was someone I loved like a sister, but she disappeared and I never found out what happened to her. I’ve always felt it was somehow my fault.”
“I’m sorry, my friend,” said Artyom.
Radulf turned from the window and smiled at him wryly. “If that thing,” he nodded at the skull, “can truly see and hear us, it’s hearing all my secrets, isn’t it?”
“I suppose it is.”
A week after that conversation the Firebird appeared with a note attached to one leg. Radulf was with Artyom as he detached and read it. He was preparing to tactfully slip away and give Artyom some privacy when the other man stopped him.
“Don’t leave. This concerns you, too.”
Radulf halted his departure in amazement as Artyom read aloud.
“You and the man who travels with you are invited to an initiation, as am I and two of my friends. The Firebird has brought word from an old teacher of mine, powerful and wise. Understand it is an invitation only — you need not accept. I choose to go. If you or your friend wish to attend, the Firebird will guide you faithfully. You will not need your servants. I hope to see you there. V.”
Radulf opened his eyes, memory fading. His hands moved deep within a pile of bones. Firelight flickered around him. Now he could hear a sound of piping, insinuating and disturbing. The singing stopped. His hands had selected and set aside a pile of bones. Some were long bones for the fence but others were curved rib bones and what looked like finger bones and knucklebones. The others knelt around him in the dim light. He closed his eyes again, moving his hands through cool, dry death.
VASILISA
Vasilisa sat back on her heels, her back and legs feeling strained from kneeling over the bones. The group around her loosened, drew apart. They stood and stretched tension out of their backs. She looked around and saw each of them had set aside a pile of bones. In front of Radulf lay an unclaimed heap out of which he’d extracted and set to one side his own collection.
As she glanced around, Vasilisa thought it was like a game of Me! Not Me! There were no obvious differences in the bones they’d each recognized, and nothing set the chosen bones apart from the discarded. Yet she didn’t doubt her choices. She’d known her own bones and they’d known her.
Dar and Nephthys came forward. With a single glance, they evaluated the individual piles. Dar bade Mary, Radulf, Kunik and Vasilisa choose the longest and thickest of their bones, and he and Rumpelstiltskin helped them place fence posts. Rose Red, Jenny and Artyom chose smaller, slenderer long bones and a great variety of other shapes and sizes. As the fence posts were firmly planted, Nephthys helped them place the horizontal pieces of the fence. She bound the bones together with a huge spool of sinew from Baba Yaga. Rumpelstiltskin produced a sharp knife to cut it with. Vasilisa had her suspicions about the material from which the sinew was made, but kept them to herself. She avoided working with it, however.
Now and then, someone searched the discarded pile of bones for the right length to fill in a gap.
As they erected the fence, Vasilisa could see two places for gates, one at one end of the oval near the edge of the forest, and the other facing the open grassy meadow, about the middle of the long side.
Artyom and Kunik discovered between them they possessed the bones needed to build a gate. They laid the bones out and fit them together with fascinated enjoyment. Vasilisa thought it was like doing an elaborate puzzle by firelight. When the gate was complete, they bound the bones with lengths of the strong brown sinew and hung it from a fence post. This formed the gate near the edge of the woods.
The second gate was wider and more centrally placed. Everyone had pieces of it. By now the night was well advanced. Baba Yaga hadn’t stirred from her place by the fire. Nephthys gave guidance when needed but kept well in the background. Dar lent a capable hand with construction.
At last, they were finished. Pale bones glimmered in the dark. The fence enclosed the chicken legs and the Yaga’s house, the fire pit and the black iron cauldron. Vasilisa stood with the others, looking at what they’d built. A few bones remained, scattered across Nephthys’s cloth. All the rest had been used.
Baba Yaga rose from her place by the fire. She took a few steps, hitched up her ragged skirt and squatted. She grunted. The unmistakable sound of liquid hitting the ground came to their ears. She rose and without a look at the pale fence, the arched gates and the sturdy posts, she stumped over to her house. Ignoring the steps, she slapped at one of the chicken legs and at once they bent, the steps folding up like an accordion. When the house was low to the ground, Baba Yaga hoisted herself over the threshold and slammed the door behind her. The legs straightened, the windows snapped shut and the house darkened.
Vasilisa met Artyom’s eye and he gave her a weary smile. Dar opened the wide gate with a flourish of his embroidered cloak, and they filed out. The fire burned low. Rumpelstiltskin threw dirt on the embers with his shovel and followed the group, shutting the gate carefully behind him.
CHAPTER 19
VASALISA
Sunlight cracked the translucent morning sky. Vasilisa woke. She’d rolled herself in blankets and slept under Dar’s cart. She’d slept deeply, feeling safe and protected between the soft mattress of grass and the wooden underside of cart. When she opened her eyes, she was lying on her side. Thick stems of grass and flowers surrounded her and she looked into them as though into a forest. She felt invisible. She listened.
The birds were in full dawn chorus. They made such a clamor she couldn’t hear anything else for some moments. Then she heard the sound of Gideon grazing nearby, a contented, unhurried grinding mastication. She heard unfamiliar whistling and thought it must be Dar. She listened as he moved about, tending a fire, heating water and murmuring to Gideon. She heard the flap of blankets being shaken out.
Vasilisa thought of the fence they’d built the night before and wanted to see it in daylight. She rolled out from under the cart and sat with her back against one of the wooden wheels, still wrapped in a blanket, looking at the morning.
There was Baba Yaga’s hovel, high on its legs. One leg bent slightly at the knee, relaxed, giving the house a slight tilt. The door was tightly shut and the windows blank and shuttered. Baba Yaga slept. The house stood within a large oval of pale fence.
Vasilisa knew the fence was solidly built, but from a distance it looked slightly drunken because bones aren’t straight and true. It flowed and leaned, looking as though it was made for movement rather than boundary. It made her smile.
She could see the two gates, easily picked out because each was topped with a curving arch made of rib bones bound together. Near one gate, in an end of the oval, was the fire pit and a high stack of wood.
As she sat there looking, Mary and Nephthys came out of a stand of three birch trees. Mary combed her thick hair with her fingers.
Vasilisa turned her head, hearing a murmur of male voices, and saw Kunik had joined Artyom and Radulf for the night, nesting in thick grass as she had, though without any overhead shelter. A tendril of smoke wavered up and she smelled a campfire, though she couldn’t see the flames from her seated position in the high grass.
The thin sound of a flute came into the clearing and the White Stag and Artemis stepped out of the trees. The piper with them was an extraordinary figure. He wore a long crimson cloak, rich with decoration. Vasilisa saw short thick horns nestled in curly brown hair and a gold ring in his left earlobe. He stood on the legs of an animal, covered with thick brown hair and ending in split hooves. Dar left his fire, inclined his head before the White Stag, kissed Artemis on the forehead with formal affection and slapped the piper on the shoulder. The piper blew a series of short notes like laughter and took up his melody again.
Mary was transfixed at the sight of the piper, body tense, staring. Nephthys walked on, taking no notice of her frozen companion.
Some way from Vasilisa a head appeared in the grass, tangled curls black in the sun. Rose Red. She, too, watched the piper with wide eyes. At the same time, she shook out her skirt and apron, put her arms into her vest and fastened it up the front. The piper disappeared with Dar between the trees. Rose Red looked after them, a frown between her eyes, and then bent over and ran vigorous fingers through her dark mop.
“I’ll do your hair if you’ll do mine,” came Jenny’s voice. “I’ve a comb somewhere…”
***
Later, hunger satisfied and everyone washed and brushed as well as possible with cold water and a comb, they gathered again in a circle in the morning sun. Baba Yaga had yet to appear. No one spoke of the initiation that would take place that night, though Vasilisa knew it must be in everyone’s thoughts.
It was a pleasant day. Kunik, Artyom and Rumpelstiltskin announced their intention to find meat and set off into the forest. Radulf and Jenny volunteered to collect water and follow the stream in search of fish. Mary went to look for strawberries and greens. Dar strode back and forth from the forest to the fire pit with armfuls of dead wood. There was no evidence of his goat-footed companion.
Vasilisa shook out and folded blankets, retrieved Jenny’s comb, a knife, a carved lump of coral and other objects mislaid or lost in the grass during the night. She made a neat stack of shovels and tools used the night before and folded the unused bones in Nephthys’s tarp. She rewound the unused, unpleasant-smelling sinew with distaste.
She and Dar chose one of the campfires outside the fence and enlarged it. They would need a place to cook meat. Dar provided a spit and pot from his cart. They laid a fire and stacked extra wood.
Baba Yaga still hadn’t appeared. Nephthys slept in the warm grass. When Dar judged they’d gathered enough wood, Rose Red wandered over to Gideon. The White Stag browsed nearby on the edge of the woods. She curried and brushed the horse, more for the pleasure of it than any necessity. She combed out his mane and tail and threaded them with flowers. Dar leaned on his elbows in the sun and watched.
“As soon as you’re finished, he’ll roll,” he predicted.
The horse blew out a breath and lipped at Vasilisa. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. She felt lazy and peaceful in the tender afternoon.
The White Stag joined them. She made a garland of tough grass and flowers and set it in his antlers.
The hunters returned with meat, already skinned and dressed. Dar lit the fire and began to cook. Nephthys woke. Mary returned, and then Jenny and Radulf, damp and happy with a string of fish.
As the afternoon lengthened, they ate, comfortable with one another, but Vasilisa felt an increasing tension as evening approached. As they finished eating, a door slammed. Baba Yaga was awake.
The old crone ignored the group on the grass. She stumped around the inside of the fence. She glared. She muttered. She shook her head in disgust. As she passed Kunik’s and Artyom’s gate, she kicked it viciously. It held. She stepped onto the lowest cross bone of the wide central gate and pushed against the ground with her foot. The gate swung back and forth on its hinges with her full weight on it. It made a sound like bare tree branches rubbing together in a high wind. She looked like a malevolent thick toad on a merry-go-round made of bones. She stepped off. The gate didn’t sag or break.
Baba Yaga stood with her hands on her hips on the threshold of the open gate. Her iron gaze swept over them.
“What are you waiting for, toadlings?” she shrieked. Her gaze looked beyond them, towards the edge of the trees. Her mad grin looked like a gash in her face. “Come in and play, sweet ones — if you dare!” She shrieked with glee.
A figure strolled out of the trees. It glowed with a pale soft light that matched the fence. Under the domed skull gaped wide empty eyes, a pit of a nose and an expressionless grin.
A skeleton is a sexless thing, yet Vasilisa immediately identified the newcomer as “he.” It was something about the graceful power with which he moved, the subtle swagger of an attractive male who knows his legs are well shaped, his buttocks hard and strong, and his flesh laid in just the right way over his frame.
Vasilisa thought him the most vividly alive thing she’d ever seen. His confidence took her breath away. He was as naked as bone, so naked one could see right through him, yet insouciant and vital and real.
“Here’s my pretty boy! Here’s my bony one!” The Baba purred and passed her hands over her breasts, pinching her nipples through the coarse, ragged tunic she wore.
Death came to meet her, grinning his hungry grin. She lifted up the hem of her skirt and pressed his hand beneath it. His elbow moved and she leaned against the fence, legs spread wide. She turned her face to his and thrust her tongue between his teeth. She put her hands on his cheeks and licked his naked mandible. She thrust her hips against his moving invisible hand, groaning and gasping and cursing, and then shuddered. Still shuddering, she pulled the hand from beneath her skirt to her mouth and licked the white finger bones with slow deliberation.
A round sphere fell out of Death’s right eye socket, pinged against a rib and fell to the ground. It was followed by another, then three from his nasal cavity. More fell from his grinning mouth like a cascade of foam, black, red and ivory. They scattered around Death’s bony feet, the color of corruption, blood and bone.
Vasilisa, like most of the others around her, stood frozen in appalled silence. Dar grinned. Artemis remained aloof and Nephthys paid no attention to the macabre sexual display but clapped her hands with pleasure as marbles fell from Death’s head.
The Baba crouched and gathered the marbles with a sweep of her hand, grinning like a child stealing candy. She went to where her black cauldron squatted on the ground near the fire, tipped the marbles into a sack and withdrew a skull. Without word or pause she threw it at Death. It flew straight through the air like a large white bullet and Death reached out and caught it casually. He pressed his grinning teeth against the mouth of the skull with a hard click, and it burst into fiery light. He balanced it atop the nearest fence post and turned, graceful as a dancer, and caught the next skull speeding toward him
.
In this way, Death pranced around the fence of bones, lighting what Vasilisa thought of as the arena, while Baba Yaga fired skull after skull at him. He caught each one, pressed its teeth to his in a grotesque kiss, and placed it carefully, facing inward.
Artemis spoke.
“On this day comes the hour of perfect balance.” Her clear gaze rested on each face. “Do you choose to enter the gate and take your place?”
Mary, without a word, left the group and walked through the gate, brushing resolutely past the obscene figure of Baba Yaga and the grinning skeleton next to her, Surrender at her heels.
One by one, Vasilisa and the other initiates followed, guides and leaders coming behind. Artemis and the White Stag brought up the rear and Artemis latched the gate.
ARTYOM
“Once upon the time there lived a maiden. Oooh, she was sweet as the sweetest morsel on the tongue! Oh la la—what a pretty little maiden! What a weak, innocent, puling little maiden she was!”
The fire was lit. Baba Yaga had gathered them into yet another circle within the bony circle of the fence. They sat on the grass. The Baba rested on an overturned bucket. Without preamble, she began. This was not like the storytelling that had come before. Artyom felt tense and expectant. The fire crackled and popped hungrily and the last light drained out of the sky.
“One washing day this little Vasilisa, this pretty little maiden, was hanging out clothes to dry in the sun. I had the misfortune to pass by, and she smiled and waved and wished me a good day. She was so sweet I wanted to step on her and see that sweetness ooze out of her cracked bones. So, I turned her into a frog.”
Vasilisa gasped. Rose Red, next to her, put out a hand in concern and Vasilisa struck at her, slapping the hand away. She stood clumsily, as though her legs felt numb. Her face looked rigid in the firelight. Her eyes remained fixed on Baba Yaga in horror and something like hatred. Artyom had never imagined Vasilisa could look like that. She staggered back a step or two, out of the circle, shadows concealing her face.
Baba Yaga continued, her gaze fastened on Vasilisa’s hidden face, her voice cold and relentless.
“She hopped away, weeping tender little glittering tears like fish scales, wondering what she’d done to deserve such a terrible fate. No more waving and smiling and wishing strangers good day for her!
Well, I kept an eye on her to see if she’d be more interesting as a frog. She hopped and she hopped and eventually she came to the King’s palace. Around the palace, you must know, are parks and gardens, and in one of the furthest gardens stands a huge old birch tree and under that is a fountain.”
The mention of the King’s palace shocked Artyom. It couldn’t be! But as the Baba continued inexorably, he saw in memory the birch tree, its peeling trunk, and the old neglected fountain, slippery and smelly with green and black scum on stagnant water. His stomach clenched in a cold knot. He put a hand to either side of his head and pulled his hair as though to tear his head apart. He wanted to put his hands around Baba Yaga’s scrawny throat and silence her forever. She eyed him mockingly as she talked.
“The fountain hadn’t worked in a long time, so it had become a stagnant pond, and a lovely dank, muddy, fetid place it was!”
Baba Yaga smacked her lips reminiscently and rubbed her hands together, fingernails clicking and knuckles popping.
“This hidden old fountain was the favorite hiding place of the King’s youngest son, who was a spoilt, weak, loathsome little tadpole. He was too obnoxious even to kill and eat. He hated everyone — but not more than they hated him, miserable spawn! He possessed a great treasure — a golden ball. He took it every day to the fountain and played with it, entertaining himself, as no one else wanted to be near him.
One day he was tossing the golden ball in the air and catching it in the aimless manner of a useless child, and somehow…”
Here she stopped and cackled, looking malevolently around at the listeners.
“Somehow, he threw badly and his pretty golden ball fell in that nasty, dark water! Of course, the brat howled about it — but no one came because no one cared, and he was too precious to guddle about in muddy water himself — make no mistake about that! A puffed-up little princeling, that one was!
Well, guess who popped her head above the water to see what the fuss was about? Ssswwweeeeet, good little Vasilisa, of course — who else? Even living in a sewer hadn’t changed her a bit, curse her! Just as boring and sickening as ever.
And ‘Oh, what’s the matter little boy? Why do you cry? How can I help you?’
