The Republic of Birds

by Jessica Miller

  I look up and see the owners of the voices: two birds, a sleek, dark-green bird and a shaggy porridge-coloured one, perched on a gold picture frame.

  ‘But we both know Ptashka sees it differently,’ says the dark-green bird. ‘We know she’d go to war over it, if it came to that. She’s told the Avian Counsel as much.’

  ‘Well, as long as the egg stays unhatched, there’s not much to worry about,’ says the porridge-coloured bird.

  The feathers around the dark-green bird’s neck ruffle. ‘It has to hatch someday,’ it says.

  ‘Beregevoi.’ The porridge-coloured bird has noticed the yagas. ‘We’re not alone.’

  The birds perch silently, in calculated stillness. Then, the dark-green bird flies soundlessly away and disappears into the darkness at the end of the hallway. The porridge-coloured bird waits a moment before it glides away in the opposite direction.

  The yagas lean together in close conversation. I hear only snatches. ‘Doesn’t bode well…’ mutters Basha. ‘If they ever found out that we…’

  ‘And the egg?’ says Anzhelika. My ears prick. ‘What are we to do about that? If it does come to war, it must be somewhere safe—’

  ‘I have an idea,’ rasps Devora. The three yagas walk away, whispering together, and I abandon my plan of getting to the palace turret, for now. If Devora is about to disclose some information about the egg, I need to hear it. I hurry after them.

  Devora opens a door. The other two follow her through it and Basha closes it behind them. I wait a beat, then follow. This is my chance to find where the egg is hidden. But Varvara’s memories are not exactly logical, and when I go through the door, I step from a night-time hallway into a music room bathed in sunlight. I’m in a different season, for all I know, a different year altogether, in a room filled with people.

  I search the crowded room for Devora, or any of the yagas, but I can’t see them. A woman in a pink silk dress plucks on a harp. Her delicate music soon swells with a strange, beautiful sound. I look up and see the rafters are filled with birds, singing with their beaks to the roof. At the end of the song, the people below break into applause. It is wonderful.

  I suppose this is what things were like before the War in the Skies, what they might have remained like without the squabble over the firebird’s egg. The harp starts again, and I leave reluctantly—I would like to stay in this sunlit room and listen to this music forever. But I go back to the door and open it, expecting to step back into the hallway. I find a different room, instead. The furniture is crooked. Golden chairs lie on their sides on the wrinkled carpet and the velvet curtains at the windows hang askew. Small knots of people stand talking in tense voices. In the rafters is a small clump of birds, huddled tight. Every now and then, a nervous-looking bird with blue-black feathers looks over its shoulder at the people gathered below.

  Loud footsteps break the almost-silence and a bearded man rushes in waving a piece of paper sealed with crimson wax. ‘The Tsarina has decreed it,’ he cries breaking the seal and reading from the paper. ‘We are at war!’

  The birds in the rafters swoop through the room and out the window. People break out of their groups—some stride out of the room, others rush to the windows. ‘Look!’ cries a woman in a bright blue dress, and she points past the windowpane. The Cloud Palace has come unmoored from atop the Stone Palace. A great flock of birds is pulling it away through the sky. Wind tears at its turrets, and small cloudlets break off and drift alone through the sky.

  So, this is the moment the War in the Skies began.

  It feels strange to think that I am witnessing the moment that changed Tsaretsvo forever. Things might have been so very different, if…But there’s no time for ifs. I need to find the yagas. I need to know where they have hidden the egg. I run from the room, rushing through the palace halls, trying to retrace my steps, but I find myself in the Palace gardens instead. It is early morning, I think, to judge by the fresh, misty air. When I look up, the Cloud Palace still floats serenely above the Stone Palace. Its turrets are tinged pink by the rising sun.

  From behind me, I hear rapid footsteps. Someone is running through the garden, puffing hard. It sounds like she is scared, perhaps trying not to cry.

  I turn around and see her appear from a gap in the hedgerow: a small, thin girl, wearing a black dress buttoned all the way up to the chin. She has sharp dark eyes and, unlike everyone else who moves through Varvara’s memories, she looks straight at me, as if she knows I am here. Almost as if she were expecting me.

  I have seen those sharp, dark eyes before, though the face they usually peer out from is far older.

  ‘Varvara?’ I say.

