The Republic of Birds

by Jessica Miller

  I should be exhausted from the day’s travel, but my thoughts are loud in my mind and before one thought has even finished, the next has already begun: Who eats an onion raw like that?—white dogs with wet black noses—but am I glad to be here?—jingle-jangle diamond bracelets—pirouette, arabesque, who cares!—sent into exile—‘tell your fortune in a match!’—

  Enough!

  I do the same thing I always do in Stolitsa when my mind won’t rest at the end of the day: I put my hand under my pillow and pull out Great Names in Tsarish Cartography.

  I light the lamp again, flip through the book, and settle on one of Londonov’s last letters from the Unmappable Blank, dated March 1830 and recovered from the edge of the Blank July 1831.

  I have drawn the beginnings of a passable map, though I have lost three fingers to frostbite which makes the work very difficult. I suspect I will lose one or two more before this expedition is complete…

  Usually, half a page is all it takes for my eyes to feel heavy. But usually I read the book in my rose-wallpapered bedroom in the top floor of our apartment in Stolitsa. Here, it is different. Here, the tales of the Great Cartographers feel more real.

  In the morning—after the sun rises and if the clouds are thin—I will see beyond the Low Stikhlos to the High Stikhlos through my bedroom window, the same mountain ranges that Debrikov passes in Chapter Ten, the same peaks that Londonov scales in Chapter Eight. I flip to the map at the front of the book: ‘Official Map of the Kingdom of Tsaretsvo and Environs’. I trace my finger north-west of Kalinzhak, along the jagged line that marks the Low Stikhlos, to the spot where I think the Centre must be, then further north to the icy Northern Plains.

  Cold shoots so sharply through my finger I almost cry out. I pull my hand away and go to suck the pain from my finger—but it is already gone. I shake my head. I must have imagined it. It’s been a long, strange day, after all.

  I slam the book shut and toss it away from me. I snuff the lamp.

  Across the room, the soft sound of Mira’s snoring starts once more. I stuff my head under my pillow to block the noise and wait for sleep.

  Sleep doesn’t come, of course. I remember the feeling of cold shooting through my finger so vividly it makes me shiver all over again.

  Mira gives another dainty snore.

  I think about waking her up to tell her what happened.

  Mira would tell me I must have been dreaming. She would tell me that whether she believed it to be true or not.

  Because if it really happened, if I wasn’t dreaming, if the map really had come alive beneath my hand—well, girls have been sent to Bleak Steppe for less.

  Yagas have been unwelcome in Tsaretsvo since the War in the Skies. After all, it was the yagas of the Imperial Coven at the Stone Palace who stole the firebird’s egg. Glorious Victory: An Impartial Account of the War in the Skies says as much, at the end of Chapter Three:

  nce it became clear that the Imperial Coven had deceived her, Tsarina Pyotrovna wasted no time banning all yagas from the Tsardom. For the next three days, the roads out of Tsaretsvo were clogged with yagas: they rode bareback on horses and tarpans, they bundled into sleighs, or they simply told their shabby huts to pick up their chicken feet and scratch their way northward. Not more than a week after the Coven stole the egg, every last yaga, every final scrap of magic, was gone from Tsaretsvo forevermore—and allow the authors of this book to be the first to say Good Riddance!

  But it doesn’t matter that Tsarina Pyotrovna banished all the yagas in the kingdom by imperial decree—there’s nothing the Stone Palace can do to stop girls being born yagas.

  Everyone knows this.

  And everyone is watchful.

  It starts around the time a girl steps into that strange space between being a child and being a woman. Around the time she makes her debut at the Spring Blossom Ball.

  Perhaps she is good at guessing what tomorrow’s weather will be. Too good. Perhaps she listens to the singing of crickets or the croaking of toads as if she understands what they are saying. Perhaps she sees shapes in the leaves at the bottom of her teacup. If she’s out of the ordinary, strange in any way, then she might be a yaga.

  She might not be one, of course. But better send her to Bleak Steppe, just to be sure.

  The Bleak Steppe Finishing School for Girls of Unusual Ability is, like Father’s recent promotion, a polite fiction. Everyone knows exactly why girls are sent there. When I was younger, we whispered about it every time there was an empty seat at assembly, every time one of the older girls disappeared. And then I got older, and we were whispering about the girls in our class who suddenly disappeared: Katia, who walked into a swarm of bees and came out the other side without being stung; Zenia, who could multiply numbers like 1774 and 3965 without pausing to think; Polina, who saw strange visions in her inkwell.