And the cub wept and pouted and gulped like a toad in the rain and Vasilisa swam right down to the bottom of the fountain, found the ball and brought it back to him.
Well! Then things began to get more interesting! Now the little pisswort possessed a new toy, a live toy! He began to wonder what sort of games would be fun with this kind of toy!
Then he conceived a brilliant idea. He’d heard the servants and gardeners talking about hunting for frogs. He stole a gig — a sharp-pronged, murderous little gig it was, with the blood of a thousand frogs on it — from one of the under gardeners and snuck out one night with his golden ball for a light.
He made his way to the pond. He set the golden ball down on the edge of the old fountain, and in a coaxing, wheedling voice, called his ‘little friend’ and his ‘dear one.’
Of course, she came, the stupid girl! She swam right up through the dark water to that glowing golden light. He was ready and he struck with the gig. I thought he might make an end to the bitch then and there, but they both proved incompetent. I might have known. He, being unskilled, struck off center and too slowly and she, even though stupid, possessed something of a frog’s quickness and jumped aside. The gig pierced right through her back foot, though. She disappeared under the water with a single splash and when he pulled out the gig, he found a piece of her foot with two toes attached to it. The nasty little worm could hardly wait to get it into the light to see what color frog blood was!”
Artyom felt bitterness rise into his throat, leaned over and vomited in wrenching spasms of fury. Tears ran from his eyes and mucus snailed out of his nose in slimy ropes. The taste of vomit made him retch again and again. Long after his stomach was empty, he heaved in aching reflex.
Slowly he became aware of a cold, wet pad of cloth on the back of his neck. He closed his eyes. That someone dared touch him, comfort him, even, as he sat there in his own vomit, nearly started the retching again, but he controlled himself, forcing breath through his mouth in shallow gasps. He groped blindly for the cloth and felt another put into his hand, cool and smelling of sweet water, not the brackish, filthy water he remembered from so long ago. He wiped his face, spit, blew his nose. His hands trembled. He wanted to move away from the stench of his vomit, to hide from it, but he refused to show weakness. He would not be further shamed in front of them.
He raised his chin and glared around the circle of strangers, defying their judgement. Who were they? Nothings and nobodies. His blood was royal. He came from a line of rulers. What did they know of his desolate, lonely childhood? It was a plot, a conspiracy, engineered by the hag Baba Yaga to disempower him, humiliate him and frustrate his need for Vasilisa, deny him the balm of her love and admiration, the peace of her strength.
Firelight flickered on the circle of faces. The place next to him, where Radulf sat, was empty, and Radulf stood at his shoulder. It was he who’d wet squares of cloth in water and come to Artyom’s aid.
No one said a word. Baba Yaga squatted on her bucket, a lumpy dark shape. The others remained silent and still. Artyom tried to make out Vasilisa’s expression, but she stood in shadows outside the circle, her empty place like a wound.
She bent. She pulled off her boots, one at a time. He could see the white of her stockings as she drew them off her feet. She dropped the hem of her black skirt and walked through her empty place in the circle to where he stood, stepping deliberately in the puddle of vomit with her pale feet. Unwillingly, but unable to help it, he looked down at her mutilated foot. Two toes were missing, leaving a jagged scar. Deep dimples of penetrating sharp injury scarred the forefoot below the toe stumps.
“You did this to me. You did this. You did this?” Her voice broke, but he couldn’t tell if rage or grief that thickened it.
Artyom looked away from her stonily. He faced Baba Yaga. “Tell the rest,” he said. “The story isn’t done. Tell it all. Finish what you’ve begun, you heartless hag!”
“Listen, then children,” said Baba Yaga in a terrible voice. “Listen to the end of my pretty little story.”
“After that, little froggie got smarter. She hid herself from the boy, but after a time her foot healed and he returned every day and coaxed and pleaded and apologized and wept for his own loneliness and she decided — oh that sweet, sweet girl! — to give him another chance. After all, he was only a child. And nobody loved him! Poor little ugly scut! He’d said he was sorry.
She kept out of his reach, though, just showing her head above the water at a safe distance. But he was so contrite, so happy to see her, so abject, she began to trust him again, and one day she allowed him to touch her. Then she began coming to his hand when he called her and he bided his time and bided his time. Had a feel for the cruelty of the thing, so he did!
A day came when he closed his hand about her and picked her up. She screamed — oh yes, frogs scream — “catching sight of horrified disbelief on Jenny’s face. “Oh yes, my pretty tawdry piece of dreck, they do indeed scream!
“Yes, she screamed and screamed, that little sweet Vasilisa frog, but he paid no attention — not he! He drew back his arm and threw her as hard as he could against the trunk of the birch tree standing next to the old fountain. Splat!” She shrieked with laughter.
“Well, that should have been the end of her and all that useless sweetness. I was sick to death of her myself, and he certainly had no more use for her! But, well…” and she trailed off into incoherent mumbling and swearing.
Artyom, still standing, kept his face expressionless. The cold clarity of a soldier slid over him like armor. He shut away his emotions, controlled his anger and focused on evaluating and controlling the situation. He watched the others glance at one another in appalled silence, wanting to hear the rest and yet not wanting to. Vasilisa stood in the slimy, foul vomit, head hanging, her hair swinging down to hide her face.
“Hhmmpphh. Yes. Well, perhaps she was too sweet to die! Who knows? At any rate, she left, yes, she did, headed back out into the world to find someone else to nauseate.”
Into the frozen silence following the Baba’s last jeering words came a golden glow like a warm flame, like a candle, like a lantern in a dark night. It shone red and orange and yellow, the color of life and sun. It streaked out of the sky in a long, graceful swooping movement of trailing tail and wings. They turned their faces gratefully to its clean warmth. The Firebird came to rest on the blackened rim of Baba Yaga’s cauldron. An owl flew like a silent shadow behind it. It floated down and perched on a top rail of the fence, regarding them calmly.
Artyom heard Dar grunt, as though in surprised recognition. There was a sound of a single wingbeat, a puff of air, and the owl vanished. A young man stood next to the fence, lean and lithe, dark haired. His gaze moved with curiosity from face to face. When he saw Dar, he smiled and moved forward, and Artyom noted his lurching, clumsy gait.
The two men clasped hands. The Firebird lifted off the cauldron rim and rose and fell in the air over Vasilisa’s head, graceful and silent. The newcomer approached her, appearing to ignore the puddle of vomit and yet avoiding it neatly. She looked into his face, her own so wooden and shocked Artyom could hardly recognize her.
“My name is Morfran, lady, and you’re my aunt. The Firebird has brought me to you. I bring greetings from my grandfather, who is your father, Marceau, a King of the Sea.”
The words made no sense to Artyom. Vasilisa, he knew, was a peasant, and possessed no siblings. This was yet another trick of Baba Yaga’s, another attempt to humiliate and discredit him, to tear him away from his last, best hope of making himself into a beloved and worthy ruler, as his father had been. He needed Vasilisa. He needed her strength and her sweetness and gratitude. He needed to show them he was powerful enough to marry a peasant and elevate her to the level of a ruler’s wife.
He waited for Vasilisa to say something, but she simply stood, looking at Morfran, her feet in the stinking puddle of Artyom’s humiliation. She neither spoke nor moved.
Artyom glanced at Baba Yaga, who smirked and stroked her wiry chin whiskers with her thumb and index finger. She looked as though she nursed other revelations up her sleeve and could hardly wait to expose them. He hated her more than he’d ever hated anyone before.
Baba Yaga broke the silence. “Oh, yesss! If it isn’t the cripple! How dare you disturb us this night? Sit down, you whelp, and be silent! You’ll learn more of your fine family!”
She turned her iron gaze on Radulf, sitting next to Artyom. “How would you like a story, Wolf?” she inquired sweetly. “I’ll tell one just for you. A little lamb story, innocent and tender!”
Radulf met her gaze calmly but Artyom recognized uncertainty in his face. The name Wolf suited him well. He looked rather wolf-like with his lean body and thick dark hair, streaked with grey. He looked hard and canny and his eyes gleamed in the firelight.
Without a word, Rumpelstiltskin rose to his feet. He took Vasilisa by the hand. She allowed him to lead her out of the puddle. He knelt at her bare feet and spilled water out of one of the water skins, rinsing them clean. He took her back to her place in the circle next to Rose Red and she sat down abruptly, as though the strength left her legs. Dar draped a blanket around her shoulders.
Rumpelstiltskin picked up a shovel and scooped up the vomit, kicking dirt over the place. He disappeared beyond the circle of firelight for a moment and returned with the cleaned shovel, which he stacked neatly with the others.
It seemed to Artyom everyone breathed a sigh of relief and some of the tension left the circle.
Radulf reached up and tugged on Artyom’s hand and he sat, pulling away from Radulf’s grasp and clenching his fists, his eyes on Baba Yaga. Morfran took a place on the other side of Radulf.
The Baba watched this cynically, stroking her chin, smiling unpleasantly to herself. She opened her mouth to speak, but suddenly the Firebird, which had again come to rest on the rim of the cauldron, took flight with a sweep of its wings and flew across the circle like a ray of light, landing rather heavily on Artyom’s shoulder. He straightened automatically to support the bird’s weight, feeling comforted by its favor.
“Very well!” snapped Baba Yaga. “All cozy, then? All clean and comfortable? Everyone’s snotty nose wiped? Is everyone quite ready?”
“The Sea King’s a busy, busy boy! He has more than one daughter, oh yesss! Oh yesss! Good thing, too! He breeds them weak, does Marceau! One daughter falls in love with a patricide and is too sniveling to leave him when he abuses her. That one was your pitiful mother, boy!” She shot a look at Morfran, who looked down into his lap, his face hardening. Baba Yaga laughed.
“Another daughter is this little sweetling!” She glared at Vasilisa, who looked expressionlessly back.
“It’s not true!” growled Artyom. Baba Yaga shot him a glance of gleeful malevolence and continued.
“Now hear the story of a third daughter of mighty Marceau, a King of the Sea!
“The Sea King, his senile mother, and his six simpering daughters lived in a palace made of coral, brittle, impractical stuff, not like good strong iron! They made pets out of fish and played in sea gardens. The youngest daughter was called Marella.” Baba Yaga made a face. “’Shining sea,’ it means. Disgusting!”
This idiotic child wasn’t content with her coral palace and her easy life, not she! She wanted more! She was obsessed with the world of land above.
Her grandmother, instead of teaching her something useful, told her pretty tales of ships and cities, people who walked about on two legs and animals that walked about on four. The flowers had a cloying scent and fish sang in the tops of trees as disagreeably as Marella herself, who loved to sing. Naturally! What could be sweeter than a singing mermaid? But I fixed that!
It’s the custom among sea people that on the day of the fifteenth birthday they can visit the world of land. Marella thought that time would never come.
One by one her sisters turned fifteen and returned to the palace to tell her all they’d seen and heard. But it wasn’t enough. She lay in her bed and spun idiotic romantic fantasies, looking up, searching for dim moon and starlight. Sometimes a shadow passed above her, and she imagined the great ships her sisters and grandmother had described. Marella longed for that unknown world, and I gave her what she wanted. Kind old Baba! Wise old Mother Yaga gave her everything she wished for!
At last, her fifteenth birthday came. She rose up to the surface of the sea. Sunset drenched the sky with the color of blood because I was brewing a storm especially for her. A storm with lighting and thunder and iron waves! The setting sun outlined clouds in red and gold, like yon goat man’s cape. A little way off a ship lay at anchor and Marella, lifted in the growing swell, saw glowing lanterns, heard music for the first time, and saw men and women clasped in one another’s arms, turning and swaying. In the center of everything stood a young scoundrel with black hair.
My storm caught them unawares, with no time to reach safe harbor. It was a fine storm, if I do say so myself. Sailors hurriedly quenched the lanterns and climbed through the rigging, trying to ready the ship, for all the good it did them! I watched until they were all aloft, and then I unleashed the wind and watched them fall. Sometimes they landed in water and sometimes they landed—splat!—on the deck. The ship labored with sea and wind, her timbers groaning. In no time at all she began to break apart.”
Baba Yaga rubbed her hands with glee, remembering.
“There was panic and screaming and chaos, wind and waves and death! The ship made a great noise as she split open. Oh, it was lovely!”
She stopped speaking, sucking meditatively on a back tooth.
“Where was I? Oh, of course. Wretched Marella! Well, naturally she saw the black-haired puppy go into the water when the ship split in two, and being a silly little girl, she saved him instead of someone worthier. She cradled his dear dark head and gazed into his unconscious vapid face and sang her pestilential songs of the sea, letting the waves take them where they would. Very romantic! Foolish girl! Stupid girl!”
Next to Artyom, Radulf made an incoherent sound, half gasp and half groan. Morfran, on Radulf’s other side, turned to him in surprise. Baba Yaga cackled, cracked her bony knuckles, and continued.
“Dawn broke. The ship was gone and her black-haired inamorata a dead weight in Marella’s arms. They washed up beneath a palace of golden stone with marble steps leading up from the sea. She laid the man on a step above the reach of the waves, concealed herself and watched. A servant came out and cried ‘It’s the prince! The prince is saved!’ Others came hurrying and helped him up the stairs and into the castle.
Predictably, Marella brooded. She possessed a secret! No one understood! No one had ever known such longing, such love! Oh, she made the most of it! She hung around the prince’s castle, hoping for a glimpse of her love. Once or twice, she saw him at night, standing on a balcony looking out across the waves. Oh, the joy of it! Oh, the bliss of gazing, worshipful, at the unattainable! The sweet misery and drama of it all! Hiding in the darkness, she sang, an infernal noise, and it seemed to her that he heard!”
Baba Yaga clasped her hands together, laid her cheek against them and gave a maidenly sigh that smelled of the charnel ground, rolling her eyes.
“Marella’s grandmother tried to talk some sense into the chit. Naturally, Marella paid no attention. They never do. Always certain they’re tragically misunderstood, special, meant for greater things! Young people are such an infernal nuisance! Her father, Marceau, ignored the whole thing. Too busy he was, to take any notice of his daughters. His interest in them was finished the moment he spawned them.
So Marella whined, and pined, and wept, and drifted around in a romantic dream, driving everyone mad. Since her family was so hard and cold and uncaring, she eventually decided to visit the Sea Witch.”
Baba Yaga stood up and bowed with a show of modesty.
“Me. And I gave her just what she wanted. A long, cold, dark journey, full of nightmare dangers!
I put on a face like a drowned woman and let the rags of the dead float around my tresses.”
She patted at her matted hair, preening.
“’I know why you’ve come,’ I told her. ‘You want to change your true shape for love of a young human man about whom you know nothing! Very well. But there’s a price to pay, you know.’
‘I’ll pay any price,’ she said proudly. I knew she would.
‘I’ll make a drink. If you take it, your tail will divide into two legs, but every step you take will be as though on naked blades. You’ll never move your legs without pain.’
‘I’ll endure the pain,’ she said. ‘Give me the drink.’
Stupid girl! I decided to up the price a little.
‘I’ll also require your voice,’ I said.
That made her pause! ‘Why?’ she whined. ‘Then what will be left to me?’
‘Why, true love, of course, and a new life. You’ll be beautiful, the most graceful thing he’s ever seen. How could he resist? But be warned, girl. If you fail to win his heart and he marries another, you’ll die.’
She agreed, of course, in the end. The romantic sacrifice was too much for her to resist!
She pulled herself up on the marble steps and swallowed the drink. The pain made her black out. When she woke the Prince stood above her and she possessed two white legs.
Of course, they questioned her, but she couldn’t answer! Every step was as though she walked on the points of knives, but everyone admired her grace and beauty. Noble, pointless suffering! How edifying!”
Baba Yaga sighed with mock satisfaction.
“The idiot prince, naturally, was charmed with her looks. He called her his little foundling and treated her like a sister. She was always at his side.
She soon discovered she still wasn’t satisfied. Of course. Perfectly predictable. Very boring. At night, she snuck down the marble steps to put her feet in the sea and remembered her old life, her family, and her precious songs. Her sisters visited her, but didn’t come too close, being wiser than she! But she could hear their squalling and weeping across the waves.
It suited the prince well to acquire mute arm candy. What more could any man want? He could prattle and pontificate to his heart’s content, no competition, no interruption and no danger someone would steal attention away from him! He told her about the night his ship sank. He vaguely remembered being held by the waves, and the sound of singing. He wanted to remember more, but he couldn’t. Marella slobbered on his hand and gazed into his eyes like an abject dog, but he turned away.