  Before she can answer, she is caught by two guards. They grab her, one at each arm, and drag her back through the hedge. I run after them.

  In the distance is another figure, coming closer—a woman in an inky velvet dress. I know her from pictures in history books and her face on coins. She is Tsarina Pyotrovna.

  The guards drop Varvara at her feet.

  ‘Tell me,’ spits the Tsarina. ‘Where have they taken it?’

  ‘T-taken what?’ stutters Varvara. She gets to her feet. She is trembling.

  ‘I thought you were supposed to know things,’ says the Tsarina. ‘I thought you were a…a…’

  ‘A voyant,’ says Varvara. ‘And I do know things. I can see things. Only not necessarily when I’m asked to.’

  ‘I’m not asking,’ says the Tsarina. ‘I’m ordering! Tell me where the Coven has taken the egg. My egg!’

  Varvara blinks and concentrates. She stays very still. Finally, she says, ‘I see…nothing.’

  The Tsarina slaps her hard across the face.

  Varvara reels. She presses her hand to her cheek, which is already bright red.

  ‘Nothing?’ shrieks the Tsarina. ‘Do you really mean to tell me you saw nothing?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Varvara. ‘White nothing. Empty nothing. A blankness. The egg is in the Unmappable Blank.’

  The Tsarina goes pale. ‘No!’ she says. ‘They can’t have taken it there!’

  ‘But they have,’ says Varvara.

  ‘Look again,’ says Tsarina Pyotrovna. Her eyes are mean and narrow.

  Varvara concentrates again. And when she is done, she simply looks at Pyotrovna and says, ‘The egg is in the Blank.’

  ‘Take her away,’ Pyotrovna tells the guards. ‘I don’t wish to see her again. And the same goes for the yagas.’ Her voice is rising to a shriek. ‘The Imperial Coven has already disappeared—see to it that there are no other yagas left in the Tsardom!’

  The guards march Varvara out of the garden and through the palace doors.

  I follow, but when I go through the door, I enter a small dark room, lit only by a flickering blue fire. Three chairs are pulled close around it, and on them sit the three yagas of the Imperial Coven, deep in conversation.

  ‘Normally,’ says Basha, ‘the egg hatches in its own time. But, as we all know, it can be hatched by a yaga.’

  ‘But none of us has a tail feather,’ croaks Devora. ‘I lost mine more than five hundred years ago.’

  ‘And I never had one to begin with,’ says Anzhelika with a toss of her flame-red hair.

  ‘Neither did I,’ says Basha, ‘but that’s beside the point. What do you think will happen if the Tsarina finds out that it is within our power to hatch the egg?’

  Devora and Anzhelika nod solemnly.

  ‘She wouldn’t rest until she had found a tail feather and made one of us hatch it. And if the egg hatches…’

  ‘There’s certain to be war,’ says Anzhelika with a grimace.

  ‘There’s certain to be war either way, if you ask me,’ grumbles Devora.

  ‘But if one side has a firebird at its command…’ says Basha. ‘I say we hide the egg. Keep it somewhere safe. Lay low for the next century or two.’

  Devora arches an eyebrow. ‘As you know,’ she says, ‘I have a winter hut in the Blank…’

  Anzhelika l
ooks at Basha, and Basha looks at Devora. Devora sits very still, but a trail of spiders crawls out from between the folds of her skirt. They creep under the door and disappear. The three yagas say nothing. I watch the fire’s blue flames throwing shadows on their faces, waiting hungrily for more. What hut? How can I find it?

  The door creaks open. Devora’s spiders stream back inside. Only now, they are carrying something—something egg-shaped—wrapped in layers of gossamer. Devora scoops it up and hides it in the folds of her dress. She stands up and leaves the room, beckoning the others to follow.

  I go too, but as soon as I step through the door, I find myself on a steeply winding staircase. I’ve lost the yagas again.

  This time the stairs don’t take me away from where I want to be going and the corridors don’t fold back on themselves. They take me to the Palace’s highest turret. I am soon looking out at the Blank. All I see, everywhere is white, white, white. White—

  And a thin streak of ashy grey.

  I lean over the turret, straining to see what it is.