  Girls who are sent to Bleak Steppe have their hands cut off, so they can never work magic with them again. They have their tongues cut out, so they can’t say any kind of spell. They’re tossed in boiling water and their bones are used for soup.

  We never knew if those stories about Bleak Steppe were true. Because none of the girls sent to Bleak Steppe has ever come back to tell us.

  I huddle into my blanket. It is cold in here. Cold enough that you could trick yourself into thinking the cold was coming through the pages of a book. Still, I decide I won’t tell Mira what happened. Nearly thirteen is a dangerous age, an age where it is best to keep anything strange—even if it is only something you have imagined—to yourself.

  I close my eyes, determined to sleep. Tomorrow, this will feel like nothing more than a dream.

  When I wake the next morning, Mira is already up. She is looking out the window and twisting her hair around her little finger. I swing my feet onto the chilly floor and join her. The window pane is covered with a bloom of frost. Beyond the frost the sky stretches wide and far.

  ‘Did you know that you snore?’ I say and I sling an arm over her shoulder. But when Mira looks up at me her face is pinched and anxious.

  I stop my teasing.

  ‘Wasn’t it dreadful last night?’ she says, returning her eyes to the window.

  Wasn’t what dreadful? I can’t remember anything especially awful about last night unless you count Glafira’s mushroom soup. My tongue curls at the memory of it.

  ‘We learned about the War in the Skies last winter,’ Mira says. I realise she is talking about the birds. ‘Madame Nazdrilev told us all about the horrible birds. Pecking peasants’ eyes out. Catching children in their claws and carrying them off, past the horizon. Puncturing holes in military balloons. And all because they don’t want to share the skies.’ She shivers. ‘Cruel creatures.’

  ‘I’m sure our soldiers were cruel, too,’ I say lightly.

  ‘There’s just so much sky here,’ she presses her hand to the window. ‘In Stolitsa, there was never this much space.’

  ‘Aren’t you forgetting the Glorious Victory?’ I say. ‘Or did Madame Nazdrilev not get up to that part? We won, you know. The war’s been over for a hundred years. The birds leave us in peace and we do the same to them.’

  ‘Well, what if they don’t leave us in peace?’ she asks, stubbornly refusing to be comforted.

  I pull her close to me. ‘I won’t let anything happen to you,’ I tell her.

  She presses against me, then asks in a muffled voice, ‘Do I actually snore, Olga?’

  ‘Yes, you actually do,’ I say. My stomach gurgles. ‘Coming for breakfast?’ I ask.

  She thinks. ‘As long as it’s not mushrooms,’ she says.

  The kitchen is even colder than our bedroom.

  ‘There’s nothing to eat here except mushrooms!’ Anastasia’s words come out in a cloud of frosty steam. She flings herself across a chair, in just the same way she did in Three Blood Moons when she read the portentous telegram. Only, in Three Blood Moons one of the chair legs didn’t snap under her weight.

  ‘Mushrooms!’ she spits
, picking herself up off the floor. ‘I ask you!’

  ‘Let me look,’ I say, and I go to the pantry. I suspect the situation isn’t as dramatic as Anastasia is making out—the situation is rarely as dramatic as Anastasia makes out.

  The shelves hold thick layers of dust, a collection of dead spiders, and…mushrooms. For once, Anastasia isn’t exaggerating.

  I get down on my knees and look into the pantry’s darkest corners, where I find a sack of grain. I haul it out.

  Anastasia peers inside. ‘Millet,’ she says, as a cloud of tiny paper-winged insects flies out.

  ‘Moth-infested millet,’ I correct her.

  ‘I suppose it’s better than mushrooms,’ mutters Mira.

  Moth-millet porridge it is.

  Mira cracks kindling and Anastasia uses it to light the stove. I stir the porridge. Father comes downstairs and gets in the way, offering advice like, ‘A pyramid shape is best, if you want the fire to catch quickly, darling’ and ‘If you stir from the elbow, Olga, you’ll find the porridge won’t clump together.’ It’s annoying, I suppose, but he seems cheerier than he was yesterday.

