A certain compass needle swung about, a certain cloudiness started to lift. For the moment, anyway. Though needles always swing again, and storms never clear for good.
The witch continued to scowl at her map. She took it off the wall and checked the back, on which she had scribbled a recipe for wolf sausage, with the emendation: Serves one. For a month.
Elena, to them all: “How did this come about? Why do you bother with me? That monk — he doesn’t know me. He pretends I’m special. He’s a dunce.”
The Prince, clambering down the ladder, began. “Madame Sophia went to the palace, and so did the witch. I eavesdropped. After the Tsar left the throne room, Brother Uri and Baba Yaga concocted a plan to spring you from prison so you could navigate. Since I don’t want to get engaged in marriage, I signed on as crew. Anchors aweigh and all that.”
Cat continued: “When my great-aunt came back from the palace, she told me that Baba Yaga was going to make an exploratory journey to find out what’s unbalancing the seasons. She mentioned the bridge from which Baba Yaga was leaving. And I … I had amends to make. So I volunteered, too. Then when I heard Brother Uri and Baba Yaga’s plan was to rescue you, I clapped at the idea.”
Elena, to them all: “But why aren’t you off hunting for the missing Firebird egg?”
Baba Yaga folded up the map. “We have a different agenda now. But if we happen to locate the egg while we’re on our voyage of discovery, we get double bonus points. I’m guessing that the Firebird’s reluctance to be reborn is a symptom of a vaster concern. If he permanently dies, unborn again, it could mean — I suppose — a deeper death.”
“I didn’t know there were degrees of death,” said Elena.
“Your father is still alive in you, I can see that,” replied the witch. “When you die, he dies further.”
“You have no right to look at me like that.” Memories of Elena’s father — they were private. They were hers. She had put them away as deeply as she could. Now they stirred simply because Baba Yaga had mentioned him. Something about Baba Yaga raised Elena’s hackles. Elena bucked against Baba Yaga’s high self-regard.
“Take no offense, you’re just part of a cycle,” said the witch. “Lucky you. I have no father and no child, so pity me.” She looked anything but pitiable, planning her assault on the North Pole. If Saint Nicholas lives there, thought Elena, he’d better look out.
She changed the subject. She pointed to a nest hovering in midair. “Is that the Fabergé egg again?”
The witch jerked her chin at Anton. “He brought it back. As if I hadn’t seen enough of it.”
“It was the only thing I could think of,” he explained. “As a thank-you for taking me along. Besides, stealing it was fun. I might be a thief when I grow up.”
Elena turned from the young prince to Cat, and her hands went out wide. “I’ve no way to pay you. And after all I’ve done wrong.”
“Don’t get soppy. We’re all in this together,” said the witch. “The League of Freed Prisoners, as Anton calls it. Open the window, Mewster, and let’s see if we’re headed in the right direction. Whatever that is.”
“North,” Elena reminded her.
“I may be indentured, but I’m busy,” said the kitten. “What are you looking at, girl? I’m trying to take care of personal hygiene. Contrary to popular opinion, not all cats are exhibitionists. Somebody else open the window.”
Elena gripped the edge of an armchair to steady herself. She knew this was no dream, but the kitten was talking.
Anton was tired of being heartfelt. He began to play rugby with four skulls at once. His opponent was a table with four human legs, which promised a strong defense, but Anton was winning. Cat went to a window and said, “I can see the bloated matryoshka dolls bobbing on the river. They’re heading east, against the current. Like us.”
“Story of my life.” The witch flapped the folded map at a couple of moths. “Everyone always chooses the same picnic ground that I do.”
Elena continued clinging to a chair as the house rocked back and forth. Her eyes were becoming adjusted to the murk. The room wasn’t large, but it had something she might have called dimension. It revealed itself only in glimpses. Where Cat had seen a funhouse mess of a space, Elena saw shadowy walls made of immense carven faces stacked upon one another. Weathered oak, scorched oak, faces like stone, like smoke frozen in place. Their eyes stared and their mouths gaped. Alive, in some sense; watching. Ancestors, or a committee of retired angels on a holiday outing. An outing that was going awry.