Well, inevitably, the prince chose a wife of means and some power. Marella stood like a martyr at the wedding. The newly wedded pair and the wedding party went out to a ship anchored in the harbor. The sun set and those tawdry golden lanterns were lit. Little Marella danced to the music, her feet light and sure, though every step gave her pain.
While the ship slept, she sat, watching for dawn and no doubt thinking long thoughts of death and futility and loss. More romantic twaddle! Then her sisters appeared. She could hardly recognize them because they’d cut off their long hair.”
Baba Yaga bounced to her feet and reached for a broom leaning against the bone palisade. She brandished the length of wooden branch with a tassel of hair, dark and clotted with filth, in the firelight.
“’Oh, sister!’ She put on a high falsetto. ‘We’ve sold our hair to the Sea Witch so she’d help you! Plunge this knife into the prince before the sun rises and bathe your feet in his blood. They’ll join back together and become a tail. Come back to us and live your true life, sister! Make haste! Make haste! Dawn arrives!’”
“Isn’t that sweeeeet?” inquired the Baba of Vasilisa. “Almost as sweet as you, poppet!”
“Well, she took the knife and found the cabin where her beloved and his new wife lay drooling on their pillows together, probably the happiest moment in their miserable marriage. The sky reddened. Marella bent and kissed her prince, sucking out every last piece of drama right to the end. When the sun rose a few moments later, she tossed the knife and herself overboard and became nothing more than dirty froth on a wave, and good riddance to the miserable wench!”
Radulf wept. He looked straight into Baba Yaga’s sneering face and tears ran from his eyes, shining in the firelight, and dripped out of his short beard. Morfran sat silent next to him, appearing deep in thought.
Baba Yaga grinned. She dropped the broom and put her hands on her hips. “Story time is over!” she shouted gaily. “Time to put an end to coeducation! No more cunt perfume, boys! No more hide the poker, girls!” She went off into a shriek of ribald laughter.
“You!” she screamed, encompassing Dar, Radulf, Artyom and Kunik with a sweep of her arm, “over there!” She gestured to the other side of the house on chicken legs, clapped twice, spit in the fire and flung out her arm in a commanding gesture. An identical fire pit, fire and pile of wood appeared on the far side of the clearing. Dar led Radulf and Kunik away, but Artyom was determined to take no more orders from this horrible old woman. He stood where he was, immobile, stubborn and seething with rage, hoping she’d make an issue of it, but she ignored him.
“You!” She pointed an iron-tipped finger at Morfran. “Get out! We don’t want you! Your part is over!”
She kicked her cauldron over, spilling its contents, and rootled, grunting, throwing aside rags; an old smelly shoe; assorted bones, some with gristle attached; what looked like a dried-up head with a quiff of lifeless hair; a dirty plate; a sticky handful of utensils; a saw blade with broken teeth; a pair of heavy shears with a loose pin, so the blades twisted instead of meeting true; a handful of rags, folded just so, with dark stains that looked like blood on them; and a dead chicken.
She gave a cackle of satisfaction and stood up with a small pipe in her hand. She reached into a fold of her filthy tunic, groped lewdly between her breasts, and brought out a bag, which she opened, sniffed at loudly, and inserted her thumb and forefinger into, transferring a pinch of its contents into the pipe. She picked up a splinter out of the fire, taking no notice of flames or heat, and applied this to the pipe bowl. A sweet, heavy smell rose from it and she closed her eyes, inhaling deeply.
She turned with sudden grace, looking much younger, drew back her arm and threw the packet straight toward Artemis, who stood quietly with her bow resting on the ground beside her. The Baba clapped her hands sharply one time and the bag became two as it flew through the air. Artemis put out a hand and caught both bags neatly. She scattered the contents of one bag over the flames, murmuring something in a low voice. She turned then and walked away, passing between the chicken legs and under Baba Yaga’s hovel, and disappeared in shadows around the fire where the men gathered.
Baba Yaga went to where the skull she’d drummed on lay on the ground, its brown and weathered dome curving in the firelight, picked up her drumsticks, squatted, and with the pipe clenched between her sharpened, grey teeth, began to drum. A heavy, smoky scent of herbs and sweet grass rose from the fire, which burned low in glowing coals and embers.
MARY
Mary listened to Baba Yaga’s stories and watched the unfolding scene with fascination, pity and horror. She felt like an outsider. Kunik was her only connection among the initiates, but the other girls were clearly friends. Obviously, Vasilisa and Artyom shared some kind of history, and Artyom and Radulf were evidently friends. The revelations in Baba Yaga’s stories had nothing to do with her, and she wouldn’t have chosen to be an audience of such painful discoveries — not if she’d been given a choice.
She wondered uneasily what was coming next.
Baba Yaga had taken control and was choreographing the next part of the initiation, but the man Artyom did not go with the other men to the far fire. He stood, glowering at Baba Yaga, radiating rage and, Mary thought, spoiling for a fight. He made her nervous.
Artemis threw something on the fire, and the smoke of its burning made Mary feel strange. For a few minutes, she forgot her distress and Artyom’s obdurate presence. Baba Yaga was drumming, and the insistent sound captured Mary’s attention. When she thought to glance again at Artyom, he was gone.
From outside the fence came the sound of piping, as though the piper had been waiting in the shadows to join Baba Yaga’s drum. Drum and flute spoke to one another briefly. For a few moments, each struggled to lead, to dominate, and then gradually each relaxed into its own rhythm, and the two rhythms began to flow together, aggressively individual but weaving a reluctant melody all the same. Mary’s blood thickened and burned. She knew the sound of that flute.
Something moved at the gate in the fence of bones, just outside the firelight. They heard the “snick!” of the gate latch as it closed behind the piper, and he was there.
Around his shoulders swirled a crimson cloak, decorated with points and sparks of light. At the shoulder of the cloak a warm golden glow radiated, as though a candle burned there. The cloak revealed and then concealed goat legs, dark-haired and ending in cloven hooves. The piper moved lightly, holding the flute to his lips. When seen silhouetted against the firelight, two pointed horns thrust out from his hair.
He turned and swayed from a supple waist, dancing to the flute and yet keeping the drumbeat with his feet as well. As he turned, Mary saw his erect phallus and felt a blossoming of heat in her belly. A drop gleamed on the tip of his erection and her own body responded in a thick, oily slide of drops down the inside of her thigh. The heavy smell of the burning herbs muffled her thoughts, but woke her body.
Then Death came clinking and jangling, high stepping and shuffling to the music. Baba Yaga threw back her head and shrieked at the night sky and the stars shivered, flickering uneasily. Death jitterbugged into the circle of firelight that revealed ivory and shadow, ivory and shadow, as he gyrated and danced. His bones were bare and dry, clacking, rubbing together like naked branches in a wind. He stepped in front of Nephthys, who jumped to her feet. They faced each other, the ancient-eyed child in her rags and gleaming golden earrings, and the bony skeleton. Death bowed elaborately. Nephthys mimed a curtsey. The piping swung into a wild waltz and Death and Nephthys revolved, macabre and barbaric, around the fire.
The piping died away and the dancers revolved more and more slowly, ending in an unexpectedly graceful movement. Death bowed over Nephthys’s hand, turned her palm up, and pressed his teeth against it. Nephthys rested her other hand on the bald dome of his skull for a moment, as though in silent blessing, and then dropped it at the same time Death released the hand he’d …kissed?
Death spun in a quick, graceful arc of ivory and shadow and looked directly at Baba Yaga. The Baba pointed at Mary with her drumstick. “That one,” she said with cold clarity. “That one is yours.”
Mary gasped, heart accelerating into painful, labored pounding. Her breath quickened with fear.
“Death for you, Girl,” screamed Baba Yaga. “Death within you and Death from your hand! Murderer! Slayer!”
“No!” screamed Mary. She was life! She was the Seed-Bearer, the nurturer, the one who blessed! The sullen fire threw maniacal shadows. Mary’s mouth was dry, her head thick. Baba Yaga’s distorted shape loomed over the skull drum between her legs.
“Black cunt! Bitch! Whore!” shrieked Baba Yaga. “I name you Death-Bringer! I name you Goat-Sucker! I name you Chalice of Blight, of Pestilence, of Decay!”
Mary threw back her head and screamed in denial, the Baba’s mocking laugh mingling with it. As she looked into the hag’s gleeful face, Mary had a sudden, overwhelming perception that she saw a reflection of herself. Her youth, her beauty, her nurture was also this aged, hideous aspect, so powerfully, vitally alive. In fact, it seemed to her Baba Yaga commanded the greater primordial power of life.
“Be silent!” spat Baba Yaga.
Mary swallowed her hysteria with an effort. The fire murmured hotly. The fragrant smoke wrapped her like a blanket. Death stood easily, empty-eyed, in front of her. Baba Yaga pulled out a slim, sharp knife with a handle of bone.
“If you’d be a Seed Bearer you must also deal in death,” said Baba Yaga. All madness vanished from her voice. She spoke coldly and clearly, holding Mary in her iron gaze. “Seeds grow in death. Show the seeds you’re worthy. Prove yourself. Give them a little drink of blooood!” Her voice dropped to a coaxing, playful singsong.
From the shadows threaded an inviting melody. It bubbled and trickled like a rivulet of shining water in the sun. It was innocent, promising play and laughter. The rabbit, Surrender, crouched at Baba Yaga’s feet. Ears pinned, eyes wide and reflecting light, it huddled, looking paralyzed with terror.
The music coaxed and beckoned, and Surrender began to drag himself toward Mary, trembling and reluctant. Inexorably caught in the net of music, he came, inch by inch. For a moment Mary felt frozen with horror. The rabbit’s terror was a palpable presence, like a stench of death and suffering, a clogging darkness in the clean night. The music was a cold-eyed thing without mercy and the gentle creature, the lonely little rabbit Kunik called into being from her agonized youthful dreams, was powerless.
Power. Choice. Consent. Mary turned abruptly on her heel, strode to the Baba and snatched the knife out of her hand. She picked up Surrender with firm hands. In a quick, sure stroke, she drew the knife across his throat. He kicked, dying, ears soft in her hand. She dropped his warm body into the empty cauldron, went to Nephthys’s cloth and carefully gathered up the packages and bundles of seeds. She let them fall onto Surrender’s body, now lying in a pool of blood.
She looked down into the cauldron’s shadows for a moment, thinking of blood and seed, death and dark earth. She raised her eyes resolutely to Baba Yaga’s face, feet planted firmly, legs slightly apart, back straight. The piping changed from the coaxing death melody to a wilder, more passionate cascade of notes, leaping and savage. The arousal in her flesh was not distracted by her bloodletting, was perhaps even strengthened by it, and she exulted in her own eroticism, opening and swelling in fierce desire, boldly holding Baba Yaga’s gaze, wanting her to know.
The piper’s notes moved against her flesh. Life and death for the cauldron. Life fed death and death fed life. The inescapable rich rightness of it was like the smell of blood on her hands.
The piper came nearer and nearer, until he stood beside her, his music demanding, lubricious. She didn’t look away from Baba Yaga. She raised one hand to her mouth and licked blood from it deliberately, smearing her lips with sticky wetness. Her mouth filled with the metal taste of blood.
“Enough!” screeched the Yaga. The piping stopped. She regarded the two of them with a curled lip, glancing back and forth between their faces.
“Hhmmpphh,” she said, pleased, and yet not so pleased. “Hhhhmmmmpppphhh.” She stood for a moment with an inward look of concentration and then spat explosively at their feet. Mary felt the spray of spittle on her skin and mentally recoiled, but willed herself to remain motionless. In the firelight, a thick blob of spit rolled down the piper’s cloven foot. The Baba turned and stumped away.
Mary’s knees weakened and she swayed. The piper flung a heavy cloak over her shoulders, gleaming with beads and golden thread, and his strong arm encircled her. He took her to a place just outside the reach of firelight and let her sit down. She put her face in her hands and smelled blood again, retched, and let the tears come.
VASILISA
Vasilisa danced. The sound of the Baba’s drumming beat in her blood, insistent, demanding, somehow mocking. Flames flickered at the edges of her vision. Her maimed bare foot stamped down on the ground. It ached, as it always did when she went barefoot or walked heavily. The drumbeat compelled her feet and she danced, danced hard, feeling the blows of her feet on the ground through knees and hips. Her thoughts were thick, far away behind the strong-smelling smoke. At the same time, she felt more present in her skin than ever before. Nice, the thinking part of her said with numb lips. Sweet. Forgive. Compassion. But the words were too much effort, and as they slowed and fell away, she was surprised to find rage. So, she danced, hating herself, hating her pain, hating her deformed foot and most of all, hating Artyom.
She heard the insinuating, trickling melody and saw Surrender dragging himself on his belly to Mary. She watched Mary take the Baba’s knife and go to meet the helpless creature. She knew what would happen, knew what must happen, and it seemed to her that same melody had played inaudibly the whole time she’d been a frog. Coaxing, inviting, pretty. A sweet melody of hopefulness and invitation. Yet it wasn’t sweet at all, was it? Surrender cringed, terrified, eyes bulging, ears pinned. He didn’t want to go to Mary, but he must go, though he went to his own death. The drumming stopped and the piping climaxed, changed abruptly into something rampant and somehow lewd.
The drumming began again, settling into a steady pulse like a heartbeat. All the madness went out of it. Nephthys sat in Baba Yaga’s place, beating the dome of the skull between her knees. The Baba stood in front of Mary and the piper in his sweeping crimson cloak. Surrender was gone.
Vasilisa turned her eyes away and danced. The grinning figure of Death leapt in front of her. In one bony hand, he held a vicious pronged tool with sharp points. He twirled it at her and she recognized a frog gig. The piping began again and Death grinned, gyrating and stamping in the same rhythm her own feet followed. He raised the gig and danced toward her, moving his hips seductively.
Red, scalding rage bloomed in her. She opened her mouth and screamed, knocking the thing from Death’s hand with all her strength. It fell and she bent swiftly, picked it up and drove it at Death. It hit a rib, turning in her hand as it slid along the bone, and lodged in the sternum. Death danced backward, still grinning, reached up and pulled it out.
Again, she knocked it flying from his hand, bent, found it among the young spring growth. She stabbed at him, dancing to the inexorable beat, her tortured foot throbbing and hot.
Again and again, she stabbed, feeling rage as she’d never felt it before. Death grinned, moving and turning just out of reach, teasing, jeering. She screamed and swore, making her throat raw. She realized she was crying. She’d kill him! She’d pierce him a thousand times and watch his blood flow out. She’d lick it from his arms, his face, his chest. She’d kill him one jab at a time. She lusted for his pain, his groans. His agony would feed her. She’d tear open his guts, an inch at a time, and spit into the wound. She’d pin him to the ground like a frog, like a rabbit, like her own poor foot… She jabbed the gig into the empty eye socket and it stayed there, jutting straight out from his face, as though held by the ghost of the long-absent eye. He didn’t care. No blood. No flesh. He was beyond agony, beyond her ability to hurt him. He danced away from her, taking the gig with him, leaving her drained and unsatisfied.
The piping stopped but now Baba Yaga drummed again, the hag and the child Nephthys bending together with their sticks.
Vasilisa gasped for breath, trembling on her feet. She thought of Artyom and gagged, remembering the smell of his vomit and the feel of it under her bare feet. Abruptly, her rage receded, leaving her feeling empty and slack. A hand came down on her arm and she turned blindly and saw Artemis’calm face.
“Come,” she said, and Vasilisa obeyed, too weary to do anything else.
Artemis sat comfortably with her back against the bone fence. Above her, impaled on a post, grinned a fiery skull.
“Sit,” she said. “Now is time for more hidden things.”
Vasilisa dropped to the ground and put her face in her hands.
“The worst is over,” said Artemis.
Vasilisa let her hands drop and leaned her head wearily against the fence. “What now?” she asked flatly.
“Who told the story of the frog and the neglected young prince?
“Baba Yaga,” Vasilisa said.
“And who’s inside her story?” asked Artemis.
“I am. And…Artyom.”
“How would Artyom tell the story?”
“I don’t know,” said Vasilisa, surprised. “I hadn’t thought of it.”
“Can Baba Yaga tell the story from his point of view?” asked Artemis.
“No. She can only tell from her point of view,” said Vasilisa bitterly. “And she did!”