  Mira screws up her face with her first mouthful. ‘Why does it taste so dusty?’

  Anastasia scowls.

  ‘Do you think the dusty taste comes from the moths?’ Mira asks.

  Anastasia scowls harder, and this time Mira gets the message. She takes a theatrically large spoonful. ‘Mmm,’ she says, ‘delicious.’

  The only person who eats with enthusiasm is Father. Having successfully supervised the porridge-making, he turns his attention to improvements for the Centre.

  ‘Krupnik has certainly let things deteriorate,’ he says through a millety mouthful. ‘Swarms of birds flying through the Borderlands with no repercussions. Frankly, I’m not surprised the Tsarina sent me in.’

  His spoon clatters against his empty bowl.

  I swallow a heavy mouthful. ‘More millet?’ I say, offering the pan of the congealing remains of the porridge.

  He shakes his head and scrapes his chair back. ‘No time, I’m afraid. I have work to do.’

  ‘So do I,’ announces Anastasia. ‘My memoir is hardly going to write itself. At least here there’s nothing here to distract me from working on my life story.’

  Mira and I look at each other. When Anastasia works on her memoir, she likes to enlist at least one of us to take dictation as she tells rambling anecdotes about things like dancing with Rudolf Valentino, or how Boris Lavrov made her a present of her white mink coat.

  ‘Look at my nails!’ I say and I hold up my grimy hands to show Anastasia the dirt embedded beneath my fingernails and in the creases of my knuckles. ‘I need to wash. Didn’t Glafira say there was a banya behind the Beneficent Home?’

  ‘I’ll join you,’ says Mira, gathering the bowls from the table. ‘I’m filthy after that tarpan ride.’

  ‘Be careful of the bannikha,’ calls Anastasia. ‘Glafira says that—’

  But we have already left the kitchen and started down the ladder.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Masha the Bannikha

  ‘IS THAT IT, do you think?’ asks Mira.

  We are looking at a small, windowless hut set on the shale slope behind the Beneficent Home for Retired Ladies in Waiting. I can’t think of what else it could be, and it doesn’t look so different from banyas I have seen in pictures, though there’s no welcoming curl of steam rising from its chimney.

  ‘That’s it,’ I say and I creak the door open.

  We step into a small room. Its wooden walls are stained nearly black with smoke. Three of the four walls are lined with benches. The last wall is taken up by a large cast-iron stove and a bundle of rags. In one corner is a water barrel with a neat stack of silver dishes balanced on its lid. There’s a row of hooks behind the door.

  ‘The hooks must be for our clothes,’ says Mira, taking off her jacket. It’s cold in here. I make straight for the stove. ‘I suppose we need to light this,’ I say.

  Mira prises the bottom compartment of the stove open and gropes inside. Her fingers come away black with charcoal. ‘There’s some kindling here, already,’ she says, ‘but it wouldn’t hurt to have some more.’ She crouches over the pile of rags, looking for something to burn.

  The bundle of rags stirs, yawns, then straightens up into a creature about half my size. She has long, spindly fingers, soap-coloured hair, and murky eyes.

  Mira topples back into me and I topple back into the stove.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ Mira gasps. ‘I didn’t mean to…I mean, I didn’t know…that there was a…a…’

  The creature bows very low. ‘I am pleased to be at your service,’ she says. ‘I am Masha.’

  We look at Masha blankly.

  ‘The bannikha,’ she explains.

  ‘Oh,’ says Mira. ‘I see.’ Except her voice goes up at the end of the sentence so it sounds more like she doesn’t see at all.

  ‘New to this, are you?’ asks Masha. ‘Let me explain. The rules of the banya are simple. You’re never to enter it backwards, or walk around it clockwise, or utter the numbers’—here she holds up her fingers to make first a three, then a seven—‘or any multiples thereof. Neither are you to bring any coins inside. Gold, silver, bone—doesn’t matter. I shan’t tolerate them. You’ll be provided with plentiful steam, hot and cold water and such protections from evil charms and spells as it falls within my power to provide. Is that clear?’

  Mira and I exchange glances. I don’t think it’s any clearer to her than it is to me, but Masha doesn’t seem to mind. ‘Good,’ she says, and she ladles water from the barrel in the corner into two of the silver dishes. She places one in my hands and the other in Mira’s. ‘Rinse!’ she snaps.