It would be curious to know what Prince Anton made of the perplexing chamber. Something else, no doubt. Perhaps he saw rotogravure portraits of Lord Kitchener of Khartoum; Speke, who discovered the source of the Nile; or Wild Bill Hickok; or other saints of an adolescent boy’s iconostasis. But I have not concerned myself with that lad, and I can venture no guesses on behalf of his imagination, however pedestrian or heroic. This is not really his story.
In any case, to distract herself from a sense of dislocation, Elena said to the boy, “But, Prince Anton, you have no reason to help me.”
“Call me Anton,” said the Prince, scoring a goal with the head of Richard III. “Or Antonio, as my friends do at the boarding school in Rome.”
She tried it out. “Why, Anton?”
“It wasn’t love at first sight, I’ll tell you that.” He stuck out his tongue.
“That’s no answer.”
“Oh, well. I was fed up with being displayed like a prize fish on a platter. The Tsar is a good godfather, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t want to be engaged. I want to learn how to shoot arrows and how to sail and how to draw horses and Lancelot and stuff like that. I want to go to the Argentine and ride the pampas with my gaucho brethren. Or blow poison darts at rhinos in the Congo.”
“The Tsar will worry, you running off like this,” said Elena.
“Cat got a spree, so did you. You even got arrested. Why should I be left out? It’s true that I did feel awful after you were taken away. Oh, and, yes, I kept my promise. I sent out for word of your brother.”
Elena put her hands at the base of her neck. “Did you hear —?”
“I learned this much: an influx of soldiers, young and old, was drawn from the hinterlands of the oblast beyond Tyer. That’s where Miersk is? They were brought to Saint Petersburg to help dig emergency drainage. But whether a certain Luka Rudin was among them, I couldn’t find out in the time I had.”
Elena said, “Oh, but that’s good enough. Witch, pull the house to shore and let me out. I have to find Luka and send him home to care for our mother. That’s why I came to Saint Petersburg in the first place. Witch, witch, release me.”
Baba Yaga: “I have a name, you know. Are you bossing me around? You may have escaped from prison, but I’ve no intention of letting you go. Have you forgotten what I just told you? We’re all in this together. You’re the one with a sense of directions, after all.”
“That’s outrageous.” She sputtered. The moths fluttered. “You’re — you’re inhuman.”
“Most days I take that as a compliment.” Baba Yaga sneered at Elena. “Look. You may be as stupid as cinnamon custard, but that monk thinks you’re setting us on the right course. Now I’ll thank you to mind your mouth. We have a job to do, we four, thanks to the accident of congruity. The League of Freed Prisoners.”
“I wouldn’t join if you invited me,” said Mewster, brandishing a cunning set of kitten claws. “I’m a rogue agent. Purrrrr.”
“Need I remind you that you’re not free?” Baba Yaga asked.
Elena fell into an armchair and began to weep. When the chair put a pair of arms around her to give her a hug, she shrieked. “This house is insane, or I have gone mad. Or both.”
Cat tried to comfort her friend. “You’ll get used to Dumb Doma soon enough. Trust me.”
“Go ahead, snuggle, while the whole world is troubled,” said Baba Yaga. “The toy mother says North, so north we must go. Stop all that coz
y-cozy, it bothers me.”
“What are we looking for, up in the frozen North?” asked Anton.
“A clue as to why it is not quite so frozen?” said Baba Yaga. “I don’t know. At any rate, what other ideas do we have?”
Anton shrugged and looked as if he were trying to multiply large numbers in his head. The girls clung to each other. The cat paid attention to a certain pesky mold between his claws. Even the skulls rolled about, slack-jawed and mute.
“This consortium of great minds doesn’t inspire confidence,” said the witch. “Is it time to strike out across the countryside? We must have cleared the city limits by now.” She threw open the shutters on the north wall of her house.
The world beyond, in drifts of moonlight upon scattered clouds, was still as a transfer landscape on a porcelain platter. A design done with a single pot of grey ink, but watered into a dozen gradations. A forested ridge. Lonely farm buildings. A couple of cows in a midnight assignation, their heads close. Perhaps discussing politics, or the price of milk.