“She did,” agreed Artemis neutrally. “But only Artyom can tell his story. And inside the Baba’s story is also your story.”
“Oh,” said Vasilisa, surprised.
“Would you tell the story the way Baba Yaga did?”
“No, of course not. My story would be about Artyom and her.”
“That’s right. Baba Yaga’s story revealed hidden things to you, to Artyom, and to the rest of us. But it didn’t go far enough. Within that story are more hidden things. What’s hidden in your story, Vasilisa? What’s there, asking to be seen?”
Vasilisa felt harried and exhausted. It was an effort to think. She wanted to sleep, find a dark safe place somewhere and forget… She realized she was going to cry — tried to stop — couldn’t — and decided she was too worn out to be proud. She let the tears come.
“Baba Yaga’s right. I’m so sweet! I’m always so sweet! I hate the way she makes me see myself! But I want to be kind and compassionate. I want to give people a second chance. It’s good to see the best in others, isn’t it? Isn’t that the way we’re supposed to be? But… he did that to me. He did that — on purpose! How could he do that? How could he be so vicious?”
She cried, confusion, rage, pain and humiliation a bitter clot in her throat. Artemis made no comment.
Vasilisa wiped her face with her apron and blew her nose.
“There’s nothing wrong with kindness and compassion,” said Artemis. “But shouldn’t your first kindness and compassion be for yourself?”
“Myself,” said Vasilisa.
“He hurt you, Vasilisa. You knew you weren’t safe with him. Did you owe him kindness and compassion at your own expense?”
“No,” said Vasilisa uncertainly. Then, with more force, “No, of course not. That can’t be right!”
“No,” agreed Artemis. “If you’d kept yourself safe after he hurt your foot, if you’d acknowledged the betrayal and done whatever was necessary to keep yourself safe… “
“He’d never have been able to get near enough to pick me up and throw me against the tree,” finished Vasilisa.
“He did wrong,” said Artemis, “and you don’t know what kind of a price he’s paid, but tonight did he behave like a man at peace with himself?”
Vasilisa didn’t answer because there was no need to. They’d all been witness to the stink of Artyom’s wretchedness.
“You’re not responsible for his choices,” said Artemis.
“But I let him,” said Vasilisa. “I was part of it. I allowed it to happen. That part is my responsibility.”
“A hidden thing,” said Artemis.
Vasilisa gave a tired half sigh, half sob. Artemis reached out and clasped her hand and they sat together, leaning against the bony fence. The skull over them dimmed its light. Firelight flickered from the bonfire in the center of the circle. Someone put wood on it. Vasilisa, looking through the flames, could look right under Baba Yaga’s house on its tall chicken legs and see the bonfire on the other side where the men gathered. She wondered remotely what they were doing and if Artyom felt as worn out as she did.
ROSE RED
Rose Red’s cringing imagination had proved inadequate to the reality of Baba Yaga. In the circle of storytelling, witness to Artyom’s terrible exposure, Vasilisa’s anguish and rage, Radulf’s despair and Morfran’s revelations, her attention never strayed far from the hideous crone. The Baba’s jibes and revelations were so perfectly timed, each thrust of her verbal knife so exquisitely aimed, and the twitching aside of protective covering so masterful! Yet she merely revealed truth, undeniable, unwelcome, desperately hidden, liberally decorated with taunts and jeers, but nevertheless truth.
There was something clean and sharp about truth, Rose Red thought. The cold clarity of truth was at once unbearably painful and strangely restful. She feared Baba Yaga more than she’d ever feared anyone, felt disgusted and appalled by her. And yet in some deeply primitive way she trusted her. Truth, thought Rose Red, is a neutral thing. Not good, not bad. It just is. This thought made a resting place, a solid rock in a river of chaos. On this night, Baba Yaga and Artemis brought the initiates together with truth.
The White Stag stood nearby. Ever since his appearance in the sunny clearing the day before, she’d felt comforted. During the Baba’s stories, he stood near the chicken legs carrying the house with its eyes like windows and door like a mouth. His white coat glowed dimly with soft light, just like Artemis’s bow. She was there, too, next to the stag, bow resting beside her on the ground. They stood like sentinels, listening and watching. Rose Red wondered if anyone else was aware of their presence.
Baba Yaga had broken the circle, caused another fire to spring into life on the far side of the house and dismissed the man called Morfran abruptly. Now she squatted in front of the skull she used as a drum, hunched and shadowed with her pipe jutting from her pursed lips. The drumming compelled and intoxicated. Rose Red watched Jenny shed her clothing and was amazed at her beauty. She watched Vasilisa dancing with what looked like passionate rage with Death. And no wonder!
The music demanded but Rose Red resisted. She remembered her dance alone in the wet woods, safe from all eyes. The memory of her rage and pain made her shudder. The old feeling of being in the wrong place, of not belonging, of being an imposter, rose in her and she turned away, meaning to move outside the range of firelight and hide in the shadows.
The White Stag stood in her path. A large broken piece of ice rested in his woven antlers. Rose Red stood quite still, shocked and somehow humiliated. She shrank from the memory of her destructive rage and grief on the day she’d danced in the wet forest. She still believed some flaw or wrongness in herself lay at the heart of her difficult relationship with her parents. To feel so much anger and despair about her mother surely revealed a vile and hateful nature.
Remotely, she heard piping and it seemed to her it was the sound of breaking, of shattering and smashing, the sound of sharp, glittering shards, the sound of hidden bleeding that went on and on without mercy or healing. She felt an impulse to push the stag out of the light, get him away from the others so no one would see that incriminating piece of broken ice. It reproached her with its cold, sharp edges. She remembered the feel of the tree branch in her hands, the good, lustful sound of smashing and breaking, the sensual excitement of destruction beyond repair.
The stag lowered his head so the ice caught the firelight and reflected the whirling, mingled figures of Jenny and the Firebird in their dance. Rose Red saw then it was a mirror, not ice, not glass, but a broken mirror with fanged edges. She feared it. She didn’t dare look into it again. She turned away from the sight of it. Her head felt thick, the vaguely herbal smoke pressing against her. She felt queasy, on the edge of nausea. She closed her eyes and swallowed.
She couldn’t stay here. She must to get away from the flickering firelight, the music that overwhelmed her control, the smothering smell and the eyes of the others. She must flee, hide, go to ground somewhere while this night passed.
When she opened her eyes, Death stood in front of her. There was something inexorable about his still figure. She could look right through him, like looking through prison bars made of white bone. The sound of drums filled the night, threaded with the cold needle of the flute, but Death stood in dreadful immobility that made Rose Red feel like screaming. Tension coiled tightly in her, drying her mouth and humming behind her eyes. She closed them, trying to pull herself together.
The drumming filled her body. It entered through her ears, on her breath, was absorbed through her very skin. With her eyes closed, she felt her pulse and breathing adjust to it, take up its rhythm. She couldn’t resist its insidious power. She opened her eyes. There in front of her stood her mother, Queen Snow White.
She wore a simple dress of deep pink. The queen had always told Rose Red this color flattered every complexion and hid signs of aging. A rope of pearls hung around her throat and another wove through her long black hair. Bitterness and grief lined her face, emphasizing her age.
The queen began to dance. Not a stylized, formal, controlled dance of the ballroom, but a wild dance of hips and elbows, knees and shoulders. Hair flew in a black storm, streaked with white pearls, and the pink dress twisted. Rose Red saw with horror bare feet under the hem of the dress. She couldn’t ever recall seeing her mother with bare feet before. It was a dance of silent screaming, a dance of pain beyond words, a dance of twisted rage.
Rose Red tried to drop her face in her hands, tried to wrench her gaze away, tried to turn and flee, but she found herself dancing too. She danced her own dance and it was like dancing in her own blood, dancing in her own filth, in her own grief. She and the queen danced with each other and Rose Red felt powerless to stop, powerless to run away, powerless to hide.
They turned together, Rose Red and her mother, and there stood the White Stag, patient and calm, holding the mirror in his antlers that were like twisted bones. The mirror reflected Rose Red dancing with …Death. Death, grinning his vacant, meaningless grin. Death, whose gyrating bones looked as though they would fall in a jumble any moment but somehow stayed loosely but solidly bound together. Not Queen Snow White, but Death. Rose Red forced her eyes away from the mirror and turned her body to face the other dancer. Queen Snow White raised her hands to her cloud of hair and began to wrench it in handfuls out of her head. The pearls fell in a white flurry and the flute gave a note of silver and bone, silver and bone, to each luminescent sphere.
Rose Red closed her eyes and shrieked. The drumming stopped. For a moment, everything was suspended. She didn’t open her eyes. She didn’t want to see any more. In the breathless silence the piping began, gentle and coaxing. It soothed and calmed. It made her think of the way she talked to birds and wild creatures. Her throat felt raw and dry. She breathed. She opened her eyes.
There in front of her danced a child. She had long black hair, beautifully cared for and looking oddly elegant. She wore a simple dress of deep pink. Around her neck hung a rope of pearls, and another wove elaborately through the fall of hair. Her skin was pale and without blemish, her lips full and red. She danced hesitantly, shyly, as though uncertain or afraid. She danced as though invisible prison bars surrounded her. She danced small and tight, looking ready to cringe and freeze into immobility at any moment. Her face was expressionless, as flat as that of a doll.
Tears blurred Rose Red’s vision and fell down her cheeks, warm and comforting. Tenderness swelled powerfully and painfully within her. She reached forward carefully with her hand to the dancing child. Dancing, but so remote! She reached out, but the child didn’t respond. She didn’t meet Rose Red’s eyes or even look into her face. She danced as though alone, danced with that pale, expressionless face. Of course, thought Rose Red, of course she doesn’t respond. She knows nothing of response, for no one has ever held a hand out in love, or in comfort.
Her own feet began to move tentatively to the sound of the flute. Her feet danced innocence and isolation. They danced a small and delicate dance that listened and watched for danger. Rose Red danced the dance of a hunched shoulder, the dance of invisibility, the dance of powerlessness and dumb hopelessness. Rose Red and the child danced together, and slowly Rose Red pivoted until she once again faced the stag, and still he stood there, looking at her out of his large, dark eyes. She raised her own eyes to the fragment of mirror and found Death reflected beside her. Death, dancing with childish, fearful grace, twirling and floating, raising his arms and then quickly dropping them, as though afraid to call attention to himself. Rose Red couldn’t decide if he mocked the child or was so at one with her his empty chest filled with her pain.
The piping began to fade away, silence stretching between notes until the next note wasn’t played. Again, Rose Red closed her eyes, wondering dully what could possibly be next. She no longer wanted to flee. She would stand. She would dance with whatever came. She would face whatever the mirror showed her.
A drum beat started, insistent and sensual and slightly mad. Rose Red knew without looking the Baba drummed. Then another rhythm joined in, like a container for the first rhythm. Steady, comforting as a heartbeat, sounding as though it would go on to the end of time and beyond, unhurried and unwearied. Nephthys beat the round, domed skull in front of her. And then the flute began again, a joyous sound speaking to Rose Red of green trees, trickling water, the peace of deep woods, the instinctive lives of birds and animals in all their lovely and mysterious complexity. Her body began to move and now her fear, rage and pain fell away and she danced coming home to peace and safety.
She opened her eyes and looked straight into the shining eyes of an old woman with a cap of curly silver hair. Her skin was lined and weathered, her lips smiling, a scatter of freckles on her cheeks. She wore a linen tunic embroidered with leaves, flowers and animals. The sleeves, collar and hem were decorated with golden thread. She wore soft-looking leather boots on her feet and a belt of braided leather and gold at her waist with a supple sheath for a knife.
The old woman danced with grace and confidence. Rose Red saw in her movements the echo of a running doe’s flank, the brown sweep of wing, the silver flash of a swimming fish, the clever hands of a raccoon and the sinuous shape of a snake. It was a dance of serenity and life. It was joy, not ecstatic, but steady, rooted, grounded in Nephthys’s drumming.
Rose Red turned towards the mirror. This time she found only herself, wearing the tunic Jenny and Vasilisa had made, her own curly black hair in a tangle around her cheeks. As she watched her reflection, she saw the face of the old woman pass across her own for a moment, like a shadow. She moved closer to the stag and the mirror, still dancing, searching for another glimpse of the old dancer. It was like watching a reflection in water, shimmering, moving with an unseen current. A fleeting movement of arm, a turn of head, the soft, crumpled texture of a lined neck, each present for an instant and then sliding away in the reflection. Still dancing, Rose Red reached out a hand to touch the mirror and a sharp edge cut her deeply. She gasped and blood fell from the finger onto the ground. Her feet stopped and she looked around, as though waking from a dream, wanting something to bind her finger with and stop the bleeding.
Death stood there before her again. He wasn’t dancing and Rose Red suddenly realized drum and flute were silent. Death reached out and took her hand, warm and bleeding and alive, in his own bony grasp. He touched the tip of his finger to the cut, coating it in blood, as though dipping a brush in paint. Still holding her hand in one of his, he leaned forward, bringing the scarlet finger bone to her lips, and painted her mouth carefully with her own blood. She stood, docile, and allowed this. It was an oddly formal, ritualistic action and something about the touch of Death’s finger on her mouth shot straight into her groin with a fiery pang, so she nearly groaned aloud.
She saw a streak of movement in the corner of her eye. Out of the dark shadows and into the firelight sprang a fox. It leapt, graceful, silent and cat like, straight for Death. Death recoiled slightly in a gentle clinking of bones, the two figures merged, and Rose Red saw the fox sitting neatly, dog-like, inside Death’s rib cage. It stretched its head forward and began casually gnawing at a rib bone. Rose Red clearly saw the gleam of its tooth, whiter than Death’s bones. The fox, still gnawing, looked straight into her eyes.
Rose Red turned her head and looked into the mirror. There stood Death and there within his rib cage, its tail neatly wrapped around its feet, sat the fox, gnawing at the rib. Its slanted amber eyes were fixed on her face. It ignored the mirror. For a long moment Rose Red looked into her own face, seeing in memory Queen Snow White in her pearls and deep pink; the isolated, stoic child who had survived; and the serene old woman who – had? – would? – attained joy.
Rose Red walked to the White Stag and carefully reached forward. Blood stained her cut hand. The White Stag bowed his head and she took the mirror in both hands and lifted it out of his antlers. She carried it to the black iron cauldron squatting on the ground near the fire and let it drop into the black depths. It didn’t shatter but cracked once with a final kind of sound.
Rose Red returned to where Death stood, encasing the shape of the fox. The fox ceased its gnawing and watched her approach, eyes wary. She stood close to Death, nearly toe to toe, but she didn’t look at that eternal grimace. Dark eyes and amber eyes looked into one another. She raised her hands and curled her fingers around Death’s ribs.
“Is it you?” she breathed, knowing the answer already.
The fox stretched its neck forward and licked the blood, delicately, firmly, off her mouth.
JENNY
Jenny danced with the Firebird.
The drumming entered her bones and her blood. She’d never danced before, but her body recognized the elemental beat in a sort of ecstasy and she felt herself changed, transformed into something peeled of all civilized softness. She felt a fierce impulse to take off her clothes. The drumbeat demanded it. The bitter green scented smoke demanded it. Her body felt ripe and must be released from its husk of clothing.
Clasped in the inexorable, pounding rhythm, she pulled her linen tunic over her head, loosed her leather and gold braided belt and dropped her leggings. She slid the leather tie off the end of her long plait and shook out her hair. At once she became vividly aware of the cool night air and the radiant warmth of the fire. Her long hair swept against her neck, shoulders, arms and breasts in a caress like the brush of a large wing as she danced. She closed her eyes and lifted her face to the night sky, feeling fire-warmed air against her bare throat. Her breasts swayed, heavy and alive.
Into this sensual awareness, the flute began again, inserting itself delicately, brushing against her, stroking the fine hair on her body into erect awareness.
She opened her eyes and found, just above her, the Firebird. It twisted and turned gracefully in the air, wings and long tail flowing. It too was caught in the erotic net of drumbeat. It coiled and uncoiled, sinuous as a snake, then exploded upward in a golden shower of light like an unfolding flower of fire. Jenny saw gold and orange and crimson, flashes of green and blue and violet. She cried out in wonder, hearing her own triumphant, harsh cry with amazement. She whirled and danced, captive to drumming and piping, and the Firebird revolved above her, its bright feathers and her brown hair mingling. Glowing wing and shapely arm, heavy tassel of hair and graceful tail blended together, wove together, each becoming a part of the other until the boundary dissolved between the woman and the golden bird.