  We undress and douse ourselves with the water. It’s so cold I yelp as it prickles down my scalp and over my shoulders. I think of our bathroom in Stolitsa. It had a deep pink marble bath with gold taps, and you only had to turn them for plentiful piping hot water.

  While I am contemplating the benefits of modern plumbing, Masha is bustling around the stove, setting a fire in its belly. Then she clears her throat, leans down and makes a low growling sound. When she opens her mouth, a bright tongue of flame shoots out and sets the kindling ablaze.

  Mira clutches my arm. I drop my dish and it clatters on the floor.

  Masha straightens up and dabs her mouth with a corner of her ragged skirt. She turns around and catches us staring. ‘You two—’ she starts, but the words come out in a cloud of ash. She waves it away and tries again. ‘You two are acting like you’ve never seen a bannikha before,’ she says.

  ‘The thing is,’ ventures Mira, ‘we haven’t.’

  ‘We…we’re not even sure what exactly a bannikha is,’ I admit. ‘Are you…are you some kind of yaga?’

  Masha laughs. Or I think she laughs. Another cloud of ash escapes her mouth. ‘I’m not a yaga, sad to say,’ she says. ‘A bannikha is a bath-house spirit—what magic we have is confined to steam and water and soap.’

  I am relieved Masha isn’t a yaga, but perhaps a little disappointed, too.

  ‘But you are magic,’ I press.

  ‘You’ve really not met a bannikha before?’ she says.

  ‘I’m sure I never have,’ says Mira in her primmest voice.

  Masha sighs and with the sigh a single cinder falls from her lips. ‘A silly question, really,’ she says. ‘Why should you have? Our days were numbered after the yagas were banished. No kind of magic was welcome in Tsaretsvo after that, no matter how poor, or how harmless. One day I was stoking the stove in the Imperial Banya and the next…’

  She shrugs and fetches a dustpan and brush from the corner and sweeps up all the ash and embers she has exhaled. Then she splashes a ladle of water onto the stovetop. The water sizzles as it hits the hot iron and turns into warm, fragrant steam. Soon the room is filled with it. I forget that just a few minutes ago I was shivering with cold, and I am soon quite convinced I will be warm forever. Mira and I s
it on the low pine bench and let the steam wrap around us like a blanket.

  Masha brings two more dishes of water, and a ball of soap from which she carefully unpeels a sliver. ‘Be sparing with it,’ she instructs. ‘Soap isn’t easy to come by.’

  She sits and watches while we scrub the backs of our knees and between our toes. ‘Still,’ she says after a long time, ‘it’s hard to imagine Stolitsa without any magic at all. Is it dull?’

  ‘If you ask me, it’s extremely dull,’ I say. ‘But I never knew it with magic.’

  ‘What was it like before?’ asks Mira.

  Masha is silent for a moment—but only a moment. And when she starts to talk, she doesn’t stop.

  She tells us about the green-haired water spirits who lived under the bridge in the Mikhailovsky Canal and sang to people as they crossed over it, and the blue-haired water spirits who splashed all summer in the fountain in the Arbatsky Square. She tells about the large, solemn birds that perched on the branches of the trees in the Palace orchard, and the smaller, daintier birds that nested in the eaves of the Mariinsky Theatre and swooped down to pull open the velvet curtains at the beginning of every act.

  She pauses to ladle more water over the stovetop. It sizzles and fresh steam, sharply hot, ribbons through the banya’s warm fug.

  She tells about the street-corner yagas who used to pick their way down the streets of Stolitsa in their chicken-legged huts, dispensing love charms and curses, and the Imperial Coven, who performed powerful spells for the Tsarina. She tells about the Imperial Banya—the most lavish banya you could ever imagine—with clouds of steam as white as snow and more than a hundred bannikhi carrying frothing dishes of soapy water to all the nobles who came to soak there.

  ‘It sounds lovely,’ I say. ‘I wish I could have seen it.’

  ‘Well, I disagree,’ says Mira in a tight voice. ‘There’s no reason to get all dreamy over yagas, Olga.’ She looks at me through narrowed eyes and I know just what this look means: girls have been sent to Bleak Steppe for less.