Just enough stars visible beside the moon to remind those peering from Baba Yaga’s window that all of life itself, however dangerous or wicked, is revealed under a jeweled heaven.
Not far away on the surface of the river, stray matryoshkas bobbed and spun.
“Frankly, they give me the creeps,” said the witch.
It all sounds like great fun to me. The League of Freed Prisoners, spinning upriver in Baba Yaga’s chicken-legged cottage! How I’d have joined them if I could.
But back in Saint Petersburg, the disappearance of the Tsar’s godson had been discovered and, likewise, that of the Fabergé egg. Which annoyed the Tsar mightily even if privately he’d thought the egg déclassé if not downright cheesy.
Then, agents and investigators learned of Elena’s unauthorized release from the House of Solitary Confinement.
The Deputy Sub-Lieutenant rushed to the home of Madame Orlova and, after addressing a comb to his flaxen tresses, pulled the bell rope. As there was no butler in attendance anymore, the carriage driver answered the summons. Korsikov was only too happy to spread the bad news. Aha. So Miss Ekaterina was gone, too. Madame Sophia made an entrance and wept in the Deputy Sub-Lieutenant’s arms, causing disarray and some damp to his coiffure.
The Tsar’s men added up the clues. A conspiracy of sorts, plain as a potato. They turned their attention to me. My remaining hours of liberty were numbered.
The witch stuck her craggy face out the window and barked instructions to Dumb Doma. The house paddled toward the north bank of the Neva River and waded ashore.
Elena was trying to accommodate herself to the notion of a talking cat. “I didn’t know chickens could swim,” she said politely to Mewster. “If this house can swim, maybe it can fly, too?”
Mewster looked jaded: a normal look for a cat. “Have you ever heard of a chicken who could fly?”
The witch’s izba humped itself across fields, following the valley carved out by some tributary of the Neva. The banks were lined with willow trees, tin skeletons in the moonlight, their limbs thrashing in the rising wind.
“How long is it going to take to get where we’re going?” asked Anton.
“Since we don’t exactly know where we’re going,” said the witch, “I’d say at least fifteen minutes. Maybe seven years. That’s the average term for an apprentice witch. I have parlor games to pass the time.”
“I can’t be gone for seven years,” said Elena. “My mother, my brothers!”
“It passes in a flash when you’re as old as I am,” said the witch. “A thousand years and counting. Table, show us what you got.”
The table ambled forward. Its top was covered with a cloth, which the table shook off. The wooden surface revealed landings and pathways for an intricate game designed for four players. Some of the spaces had words written on them. In the middle was a compass rose indicating Northern Exposure, Easter Island, Westward Ho, and Southern Comfort.
“Oh, goody. Let’s play Chuckleheads on Parade. I’ll deal.” Baba Yaga dove into a drawer in the table and fished out the pieces. A set of standard playing cards, an egg timer, and a pair of dice. Four game markers, with faces carved on them: a red Queen, a black goose, a yellow rat, and a blue one that may have been meant as a Commissar of Rents.
Also a revolving arrow mounted on a flat dial that was marked out with a few instructions: Spin Again, Too Late, Quarter the Cash, Lose Your Turn, Home Free, and Chucklehead Challenge.
Finally several sets of cards marked on their backs: CHANCE and DESTINY and WHEN’S YOUR BIRTHDAY?
Baba Yaga snatched up the red marker with the stodgy face on it. “I’ll be Queen, and Queen goes first in the first round. Also all the other rounds. On your mark, get set, rumble!” She spun the arrow with terrific force; it whirled so fast the paper dial lifted up in the air like a child’s whirligig. When it landed, the arrow pointed to Chucklehead Challenge.
Elena said, “I don’t know what this is or why we’re doing it. I’m not playing with toys. You’re twenty times madder than Grandmother Onna. I’m leaving.”
“Don’t try me, little peasant girl. You didn’t bring me a present, so I owe you nothing. And I play for keeps.” She began to hop her marker along a winding path.
Cat said, “Don’t be cross, Elena. Within this house Baba Yaga works with finesse, though it’s hard to follow her thinking.”