Then Death appeared, grinning his merciless, unending, maniacal grin. He danced in front of her, too close, crowding her, making her fall back a step to avoid the hard touch of his bones. Death danced, rotating pelvis, shoulders, head and knees, but not together, no, rather in a terrible visual cacophony, an impossible gyrating chaos. Jenny turned to avoid him and he stepped sideways and remained in front of her, so close he blocked her from the rest of the circle, from the warmth of the fire, and from her joyous dance with the Firebird. Her feet became heavy and angry, shackled to the drumbeat. She felt hounded, defensive, trapped. She would stop. She would not dance with Death! She would not be forced. But the Firebird! Oh, the Firebird! The Firebird that leads one to treasure!
Death, as though relenting, fell back a step, and then another. Jenny relaxed slightly, dancing strongly, proudly, with straight back and shoulders thrown wide. She glared at Death, grinning fiercely.
He grinned back, of course he did, without the slightest change of expression, and flung a bony hand into the air. From his fingers blossomed a golden, gossamer shimmer, opening like a flower and falling gently around the Firebird. In a deft movement too swift to see, Death made a circular sweeping motion with his upraised hand, gathering the edges of the blossom together and pulling them tight, and the Firebird let out an agonized cry and hung motionless, a glowing stationary thing in the air. Death twisted his hand and jerked hard, wrapping the fine strands of the net around his wrist.
The Firebird fell ungracefully out of the air onto the ground in a puff of feathers and Death, looking into Jenny’s eyes, tightened and twisted the strands of the golden net around his hand again, a third time, a fourth time. The Firebird shrieked in agony and Jenny heard a delicate cracking, as of fragile, thin bones breaking, a rippling sound. She thought wildly of Baba Yaga’s drumsticks — surely, they were bones and the Baba snapped them with strong fingers -- but she knew it was the sound of the Firebird’s bones breaking.
She screamed and lunged toward Death, meaning to break him apart, smash him into pieces, unwind the terrible, killing net, but he eluded her, skipping backward and winding the net around his bony wrist in a thick golden sleeve. The Firebird hung silent and limp, becoming a diminishing ball of golden light that dimmed and dimmed, golden glow filmed with smoke or dust, and then the net no longer contained anything at all. It was a twisted rope of gold, trailing limply on the ground, hanging from Death’s hand and wrist like a dead snake. He jerked at it and a few soft feathers fell between the net’s meshes. That was all.
A black, icy wave of despair rose up in Jenny and she fell into it, nearly senseless. The ground felt hard beneath her hip and shoulder. The only light in the world came from the pitiful scatter of feathers. She couldn’t see the fire or feel warmth or hear drumbeat. There was nothing but death and darkness. The Firebird was gone. The Firebird was destroyed. Her groping fingers found the twisted rope of net and she closed her hand around it…
…and recognized it. She herself had woven the golden strands of the net. She’d woven them out of straw. Somehow, she’d provided the means to murder the Firebird.
She jerked her hand back from the loathsome thing, but found she couldn’t release it. It tightened in her hand, pulling her to her knees and then to her feet. Baba Yaga stood there, a malevolent grin on her face. Death was gone. The fire burned low and sullen. The circle was mute.
“Now then, my princess, we come to you,” said Baba Yaga contemptuously. “You, motherless, sold by your father for more than you’re worth, of course,” she spat onto one of the feathers, turning the soft golden flutter into a wet, draggled thing on the ground. “You, with your pretensions to marry a king!”
“I didn’t want to marry a king!” protested Jenny. “I didn’t ask for that! It was all my father!”
“Oh, yessss, I know all about it! Your father had no use for you! The king had no use for you, either, as you couldn’t make him rich! The only one who wanted you was that little freak of nature Rumpelstiltskin! That male thing with balls who carries on as though he has the tits and crack of a woman! And what is he? Neither one thing or another!”
The Baba threw back her head and shrieked at the sky. “A fine thing to be loved by such as he! So, you went off with him! Well and good! But the next man didn’t want you, either! You couldn’t pass the test! You’re an imposter, a cuckoo in the nest, an ugly duckling! You’re nothing! What can you do? Spin straw into gold? Pah! Gold of no use to anyone else! Straw pretending to be something it’s not — just like you! What are you? Who are you? You’re nothing!”
Baba Yaga looked down at the net in her iron-tipped hand and a smile spread over her face. “Wait, now. Wait! I forgot! Here’s some gold you spun that did something useful! Here’s some gold, but it wasn’t made of straw!” She cackled with delight. “No, duckie, no, no, this wasn’t straw! You spun this lovely little net out of what you are!” She untwisted the net lovingly, caressing it as she spread it out. “See that strand there? That’s made from no need! Yes, no need makes a mighty strong strand! This one here, this is made from trying to please! Trying to please! An important ingredient in any net! And here, here is being good. Oh, that’s one of my favorites! Being good. Being goooood!”
The Baba sneered magnificently under her down-curving nose. “These,” she spread out several strands, “these are They! What They say! What They expect! What They teach! Their rules!” Impatiently, she jerked the net out of Jenny’s appalled hands and spread it out further. “Oh yesss, yess, very nice! Here’s hunger! See these strands, girl?” She shook out the net under Jenny’s nose. “Here, and here? Soul hunger, mmmm, yes, delicious…” The Baba trailed off into distracted mumbling and her belly rumbled loudly. “And here! Heart hunger! Poor starving little heart! Poor little hungry heart! Juicy…dripping…heart!”
Baba Yaga paused, looking intently down at the mesh spread across her palms and dropping down toward the ground. She dropped her voice into a whisper. “Ah! Here’s a strand spun from injured instinct! Injured instinct,” she repeated, as though reading an ingredient from a cookery book. “I’ll tell you what, my worthless little piece of gimcrack! If you weave another net from injured instinct, we’ll inveigle Vasilisa’s doll out of her pocket and do away with it! Then perhaps I’ll let you live — a salvage deal for a new master!” She went off into gales of laughter.
Jenny looked down at the terrible net, the net of her own making, the naked illustration of her most secret heart, spread out in a glimmering web of gold. Carefully, gently, she unwound the rest of the net, gathering it into a soft shining bundle, and took it off Baba Yaga’s hands as though she was a clothes line. She squatted with the net in her arms, remembering she was naked as she felt her heels against her buttocks and her sex open, and lovingly gathered up the golden feathers, including the one the Baba had spat on. She rose to her feet, one of her knees popping, and approached the iron cauldron that already contained Surrender’s body and Mary’s seeds. Without looking inside, she lowered in the net and feathers. Her grief for the Firebird was a dry, hard weight in her belly. Her grief for herself fluttered behind the cage of her sternum and ribs, frantic, imprisoned and anguished.
Jenny returned to where her discarded clothes lay on the ground. Wearily, she put them on. Baba Yaga was gone. The Firebird was gone. Was it too late for her to save herself? Was the net too tight around her, even now, for her to ever be free of it? How could she begin to disentangle herself? She heard the Baba’s sneering voice, “Who are you? What are you?”
I’m a spinner, she thought. I’m a woman. I create beauty and value out of life. I’m not for sale. I…am. I am. I am.
She stood looking into the fire as she thought. Something moved next to her and Rumpelstiltskin came to stand with her. She hadn’t thought of him for hours.
“How is it with you?” she asked. He looked up at her, firelight throwing strange shadows on his strong features. “Is everyone all right — over there?” she gestured towards the men’s fire on the other side of Baba Yaga’s elevated house.
“All is well,” said Rumpelstiltskin, sounding comfortingly ordinary. The sound of his voice made her feel very young. “We must talk. I have something for you.
They walked away from the fire to the pale fence of bones. Jenny sat down, feeling tired out.
Rumpelstiltskin handed her a single broad feather, large, but not as large as the Firebird’s feathers. She took it, holding the smooth shaft between her fingers.
“What does it mean?” she asked, bewildered.
Rumpelstiltskin reached into his shirt and drew out another feather the same size and shape. He held it up so it was silhouetted against the fire. “This one is brown and cream colored,” he said. “It’s like yours. They’re owl feathers, a message from Minerva.”
“Minerva?” Jenny felt more and more confused.
“Minerva is an ancient wise one who often takes the shape of an owl,” explained Rumpelstiltskin. “She spins, dyes and weaves in a workshop in the harbor city of Griffin Town. She’s a teacher and an excellent business woman.”
“Do you know her?” asked Jenny.
“I haven’t met her. I know of her. But I received the same message from her during your time with Hans.” Jenny stiffened. “I didn’t know what to do until this feather came. I took it as a sign all would be well if I left you for a time, that you wouldn’t be quite alone.”
“But how does she know me?” Jenny asked.
“Minerva has watched over you for a long time. She knows what you can do. She offers you a place as an apprentice.”
“She… wants to teach me?”
“No one in on Webbd knows more about spinning, Jenny. She can teach you things no one else can. I can think of no better place for you than with Minerva, but you need not go if you don’t want to. Only you can choose.”
“I’ll go,” said Jenny.
CHAPTER 20
ARTYOM
The Firebird stayed on Artyom’s shoulder as he walked under Baba Yaga’s hovel and joined the men.
The fire was a large bed of glowing coals, as though it had been burning for hours instead of minutes. Here, too, was the strong scent of herbs. Artyom stood looking at the sullen embers, aware only of his anger.
The hag! The old bitch! She’d humiliated him, made him look despicable in front of the others. He wasn’t responsible for the small cruelties and sins of his childhood. If one person had cared! If one person had loved him or wanted him! How dared they judge him, when they’d all possessed loving parents and happy homes! No one could understand the barren desolation of his childhood, the loneliness of being groomed for power and responsibility! How could he possibly know the frog was an enchanted girl?
And Vasilisa. Her white face. Her ragged, ugly foot. No one must ever see that! The King’s wife mustn’t reveal such a blemish. Still, she’d forgive him. She must forgive him. He needed her, and somehow after this night he needed her more than ever. With her beside him, everything would be all right. He’d work hard, be a good leader and a good husband. He’d be honorable and strong and wise. She’d save him.
He wouldn’t allow Baba Yaga to destroy his hopes and dreams. He wouldn’t be her victim, or her puppet.
Artyom lifted his head defiantly. The Firebird, with a soft noise, took off. Dar was walking thoughtfully around the fire, softly beating a pair of small drums hanging at his waist on a leather strap. He used both hands, settling into no particular rhythm. At first the sound soothed, but then it began to wear at Artyom’s nerves. He wanted Dar to find a rhythm and stay with it. Damn the man! What did this wandering, meaningless jumble mean? Where was it going? The herbal smell in the air pressed unpleasantly against him.
KUNIK
Kunik couldn’t stop thinking about the stranger Morfran’s connection to Vasalisa and, more remotely, Radulf. He’d traveled for many years. He was naturally quiet and always conscious of being a stranger. He’d perfected the trick of being just pleasant and friendly enough to disappear entirely in company, always sitting at the edge of gatherings, listening and observing. He’d heard a lot of stories. He’d heard of Vasilisa and the fiery skull. Now characters from stories lived and breathed around him, as the stories of his own life lived and breathed within him.
His greatest wonder, though, was for the series of hidden connections. Vasilisa — not the daughter of a peasant but the daughter of a King of the Sea! Morfran — son of a sea princess! Radulf — beloved by Morfran’s aunt! Family. Kin. Tribe. One connection linking with another and then another. Belonging. Hidden secrets and liaisons out of the past echoing in present lives. His chest ached with longing.
Still, he comforted himself, I’m whole in myself. I know who I am. I feel adrift in the world, it’s true, but I’ve survived and I’ve healed myself. I uncover shape within shape. There’s good magic in my hands.
But Baba Yaga told no story for him.
Dar walked around the fire playing a pair of drums. It wasn’t rhythmic but irregular and somehow disturbing. Artemis had thrown something on the fire — some kind of herb — and melted away again into shadows. A strong musty green smell filled the air. Kunik wandered to the edge of the fire and looked down. The pieces of wood looked like bones and the consuming fire revealed the hidden heart of each stick. He watched, fascinated, seeing shapes and stories, watching thin sticks fall gently into grey and white ash. The ash made him think of snow, the starry snow of his childhood under a dim noon sky. Of course, snow looked white in sunlight. Old snow might look as grey as this ash.
He thought of snow and ice — all the textures and ways of it. New snow, thin ice, solid ice, falling snow, fine snow, coarse snow, rotten ice. Snow and ice and cold and endless night sky filled with stars like snowflakes hanging suspended, frozen, gleaming in night’s dome.
Dar began to speak.
“There’s a land where snow drifts like fallen stars and night sky ripples with color. In this land live the ice bears. They’re born. They grow and learn to fish and swim. They play and mate and walk on the ice. When their time is over, they die.
There lived an ice bear called Nanuk, and the first time he came out of the cave where he was born, he discovered sky and snow and sea and he smelled another. It wasn’t the familiar scent of his sister or his mother. It wasn’t the scent of seal or walrus or fish or any other wild creature living with and around the ice bears.
It was a female scent. It was named Tapeesa.
Nanuk grew and learned to fish and swim. He played with his sister.
Always, there was the scent of Tapeesa.
He reached adulthood and his mother and sister were gone. He was strong and powerful. It was time to find a mate.
Always, there was the scent of Tapeesa.
Sometimes he saw her. She was a round shape in her parka with its fur hood, but once the wind caught at her hair and it looked like a raven’s wing sweeping around her face.
Nanuk began to follow Tapeesa’s scent. He discovered the places where she hid and watched him. He followed her tracks back to her people, but he didn’t go near the village. He knew human hunters killed his kind.
Sometimes Tapeesa came a long way over the ice to be near him.
He began to wait for her. He didn’t hide himself but stayed in the open, thick white fur on his legs ruffling in the wind.
Gradually, she stopped hiding, too.
They looked at one another across the ice and snow, Tapeesa and Nanuk.
Every day they drew closer together. He stretched out his neck and black muzzle and drew in her scent.
She threw back her fur-fringed hood.
One day they touched.
Nanuk’s people drove him away. They could smell Tapeesa on him. He took the form of a human man.
Tapeesa’s people shunned her. She was a danger. She was unnatural.
They found a village and settled on the edge of it. There was a child.
One day, polar bears dragged Tapeesa and Nanuk onto the ice and ate them, but not before Tapeesa hid the child, wrapped in sealskin, behind a ridge of ice.”
Kunik wept. As Dar spoke, he watched fire burn away logs of wood and he saw the young ice bear and the young woman. He saw his mother’s wide hips and round cheeks. He saw his father’s powerful curved claws, his half-moon ears and his strong legs. He saw them stand on the ice, facing one another across their people and the rules of their tribes. He tasted the bitterness of their exile and the sweet musk of their love. He saw himself between them, love child, child of neither one tribe nor another. He saw their torn bodies on the red snow and he saw himself, drifting on an ice flow in the arctic night.
He wept in great, heaving sobs, making no effort to control his tears or the mucus dripping from his nose. He didn’t cover his face, but turned it up to the night sky and sobbed. He didn’t know if he wept for relief or grief, for rage or peace. He didn’t know if he was torn in pieces or healed. The pain was too great. He merely wept because he must.
ARTYOM
In the silence following Dar’s story, Artyom heard the flute. In fact, he realized he’d been hearing it vaguely for some time, coming from the women’s circle, but now it approached their own fire. He didn’t like something about the melody. It teased at him the way Dar’s random drumming had before he began to speak the story and his hands fell into a steady rhythm.
The flute sounded sly and somehow greedy. It was a thoughtless sound of desire, even lust, a raw sound. It was…Artyom groped for the right word…uncivilized. It made him uneasy and feeling uneasy fed his anger.
The piper came out of the shadows into the firelight. His crimson cloak was encrusted with points of light picked out by the flames. Over the left shoulder, high on the back, glowed a large golden feather that obviously came from the Firebird. Glancing around, Artyom realized the Firebird itself had disappeared. Looking back at the piper, disgust rose in Artyom at the sight of his animal legs, covered with dark hair and ending in split hooves. There was something obscene about the piper, half man, half beast, as he danced and turned lightly on those legs. Two short, thick horns thrust out of the curly hair on his head.