  Smoke. Which means there must be a fire. And where there’s a fire there might be a chimney and a house. Perhaps a hut, I think, rather than a house. A yaga’s hut…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Yaga’s Hut in the Snow

  I RUN DOWN THE stairs, out through the palace gates and back into the stinging cold of the Unmappable Blank. But this time I know where I’m going—and I’m determined to get there before the cold turns my brain thick and woolly. The palace ripples then melts, returning to liquid as I shut the gates behind me. I scoop what I can of the memories back into the bag and strike out in the direction of the smoke.

  I make out a shape in the distance, nearly as white as the snow and the sky. Nearly as white, but not quite. I double my pace and soon the shape becomes a small house. As I come closer I can see its shingled roof, whiskered with icicles, and its crooked chimney.

  Just outside the house is a pack of white dogs, snoozing in the snow. Their legs and tails twitch as they dream.

  And now, I am close enough to see that the house perches on two frost-shiny, cold-pimpled chicken feet.

  It’s just as I hoped. This is a yaga’s hut. And, unlike the hut that took me to Bleak Steppe, there’s smoke rising from the chimney. This hut has a yaga living in it.

  I walk up to the door but before I can knock, it creaks open, and a ragged voice issues from inside. ‘Is that a visitor?’ it says. ‘Come all this way to see me?’

  It’s strange, I think, that the voice sounds so much closer to my ankles than my ears.

  I look down. And I scream.

  The scream keeps going out into the Blank long after it has left my mouth.

  ‘Come now,’ the voice says. ‘Why don’t you come inside?’

  I stand there, looking down at the head that sits on the hut’s dirty floorboards. It is the head of an old woman, deeply lined and almost completely bald. The head grins up at me, with teeth, wooden ones mostly, set sparse in grey gums.

  ‘See?’ says the head. ‘Nothing to be afraid of at all. It’s only me. Old Devora.’

  Devora. One of the yagas of the Imperial Coven. The one who proposed hiding the egg here, in the Unmappable Blank. My heart quickens.

  ‘That’s right,’ Devora coaxes, ‘ just a little closer.’

  I step over the threshold, careful to avoid kicking her between the eyes as I go.

  Devora’s grin widens. ‘Ahh, it’s lovely to have a visitor—and a young yaga too. You needn’t look so surprised—I have a nose for magic. I can sniff it out. You’ll learn to smell it too, in time.’

  Inside, the hut is dusty and sheeted with spiderwebs so thick they seem almost solid. The webs are studded with neatly parcelled flies but also with other objects—forks and shoelaces and a broken wristwatch—that have been embalmed in their sticky mass.

  I feel cobwebs against my face and I shudder. But even though it is dusty and cobwebby, Devora’s hut is warm. A blue fire snaps and hisses in the corner. A bubbling pot hangs from a hook over the flames. It emits a smell that is…interesting, if not exactly appetising.

  Devora frowns. ‘But I’m not really ready for company, am I—not in this state.’ Her voice lowers to a whisper. A spider crawls out from between a crack in the floorboards. Then more tiny, ice-blue spiders crawl out from behind the fireplace, from the kitchen cupboards, from the rumpled sheets of the bed in the corner. They surge toward Devora’s head.

  Spiders are Devora’s medium. I remember that from Varvara’s memories. But that doesn’t stop my toes curling as the creatures crawl over my feet and scurry across the floor.

  Hundreds of them carry Devora’s head over to a scorch-marked armchair by the fire, where Devora’s headless body sits, her hands busily darning a sock.

  ‘Won’t you come and join me?’ calls Devora, as the spiders work. ‘Warm yourself by the fire?’

  I take off my coat and edge closer to the fire, watching as the spiders fasten Devora’s head to her neck with strands of web. Devora creaks her head this way and that, until she is satisfied that it is stuck fast, and the spiders disappear back into the cracks and corners they came from. Her hands keep darning. She hasn’t missed a stitch.

  ‘There,’ she says, ‘that’s much better. Mind you, I won’t stay whole for long. When you’re as old as me, you’ll start falling apart too. Now,’ she gestures to the armchair beside her. ‘Sit and tell me all the news from beyond the Blank.’

  I check, first, that the spiders really are all gone and then I go to sit in the empty armchair.

  Which is not empty at all.

  It’s occupied by a man covered in a shaggy coat that seems to be made of frost and snow. He is wearing a cracked pair of ice goggles on a frostbitten nose, and his skin is an unnatural blue colour.