“I’m not cross, I haven’t time to be cross. Let me out. I’ll take my chances.”
“I haven’t discovered what the Challenge is.” The witch pulled a Chance card. “ A Spot of Weather.”
“What’s that noise?” asked Mewster. “Is it part of the game?”
“Step out in that, will you?” said Baba Yaga to Elena, thumbing at the window. “Be my guest. I dare you. Bon voyage, little poor girl.”
She leaped up and pulled aside the drape, but the way she drew in her breath startled them. “Crimean Christmas! The card wasn’t lying. What is that?”
The young people gathered around her. None of them had ever seen the like. Mewster hid under the gaming table.
Against the blackness of night, an apparition of whiteness was hurtling near. It pinpointed upon the ground but broadened in coils as it rose. The top of the monstrous presence spread to the heavens. Though the dainty foot roamed at random like an anteater’s tongue, they had no doubt that the heft of ghostly glow and ghastly noise would happen — just happen — to light into them. The entire landscape of Russia stretching out on either side, and this weathery beast would nail them. Chance plays rough.
“This is one big breeze!” shouted the witch. “Brace yourselves, kiddos!”
Dumb Doma had been standing still, but now it turned and began to run away. The windstorm, spinning like a top that couldn’t topple, bore down upon it. Gravelly snow struck the windows and cracked the glass. As Dumb Doma veered and pivoted, Baba Yaga lurched to slam the shutters closed. “Table!” she shouted. “Chair! Wardrobe! Bathtub! Battle stations!”
The furniture hurried to obey, each large piece throwing itself up against the closed shutters to keep the gale from blowing them open. A chesterfield barricaded the door to the oven.
Dumb Doma loped with longer strides than Cat had known it to manage before. As it left the ground momentarily and began to come down to land again, everyone inside floated in the air, weightless and in slow motion. As if suspended in clear aspic.
Cat realized that the house was being buffeted aloft by the winds. Elena thought the stout faces in the walls looked terrified, when she could glimpse them within the blur and shudder of it all.
“I don’t believe it,” said Baba Yaga. “Is this some sort of joke?” She sat down upon an airborne stool and began to reshuffle the deck. Perhaps she realized that the others were terrified, and she wanted to calm them by her ordinary behavior. Or maybe she had a card trick up her sleeve.
Mewster had flung himself up in the air and landed upon the floating nest that once again carri
ed the porcelain egg. This seemed to steady the kitten, as the gyroscope of the Firebird’s nest held its perfect poise in the mayhem.
Little by little the corkscrew wind caused the witch’s hut to mount the air. The pressure upon their eardrums, the irregular gravity. Cat and Elena tried to cling to each other but kept drifting apart.
“An American tornado touring the Russian provinces,” said Baba Yaga. “My, the weather is more deeply unsettled than I thought.” She put the cards aside and pollywogged through the air, shoving the wardrobe from her front door. “My internal barometer’s yipping; I don’t want the house to implode. But hang on to something in case I’ve misremembered my physics.”
Anton clung to a swinging chandelier made of elk antlers. The girls managed to kick-scramble toward the carpet, which was itself flying. They each grabbed part of the fringe and floated in midair, like angels supporting a banner that said something uplifting. Well, uplifted they were. The witch said, “Ready, steady, pandemonium.”
The unlatched door swung open with a gentle sway. The pressure rebalanced itself, and the travelers settled on the floor. Outside, grim brightness streaked with snow and hail. Every now and then strings of snow would gape apart like twisted lips, as if the black night were a mouth eager to swallow them whole.
Suddenly Baba Yaga smacked the side of her head. Then she reached for the pieces of the board game, and put her hands upon the dial. She spun the arrow and said, “Come to Mama, come to Mama.” The arrow landed on Spin Again.
She did this eight or nine times more. The arrow always landed on Spin Again. “This is rigged. This is cheating. I hate when board games cop an attitude.”
“How could it land on anything else?” said the kitten. “We’re still spinning ourselves.”
Mewster was right; the house was rotating slowly, an unmoored boat in a lazy current.
Egg & Spoon Page 26