The piper and Dar faced one another, each straight and tall with his cloak in graceful folds around him. The cloaks were clearly made by the same hand, but Artyom thought the two figures were alike in some deeper way, although Dar was a real man, not a half beast. He saw the piper’s erect phallus silhouetted against the fire, thrusting up obscenely as though relishing the firelight. Dar’s hands fell, relaxed, to his sides and the piper took the bone flute from his lips and held it loosely by his own side. They smiled at each other and then leaned forward and kissed one another on the mouth.
Dar reached under his cloak for a goblet that shone silver in firelight and handed it to the piper. The piper produced a corked bottle and poured the contents into the cup. Dar took a sharp looking knife from a sheath at his belt, extended his left hand and drew the blade across his palm in a quick, casual gesture. Artyom watched the dark line of blood follow the blade’s path. The peddler held his hand over the goblet so blood dripped into it, then bound up his hand neatly and quickly with a strip of cloth. The piper extended his own hand and Dar repeated the gesture without hesitating. The piper’s blood joined the contents of the cup.
Dar gestured to Radulf and Artyom. Kunik had already approached, his round face still washed with distress from the story. As the group of men came together, Dar said, “Brothers, we’re come together on this night to walk forward, shoulder to shoulder, into the next cycle. Initiation is a threshold between one thing and another. Tonight, we bear witness for one another. Many in the world are exiled from family and home but kinship is a wild, flexible connection with many aspects. Tonight, you may become a member of a tribe. You may have a place and a voice. Your strength may sustain others and your weakness be strengthened. Tonight, you stand at a crossroad. Will you be present with us? Will you consent to membership in the tribe?
“I will,” said Kunik, and held out his hand, palm up. Dar made the cut and Kunik let drops of his blood fall into the goblet. The peddler deftly bound up his hand.
“I consent,” said Radulf quietly.
Again, Artyom watched the ritual cut, the shedding of blood into the goblet and the binding of Radulf’s hand. When the eyes of the others turned to him, he said, “I’m not interested in having a ‘tribe’ that answers to that old hag!” He gestured towards the women’s fire on the other side of the motionless chicken legs. “You may not mind having your privacy invaded but I do! I’m an important and powerful leader and I’ve already proved my strength. I can’t afford to make alliances with witches and…animals!”
Radulf made a sound in his throat as thought to speak, but Dar cut in. “Animals…like frogs?” he asked quietly.
Artyom felt his face flame. “How dare you speak to me of that?” he asked through rigid lips. “What kind of woman would trick a child so, and then drag it out years later, and jeer and gloat? She’s responsible for Vasilisa’s hurt, not I!”
“Artyom,” said Radulf, “this is not about blame, but understanding. You’re not the only one uncomfortably exposed this night! You once extended the hand of friendship to me. Can’t we now accept other hands from other friends?”
He gestured with his bound hand. For some reason, the sight of it made Artyom desolate. “I don’t need friends. I suppose the next thing is you drink from that mess,” he sneered, pointing at the cup in the piper’s hand. “Then you sit around and tell your secrets! Count me out. I don’t need this. I’ve more important things to do.”
He strode purposefully past the group to the bone fence. He thought he remembered a gate…yes, there it was. He could see the arched top, made out of four rib bones bound together. At the top of the gate sat the fiery skull. He remembered he and Vasilisa putting it there together and the memory seemed years old. As he approached, the skull burned more fiercely than he’d ever seen it, glowing red hot. His steps faltered and he stopped. He felt afraid to get too near, in case the skull exploded with its own heat. Doggedly, he turned away and walked past Baba Yaga’s house, following the fence. There was a gate near the women’s fire.
He stayed well out of reach of firelight. As he left the men’s circle behind, the cool, fresh air cleared his mind. He’d be glad to leave this place. It had been a mistake. He’d thought this would help him prepare to go home and be a good ruler, but nothing here helped with that. He glanced around the women’s circle in search of Vasilisa.
The Firebird caught his attention. It danced with Jenny, rising and falling, turning and whirling in the air around her head. Jenny danced naked and her hair fell around her, mingling with the Firebird’s long tail. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. They weren’t two but one, the fantastic bird and the lovely girl, a unity of such beauty and grace he found unwilling tears on his cheeks.
Then Death appeared and the dance broke apart. A gossamer shimmer of gold floated in the air above the Firebird. It fell gently around it, looking as light and insubstantial as dust but dragging the bird down, making clumsy the lines of wing and tail. He watched in horror as Death gathered up the folds of net, tightening it relentlessly, twisting the rope around his bony hand and wrist.
Artyom heard Jenny’s shriek and it was the sound of his own anguish. The glowing bird grew smaller and smaller in the strangling folds of net and then it disappeared in a puff. A few golden feathers wafted to the ground like sparks.
Artyom stood, dumb and cold in the shadows. He couldn’t believe what he’d seen. Jenny fell to the ground in what looked like a faint and Death stood over her with the golden net in his hands. Nothing remained on the ground where the Firebird had struggled except a few pathetic feathers.
So much for the fiery skull and the Firebird, he thought savagely. So much for my talismans! So much for the fairytale I believed about love! The fabulous Firebird led one to treasure — and yet it had come here to its own death. It was all Baba Yaga. Everything she touched became evil and grotesque. How did he know Vasilisa wasn’t tainted too? Perhaps he’d had a narrow escape!
He found the arched shape of the gate. It opened easily under his touch and he shut it quietly behind him with a ‘snick’ inaudible to those around the fire. He went to the place where he’d camped with Radulf and Kunik and hastily gathered his belongings, putting his weapons back on his belt and rolling his blanket.
He walked into the night, removing his over shirt as he strode along and unbuttoning the linen shirt Vasilisa had made. He took it off impatiently, balled it up and threw it to the side, shrugging back into his over shirt. It felt rough against his skin after the fine linen.
KUNIK
“No! Artyom!” Kunik sent an agonized cry after Artyom as he walked away from them. Once again, pain and grief rose in his heart in a shattering wave. He wanted to howl into the sky, howl and howl until his throat filled with blood and silenced him. He couldn’t bear it — that anyone should be exiled. He wouldn’t bear it! He took a step, intending to run after Artyom, to reason with him, hit him, drag him back to the others if necessary. He mustn’t be allowed to go into the night alone!
A strong hand closed about his upper arm and he turned, snarling.
“No,” said Radulf firmly, looking into his eyes. “Let him go.”
“No!” Kunik struck out clumsily, unable to see clearly through his rage and despair. His fist bounced off Radulf’s shoulder. The grip around his arm tightened and he threw another punch, better aimed this time, feeling the satisfying hard bone of Radulf’s jaw, the moist meaty give of his flesh. Radulf’s head snapped back but his grip, if anything, intensified.
“Let me go! I’ll kill you!” Kunik had never before said such words, but now something savage awakened in him, some red, primal, raging thing. He felt himself grow erect. He hungered for blood and bone, for crushed flesh, for warm copper spray on his face as he tore at a throat. He lusted to bite, to claw, to strike, to dominate and thrust and come! He threw back his head and bellowed, fully releasing his rage. He thrashed and heaved, spit and snarled and bit, kicked and clawed, seeing nothing, thinking nothing, only swept into a timeless red lustful river of passion.
Then, suddenly, he could hear again, only then realizing he had not been hearing for some uncounted period of time. He heard Radulf’s voice, right next to his ear, muttering over and over, “It’s all right. I’ve got you. It’s all right. I’ve got you.” Radulf was gasping. It sounded strange to Kunik. They laid on the ground but Radulf sounded as though he’d just run five miles. Radulf twisted Kunik’s left arm behind his back. It hurt. The cloth binding his cut was gone and he thought he was bleeding again.
Kunik lay on his side and Radulf lay behind him. Kunik could feel the whole length of Radulf’s body pressed against his own. They both trembled, shaking as though with cold, but he wasn’t cold. He was greasy with sweat. He could smell himself. Someone was close by his head. Kunik’s right hand was over his head, wrist clamped in a bruising grip. Suddenly, the grip released and the kneeling presence withdrew. Kunik could see split hooves a few inches from his face, standing in the grass. Above the hooves rose the hair-covered legs of an animal.
“Kunik?” Dar knelt at his feet, holding his legs down.
“Yes.” Kunik meant to speak but could only whisper. His throat ached, as though he’d been screaming. He desperately wanted a cool drink.
The grip on his left arm relaxed and Radulf rolled away. Night air felt good against Kunik’s overheated back, but he also felt strangely bereft at the withdrawal. Gratefully, he brought his left arm forward and sat up. Pain streaked fiercely through his body and then throbbed sullenly. He groaned before he could stop himself.
“What happened?”
But he remembered. Artyom. Artyom had walked away. He’d left the fire, the offer of brotherhood, the chance to be loved, and gone out into the night alone. Only it hadn’t felt like it was happening to Artyom. It was happening to Kunik again, and not just him, either, but to his parents. Outcasts. Exiles. Alone. Shunned because of what they were.
He sat there in the dirt, utterly exhausted, broken, silent tears falling down his cheeks.
Dar gathered up his cloak in one hand and sat down neatly, cross legged, in front of him.
“It’s not the same,” he said conversationally, as though Kunik had spoken his thoughts aloud. “Your parents couldn’t be true to both themselves and their tribes, and so they chose to live what they were, knowing the cost. You chose what to do with your exile, to endure and then to heal. You’re still making that choice. You’re here because of it. Artyom also made a choice tonight. Like you and Radulf, he’s traveled towards this initiation for a long time. He’s had guides and opportunities and freedom to choose. He’s had hidden things revealed on this night and before this night. It’s not our business to disallow choice. We who initiate hold space and extend invitation, but each initiate retains the power to consent or refuse. You only choose for yourself. You can’t choose for him.”
Kunik’s upper lip swelled. He tasted blood in the back of his throat.
“Was he right?” he croaked. “Artyom — was he right about drinking from the goblet?”
Dar threw back his head and laughed, and Kunik was glad to see his face remained smooth and unhurt. His teeth gleamed briefly in the firelight. He rose to his feet in a graceful movement, like a cat, Kunik thought hazily. The cloak fell in folds around him, spattered with points of light. He reached down a strong lean hand and Kunik took it with his own broad fleshy one. The peddler heaved him to his feet.
A wooden bucket of water sat against the fence. Kunik extended his arm in wordless invitation to Radulf, who followed after them. Kunik stood wearily, alternately wiping blood from his nose and from a cut on his forehead while Radulf knelt and sloshed his face and head with handfuls of water, rinsed his mouth, spat. He stood, turned aside, and blew his nose. Kunik smiled to himself at the homely sound, remembering Radulf had been a prince, once upon a time.
He followed Radulf’s example, drank thirstily and felt better. Dar handed him a handful of grass, green and rich smelling, and Kunik wiped his face.
Near the fire, the piper stood waiting, goblet in hand. The four them stood together silently.
“Will you drink?” Dar asked.
The piper handed the cup to Kunik, who put the cool rim to his swollen lip and carefully took a sip. The taste was unexpected. Mint, he thought, and something sweet like honey. It had a sharp but not unpleasant aftertaste.
“Will you drink?” he asked Dar, and passed the cup to him. The peddler drank.
“Will you drink?” Dar asked Radulf, who took the cup and drank.
“Will you drink?” Radulf asked the piper, who inclined his head wordlessly, took the cup, and drank.
“If we clean our cuts with a drop of that,” Dar said, gesturing to the goblet, “they’ll stop bleeding and heal without trouble.”
Kunik made a pad of a fresh strip of cloth, dipped it in the goblet and gently cleaned Radulf’s palm and then a cut on his cheekbone.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“No matter,” said Radulf gruffly. “You were upset.”
Kunik bound Radulf’s hand and then, impulsively, kissed the other man. A feeling of tenderness towards the others pierced him. They’d held him, restrained him and cared for him in his madness. He’d hurt them, yet they weren’t angry and they didn’t turn away from him now.
“You’ve a fine rage,” said Radulf, “son of Ice Bear.” He leaned forward and returned Kunik’s kiss.
Kunik cleaned and dressed the piper’s hand and then Dar’s, finishing with his own. Radulf tied the bandage for him.
RADULF
Slow warmth bubbled in Radulf’s blood. A thousand insects buzzed between his flesh and his skin, trapped. He sweated. The hair on his body slowly stood up, each tiny follicle a separate sensation. Hastily, he unbuttoned and threw off his tunic. The sensation of cloth felt unpleasant against his singing skin. Was it warmth in his blood, or coolness? He couldn’t tell. It was honey. It was the smell of crushed spring grass. It was cool like water, like the sea at night after a hot day. It was hot and smoky like lanterns lit for a shipboard dance. It was wet marble with a film of salt. It was long, silky hair. It was a flash of white thigh in green water. He felt himself fill and rise until he was erect.
The piper played again, and this time the melody called to the very roots of him. His blood coursed, passionate and flooding. The air on his lips was a pleasure and a torment. His nipples ached. His testicles felt heavy and languorous on his thighs, pulsing. Saliva flooded his mouth and he could feel sweat, slippery and musky, between his legs. Moisture oozed out of the tip of his penis. Never, even as a boy, had he felt so aroused, so alive, so wildly excited, so blindly lustful.
The piper danced, hopping back and forth from one leg to another as he played, elbows outthrust. He swayed with the music, his engorged penis bobbing. He’d taken off the cloak and was clad only in skin, horns and pelt. He was elemental, primordial. He was beautiful and Radulf thought of green and gold, the heavy heads of wheat under a hot sun, the taste of warm purple grapes, dusty and bursting. For the first time, he understood the world as male, a thing of hard strength wrapped in green and gold velvet, a thing of horn and hoof, heat and harvest. He looked down in wonder at his own hands, strong, callused, with a scar across the base of his right thumb where he’d gashed it as a boy. Capable hands. No longer the pampered white hands of a prince but the hands of a man in the world. Beautiful hands, with their oval nails and jointed knuckles. Now he’d bear a new scar across his left palm, and he was glad. He clenched his hand around the wound, feeling the cloth tighten.
Wild power filled him.
Death came from under the shadows beneath Baba Yaga’s house. He danced the same wild dance as the piper, hopping from bony foot to bony foot, lifting his round knuckled knees high, dancing with sharp elbows outthrust and waggling his head with its insane, endless grin. Radulf wanted to laugh and howl at the same time at the sight of him. Death turned and danced in between the chicken legs. He jumped between the toes planted in the dirt. The legs stiffened but didn’t move. Death reached up a long thin stick-like arm and tickled as high as he could reach on the inside of one of the scaly yellow legs. The leg twitched. Now Radulf did laugh. Death danced round and round one leg and then another, reaching up to run his fingers lightly, teasingly, up and down the chicken leg. The feet remained firmly planted but the legs swayed away, flinching from Death’s touch.
Death left his play with the legs and danced to the piper, and the two faced one another, dancing the same exuberant dance. It was a macabre sight. Again, Radulf was struck by a sense of wild male power. Flesh and hair and bobbing erection of the piper and stark white, dry bones of Death merged and mingled in their dance until it looked as though one being had husked himself into two pieces. As though Death and Life were one separated into two.
But Death and Life are one, thought Radulf to himself with sudden clarity. They’re different sides of the same thing. They can’t be separated. For a moment, he discovered…something important. He discerned a pattern to life beyond guilt and shame and fear, a pattern so large it was invisible. But as he turned toward understanding it eluded him, disappeared from the corner of his mind where he’d glimpsed it.
Radulf watched the dancers. His skin twitched over his bones. Dar carefully and deliberately took off his clothes. One by one, he peeled them away, as unconcerned as though alone, folding them neatly in a pile against the bone fence. He slung the drums against his hip. His body was lean and finely made, not as broad through the shoulder as the piper. Muscles bunched in the piper’s strong haunches as he danced, but Dar’s strength was like a flexible young sapling. Dark hair grew at his groin. He joined the other two dancers, hands picking up a rhythm to support the piper’s melody.
Radulf, watching, felt a longing to join them. They were beautiful. They were strong. They were real. He wanted to be like them, to be of them. He wanted to smell them, to touch them, to feel their breath, to dance with them. He knew they’d make a place for him if he chose to join in. Yet he stood, watching.
“Who do you fear the most?”
Kunik stood beside him. Kunik, with sweat shining on his face and an ecstatic kind of smile on his mouth. He’d loosened his clothing and Radulf could see his strong, round body underneath it. His bare feet looked square and broad on the ground.
“Fear?” asked Radulf, confused. He didn’t fear them. He wanted to be like them with his whole heart.
Kunik’s smile widened. “Yes, brother. Are you more afraid of life — or of death?”