  I stumble back and almost fall into the fire. The hem of my skirt catches alight, and Devora douses me with a cup of cold tea. ‘What’s got into you, child?’ she snaps.

  ‘Is that—is that Boris Londonov?’ I gasp.

  ‘Ah,’ she says. ‘Yes, he does look quite frightful. But you’ll get used to him. I’m quite fond of him, myself.’

  I wring my dripping skirt and lean closer to the armchair. It’s him. It’s really him—Boris Londonov. More frostbitten and icicled than he appeared in his portrait in Great Names in Tsarish Cartography, but still—Boris Arkadyov Londonov.

  ‘Mr Londonov,’ I say, awestruck. ‘It’s an honour to meet you. I’m a great admirer of your work.’

  Londonov grunts.

  ‘He’s not especially chatty, dear,’ says Devora kindly.

  ‘But I’ve so much to ask him,’ I say. ‘I can’t tell you how incredible it is, stumbling upon him here.’

  He grunts again and I lower my voice to a whisper. ‘The thing is,’ I say to Devora, ‘he was supposed to be—I mean everyone thought…when he didn’t come back… that he was dead!’

  ‘Well.’ Devora looks sheepish. ‘Technically he was. It must be said, my spell-work isn’t quite as strong as it was in my youth. It’s a challenge enough keeping my head attached to my spine, these days! Let’s just say that Londonov is alive, but not as alive as he could be.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ I ask, still trying to understand how Tsaretsvo’s greatest cartographer has come to be sitting in an armchair in a yaga’s hut in the middle of the Unmappable Blank ‘not as alive as he could be?’

  ‘Put it this way,’ creaks Devora, ‘he’s not exactly a sparkling conversationalist. But some company’s better than none, isn’t it, my dear—what did you say your name was?’

  ‘Olga,’ I say, and I perch gingerly on an ottoman.

  ‘Olga,’ she says, pleased. ‘This is Olga,’ she yells.

  Londonov rouses himself. Devora speaks very loudly and very slowly. ‘LONDONOV. THIS. IS. OLGA. She’s a VISITOR.’

  ‘Visitor,’ rasps Londonov. A spider crawls from a corner of his mouth and down inside his collar. ‘Olga,’ he says. And
then he sinks back into his chair.

  I wonder if he’s alive enough to tell me what happened in the Unmappable Blank. What happened on his expedition? Did he map any of the Blank? Just imagine if he had—the map of Tsaretsvo would be changed forever! I am leaning forward to begin asking, when I become aware that Devora is talking to me.

  ‘I said,’ she says, ‘would you like some tea, Olga?’

  I nod. Devora reaches for the poker, propped against the fireplace, and she prods Londonov quite hard in the stomach.

  ‘Unnnngh.’ He stirs.

  ‘Tea, Londonov!’ says Devora.

  Londonov grunts some more.

  ‘TEA!’ yells Devora. Londonov hauls himself to his feet and lumbers off to make it. I worry that Devora is going to ask me about where I came from and what I’m doing here. I bite my lip and prepare for her questions.

  But Devora is simply pleased to have a visitor. She talks about the Stone Palace and the War in the Skies and old friends and old enemies. Her stories wrap around me like the spiderwebs in her hut. She only pauses long enough to let Londonov plonk down three cups of tea and a plate of biscuits, before she launches into a long story involving the King of Kyiv and an out-of-tune piano.

  As Devora talks, my eyes search the room for any sign of the egg. In Varvara’s memory, I saw Devora tuck it, coddled in spiderwebs, into the folds of her dress. I peer into the heart of every cobweb, into the shadows in every corner. I crane my neck to see the tops of shelves and inside cupboards. But I can’t see any sign of it.

  I slurp the last of my tea and remove a web-wrapped fly from the plate of biscuits when I think Devora won’t notice. I am weighing up whether or not to eat a biscuit when Devora says, ‘And what’s yours, Olga dear?’

  ‘My what?’ I ask.

  She sighs. ‘I was just telling you that Anzhelika’s medium is mirrors. Basha’s is rain. Mine, as you see’—she grins, and a spider crawls out from between her two front teeth—‘is spiders. What is yours?’

  ‘Maps,’ I say. ‘My medium is maps.’