“Oh!” And Radulf thought, oh, yes, I’m afraid. I’m so afraid! He felt the fear then, coiled in his belly, in his chest, behind his eyes. Afraid to live, to be a blind fool, to fail to love, to understand, to see… Oh, yes, I’m afraid! I’m a stupid man, a weak man. I’m not a man like these. I don’t belong with men like these! And that thought was bitter, like salt in his throat and eyes and belly. Tears fell down his cheeks.
Kunik wasn’t looking at him. He was watching the dancers with a kind of hilarious, fierce hunger. “Me, I think I fear Death the most. It’s the end to everything. Love is death. Healing is death. Strength is death. Courage is death. What’s the point of anything, then? Why is life so futilely persistent?
“We can’t live if we don’t die,” said Radulf.
Kunik looked at him, pushing hair out of his eyes. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Radulf. “I can’t explain it but it feels true in my heart.”
“It sounds like you mean death makes life possible.”
“They make each other possible, don’t they?”
They stood and watched the dancers.
“I want to be like that…” said Kunik in a low, choked voice. Radulf saw he wept again.
“You are like that,” Radulf said firmly. “You are like that. Powerful, and beautiful and alive.” He remembered the feel of Kunik’s blind ferocity, his rage, his pain, the strength in his square body. “I think…I think there’s some of your father in you.”
“Baba Yaga called you Wolf,” said Kunik suddenly, still gazing at the dancers.
“Radulf means wolf.”
“Will you dance with me, then, Wolf? Will you chance life — and death?”
For answer, Radulf loosened his clothing, letting it fall around his feet. He and Kunik joined the three dancers at the edge of the fire, naked as they were naked, and they danced, piper and drummer, goat-foot, Ice Bear and Wolf, guides, outcast and exile, and Death danced around them.
KUNIK
Kunik danced. Drumbeat possessed his strong legs and he danced. He didn’t think. He was pure sensation. His skin felt exquisitely receptive, his hearing so acute he heard the thump of his heart and the fainter, threadier pulsing of blood through vessels. Every hair on his body stirred and lived. His testicles burned. He watched Rumpelstiltskin stride towards their fire. In his hand, he held two long sticks of wood. The dwarve caught Kunik’s eye and threw one of them in a graceful arc, the stick revolving end over end. Kunik reached up and caught it with ease. Then the other flew into the air. They weren’t sticks but bones, long slender bones. Kunik held them uncertainly for a moment and then looked at Death. Were the bones his? Death grinned emptily.
With a whoop, Kunik sprang, twisting his body, and landed behind Death. He took a bone in each hand and began to beat on Death’s scapula. Bone on bone made a sharp tapping sound. Easily, he picked up Dar’s more resonant beat, and then he flowed away from it into a sharper, crisper counterpoint, and the piper’s melody wove in and out of both. He tried tapping on the spine, up and down, up and down, from skull base to sacrum and back again. Death arched his back like a cat, jigging in place, presenting one vertebra at a time to Kunik’s drumsticks. He tip-tapped against one curved ischium and then the other. Death rolled his hips in a bizarre imitation of a belly dancer. He leaned backward, jutting out pelvis and widening ribs, and Kunik, now in front of him, tried the rib bones, getting a subtly different sound with each. Kunik bent and tapped away at a long femur. He squatted in front of Death and Death squatted too, so they balanced on their hunkers a few inches apart. Radulf snorted with laughter at the sight of them. Kunik drummed on Death’s knees, his face stretched in an insane grin, hands and drumsticks blurred and flying. Tap-TAP! Tappity-tap-tap! Tapa-tapa-tappity! He reached up suddenly with one stick and tapped it on Death’s curved skull. Death jumped in surprise and Kunik fell back, laughing. They all laughed now, hilarious, breathless. The piper removed the flute from his lips and bellowed with laughter, and Kunik realized it was the first sound he’d heard him make that wasn’t the flute. Dar wept with laughter. Death slapped his own knee with his bony hand and grinned. Rumpelstiltskin chuckled with a sound like gravel in a bucket. He was the only one clothed.
Kunik’s mouth felt dry. He licked his lips with a thick tongue. He was naked. Odd to be naked in the company of other men. He looked at what he held. Bones or drumsticks? Bones or drumsticks? He felt confused. The laughter died away and the music stopped. In the silence, he could hear the fire burning. He felt let down, deflated. What was he doing? What did it mean? His injured hand throbbed.
Death stood across from him, perfectly relaxed, motionless, expressionless, unless you counted the death’s head grin. He’d danced with Death! He’d played on Death as though he was a drum! Was it a mad dream?
He looked at Rumpelstiltskin, who appeared entirely normal. A sudden harsh shriek tore at the night, and in the appalled silence that followed came a thud. Baba Yaga’s huge iron cauldron appeared between the fire and the bone fence. The pale glimmer of a skull on a fence post near the cauldron burst into fiery illumination.
Radulf walked to where he’d let his clothing drop and began to get dressed. Kunik did likewise.
Rumpelstiltskin moved toward the cauldron. The dwarve’s seamed face was set in an expression of unwavering purpose, the laughter that had shone out of his eyes quite gone. Kunik felt a sudden impulse to call out and warn him from getting too near the cauldron. He didn’t like it. There was something fearful about its squat black shape, something menacing.
The dwarve stood next to the cauldron. He raised his head, took a deep breath, and held his arms up as though in prayer. Kunik heard the murmur of his voice, but not his words. Rumpelstiltskin rested his hands lightly on the oily black rim and looked into the cauldron’s depths.
“He sees a hidden thing.” Dar spoke in a low voice to Kunik and Radulf. The piper and Death were gone.
“A hidden thing?” asked Kunik, his voice equally quiet.
“Yes. If you choose, you may look into the cauldron and it will show you a hidden thing. You mustn’t touch the contents of the cauldron, but you may look. You’re not required to do it. The choice is yours.”
Radulf asked, “Do you advise us to do it?”
“I can’t advise you. I only say if you consent to look, you’ll see something that’s been hidden from you.”
Rumpelstiltskin was absorbed and still. Firelight shone on neatly braided hair and beard. It picked out the rough planes of his face, and Kunik noted the shine of tears on his cheek.
It seemed a long time the dwarve looked into the cauldron. He stood absolutely still, but tears ran down into his beard. The fiery skull burned above his head, illuminating whatever the cauldron held.
At last Rumpelstiltskin moved, fingers releasing the black iron rim. His wiped his cheeks on his sleeve, turning away. He took an audible breath, and made his way around the edge of the fire to where Kunik, Radulf and Dar stood.
“So?” asked Dar quietly when Rumpelstiltskin stood with them. The dwarve’s face was peaceful.
“So, I know what to do now.”
“Are you all right?” asked Kunik.
“I’m well,” replied the dwarve. “But thank you for your compassion. I can do what must be done and I’m glad to do it. Sometimes it’s hard to know what it is, that’s all.”
He inclined his head, turned and walked away, disappearing into the shadows under Baba Yaga’s house.
“I’ll look in the cauldron,” said Radulf quietly to Dar.
Dar reached forward without speaking and laid a hand on his forearm, as though in benediction.
RADULF
When Radulf looked into the cauldron he saw black liquid with an oily sheen. The fiery skull revealed swirling patterns on the surface. Unexpectedly, he smelled blood, and nausea twisted in his stomach. He swallowed, his mouth flooding with saliva. The swirling pattern grew into shapes and the fiery skull burned brighter and brighter until it was reflected on the surface like a candle…
There were many candles lit, and lamps as well. He was looking into the ballroom at home. There was a dance. He remembered the evening well. There he was, in his formal clothing, revolving to the music with his wife. Not yet his wife, though, for this evening had occurred before his marriage. He saw a long table set out with food and wine, and everyone in elegant dress. He saw his parents, waltzing decorously. Face after face passed by, each belonging to someone of power and wealth. He watched himself, smiling, chatting, dancing gracefully, offering his wife-to-be a glass of wine. His face looked untroubled and young.
But where was Marella? He couldn’t see her, and he remembered she’d been there as well. She’d been at all the dances, had been much admired for her grace and beauty. She’d so loved music. For the most part, he could only see himself. Other faces came and went, but his remained central.
Then the view changed and he moved. No, he wasn’t moving. The viewer moved. The owner of the eyes watching him moved. He felt a sudden stabbing pain, lancing up from his foot and burning all the way to his hip. He groaned inwardly, holding tightly to the sound so it wouldn’t escape. He felt his face — no, the viewer’s face — set in a rigid mask of a smile. Another step and again the pain, this time in the other foot and leg. He looked down and saw his feet in delicate dancing slippers under a skirt of pale blue green and ivory lace. He remembered that dress. All Marella’s dresses had been in the colors of the sea.
Images came and went swiftly before his (her) eyes. He (she) danced, swaying and whirling, and the pain felt like ground glass in every joint of his (her) legs and feet.
The pain was so large it muted and muffled his other senses. It seemed impossible to function over it. Through it? With it? He couldn’t think clearly, but he knew he mustn’t betray the pain. No one must know. Nothing was more important than that.
As familiar faces passed before his (her) eyes, Radulf noticed expressions he’d never seen on them before. Here he noted a hint of slyness in twist of lip and glance of eye. On another face, an instant of unguarded despair and unutterable fatigue before the pleasant mask was resumed. On a woman’s face, he caught a malicious raised eyebrow and watched a word whispered behind a fan. A young male friend of his partnered him (her) in a dance and he (she) saw hot lust in his eyes before he (she) dropped his (her) own and kept them on the youth’s chin. His lips were red and full and he wet them repeatedly with his tongue.
Faces passed in front of him, but the pain remained constant, a fierce clamor, and all other faces remained peripheral to his own young, handsome face. He saw the thick dark hair of his youth, a little long, so he swept it out of his eyes from time to time. He saw his deep-set hazel eyes, the smooth clean planes of his face. He watched himself, gallant, pleasant, witty and poised, kissing a white ringed hand, listening to an older man with alert interest, dancing gracefully with a dowager, offering a glass of wine and a tempting plate to an overweight gentleman with a red face sitting in a chair. Now and then he threw a tender look towards the young woman who would become his wife, and she returned it eagerly, adoration and uncertainty in her eyes. His parents watched him unobtrusively, his mother with magnificent calm authority, indulgent, sure of his good behavior, and his father with the wrinkle of skin between his eyebrows that made him look slightly anxious.
He (she) turned in obedience to the dance, revolving gracefully on knives of pain, and as his face came back into view he (she) looked up and met his own eyes. For a moment his face was unguarded, naked, and he (she) saw something caged, something chained in the dark, something wild that lay dying, and he thought, I remember this! I remember! I looked at her and thought, I’d rather be riding under the sky, I’d rather be standing at the rail of a ship listening to the hiss of waves, I’d rather be walking with you through the gardens. Walking! He groaned aloud. She had walked with him and endured this hidden pain!
His mother laid a fat beringed hand on his arm, claiming his attention, and he turned at once, deferential, courteous, affectionate, and bent to hear what she said in his ear.
The contents of the cauldron stirred and shifted, darkened, and he saw a dark dog-like shape. The dim figure grew gradually clearer. The creature was caught in something, held fast by a leg. It bared its teeth and pinned its ears. He saw blazing amber eyes. It wasn’t a dog but a wolf, a dark grey wolf, and it was just on dusk or dawn, the greasy threshold where surroundings are only dimly seen.
Its front paw was in a trap, an ugly black iron thing with a fringe of sharp triangular teeth snapped shut on the wolf’s paw, crushing bones. The ground around the trap was furrowed and clumps of vegetation were uprooted. The wolf panted heavily, its long red tongue lolling, and then bent its muzzle to its injured leg and began to gnaw at it.
Radulf watched, sickened and horrified but unable to look away. Hard bones stood out under the wolf’s shoulders, every line of its body rigid. Radulf shuddered, imagining the creature’s agony, and realized in that instant he no longer felt Marella’s pain. His body belonged to him again, but he couldn’t enjoy it. He couldn’t be glad or feel relieved, imagining the pain of the trap, the shattered foot and the desperate severing of the limb. He felt faint and his gorge rose. His hands clenched on the iron rim. He tasted blood and felt shreds of his own tissue between his teeth. He wanted to scream, to close his eyes, to howl, and could do none of them. He could only watch as the wolf inexorably but delicately chewed through its own flesh and bone.
Then it was done. The leg stuck up out of the trap, paw crushed in its jaws. Shards of white bone and bloody tissue littered the ground. The wolf, panting heavily, lips smeared with blood, whined deep in its throat and backed awkwardly away. It bent and sniffed at the ragged stump of its leg, licking. Radulf, watching, felt the creature’s relief under a numbing blanket of shock. The wolf raised his head and sniffed at the air and then moved off, hobbling on three legs. It was gone. Only an oily swirl of liquid remained in the bottom of the cauldron.
Radulf straightened his head stiffly. His neck and shoulders felt like stone. He turned his head and spat on the ground, trying to rid himself of the taste of blood. The act of spitting made him gag and he went down on one knee, fighting the urge to vomit. As he knelt there he began to tremble and his head swam.
A hand came down on his shoulder.
“What can I do?”
“Water.”
Kunik helped him to his feet. Holding Radulf’s arm, he led him to the water bucket next to the fence. Radulf splashed water over his face, running wet fingers through his hair. He rinsed his mouth and spat again, this time without nausea rising. He drank cautiously. Water slid down his throat and into his stomach, clean and cold and sweet. He sat down on the ground, the strength draining out of his legs.
“Oh, Gods.” He put his face in his hands and gave himself up to a torrent of grief for Marella, and for himself.
Kunik sat beside him, his leg pressed against Radulf’s, and let him weep.
It took some time, but the torrent gradually ebbed to a trickle and the trickle gave way to sobbing breaths. Silently, Kunik passed Radulf a strip of clean cloth left over from bandaging their cuts. Radulf once again knelt before the bucket and rinsed his face and blew his nose. He stood shakily, reaching down to give Kunik a hand up. He turned and embraced the shorter, younger man.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Are you glad you looked?” asked Kunik.
“I am,” replied Radulf at once.
“Well then,” said Kunik, “it’s my turn.”
KUNIK
Kunik rested his hands lightly on the rim of Baba Yaga’s cauldron. It felt greasy. He expected to see some kind of dark liquid inside it, but the contents glimmered palely. There was a subtle disturbance and then a picture cleared and became more defined. Bones. He saw the reflection of the bone fence.
But no, that wasn’t right because he couldn’t see the reflection of the fiery skull. He frowned, trying to look more deeply. He certainly saw bones, bones set in a pattern with a central pale shape and spokes of long bones radiating out from it, those radiating shapes connecting one to another in a web of bones. A web of bones, he thought in some wonder. As his eyes followed the complexity of connection, he began to see shapes in the bones. He itched to reach down and pick them up, turn them over in his hands, search out the hidden shapes, but he remembered Dar warning them not to touch the contents of the cauldron and refrained.
He clenched his jaw in frustration and at the same moment hands — his own familiar hands — reached into the picture and picked up one of the bones. The (his) hands turned the bone this way and that. He saw the missing fingernail on his middle finger where once his knife had slipped and sheared off the dorsal tip, nail bed and all, yet he also felt the rim of the cauldron under his hands and knew he hadn’t moved them. As the (his) hands turned the bone and felt it, the shape spoke to him and he thought, ‘ice bear,’ at the same moment it turned into a beautifully carved ice bear. Its fur rippled with life, the shoulders powerful, one broad heavy foot with its curved claws planted forward and the head turned, as though listening. It was the finest work he’d ever seen, far finer than anything he was capable of. The (his) hands set the bear back in its place and picked up another bone.
As he watched, bone after bone was picked up, felt and turned, and transformed, each carving an exquisite piece of art. There were men and women and children, seals and walruses, snow geese, foxes, arctic hares, whales, ravens, salmon, ice houses, bows and arrows, cooking pots and bears. One bone became a flute, pierced, carved and set with bands of bright metal and gems. The web grew larger and larger, more and more intricate, until at last every bone was carved.
The (his) hands disappeared. Kunik looked at what he’d done. It was good. It was beautiful, nearly magical. He felt a shy sense of pride.
Then the (his) hands returned back to the first carving, the ice bear, and Kunik watched, disbelieving, as those skilled, tender, seeing hands used a sharp knife to cut away one of the ice bear’s soft, round ears.
The chip of bone fell into the web. Kunik let out a cry of dismay at the ruined figure. The (his) hands set the bear down and picked up the next carving. One by one, the (his) hands deliberately mutilated each carving, so what had been a marvelous web of intricate beauty became an ugly mess of broken pieces of bone and ruined figures, malicious and mocking. The bone flute was splintered lengthwise, metal bands broken.
Kunik wept as he watched. He’d made a perfect web of connection and wonder, life and place, and then he’d destroyed it. Was he maker or destroyer? Had his people been right to reject him? Had they seen him truly or utterly failed to see him?
The (his) hands withdrew from the picture. The broken bone carvings lay scattered. As he stood looking with sick despair, he noticed movement. The ice bear with the missing ear stirred. He lumbered to his feet. He raised his long muzzle into the air and sniffed. The figure of a woman stirred. Her left arm had been cut off. Awkwardly, she clambered to her feet. In her right hand, she held a spear. The ice bear and the woman approached each other, staggering as though exhausted or in pain. Together they picked their way through the field of broken carvings. The ice bear pawed at a jumble of pieces and the figure of a child came into view. The woman knelt, as though talking to it, and the child struggled to his feet. It was a round figure in a parka with a fur fringed hood, but part of the hood and the head it covered had been gouged away. The ice bear and woman stood back to back with the child crouched between them on all fours like a puppy.
Now Kunik noted slight movements throughout the field of rubble. The ruined carvings stirred, righting themselves, and moved toward the center, where the three figures waited. They limped and crawled and wriggled and squirmed, according to their shape and damage. There was something coldly inexorable about them. When they came in reach of the bear, he swiped at them with his powerful front legs, sending them flying. Many of them broke into further pieces. The woman used her spear bravely, piercing one and now another, beating them off, inflicting all the damage she could. None of the menacing animals or people came anywhere close to the child.
The battle unfolded in complete silence. Kunik knew that silence — the cold, dark silence of the long arctic night, the silence of snow drifted like fallen stars and the night sky rippling with color. The bones shone with a pallid light and everything looked dim white and stark black.
Kunik’s teeth drew back from his lips, his slanted eyes slitted with rage, and he longed to hear the sound of his father’s blows, hear the death cries his mother forced from the attackers. He wanted to see the blooming blood, smell the stink of spilled guts and emptied bowels. He wanted to bite, to strike, to crush, to kill. He wanted to wade in the blood of those who threatened him and his parents. He was not rejected and shunned. They were not worthy. Their hearts were small and weak and rigid. He rejected them.
Then it was over. The three figures stood absolutely still at the center of what had once been an intricate mingling of connection. His mother’s spear rested on the ground.
The figure of the child moved. He crawled out from between the ice bear and woman. He stood looking over the field of broken bone. He reached in his pocket and withdrew a tiny knife. The child stood in front of the motionless figure of the woman, reached forward with the knife and held the point against her belly. Kunik cried out. The child stood quite still, deadly knife poised, hood hiding his face. After a few moments, the child’s hand dropped away. He turned and looked out over the battlefield. He took a few steps and then bent and picked up a chip of bone. The child stood, turning the bone chip around and around in its hands, head cocked as though listening, and Kunik saw himself through the eyes of others, the intent posture, the delicate listening hands.
The child, still holding bone chip in one hand and knife in the other, moved in front of the ice bear. He looked up into the bear’s face. Once again, he reached forward with the wicked blade, but then the small hand slowed, wavered, and dropped. The child looked from the ice bear to the bone chip it held.
The child turned and looked up into Kunik’s face. He could see delicately carved eyes above round, firm cheeks. He could see the shape of nose and plump lips. The small face gleamed, catching the light, and Kunik realized the carved child wept, even as he himself wept. The child lowered its head and trudged through the field of bony debris, looking exhausted and disconsolate.
The little figure disappeared into the blackness at the edge of Kunik’s field of view, but Kunik knew where he was. He was alone in the dark, outcast, exiled, without family or kin. He was a loose, lost chip of bone, anonymous, splintered, hacked away from his place, without meaning.
Kunik closed his eyes in anguish. When he opened them again the cauldron was lightless and empty.
***
“I ran away,” said Radulf. He looked down at the trampled grass in front of his crossed legs. He took a stem between his index and middle finger. “I couldn’t stay. I had no words for it, no one who I could speak the truth to. One day it became too much and I left. For years, I’ve despised myself for it. What I saw in the cauldron, the wolf chewing off its own leg, the horror of it, the suffering …” He choked.
“Maybe you were just saving your own life, doing what you had to do,” said Kunik. “Maybe some unconscious part of you was as desperate as the wolf.”
“But it wasn’t that bad! It was a good life, an enviable life, really!”
“Do you want that life back?” Dar asked quietly.
Radulf hesitated.
“No,” he said dully. “No.”
In the silence, the fire bubbled and cracked.
“I never asked myself before if I wanted to go back,” said Kunik slowly. “I only told myself I was exiled; I was unwanted and couldn’t go back.”
“Do you want to go back?” Radulf asked him.
“No,” said Kunik, feeling surprised. “No, I don’t. My life lies ahead. It’s just that…” he trailed away, groping for the right words. “I want to know my family loves me, and recognizes me as one of them, even though my place isn’t with them. Is that wrong? To want to be a part of them but not want to be with them?”
“If so, then I’m wrong, too,” said Radulf.
“We all need love and connection,” said Dar.
“I had love and connection,” said Radulf, “and I walked away from it.”
“Why?” asked Dar.
“I was alone.”
“How do you know you had love and connection, then?” Dar’s voice held a faint hint of amusement. “If you had it, why did you leave?”
“I felt unseen,” said Radulf. “Nobody knew who I was. I didn’t know who I was. It was like playing a part and having a script to read.”
“Who directed the play?” inquired Dar, again with the tinge of amusement.
“My parents,” said Radulf unhesitatingly. “My parents,” he said more slowly, thinking aloud. “I knew exactly what they expected… and I did it.”
“How compliant!” said Dar.
“But no, I wasn’t compliant,” said Radulf. “That’s the problem. I wasn’t compliant at all!” He thought of watching himself in the cauldron. “I was good, but I wasn’t compliant. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t real!”
“Did you feel loved?” asked Kunik.
“I suppose my parents loved — love — me, but they didn’t care about who I was or what I wanted. Marella loved me and perhaps understood me best of all, but I loved her as a sister, a pretty little companion.”
“I wonder,” said Kunik, “if that’s how my parents felt, too — that they weren’t real. Perhaps they felt different or wanted something different from those around them. But maybe they felt seen by each other. Seen and known and real, and that’s why they made a life together, though it meant exile.”
As he finished speaking, Artemis appeared and motioned to him. “Come with me.”
Kunik followed her to a stretch of fence from which both the women’s and men’s fire could be seen. A single skull perched on top of a fence post.
“Light!” Artemis commanded, and the skull lit from within, casting flickering, warm light on the pale bones of the fence. Rose Red stood, waiting. The sight of her face gave Kunik a sudden feeling of tenderness. It was a face that had felt a storm of emotion. It was the emerging face of a woman, beautiful in wisdom and peace.
Impulsively, Kunik embraced her. They’d hardly spoken to one another before, but she was altogether precious to him in that moment, vulnerable and strong, and they came together in the mystery of the initiation. She returned his embrace and it was like holding some wild, lithe animal, her curly black hair like fur against his cheek.
Artemis sat and the other two joined her, facing one another.
“It’s time for you two to recognize each other,” said Artemis. “You’ve shared a wound. The places where you tore yourselves from your tribes and families are exposed. With the help of one another you can begin healing. Do you consent to do this?
Rose Red reached out for Kunik’s hand. Their hands met and linked, first his right to her left and then his left to her right. It was answer enough.
“Rose Red, look into his face and imagine the face of your mother.”
Rose Red’s hands tensed and tightened in Kunik’s and he rubbed his thumbs gently over their backs. Her hands relaxed slightly.
“It’ll be all right,” he said quietly, though he didn’t know what Artemis’s intention was. “I’ve got you.”
Rose Red looked searchingly into Kunik’s face.
“Tell her, Rose Red,” said Artemis, “’I’ve abandoned you.’” Look into her eyes and speak your truth.”
Kunik felt shocked. The unexpected cruelty of it! The unfairness! His grip didn’t change on Rose Red’s hands, for he was determined to support and protect her, but he felt anger against Artemis. He hadn’t expected such tactics from her.
Rose Red’s expression changed as she looked into his face. It flowed like wax melting and then hardening again. For a moment, she looked like a child, her features soft and immature, and then a hardness made of pain and strength transformed the child into a woman. Yet her eyes remained steady and peaceful. They looked directly into his, though he thought she wasn’t seeing him at all.
“I’ve abandoned you,” said Rose Red clearly, enunciating each word deliberately. “I’ve left you.” Her gaze never wavered from Kunik’s, but tears began to course down her cheeks.
Her hands relaxed trustfully in his own, and Kunik felt a sense of release, of letting go. He felt her relief. He suddenly understood Artemis wasn’t being cruel. She was allowing Rose Red to speak the truth at last.
“Kunik,” Artemis said in the same quiet voice. “You’re her mother. Her mother speaks through you what she can’t say by herself. ‘I completely understand. I love you. I only want you to be happy.’”
Kunik opened himself to this unknown woman, the mother of this beautiful, vibrant, shy, wild young creature with her mop of curly black hair. He brought forward his tenderness and his love, his artist’s sensitivity and intuition, everything his own hungry heart longed for from his own mother.
“Rose Red, I understand completely. It’s not your fault. I love you, my daughter. All I want is for you to be happy.”
Rose Red’s face contorted. Her nose ran. She didn’t sob. She held tight to Kunik’s hands, as though for comfort, and made no effort to hide her emotion.
Kunik said it again.
Rose Red cried.
Kunik said it again.
The skull above them flickered like a fire on the hearth or a good lantern. The air felt soft and cool, smelling of wood smoke and crushed grass. Kunik felt at peace. He didn’t want to be anywhere else or doing anything else. He didn’t think about past or future. He was here, in this night. He belonged here. He had a place within the circle.
“Kunik.”
Rose Red stopped crying. She released his left hand and wiped at her cheeks and nose, using the hem of her tunic. She took Kunik’s again, and now he became conscious of her strength and tenderness directed at him.
Artemis said, “Look into her face and imagine your parents.”
Kunik didn’t remember the faces of his parents, but he reached easily for the memory of the carvings he’d seen in the cauldron. He looked into Rose Red’s wide, steady eyes and he saw an ice bear, the long muzzle, the small black eyes, the thick half rounds of furred ears. He thought of the round face of the warrior woman, imagined hair like a black silky wing against her neck, her dark, slightly slanted eyes and olive skin. He brought each face to life in his imagination and he laid them gently over the face in front of him, first one and then the other.
“Speak for them, Kunik. Speak for yourself.”
“Mother.” The word felt strange in his mouth. He’d never used it before to address another human being. “Mother. You abandoned and betrayed your people.”
He stopped, not wanting to diminish the truth of the words, not wanting to rush by them as though they hadn’t been said. He let them rest in the ears of the listeners. He let their meaning unfold.
“I understand, Mother. I understand. I love you. I hope you found happiness.”
He looked into the face across from his and saw his father.
“Father. You abandoned and betrayed your people.”
Again, he stopped, thinking of the solitary shaggy ice bears making their way across frozen land and sea, the males coming together in dreadful strength and violence during mating season. He thought of them swimming, powerful shoulders working. He thought of mothers and cubs moving together through the landscape, the cubs playing like puppies. He thought of his father and mother facing each other across the starry snow.
“I understand, Father. I love you. I hope you found happiness.”
Kunik turned his thoughts to his time in the village. He allowed himself to remember the hunger and loneliness in his heart. He tasted rancid meat again. He thought of the jeering faces of the young hunters, the smell of the dogs as he slept among them.
“I abandon you,” Kunik said to them all. “I leave you. “
“Kunik.” Rose Red spoke steadily, looking into his face. “Kunik, we completely understand. We love you. It wasn’t your fault. We only want you to be happy.”
Kunik heard. He thought, my parents loved me. I was born of their love. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault.
His face worked and Rose Red repeated for him, as he had repeated for her, the exquisite healing blow.
“It wasn’t your fault, Kunik.”
MIRMIR
“So much guilt and shame,” murmured the Hanged Man. “I’ve never felt like that. I wonder why?”
“You weren’t outcasst and you’re not female,” whispered the snake. “You’re not taught to feel it.”
“We weren’t ashamed, Dar and I, nor Mary and I. She won’t teach the children to be ashamed.”
“No,” assented Mirmir. “Shame doesn’t turn the ssircle.”
“The circle must turn,” said the Hanged Man dreamily. “Go on telling about Rose Red holding Kunik’s hands.”
“Rosse Red held Kunik’ss handss and thought about the terrible burden of shame and guilt. She thought about forgiveness and love and not-forgiveness and not-love. She thought about exiles and wandering in the wilderness and finding pieces of home. She thought about searching for oneself, about Me! Not Me! She thought about the electric feel of the fox’s tongue on her lips and the smell of blood.”
“The fox was called Rowan,” said the Hanged Man. “Like the tree. They were lo…”
“Not yet,” hissed the snake, mouth stretched in a smile. “That came after the initiation. You’re rushing me.”
“Oh, very well. Tell it your own way, then!” said the Hanged Man grumpily.
Mirmir’s throat quivered with mirth as he resumed.
ROSE RED
Rose Red stood with the others in a silent circle around the iron cauldron. The sky paled in the east from black to tarnished silver. A blush of lavender overtook the silver, cool and fresh. The strengthening half-light revealed the new green of the trees.
From the woods stole the sound of the flute. It was hard to say if the dawn played the music or the music played the dawn. The notes moved delicately through the mesh of trees and spring growth, shy but sweetly persistent. The melody wove in and out of the circle, binding each figure to one another. The piper outlined each corner, border and edge in his silvery music and then erased them, passing through boundaries as though they didn’t exist.
Before them lay the last step over the threshold of initiation. Baba Yaga had thrown them into her black iron crucible, stirred them brutally with a grease-coated spoon, and plucked them out. Rose Red saw in the faces around her exhaustion, ebbing despair and a kind of quiet exultation. The long night of story, revelation and catalyst ended. Dawn broke. Secrets had been told and hiding places discovered. Fears had been unmercifully exposed to the gaze of every eye. Each had seen. Each had been seen. Each had surrendered. Rose Red joined hands with Kunik on one side and Vasilisa on the other.
Dawn rose from the cool, dewy grass, rose from the dying embers. It rose with outstretched pearly arms, rose and rose up slim tree trunks, spread into branches where birds stirred and opened their throats, lifted to meet the sun’s first rays. The piping stopped abruptly, leaving an expectant silence behind.
A beam shone through the misty green trees and fell on the squat shape of the iron kettle. They heard a crack, as though a cosmic egg cracked on the star-studded edge of the sky’s bowl, and the cauldron fell into two pieces. Packets of seeds spilled out with a soft sound like falling sand. They were unstained and dry. With a graceful leap, a brown rabbit sprang out into the morning sun and sat, scratching unconcernedly at its ear
.
Baba Yaga, with a grunt and a rattling fart, stooped and scooped up a large egg lying between the cracked iron halves of the kettle. In a single motion, she rose, drew back her arm and threw the egg, and Death, standing outside the circle, put up his hand and caught it easily. Grinning, he entered the circle between Kunik and Radulf, who moved apart to admit him. Death stood, cradling the mottled ivory egg in his cupped bony hands. In the morning light, egg and bone were indistinguishable. Slowly, Death raised his hands as though in offering, turning on the spot so everyone could see the egg. The rising sun shone on his slim forearms and delicate hands, though the rest of him was still in dawn shadow.
They heard another crack, and a hole appeared in the side of the egg as something struggled inside it. The hole widened, bits of eggshell falling onto the ground between Death’s fingers. No one spoke. The morning air filled with a strengthening chorus of birdsong. Out of the hole struggled a limp, bedraggled, wet creature like a piece of chewed up golden string. The Firebird was born again.
The sound of the flute rose again, but more distant. Hesitantly, restless now, it passed once more around the circle, weaving in and out of the still figures. It brushed by Rose Red like an invisible presence, moving against breast, thigh and belly in a brief but assertive caress. She felt the breath of it at the nape of her neck and then it moved away, becoming fainter, meandering through the bright morning and slowly, slowly fading into the music of the birds.
(To read Part 7 in its entirety, go here.)